I just saw Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You. Midway through it, I was reminded of something that Marshall Berman once mentioned about Friedrich Nietzsche's generation of intellectuals. This generation was living at the tail end of one of the most peaceful centuries in European history (if you focus on European rather than international wars). With the exception of relatively minor wars like the Crimean and the Franco-Prussian wars, Europe hadn't seen continent wide conflict since the Napoleonic wars. And this made many intellectuals hungry for conflict - they were bored. So, as much as the will-to-power might explain the world war to come, it wasn't the product of war but of peace, expressing the hunger of a generation. And then, when the shit finally did hit the fan, the interwar years were anything but boring, as they gave us some of the most exciting cultural products of the past few centuries.

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