The only difference between men and other animals is that of values. No animal lives according to values; he lives blindly, not knowing why. His life force is unconscious of itself. Many men also live in the same way. They only look like men, but they have not yet transcended the animal. The transcendence of the animal is indicated by the values.
But values can be of two types: one that is imposed upon you from the outside, thou shalt; and one that arises in your own being, I will.
The first kind of value is just a hypocrisy. It is a strategy to make you believe that you have transcended the animals; but in fact you have even fallen below the animals. The animals are at least natural; you are not even natural. Your values distort your nature, distort your simplicity, distort your innocence – but they give you a false notion that you are a man.
The second kind of values are the authentic values. But for them, you have to avoid any kind of imposition from the outside, and you have to allow your own inner being and its still, small voice. The beginning of man is in the trust that he shows in his own inner voice.
Zarathustra is talking about values in these statements: NO PEOPLE COULD LIVE WITHOUT EVALUATING; BUT IF IT WISHES TO MAINTAIN ITSELF IT MUST NOT EVALUATE AS ITS NEIGHBOR EVALUATES. Everybody has to be himself, not a carbon copy of his neighbor -- although the whole crowd in the world, because of its immense majority, destroys the individual and makes him just a carbon copy.
This whole thing goes on in the name of good intentions. Your parents, your priests, your leaders, your so-called saints are all doing one thing; they are not allowing you the freedom to be just yourself, and find your own values. They give you ready-made concepts -- what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is evil. They decide for you, and while you let them decide your life and your live's values you are not yet a man. You are just a slave.
The greatest slavery is of the spirit.
They are not binding your bodies and they are not imprisoning your bodies, but they are putting chains on your soul -- and that is the worst slavery in the world. And it becomes even worse than it would have been, because the chains are of gold. And the chains of gold convince you that they are not chains but ornaments, that your society is making you richer, that your society is making you better. But chains are chains, whether they are made of steel or of gold. The chains of gold are worse, because there is a possibility of your clinging to them, and forgetting that they are your chains.
With all good intentions, the people who think they love you, the people who think it is their duty to make a man of you, are really the destroyers. Beware of the neighbors. Gather courage to be an outsider; be strong enough to be a stranger -- but remain yourself. You are bound to be a stranger if you remain yourself, because then you will find a totally different category of values to live by, to live for -- not the dead values that are being imposed on you. The values imposed by your neighbors, by your society, simply create a split in you.
Your own being needs assertion, expression. Your own heart wants to sing its own song. But even that is not allowed. You have to sing the songs of others. They are not a nourishment, and they are not a fulfillment; and they will never bring contentment to your life.
MUCH THAT SEEMED GOOD TO ONE PEOPLE, SEEMED SHAME AND DISGRACE TO ANOTHER: THUS I FOUND. I FOUND MUCH THAT WAS CALLED EVIL IN ONE PLACE WAS IN ANOTHER DECKED WITH PURPLE HONOURS. He is saying that values are not something universal. Every society has created its own values according to its own needs, but those values were created thousands of years ago. Needs have changed; values have remained.
That is why it is very difficult to find a contemporary human being. You cannot be contemporary if you are not moving with the times, but you are lagging thousands of years behind. Life does not stop for you; it goes on moving into new spaces, and your values remain dead, unmoving, and every generation goes on giving the same set of values to another generation. And you never think your misery is caused by many factors. One of the most basic factors is that your values are not in tune with the time, your values are not harmonious with existence -- they are not contemporary.
All the religions, all the cultures, all the civilizations belong to the past. They should be dead by now, and we should have taken them to the graveyard -- of course with respect. But those dead corpses are moving amongst us; not only moving amongst us -- they are dominating us. They have become absolutely absurd and irrelevant. But they are ancient, and you have been told, "Whatever is ancient is right."
The truth is just the contrary: the older the thing is the more is the possibility of its being wrong, because it was conceived in the childhood days of humanity, and now humanity has come to maturity. Your spirits are in such a ridiculous state -- as if a mature young man is still wearing a small child's clothes. Those clothes will not only be ugly, they will be too much of an imprisonment; his movement will become difficult. Your clothes have to change as you grow: your values are the clothes of your soul. They have to change -- every day, every moment. Hence, only individuals can have values... living, breathing, with a heartbeat. Societies can only carry corpses, because the individual has the future and the society has only the past. Just a few examples will help you.
In China, for thousands of years, it was thought beautiful that women should have small feet. But to keep them small, they had to put on young baby girls' iron shoes. Those iron shoes crippled the girl; her body went on growing, but her feet remained small. At a certain age the shoes were removed. It was thought that the more highly cultured you were.... Your women would be almost unable to walk, the feet were so small.
In royal families the women could not even move -- they were carried; and it continued for thousands of years, such a stupid idea. The feet have to be in proportion to the body and they have to grow according to nature, not according to your idea of what beauty is. It took a long time for intelligent people to fight against it: that this is crippling the women. They cannot move, they cannot work -- of course, their small feet look very dainty, but a woman is not in the world just to have dainty feet.
The situation has been the same all around the world, in different ways, because all these societies have developed separately. The world has become one for the first time; people have come closer and seen each other. And that has created the doubt: "What we have been calling values, were not values, because there are millions of other people who have never thought about those values. They have their own ideas."
Howsoever painful, howsoever unnecessary, only the individual can find, through being more conscious, an insight into what is good and what is not good. And he has to live accordingly; whether it suits the society or not, cannot be the concern or the consideration.
I have been around the world and I was surprised that even in the so-called advanced countries stupid ideas, superstitions, are still pretending to be values; even though they have become dangerous. For example, on Christian holy festivals, friends sit around the dining table celebrating, and they drink from the same cup of alcohol. The cup moves from one hand to another. Even now, when it has become an established fact that your saliva is one of the most dangerous things, it can infect you with the disease, AIDS -- which has no cure. But it is their tradition, and it is a holy rite. They will not listen to medical science, they will listen to the dead past.
Just a single man who has AIDS can spread it to many people, and those others will start spreading it in different ways. Kissing should be prohibited; that is also dangerous, because AIDS does not infect people only by sexual intercourse, it infects in many ways. There are even experts who suspect that the AIDS virus can spread through your breathing, and certainly it spreads through your tears, through your perspiration. Any liquid that comes out of the body can carry the virus.
The values should change. But people cling to the past, and cling so blindly that you cannot believe.... In India, they have worshiped the cow for centuries. Nothing is wrong, it is just an innocent stupidity. But once you move in a direction of stupid ideas, there is no end to where you will stop.
- Osho, "Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance, #12"