Hello everyone I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This.
So we live in a time where people will do some pretty moronic stuff in the name of their political beliefs.
We also live in a time where it's common for people to look at that moronic behavior that's going on and say you know the only reason that person is doing any of that stuff is because they're a follower of the philosophy of Marx or Ayn Rand or Hobbes or Machiavelli, Freire last time.
Well another thinker whose work gets this very same kind of treatment in the modern world is the work of Frederick Nietzsche.
No shortage of people out there will cite Frederick Nietzsche as the inspiration behind their behavior and there's even more people out there that blame Nietzsche for the behavior of other people they see as problematic.
So as the resident guy that spent way too much time reading philosophy in his life and then passes those savings on to you, I want to offer some context to Nietzsche's work today that we've never gone into on this podcast before, just hasn't made sense to bring it up before this point but it's a great story
to know. It's important to know if you're a fan of philosophy why Nietzsche had such an impact on the history of philosophy.
It's important to understand why he described what he was doing in his work as philosophizing with a hammer and look by the end of the episode I'm hoping you'll at least know some of the main arguments for why Nietzsche was doing his work, how he saw his work in the context of history.
I'm hoping you'll see that but what I know there's no doubt you'll see by the end of this is a picture of the modern world we've been talking about on the show lately that has not been represented yet by any of these episodes and it does not fit neatly into any political category that we'd recognize
today you know if it's even appropriate to call any of Nietzsche's work political at all.
We'll get into the arguments for and against it.
The point is Frederick Nietzsche would likely say that much of the conversation we've been having on this podcast lately about the state of the world and how to make it a better place is one remarkably naive and two in serious denial of certain realities about life, about history, and about the state
of the universe that this idea that we're going to have more quality conversations with each other about morality and political realities and that those conversations are going to make the world a better place as a result of them.
That delusion he thinks is the evidence of a decay that's gone on in people's thinking.
It's the result of the decline of western society that's been going on for over two millennia he thought.
A decline that's caused can be traced back to a few key figures that we'll talk about on this episode but a good place to start for him would no doubt be the collection of issues that he had with Socrates and his entire philosophical project as it was described by Plato.
And from here on out I'm just going to combine Plato and Socrates and say Socrates.
Socrates is ultimately a character in Plato's work, a mouthpiece for his ideas.
So when I say Socrates know that I'm referencing him as an example of Plato's work the two are a package deal here for Nietzsche.
You know it's funny if someone was listening to this from the outside not knowing much about Nietzsche's work but knowing who Nietzsche and Socrates are if I asked you who you think Nietzsche believes is most responsible for a decay in western society is it Socrates or is it Jesus most people I'd imagine
would say Jesus I mean obviously Nietzsche hates Christianity right the whole God is dead thing Socrates is a philosopher a fan of reason seems like these two should be blood brothers of overthinking everything together but the reality is actually the opposite as far as we can tell Nietzsche has a considerable
level of respect for Jesus as a historical figure which we'll also explain in this episode but as it turns out not very much for your boy Socrates over there should be said it's not that Nietzsche didn't like Socrates personally it's just Nietzsche thinks the very fact Socrates could even get off the ground
as an influential thinker with the particular sales pitch he was bringing to the table is more of a testament to the horrible state of Athens at the time than it is to Socrates being any sort of religious figure that's incredible and worthy of praise few big problems Nietzsche had with Socrates the first
problem is going to be his obsession with rationality to give some context here in Nietzsche's first book the birth of tragedy Nietzsche makes the case that great artwork has represented in it both the energies of Dionysus and Apollo and what he means when he says that is that it references two very
different sides of human life that are always in tension with each other on the one hand you have Dionysus that's the Greek god that represents the side of human life that's chaotic passionate volatile unknown Dionysian elements like these are important pieces of what a human life is but on the other
hand you can't forget about the whole other side of this that's represented by the Greek god Apollo apollonian elements as they're called represent the side of life that is ordered rational and harmonious which as you can guess is another important piece of what a human life is here's the point great art
for Nietzsche and more importantly a human life that is looking at existence fully always has a tension between these two drives you need both order and chaos reason and passion Apollo and Dionysus to be looking at reality fully and the first mistake of Socrates in the eyes of Nietzsche is going to
be removing the Dionysus side of this the passionate chaotic energy and then steering western thought completely into the Apollo side of existence strictly looking for rational harmonious order to things that's a very Socratic kind of idea and it's a very Socratic kind of mistake if you're Nietzsche
the second big mistake that Socrates made was the creation of what Nietzsche called the Hintervelt people call this the other world the real world true world theory is I think how I put it years ago we did the original episodes on Nietzsche I was trying to make it relatable point is this true world
theory is an idea you'll no doubt recognize because it continuously comes up in people's thinking and different variations all throughout the history of western thought for the character of Socrates this is Plato's world of forms it's this concept that we have this world that we live in you know this world
is but an earthly shadow and then there's the ideal world the world of forms it's a world that's more important or real to Socrates in some sense and as Nietzsche says you see this exact same logic used in Christianity with heaven as the ideal and this earth as the moral obstacle course where you're
being tested you also see it in Kant's work where he talks about the numinal world the world of things in themselves versus the phenomenal world of human experience even in renunciative forms of classic buddhism you have the eightfold path to enlightenment the ideal and then you have the fleeting transitory
world of suffering and it is not a coincidence that we keep seeing this dynamic pop up over and over again now again Socrates wasn't the first genius to ever come up with this idea but his character actually Plato was the first genius to Nietzsche to ever do it to philosophy and to him this metaphysical
dualism combined with that obsession with rationality of Socrates the denial of the Dionysian aspects of existence leads to a familiar outcome that we'll all recognize that this world as flawed and messed up as it is cannot be the place where you look if you want to find the truth lies in the ideal
world up there somewhere and that the only way we can get there is through rational contemplation or thinking about stuff really really well for Nietzsche the problem with this is that it denies a major aspect of what life is it is life denying as he says and what that leads to more broadly are people
that prefer attitudes of renunciation about the world they live in in favor of some higher ideal the basic idea is look this world sucks and this other world is where things really matter so where should our focus be going then obviously on this other world and Nietzsche says this idea being systematized
into a philosophy that was one of the contributions of the character of Socrates I mean this is not something we see in pre -Socratic philosophers that came before him you know they never cordoned off reality and said that this world is an illusion and some ideal world is where the truth is this just
wasn't a part of their thinking more than that societies prior to this Socratic turn Nietzsche says if you read their literature if you try to get into the heads of the people living prior to this turn you just get the sense they weren't caught up in this duality between the real and the ideal the world
that they lived in was enough for them it was real to them and more than that the meaning in their lives didn't need to come from anything other than the world they actually existed in even their gods just referenced processes that were going on pragmatically in the real world god of the harvest fertility
god god of the sea in other words people back then seemed to affirm rather than renounce the world as it was in a way that post -Socratic societies had seemed to move away from now one of the things that becomes possible with this idea that thinking rationally will lead you to the ideal is the further
assumption that if we think rationally about morality then that's also something that will get us to an ideal or objective form of morality this is a new idea too and again to add some context here this is what Nietzsche writes about in his book on the genealogy of morality that around this time of Socrates
the religion of Zoroastrianism that would later go on to influence Judaism and Christianity well it no doubt had an influence on Plato's thinking around this time too the thing about Zoroastrianism is that it's one of the first examples we can find in the history of humanity where it's a religion that's
built on the concepts of good and evil and don't get them wrong people obviously thought about outcomes in the world as good or bad for them before this but Zoroastrianism was one of the first examples we can find of there being specifically an abstract concept of the good that's written into the universe
somehow a good that is always battling against an abstract concept of evil written into the universe that's a fairly recent development in the scope of human history people haven't always thought about things this way well again this concept of abstract good and evil plugs into Plato's philosophy incredibly
well you can see how the ideal is going to be aligned with this concept of the good and the real is naturally going to be aligned with this concept of evil meaning in practice what this is going to do is denigrate people's view of the real world so this naturally leads us to the last big problem Nietzsche
has with Socrates if rationality is how we get closer to the ideal and the ideal is aligned with this abstract concept of the good then the assumption that gets made by Socrates is that if people are doing something that is immoral it's really because they just haven't reasoned about morality well enough
to arrive at the wisdom of being a virtuous person that all evil is born of ignorance as he famously says in other words morality is something that can be taught to people and if we teach people to reason better about their morality if we have more moral conversations then everybody can become a more
virtuous person it's universalizable more than that the assumption is that if we just have more of these moral conversations in keeping with the assumptions we've had on this podcast recently if enough people are knowledgeable about the truth then we will have a more moral society as a result of it
the question just becomes how do we facilitate that moral growth of all these people well to put it bluntly Nietzsche thinks this idea is nonsense at best and destructive to the history of the world at worst see to Frederick Nietzsche just to switch us over to the way he's looking at things these abstract
concepts of good and evil don't actually exist they are human rational constructions that allow us to make sense of the chaos of the world also this duality of these different worlds that supposedly exist the ideal world versus the real world those don't exist either i mean to him obviously they don't
exist we can trace their historical origins and just because abstract objective good and evil don't exist doesn't mean nothing means anything to talk about morality at the level of the universe to Nietzsche is beyond ridiculous and by the way that assumption only opens up the possibility of people talking
about ridiculous concepts like the moral progress of society which obviously doesn't exist in this picture and it keeps people not talking about the power dynamics that actually explain the changing circumstances that go on in the world to Nietzsche what exists is the world that's it and he doesn't
resent that fact this is why he admired the pre -socratic society so much they just seem to accept this a lot better than we do and this idea that there's a linear progress that's being made as we march closer and closer to some moral ideal or some ideal society this is in complete denial of our actual
history human history is not linear to Nietzsche it's cyclical we cycle between different levels of a lot of different things of abundance and scarcity strength and weakness peace and war we cycle between different circumstances that people then label moral or immoral depending on how well it corresponds
to their values a set of values that's constructed and inherited as well and it's at this moment in Nietzsche's argument here that he's going to make a criticism of basically every philosopher that's come before him in the history of the western world philosophizing with a hammer as it were and it's
a criticism that will go on to have a massive impact on a lot of thinkers that have lived since Nietzsche and the way they approach their work the argument is that philosophers don't actually seek the truth when they create their philosophy what they actually seek is power in the context of his will to
power so when a philosopher arrives at a fully devised system of philosophy a worldview the contents of it say much more about the individual bias drives and personality traits of the philosopher than it says anything about the truth of the universe that philosophers despite the glamorous picture that's
often painted to these people sitting around totally unbiased you know just walking around their house with a magnifying glass i don't even know what i'm looking for right now i'm just searching for the truth about things the reality of the situation in Nietzsche is that most of these philosophers don't
start at zero and then piece together the truth through investigation most of them start with a knowledge of the problems that face the philosophers of their time then they pick answers to those problems that seem right to them and then they fill in the blanks after the fact with their rational arguments
so what this means is that the answers a philosopher arrives at are always going to end up reflecting their own personalities and bias and this extends to non philosophers as well for Nietzsche when a person picks their moral approach to life and it seems right to them what are they doing well they're
picking the moral approach that seems right to their own bias and personality more on this in a second but consider an example of this at the level of one of these philosophers from history that Nietzsche is criticizing here take ammanuel cont for example a guy Nietzsche had plenty of choice words about cont's
the guy that writes the essay what is enlightenment he's the guy that says hey everyone just remove yourself from your self -imposed immaturity we got to remove all this dogmatic thinking that's been going on dare to be wise he says and start thinking purely for yourself he says that but from Nietzsche's
perspective all that cont did when he tried to come up with these categorical imperatives and this objective morality that's written into the universe all he did was try to use rationality to recreate the morality of christianity in a purely secular form meaning he no doubt just projected the bias he
had internalized from living in proximity to christians throughout his entire life this is a criticism that actually extends to a lot of philosophers that are alive today if you can think of a philosopher who tries to reproduce objective morality as being a concept that's written into the universe somehow
and more specifically if that philosopher also tries to say that that objective morality is the elimination of the suffering of people and that that morality is universally reachable by every single person well what does that type of system remind you of i mean from Nietzsche's perspective you could say
that subconsciously that philosopher is just projecting into their work two things one the teleology of christianity where the elimination of suffering is an ideal and two the Socratic idea that morality is teachable and universalizable and considering some of those people we're talking about see christianity
as a type of primitive moral approach that's based on utter nonsense it's pretty scandalous they'd be making that mistake if you agree with this criticism from Nietzsche and just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this i want to thank everybody that goes to the sponsors of the show
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throughout history have been doing this you look at it from his perspective and the optimism that came out of an era like the enlightenment where reasons going to be applied to our political institutions and make them better for us the optimism of the enlightenment starts to look pretty naive because if you're
Frederick Nietzsche you are very wary of the potential negative impacts of the egalitarian societies that we have today that emerged out of that enlightenment optimism let's explain why he's wary of them he traces what you could call a genealogy of egalitarianism that gets us from Socrates to our modern
egalitarian societies step one Socrates convinces people of this nonsense that anyone can be a moral person if they just use their rationality well enough step two Christianity comes along and popularizes a worldview of people being totally equal beings under the eyes of God and then step three enlightenment
philosophers come along internalizing both of these points and recreate our political systems under the idea that everyone is an equal autonomous rational agent that our abilities to be rational are equal that no one's opinion is any more valuable than anyone else's and thus everyone should get an equal
say in how things are organized one person one vote and this obviously leads society into an era of egalitarianism liberalism democracy socialism and these things all sound wonderful in theory especially being people that live in these modern societies that put the universal equality of everyone is the highest
priority we're shooting for but to Nietzsche it sounds wonderful on the surface to say that everyone is equal until you remember the obvious fact that not everybody is equal people are born with and develop different abilities different skills drives passions there's a big difference between a five
-year -old banging on pots and pans on the kitchen floor and a professional drummer who spent 20 ,000 hours of her life practicing the drums see more than that it sounds great on the surface to say that everyone's opinion is equal that everyone has an equal ability to be a moral person to know about their
political reality they just got to put in the work and have the right conversations and arrive at the right reasonable conclusions yeah that is until you realize the obvious fact to Nietzsche that those conversations are not getting people closer to being moral they're just getting people closer to
agreeing with you not to mention the fact that this oversimplifies how virtue is expressed differently by people depending on what their individual goals are see it sounds great to say that society's chief focus should be to maximize equality across the board but Nietzsche thinks this type of setup
leads to a very predictable outcome it leads to people in these societies having a passive reactive approach to life where mostly mediocre people demand equal consideration to everyone else regardless of the amount of effort they put in all the while constantly obsessing over equal representation and culture
spending much of their time resenting the other people around them for not denying reality like they do now why would this happen particularly in an egalitarian society well if everyone's supposed to be equal if that's the biggest goal of society then when i look around me and i see someone who's doing
worse than me where does my head go this is wrong this isn't what our society is all about somebody must be responsible for this person not doing well a fact that then breeds resentment towards the people they see as responsible on the other hand if i look around me and i see someone doing way better
than me well what the heck aren't we all supposed to be equal here why do they deserve to be doing so well nicha would not be surprised that people operating from within this cultural logic would eventually start to see every event of their lives filtered through the lens of oppression constantly looking
for how much oppression is going on here any way we can fix it any way we can restructure things overall to make things even more equal this is the culture of egalitarianism now first thing that needs to be said here is don't take this as nicha arguing for the opposite it's a common mistake people make
when reading them and it's understandable i mean we're all people in the western world that think in very dualistic ways sometimes i get it point is nicha's not saying that we need more inequality in our political setup he's not saying that there's too much equality what he's saying is that when we
structure things around egalitarian and Socratic principles like this they're just end up being more people out there that statistically conform to a herd -like mentality and if the label herd mentality starts to throw you off there like why is nicha so angry here who hurt him at some point in his life
it hurt people hurt people and then call me a member of the herd as well understand this within the context of nicha's work a peek to the end of the book here is that eventually he's trying to shake people out of this herd mentality and get them to engage with life more fully so the herd rhetoric is designed
to get a certain kind of person out there feeling a little self -conscious but it does not nicha trying to make most people out there feel bad it's just not his intention i mean to him most people just choose what he calls the herd mentality that's just the truth and egalitarianism as a set of values
is ultimately a moral approach he thinks that really aligns with you it really makes sense to your worldview if you're someone who is weak and there again is the rhetoric designed to get the gears turning for you first he calls you a herd member now he's calling you a weak let's explain why he thinks
egalitarianism is a value system for the weak let's talk about nicha's views on christianity for a second i go much deeper into the master slave morality dynamic in episode 158 of this podcast we did on him so in the interest of time i won't re -explain everything here but the short version of this is that for nicha early
christianity if you look at the values it embodies it exalts and makes virtues out of the qualities of weak people turn the other cheek the meek shall inherit the earth it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god you are told you are a good
person if you possess the qualities that make you not able to assert yourself on any situation christianity then becomes a slave morality to nicha because it's a type of morality that would resonate with someone if they were a weak person a slave to the circumstances around them remember to nicha when we
choose an ethical approach it says much more about the person than it does about the truth of the universe and think of what this means when we're forced to accept the reality of the world to nicha that everyone is not equal then in that world weak people are always at the mercy of the strong so the weak
as one of their only forms of recourse have to band together or else they just get walked all over by the strong for the rest of time so for nicha the rise of christianity as a slave morality represents a historical victory for the weak overcoming the strong and very similarly he would see modern egalitarianism
as the same kind of victory for the weak because here's the thing developing yourself and becoming a strong person requires you to be someone who overcomes your own limitations sometimes you got to read the thing that's difficult to read you got to have uncomfortable experiences push yourself to get
the things you want that'll make you more capable of navigating whatever world you find yourself in but modern egalitarianism to him is a cultural setup that incentivizes weakness and not overcoming these limitations it incentivizes mediocrity collecting ideas that other people have told you and becoming
a member of the herd relying on the strength of the group i mean the thinking is why push myself to learn more about something or do something difficult my opinion's just as important as everyone else's and if you don't think so well then you must be one of those people that think you're better than everyone
else that's not equality though i think you might be oppressing someone with that attitude there you better be careful and if you doubt that modern society incentivizes weakness just look around you at all the products digital and otherwise that are created with the sole intention of trying to make
people feel more comfortable and secure comfort and security is what most people are trying to maximize in their life modern egalitarianism is practically a cult that is built on a few different maxims be a weak person enjoy the fruits of modern civilization be comfortable avoid suffering and discomfort
as much as you possibly can and if at any point this passive approach you have towards life relying on the herd starts to backfire because life throws something difficult your way just turn to your friends for moral support or help from other people around you who will tell you there's nothing you could have done
about it you just got unlucky don't worry the herd's going to take care of you everything's going to be fine but comfort to nicha is not the default state of human existence neither is suffering by the way to nicha again this isn't dualism both comfort and discomfort are types of sensations that lead
to different circumstances but the important thing is that they're both a part of what life is and somebody sitting in comfort all day is not a moral nihilist to nicha it's easy to make that mistake you know people say if there's no meaning to anything then why do anything i guess i'll just sit around
and be comfortable all day no that's not nihilism to nicha that's choosing the value of comfort and thus choosing a slave morality that could be limiting your potential it leads to nicha's concept of the last man as laid out in his book thus books are at ustra point is to live life fearing running from suffering
always doing an accounting of how to minimize the amount of suffering i'm going to endure today you know to live life running from an inevitable part of human existence is to live a life that's in denial of the full picture of what existence is again it is fundamentally renunciative and life denying
to nicha and the question that leads him to his idea of the ubermensch is to say okay we know how a system of morality would be if it was created by a weak person that was trying to avoid suffering all the time but what would morality look like if it was built by someone who was strong like truly strong
a person that starts their day by affirming all aspects of life as they are again living in the world rather than in some abstract ideal the idea would be accepting look life is crazy right you can't predict what's going to happen perfectly by rationally understanding it so i'm not going to deny these
dionysian aspects of existence and in the face of accepting that chaos i cannot be a passive reactive person whose highest goal is to have as much comfort and security as possible suffering is a part of life obstacles are a part of life i'm not going to sit around all day obsessing over them instead
i'm going to face the world authentically listen to that voice inside of me that wants me to overcome my own limitations and then create my own set of values and meaningful projects out of my interaction with that chaos thus being one of the people truly engaging with it not avoiding it all the time
and trying to be comfortable well if you wanted to do that obviously laying out an exact blueprint for that goes against everything that nicha believes in you know the specific values and projects that you would embark on could only be something that you come up with or else they wouldn't be authentic
and while he can't lay out a blueprint for you he does lay out one example that seems to correspond to his life and times in other words the values and projects that he has created more than that he also thinks that we can spot examples of these remarkable people that have done this by looking at our
history people were the sheer force of their authentic way of living couldn't help but boil over into the herd of people around them that were passively consuming and this is where his respect for jesus comes from nicha has a quote that there was only one christian and he died on the cross see jesus
represents for nicha one of these exceptional historical figures that was a radical of his time he faced the chaos of the world he was living in head on he created meaningful projects out of that chaos and then lived authentically in the name of that meaning he created in the face of a very painful
bitter end i mean the way nicha sees it jesus didn't create a new religion what he created was a new way of living a way of approaching the reality he was in where you could be hit with basically anything and be totally free of resentment of any type the values embodied by jesus throughout the stories
are all instrumental to this goal now some of these values were renunciative and life denying to nicha but again there's not one way to embody the uber mention to live authentically the true question is one of inner authenticity the question is did jesus create a set of values and authentically engage
with the world in accordance with them well yes was he tested to see how real those values were as opposed to him just saying something that sounds good uh yes crucifixion uh check well that's not a slave that's a master and in each it's the early christians that come after jesus that then turn his example
into a codified way of living that people can emulate it's only then that the strong approach of jesus gets appropriated and doled over time by the herd again these people that aren't engaging with the chaos people living in a reactive way where they're just parroting the ideas that are given to them
so in a sense anybody can be one of these people who's living authentically like this it's just a nicha in practice the people that are actually doing it are exceedingly rare like compared to the number of people that think they're doing it when they're actually constantly in denial of certain things
about life constantly looking for external validation again the real test of this would be does this truly come from a place where you're trying to overcome your own limitations are you truly creating your own meaning here or are you simply emulating the values of some actual great person in a deflated
passive way because that's the thing the story of jesus's example being doled and appropriated by the masses over time that is the story of human history to nicha we are not living in a world where our political institutions and democratic participation are getting us closer to an ideal society again that's
very socratic of you very christian of you but that's nonsense the changes that go on throughout the cycles of history are really just the story of these exceptional individuals overcoming their limitations becoming great where again the sheer force of their existence overflows inevitably into the herd
around them calibrating society to be in accordance with their values so that isn't a process of good and evil going on anything that changes that you perceive to be good or bad is just some impact of some great individual at some point in time that either corresponds with your morality or it doesn't
the point is contrary to what Socrates had to say social change doesn't happen because people are having more rational conversations in democracies for nicha it almost always occurs more fundamentally on the level of a specific type of cultural elitism now i get how that sounds nobody likes an elitist
especially in these societies where we're trying to look at everything equally but what's important is to notice what cultural elitism is not saying here it is not saying political elitism nicha doesn't call for political elitism and the cultural elitism does not mean elitism based on race class gender
or creed now don't get me wrong if you're searching for an interpretation of nicha's work that says he would have called for a type of political elitism you can definitely find it there's Marxist historians out there who actually do a good job all things considered and some of them will frame nicha's
work completely from the perspective of him being an anti -revolutionary more scholars out there would say though i think that as interesting as that framing may be it's ultimately just them projecting how important they think politics is onto the work of nicha who clearly they say was far more concerned
with culture and people's individual experience of the world than anything to do with politics the common view is that nicha obviously is influenced by politics nobody isn't but he's not a fan of making political statements he's not in the business of giving rigid prescriptions of any type for that matter
and that any time he mentions politics in his work you always got to view it through the lens of his larger project of shaking these exceptional individuals out of that herd mentality and see that's the reason why a lot of people say he could never be calling for a type of political elitism i mean people
that cite nicha as the philosophical foundation for authoritarianism look nicha was clearly not in favor of authoritarianism authoritarianism is exactly the kind of society that keeps people locked into these narrow lanes of existence not able to create their own values his point is we need to encourage
the development of these great people that calibrate society to an updated set of values that corresponds to the ever -changing state of the world not to create political systems that drive people away from that project and this is the claim he's ultimately making about modern egalitarian society it
disincentivizes this individual development but why would you ever want to do that he would ask maybe you're someone who thinks look we don't need great individuals so much what we need are well educated politically engaged average populations well for the people that think they're saving the world
when they listen to the news have political conversations around a water cooler and cast their vote every couple years consider what those people are really doing few different angles here nicha might be critical of first of all he would say clearly what you're doing is participating in a kind of herd
activity which isn't bad unless you really wanted to change things let me explain i mean just by default by participating in this democratic political process you are supporting the very system that furthers the interests of the herd mentality i mean you are concerning yourself with conversations about the quality
of life of the average herd member but more than that what is it that people are really doing when they talk about politics are they road scholars having a debate no almost all of them are not authentically engaging with the issues it's just people repeating ideas that they heard from someone else that was talking
about it and then that person they heard it from is often just repeating a variation of a theme that they read from some original person who did engage with the chaos of the world create values and came up with this idea in their work political conversations then from one perspective are just second
or third order actual conversations that are mostly happening among the herd about herd things that are going on it's a fun thing to do maybe it's entertainment may make you feel like you have a say in the world but the reality is to nicha politics is at bottom a weak person's game politicians are so often
controlled by the actual powerful people that are behind the scenes now this is not nicha endorsing any of these powerful people behind the scenes today i think he'd say that the type of society we set up allows these types of people to have this level of influence without actually needing to go through
that tough process of overcoming their own limitations and being a true reflection of strength again his point is not to justify their existence it's just to say that power doesn't fundamentally go on in the political process so to that you may just say well i'll just run for political office and i
won't let these elites behind the scenes control me that'll work right okay even if you run for political office what do you do then argue with people try to convince people to come over to your side again to nicha arguing is a weak person's game if you were truly strong you wouldn't need to argue and considering
how corrupt and inefficient these systems usually are most of the effect you think you're having on politics by arguing is an illusion anyway so for somebody that truly wanted to change the world to correspond more with their values all of this for nicha is mostly just a distraction from the more important
work of developing yourself and becoming a strong person who truly can change things and you can say back to that well look not everybody can do that not everybody's gonna do that nicha so your whole moral approach here that you're given is horrible if it can only apply to an elite few but he could say
back to that again look how very Socratic and Christian of you to say that morality does not have to be universalizable he's not sure what percentage of people can possibly become an uber mensch and by the way the uber mentioned practice is likely somebody that doesn't even concern themselves with being
noticed by culture or overflowing into the herd like that that wouldn't be a goal of theirs that drives their self overcoming because they wouldn't be looking for external validation it would just happen i mean you could be an uber mensch for example and just move out into the woods each day confronting
your own limitations and the chaos of the world creating values and projects that mean something to you you could be that in a place where no one even knows that you exist you could be a scientist each day confronting the limitations of your own knowledge and experiments accepting the chaos of the universe
you're studying creating new projects and values from a totally authentic place and nobody in culture would ever know who you were until the results of your work led to something incredible that bled into the lives of the rest of the people so i guess the safest way to talk about what nicha is saying
is that if he sets society up in a certain egalitarian way it's gonna have certain consequences you're gonna have people that are living in those societies that have this voice inside of them that tells them to develop themselves and in these types of societies that voice is sometimes going to get squashed
by any number of things by this obsession with equality or by them blaming obstacles in their way or by trying to constantly remove suffering from your life in a way that's in denial of life seeking comfort and security otherwise great people he thinks in these societies will be wasted never developing
themselves and again his rhetoric gets more severe the later in his work you get some people say it's because his health was declining other people think it's because his main goal above all else is to reach that very rare person out there who might hear him feel a little bit ashamed at first but his words
may shake them out of these chains that they were born into his point is we need great people not living in denial of that voice inside of them we need the people that are going to be this generation's cultural elites we need the great people that are going to assist those cultural elites and instead
of our society's entire strategy being to provide well -being to the greatest number of people he says why not focus on maximizing the greatness of these diamonds in the rough i mean you can imagine a program like this where no one is excluded but when we find someone that shows a lot of potential we
hold their development to be one of our highest cultural priorities regardless of whatever political framework may or may not be in place and you know we started this by talking about people that cite Nietzsche's work for problematic ways of looking at the world in last episode we talked about people
that claim to be inspired by Freire that do things that oppress people in the name of removing oppression and we talked about how if someone was doing that it is ironically exactly Freire's work that properly understood might help them to see the mistake that they're making there well if people look
at Nietzsche's work and they do something similar if they see him promoting excellence and developing yourself and how he thinks we should facilitate the discovery and cultivation of these great people as the rare diamonds that they are if somebody saw all that and then took that to mean that he wants
to dismantle egalitarian society and then erect an authoritarian one in its place well then similarly just like the Freire people they should go back and read Nietzsche's work because he'd have a lot to teach him i think if they did anyway hope you like this one let me know if you want more Nietzsche
thank you for supporting an effort like this podcast that is a cultural influence on patreon patreon .com philosophize this as always thank you for listening i'll talk to you next time
