Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

April 7, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor

01:21:59

Towards Noble and Ignoble

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hello everyone, welcome to Left, Right, and White.
	I'm Chris Roberts and I'm joined, of course, by Gregory Hood.
	And today we are talking about Friedrich Nietzsche's book Beyond Good and Evil.
	Now in theory we wanted to do an episode just about Nietzsche generally, but the man wrote quite a bit and all of it is dense, so we figured doing maybe just one book at a time would be more advisable to the extent that that's possible, given that obviously all of Nietzsche's work, you know, constitutes a whole and interacts with each other.
	But For better or for worse, we're just doing Beyond Good and Evil today, and for those of you paying really close attention, we are both using Walter Kaufman's translation of it.
	So, Greg, I'm curious, when did you first start reading Nietzsche, and why?
	I mean, I think that's fairly typical high school, where I think most people start reading it, but it didn't have the kind of devastating impact it has on a lot of I don't know.
	Edgy teens who think they're something special.
	I didn't read it and immediately think to myself, like, oh, I must be the Superman, which I think is the biggest danger that a lot of people have.
	Rereading this now, after some time, I mean, you begin to see how leftists have really made a use of it.
	And everything has really been a postscript to him.
	All modern philosophy at this point.
	And while He's probably the most misunderstood of most philosophers and obviously the so-called radical right takes advantage of a lot of what he says.
	You can see how today's progressives have really taken some of the things that he said and ran with it.
	I think they're misunderstanding it too because he's warning of certain things and he is Saying what vistas are open by the death of God and the destruction of the idols, but he's not saying that this is necessarily going to lead to good results or that this is going to lead to something greater for humanity.
	Instead, he's saying that there's actually a lot of danger in this and we have to be careful.
	But I mean, it's sort of like.
	Giving a bunch of chimpanzees and assault rifle or something like that.
	He's dropping these bombs that are tearing away these certainties of the past.
	And giving it to the people and then the people are just going crazy and nothing productive is coming out of it.
	It's just sort of destruction, but I think he knew that and he warned of it and part of me thinks that.
	The undercurrent of despair, even though he talks so often about loving life and being true to the Earth, at least in Zara Zarathustra, I think so much of the tragedy of his thought is that he understood.
	The ways that what he said was going to be turned to bad ends and that's just bad ends or terrible ends terrible in the sense of of great but awful you know like I've been the terrible but just petty disgusting stupid downgrading things that we experience today.
	A lot of that comes out of what he talks about in this book, because once you start destroying concepts of good and evil, and you start replacing them with personal whims, unless those people coming forward really have something noble to them, what you're going to get is oftentimes worse than what came before.
	What about you?
	When did you first get into this?
	Sort of a two-part answer.
	It's funny that you brought up high school.
	I tried to read Nietzsche specifically beyond good and evil in high school and I was not yet smart enough.
	I just couldn't do it.
	I couldn't make heads or tails of what he was talking about.
	It was too dense.
	The vocabulary was too advanced.
	So I sat down with Nietzsche and then in college, in my early 20s, I actually kind of avoided him because I thought It was such a cliché for a young man on the right, especially one that had nothing to do with Christianity.
	It just seemed like too much.
	I just didn't want to fall into that cliché.
	Worse than Ayn Rand, right?
	Yeah, even worse, that's right.
	And as our listeners know from what I believe was our first episode, or second episode, I only read Ayn Rand to try and get a college scholarship, but I failed to do so.
	So I didn't really dive into Nietzsche until the second half of my 20s and I actually started reading him specifically because I started reading a lot about Christianity and at a certain point I felt like I was kind of in too deep with Christianity and I wanted to start reading things that would give it sort of a context outside of itself.
	I felt like I was sort of navel-gazing, or getting into the weeds of Christianity, and I wanted to kind of put it in relief.
	So I started reading a lot about Islam, and I started reading Nietzsche, and in that moment, cliche as it may be, Nietzsche really came as a revelation, especially beyond good and evil, which I read really quite shortly after reading the entirety of the New Testament for the first time.
	So yeah, in the end, my affinity for Nietzsche is actually about as cliche as possible.
	Well, I think... Cliches are cliches for a reason, so here we are.
	I think it's important that you're coming at it from that point of knowledge.
	I mean, he was writing at a time when everyone, from the most educated to the lowliest peasant, Could be expected to have a thoroughgoing knowledge of the bible at least the main stories Of christian theology.
	It was still something people would be willing to fight over Still something that animated the passions of leading statesmen and the masses Now we're at a position where you don't even have that common background and I think that cheapens Nietzsche in a way because it minimizes what he's doing You have to have a certain Knowledge if not mastery of the idols you want to destroy before you start dismantling them There's no accomplishment and just saying well This is all fake and I can say whatever I want if you're not if you don't actually know like what it is you're replacing He was writing a time when people knew what it is.
	They were replacing.
	I think that why it's more destructive than not now is because most people don't even have what you just said, I mean having even read the New Testament back to front or or Or front to back and having driven into reactionary thought and the importance of Christianity in the Western tradition and why the death of God opened up these horrifying vistas that led not just to the cliched, you know, oh, if God is gone, everything is permitted and that leads to genocide.
	I've always thought that was a stupid argument.
	To me, the real horror of it is you remove God, and we talked about this when we were talking about the new atheism.
	You remove God, and what you're left with is not Nietzsche and Superman, but a bunch of petty people seeking to elevate their degeneracy to the form of an identity.
	And, you know, God is just whatever I want to do is actually God, and we'll just sprinkle some incense around it and call it a day.
	I mean, I think Nietzsche, to his credit, understood fully what he was doing and understood fully the seriousness of what he's doing.
	And that's something that's been lost just because, you know, we're men amongst the ruins and you don't even have the tradition that he's attacking to appeal to anymore.
	I mean, that's what's so kind of devastating about this is reading it now and having seen what this has wrought makes these words seem so much more Horrifying and terrible in a way and I mean terrible in the way that.
	Terrible being great and magnificent and awful in the sense of scale of what was accomplished by it.
	This is not something where you should just read it and say this gives me permission to do whatever I want what he's saying is is a lot more powerful than that.
	That said, let's just jump in.
	There's one quote that I think is, and again, going from the Kaufman translation, I think that really kind of sets the ground for everything.
	And I quote, gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been, namely the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
	Also that the moral or immoral intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.
	Now, this alone, Explain so much of what's happening in academia today where people set up these philosophies and these ideas and meaning but really it's coming from their own subjective experiences and eventually it leads to the conclusion that all we have are subjective experiences.
	And therefore everything needs to be analyzed from the viewpoint of how does this impact me as an individual or whatever other intersexual categories, whether you're gay or not, whether you're a woman, whether you're white or black or Hispanic or whatever identity that is created or that you find useful.
	And this attack on the idea of absolute truth, as we talked about last week, the last time you and I talked, um, This idea that everything becomes essentially you taking your subjective experience and elevating it to the level of a God or of a truth.
	What you're left with is something that's very unimpressive and what you're left with is something that really doesn't have the power to move an entire society to create anything new.
	It just kind of tears everything down.
	That's why I mean on balance.
	I think the when you're reading Beyond Good and Evil, I agree with everything he's saying, but I don't want to, just because I see where this all goes.
	It's sort of the same way.
	I mean, I hope at some point we get to get into some of the great Christian reactionaries, Catholic reactionaries specifically, and some of the great critics of the Enlightenment, where I read these guys and I say, I agree with everything they're saying, except their most fundamental premise upon which everything is built.
	Like, I agree with the consequences of what they're saying, except their premise is all wrong.
	With Nietzsche, it's sort of the other way around.
	I think his premise is right, but where it led to is terrible.
	But if he's right, he's right, and we just have to deal with it.
	We can't shy away from the consequences.
	I mean, what really blew me away about Beyond Good and Evil, and what I'd really never given enough thought to, was the assertion that, like, if, you know, if God is dead, and if Christianity is simply wrong, Just how deeply that changes everything.
	It was Nietzsche who really forced me to think so seriously about how similar a lot of supposedly atheistic Worldviews just draw enormously from Christian Christian presuppositions and I mean just just the Ten Commandments generally I mean so much of Humanism and so much of existentialism and I mean a lot of the secular left-wing views and you know about feminism and and Marxism are all taking for granted this idea of
	of just kind of equality itself in the sort of Christian view of every human being is, you know, innately valuable, and that human life is valuable, and that suffering and cruelty and all of these things are wrong, and what Nietzsche demands of us when he, you know, through Beyond Good and Evil is that we, you know, acknowledge that if we are not to be Christians, or if Christianity is over, That all of those things go away, and we either have to come up with some sort of new way of reaching the same conclusions, or our whole concept of morality is without basis.
	And I think that's really what he gets right about the Enlightenment as well.
	The whole of the Enlightenment is just kind of a scientific attempt to rationalize what Christians already believe.
	Right, and they've got it all backwards, because unless God exists, unless Christ's message is true, all of the moral suppositions put forward by Christianity have no basis.
	Because if you actually look at it, and this is not a new observation.
	I'm not congratulating myself on being clever here.
	I mean, this is, you know, philosophy for babies.
	I mean, everybody recognizes this.
	I mean, You know, Jordan Peterson, which is about as entry grade as you can get, talks about this.
	And there's a new book, Dominion, how the Christian revolution remade the world by Tom Holland, where he essentially takes, you know, he details the inversion of values of the classical world, what Christianity did, but he takes it to the modern era and shows how this morality continues to affect us, even though the actual belief in Christianity has faded.
	But I would argue that this makes it even worse, because Christian morality and the inversion of values, the idea that suffering is better than nobility, that mastery is something to be avoided, while sacrifice, not even sacrifice for a cause, but sacrifice for the sake of an egalitarian ideal, you'll be rewarded in heaven for this.
	If you take away The incarnation of God, if you take away the supernatural basis of all this, these values don't make any sense and there's no reason to go along with any of these things.
	Leftists who are essentially pushing Christian morality without God, it's not just stupid and false, it's just insane because these values on their face don't make it.
	It's not just that they don't make any sense, it's that they're evil and wrong.
	They only make sense if there actually is a divine order behind it.
	And you can't just blank that out and expect us to go along with the rest of it.
	And I include even people like Thomas Jefferson in this, who famously created a Bible where he took all the supernatural stuff out and then said, well, here's a guide to good moral teachings.
	And it's like, but it's not a guide to good moral teachings.
	It's a fact, in fact, a very stupid guide to moral teachings, because it doesn't make any sense.
	You can't deny Christ's central message.
	And then say that there's still a Christianity left over worth believing in.
	I mean, he was either God or he wasn't and everything faded.
	He either rose or he didn't and everything rises or fades based on that.
	Now, from a reactionary perspective, I could say that it is useful and better if people believed in God and it is useful and better if people believed in this divine order.
	In fact, I would say that flat out.
	That it's better that people don't look into these things, almost like a Lovecraftian thing.
	If you look beyond the little island of what you're supposed to know and start to look into this, you just go nuts.
	And I think Western history, after the death of God, sort of proves that.
	I mean, it hasn't led to new revelations.
	It's just led to a down going.
	But Nietzsche, he understands the magnitude of what he's saying, and he's also giving us A different approach, and he's not going to try to prop up Christian morality without its central claim, which I think is what modern leftism tries to do, where it takes this kind of unsophisticated, dumbed-down view of egalitarianism vaguely borrowed from Christianity, strips God from it, denies the Christian origins of it, and then serves us this slop and says you have to believe in it.
	But there's really no reason to believe in it, and in fact it's self-refuting and stupid, and it leads to unhappiness and suffering, and the people who preach it most of all don't believe in it.
	Okay, well hold on.
	So, you've said two very different things so far, actually.
	Right now you're saying that leftism is in many ways just sort of a secular Christianity, and that Nietzsche helps us understand that fact.
	However, earlier you were talking about how a lot of the left uh knowingly or unknowingly really draws a lot from Nietzsche which uh what's what's your explanation for this uh this duality well i think that christian assumptions about morality and they the the dumbest and most simplistic idea of who are good guys and the bad guys say one this is one of the things we talked about recently that the the idea that the lefts are moral
	That leftists are moral relativists, just that doesn't hold up.
	In fact, they seem to be the most strict in terms of assigning categories of good and evil.
	What Nietzsche says, and as I said in the quote at the beginning, is that.
	These philosophies or these moral codes are really being the personal confessions of their authors, and in many ways a thinly disguised will to power from their authors.
	I think they're taking a lot of these assumptions about equality, they're removing the context from which these ideas developed, and then they're pushing it on everybody else.
	So they're still drawing on Christian morality, but they're doing it in a way where it's so obvious they're just doing it for their own subjective ends, and there's nothing deeper behind it, behind sort of the Prejudice that isn't even conscious of itself I mean this is one of the big things that he talks about that a lot of these so-called moral codes are essentially just the prejudices of their authors and They aren't revealed truths that were Discovered through a process of logic and reason I mean this is one of the the big things that he criticizes basically all philosophy except him for but
	They're just taking this sort of wreckage from the past, arranging it in a way that serves their current motives, and then putting it forward as a moral code and saying, this is what you need to believe in, when actually there's no reason for us to believe in these things.
	Well, as far as somebody just rising.
	up and laying out a set of values with just, you know, complete belief and dedication and then demanding that everybody follow them.
	It's not really necessarily something that Nietzsche would oppose outright.
	I mean, that's in many ways where he believes that morality comes from.
	This is something he gets into a little bit more in the genealogy of morals, but Nietzsche is so much more interested in Morality being dictated from the top by somebody who is worthy as opposed to there simply being some kind of codex that is universally applied.
	Now, the trouble is, Nietzsche doesn't ever quite, or at least debatably, He doesn't exactly say who it is that should rise to the very top and dictate morality and what precisely that morality should be.
	I mean, he obviously fetishizes strength in a very big way.
	I mean, he likes strength more than peace, right?
	He likes nobility more than the alleviation of suffering.
	But even with those guideposts, there's still a whole wide array of interpretation to be had from that, which is, I mean, you were talking earlier about how Nietzsche was very aware of the chaos that the death of God would leave us with.
	Part of that is because, so for Nietzsche, you know, if God is dead, then it is supermen who must arise and sort of you know, grab the reins of power and dictate what is good
	and what is bad. Well, if you have a lot of people doing that, they're going to have, you know,
	different ideas, and this is going to lead to, you know, very serious conflict. And this is something
	that Nietzsche was very prophetic about, because you can absolutely, you know, Nietzsche's feeling
	that God died, you know, at some point in the 19th century.
	Well, the 20th century absolutely represents a rise of supermen with very, very different moral codexes, and this resulted in absolute and total war, you know, from the rise of Islamism to Stalinism to Nazism, etc.
	I mean, these are just, you know, very, you know, all of these things You know, we're became so prominent because of their
	charismatic leaders who were very very good at obtaining power
	ruthlessly, but then eventually, you know, you're gonna you're gonna come across your um, your doppelganger or
	Or your your equal, you know somebody who's just as much a superman as you are
	Um, simply the only way to to resolve it is is to fight right? It's it just becomes a question of power and he
	explicitly predicts this even in terms of geopolitics as as he goes
	into The question of germany's role in europe the question of russia
	and he says And I quote here
	The time for petty politics is over the very next century will bring the fight for the dominion of the earth the compulsion
	to large-scale politics
	and then he Prophesies a new warlike age to which we Europeans have evidently entered and also favor the development of another and stronger type of skepticism.
	This is.
	Where he's he's sort of grasping at where this could lead to.
	We know that there's going to be a conflict.
	We know that there's going to be a battle for Dominion of the Earth, and he has a contempt for what he calls the parliamentary nonsense, including the obligation for everybody to read his newspaper with his breakfast.
	Because, you know, again, this is all a will to power.
	This is all codes being put forward.
	These are all things that can't really just be taken on their own terms.
	But now that we've been through that warlike age, and now that we've seen who, at least for now, seems to have won the battle in large scale politics for dominion of the Earth.
	And now it's not just reading the newspaper with your breakfast, but being besieged by media at all times by being, you know, constantly assaulted by these moral codes created by people who have no love for you and who are very, you know, once you recognize that you can see through it very easily.
	We're left with.
	We're left with Nietzsche and what he said at the beginning of all this.
	And a lot of professors will kind of explain away some of his rhetorical excesses.
	So he'll talk about, you know, the noble barbarians overthrowing decadent civilizations, and the problem with the French Revolution, and they need to be warlike, and they need to be savage, and this and that.
	And all these commentators will say, oh, well, he's just talking about Intellectualism, right?
	He's just talking about being brave and overturning the icons of the past and and carving out new vistas and purely intellectual terms.
	He doesn't actually mean conquering and doing stuff in the physical realm.
	Well, one, I think that, you know, you don't use this kind of language unless you're actually Hinting towards something like this.
	I mean, this isn't all just metaphor.
	So that's one point.
	Yeah.
	And the second day not metaphor.
	Yeah, it's preposterous.
	Right.
	And it's just a way to try to allow you to study it in the modern university without people going nuts.
	You know what I mean?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And I think that the other big thing is when we talk about the bravery Even if we accept this idea of you need bravery and savagery to take on the sacred cows of the European past, we'll apply that to the situation today.
	What's considered sacred today?
	What are the narratives that are unchallengeable today?
	What are the icons you're not allowed to touch or let alone topple?
	I mean, you try to do that now, especially those of us who work for American Renaissance or anybody involved in advocacy.
	There are real consequences when you talk about these things in intellectual terms.
	This isn't just a debating society.
	And if you think it is, say something that actually matters and watch how quickly real power and the terms of money and physical force and media outlets will come after you.
	I mean this isn't this isn't just abstraction this is flesh and blood and again I think he is honest enough to recognize this and I think a lot of us interpreters are not self-aware enough.
	They seem to think this is a game or praise him because he's saying oh Christianity is false when even at the time you could basically say that and get away with it.
	I mean if That's why he was a professor.
	That's why he was prominent.
	That's why people were taking these things seriously.
	It was because the death of God, in terms of elite culture, that had already occurred.
	He was pointing out the consequences.
	He wasn't, you know, setting himself up to be burned at the stake by a church that had long been stripped of its power.
	Right.
	Yeah, well, and there is this treatment of Nietzsche by much of the mainstream, especially in academia of He's often liked sort of just because he's so different from everybody else, and he gets to be sort of this token figure of being really unlike all of the Enlightenment philosophers, you know, all the Greco-Roman philosophers, all the Christian philosophers, etc.
	But that's a really dumb way of understanding Nietzsche, you know.
	Nietzsche is not like an abstract film that just sort of makes us You know, it's just sort of pleasing because it's so off the wall.
	I mean, Nietzsche was really different because he asks these just enormous questions, and those questions should be, you know, taken absolutely seriously.
	One guy who really did take Nietzsche as seriously as he should be taken would be MacIntyre in his book, After Virtue.
	MacIntyre, you know, and After Virtue, For you listeners, it is an interesting book.
	It is really quite a slog.
	McIntyre commits the cardinal sin of doing nothing to make sure his audience is really understanding what he's saying.
	But it is an interesting book, and something McIntyre in the end sort of concludes.
	is that the modern world needs to basically go back to Aristotle or opt for Nietzscheanism.
	And part of the reason MacIntyre chose Aristotle as the foil is because Aristotelian logic and morality was really comfortably folded into both Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
	So for him it represented this really universally applicable set of beliefs that could sort of adapt with lots of different cultures, which to him, to MacIntyre, was a representation of its strength.
	So when he says Nietzsche or Aristotle, by Aristotle he also means Abrahamic religions.
	And for better or for worse, MacIntyre opted for Aristotle.
	He actually converted to Catholicism not long after writing the first edition of his most famous book, After Virtue.
	And he also coined the concept of Rod Dreher at the American Conservative, he's often talking about the Benedict Option.
	That is in reference to the very end of MacIntyre's book, in which he says, you know, if we are to choose Aristotle and Abrahamic religions, we're going to have to emulate Saint Benedict at the end of the Roman Empire.
	Now, to wrap sort of that tangent up, I think MacIntyre is really right about the fact that the Enlightenment really didn't get us anywhere.
	Right.
	And I think that's probably the most valuable thing about his book.
	But, and I can't prove this, I'm engaging in a bit of mind reading here, I'm really left with the sense that MacIntyre, as a philosopher, chose Aristotle over Nietzsche not because he felt that Aristotle beat Nietzsche in some sort of imagined philosophical debate that took place in a void, But actually that he opted for Aristotle because he was too scared of what opting for Nietzsche might entail, which is why I think he then, shortly after, converted to Catholicism.
	Because true Christianity and Catholicism, whether it's true or whether it's false, it is really convenient.
	don't everybody freak out on me for using that word.
	Christianity, and especially Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, is really convenient because it is a
	really robust and meticulously detailed worldview.
	There is absolutely no shortage of positively brilliant philosophers, ethicists, and theologians, and apologists, who work within that tradition.
	And if you choose that, you immediately get all of this sort of preset stuff, and there is a real comfort of being guided by all of that.
	And it's a good guide.
	I mean, so many of these people are brilliant.
	So many of these theologians, ethicists, apologists, philosophers, etc., working in the Christian tradition are just absolute geniuses.
	And it's not a terrible thing to believe, I mean, by any means.
	I mean, it's not If you're willing to take a leap of faith and actually believe in the divine order.
	When I first went to DC, I knew an enormous amount of libertarians who were by and large moral relativists, which is a big reason, actually, why a lot of people are libertarians, is they're just not really sure what is good and what is bad, and ergo, they want to create a society that politically allows for a lot of different moral views.
	And by the time I left DC, an enormous number of those libertarians had become really devout Christians.
	And again, I think that's because, regardless of whether or not Christianity is true or not, It is just so convenient and so intellectually and morally robust.
	There's just so much there to latch on to.
	And it's difficult to be a moral relativist forever, indefinitely.
	I think it's really common.
	For people to be that in their youth, especially in this day and age, if you'll forgive the cliche, and libertarianism makes a lot of sense for relativism.
	And that's fun and easy when you're 20 and you really like to party and smoke pot and stuff, but it gets a lot harder to do that and to have that worldview by the time you're 27.
	Let alone when you're as old as I am and have kids.
	Right, yeah.
	Moral relativism goes out the window real fast.
	Yeah, definitely.
	Yeah, once you have your own children, yeah, definitely.
	But again, sort of, but back, you know, back to McIntyre, you know, my point is, is that
	like, if you come to, and you're definitely getting at this at the beginning of this podcast,
	if you come to agree with Nietzsche that God is dead and Christianity is not true, and that
	because of that we have to throw out all of these moral presuppositions, we can't just sort of
	cowardly secularize them, well then what exactly you do after that is incredibly
	unclear, and Nietzsche is...
	is really not helpful after that.
	You know, after that, for Nietzsche, it's just power, it's strength, it's Machiavellianism, it's sort of survival of the fittest.
	I'd say it's a bit more than that, but again, this is, again, Mr. Taylor's gonna rip our throats out, because I'm gonna engage in some mind reading here, too.
	In some of the rhetoric he uses, I don't think he's using it just to make a point.
	I think that there is something substantial here.
	And again, I think, just in passing, one of the reasons that so many people, especially conservatives and kind of the DC crowd, sort of fall back on older Christian traditions, particularly conservative readings of those traditions that may not even have power in the denominations today.
	You know, how many Catholics, Reactionaries, you know, Pope Francis would instantly excommunicate if they were ever in his presence for five seconds.
	But you can do that and it's safe and you have, you basically have like an army around you automatically.
	And it allows you to say things without becoming a huge political target.
	And there's a lot of profound truth to it, even if you don't believe in God or that version of God.
	And I do, I promise we will get into a lot of the great Catholic reactionaries who might truly admire and feel a lot of my thought is based on, even if I'm not coming from that faith tradition.
	But to return to Nietzsche, he does provide a bit of guidance, and this reminds me of what Venner was talking about as far as the path forward, and I quote.
	Part 9.
	Every enhancement of the type, quote, man, has so far been the work of an aristocratic society, and will be so again and again.
	A society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other.
	Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata, when the ruling cast constantly looks afar and looks down upon subjects and instruments, and just as constantly practices obedience and command, keeping down and keeping at a distance.
	That other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either.
	The craving for an ever new widening of distances between the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further stretching, more comprehensive states.
	In brief, simply the enhancement of the type man, the continually self-overcoming of man, to use a moral formula in a super moral sense.
	To be sure, one should not yield to humanitarian illusions about the origins of an aristocratic society, and thus of the presupposition of this enhancement-of-the-type man.
	Truth is hard, let us admit to ourselves, without trying to be considerate, how every higher culture on earth so far has begun.
	Human beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, Now, I don't take that purely as an intellectual metaphor.
	more civilized, more peaceful races, perhaps traders or cattle raisers, or upon mellow
	old cultures whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit
	and corruption."
	Now, I don't take that purely as an intellectual metaphor.
	I think he is hinting at, not hinting, directly stating this is what is to be admired.
	And you can explain it away and say, well, he didn't actually mean this, and he was opposed
	to German militarism, which is true.
	It was opposed to anti-Semitism, which is true.
	But that idea of a certain vitality where.
	You know in your bones and your blood what is worthy, what is unworthy, what is heroic, what is base, what is noble, and what is not.
	That provides the basis for a new or really an old morality.
	Something that doesn't need to be spelled out in abstractions.
	Something that doesn't need huge apologies for why you should believe this, why you shouldn't.
	Because it was something healthy people's just knew.
	And I think that even in Christianity and in terms of the world, its greatest moments of glory also speak to this impulse.
	Because when we think of the glory of, say, medieval Catholicism, we think of knights, we think of holy war, we think of the idea of sacrificing everything for the kingdom of heaven.
	And even among evangelicals today, what I always thought was kind of an inspiring saying was, I think it was, my utmost for his highest.
	Where you're sacrificing the best of yourself to achieve something even greater.
	So I mean, I do think that there are some guideposts here.
	He's not just leaving us in the dark.
	It's just people.
	Don't really want and modern people really just can't relate to that because I mean, okay We're gonna form like a motorcycle gang and like run around raiding people Like what do you actually do with these sorts of things?
	I mean as far as the practical consequences of this thought That's a whole nother debate in itself, but I do think he does give us some guideposts for how we can move forward and I think the dichotomy of noble and and base is a useful contrast to Good and evil.
	Listen, okay, I think all of that, I think you're right about everything.
	That was an excellent passage to read as far as a guidepost for what Nietzsche thinks we should do next.
	And yeah, your point, I mean, if you wanted to summarize beyond good and evil, you know, as shortly as possible, as briefly as possible, It really probably would be something along the lines of, don't think of things in terms of good and evil, or moral and immoral, but think of them in terms of noble and ignoble.
	Think of them in terms of aristocratic and base.
	I think that's absolutely true.
	I don't think that Nietzsche is necessarily wrong about this, and the passage you just read, I mean, about those aristocrats rising, I mean, that's what Nietzsche is getting at when he talks about the Superman, which is probably his most famous concept, or at least after the death of God concept.
	But the thing of it is, that you can that multiple different people who are supermen or aspiring supermen could could read that passage that you just read completely agree with it and then initiate a a rise to power but actually hold really different views this idea that you know i i don't think it's it's fair to say or fair to describe to Nietzsche this idea that like if we all just
	Think really deeply about what is, you know, what is good and what is bad or what, you know, what is, what should be valued and what should not be valued will all come to roughly the same conclusions.
	I don't think that's true at all.
	And Nietzsche himself somewhat concedes this because when he talks, so for the record, Nietzsche said that there had yet to ever be a Superman on Earth.
	That had never happened yet.
	But he does name a few people who he thought, you know, got closest to it.
	And basically all of the people, well...
	He names spiritual leaders, political leaders, and a handful of artists that he liked.
	And in regards to the spiritual and political leaders, well, none of the people he named agreed with one another about anything.
	I mean, two people he admired a great deal were Muhammad and Napoleon Bonaparte.
	And both of them definitely, you know, I mean, it's very obvious and it's very easy to understand why he thought of both of them as models of, you know, getting as close to possible as being
	a Superman. I mean Napoleon nearly conquered all of Europe and Mohammed, I
	mean, launched this whole religion that spread incredibly rapidly. I mean, I think
	Islam spread furthest and widest more quickly than any other religion
	ever.
	And they yet overcome Europe itself.
	Right, it just absolutely exploded.
	And all of these men, well and again just get back to to Muhammad and Napoleon, you know both of these men were 100% confident in what they believed to be to be good and bad and noble and, you know, not noble.
	But those conceptions were totally different.
	There's no I would actually disagree with you there, because when Napoleon was fighting the campaign in Egypt, when he was turned back partially because the Ottomans got some British reinforcement and he wasn't able to achieve the full aims of his campaign,
	Later on in life, he said that was the moment when he lost his destiny.
	Keep this in mind.
	This is after he conquered basically all of Europe, and he was still looking back and saying that it was all downhill because his true destiny, as he saw it, was to win in the Middle East.
	And then I believe this is an exact quote.
	he considered himself to be a kind of new Muhammad and he would put forward a new religion, a new
	creed of heroic. Are you serious? Yeah, I am totally serious. And he thought that he would
	win over the peoples of the east by creating this new thing.
	Keep in mind, when he was in Egypt, he talked all the time about how much he loved Islam, and invited all these clerics to come and sit with him.
	You are blowing my mind.
	You're 100% positive that this is true?
	Well, I know this is true, yeah.
	If you just read about Napoleon's campaign, I mean obviously Napoleon's campaign in Egypt did not go the way he wanted because Nelson basically blew up his navy at Alexandria and so it was he was cut off after that but and then you had the plague and all sorts of other stuff but for a while there he was accomplishing his objectives and he was moving to take over what we would consider to be the Holy Land And were it not for the British helping out the Ottomans, as they so often did throughout history, the French would have captured those areas and Napoleon's hubris
	was far beyond any proclaiming himself emperor in Europe.
	It was, he really thought of himself as becoming almost kind of a new Muhammad.
	For that matter, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, famously wrote that he would be like a North American Muhammad.
	So, I mean, this idea, I think that this idea of a kind of warrior creed where you're simultaneously also providing a spiritual orientation That is directed upwards that is directed toward conquest and glory and you know, a hostile critic might say self aggrandizement that is all there and I want to read one other quote here.
	Now.
	This is controversial because he's talking about women and feminism here, but I want to take a step back and say this isn't really about women in feminism.
	This is really about the kind of society we're in now and this applies both to men and women.
	If we're still allowed to say there are such a thing as men and women, because apparently nobody knows what a woman or a man is anymore.
	That's science!
	Here's the quotation.
	Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman now aspires to the economic and legal self-reliance of a clerk.
	Woman as clerk is inscribed on the gate to the modern society that is taking shape now.
	As she thus takes possession of new rights, aspires to become quote master, and writes the quote progress of woman upon her standards and banners, the opposite development is taking place with terrible clarity.
	Woman is retrogressing.
	Since the French Revolution, women's influence in Europe has decreased proportionately as their rights and claims have increased, and the emancipation of women, insofar as that is demanded and promoted by women themselves and not merely by shallow males, is thus seen to be an odd symptom of the increasing weakness and dulling of the most feminine instincts.
	There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a woman who had turned out well, and such women are always prudent, would have to be thoroughly ashamed.
	I think there's a lot to be said about and I think Kaufman hinted as this
	is one of the passages he doesn't particularly like very much. Yes, that's right. Kaufman has
	these really unhelpful notes that are just his opinions. Don't believe this. I'm letting you
	read this, but don't get too carried away.
	But I mean to me the real giveaway here is wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over
	over the military and aristocratic spirit.
	I mean, here I'm hearing the ghost of Baron Evola screaming in my ear about this is like what he's talking about.
	But we can also think of Fukuyama here, because when he said the end of history, it raises the fundamental question.
	If you have men with great spirit, are they going to be satisfied with triumphs in the field of commerce?
	Does that make one a superman?
	Let's take a person who we could say, I mean, someone like Bill Gates, you could argue that his accomplishments were because he mastered marketing and IP and stuff like that.
	But let's take a guy who does know engineering, who is, you know, if he didn't exist, the world would be fundamentally different and his greatest impact is still to come.
	Let's take Elon Musk.
	He is Pushing humanity forward with electric vehicles, with space exploration.
	Maybe he's about to do some big political stuff with Twitter now that he's got a board seat.
	He's doing some stuff with neural implants that could fundamentally challenge what it means to be human.
	There are some very horrifying and disturbing possibilities with that, along with some very positive ones.
	If you were saying, is there a Superman who has triumphed purely through commercial interests. He's
	probably the best example I can think of.
	But yet, speaking of him as a Superman, somehow still feels absurd, does it not?
	Yep.
	I mean, we still, we recognize him as a great...
	great man in terms of what he's been able to achieve. Well, and better than fundamentally,
	right? And it's certainly what he put forward as his own code is superior to what academics who
	might understand Nietzsche more thoroughly have put forward as their own code. But to
	put him in the same sentence as, say, Alexander the Great, I mean, it's just ridiculous.
	You're not even you're not even speaking the same language.
	It's not he's not transforming the way people think of themselves the way like true Superman or what's come closest to true Superman have done and I think that's one of the other big things we have to keep in mind when he chose.
	Every stupid kid who reads this or, God help them, Zarathustra thinks to themselves, well, I'm going to be the Superman.
	Like, well, no, you're not.
	There has not been a Superman and there will not be a Superman.
	And he set that up as basically his best case for a goal for humanity now that God is dead.
	And there was a certain desperation in it, I think.
	I mean, it's not that he logically proves that this should be the aim of humanity.
	He essentially just suggests it, because now we're lost in this darkness and we need to set something up for ourselves to be worthy of this great blasphemy that we've committed, which is the death of God.
	It's so funny that you keep bringing up how there are all of these stupid kids who read Nietzsche and decide that they are the supermans, because Whenever I read Nietzsche, I'm always struck by the fact that if, you know, Nietzscheanism is correct and true, that that's a bit of a downer for me personally, because, man, there is just no way in hell I am Superman.
	It's just absolutely hell.
	I mean, that's the healthier reading of it, though, is that it's not that you think of yourself as that.
	It's that you think of yourself as the rope over the abyss.
	I mean, that to me, without getting into spiritual stuff, my beliefs, your beliefs, whatever.
	I mean, I think that there, there is a plausible case to make that if you are listening to this and you're thinking yourself, well, how do I orient my life?
	And, and you're, you're bringing up all these thinkers and they raise certain questions, but I don't know what to actually do about this.
	I think you can say, That there is such a thing as the advance of humanity as the upward development of the race of the species even that the will to power and mastery over yourself over nature over dangers to your body and to the culture.
	The idea that you can resist the degeneration of a culture and that you can actually judge.
	What is superior and what is inferior in terms of art?
	I would say that we can we can make these claims and we can look upward and we can advance toward those things and fighting for that makes life worthwhile.
	It's just if you think you're the Superman if you think you're the God Emperor of Mankind.
	Well, I hate to tell you kid, but you're not.
	Because not only are you not, but even all these men who were invoking were not.
	Nietzsche was not.
	I mean, let's not forget how he ended up at the end.
	And I mean, in the end, we're all human, all too human.
	So I think that what he's setting up here, including some of the rhetorical excesses, there is, you can acknowledge that he's right, and you can acknowledge that He's stripping away illusions that need to be stripped away, but the rhetorical excesses, what some would consider excesses, or what someone like me might consider to be truth, there is an undercurrent of desperation there, because we're left with this terrible task, and if you are willing to go this way, you can't, as you put it, you can't just fall back on established
	Churches and institutions and doctrines because if you do that you immediately you have this whole huge social Support network and intellectual tradition that you can always appeal to it fortifies you like being in a castle but if you take the new chain road, you're basically on your own and you At best you can gather with small groups of people who are vaguely looking in the same direction But there's no there's no dogma I mean, much of this book is about attacking dogma and about attacking established, the idea that there are certain truths that we can just take on faith.
	But the reason these things exist is because there's comfort in that.
	And because most people do need dogma and they do need certain things that can't be shaken.
	Otherwise, they're not going to know what to do with themselves.
	They're going to fall into despair.
	And frankly, if we look at American culture today, Western culture today, even modern societies like Japan, People are falling into despair without the certainties of the past.
	I mean, it really does raise the question that we talked about with the new atheists.
	You know, Christopher Hitchens said, oh, religion is so terrible because it infects us in our central being and says that we can't do any better than these Bronze Age, Stone Age moral codes.
	And you look at the world today and say, well, Chris, yeah, we can't do better than these Bronze Age, Stone Age moral codes.
	Like some cleric from the most savage Stone Age tribe I guess, to a couple of things.
	than the head of the philosophy department at Harvard.
	I mean, that's just, I don't even know how you can argue with that at this point.
	It's just, that's how it is, but that still doesn't change the fact that Nietzsche was
	right.
	I guess, so a couple of things.
	One, I'm not quite certain I agree with you that he is, that Nietzsche is sort of scared
	about the emergence of a superman.
	There's this tone of desperation.
	Do you really find that Nietzsche, if anything there's a tone of excitement about the possibilities and the prospect of the emergence of a Superman?
	It's fair that he thinks we're sort of forced into this because God is dead and that comes with certain dangers, but I think at the end of the day Nietzsche really was excited about this prospect.
	But something I always wonder in reading Nietzsche, and I mean Nietzsche does often get me excited about this prospect, but there's this weird thing where because Nietzsche is without theology, right, he is without gods, There's no real reason to be certain that a Superman will emerge.
	Like, there's absolutely no guarantee.
	And he talks about it as if there really is a guarantee of it.
	But without God, there can't really be a guarantee of almost anything.
	I mean, I guess there's a guarantee of certain scientific principles, like gravity or something.
	But that's something I really wonder whenever I read him, is why Why he seems so confident of the emergence of a Superman, given that there's never been one before.
	And for Nietzsche, I mean, in so many ways he viewed humanity as degenerating, not regenerating.
	And I don't think degeneration guarantees rebirth.
	I mean, what do you...
	Do you think he was certain about the emergence of Superman?
	And are you certain of the emergence of a Superman?
	No, no to both.
	I mean, I think he was, I think he was setting it up as a possible goal.
	I don't think he necessarily thought it was inevitable.
	I think that he thought it equally likely, and I certainly do that, not that I would dare compare myself to him, that there's a real danger of a down going.
	I mean, one of the things that I'm, I'm suggesting here is that you can say Nietzsche was right.
	And we're not just talking about, you know, good and evil, but also Zarathustra and really is his entire body of work.
	You can say that he was right and still say, but it's still better that people believe in medieval Catholicism because if people are left to their own devices, they'll actually fall even below.
	What Nietzsche himself considered cowardice and degeneracy.
	That human beings left freed of all these ancient prejudices.
	I mean, the great progressive dream, right?
	That we can, we can perfect humankind.
	I mean, there's, you can almost say there's a left-wing version of Nietzsche, of Nietzscheanism.
	The idea that humanity can be perfected through education or whatever else.
	I mean, we've seen how that plays out over the last, what, century and a half?
	And it just kind of leads to things getting worse and worse and worse.
	So I don't I don't think that the Superman is inevitable.
	I think that it's a highly it's a worthy goal, but it's highly questionable about whether it's even possible and also once people are freed from the demands of Christianity, it's almost like they take the worst parts of it and remove the things that made it Worthwhile including of course the central question of spiritual redemption like not playing games Not like oh, it's a it's a spiritual birth and that'll make you feel happy and have self-esteem It's like no, do you do you live forever or not?
	Did Christ come back from the dead or not?
	like don't give me stupid books about like how this makes you feel like these are explicit claims that are being made and If you take those truth claims away from people, I think The majority of people, even in the West, get worse, not better.
	So, I mean, there's also, he goes on a tear, being a good German, he goes on a tear about Anglos.
	He has a specific critique of this form of Christianity that they practice.
	He says, you know, he's contrasting English Christians and German Christians.
	I quote here, it is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race that it clings firmly to Christianity.
	They need its discipline to become moralized and somewhat humanized.
	The English being gloomier, more central, stronger, and well and more brutal than the Germans,
	are precisely for that reason more vulgar, also more pious than the Germans.
	They stand more in need of Christianity.
	For more sensitive nostrils, even this English Christianity still has a typically English odor of spleen
	and an alcoholic dissipation against which is needed for good reasons.
	as a remedy, the subtler poison against the coarser.
	A subtler poisoning is indeed for clumsy people some progress, a step towards spiritualization.
	English clumsiness and peasant seriousness is still disguised most tolerably, or rather elucidated and reinterpreted, by the language of Christian gestures and by the prayers and singing of songs.
	And for those brutes of sots and rakes who formerly learned how to grunt morally under the sway of Methodism and more recently, again, as a Salvation Army, a penitential spasm may really be the relatively highest achievement of, quote, humanity to which they can be raised.
	That much may be conceded in all fairness.
	So, as far as a pessimist, there you go.
	I mean, that's my answer, you know, direct from him.
	Man alive.
	A couple of things.
	Getting back to the idea of being afraid of Nietzsche, especially in the context of MacIntyre and his book After Virtue, yet another reason to be afraid of Nietzsche being right is especially if you do not think the emergence of a Superman is inevitable.
	Or even more so if you think it's unlikely.
	I mean, that is truly a bleak view of, like, God is dead, which is going to cause all of these problems, and, you know, some noble Ubermensch is probably not going to arise to save us.
	I mean, that's got to be one of the most pessimistic views of humanity, like, of all time.
	Yeah.
	I mean, if you're into Nietzsche, if you think Nietzsche's basically right, you've really, really got to hold on to the prospect of the emergence of a Superman.
	Well, but you could also, I mean, this is why I think it's sort of like Hegel, right?
	I mean, how, if you look at what he said, you understand how it was coming from a,
	what we could broadly call a right-wing position.
	But of course, his biggest impact, arguably, was on the left,
	because Marx took a lot of his stuff, inverted it, and then gave us Marxism.
	Well, and a lot of anarchists were really influenced by Nietzsche as well.
	But this isn't, this is not surprising, because, you know,
	Nietzsche is really the foremost thinker on the right who moves beyond conservatism,
	and who is, again, if you do believe in the eventual emergence of a superman,
	you know, who believes in a certain utopianism and a certain revolutionary utopianism,
	of like, there is something about the innateness of man right now.
	that can be changed, right?
	That's exactly similar to the utopic socialists and to the Marxist socialists, right?
	They also believe that man can be fundamentally transformed through some kind of revolution or a new system of political and societal organization.
	Nietzsche, again, is totally on board with that.
	His view is just simply one of You know, that, you know, aristocratic noblemen will emerge to create this, not, you know, anarchist scribblers or, you know, or somebody like Colin Watts.
	There might not be a contradiction between the two, as we were talking about the Iron Heel, where Jack London creates this incredibly boring, uh sort of like socialist ubermensch who leads the the
	revolution right well but it's just totally perfect and everything else and also i was getting at
	earlier about how you can believe in the ubermensch and that it emerges through an aristocracy but
	still with wildly different value sets right Right.
	Like, I mean, you just compare, like, you know, Jack London's socialist ubermensch to Adolf Hitler or somebody like that.
	I mean, there is a sense in which both really fit the bill, but the values are just completely at odds.
	Oh, and also, you can see how this idea of everything that has been imposed on you, you can cast off.
	You can see how intersectionality and identity politics and also some of the more... It's always kind of weird to talk about this stuff because I'm kind of a prude.
	Like the weird sexual identities that are being created now.
	The question of transsexuals and all the other new categories that are being created, that's almost just the beginning.
	It's going to get a lot weirder and a lot more perverse a decade from now, barring radical change.
	And you can also see how Nietzsche is arguably responsible for that too, because once you reveal that you are actually being held by these shackles, And once people conclude that they don't need these shackles and that they can self create that they can live their life as sort of a work of art.
	What you end up with is actually not that impressive for most people, but in their heads.
	They are overcoming the prejudice of centuries.
	They are self-creating.
	If they are not, maybe they don't think of themselves as an uber bench because they've still got that ingrained egalitarianism, but they at least think of themselves as liberated.
	And they at least think of themselves of triumphing over a darker reactionary past.
	So.
	I think reading this.
	Going into this, if you're listening to this podcast, you're obviously.
	Probably have a certain bent where you're thinking to yourself.
	Okay.
	I'm a white advocate.
	I don't believe in egalitarianism.
	I'm looking for a way forward, but I think so, you know, obviously you're going to read mutual and you're going to find a lot of stuff in there.
	That's going to get you excited and say, yeah, this is the way, but I'm merely suggesting is that I don't disagree with that at all, but we should be aware of the dangers here too.
	And we should also understand that.
	The people who probably consider themselves our worst enemies take equal inspiration from this and that their conclusions are diametrically opposed, but the inner logic is still there.
	It's still internally consistent what they're doing.
	It's still coming from the same place.
	I don't know.
	I mean, left-Nietzscheanism is certainly a thing.
	And it's funny that you bring this up, because you also brought up left-Randianism when we did a podcast on Ayn Rand.
	Ayn Rand was, of course, deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche.
	But in both cases, your point is that so many of these lefties latch onto a particular identity, especially sexual ones.
	and just proclaim it to be, you know, absolutely great, and then just sort of go forth proclaiming their own greatness.
	But I think that this, in both the comparisons, I mean, in regards to both left-Randism and left-Nietzscheanism, it really lacks a certain, the left iterations of them, We really lack the same sense of grandiosity and scale of the original right-wing versions.
	I think a lot of these people who really want the world to know that they're transgendered or pansexual or whatever, Their world is really very small.
	I mean, it's really just kind of a solipistic individualism, which I do think is the result of the death of God and the erosion of normal communities and all of these, you know, conservative talking points.
	But, like, these people don't, right, like, even the most aggressively pro-gay person does not want to remake the world so that like everybody is gay or so that everybody is is transgendered.
	Also the public school teachers seem to.
	It's the ones that keep showing up on TikTok.
	It's really very hyperbolic.
	They don't have this sort of big vision for society that somebody like Ayn Rand or Friedrich Nietzsche did.
	Their vision is one of just complete atomization In which everybody gets to sort of pick somewhat at random the identity that they are most proud of, and they get to just proclaim how proud they are of it all the time, and nobody interferes with that.
	And the only exceptions to this are certain identities that are off-limits, right?
	Or what have you.
	But this is part of the reason why I'm fond of often describing contemporary liberalism as just kind of nihilism with shibboleths, because there are these hang-ups, right?
	It's not relativistic in that there are things that are really, really, really big no-no's, like white identity, obviously.
	But aside from these no-no's, the big sort of moral principle is that everybody gets to do what they want.
	I mean, again, once you eliminate the shibboleths, Then it does become really relativistic, right?
	We cannot judge transgender people, we cannot judge the homeless, we cannot judge heroin addicts, you know, all of these things are just different ways of living, right?
	All of these are just different lifestyle choices, and all lifestyle choices are awesome, and it's really mean to critique them, except for the really bad ones, which we've already talked about.
	And in that sense, like, that's the relativism of the left.
	So no matter how much of a kind of freewheeling egomaniac any of these lefties really are it still lacks this this big big vision of somebody that Nietzsche would have admired like Napoleon or Muhammad or even or even the Buddha right I mean it's it's often very difficult to categorize you know Muhammad as was he was what was he a left-winger or right-winger it's like it doesn't really apply it's not it's not that simple
	But that's not really true of all of these.
	Again, it's like, being a self-aggrandizing egomaniac doesn't really mean that you're super Randian or super Nietzschean.
	It can be much simpler than that.
	And Nietzsche, even in Good and Evil, I found the passage, but it's a bit too long.
	He does actually talk about Anarchists, which, I mean, anarchy was a big deal when Nietzsche was writing in the second half of the 19th century, and he talks about how all of these anarchist dogs were baring their fangs more and more obviously and roamed through the alleys of European culture.
	He talks about how they sort of posture themselves as being really different from the more sort of generic like socialists or parliamentarians or democrats or whatever but that ultimately what they want really just isn't that different and I think that that was true when Nietzsche wrote Good and Evil and I think it's true now.
	You know it's sort of the way how like even the most radical member of Black Lives Matter really doesn't hold beliefs that different from whoever's in charge of Goldman Sachs You know, the rhetoric is different, some of the tactics are different, but all the money is going to the same things, you know, the goals are the same.
	You heard about that new thing, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And just like how 150 years ago, you know, anarchists might claim, you know, that they want to abolish, like, all of capitalism or whatever.
	You know, anarchists and, you know, Antifa members say the same thing now, but it's not It's not really true, or at the very least it's not meaningfully true, because they don't do anything to challenge capitalism.
	And the biggest institutions and proponents of capitalism do not in any way feel threatened by BLM or Antifa.
	That's very apparent.
	I mean, you just have to follow the money, and it's clear they're not bothered by it in the slightest.
	You know what Mussolini said about anarchists?
	Every anarchist is just a frustrated dictator.
	If anything, that makes me think better of them.
	They're trying to impose something, as opposed to just kind of free ride off the generosity while giving yourself a cloak of self-righteousness.
	I've known some anarchists in my day, and they're not great people, nor do they tend to be very impressive.
	They're obviously exceptions, but whatever.
	Anyway, so my point is that I think it's a little too easy to kind of look at these solipistic, egomaniacal lefties and be like, oh wow, they're kind of drawing from, you know, the Nietzschean, you know, Will to Power or Ayn Rand's sort of copy of it.
	But I don't think it's actually that direct a line.
	I think it's just sort of easy to confuse Selfish people with delusions of grandeur as being influenced by Nietzsche.
	And there's a whole book called Nietzsche and the Anarchists.
	I mean, there were anarchist theorists from the heyday of anarchism in the second half of the 19th century, excuse me, who did draw from Nietzsche.
	And like I said earlier, I mean, it's because of this They share this kind of view of a revolutionary potential of man that, you know, generic conservatives do not have, obviously, at all.
	And cautious centrist Democrats and Republicans, in the classical sense of both of those words, also do not share.
	They're also very leery of changing human nature and utopias.
	But even despite that historic theoretical connection, I don't think you can look at I think that's probably the best way to put it.
	is it like Tranny Story Hour or whatever or Head Honchos or whatever it is or Head Honchos and
	Antifa groups as being very very Nietzschean. It's just their their vision is just way too
	small scale. Yeah yeah I think that's probably the best way to put it. He might have at best
	or at worst cleared the way for for them a little bit but they're not really drawing from him.
	Maybe they think they are, but they're not.
	And again, I mean, it's sort of like if you, you know, if you meet, if you meet one of those people, you know, one of, I mean, one of those kind of generic Noam Chomsky fans who just sort of couch surfs and, you know, never really has a steady job and, you know, has all of these complicated relationships with girlfriends and friends because he never really you know, he doesn't really have a very stable life, so he's
	constantly relying on others, but his reason for doing this is so that he does not perpetuate
	capitalism or perpetuate, you know, neoliberal tyranny or, you know, whatever it's so
	he doesn't have to find the war machines. There's always a glorious cover story for
	whatever's going on. Well, and those cover stories are often genuine, but like you wouldn't look
	at that guy and be like, man, he really is forging his own way.
	I mean, he has his own moral codex, and he's, you know, he's rejecting a lot of these things that the rest, a lot of these sort of moral requirements that the rest of us accept, like paying taxes or...
	You know, having a job.
	You can't look at that guy and be like, oh yeah, this is sort of a budding left-wing, you know, uber-bench.
	You know, if you're looking for that, it's somebody like Vladimir Lenin, right?
	It's somebody who is absolutely ruthless in seeking power.
	I mean, he was not so dumb as to think that the best way to stick it to capitalism was to be unemployed, or to just periodically work just miserable minimum wage jobs.
	Again, to quote Rand, I don't admire your ends, but I admire your means.
	I want to read one thing.
	Obviously, there's a whole host of things we didn't get into too much about slight morality and everything else, but I want to read one excerpt where I think he kind of shows his fangs a little bit and gives us an example of what it means to be Noble and to have a code and I quote.
	It is obvious that moral designations were everywhere first applied to human beings and only later derivatively to actions.
	Therefore, it is a gross mistake when historians of morality start from such questions as, why was the Compassionate Act praised?
	The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values.
	It does not need approval.
	It judges what is harmful to me as harmful in itself.
	It knows itself to be that which first accords honor to things.
	It is value creating.
	Everything it knows is part of itself that honors such a morality as self-glorification.
	In the foreground, there is the feeling of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of wealth that would give and bestow.
	The noble human being, too, helps It helps the unfortunate but not, or almost not, from pity,
	but prompted more by an urge unbegotten by excess of power.
	The noble human being honors himself as one who is powerful, also as one who has power over himself, who knows how to
	speak and be silent.
	Direct from the Havamal.
	Who delights in being severe and hard with himself and respects all severity and hardness.
	A hard heart, Wotan put into my breasts, is an old Scandinavian saga.
	A fitting poetic expression, seeing that it comes from the soul of a proud Viking.
	Such type of man is actually proud of the fact that he is not made for pity, and the hero of the saga therefore adds as a warning, if the heart is not hard in youth, it will never harden.
	Noble and courageous human beings who think that way are furthest removed from that morality, which finds itself Which finds the distinction of morality precisely in pity or enacting for others.
	I think that basically sums it up that you know if you are.
	It's very easy to say.
	I am free.
	I am creating my own values.
	I am.
	I am self glorifying and if you're a Christian, you can see the.
	demonic implications of that.
	What is the first sin, right?
	The first sin is also crime and punishment.
	Right, right.
	The first sin is we will become like the gods.
	Interestingly enough, in Genesis, gods are plural.
	But, you know, it's to try to replace God.
	It's to try to become the equal of God.
	But there's something else in there which a lot of people miss, which is that You actually are imposing a code on yourself that is so unyielding and so hard and so stern that your self-glorification is actually a form of self-imposed slavery to this creed that you've set up.
	And you have to commit to it completely unyielding and commit to it so totally that It's almost much worse than anything that a God or another person could impose on yourself.
	And that's what it takes to actually be a creator and someone who determines values.
	And when you look around, and even if we're being honest, if we look at ourselves, who do we know who do who is capable of doing such a thing?
	Not many people.
	Yeah.
	So That's the undercurrent of caution that, I mean, you can read a lot of stuff and start like pumping your fist and being like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the way to go, but I'm already assuming that a lot of you listening to this already kind of know that, are already encouraged by this, and I'm putting forward some caution here.
	There is a real, I mean, That passage you read is both the challenge and the comfort of trying to sort of be Nietzschean yourself.
	I mean, something I find really... I mean, comfort is probably the right word.
	Something I find really comforting about Nietzsche is that Nietzsche is such a reminder of the fact that, like, You can become totally isolated from society, which if you get into white advocacy, that's likely to happen.
	The outside world can punish you in all sorts of ways.
	They can take away your access to all kinds of services, including very serious ones like banking, and they can restrict how easy it is for you to travel.
	But they cannot take away your own moral codex and what you hold yourself to.
	They cannot take away from you your ability to get strong and to become physically gifted.
	They cannot actually really affect your diet very much.
	They cannot affect what you write and your mind and its ability to...
	You know, seriously and critically analyze the world around you, and there are all of these very serious things that cannot be taken from you, and that, you know, you can really focus on.
	And in that sense, Nietzsche is similar to the Stoics, even though Nietzsche dismissed them in very harsh terms.
	And I don't know, I mean, that's something I do try to remember, and that I do think is a really valuable thing to keep in mind.
	Yeah, at most they can compel your surrender, but they can never compel your agreement unless you let them.
	Yeah.
	But I dare say we've gone on for long enough here.
	Yeah, and I think that's a good place to wrap it up.
	And of course, not only will we never agree with them, we will never surrender.

▲