Section 188 of Nietzsche's Daybreak
Food and Intoxication -- People are so greatly deceived because they are always seeking a deceiver: that is to say, a wine to stimulate their senses. If only they can have that, they are quite content with bad bread. Intoxication means more to them than nourishment -- this is the bait they will always take! What is a capable man of the people compared with sports champions and movie stars? The man of the people at least has to hold out to them the prospect of conquests and grandeur: perhaps they will then come to believe in him. They always obey, and do more than obey, provided they can at the same time become intoxicated! One cannot even offer them peace and plenty unless it includes the laurel-wreath and the madness that accompanies it. But this mob taste, which prefers intoxication to food, by no means originated in the depths of the mob: it was rather transported and transplanted thither, and is only growing up there most persistently and luxuriantly, while it takes its origin in the highest intellects and has flourished in them for millennia. The people is the last virgin soil in which the glittering weed of intoxication can still thrive -- What? And is it to We the People that politics are to be entrusted? So that they can make of them their daily intoxication?
Food and Intoxication -- People are so greatly deceived because they are always seeking a deceiver: that is to say, a wine to stimulate their senses. If only they can have that, they are quite content with bad bread. Intoxication means more to them than nourishment -- this is the bait they will always take! What is a capable man of the people compared with sports champions and movie stars? The man of the people at least has to hold out to them the prospect of conquests and grandeur: perhaps they will then come to believe in him. They always obey, and do more than obey, provided they can at the same time become intoxicated! One cannot even offer them peace and plenty unless it includes the laurel-wreath and the madness that accompanies it. But this mob taste, which prefers intoxication to food, by no means originated in the depths of the mob: it was rather transported and transplanted thither, and is only growing up there most persistently and luxuriantly, while it takes its origin in the highest intellects and has flourished in them for millennia. The people is the last virgin soil in which the glittering weed of intoxication can still thrive -- What? And is it to We the People that politics are to be entrusted? So that they can make of them their daily intoxication?
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