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July 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:21
331 Morality as Dominance Part 2: Theory
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It's a lot!
It's a lot! It's a lot!
Like, like, master and servant!
Alright, we're going to continue on with this idea of morality as domination, or ethics as domination, which is a fantastically fascinating, I think, topic which we all understand emotionally when we are told to do...
Oh, you know what? I haven't even done the date.
Good heavens! I'm just out of control today!
I just came back from a, uh...
Oh, I guess almost a sort of third round job interview.
I got a fourth round on Monday.
I've got a third round on Wednesday.
I sort of have two jobs in the cooker at the moment.
So I have to go meet with an investment group that is backing one of the companies that I want to work for on Monday.
And then I'm meeting with the...
I've been sort of passed by the CEO and COO and I've got to meet with the CTO. On Wednesday, so hopefully, and I have one other job that's cooking around.
So with any luck, I'll have a competing job, Mud Pit, where everybody's vying for my unique brand of software services for massive amounts of cash.
Bidding war! That's all we can hope for.
And so, I mean, I did sort of think I could, if I got sort of like...
I don't know. If I got donations up 40%, I could survive on donations, but I think that's going to take another little while, so I'm going to continue.
Unfortunately, this will mean a little bit less time for Freedom Aid Radio.
I've had a little bit more time for it because my job has been sort of not overly busy lately.
But if I'm going to a new job, that's going to be quite another matter.
But let's get back to the key.
It is almost 4pm on Friday, the 14th of July, 2006.
And I'm heading home.
So... The idea that ethics are invented...
There's two approaches to this, right?
Two sort of ideas to this idea of ethics as dominance.
The first is that ethics are invented by the strong to keep the weak weak.
And the second is that ethics are invented by the weak to disarm the strong.
These are... Not exactly the most compatible of views, but they do sort of fit around this.
And so, we'll just sort of talk a little bit about the polls, as identified by the person who I think delved into this the deepest, and to some degree the most accurately, our good old friend Freddy Nietzsche, Freddy N. And we'll talk a little bit about his definitions into sort of the slave and master morality.
Let's start with the slave and we'll sort of compare and contrast these with the slave and master directly.
So, the slave is resentful.
The slave is depressed and meek and self-controlling and altruistic and lives for others and compares himself to others and judges his worth by approval and so is resentful of anybody who hasn't fallen into the same trap.
And I think we've all met people like that.
So they're resentful, they're passive-aggressive, they're shaming, they're blaming.
Nietzsche associated this with women and slaves and so on.
He wasn't the most egalitarian when it came to gender.
But I could say that in very broad categories, I'm not going to make that joke.
I've already done it twice before.
Normally I will, but just not this one.
No shame in repetition for jokes for me, because it's not an endless well, so...
But I think when we look at moms, a little bit more than fathers, there's a little bit more of this.
So there's a lot of resentment and controlling through guilt and so on.
But in the master morality, anger is expressed directly.
We all know these kinds of divisions, right?
But anger is expressed directly.
I would say maybe a little bit more rage than anger, but anyway.
The slave morality, a little bit more on the reactionary side.
Or a negative side.
So it is a reaction to strength.
It's a reaction to dominance.
It's a reaction to independence.
It's a reaction to all that would be sort of natural in the human soul if it wasn't for, you know, 10,000 years of cloying in claustrophobic slave morality that chokes up the natural pathways of neurons and neurology.
But it's a reactionary philosophy, whereas the master philosophy is creative or a positive philosophy.
I'm not arguing for either side.
I'm just sort of trying to differentiate them in your own mind.
The slave morality is other-directed.
In other words, it's how other people are doing that you measure your worth, right?
So you argue for freedom and people say, well, what about the poor?
That's other-directed.
When people disapprove of you or seem to think that you're an idiot and don't give you a reasonable argument to help you out, that is, they're hoping that you're other-directed.
They're hoping... So when people send me emails saying that only a bad person would have these views or...
You are arrogant, or you are cult-y, or you are petty, or you are whatever, right?
You only associate with weak-minded people so that you can feel like an intellectually superior guy, like whatever it is that people come up with, the endless slings and arrows that they attack me with.
Generally, this is a slave morality, right?
They're hoping that I'm other-directed enough to be shocked and appalled that I've offended someone.
Oh, I've offended someone.
That must be bad.
I must be wrong. Of course, it's pure nonsense, right?
It doesn't have anything to do with the truth at all.
The master morality is self-directed.
What are my standards of values?
What do I consider to be the good?
What gives me pleasure? And it's not other-directed.
I think this is a bit of a false dichotomy, but we're not going to do all of that analysis of these two viewpoints relative to the truth.
We're just going to go through these a little bit.
Now, the slave is, to some degree, to a large degree, is self-deceptive.
So the slave thinks that it's morality that he's interested in, but it's not.
It's resentment. It's a building up in justification and praise of obedience, right?
Which is not considered to be obedience to a secular authority or the priest or whatever, but obedience is instead to the good, to the highest and so on.
But it actually translates in reality to obedience to another human being, right?
So from the slave morality, the slave lies to himself constantly.
About what it means to be brave and honorable and strong and so on.
And so somebody who says that it's patriotic and virtuous to submit to George Bush, this would be the slave morality.
It's virtuous to go into the army would be the slave morality because it's not virtuous.
You're simply plugging yourself into somebody else's advantage and calling it virtue.
You're simply submitting to somebody else's advantage and calling it virtue.
So there's a real strong sense of self-deception in the slave morality.
In the master morality, there's a self-awareness.
You have to be aware of yourself and your own desires and your own preferences and your own needs and your own wants and your own strength and power in order to be able to achieve those things.
So there is a self-awareness.
Now, in the slave morality, humbleness.
Oh, humbleness, humbleness, humbleness.
And this does not mean humbleness in the face of reality, but rather humbleness in the face of other people's needs, requirements, and so on.
So humility is a very strong ethic in the slave morality, and it's part of this whole self-deception thing, because humility simply means obedience to others, for the most part, like in this definition.
So to be humble before God means to be humble before The priest, the pope, whoever is ordering you around.
So humility and meekness, and the meek shall inherit the earth, and only after everyone else has gotten the property rights, or has left for the stars, as a few wits have put it.
Whereas the master morality is proud, not vain.
Nietzsche is incredibly...
Venomous and effective critic are vanity.
One of Nietzsche's more memorable aphorisms is that vanity is the fear of being original.
Vanity is always trying to be powerful or successful in the eyes of others, which is based on their standards, not original standards.
So pride is a hallmark of the master morality.
Now, the slave morality, and of course, if you know anything about Randian heroes, this stuff is not unknown to you, I think.
But in the slave morality, altruism is the general philosophy.
So you only exist to serve others.
You only exist for the good of others.
And the others, of course, who have no voice, always need somebody to define what they need, so you end up being a slave towards somebody who claims to be the voice of everyone, like the politician or the priest or whoever, right?
But altruism is the big thing.
In the master morality, egoism...
It's the big thing. Now, in the slave morality, there is a prudence, which generally translates to a kind of conservatism.
The good old days, the way things used to be, there's a sort of prudence is considered to be the real value.
So be careful with your money.
Don't invest in wild schemes.
Don't think so much of yourself.
Oh, you're just too big for your britches.
All that kind of stuff. Prudence and conservatism and not wanting to take risks and so on is the way to go for the slave morality and the master morality.
Much more entrepreneurial, experimental, push the envelope, live on the edge, all that kind of stuff.
And in the slave morality, democracy is considered to be a very good thing.
Because in the slave morality, everyone is equal.
And this doesn't sort of mean equal before the law or equal in terms of the right to exist.
It means everyone's kind of equal, right?
There's that Japanese proverb that says, the nail that sticks up is the one that gets hammered down.
Also, the tall poppy is the one that gets cut down.
So, in the slave morality, you're never supposed to be anything big.
You're never supposed to aim for the stars.
And if you do aim for the stars, then you have to mouth all of these saccharine platitudes of service to everyone.
So if you aim to become rich, you have to say, well, I do this, I'm a philanthropist, I want to give back, I do it for the shareholders, I do it for my employees.
You can never openly say, I want money and power, and I want to control my own destiny, and I think that those who don't are kind of pathetic.
But I'll give them jobs because somebody's got to be the peons, right?
That would be a frank expression of a master morality.
I use other people to my ends.
It's my pleasure that I serve.
And if other people benefit, fantastic.
But I could care less fundamentally.
I don't do it so I can give back to the community.
I don't do it so that I can donate $31 billion or $1 billion to the UN. I don't do it.
So that I can give back to the community.
I do it because I want control over my own destiny.
And I want to be mastered within my own ego and within my own house and within my own world.
And so I don't take orders from people.
I much prefer giving them and that's my motivation.
You can't say that, right?
I mean, at least not many people can say that openly.
And so, in the slave morality, you are democratic, you are self-indulgent, you forgive yourself for all your flaws, you don't aim too high, you don't differentiate yourself from others, because we all live, and you know what,
I'm going to fight my way back from the conclusions that I have about all of this, and we'll just talk about a further understanding of these two ways of approaching ethics, which are very much talked about in Crime and Punishment, and of course in And Nietzschean philosophy as well.
But there is a self-indulgence, a forgiveness of others, a forgiveness for people being pathetic, a general belief that people are sort of pathetic.
There's more comedy.
There's more, aren't we all fools?
And anybody who claims any kind of virtue in the slave morality, anyone who claims to be superior, is considered to be pompous and vain and arrogant and self-serving and false and hypocritical.
They have nothing but hatred, right?
This is the resentment. Nothing but hatred for those who claim to be superior To the hurt.
So there's a lot of self-indulgence, a lot of forgiveness of others, a lot of forgiveness of the self, a lot of don't aim high.
Whereas in the master morality, there is a very aristocratic approach.
There is a value hierarchy.
People are not equal.
People are not equal in the master morality.
To imagine that they are is to ignore the basic facts of reality.
There are great singers and there are mediocre singers and everyone's pretty bad.
Just about everyone else is pretty bad.
There are really blindingly intelligent people, and then there are people who just think that they're smart but aren't really, and thus have a lot of resentment.
There are people who are kind of dumb, but everyone thinks their abilities are above average, but of course the average is the average, and then there are people who are just plain silly.
And there are people who are fantastic in business and great at creating jobs and great at negotiating, and then there are other people who just think they are and are all pompous and like wearing the suits and staying at the big hotels and tend to drive companies into nothing and so on.
And so there is a really self-indulgent, pathetic kind of democracy on the slave side, and there is really a value-based hierarchy on the master side, where there is no illusions about the equality of people and the differentiation between those who are confident and strong and those who are resentful and pitiful and weak and claim that it's a virtue.
In the slave morality, there's a lot of confessionals.
There's a strong desire to confess your weaknesses to people, right?
Because that's part of serving this democratic illusion of equality and that we're all sort of, we all put our pants on one leg at a time and so on.
Whereas in the master morality, it's very hard to figure out what people are thinking, and people don't walk around stepping onto Oprah and confessing all of their weaknesses and all of their problems that these people are...
In the master morality, you don't do that.
You have too much pride.
And so you don't talk about these kinds of things about yourself.
You kind of wear a mask, to some degree.
A mask is probably not the right way of putting it in a very sort of...
It's too prejudicial a term.
But you have a great deal of gravitas and reserve.
Now, in the slave morality, there is considered to be, and I'll stay back, okay, there's considered to be a morality of principles.
So the principle is equality, the principle is humility, the principle is altruism, the principle is basically no self-esteem and service to others and so on.
And so the morality is following those principles.
Whereas in the master morality, at least in the Nietzschean definition, the morality is myself, right?
The morality is what is good for me, what gives me strength and power and joy, and makes me happy, and gives me thrills of power, and not necessarily power over others.
It can be self-mastery.
But what is good for me, what is it that gives me pleasure and power, is morality based on the individual personality rather than any universal principles.
Now, the slave morality is pretty weak-willed.
It's petty and resentful and vengeful and passive-aggressive, but it's kind of weak-willed.
So you don't see a lot of people in the slave morality camp standing up for principles.
They just kind of bow down to whoever's got the most power and call it virtue.
There's good and evil in the slave morality, and good is whoever is weak.
And evil is whoever is strong.
But I don't, I mean, this is sort of the definition.
I have a slight problem with it because they love to bow down to those in authority.
But those who are strong and don't mouth the platitudes of equality and I, you know, the politicians who don't say, yeah, I wanted power and I got it and it's a great thing.
I love it. I have to work like six months a year.
I get great pay.
People like bow and scrape in front of me all day long.
It's a beautiful thing. I love power.
It's great. You don't hear a politician saying that.
You say, well, I felt called to give something back to the people and to this great country which has given me so much and I'm here to serve, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now, the slave morality has no problem with those who have strength but cloak it in these saccharine, banal phrases of service and altruism and so on.
But the strong people who say, yes, the politician who says, yeah, I wanted power.
You guys are willing to give it to me.
I'm good at making speeches and I like to negotiate and I like to hand out favors.
I like to punish my enemies and reward my friends.
That's good. If you all don't like it, that's fine.
Don't give me the power, but you all did give me the power, so I'm going to use it.
That would be a railing out against that, because it would be honest.
This is part of the self-deception that is in the slave morality.
But basically, good is that which is weak, and evil is that which is strong and certain.
So these are two opposites.
Now, the master morality doesn't have evil.
It doesn't have evil.
What it does have is good, that which contributes to my strength and power and joy, and there's bad, which is that which saps my strength and energy and will.
So they would say that the slave morality is fine for the slaves, but it's bad for the masters, because it saps their energy and decisiveness and willpower and so on, and so it makes you kind of clammy, right?
So if you're a master, if you're somebody who believes in the master morality or follows that or embodies that, And you go to a sermon wherein you hear nothing about anything except man is weak and pathetic and sinful.
You come out of that like somebody's just laid a suit of armor on you and just feel heavy and worn down and so on.
So they would say, well, that's bad.
They wouldn't say that's evil because there's no sort of universal principles in that other than there are these divisions between people.
But they would say that what saps your will and saps your energy is bad, not that it's evil.
Obviously, to some degree, Nietzsche was heavily influenced by Darwinian thinking, which is Obviously, badly translated into capitalism.
It's true that strong companies flourish and bad companies get beaten down, but it's not...
Capitalism, you never want to mistake it for Darwinism, right?
Because Darwinism, the species survive by eating each other, but in capitalism, companies flourish by providing services that people want, right?
It's a little bit different than chewing your leg off, right?
I mean, Warren Buffett didn't get all his money by coming and eating your arm off while you slept.
Or taking bites out of you, right?
It's sort of silly.
You get a lot of money in capitalism by serving the needs of people and to some degree creating those needs or creating products which serve needs that they didn't even imagine they could get solved.
So it's very different from that standpoint.
And if you look at the world, I'll just dip slightly into the analysis thing.
If you look at the world, there is this kind of thing.
Except there don't seem to be people at all who simply say, I want power and I want joy, and if I have to overcome obstacles to get it, too bad, it's their fault.
You will see the occasional capitalist who will talk about this in terms of the market.
Yeah, we're in this to win.
And if us winning means other people have to lose, great.
We're for that too, because when we win, the client wins.
But certainly in the realm of politics and in the realm of academia and so on, you don't get any of this kind of honesty.
You don't get any of this kind of direct anger.
You always see passive-aggressive slave morality being expressed in politics and so on, a lot of it in business.
And I get lots of this too.
It's pretty funny stuff in a lot of ways.
But you don't see any honesty in terms of, like, the public show, the world is ruled, definitely, and the West is particularly ruled by the slave morality.
I mean, in the totalitarian Muslim countries, it's there, and it's definitely saccharine, but here, where there's less force to compel us to do it, the slave morality absolutely holds complete sway over just about everybody's thinking.
So all you ever get when you're a libertarian, because libertarianism is definitely on the master side of morality, it's not the same, right?
But it's definitely, it reminds people of this master, certainly it looks like the master morality to the slaves, right?
Which are to the people who subscribe to all of this passive-aggressive, resentful, reactionary, other-directed, other-worldly philosophy, right?
And the slave morality is very much around some sort of, it's very much around concepts are greater than instances, right?
It's otherworldly, so it either focuses on sort of platonic forms, like the collective and so on, or directly on otherworldly things like religion and heaven and hell and so on.
And of course, to be a slave, to subscribe to this philosophy, is to live a life of pure degradation and shit.
Frankly, it's to live a life of pure degradation and shaming of others and hostility towards strength and hostility towards competence and resentfulness and baleful glares.
And this is sort of mentioned in Catcher in the Rye.
That you're the kind of guy who's going to shoot paper clips at people and gossip negatively around the water cooler.
This is a life of resentment of strength, of resentment of health, of resentment of vitality, of resentment of confidence, right?
The slave morale, the slaves hate confident people.
And you really are a poisonous human being.
And it comes out pretty quickly, right?
So we had a gentleman who was a Christian who was willing to debate us, but then ended up calling me arrogant and...
Self-centered and pompous and all that kind of stuff.
And so you just take that as a logical argument, right?
Because if this person is not just expressing resentment, but believes that there's a logical argument by which I, Steph, can be proven to be arrogant or whatever, rather than just, look, I've thought about this stuff, I've reached some conclusions, I'm putting my ideas out, and if you've got corrections, I'm more than happy to hear them, but this is what I believe.
And not for no reason, right?
If that's arrogant, then having any kind of conviction is arrogant, right?
And so the frustration that he felt towards me, and I get this from a number of Christians and socialists and statists as well, the frustrations that people feel towards me, and it's not like I'm sort of some master of morality principle in action or anything, But the resentment that people feel is the resentment of strength.
It's the resentment of certainty.
It's the resentment of confidence.
And what happens is then people just sort of try and stab at me with these slave morality words, right?
Arrogant and culty and all those kind of nonsense, right?
As opposed to correct or incorrect, right?
Is it true or is it false? Thinking that my self-esteem is wrapped up in other people's approval of me to even...
A tiny degree is to make the fundamental mistake of the slave morality, right?
Which is to believe that if I disapprove of someone, they will feel bad and change, right?
That's the slave morality that other people are dependent in an altruistic way upon other people's approval.
If you make other people unhappy by being confident, then you need to shield or mask your confidence and pretend in this sort of self-indulgent and self-denigrating way to be...
To be less than you are, well, people try that with me, and maybe they try it with you, and I'm sure they try it with other people who are confident.
They try all of that stuff, in one form or another, just saying that you're crazy, or you're arrogant, or you're totally wrong, but I'm not even going to bother telling you why.
I certainly get those emails.
And this lack of curiosity is a revengefulness towards strength, very much on this sort of passive-aggressive slave side.
And so what happens is then when people run up against, like, I don't care that you all disapprove of me.
Like, I don't care that you don't like what I'm saying or you think I'm a bad guy.
I don't care about that because it's completely irrelevant to what it is that we're talking about.
It doesn't matter. I could be absolutely vain and arrogant.
It has absolutely no bearing on what's being discussed.
Because what's being discussed is not me saying, I'm not vain and arrogant.
That's not the topic that's being discussed.
What's being discussed is truth and falsehood.
And me being arrogant or not being arrogant has zero...
I mean, it was completely bizarre.
It's like somebody saying to me, you're wrong because you're wearing a t-shirt and not a button-down.
It's that level of, who cares?
What the hell are you talking about?
When people will bring personal negative complaints against me or against other people, it's just so completely irrelevant and so completely pathetic.
I mean, if that's the best you've got, you really are a two-year-old and a badly treated and vengeful two-year-old at that as well.
But this is sort of the slave morality.
This is why people don't like going out on a limb and saying, this is the case, this is the truth, and this is the proof.
Because they get so much negative reaction and hostility and hatred and vengefulness and resentment and pettiness from all the people to whom any kind of strength is a great threat, right?
And so these are people who've been beaten down by their schools and their...
They're teachers and parents and priests and military officials and political leaders and so on.
And so they no longer believe that strength is possible, so they have a reaction formation called...
Slavery is now a virtue, right?
I have no choice but to be a slave because that is the world, as we talked about before.
But unfortunately, that is the world.
There's no possibility of not being a slave.
And so I'm going to call slave attributes like submission and humility and so on a virtue.
And this is sort of what... This is what Nietzsche had to say about Christianity in its interpretation, not in its foundation, but through St.
Peter and so on in its interpretation, and what eventually became Christianity through the course of history.
He was of the opinion that, especially in the Roman Empire, these people were slaves, and so given that I am a slave and I have no way of fighting my way free, I'm going to turn slavery into a virtue.
And all of the anger that I should be using, I should be using to fight my way free of slavery, all of the anger for that, I am going to pour forward on two people.
One, on anyone who does seem to indicate that slavery is not a fact but a choice, right?
So anybody who has self-confidence and who puts ideas out there and refuses to be cowed merely by petty personal insults that are completely irrelevant, Anybody who then shows courage then Starts to break down or implicitly break down the idea or the sort of axiom that people have that slavery and conformity is inevitable.
This can be slavery and conformity to libertarian ideals.
Whatever it is, it's not thinking for yourself.
It could be to objectivism as well.
I'm not just talking about the general collectivist nonsense.
But anyone who then shows courage then begins to impress themselves upon you, and by begins I mean instantaneously, impresses themselves upon you with the fact that your cowardice is not prudence.
I mean, it's not inevitable.
It's not a simple fact of reality that you have to be a slave and you better make the best of it and better pretend that it's a virtue.
But that it is possible for you not to be a slave.
It is possible for you to think for yourself.
It is possible for you to have courage and integrity.
And therefore, what you consider to be an absolute and a virtue is in fact a contemptible enslavement of your own hand.
You hold the whip. Because the first enslavement is around family, not around the state.
So when you start to show courage, people hate you.
They hate you.
They hate, hate, hate, hate, hate you.
And that's why I say you can't have these people around you.
You can't have courage in a situation very easily.
And you certainly can't have integrity if you keep people around your life who hate you.
And they hate you because they believe that their compromises are rational and virtuous.
And by showing them otherwise, by showing them one example of a human being who can act with virtue and act with dignity and act with integrity and speak the truth and have courage, one instance of that is all that is required.
Just one! And then it is no longer an absolute that you must be a slave, and they're going to hate you for that.
Because you're basically throwing their supposed virtue in their faces and saying that, not voluntarily, like I could care about changing people from that standpoint, but you're implicitly saying, you're not virtuous, you're a coward.
Right? You're not prudent, you're a slave.
You're not conservative, you're beaten down.
And people hate that, so they will absolutely throw all of the slings and arrows of outrageous insults at you, and then, of course, when that doesn't work, they simply run away.
They just run away. And I can't tell you how many times this has happened since I started my blog a year and a half ago or down to Freedom Aid Radio.
People come at me like a lion, like, oh, you're a bad guy, you're this, you're that, the other, you haven't thought of this, you haven't thought of that.
I got an email today, one guy saying, oh, so you feel that we went and provoked the Muslims when they just attacked us unprovoked like Pearl Harbor?
Well, yeah, maybe, but, you know, there were sort of half a million Iraqi children who died as a result of this embargo.
You know, that might count. Might count for something, right?
Now, of course, he never emails back, right?
I mean, they come at you like a ton of bricks, right?
Like a charging lion, like a locomotive.
And this is the funny thing that you find, right?
As the gentleman found who was talking to his mother, and will doubtless find when he talks to his hopefully by now ex-girlfriend, that people, they come on like lions, and they evaporate like...
Fog when they see that you're resolved, right?
So when people come at me and say that I'm dishonorable or vain or narcissistic or petty or pathetic or all of that kind of stuff, then they try this, they try to inject this venom of resentment and slave morality like I should care what people think about they try to inject this venom of resentment and slave morality like I should care what people think about I have to live my life as virtuous as possible, as honorably and as honestly and courageously as I can.
If people like that, fantastic, and if they don't like that, I think that's more, frankly, a reflection on them than it is of me.
Because you may dislike me in every which way, but you certainly can't say that I'm not trying to get the truth out there, and you certainly can't say that I'm acting in a cowardly manner, or that I'm being beaten down by people's opinion of me, because that really, you know, my self-esteem is related to my action vis-a-vis reality and principles.
My self-esteem is not invested in people's opinions of me.
And that's sort of a very important thing to understand.
On that side, I mean, definitely I would conform to the master morality here.
Again, I don't agree with both of these in general as the only two poles.
I think that they're a good analysis of a particular kind of society of which we are definitely a preeminent example of it.
But I definitely would fall on that, which is that I am, sort of my own definition of truth is my cognitive faculties relative to empirical reality, logical proof, and so on, relative to the scientific method.
It's certainly not dependent on other people's opinions of me, and what a completely ridiculous standard that would be to have, to think that What I am allowed to say, who I am allowed to be, is what other people give me permission to be?
I mean, really, how funny that would be.
And I know this, having done this in my life.
I was in boarding school, and I was enslaved to other people.
I recognized it as slavery.
And have worked and moved very hard to get out of it as a principle of slavery.
And to recognize how foolish it is to invest your emotional energies and self-esteem in other people's opinion of you.
That's really being a slave.
And this is something that's very important to understand.
If what is most treasured to you is what other people hate, that is a very important thing to understand.
Because it will enslave you.
To be dependent on other people's opinions of you.
And yes, other people can earn the right to have opinions on you that mean something to you, like Christina's opinion on what I'm doing matters a lot to me.
But even that finally has to come down to my own integrity, and she only has proven her right to have a good opinion or a bad opinion of me that means something to me because of her virtue and her own courage and strength.
So it's not like you then are this sort of proud, Nietzschean, Rockian hero who has no desire to have anybody's opinion ever matter to one even tiniest degree.
I mean, that doesn't make any sense because logically, if people have been right a hundred times, then you should listen to them, right?
I mean, my doctor's opinion means something to me, as I've mentioned before, but not because I care about his opinion of me as a human being and a personality, but simply because...
I care about his opinion from a standpoint of somebody who can help me be healthy.
That would sort of be an approach to take that I think would be just a little bit more logical than, ooh, does he think I'm a good guy?
Or does he think I'm a bad guy?
I mean, that really doesn't mean anything to me.
And it's not like the easiest thing in the world to achieve, and it's not like it's never, ever penetrated.
Like, I'm sort of Iron Man who, you know, every now and then I'll get an email where it's like, ooh, yeah.
Ouch! You know, and then I sort of have to shake that off and say, okay, well, that's not really a very sensible approach.
This guy obviously has a, you know, if he hits a wound, if he gets through the armor, right, the truth, and he hits a weak spot, that's a knowledge for me on where to repair, right, where I'm vulnerable to this sort of stuff, which is where I have infections and old sores based on my own exposure to this sort of slave morality growing up, right? It's just an important thing to understand.
Where people say stuff to you that stabs you is your weakness to overcome, right?
The slave morality, which we're very tempted by, is when somebody hurts us, that we say, I need to control their behavior.
That's the resentment, that's the control, it's the blaming of the other.
No. And this is what keeps you enslaved in bad relationships.
When somebody hurts you, you have no need and no right to control their behavior.
It is completely wrong and illogical To try and control somebody else's behavior if they hurt you.
It's petty. It's resentful.
And it's gross, I guess you could say.
Sorry to get so non-technical.
But if somebody hurts you, you accept the fact that they've hurt you, you figure out what your vulnerability was to being hurt, and then you plug that hole.
You find out where the weaknesses in your thinking, where the false premises are that let you be so dependent on other people, and you figure out what the truth is and you sort yourself out.
And from that, sorting yourself out, then you become wiser, right?
That which does not kill us makes us stronger if we intervene.
If we intervene and we understand, then that can all work beautifully.
But if we don't intervene and don't understand, then we just get so dependent on other people hurting us that we end up saying, oh, well, I need to control other people because they're hurting me.
So then you take ownership for what other people do that hurts you and you end up trying to control them and you get locked in this death grip of horror wherein you are stuck with really bad and negative and abusive people And then you end up trying to control them, which means you're locked in with them forever.
Well, you can't control people.
You can't control the behavior of other people.
If other people hurt you, it's up to you.
It's up to you to stop that with your own analysis of what your weak spots are in terms of thinking.
And if they continue to hurt you, and you can't ever turn yourself into somebody who's invulnerable, right?
That would be psychotic. But if people continue to hurt you then, then of course you need to stop seeing them.
You deal with your weaknesses, you deal with that which makes you vulnerable to other people, and then once you've dealt with that, you stop seeing them.
That would sort of be the case, because why would you want to be around people who hurt you?
I don't want to hang out with people who punch me when I sit down, and a punch is a whole lot more honest than the resentment that you get from other people.
So I hope that that at least helps people to understand the general ideas behind the master and slave morality.
We'll have one more go at this because I do want to talk about how these ideas logically don't work in the description of reality.
The danger, of course, of the vanity that the master morality attracts to certain people and the slave morality that other people are attracted by.
But I would like to talk, and we'll have one more short podcast on this, about why these ideas are contradictory to each other and why they just don't work, sort of fundamentally.
But they do, I think, work as great ways of helping you to understand how certain kinds of philosophies end up expressing themselves in society.
So they're useful from an anthropological standpoint, but I don't think they're particularly logical in the final analysis.
So we'll talk a bit more about that soon.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
I will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for my donation today.
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