It has been 134 years since Friedrich Nietzsche declared: “God is Dead” (or “Gott ist tot”, in German). The statement was published in his book The Gay Science, (or “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft” in German). Nietzsche was an atheist and didn’t mean that there was a God who had actually died, rather that our idea of one had.

The idea of a universe that was governed by physical laws and not by divine providence was born together with the Industrial Revolution. Philosophy had shown that governments no longer needed to be organaized around the idea of divine right to be legitimate. Europe no longer wanted God as the source for all morality, value, or order in the Universe; now people were induced to believe that philosophy and science were capable of doing that for us. This increasing secularization of thought in the West led the philosopher to realize that not only was God dead but that human beings had killed the belief in him with their scientific revolution, their desire to better understand the World.

The death of God didn’t strike Nietzsche as an entirely good thing. Without a God, the basic belief system of Western Europe was in jeopardy. When one gives up the faith, one pulls the right to morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Religion is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. Culture, traditions, social behavior. By breaking the main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.

Nietzsche believed that the removal of this system put most people at the risk of despair or meaninglessness. What could the point of life be without a God? Even if there was one, the Western World now knew that he hadn’t placed us at the center of the Universe, and it was learning of the lowly origin from which man had evolved. We saw another World. The Universe wasn’t made solely for human existence anymore. Nietzsche feared that this understanding of the World would lead to pessimism, “a will to nothingness” that was antithetical to the life-affirming philosophy.

His fear of nihilism and our reaction to it was shown in in The Will to Power, (Der Wille zur Macht in German) when he wrote that: "What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism... For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe."

He would not become surprised by the events that plagued Europe in the 20th century. Communism, Neoliberalism, Capitalism, and the other ideologies that made their way across the continent sought to provide man with alternative meaning and value, as a worker, as a consumer, as a researcher,  as an activist…

However, as Nietzsche saw this coming, he offered us a way out. The creation of our own values as individuals. The creation of a meaning of life by those who live it. The archetype of the individual who can do this has a name that has also reached our popular consciousness: the Übermensch. Nietzsche however, saw this as a distant goal for mankind and one that most would not be able to reach. The Übermensch, which he felt had yet to exist on Earth, would create meaning in life by their will alone, and understand that they are, in the end, responsible for their selection. As he put it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:  "For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred yes is needed: the spirit now wills his own will." Such a bold individual will not be able to point to dogma or popular opinion as to why they value what they do.

But you might ask, if God has been dead for so long and we are supposed to be suffering for knowing it, where are all the atheists? Nietzsche himself provided an answer: “God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.” Perhaps we are only now seeing the effects of Nietzsche’s declaration.

As many atheists know, to not have a god without an additional philosophical structure providing meaning can be a cause of existential dread. Are we at risk of becoming a society struggling with our own meaninglessness? Are we as a society at risk for nihilism? Are we more vulnerable now to ideologies and conmen who promise to do what God used to do for us and society? It seems that we have managed to create a world where the need for God continues, more than ever.

Finally, The Digital Government, Big Diggo is here, people now obey digital rituals like they obeyed a God.  Google, You Tube, Microsoft and Facebook, just to mention some examples. The digital power radiates from Silicon Valley, spreading almighty over all the World by invisible waves just like spirits. It is all about depriving humanity from freedom, faith and dignity. Back to Nietzsche and his fear of the consequences of the lack of God: The removal of God put most people at the risk of despair or meaninglessness.

The Digital Government will as soon as possible substitute God, erase human traditional values and downgrade Man to a lower stage where he, in best case, will obey orders from AI – Artifical Intelligence. Or, being erased as soon as AI find him disturbing, annoying or edible.

Nietzsches difficulty in creating and describing the Übermensch where not based on the obvious ignorance of future technology. Sure he did not even think about the possibility for human to be so stupid that she should erase and substitute herself by something afar from any living being, for the AI, for the intelligent machines, all without soul, without spirit.