Of the New Idol, the State

From Nietzsche's Of the New Idol chapter in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.' 

 It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it a state. 

Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye. 

The state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies - and whatever it has, it has stolen. Everything about it is false, it bites with stolen teeth, even its belly is false. 

Confusion of the language of good and evil; I offer you this as the sign of the state. Truly, this sign indicates the will to death! Truly it beckons to the preachers of death! Just see how it lures them. How it devours them, and chews them, and re-chews them.

'There is nothing greater on earth than I, the regulating finger of God' - thus the monster bellows. It likes to sun itself in the sunshine of good consciences - this cold monster. 

A cunning device of Hell has here been devised, a horse of death jingling with the trappings of divine honours. I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state where universal slow suicide is called - life. 

Just look at these superfluous people! They are always ill, they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another and cannot even digest themselves. See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another and so scuffle into the mud and the abyss. They all strive towards the throne: it is a madness they have- as if happiness sits upon the throne! Often filth sits upon the throne- and often the throne upon filth, too. 

One element of focus I would like to add to this diatribe - which hopefully results in  a catharsis through this expression and expulsion of healthy disgust - is the word state itself, which contains a double-sided linguistic nature which may even work in a subconscious level in favour of Nietzsche's idol workers. In the above usage by Nietzsche we have the state as “the body politic as organized for civil rule and government”, or “the operations or activities of a central civil government”. Though, as Nietzsche argues it is no longer connected to life, or the culture of a living people, but is an abstract and artificial behemoth imposed upon life. 

However we also have meaning of state as the condition of a person or thing, as with respect to circumstances or attributes, or the condition of matter with respect to structure, form, constitution, phase, or the like. The second meaning is in relation to the human condition itself, or life as is. One is born into the human state. However, the rulers of the body politic perpetrate a kind of intellectual or existential coup over pure reality, or 'the state'. Instead one is born into the state in the political sense, and as Nietzsche says, "this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'" Now life and existence within ‘the State’ are so inseparable that its implication is that one is actually owned by the State. And which logic of course played out in 20th century state totalitarianism - and towards which the idol of Statism is always travelling. You have no existence apart from ‘the State’.

Living reality is not 'the state', the State is 'the state'.