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The last man wants comfort
Who the last man is
He is a passive nihilist, someone who has surrendered to nihilism and stopped looking for meaning or making any. He has no original thoughts of his own and doesn't feel the need to become an independent thinker. In Nietzsche's phrase, he is an evangelist for mediocrity.
Weak wills and mass movements
Nietzsche pinned this on weakness of will. Once the conventional sources of meaning and purpose, Christianity among them, are undermined, a void opens. People strong enough fill it by creating their own values. People too weak for that join mass movements instead, placing their faith in a political party, a leader, a nation-state, or an organization that promises to solve all their problems and make them valuable to a cause.
Zarathustra's warning
Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book For All And None tells the story of a prophet trying to warn humanity about the growing threat of nihilism. It is Nietzsche's attempt to wake people up before the last man becomes the norm.
Why did Nietzsche call him the last man?
In the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the prophet Zarathustra describes the last man as the most contemptible kind of human, a creature who makes everything small and calls that happiness. Zarathustra offers the crowd the Übermensch as a goal, and the crowd shouts back that it would rather have the last man. The people in the marketplace ask Zarathustra to turn them into last men. The scene appears in the opening section of the book.
How do mass movements fill the void?
Eric Hoffer examined the question in his 1951 book The True Believer. He argued that mass movements attract frustrated people who want to lose their individual selves in a larger cause, and that the content of the cause matters less than the belonging it provides. His examples ranged across religious, nationalist, and revolutionary movements of the early twentieth century. Hoffer wrote the book while working as a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks.
Why did Nietzsche choose Zarathustra as his prophet?
Zarathustra is the Persian name for Zoroaster, the founder of an ancient religion in which the world is a struggle between good and evil. Nietzsche borrowed the figure and gave him a reversed role, a prophet who speaks against moral dualism instead of for it. He also wrote the book in an imitation of biblical style, with verses, parables, and sermons. It was published in four parts between 1883 and 1885.