AUGUST 30, 2026
Opinion piece draws parallels between the American frontier, Nietzschean philosophy, and the challenges of future Mars settlement
A Washington Examiner opinion piece published by retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant Michael Breeden argues that the conditions of the American open-range frontier of the 1870s–1880s offer a practical model for the kind of individual character future space settlers will require. The piece uses the 140th anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1886) as a framing device to connect European philosophical inquiry with the improvised social order of the historic American West. Breeden contends that scarcity, weak higher authority, and existential risk — features of both the frontier past and future planetary settlement — produce, by necessity, individuals capable of creating workable order.
A Washington Examiner op-ed by Michael Breeden, a retired Air Force special-operations chief master sergeant, argues that the cultural and moral conditions of the American open-range era prefigure what future Mars settlers will require. The piece frames its argument around the coinciding 140th anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche's 1886 work Beyond Good and Evil, drawing a parallel between Nietzsche's philosophical demand for individuals who create values from strength and the improvisational survival ethic of late-19th-century frontier cowboys.
Breeden describes the classic open-range cowboy not as an ancient archetype but as a specific late-19th-century invention — a synthesis of Mexican vaquero technique, post–Civil War commercial cattle drives, and an ecological window opened by the destruction of the buffalo herds and the defeat of the Plains tribes. The resulting working culture, Breeden writes, was governed more by reputation, commercial interest, and calculated loyalty than by statute or inherited duty. Loyalties were fierce but provisional; survival and interest determined allegiance.
The piece does not omit the violence of the period. Breeden states that the Indian Wars and range wars were "brutally inhumane," that Native American nations suffered "catastrophic loss of life, territory, and culture," and that settlers and small ranchers simultaneously faced exploitation by railroad barons, organized rustlers, and the hired enforcers of larger cattle interests. He uses the gunfight at the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881 — in which three men died in under a minute — as a compact illustration of a period when personal reputation and direct force settled disputes that higher authority could not resolve.