Conan the Schumpeterian.

Nietzsche. Anarcho–capitalist Austrian economist Murray Rothbard quotes him in his letter to Ayn Rand. Cigar-chomping Zen-Anarchist film-maker John Milius appends him to his adaptation of E. Ron Howard’s Conan The Barbarian starring steroid enhanced, enthusiastic free-marketeer Arnold Schwarzenegger.

                                      
                                          (the little boy who never grew up, John Milius)

Why is Nietzsche such a core reference point for two such seemingly different characters?

Schumpeter.

Schumpeter is, of course, an Austrian with Aristocratic pretensions who fled to the USA. He wore a cape while lecturing at Harvard and as every biographical entry on him tirelessly repeats, claimed that as a youth he intended to be the best horseman, the best economist and the best lover in Austria, but only achieved two of these goals, there being an unsurpassable excess of skilled riders in the Country. From this we might do the great theorist and highly influential thinker the gross injustice of concluding that in many respects, for all his undoubted brilliance, he was a bit of a twat.

 (ubermensch and Austria's greatest lover "Big" Joe Schumpeter in his prime.)

In Schumpeter's view Capitalism tends toward stagnation and stalemate and requires constant innovation in order to grow. Any given company will gain a productivity edge on its rivals and outstrip them for a while, but those other companies will steal or copy that new technology and catch up. The figure that steps into the closed and stagnant state of capitalist equilibrium and shakes up the whole process, beginning a new round of productivity gains, is the entrepreneur, who takes on a heroic aspect: the senescent late stage of the business cycle, the long Winter is jolted back into life and growth again by his actions. He is a bringer of life, a destroyer of the old and closed, an innovator, the real dynamic impetus behind the growth and progress in the system. For many commentators the 70s is the point at which the entrepreneur heroically reappears to save America again ( Bob Jessop likes to refer to post-Fordism as the Shumpeterian Competition State.)

In a sense the worldview is not so remote from fertility myths of a primitive age, John Barleycorn, the Fisher King, the great re-awakeners of the invisible spirit of growth, the necessary rending of the god into pieces so that new life can sprout from his scattered and eviscerated head and hands. A rough genealogy of Schumpeter's thinking would go back through his mentor Sombart, to Nietzsche to Hindu creation myths

The world Chauncey exists in in Being There, and to which he promises to bring fresh political life, presumably, like Reagan as a useful telegenic idiot for his Corporate overlords, is at the end of a cycle and his reassuring message is that there will be a new spring. Stay Hungry takes a slightly different tack, introducing the notorious and cursed third generation. According to certain theories the business cycle runs through a first generation who innovates, the sainted Grandfather-entrepreneur (in Stay Hungry Scatman Crothers as the devoted black domestic talks reverently about the world of Blake’s grandparents), to the second generation who live off a combination of business and rents to the last, decadent generation who live solely off rents. In Stay Hungry Craig Blake manages to find himself a purpose as an entrepreneur rather than simply rot away rich in the dilapidation of his estate, and he achieves this through an infusion of the vital fluids of working class and sub culture. In Stay Hungry it is already mid-summer, and opportunity is just waiting to be plucked from the vine, it’s just that no-one has noticed it yet.