It's all nice and well to say "You must make your own values!", but on what basis? If it's on any rational basis whatsoever, sounds like you're not really making the values (you're just borrowing some other set of values, then reasoning about them). If it's completely random - you literally write down every value you can think of on pieces of paper, then pick one out of a hat - then that seems kind of pathetic. What's the middle road?
I think that Scott means that you don't literally conjure your values out of pure ether, other people likely influenced you in some way which led to their adoption, or at least to bringing them up for consideration. Which seems like a sort of thing that nobody would really disagree on, so I'm also baffled at this misunderstanding.
There's a middle ground though. Nietzsche's goal (which he accepts would be a very difficult thing to do) is for someone to look at the world, somehow cross the is/ought distinction, and find a set of values to live by which are... good in some way? I'm aware you'd need values to judge those new values by, but they don't have to be moral values in themselves (eg. slave morality is bad aesthetically because it seems servile, low status and it's hard to like people who instantiate them; master morality looks cool but is kind of ridiculous in the steam age and clearly can't survive without turning into slave morality). If coming up with a workable moral framework which was both "beautiful" and "true" was easy, Beyond Good and Evil would do that instead of gesturing at it.
I've always thought that the is/ought thing is a sham. Humans are creatures that happen to want things (the is part). They can use reasoning to decide the best way to get those things (the ought part). There's no mystical law that makes it obligatory to follow that way above and beyond that. Of course, it's also not to hard to guess why the sham is there. The reasoning part doesn't actually work that well in practice, so people generally do better in satisfying their wants instead by following available cultural heuristics in most ambiguous cases, which are also imbued with Mystical Significance for enhanced effect.
It holds as a distinction, but you can boil it down really trivially for any non-moral desiderata to "I should act to obtain things that I want." Nietzsche tries to do that for morals as well in the Genealogy, simplistically for master morality, through instrumental steps for slave morality. It's not remotely the way he'd frame it, but you could view the superman project as attempting to find either another grounding, or a better route out of that grounding.
Has anyone ever successfully changed their values? Is there anyone out there who'd be willing to say "I used to value kindness and compassion, but now I value courage and heroism", or vice versa? If so, how did they do it? Seems like we should be looking for concrete examples of this instead of reasoning about it in the abstract.
I'd expect that at least some are absorbed from one's culture.
I, personally, like to see closed-form solutions to mathematical problems. I suspect that at least part of that is from long-forgotten classes or discussions, with teachers or classmates commenting on a solution being elegant...
I also suspect that another part of them are from "subgoal stomp", a mistake where one starts trying to do X in order to do Y, but then loses track of the link, and starts valuing X in a vacuum.
The problem with this whole discourse is that it focuses on the errors people make rather than the correct way to view things. I think the Linear Diffusion of Sparse Lognormals concept I've been cooking up over the past few months is the core of it - in particular it answers where you get your own values from.
Values must be gotten from the outside, because some outside things have massive amounts of energy, and that's the only way to succeed. What's written on your soul is certain patterns that allow you to recognize certain external values.
If you want to sell it, you need to adapt it to the target audience you want to sell it *to*. Linear Diffusion of Sparse Lognormals is the thing to go with for people who are used to thinking in terms of birds-eye probabilistic models.
I really wish you had a translator. I find your writing to be interesting but incomprehensible to me, someone with low statistical training. And I fear that the only way to actually comprehend it would be for me to get much better at statistics, which, alas, probably isn't going to happen.
> Is a super-duper-man allowed to overturn those values? Can he get an even bigger tablet and write “ACTUALLY YOU SHOULD LIVE YOUR LIFE BASED ON CONFORMITY AND RESSENTIMENT?” Why not?
I'm hardly a Nietzsche expert, but I'm not sure it's so obvious that his answer here would be no. He certainly seems to find something admirable in Jesus, despite Christianity:
> The fate of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the “cross.” ... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only—it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause ; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?”- this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?”—this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one’s self in revolt against the establishedorder, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was understood at all!
Nietzsches analysis of slave morality is largely in terms of a psychological phenomenon. Asking why the übermensch cant introduce [values that suspiciously sound like slave morality] is like asking why you cant have a prior where gods existence is BusyBeaver(TREE(Grahams number)) times more likely than atheism: Sure, its not literally impossible that you got into this position without doing anything wrong, but lets be real. Whatever you might think of Jesus-when-taking-the-literary-person-seriously, you arent him. Atheists and christians agree.
"Yes, you have to choose your own values, not the herd’s values - but where do your own values come from?" My stab in the dark on this topic:
Ethics/Ideology/Morality/Values inherently come from other people, at least to some degree, because they're all about deciding how to interact with other people (and we spend our childhood being taught by others). So pick some values to be axiomatic, preferably ones as deep and broadly applicable as possible, integrate them into your "soul", *stick to them* as hard as you can, and make sure your other values follow from your axioms.
If you just passively collect values from the herd without actually considering them, you'll end up with contradictory nonsense that'll make you a blasé hypocrite, or eat you alive.
(Does this actually come from Nietzche? I haven't the slightest. But what's a comment section for, if not pontificating on possibly-adjacent topics?)
Depending on how general your values are, I'd be really worried about calcifying a particular set of values to stick to my entire life, seems really easy to choose wrong. I think EA has a good example of what to do: try to grok the highest level value like "maximize collective utility" but constanly vigorously introspect your beliefs about how to get there, such that different smart people will end up with different conclusions (animal welfare vs longtermism) at different points in their lives.
If you're not the religious type, the second part is just something some dude said a couple thousand years ago, so it's not clear why it should have any weight.
People said a lot of things a couple thousand years ago. The fact that some handful of those things are *still* being said at least by a large number of people is an argument for their perceived applicability as a moral standard across varying circumstances.
It's a bit Ad Populum, granted, but so is morality.
FWIW, my reading of Nietzsche always chimed with naraburns's - i.e. about overcoming self not others.
Re this bit:
> I think of Nietzscheans as the sort of people who would usually shout “Stop wallowing in your fetishes and instead achieve great things!” But if your natural tendency is to wallow in your fetishes, and you’re only trying to achieve great things because people are shouting at you, should a Nietzschean keep wallowing in the fetishes?
My crude opinion is something about how you should definitely 'trust your gut/soul', but only if you're 'seeing clearly'. Which I appreciate is horrendously vague, but I struggle to think how I'd explain it to myself before I jiggled my brain and heart into a better shape, so... maybe a diet analogy will help...
It's not strange to hear someone claim that every body is hardwired to want cake. You can get really good at resisting eating cake, and become super fit and healthy despite your hardwired cake-eating desire, but that desire doesn't go away. And yet, no _body_ I think, really wants cake. If you were seeing clearly, you'd see that, and not need to resist eating cake. You simply wouldn't care.
I see the same with all 'mimetic desire' stuff - yes, 'wanting stuff because other people want it' is clearly a THING that affects goodness knows what majority of people. But also it doesn't have to be. You can just not care.
If someone really and truly, when seeing with Buddha-like clarity, WANTED to wallow in their fetishes, then sure, keep wallowing. I just seriously doubt (though of course cannot get anyway towards 'proving') that's a thing that applies to anyone.
Well articulated! I second this point. I'm a bit confused as to why Scott (and others) finds this idea confusing. It feels like there is some underlying disagreement/confusion that I can't quite identify.
To me, there is nothing contradictory about girl-power feminists and self proclaimed Nietzschean bros both acting out different flavours of self actualisation (and in doing so both being faithfully 'neitzshean').
Why does Scott find it so odd the idea of "doing what he actually wants" v.s. "what society/others want?" It appears that on some level he has so deeply internalised some set of social wants that he can't even conceive of disentangling them (while still being himself).
I want cake. I don't have any around right now, so I'll have to settle for a donut (which I believe nowadays are mostly cake donuts rather than yeast donuts).
When I am trying to be particularly rational (aka: force myself to do something I don't want to do in the moment) I try to pick the choice that I will wish I had made 5 years from now.
At the moment I would rather eat cake than do 20 pushups, but five years from now if I *keep making that decision* I am confident I will be happier to have done the pushups.
Reading someone describe Nietzsche in the context of eternal return or "do it again" reasonated with me, because your best life is probably one where at the end you were happy with the choices you made and their consequences, both within your life and under the threat of having to live in the world you've created.
Yeah but ... if you look at a life that did not include cake at any point, it seems obvious to me that the addition of cake would improve it. I can readily imagine somebody agreeing on their deathbed that surely, _some_ ice cream would have made their life better. Or even that they should have traded off some overweight for more icecream. So I don't follow this argument at all.
Yes, exercise for today's people. In the long history of humanity 99.99% of the time we were well exercised people carrying too large parasite loads, scraping under logs for each tidbit, gleefully munching on grubs, frogs, lizards, & mice ... teetering on the brink of starvation.
The notion of Eternal Return didn't sit well with me because I want my kids to do well. So I've spent my life investing a lot in that. The conscious choice for Eternal Return negates the value of that investment in the future, reducing it to a comforting illusion lacking any kind of reality.
I want my kids to do well even if i can't personally experience it.
Wanting a thing because someone else wants it likely has an evolutionary origin.
If I have tool A for digging, and you have tool B for digging. We watch each other dig, and see the benefits/detractions of these tools. We both see that tool B is obviously better for digging than tool A. Hence I want tool B because it appears to work better for this application.
This comment, about who gets ahead in bureaucracies:
> people with good social skills and balanced pro-social tendencies
This is wrong in a subtle way. They get rewarded for APPEARING pro-social on the surface. But, again, in the absence of an objective standard, all that means is “enforces collectively determined morality”. This is why all the giant corporations took the knee for George Floyd and have aggressively enforced whatever norms happen to be particular to highly-vocal-on-the-internet college educated Americans. I don’t think there’s anything “pro social” about encouraging people to hyperfixate on race and obsess over implicit bias there, while totally ignoring explicit bias about political or religious outgroups. There was nothing “pro social” about firing James Damone for pointing out true facts that make people uncomfortable. Yet that’s what most corporations have done because the HR departments have absolutely been enforcers of slave morality. No, I don’t think that’s a sign of long term strength- I think it only works by undermining the foundations of prosperity. It’s extremely anti-social, but propents of it consider it pro social because they, like everyone, live in a world made up or their own beliefs. The commenter is right that this sort of behavior - being socially skilled and riding the waves of whatever is popular - has worked really well for decades. But does this social setup really seem remotely sustainable to you? Or is our collective consciousness splitting in two because of how insane the zeitgeist is?
It is worth stating this 1,000 times in all caps and banner behind an airplane: Absent an objective standard it makes no sense to debate any of this.
Your point about Hitler was absolutely right! He DID think he was in the right. Absent a universal standard, your condemnation is “just your opinion,” man. There’s no way out of that recognition unless you believe there’s some objective standard.
An objective standard of “promotes longevity not just of the individual but of the concentric networks of increasingly larger social groups they are part of” is completely in line with the philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church, which is maybe worth taking seriously because they’ve been around for 2,000 years and there’s over a billion of them.
It’s also worth noting that Nietszche grew up in an atmosphere of German Lutherism, which evolved from Catholicism but many Catholic would say was a reduction in complexity to appeal to the masses without challenging their intellects.
HR departments are enforcers of slave morality because their job is to keep slaves in line. Not for the benefit of government bureaucracies beyond a box-ticking exercise, not in order to to achieve something objectively to moral and not to contribute to wider prosperity. They do it to make more money for the variable and skewed mixture of shareholders executives who control the company and benefit from its bottom line.
A typical firm's non C-suite employees are a mix of highly-fungible menials (eg. janitors, packers), highly-fungible literates (eg. payroll admins, team leaders), highly-to-moderately-fungible specialists (eg. machinists, engineers, rig operators) and, possibly, one or two non-fungible rare-skilled specialists (eg. seriously-gifted traders, salesmen for some types of business, freakishly skilled product designers). Let's call them categories 1-4 in that order.
The company wants category 1 to do whatever they're paid to do for either a minimum or subsistence wage. They're often subcontracted. HR basically doesn't exist for them beyond their line manager, and if one of them complains about another the manager will tell either one of them to knock it off, unless it's horrendous (in which case they'll be summarily fired). If anyone else complains about them, they'll be summarily fired. If one of them complains about anyone in a better category, they'll be ignored even if it's a social justice complaint, unless there's a risk of a PR hit. Ideally, category 1 are illegal immigrants who can't draw attention to themselves, but the less likeable parts of the poor are an acceptable substitute.
The company wants the same thing from category 2. However, category 2 will be doing jobs which require a lot more co-operation, and the company wants them to play nicely together and not cause trouble. How well they do their job doesn't matter as it's a task which is either completed or not completed, so avoiding friction is more important than skill. HR's main job is making sure that don't cause problems, either PR problems (instant firing), or inter-personal dramas. HR people themselves are in this category. The difference between category 1 and category 2 is that companies have to pretend for PR/regulatory/litigation reasons that category 2 people have rights and will be treated fairly, so can't just tell them to knock it off and fire them if it's bad. HR's main job is to perform the bureaucratic rituals required to manage category 2 people while still managing them like category 1 people.
Crucially, the major virtue of the category 2 person is obedience/conformity/agreeableness, and random ideological tests are a good way to bin people you don't want to keep on these grounds.
How much category 3 people can get away with depends on how replaceable they are, and the sorts of problems they're causing. Given they're not commodity-humans like category 1 and 2, they often get a bit more leeway, but they'll be fired if they cause PR or regulatory problems. James Damore was a fairly fungible member of category 3, he embarrassed Google, so he was fired (this was an absolute bank shot, as firing him for being a scummy autistic sexist also prevented his criticisms of people who actually matter at Google being taken seriously). It's also the category 3 people who get pandered to a bit more by HR, as often they can add more value if they're happy.
Category 4 people are immune to HR up to the point where the cost of the lawsuit/boycott that would otherwise result becomes greater than their value-over-replacement. If you ever get confused by living in a world where sometimes people get fired for commenting on their colleagues dress sense, but other times people can slap their PA's arse and the PA gets fired for complaining, this is why; it's cheaper to pay off the PA than lose the salesman (and potentially a chunk of his customer base) to a rival. Hence the same HR department that makes 2s and 3s go through diversity training will draft NDAs for the people they pay off for complaining about 4s racially abusing them. This isn't because HR cares about the category 4s though, it's because their job is to make the company money.
Obviously none of this will be in the HR policy (which is in the same category as marketing material), but it's how you get considered good at your job within HR. The company's official line will always be that they promote diversity, because that's part of their PR strategy and part of how they manage the 2s.
HR thus aren't engaging in slave morality at all. They're enforcing slave-appropriate behaviour onto slaves by lying to them, in service of the master morality goal of using other people to make money.
This is very interesting. It sounds right to me. But is this last part:
> HR thus aren't engaging in slave morality at all. They're enforcing slave-appropriate behaviour onto slaves by lying to them, in service of the master morality goal of using other people to make money.
Are those two _really_ different?
If elites didn’t like slave morality, they wouldn’t be encouraging it. Notice how differently they respond to protests against state poverty, vs say protests against “racism” or the right in general.
It seems to me that slave morality has the net effect of making excellently obedient slaves, and so the role of HR is to enforce slave morality for the very reason that it leads the slaves to keep on working.
I think that's a missing mood in Nietzsche (there's a gulf of hypocrisy and propaganda between what gets promulgated and what the people doing the promulgating actually do). But the idea of slave morality as a kind of social weapon used by slaves to restrain masters is backwards at least for these purposes.
The CRA doesn't seem to be a discontinuity in the growth of HR departments, and my guess is the driving force is the more general shift in the economy from category 1 to category 2 employees. Using civil rights categories to enforce discipline internally is a much later development.
This in turn ins skewed by the fact that prior to Meritor ('86) and the CRA '91, most of Hanania's complaints about civil rights law aren't in place.
I think jumpingjacksplash hit the nail on the head with regard to inward-facing policies. Corporations are in the game to make money, by default you should assume that all their inward-facing policies exist to help them make money, and any veneer of social consciousness it just the most efficient way for them to do that.
But the same is also true of their outward-facing policies, which is the thing you seem to focus more on. I think picking examples of politically controversial events is a great way to get the wrong idea here. Partly this is because politics is the mind killer; you're quite convinced that those examples represent significantly anti-social choices, someone else out there is quite convinced that it would have been a majorly anti-social NOT to do those things, and one of the two of you is wrong in each case. But even more than this, these aren't great examples to start with because they're, y'know, at least somewhat interesting. The vast, vast majority of a large company's outward-facing policies (in the developed world) is going to be EXTREMELY banal tripe. Things like boilerplate statements about their commitment to fostering [social-value that's just trendy enough to look in-touch without actually being controversial]. Things like advertising cynically calculated to feel the most "authentic" to the communities that see them. And of course charity. Not charity-for-charity's sake, of course, but charity targeted at purchasing the most goodwill for the lowest cost. Kind of like the bizarro-world version of what EA's do, where the metric isn't lives or QALYs or utils, it's positive affect among your customers. The things you are citing are RARE exceptions to the everyday banality of corporate image-management and I guarantee all the decision-makers HATED having to actually take any sort of a position there. If they could have pandered to both sides of the George Floyd narrative they absolutely would have, but a video of a man getting murdered by police officers is about as inflammatory of a "you're against it or you're against us" flashpoint as a piece of media can possibly get. 70 years previous they might have cynically decided that coming out in "support of the police" was the best way to keep the most goodwill among their customers. But in 2020, the weakest, most euphemistic version of "murder is bad, actually" that would still communicate the message was really the only thing they could ever have settled on. Calling it "anit-social" or "pro-social" almost misses the mark: the social current was very much in motion without them: literally zero people in the U.S. were ever going to say "well, I was really upset by the George Floyd video, but CocaCola Tweeting out '#BackTheBlue' made me realize I was being unreasonable."
Beyond that, the ideological split of American politics likely has a lot to do with the way that sort of calculus plays out. When you have Group A that has a fairly firm ideological commitment to the belief that Corporations Have a God Given Right to Do Whatever They Damn Well Please (as long as they're pro-America) and Group B that includes a lot of people who think They're All Greedy Bastards who Need to Be Reigned In, plus a smaller but not insignificant group who believes they're Fundamentally Illegitimate and Shouldn't Exist at All, it's not hard to see why they'd put more effort into pleasing Group B. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. The marginal PR dollar (or unit of reputation) is much better spent assuaging to someone who feels vaguely guilty every time they buy your stuff, but hasn't *quite* let that push them through the hassle of finding alternatives than someone who just buys whatever they like and doesn't worry about the social implications. This is doubly true when Group B is the majority is nearly all the economic and cultural centres: you care about the opinions of people with money who might see your PR and buy your stuff, not people more generally. Of course, there's a niche for specifically pandering to those Group A people who's purchasing habits *are* strongly driven by ideology, and you can certainly find examples of companies exploiting it. But it's a fairly small niche.
I guess the tl;dr here is that labelling corporate PR efforts as EITHER "pro-social" or "anti-social" misses the mark. They're "pro-people-buying-our-shit" and that's all they'll ever be. If they just so happen to save or damn the world in the process, it will be entirely incidental.
> the Roman Catholic Church, which is maybe worth taking seriously because they’ve been around for 2,000 years
Point of order, I'm pretty sure the Roman Catholic Church wasn't present in its current form in 24 AD. That predates even the Pauline Epistles by a fair bit. I'm not saying the institution in question isn't worth taking seriously, but a similar level of generosity in definitions could credit the standard model of particle physics to Epicurus, three hundred years further back.
Hm, yes, one timeline I looked up had him recruiting Simon Peter in 27 AD, and that's probably the earliest date I'd use for the start of the Church (used in the collective sense).
When I just read the question "who in the Western World could conceivably actually follow master morality, seeing how slave morality has pervaded society for so long?", the answer that immediately came to my mind was "a follower of the occult traditions that have existed parallel to mainstream society for centuries".
I only absorbed a very rough outline of Aleister Crowley's philosophy (because I find his actual writing incomprehensible), but doesn't it boil down to "become mentally strong enough that you don't give a shit what anyone else thinks, then spend a lot of energy to figure out what you really want (in a written-on-the-soul, mystic destiny sense), then devote all your focus and energy on achieving it"? And isn't that really aligned with Nietzsche's Übermensch idea?
>"a follower of the occult traditions that have existed parallel to mainstream society for centuries".
Crowley and the rest of the Victorian occultists are not followers of a centuries old tradition that has existed parallel to mainstream society. The Hermetic Order started in the 1880s, and while they claim to have learned magic from the Cipher Manuscripts that are supposedly very old, there is not sufficient evidence that the Cipher Manuscripts are any older than 1842. Crowley himself claimed that his occult book, "The Book of the Law" was dictated to him by a spirit in 1909. European occultism in general does not date back to ancient times, but began in the 16th century.
It seems more likely to me that Crowley was just as influenced by the zeitgeist of his day as anyone, and a big part of that zeitgeist was Nietzsche. So it's not strange that his ideas seemed aligned with the Ubermensch.
I see your point. And sure, it's easier to patch something together from a bunch of books you read and things other people showed you and sell it as an unbroken lineage of mystical knowledge reaching back millenia, than it is to actually find and be part of an unbroken lineage of mystical knowledge. But the ideas that keep bubbling up and getting remixed are quite old - at least older than the 16th century. Alchemy and Jewish mysticism were around in the late Middle Ages, going back to older roots, and Gnosticism and Hermeticism date back to antiquity.
Now, Crowley was very eclectic, and it's not surprising if he picked up things from Nietzsche as well. But Nietzsche himself quotes Goethe (as cited in the comment by naraburns above), and Goethe famously was a Freemason. Other influential European branches of philosophy are influenced by "occult" lines of thought as well (it has been argued that Hegel was a Gnostic, and Hegel influenced Marx and the Fascists and pretty much everyone else), so it's not like textbook Christianity had an undisputed monopoly on morality among influential, free-thinking people.
That's also around the time that Eastern influences began to percolate into the West. Of course, much of that was also slave morality-tinged, but it still provided some novelty.
For me, the cool thing about the Eastern influences is that they don't particularly cleave at the joint of "slave" vs "master" morality. That's a specific clustering of ideas that Nietzsche diagnosed within the West's specifically fraught relationship with Christianity and with its pre-Christian past. Of course you can force fit a mold everywhere and analyze e.g Daoism in Nietzschean terms, but if you take a step back the much more interesting point is that it doesn't particularly fit the frame.
I think they're mostly people in later time periods opposed to what's going on then, so they pick up prior 'alternative' views and go with those.
We don't actually know what the Gnostics thought (or didn't until they found the Nag Hammadi texts)--we just have all the criticisms of them the early Christians who would later become the major churches made. The Hermetic texts were actually from the Hellenistic era--basically, woo from the immediately pre-Christian period--rather than being thousands of years old as people had claimed. So 'ancient' wisdom has been going on even in the ancient world!
Similarly, on a much smaller time gap, you now see alt-right people digging up Julius Evola and Carl Schmitt. It's not that these books were handed down to them by their grandparents, it's that they figure 'well, modern society sucks, who wrote against it?'
Crowley in particular was a rich kid raised in what we would call a fundamentalist sect and proceeded to rebel against it by declaring himself the Great Beast 666 of the Apocalypse and getting into sex magic.
Influential, free-thinking people did mess around with magic in the early modern period (when it wasn't really separate from science), but went in for the Enlightenment and science after that. Magic was more of a niche pursuit by people who liked mysticism but didn't like Christianity (or conventional Christianity in the case of the Golden Dawn).
But hey, if it works for you, keep on doing it. Do what thou wilt shalt be the whole of the law!
After reading all of this, I've mostly become convinced that all this discussion of "Master Morality" and "Slave Morality" is uselessly trying to force the world to fit into one man's rhetorical categories rather than "carving reality at the joints". There are a lot of important distinctions between different moral views and I don't think that trying to fit things into these poorly drawn and labeled classes is a good way of approaching them.
Some interesting distinctions which have come up in some way or another in this discussion:
- Do you have a positive vision of the good that you are trying to pursue, or do you have only an idea of badness that you are trying to avoid, and define good merely as its opposite?
- Why do you value that which you call good? Merely because you happen to prefer it? Because you are a moral realist and think that it is The Good? Because everyone around you seems to think that it's good? Because you are afraid of not being seen to value it?
- What do you think of excellence as a good vis-a-vis moral goodness (e.g. beneficence, etc.)? That only excellence is good and morality is a sham? That they are the same sort of thing? That they are different but equally important? That excellence is an independent good, but subordinate to morality? That excellence is only instrumentally good and morality is the only terminal good? That excellence is not a positive good at all?
- What, exactly, are the contents of what you think is moral goodness? And what do you think constitutes excellence?
If you squint really hard you can sort of map these questions onto the "Master Morality" / "Slave Morality" thing, but I really doubt that this is a fruitful exercise. Instead of worrying about Nietzsche, try to figure out which distinctions actually matter for the point at hand and talk about those.
Love this work, thank you for writing it. It’s very wonderful. That one part about art though, being either just one great work or a lot of mediocre works…hmm…that part stopped me and I want to go over it with another brush, so to speak. Art (not just to me) is so very many things and sometimes I just like it, can’t explain why really…I’m sure we could trace all my influences over the years, for good or not-as-good, using neuroscience, but I don’t think we have those techniques yet…anyways, I just find myself yearning for that particular part in your paragraph there to be a little more inclusive (like there is something about art for me to defend, but perhaps there’s not) and not so this-or-that. Although it serves its purpose where it is and as it is, in your work here, and all that’s very clear; so I would perhaps have done better to just leave it alone. Not sure about that yet. Guess it’s just a trigger for me and at this point in my life I’m barely conscious of being at least somewhat responsible for my triggers.
All in all, a very thought-provoking thing you have written here, and thanks again. I will probably go back over it as there is much to gain from re-reading a stirring piece of this (very good) quality. I’m not a philosophy student or a teacher or a professor or anything like that, just a person who sometimes reads. And I suppose I do a fair amount of trying to “figure it all out,” but that usually leaves me going in endless loops.
Also I love Walliserops’s addendum. Hilarious!!!! Made me laugh and laugh. And also made me think. Well done! All of this…just richness galore here, from everyone. ♥️
A question to the Nietzsche scholars out there: Scott keeps joking about invading Poland or conquering Europe as good examples of Nietzschian master morality.
But while those are Nazi goals, and the Nazis loved what they thought they understood of Nietzsche, and his sister certainly loved their interest, I do not think Nietzsche ever proposed invasion or something like that as a virtue.
I remember his outspoken disdain for Germany, he himself was always a bookish guy prone to sickness, a lot less martian then everyone else in pre-WW1-Germany, and the idea of a whole state serving the will of one Führer is a direct example of slave morality for all but one, I would say.
I clearly see his "choose your virtue" as a purely personal thing, and one which is supposed to kill you = dein Untergang.
All comparison of Nietzschian philosophy and Nazi ideology looks like a really big stretch, more like a farce to me, based on what I know of Nietsche.
I'm joking more about Napoleon and Cesare Borgia, although I don't remember exactly what Nietzsche said about them and he might have approved only partially.
While Napoleon did invade Poland, Hitler is much more famous for doing so (primarily because it was his first major military campaign). I'm therefore not surprised that Nazis is the first thing people associate with the phrase "invading Poland". Invading *Germany* seems more Napoleonic. ("Invading Russia" could go either way)
…Which happens to be the most adrenaline-pumping national anthem in the world. I keep it on repeat whenever I confront a too-fast-approaching deadline.
My understanding of the situation matches yours. The only real connection between Naziism and Nietzscheism was a propaganda move by the Nazis with the willing help of the sister. And, as you point out, the apparent connection shouldn't survive thinking about the things Nietzsche said.
Edward Bernays, it would appear, is more important than any other philosopher, as his techniques are able to permanently alter the lesson any philosopher may try to impart, no matter how obviously it flies in the face of the philosopher's own words.
Nietzsche actually tried to serve in the military, first as cavalry in1867 ... 5 months in to service, serious chest injury while trying to mount a horse, extended medical leave. Then 1870, volunteered as a medical orderly, one month later contracted diphtheria and dysentery, which did permanent damage to his health and retired him from the service for good.
This does nothing to dispel the idea that he was a bookish guy who probably *shouldn't* have tried military service, but suggests he wasn't entirely at odds with the whole idea.
And of course ... "You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause."
> and the idea of a whole state serving the will of one Führer is a direct example of slave morality for all but one
Furthermore I'm sure if you'd asked the Führer he'd have said (and quite honestly believed) he was serving the will of the State. So I'm not sure that master morality applies even to him.
Nietzsche directly and unequivocally criticizes militarism and the antecedents of intense German nationalism he observed in the second half of the 19th century (especially in regards to his friendship with proto-Nazi Wagner). He even goes so far as to say that a strong military is not whatsoever sign or symbol of a great nation or people. He saw the 'great generals' and Hitlers of his time as small, vulgar, and brutish men with childish and resentful notions of national greatness. Indeed, Nietzsche is pretty much inarguably anti-nationalist and some scholars even consider him one of the earliest forefathers of the pan-european EU concept.
"But anyone can get a new tablet ($139.99 on Amazon) and write whatever they want on it. I could write “PAINT EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD GREEN”. Then I could spend my life trying to do that. I bet I would encounter lots of resistance (eg from my local HOA), and I could try to overcome that resistance. Would that be a life well-lived, because I chose the value?"
Chesterton (from Orthodoxy, which you may have been deliberately referencing) certainly would say so, so long as you don't change halfway through your life to purple:
"Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted a particular kind of world; say, a blue world. He would have no cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense) until all was blue. He could have heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. But if he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it. If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day, he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite colour every day, he would not get on at all. If, after reading a fresh philosopher, he started to paint everything red or yellow, his work would be thrown away: there would be nothing to show except a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner."
(Whether Chesterton's approval automatically means Nietzsche's disapproval, I leave as an exercise to the reader, because I know the former but not the latter.)
Another relevant bit from Orthodoxy looks at this worship of will for wills sake as silly for much the same reasons as Scott does:
"The worship of will is the negation of will. To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose. If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, "Will something," that is tantamount to saying, "I do not mind what you will," and that is tantamount to saying, "I have no will in the matter." You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will—will to anything. He only wants humanity to want something. But humanity does want something. It wants ordinary morality. He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything. But we have willed something. We have willed the law against which he rebels.
"All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses. If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon. It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense. For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with "Thou shalt not"; but it is surely obvious that "Thou shalt not" is only one of the necessary corollaries of "I will." "I will go to the Lord Mayor's Show, and thou shalt not stop me." Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles"; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless."
I love Chesterton’s gift of lucidity and his actual ideas are often valuable, but that last part is very silly. A can and does become B all the time. We don’t live in a static cosmos. Framing such events as the death or destruction of A … idk, I suppose it may occasionally be illuminating, but it seems more likely to risk really egregiously missing the point.
A triangle that has changed from being angular to being all in a round is not a triangle any more, it is a circle. That may be a change in the cosmos, but you can't keep calling it a triangle and making claims based on its triangularity.
Is that so terrible? If it’s a circle now, then why not just call it a circle, instead of insisting that no, no, it’s a really bad triangle? This is a circle. It was once a triangle, and then [events occurred], and now the situation is different than it was in the past.
I’m not trying to be patronizing here, and maybe the issue is that I’m making one sort of example in my mind and you’re making a different sort of example, but if so I think that requires eliciting and then some kind of qualification or limitation of the principle we’re arguing about.
I see it as a specific criticism of the idea of the Ubermench: of overcoming humanity. A triangle that "breaks out of it's three sides" is no longer a triangle. The alternative would be that a triangle should be the best kind of triangle it should be, and humans should be the best kind of humans they should be, so to speak. It's a bit like poetry, actually; modern poetry has "broken out" of the rules of meter and rhyme, but is it good poetry? Modern art has "broken out" of the rules of beauty, proportion, weight, etc, but is it good art? My daughter does not like to color within the lines; she scribbles madly over her coloring sheets, creating chaotic nests of color. She has "broken out" of the rules of coloring; but is it any good? It's really not. Now in her case, she is a little kid and doesn't know how to color within the lines. She would color within the lines if she was capable of it, and she will when she is. But how silly to think that by coloring outside the lines my daughter is doing something amazing and bold, by turning a coloring page into a mass of scribbles. The Olympics are going on right now: would a runner be doing something grand if he decided to just run across the middle of the track, beating everyone to the finish? The whole value and glory in winning is that you excel within the limits of the rules of the game; there's nothing glorious in knocking the board over and declaring yourself the winner of a new game without any rules.
I mean, those are perfect examples, because some modern art that’s broken out of various formalisms is awful, but some of it is wonderful. It’s not as if there’s some convenient heuristic where quality falls as innovation rises, any more than vice versa. Lumping Picasso or e e cummings together with your average kindergartener because both are rule non-followers really does seem to me to miss the point!
What point is it missing? Picasso was a terrible man who made terrible art, and Cummings killed poetry in the West. I can't lump them in with the average kindergartener because at least the average kindergartner can't do better, while they made bad art on purpose.
> To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.
Surely, this is just the distinction between the potential and the actual? To follow Chesterton's strawman of Nietzsche would be to never do anything and live in a world of pure imagination, and that's clearly not what Nietzsche was talking about. It's OK to talk about the glorious feeling of flight without constantly mentioning gravity; we all know about gravity. Gravity is the context in which flight is meaningful. The constraints of reality are the context in which acts of will are meaningful.
"I hate the terms “pro life” or “life affirming” for this. Vitalism isn’t literally pro life in the sense of “cause there to be more life” - it neither recommends preserving your own life (by being safe) nor preserving others’ lives (by being altruistic)."
I think these terms are being used in the sense of "enjoying one's life to the fullest" and "saying yes to what life has to offer instead of hiding in your shell / being meek and humble and refusing to enjoy it", not in the abortion-politics sense of "pro-life". Cf. the section in your original essay equating slave morality with the morality of a corpse (very much the opposite of alive!).
Kriss's post motivates me to share a passage I love from Chesterton's Heretics:
"Now if any one wishes to find a really effective and comprehensible and permanent case for aristocracy well and sincerely stated, let him read, not the modern philosophical conservatives, not even Nietzsche, let him read the Bow Bells Novelettes. Of the case of Nietzsche I am confessedly more doubtful. Nietzsche and the Bow Bells Novelettes have both obviously the same fundamental character; they both worship the tall man with curling moustaches and herculean bodily power, and they both worship him in a manner which is somewhat feminine and hysterical. Even here, however, the Novelette easily maintains its philosophical superiority, because it does attribute to the strong man those virtues which do commonly belong to him, such virtues as laziness and kindliness and a rather reckless benevolence, and a great dislike of hurting the weak. Nietzsche, on the other hand, attributes to the strong man that scorn against weakness which only exists among invalids."
You got there before me with Chesterton on Nietzsche 😁
Some more extracts along this line. First, Chesterton on what he takes to be the deleterious effect of Nietzsche on George Bernard Shaw, from his biographical treatment of the same:
"This clearing off of his last critical plays we may classify as the first of the three facts which lead up to Man and Superman. The second of the three facts may be found, I think, in Shaw’s discovery of Nietzsche. This eloquent sophist has an influence upon Shaw and his school which it would require a separate book adequately to study. By descent Nietzsche was a Pole, and probably a Polish noble; and to say that he was a Polish noble is to say that he was a frail, fastidious, and entirely useless anarchist. He had a wonderful poetic wit; and is one of the best rhetoricians of the modern world. He had a remarkable power of saying things that master the reason for a moment by their gigantic unreasonableness; as, for instance, “Your life is intolerable without immortality; but why should not your life be intolerable?” His whole work is shot through with the pangs and fevers of his physical life, which was one of extreme bad health; and in early middle age his brilliant brain broke down into impotence and darkness. All that was true in his teaching was this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere achievement of dignity, beauty, or triumph is strictly to be called a good thing. I do not know if Nietzsche ever used the illustration; but it seems to me that all that is creditable or sound in Nietzsche could be stated in the derivation of one word, the word “valour.” Valour means valeur; it means a value; courage is itself a solid good; it is an ultimate virtue; valour is in itself valid. In so far as he maintained this Nietzsche was only taking part in that great Protestant game of see-saw which has been the amusement of northern Europe since the sixteenth century. Nietzsche imagined he was rebelling against ancient morality; as a matter of fact he was only rebelling against recent morality, against the half-baked impudence of the utilitarians and the materialists. He thought he was rebelling against Christianity; curiously enough he was rebelling solely against the special enemies of Christianity, against Herbert Spencer and Mr. Edward Clodd. Historic Christianity has always believed in the valour of St. Michael riding in front of the Church Militant; and in an ultimate and absolute pleasure, not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the wine of the blood of God.
There are indeed doctrines of Nietzsche that are not Christian, but then, by an entertaining coincidence, they are also not true. His hatred of pity is not Christian, but that was not his doctrine but his disease. Invalids are often hard on invalids. And there is another doctrine of his that is not Christianity, and also (by the same laughable accident) not common-sense; and it is a most pathetic circumstance that this was the one doctrine which caught the eye of Shaw and captured him. He was not influenced at all by the morbid attack on mercy. It would require more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw anything but a generous and compassionate man. But it is certainly a nuisance that the one Nietzsche doctrine which attracted him was not the one Nietzsche doctrine that is human and rectifying. Nietzsche might really have done some good if he had taught Bernard Shaw to draw the sword, to drink wine, or even to dance. But he only succeeded in putting into his head a new superstition, which bids fair to be the chief superstition of the dark ages which are possibly in front of us — I mean the superstition of what is called the Superman.
In one of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just as the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately produce something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of course, is sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the man, so why should we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful; sensible advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this, why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions have been many times asked of the Nietzscheites, and none of the Nietzscheites have even attempted to answer them.
The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen through this fallacy and verbiage had it not been that another important event about this time came to the help of Nietzsche and established the Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have called stepping-stones to Man and Superman, and it is very important. It is nothing less than the break-down of one of the three intellectual supports upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through all his confident career. At the beginning of this book I have described the three ultimate supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan, and the Progressive. They are the three legs of the tripod upon which the prophet sat to give the oracle; and one of them broke. Just about this time suddenly, by a mere shaft of illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to believe in progress altogether."
"Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.
...At the beginning of this preliminary negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild reason, not by wild imagination. A man does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square inches. Now, one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing the pagan health of the world. They see that reason destroys; but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not in reason. The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it. I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will. It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism.
... Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it. He is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces. But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence. The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.
...This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism, and therefore in death. The sortie has failed. The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
...Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist. In our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough. The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant. The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist. There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments. There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about. They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness. They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout.
...This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either."
Chesterton is a journalist and precision is not always his strong suit, so it may be a mistake to try to shore up his thought (which I originally posted, at the top of the subthread, more because it was hilarious than because I thought it altogether accurate); and especially so because I have read absolutely no Nietzsche. But I suppose Chesterton *might* try to retort that Nietzsche is trying to argue to people stuck in a particular value system that they "should" move on to another value system, but has a hard time doing so, because he can't appeal to the values in that system (without undermining his own argument), and can't appeal to values outside it (as his audience doesn't share those); and fails to find a third option, and so appeals to metaphor, which is bad not in itself, but because in this case it fails to refer to something coherent?
As I say, I have no idea how fair that criticism is; but it seems to me to be an interesting point one could make about someone trying to undertake the project you describe Nietzsche as engaged in?
(Incidentally, I don't want to be too unkind to Chesterton: I think he makes a lot of startlingly good and original points with precision and lucidity. When I said "not always," I meant just that, not always.)
>But I suppose Chesterton *might* try to retort that Nietzsche is trying to argue to people stuck in a particular value system that they "should" move on to another value system, but has a hard time doing so
I'm not sure the premise here is accurate. I think Chesterton's interpretation of Nietzsche might be coloured by his Catholic background -- he assumes that anyone writing on how to live must be seeking converts. I think Nietzsche's purpose was less about trying to persuade people to change their values, and more about reaching out to find others who had *already* seen through (what Nietzsche regarded as) the false values of society.
As he says in "Ecce Homo":
"Meanwhile, I had slowly to look about me for my peers, for those who, out of strength, would proffer me a helping hand in my work of destruction. From that time onward, all my writings are so much bait: maybe I understand as much about fishing as most people? If nothing was caught, it was not I who was at fault. There were no fish to come and bite."
First, a technicality -- Chesterton was Anglican when he wrote the book, and had never been Catholic. But I don't think that affects your point.
Nevertheless, I don't take your point. In the passage you quote, Nietzsche sounds exactly like he's trying to convert people, and his discussion of why they don't accept his message reads almost like a summary of Jesus' parable of the sower.
> It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.
I actually think we could make a go of this! We just need a bunch of statistics on pig mass and volume, which shouldn't be too hard to dig up, and some sort of scale of Puritanism that we could rate Milton on; I think Scott might have already come up with something along those lines a decade ago?
"It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat."
As a wise guy once said: "Challenge accepted."
To compare two seemingly unlike magnitudes, all you need is a common scale. Modern statistics provides one that you can apply to just about anything: the standard score, also known as the z-score, which is a measure of how extreme a data point is: more specifically, it's how many standard deviations the data point is from the population average. If you can calculate a z-score for the level of Milton's puritanicalness with respect to a relevant population and do the same for the fatness of a particular pig, it's entirely meaningful to compare the two and say that Milton was more unusually puritanical than the pig was unusually fat or vice versa.
>It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism.
This paragraph makes it pretty obvious that Chesterton didn't actually read Nietzsche. Whether Nietzsche "preached egoism" is a complicated question (I would say he didn't), but he definitely didn't preach that one shouldn't give things away, nor did he ever "call life a war without mercy". In fact generosity and mercy are two of the main traits which Nietzsche advises those seeking to bring the Superman to cultivate.
Nietzsche on giving, from "Thus Spoke Zarathustra":
"Verily I have found you out, my disciples: you strive, as I do, for the gift-giving virtue. [...] Insatiably your soul strives in treasures and gems, because your virtue is insatiable in wanting to give. You force all things to and into yourself that they may flow back out of your well as the gifts of your love. Verily, such a gift-giving love must approach all values as a robber; but whole and holy I call this selfishness."
And from "Beyond Good and Evil":
"He honors whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality equals self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of plenitude, of power, which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth *which would fain give and bestow*:—the noble man also helps the unfortunate, but not—or scarcely—out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the superabundance of power." -- "Beyond Good and Evil"
And from "Zarathustra" again, on mercy:
"And there is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your ultimate self-conquest. Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws. You shall strive after the virtue of the column: it grows more and more beautiful and gentle, but internally harder and more enduring, as it ascends."
“It would require more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw anything but a generous and compassionate man.” 😂😂😂 I would give ten thousand imaginary dollars right now for a good look at the model with which Chesterton has implicitly quantified mad Polish Professor energy units per increment of George Bernard Shaw worsification achieved
But he doesn't. Nietzsche regards scorn for the *strong* as an attribute of the *weak*, but he stresses that the reverse is not true, that the strong have no natural tendency towards ill will towards the weak.
"And when the lambs whisper among themselves, 'These eagles are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever is the opposite of an eagle must be good?', there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument - though the eagles will look somewhat quizzically and say, 'We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb.'"
Well that would make Chesterton's claim factually wrong, since there are countless examples in history of strong men who took precisely that sort of attitude towards the weak. Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Shaka Zulu, Vlad the Impaler etc. weren't invalids.
Anyway, yes, Chesterton definitely meant that his claim was 100% universally true and there had never been a cruel strong man. You have seen through him.
Weekly magazines that had serials running in them, often romance stories. These sorts of magazines lasted quite a long time, and had their last gasp in the "women's magazines", many of which are still going today but which have shifted emphasis:
"Bow Bells was a British "magazine of general literature and art for family reading", founded and published by John Dicks.
Bow Bells began in 1862. New series began in 1864 and 1888. It absorbed Reynolds's Miscellany in 1869. It ran until 1897."
Sample issue here from 1874 which gets straight into the action on the very front page with chapter 31 of the (doubtless) thrilling tale "Who Will Save Her?"
Inside, we have the start of another tale, "Which Conquers - Love or Money?"
Then there is chapter 23 of "The Gipsy Bride, or, The Lost Pearl", entitled "The Colonel and His Captive", extract quoted below:
"Colonel Clayton recognised Rose at once by the shapely head and graceful outline, even before he had brought her face round and caught one gleam of the beautiful, angry eyes.
“Let me go,” Rose said passionately, “you have no right to keep me here.”
“That is rather a poor plan,” answered the Colonel, with dangerous calmness, “considering you have held me in the den yonder for three nights and two days.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” she stammered out.
“Of course not,” he replied derisively. “You didn’t lure me to the spot where you knew your men were waiting to welcome me so cordially! Ah! by-the-bye, I may as well pay off one score before I begin to reckon up the other.”
And, ere Rose could resist, he had kissed her repeatedly on her shrinking lips.
“Now,” he added coolly, “we’ll consider the other matter, shall we? You can’t deny that you led me wilfully into danger’s way?”
“I had to do what I was told,” replied Rose, who had ceased to struggle vainly against his power, and was weeping for very anger and shame. “I am always chosen for all the disagreeable work.”
“Because your beauty makes you a successful decoy, Miss Rose.”
"Yes, you have to choose your own values, not the herd’s values - but where do your own values come from? He seems to write as if you’re born with a destiny written on your soul, and you become pathetic if you let the herd trick you into do something other than your soul-written destiny."
I find the idea that we can truly choose our own values a bit surprising. I was very convinced when I read Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory a while ago. His theory suggests that our moral judgments are derived from several psychological dimensions, such as care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity, whose importance, like everything else in humans, is probably both innate and shaped by culture.
In my opinion, we cannot really choose our moral values or a moral system; we can only select the values or system that best align with the foundations that we were born and raised in. For example, someone who emphasizes the care foundation will naturally resonate with EA's focus on reducing harm, while someone like Walt Bismarck who prioritizes loyalty and authority, will find EA's 'impersonal' calculations strange, especially when they conflict with his in-group loyalty.
Don't you think it's a layered thing? The foundations give us specific centers of moral interest, which culture can then both shape and tone up or down. So we get a certain facility for latching on to authority figure and feeling a duty to honor and follow them, but culture is the one telling who are the authority figures, and how their authority extends or is bounded.
Then, on top of that, because culture is not uniform, we're exposed to lots of different debates and variations on ideas, so we make our mind somewhere within that range. Maybe we reject our parents' authority figures and pick some other ones, or after deep reflection, adopt a morality of avoiding harm or injustice and decide to do our best to not care about anyone's authority.
The genetic, cultural, subcultural and invididual levels are not in contradiction, they build on each other!
I also think that we mostly don't choose our value. My impression is that EAs (for example) seem to think that they are EA, and that everyone should also be EAs, because this is the correct moral position, whereas I think that they are EA because it FEELS right to them, for genetic cultural or subcultural reasons.
Not sure if you're arguing for bandwagon effect influence, or making a hardcore determinist argument that choice doesn't exist at all.
In the first case, bandwagona can't explain your values entirely, because there are multiple bandwagons to join, and somehow the choice still gets made!
For the hardcore determinist, I can only say that there is a level at which I can say that I have the experience of choosing what to eat for dinner, and choosing one's values can't be ultimately different from that.
I know a lot of boomers who became conservatives because they were disillusioned with the failures of the Carter administration and then inspired by Reagan. That's not choosing their values, but it's also not innate or "shaped by culture" in the sense of having been gradually inculcated by exposure to the larger culture. It seems like a kind of spontaneous change in how much they valued loyalty and authority.
To the point of choosing our moral values, many (most? all?) Buddhist meditation traditions have a practice of metta aka loving-kindness meditation where the practitioner actively makes themselves more empathetic and kind by willing themselves to feel those emotions continually -- in other words, training themselves to value care more highly. Born-again Christians seem to be at least occasionally sincere, and 12-step programs do seem capable of transforming people as a result of "hitting rock-bottom" and then adopting a new value system that allows them to escape from their prior bad habits and I think those examples also demonstrate spontaneous changes to the relative importance of the moral foundations within individuals.
I think these examples do tend to emphasize that changing one's prioritization of the foundational values requires either a lot of hard work or significant external shock to one's worldview -- it definitely doesn't seem as simple as choosing one's values from a menu.
It seems to me that the distinction between values from within and values from others might collapse under closer inspection. Who is to say that me imitating others and taking on their values and according behaviors isn't also me living up to my inherent values of getting along with others and being seen positively by them?
This says: make yourself small and harmless. Have the goals of a corpse. Here is Ozy's discussion:
> Many people who struggle with excessive guilt subconsciously have goals that look like this: I don’t want to make anyone mad. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I want to take up less space. I want to need fewer things. I don’t want my body to have needs…"
This arises organically in either hierarchical societies dominated by M1 or egalitarian societies dominated by S1, or just in highly decentralized societies where you don’t know who you might accidentally piss off. M1 can foster S2 by demanding obeisance from others and punishing them for not doing so, while S1 can make people worried about sticking out and being taken (sometimes accurately, sometimes not) as a potential master. Especially in the first scenario, S2 can, like M1, derive from cope.
Although both can inspire dislike of the master class, the basic idea behind S1 is “it’s bad to be a slave,” while S2 says “it’s good to be a slave.” S2 is even more contradictory with M2, but contradiction exists in the human soul just fine. In the case of flunkies in power structures, M1 and S2 can be very compatible: deriving joy from being both a faithful servant and loyal instrument to one’s superiors, and from exercising power over everyone else. No armed body of men, I suspect, could function without an unhealthy helping of both."
Nobody understands the proper use of humility. It's not Uriah Heep, choking on his own resentment and envy and weaponising "I'm ever so humble and know my place", it's the Proud in Purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy going "Yes, when I was alive I was famous and feted, but a better came after me, and I'm *glad* about that for the sake of the art", and the Blessed in Heaven not wanting a 'better' or 'higher' place, since the bliss each experiences is as much as they have capacity for.
Purgatorio, Canto XI:
'Oh,' I said to him, 'are you not Oderisi,
the honor of Gubbio and of that art
which they in Paris call illumination?'
'Brother,' he said, 'the pages smile brighter
from the brush of Franco of Bologna.
The honor is all his now--and only mine in part.
'Indeed, I hardly would have been so courteous
while I still lived--an overwhelming need
to excel at any cost held fast my heart.
…'O vanity of human powers,
how briefly lasts the crowning green of glory,
unless an age of darkness follows!
'In painting Cimabue thought he held the field
but now it's Giotto has the cry,
so that the other's fame is dimmed.
'Thus has one Guido taken from the other
the glory of our tongue, and he, perhaps, is born
who will drive one and then the other from the nest.
'Worldly fame is nothing but a gust of wind,
first blowing from one quarter, then another,
changing name with every new direction.
'Will greater fame be yours if you put off
your flesh when it is old than had you died
with pappo and dindi still upon your lips
'after a thousand years have passed? To eternity,
that time is shorter than the blinking of an eye
is to one circling of the slowest-moving sphere.
'All Tuscany resounded with the name--
now barely whispered even in Siena--
of him who moves so slow in front of me.
'He was the ruler there when they put down
the insolence of Florence,
a city then as proud as now she is a whore.
'Your renown is but the hue of grass, which comes
and goes, and the same sun that makes it spring
green from the ground will wither it.'
And I to him: 'Your true words pierce my heart
with fit humility and ease a heavy swelling there.
But who is he of whom you spoke just now?'
'That,' he replied, 'is Provenzan Salvani,
and he is here because in his presumption
he sought to have all Siena in his grasp.
…And I said: 'If the spirit that puts off
repentance to the very edge of life
must stay below, before he comes up here,
'as long as he has lived--
unless he's helped by holy prayers--
how was his coming here allowed?'
'While he was living in his greatest glory,' he said,
'he willingly sat in the marketplace
of Siena, putting aside all shame,
'and there, to redeem his friend
from the torment he endured in Charles's prison,
he was reduced to trembling in every vein.
…It was that deed which brought him past those confines.'
The last part is correct, here:
"Moreover: just a little bit of S2 can keep you sane, since the natural default is to think very highly of yourself. A bit of humility helps avoid pointless dick-measuring contests, reminds us we might be wrong and that pobody’s nerfect."
Or in Lewis's "The Great Divorce" where the ghost of the artist is instructed about art in Heaven:
""How soon do you think I could begin painting?" it asked.
The Spirit broke into laughter. "Don't you see you'll never paint at all if that's what you're thinking about?" he said.
"What do you mean?" asked the Ghost.
"Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country."
"But that's just how a real artist is interested in the country."
"No. You're forgetting," said the Spirit. "That was not how you began. Light itself was your first
love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light."
"Oh, that's ages ago," said the Ghost. "One grows out of that. Of course, you haven't seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake."
"One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower-become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations."
"I don't think I'm much troubled in that way," said the Ghost stiffly.
"That's excellent," said the Spirit. "Not many of us had quite got over it when we first arrived. But if there is any of that inflammation left it will be cured when you come to the fountain."
"What fountain's that?"
"It is up there in the mountains," said the Spirit. "Very cold and clear, between two green hills. A
little like Lethe. When you have drunk of it you forget forever all proprietorship in your own
works. You enjoy them just as if they were someone else's: without pride and without modesty."
"That'll be grand," said the Ghost without enthusiasm.
"Well, come," said the Spirit: and for a few paces he supported the hobbling shadow forward to the East.
"Of course," said the Ghost, as if speaking to itself, "there'll always be interesting people to meet. . ."
"Everyone will be interesting."
"Oh-ah-yes, to be sure. I was thinking of people in our own line. Shall I meet Claude? Or Cezanne? Or-----."
"Sooner or later-if they're here."
"But don't you know?"
"Well, of course not. I've only been here a few years. All the chances are against my having run
across them . . . there are a good many of us, you know."
"But surely in the case of distinguished people, you'd hear?"
"But they aren't distinguished-no more than anyone else. Don't you understand? The Glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the light's the thing."
"Do you mean there are no famous men?"
"They are all famous. They are all known, remembered, recognised by the only Mind that can give a perfect judgment."
"Of, of course, in that sense . . ." said the Ghost.
"Don't stop," said the Spirit, making to lead him still forward.
"One must be content with one's reputation among posterity, then," said the Ghost.
"My friend," said the Spirit. "Don't you know?"
"Know what?"
"That you and I are already completely forgotten on the Earth?"
"Eh? What's that?" exclaimed the Ghost, disengaging its arm. "Do you mean those damned NeoRegionalists have won after all?"
"Lord love you, yes!" said the Spirit, once more shaking and shining with laughter. "You couldn't
get five pounds for any picture of mine or even of yours in Europe or America to-day. We're dead out of fashion."
"I must be off at once," said the Ghost. "Let me go! Damn it all, one has one's duty to the future of Art. I must go back to my friends. I must write an article. There must be a manifesto. We must start a periodical. We must have publicity. Let me go. This is beyond a joke!"
And without listening to the Spirit's reply, the spectre vanished"
That was exactly my complaint, it seems completely impossible to develop values purely by yourself, without any influence from others.
It's sort of like the arguments against free will. How is such a thing possible? If our decisions are caused by something else, like everything else in physics, then it's not free. If it's not caused at all, and just appears randomly, then it's not reallyl "will."
Still, plenty of philosophers defend free will. Its an ancient puzzle with no clear answer. Maybe there is a way to find true values for ourselves, even if the way there is not clear.
Actual question here, not trying to make a point just yet:
I have no particular knowledge of this realm of philosophy, but it seems as if comments and discussion on this have taken two distinct positions:
1. Slave morality is morality that one assembles by herd-following and norm-folllowing, while Master morality is assembled by dancing to the beat of one's own drum and ignoring the values/commands/pressures of others.
2. Slave morality necessarily encompasses belief set Y (Which includes altruism, charity, and a couple other things) and Master morality necessarily encompasses belief set X, (which has some other shit in it.)
#2 above seems necessarily consistent with #1 at any given time, but only as it concerns slave morality. It seems like all the descriptions of Master morality and how it's built I've seen here would definitionally demand it doesn't necessarly cleave to some slave-defined Set X, but it seems like both the article and a good deal of the comments on it seem to assume it does.
I'd modify #1 by substituting "assembled" for emerges, inasmuch as they're historical phenomena and there's no clear upper limit on their internal complexity and contingency. I'm agree with your broad description, but in the fashion of clearing out the noise and seeing the rough shape that remains.
The distinguishing feature that I think explains the difference, in Slave morality generally having proscriptions more than Master Mortality, is that the latter leaves more to the individual agent and so is naturally more chaotic, less apt to build a canon of agreed truths.
I think there's something interesting to this point in the contrast between Hellenic and Hebrew theology. The Hellenes understood the higher cosmos as a class of forces represented in warring gods, and a tale of the Gods might present a worthwhile lesson but in the fashion that comes down to us in fairy tales and fables. The Hebrews by contrast believed in a singular revealed truth and assembled their fragments of legend over time to glean it's totality.
Out of this Hellenes have more of a buffet to assemble their guiding theology while the Hebrews attempted to determine the singular truth. Mind you this isn't as a comment on Jews as somehow a slave morality people, and I recall even Nietzsche agreed the earlier pre slavery Jews were a noble people by his way of thinking, and didn't contrue the project of Judaism as somehow constitutionally slavish. But I do think it's interesting in sketching part of the genealogical background that might have informed the above distinction between Master and Slave morality.
After a brief hope when I first saw that there was a section for "Comments By People Named In The Post", I was really disappointed not to find comments by Cotton Mather, Ayn Rand, and Nietzsche himself. For the latter two, I would certainly think that mere *death* does not excuse such wanna be Ubermenschen from commenting—can't they overcome that? And as for Mather I presume he'd cosign "And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die", so he's not excused either.
> even though I think I like travel, whenever I actually travel I can never quite put my finger on the part where I’m having fun
"Having fun" is only one small dimension of value in your value system (and mine, coincidentally). Another is "learning something new and novel," as an example.
Maybe you're just mixed up about your motivations for wanting to travel. You think it should be to "have fun" and you never have it. I'm with you there. Yet I wouldn't turn down the opportunity to go physically touch the pyramids in Egypt, despite all the very-much-not-fun aspects such a journey would entail.
> I know nothing about Tate except that I’ve seen some bad tweets by him and heard he was involved in sex crimes. I looked at his Wikipedia page which seemed to agree
Wikipedia is extremely useful to learn, eg, which forms of rock are harder than other forms of rock.
However, Wikipedia is ideologically captured. You cannot trust it for any topic about the outgroup. Tate is very much the outgroup here. Do not trust Wikipedia to give you even remotely impartial information on him or any of his activities.
I guess, for completeness, I do need to say Tate is a scummy person and not someone I choose to spend much time watching or learning about. It's just a simple objective (and obvious in retrospect) fact. Wikipedia has a very clear ideological bent, as does Tate, and they are incompatible.
I have come to believe that on many topics, there is something like a psychological Heisenberg uncertainty relation: you can get an informed opinion or an impartial one, but never both at the same time.
The next best thing, IMO, is an opinion that is not impartial, but comes with lots of direct quotes and footnotes. The youtube channel "Common Sense Skeptic" has done a pretty thorough series on Andrew Tate, and I came away with the same impression: dude's a scumbag, and most likely a thoroughbred sociopath.
One thing that I genuinely prefer about Rand, here, is that she doesn't resort to the notion of a final judgement. Nietzsche's eternal return sidesteps the Christian notion of God's judgement, by placing you as your own judge in a semi-Rawlsian sense. But there is no Final Judgement, neither divine nor mundane, and the telos and value of your life is not evaluated at its ending.
Rand was all about reality, and in reality, the exercise of power by a person truly skilled at being powerful looks more like an unending dance on the knife-edge between exerting that power, and maintaining the apparatus of power by addressing the needs and concerns of others. And there is no contradiction here. A prerequisite of being a powerful king is that the king must remain in power. A bad CEO is the CEO who gets fired. Optimal actions by the powerful are those that skillfully achieve the personal aims of the individual while maximizing the leader's popularity with the group. The best leader rides the Pareto tradeoff between achieving their personal goals and the needs of the group. And of course it has to be this way, there are no successful leaders who are doing Master Morality as described.
Some people are so good at this balancing of the exercise and maintenance of power that you don’t even realize they’re doing it, and their names probably don’t spring to mind even after you think about it for a while, because your brain categorizes them as “just good people” and not “Machiavellians pretending to be good people.” Successful Machiavellians do not mention Machiavelli in public! (Looking at you, Sam Altman.)
Since there is no final evaluative step where God judges you as having been a Good Master or a Good Slave and there is instead just life, the optimal path is one that will look both masterlike and slavelike depending on perspective, and mysteriously have resulted in getting what you wanted and achieving what you want to achieve personally — including achieving and securing the happiness of loved ones. It's a path that results in personal goal achievement while appearing virtuous from multiple moral frameworks.
Wow, much to read here. I thought I'd done a good browse of the comments before, but there's so much more here that I still want to ingest.
Some points in the narrow range that I feel confident about:
> If Nietzsche is really saying “ignore the strictures of society; pursue the destiny written upon your own soul”, how does that differ from Instagram “find yourself” therapy culture?
If it's "find yourself by going to therapy" then, to steal from TLP, that's using self-knowledge as a defense against action (and what N wants is action).
But if it's more like "be true to yourself, don't make yourself small, sleep with the yoga instructor, etc." then on the surface it does look like a typical masculine call-to-action. Some "masculinizing" advice is frankly appropriate for women to hear in an individualized world (where we each have to be masculine and feminine at different times). But in practice, pop-feminism isn't so pure. It takes on masculine language, but the advice is too often *directional*, prescribing a specific life path, which is not empowering but sort of "re-enslaving". It says be masculine (resist submission/enslavement) when it comes to traditional power structures (don't listen to your dad, don't let your boyfriend act possessive, don't be bound to expectations of niceness/hospitality) but be feminine (submissive, supportive) toward the universal/global/moloch/Whatever-This-Is power structure: meet all the expectations at your soulless corporate job; be a soldier in whatever culture war battle the NYT has drafted you into this week; Don't Question The Science. In practice it's just taking naturally-feminine people (mostly women but you get that that's not a strict category) and recruiting them to a new cause.
> The Last Psychiatrist (who I usually think of as Nietzschean) had a scathing article about people who sink too much of their identity into their sexual fetishes, as if they were central personality traits to be proud of, rather than shameful vices to be indulged in secret. But aren’t fetishes, in some sense, the purest and most soul-written preferences we have? Preferences that date back from before we can remember, preferences which go so deep they can affect our very autonomic nervous responses, preferences which we stick to even when everyone else hates and shames us for them?
Indeed TLP is against "identifying-with" anything other than action. That's one of the TLP points I most readily grasp. Don't identify as "creative", just create something. etc. What would it look like if someone is taking bold action in pursuit of their fetishes? Idk, TLP might even approve of that. Surely at least something interesting would happen...
But that's like your "paint everything green" example, and the comments you parse immediately after are further enhancing my confusion about what the ubermensch "writing his own values" would really look like. A rational understanding of your desires ("this is just evopsych, this one's just a trauma response, this one's just operant conditioning") makes it impossible to go all-in on that desire. And appropriately, TLP has much contempt for people who rationally understand their desires. I think he'd want us to learn how to notice and maybe even measure desire, *without explaining it*.
If we valued our desires by how strongly we feel them, instead of how hard they are to explain (which is what we do now, embracing the more "original" desires as decorations to our identity - this includes all contrarianism), then maybe we'd find 1 or 2 core ones, and just maybe we'd be able to all-in on them. Is that what makes an Ubermensch? Necessary, but probably not sufficient
"I think of Nietzscheans as the sort of people who would usually shout “Stop wallowing in your fetishes and instead achieve great things!” But if your natural tendency is to wallow in your fetishes, and you’re only trying to achieve great things because people are shouting at you, should a Nietzschean keep wallowing in the fetishes?"
This seems like a good place for an ego v id distinction. Following the herd and wallowing in fetishes both seem like base desires, all of which must be overcome to reach actual destiny. That sure seems like a cop-out, but if everyone destiny is just pursuing their version of the "good", their version is what's written on their soul, potentially obscured by their particular vices
> But aren’t fetishes, in some sense, the purest and most soul-written preferences we have?
Which leads me to the question, what about lower status people who, however, internalise the master morality and their place in it?
The modern example would be individuals with a submissive nature - whether kinky or not - who seek out "alpha" partners, and maybe old-school groupies making themselves available to rock stars.
However, I also mean, the peasants cheering on Achilles as he heads off to war, knowing they are unworthy to so much as polish his armour, but being OK with that.
But I seem to recall loyal "servants" in the Odyssey. Moreover, there's plenty of modern footage of crowds of commoners cheering the good and the great. People at the bottom do buy into hierarchies, maybe partly instinctively and maybe partly to validate themselves. It's not necessarily a good thing, but it's a human thing.
I think that goes to the Alastair Roberts comment on group identities. They're not thinking "yay sports team, the team is so much better than me!" They're thinking "yay team, our team is so much better than the other team!"
It depends on what you mean. I don't find Tate interesting enough to have even read the wikipedia page, but it's atypical (although by no means unheard of) to have proceedings for a criminal offence against a person that don't start with the victim reporting it, even if the proceedings are subsequently prosecuted by a government. I assume that victims did go to the Romanian police in the Tate case, but I don't actually know.
Usually what happens is that some person gets the police or other government entity involved, then the police investigate, which seems to be...exactly what happened in the Tate case insofar as I understand it.
I've only commented on one other post (Whither Tartaria), and got dunked on in the Comments post for that one too, it's an honour!
I didn't mean to speak to "vitalism" nor attempt to claim it has a special claim on being "pro life", which I admit was a poor choice of words. I was only attempting to explain Nietzsche's meaning as I understand it, and I don't think he himself is exactly in the camp of people you're identifying as vitalist. I don't find them very sophisticated followers of Nietzsche if there's really followers at all.
What I intended to mean by "pro life" is an internal orientation towards growth and development of one's potential. This is not inconsistent with dying a glorious death, nor in being a friend and helping hand. I think there is something anti life in the converse, to be safe and miserly, never taking risks.
Attending to and enforcing external asymmetry (I win, they lose), vs cultivating an internal symmetry, and damn the consequences. But the consequences are sometimes that the internal symmetry seems to then flow outward, creating beautiful and potentially stable things that far outlast their originators and potentially inspire people in the future to do the same. As opposed to the forced asymmetries that collapse in a single generation, generally.
I read Nietzsche through the cyberticians, so that the will to power is really about the need of a system to engage with its feedback loops and goals. To feel positive feedback at achieving and overcoming. Ted K called this the power process. This I think engages with the subtlety of N's thinking much better than simply referring to power alone, which can flanderize itself as a term.
Scott almost had the problem solved talking about instrumental convergence in the land of Tank building maximalism. The achievement of goals, any arbitrary goals across time, necessarily involves a set of meta goals to cybernetic systems, and I think it's this that N was trying to get at later on.
We can endure any how with a sufficient why. The fun of philosophy is in the play of the why. There's a lot of wiggle room here and the right-wingers are generally correct that where you go with it largely reflects something biological about you.
The point I ultimately want to get to though is that AI ruins all of this. It ruins instrumental convergence because it ruins instrumentality itself. It obsoletes mankind--all life happens in the gap between goal and achievement. My claim is that Ted K jumped the gun, industrial society and it's meaninglessness is not fatal to meaning as such. We could overcome it. But AGI is. The only solution is to have faith it won't happen.
I encountered the cluster of ideas similarly. I like the concrete aspect of 'in the pursuit of your initial goals, you discover that there are relevant meta principles to the various subskills etc.' I'd add to this that in the subsequent pursuit of said meta principles, one finds a vast frontier of possibility opening up, as the meta principles are potentially relevant to a wider range of goals than you initially were aware of. If we are, as Quine put it 'homeostatic envelope extenders,' then this will be a rewarding discovery and a process that often makes available a more interesting goal than our original one.
>Nietzsche keeps saying that the Superman is the one who can “write new values on new tablets”. But anyone can get a new tablet ($139.99 on Amazon) and write whatever they want on it. I could write “PAINT EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD GREEN”.
I'm pretty sure that's not what he meant, but instead something along the lines of becoming a leader of a movement that would transform society in such ways that "good things are good, actually" wouldn't be something that contrarians have to point out. Raising the sanity waterline, as it were. Now, what does that remind me of?
To put it another way (maybe), everyone wants the greatest good for the greatest number. But everyone except Naïve Utilitarians understands that this is not a goal that cannot be pursued directly (since unintended consequences dominate everything), you must instead pursue it by following heuristics.
The highest good, then, is to be the person who comes up with better moral heuristics, which we can call values. Jesus came up with the heuristic "love your neighbour as yourself" which isn't perfect but was probably an improvement over "kill and eat your neighbour, he's delicious". Marx came up with the heuristic "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" which sounded tempting but turned out to be terrible.
What we need is better moral heuristics. But coming up with better moral heuristics is hard -- firstly because new moral heuristics are usually kinda immoral by the standards of old moral heuristics, and secondly because most of the new moral heuristics that you might invent off the top of your head turn out to be dumb and terrible.
But even if we're not the Superman and we can't figure out what these ideal values would be, we can at least recognise that such a hole exists, and that our current moral values are not the ideal or final ones.
Yep, something like that. I also think that optimal values are a moving target, so talking about ideal or final ones doesn't make much sense. To use Scott's terms, whether you are in "thrive" or "survive" situation matters for how people should think and what they should do. So some kind of framework for timely updating values to keep up with changing circumstances appears desirable, but no such notion is even near the Overton window!
Anyone have the Last Psychiatrist article Scott mentioned on turning your fetishes into your identity? Couldn't find it from a few keyword searches on TLP's website.
>Instead of building rocket trains to Mars out of magic green metal that cures cancer or whatever, it seems like the idealized girl-boss is just leading a few Zoom meetings and then going home to do yoga and meditate on how liberated she is, and possibly writing a pop anthem about the experience.
To paraphrase the famous comic book panel: They don't *want* to cure cancer, they want to do yoga and write pop anthems!
That seems like ubermensch morality as much as anything else we've seen presented here.
Maybe online porn consumption is the one place left in our society that's anonymous and hidden enough that people will develop their true preferences without fearing society's judgements, and get training for their ubermensch muscles.
Interesting point! A lot of the comments talk about some version of either master or ubermensch people being true to themselves (authentic?), yet there has been very little talk of privacy, which I'd expect to be closely connected to that aim.
First, one thing no one has talked about is that Nietzche is not the inventor of the "master/slave" dichotomy in philosophy. I don't know if Hegel is the first person either, but I do know that he was probably the most famous philosopher who Nietzche openly admitted to being influenced by to use it. The master-slave account in Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit is famously hard to unpack, and I won't pretend I'm sure I got it right, but if I understand it, it goes something like this:
Imagine if there were only people who thought of themselves as master in the universe. Then, whenever two of them competed over anything, one of them would have to die. Because submission isn't an option for a master-personality. So every conflict whether over status or resources, degenerates into a battle to the death. Fortunately, humanity is saved from being reduced down to a single human being by the existence of a whole other type of person, one who recognizes that actually, there's a second option, which is just to let the master-personality have whatever he wants and make do with what's left. This is the slave-personality, and while it might seem contemptible, it provides the useful role of insulating the master-type personality from perpetually seeking out conflict unto destruction. So in Hegel the master-slave relationship is sort of the first psychic and historical molecule of social order and allows for human progress. He charts the way it eventually breaks down and evolves into something else.
I don't know that Nietzche fucks with all of that, but he definitely read it, and I think it is helpful to explain his conception of master morality at least with respect to one question Scott was asking which is "where do Master values come from" which is that...they don't. Masters are pure id (to further mix influential German philosophical concepts). They want what they want without reflection, and therefore what they want can be reduced to pure "will to power," which is a drive for dominance, to reduce the other to a kneeling paste. "Power to do what?" is actually, paradoxically, not a question a master would think to ask. Think of it like the profit-motive in capitalism. The classic critique of unchecked capitalism isn't actually that its evil, its that its value neutral, whatever is going to increase its profits is the thing its going to do, no matter what.
"So the master is a slave to his own desire to be the master?" Well now you're doing Hegel again and I don't feel qualified to get into it. But essentially, I think Nietzche would agree that for all its power, master morality lacks any quality of introspection or value-determinism, which is why he doesn't outright endorse it, a thing I don't understand how people don't understand. He's critical of slave morality because its what produced the conditions he lived in and had contempt for, but he also recognized that slave morality catalyzed Catholicism, which at its height created all the cathedrals in Europe and which led Bach to compose the St. Matthew's Passion.
So if you want to really reduce Nietzche's project to an elevator pitch, he's trying to take all of the vitality and intensity of the masters and combine it with the introspection and moral truth-seeking instincts of slave morality to produce actual articulated values of human excellence beyond simple dominance seeking and answer the question "will to power to what?" for essentially the first time in history. THIS is what the Ubermensch will accomplish.
Second, yes of course this is fucking hard! Nietzsche symbolizes the process in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as the transformation from a camel to a lion to a child. The camel is your basic classical hermetic saint, he bears all worlds morality on his back through the desert in his quest to become the most holy person conceivable, and the process usually kills him.
If somehow the camel manages to lay his burden down, he becomes the lion, who is your more typical master-type asshole, he dominates , he destroys, but most importantly he rebels against the *system of morals he was just trying to uphold in his previous incarnation (which are now a dragon, because its a cool metaphor and not a stuffy philisophical treatise)/ So the lion isn't just a master, he's a proud heretic. Most people who make it to this stage will stall out here, because they never actually manage to beat the dragon, they live the rest of their lives opposing a series of values without really learning to define themselves by anything but their opposition to those values. Think of your average 4chan troll here, he's not a magnificent lion, but he shares with the lion the fact that if liberal norms went away he'd evaporate into nothingness overnight because he'd have no purpose to his existence anymore.
Finally if the lion defeats the dragon, he becomes the child, which the last stage, but also the first stage where anything new happens. The child gets to make up new values because he's destroyed the influences of everything else and thereby reverted to a state of pure make-believe. Has anyone ever gotten to this stage? This is where we finally get new values that created by societal norms or historical trauma or whatever. What will these look like? Fuck if I know. No one knows, that's the point, the child looks a lot to me like the awakened being in most forms of Buddhism, people may claim to have gotten there but have you ever met someone where you personally buy that? Creating new values is a profound, spiritually transformative process accomplished only at the highest individual level. It wouldn't surprise me if no one had ever actually done it, decide for yourself whether that makes it impossible.
BTW, does this Camel-Lion-Child transformation look superficially similar to the thesis/antithesis/synthesis Hegel's dialectic gets reduced to in intro to philosophy books? I don't think that's a coincidence. I don't think its accurate either, I think its more like "thesis-antithesis-???-profit!" but this is one of those cases where its helpful again to realize that Nietzche wasn't inventing every notion about how the soul evolves completely from scratch. Because his entire oeuvre is about how no one, at least in modern history, has ever actually done that and anyone who claims otherwise is selling you something.
> In theory, you should be neither right nor left, neither capitalist nor communist, neither pro-US nor pro-China, simply choosing The Good at every opportunity without reference to puny mortal concepts. In practice you have to use some kind of heuristic and join some kind of coalition, and so all these things become important again.
Strong disagree here. Nothing requires you to use the same heuristics others have already invented; earlier ones are not necessarily better. You can invent your own -- and in many cases, things have already been split in many independent ways, and rather than invent your own you can pick among *multiple* pre-existing ways of splitting things up, with no particular one behing "the" preexisting one!
Yes, for collective action problems you may have to throw your support behind one coalition or another, but that doesn't mean you have to *agree* with one or another, and also lots of what we're talking about here has nothing to do with collective action problems.
(...and I will continue to reiterate that I think you are making a mistake by taking seriously the idea of a left-right political spectrum, I think a tripolar model is better, and rather than try to explain it myself as I did in the past I can now just link to Nate Silver since he's talked about it here and he seems to largely agree with me: https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly )
A linear spectrum for politics is quite workable, but the left/right divide is largely useless. It's especially confusing as Nate points out because America was founded on very liberal European principles of the time, but in America today liberal is often used to describe movements away from the founding principles, ditto with conservatism but the inverse. In a two party system, any faction that doesn't end up under the umbrella of one party is taken in by the other. So The Left and The Right in America are a hodgepodge of different ideologies all wearing the same trenchcoat without regard to consistent principles.
A tripolar model like Nate proposes also has the issue that each pole is just an arbitrary ideology. You might point out the differences between socialism and conservatism and liberalism, but these all mean different things to different people. There is an extra dimension to map information onto but the quality is no different than with left vs right. It also has problems mapping ideologies that don't correspond to the arbitrary poles. Are communists super socialist (this kind of works), fascists super conservative (this works less well), anarchists super liberal (huh)?
Personally I find the most useful political spectrum to be a measurement of the degree of state power the average citizen is subject to. On one end there is no state power at all and everyone is free to do whatever they please, i.e. Anarchy. On the other end the state wields ultimate power over the lives of everyone, i.e. Tyranny. This spectrum also maps well with individual vs collective exercise of power. Systems which value strong individual rights will favor the anarchy side of the spectrum and collectivist systems will favor the tyranny side. Communism and fascism occupy basically the same spot over towards tyranny, which might throw people off. But both systems were strongly against individual rights and concentrated power in a tyrannical minority, while espousing collectivist solutions to societal problems. I think it's also instructive to look at the violent clashes of communism vs fascism in 20th century Europe not as inevitable polar opposites, but as two ideologies competing for the same political niche.
IIRC another classic is to split the anarchy-tyranny axis into two: economic and socio-cultural. The first has to do with how regulated the economy is, the second about how much variety of values and mores a society allows.
I'm not a big fan of that. Both economics and culture are tied into the anarchy-tyranny equation already. The more a state insists on robbing individuals to fund itself the more tyrannical it is. Economic freedom and private property are core components of individual rights and separating them onto another axis doesn't make sense. I'm more favorable to the cultural axis because norms and mores often exert pressure on individuals outside the window of the state, which adds useful data to the anarchy-tyranny spectrum. Although dominant cultural ideas are often made into law, which brings culture back into state power and makes the axis redundant.
> lots of what we're talking about here has nothing to do with collective action problems.
YES. I was wondering what was bothering me about the whole tone of this post and related ones. It looks like much of this community insists in looking at things almost exclusively from the point of view of collective action.
> I like this way of thinking about “who you are doesn’t matter, only what you do”, but I find the connection to 4chan kind of tenuous.
It's tenuous with the immediate context, but I think this is a primary part of the culture at 4chan. See Moot's comments on the advantage of anonymity[0]:
>>
RW: 4chan has become a springboard for many memes. Did you ever imagine that it would be so influential?
CP: No I didn’t imagine it. But I think that it makes sense [because] the two things that really define 4chan are its anonymity and the ephemerality of its content. So the anonymity I’ve advocated in the past for allowing people to share using a pseudonym or share anonymously allows you to share in a way that’s unencumbered by your real life identity and it enables kind of discourse that you don’t find kind of elsewhere on the web.
Also, the fact that the site basically deletes itself every few hours. The content doesn’t last very long in the site, once it kind of gets pushed off the last page it’s deleted. It created this environment where people could be very experimental and provocative. At the same time, if ideas didn’t resonate with the community, then they were lost; they just rolled off the site.
So on one hand it’s surprising that it all happened, but on the other hand, the design itself really lends itself to the production of memes. It’s the ideas that can spread.
>>
Moot, the founder, clearly thinks that the anonymity and self deleting nature of the site is what lets a meritocracy of ideas form on the site. You can argue that he's mistaken, or that his idea of quality is far from yours, but you cannot argue "anonymity enables a meritocracy of ideas and posts, rather than personalities" isn't an intentional part of the culture.
Insofar as what you do on the internet is make posts, I think it fits. Although obviously in the space of all things you can do, posting is pretty low on the impact factor.
I think 4chan's role within the broader Internet prevents it from being a true "meritocracy of ideas". It has the same problem that every other "alternative" social media network has, which is that when everyone but you is conducting witch hunts you end up with all the witches. The persistent prevalence of offensive and provocative posts on the site isn't due to them winning any sort of fair memetic competition, it's due to broader social dynamics providing a constant influx of new offensive and provocative posters.
With that said, I was also a regular on 4chan as a kid and I largely agree that its anonymous and ephemeral nature is a huge advantage. I was so terrified of making even the most minor mistakes that if I'd ever made some dumb post on Reddit and seen it accrue 200 downvotes I sincerely believe I would never have psychologically recovered. Meanwhile, if I made a similar mistake on 4chan I could just close the thread and never think about it again. It's hilarious to describe it this way, but it genuinely felt like a safe space for me when I needed one.
4chan gets a double whammy, it ends up with all the witches and all the worst assholes. The asshole part was already true 20 years ago, when there were much fewer witch hunts, because nobody likes having them around if they can help it. That's not to say that there were no advantages, but 4chan never was a pleasant place.
To be clear, I don't think it accomplished the goal either, you likely need some sort of accepted identity to carry on long term projects, and it's telling that cooperatives consistently scale worse than top down hierarchical companies. I just think that someone should not be accused of having a novel theory when they are essentially regurgitating standard tropes!
This is why I feel like Nietzsche is basically incoherent: In theory, the morality is 100% about aesthetics. It's about doing what seems nice to you. If you write on your tablet "I want to paint the whole world green" and then you do that because the world being green seems like a good thing to you... yeah, you got it. Other people will disagree and try to stop you. To them you aren't anything special, just a crazy dude. If you stop them from stopping you, then it doesn't matter what they think, you still win.
But if you had any reason for painting the world green, any reason at all, it doesn't count. If your parents like green, it doesn't count, you're enslaved to their expectations. If you are a member of a club that likes green, that doesn't count, you're in a herd. If in your youth your babysitter wore a green sweater and you saw her changing and now you have a fetish for green, that doesn't count because you are enslaved to your own psychosexual whims. The only thing that would count would be if you just spontaneously developed a love of the color green, independent of any influences, for no reason. Which doesn't happen.
First section of the comments, and especially the first few posts made me reflect on the distinction between authenticity and greatness.
The clearest treatment I know so far of this is in Jungian thought (as reinterpreted by Hollis), where the individual preferences (down to dreams and fetishes) are meant to be transmuted into a life's work that can be sustained. In this, the key distinction is between self-centred life projects (be the best) and projects that are actually world-affirming and socially beneficial, where self is the instrument of such an effort versus its end. I think this goes someway towards explaining the distinction between instagram authenticity projects and actual greatness. I am unsure if it does explain why dreams of greatness may involve conquest and war - this may be the relic of that pesky master morality we are meant to overcome?
While I’m not a vitalist, my understanding - and what draws me to it - is that it is “pro life” in the sense of increasing depth or intensity of experience. Like the opposite of disassociation.
I'd advocate for pro-maxxing, which seems to be what the vitalist praxis is all about. If you want to be buff, lift weights until you get all the muscles. If you want to write poetry, write away, and even if you become the next McGonagall vitalists will still like you because you're being true to your heart's desire. You want to looksmaxx, but have an overbite or some other physical defect? Doesn't matter, you're part of the group as long as you aspire.
I think this kind of "as long as you're improving yourself, you're doing good" attitude is why many young people are drawn to the idea. Cruelty towards non-improvers is a general function of ingroup-outgroup dynamics instead of a core tenet of vitalism, so I agree that it and altruism are easy to reconcile.
(But isn't altruism just goodmaxxing? Kind of, but altruists like to run calculations about how to do the most good and end up in Africa licking mosquitoes off of random doorknobs instead of following their heart's desire. This is scary and confusing to vitalists, because maxxing is a very different thing from optimization. Their approach to altruism would be to run around doing whichever acts of kindness they feel like doing while yelling "GOOD FOR THE GOOD GOD").
Looksmaxxing with an overbite isn't even hard. Expensive maybe, painful probably, but if you have an overbite and it's fucking up your looks, what you should do to improve your looks is *obvious*, it's the most straightforward thing in the world to maxx in that scenario. Just fix your goddamn overbite!
>because you're being true to your heart's desire.
This sounds like it amounts to being enthusiastically authentic?
>because maxxing is a very different thing from optimization.
That sounds interesting, but confusing to me. If someone is pursuing a(n authentic to them) goal, how do maxxing and (reasonably accurate) optimization differ?
Yeah, enthusiastic pursuit of a goal seems to be the thing for vitalists. As for optimization and maxxing, I think the key distinction is that there's no such thing as an effective vitalist.
Altruists are initiated into the order with the sacred words: "Your heart's desire may be right, but the way you're pursuing it is dumb and wrong. Here's a set of equations to replace your instincts with. There's no god but probability, and Bayes is his servant and prophet." Vitalists don't like this, they like evolutionary heuristics that say things like "if you want to become strong, lift lots of weights and eat two lions every day". They'll listen to people who find better ways to lift weights and eat lions, but if you say "wait, you can become stronger by building a machine that stimulates your muscles in your sleep" you'll lose them, because they like the lift-and-lion part as much as the get-stronger part.
In other words, while altruists value the end goal and want to find the best path there (optimization), vitalists value both the goal and the path they want to take on the way (maxxing). Think about the responses to AI art: the EA-aligned response is to like it because it gives you the end-goal of decent art that you can tailor to your sense of beauty, while the vitalist response is to hate it because it destroys the path the artist takes. All this talk about strength and weakness is distraction, even groups that dislike the Tate-style hyper-masculine ideals have vitalist elements (see e.g. Tumblr and *their* take on AI art).
(Of course, nobody is 100% a maxxer or optimizer in practice. Sometimes you just throw your equations to the wind and go all-in on what seems like a good idea. Scott is a gold star rationalist, but even his post about donating his kidney starts with a cost-benefit analysis and ends with "sod Bayes, I'm going to do a nice thing and I'm going to like it. GOOD FOR THE GOOD GOD!").
This explains the lack of concrete policy proposals on the part of vitalists. A Dark Altruist will sit with you and explain in detail how she can cause the maximum amount of suffering to people with the wrong color. In contrast, a Dark Vitalist will say "I don't like wrong-color people because my evolutionary heuristics say they're bad and should suffer", but won't really act on it except in a fuzzy hand-wavey way, because her heuristics also tell her that wishing bad things on her outgroup is good enough and she should go eat some lions now.
Similarly, altruists are more prone to attacks-from-infinity than vitalists, because they're more concerned with that infinity while vitalists just want to affirm themselves and their way of living. "The most good" gets taken more seriously by altruists than "the most tanks" does by vitalists.
(Doesn't this reduce vitalism to stupid cavemen going unga bunga at each other? Kind of, but evolutionary heuristics are widely applicable, population-wide Schelling points that also make you happy when you follow them. Your alternative better be really good if you're going against that.)
>In other words, while altruists value the end goal and want to find the best path there (optimization), vitalists value both the goal and the path they want to take on the way (maxxing).
Good clarification! I can see both positives and negatives to this approach.
On the positive side, for most goals, one spends a lot more time on the path to the goal than enjoying the goal itself. The path better have rewards of its own.
On the negative side, if the path to a goal involves 27 intermediate dead ends, trying to cut that to 3 dead ends is probably worthwhile. Optimization shades into just thinking carefully about alternate tactics, which is generally useful.
edit: I should say, I'm not really contrasting vitalists with altruists here. I'm more nearly contrasting vitalists with a hypothetical "prudent man", independent of what the prudent man's goals are.
This is certainly how I would understand it. If you can accept "corpse logic" surely "life logic" as its antonym isn't even a leap? V. confused by this confusion.
I fully agree with Scott's point contra the racist, but the math he did when making it was jarringly wrong. The calculations for additional expected rapes should be calculated using [African rapists of Europeans]/[Africans in Europe], not [African rapists of Europeans]/[Africans]. Honestly, the point seemed wrong/stupid enough on its face that I'm not really sure why Scott bothered including it, though.
Disagree. EA is saving the lives of Africans in Africa, so the chance that they commit rapes in Europe is (chance that they go to Europe) * (chance that they rape after getting there).
It looks like the problem is caused by syntactic ambiguity. “go on to commit rape in Europe” read as P(rape|saved and allowed to immigrate to Europe) rather than P(rape in Europe|saved and allowed to live standard life). I see why you were calculating it as you did, it just addresses the immigration bit less directly than I thought.
Although I was also confused by the calculation, I think the actual problem with Scott's counterargument is that it's completely beside the main point of the argument. "We shouldn't help Africans because they don't deserve help" cannot in principle be rebutted by "but helping Africans helps Africans a lot". What is needed is an argument on the form "Africans deserve help because ..." (or a dismissal of desert).
The way Naraburns puts it, the whole Nietzschean master and slave morality feels like a dressed up version of an almost comically simple and obvious concept - "do what works for you and make you happy, don't worry about what others think".
Lot of stuff seems comically simple and obvious once it becomes widespread, but still took somebody a lot of hard work to invent. The process of that invention is worth studying, if we want it to continue adding beneficial features to the world which then become ubiquitous.
I haven't read much of Nietzsche, but from your criticism of "master-slave" morality (one of the interpretations of which - by naraburns - sounds a lot like what I call "inner-compassing"), it sounds like it's not that you disagree with that philosophical position as such, but more that you think it is actually kind of incoherent, in the sense that if one actually attempts to implement that morality, one couldn't do much better than merely signaling to other people that they were part of a special "following your own values" kind of tribe. I could be wrong about my interpretation here.
Actually, I realize now that it's not quite clear to me if you meant that naraburns' reading was incorrect or if that interpretation sounded right but Nietzsche himself was incoherent.
One thing to note as regards Nietzsche's illness is that people's standards as to what constitutes a debilitating illness has changed a lot. For example, I have an ancestor who was discharged from the army in the 19th c at age 37, due to liver disease and dysentery. On his discharge the record states that :
" he suffered much from Liver disease and dysentery and has been frequently under treatment in Hospital since his return to this Country in 1828 with frequent & harassing vomiting, flatulence and fever in the Stomach with general febrile symptoms, a great variety of treatment has been tried in his case but without permanent benefit" [...] " his general health of course is greatly impaired and no probability of its becoming such as to enable him to perform his military duties".
He nevertheless went on to father 10 children.
(of course, this record is also consistent with his being a malingerer who successfully fooled the military authorities)
Nietzsche makes no sense for the same reason that none of the existentialists make any sense. Scientific progress has moved civilization beyond the point where religion can be used to import concepts of intrinsic meaning, purpose or value for human life. Whether by accident or some transcendent quantum certitude, we simply ‘exist’.
Nietzsche can’t create intrinsic, objective meaning or purpose where there is none, as much as he wants to. His philosophy just reflects his personal aesthetics. He prefers to write about a strong man accomplishing notable deeds whose name rings through history rather than millions of faceless peasants building a cooperative society over centuries. So did Tennyson. So have a lot of authors. Not a lot of people went to bat for the faceless peasants before Smith.
As a sociological matter, it’s hard to envision a nation-state with 100 million cooperating inhabitants emerging from a culture embracing master morality. I expect this social evolutionary pressure is the reason slave morality has become largely universal. A Superman can’t compete with 100 million commoners.
Nietzsche misses the fact that a society that embraces master morality never makes it past the petty tyrant organizational level of Bronze Age Greece. Charlemagne and Napoleon were fundamentally different from Agamemnon and Achilles—channeling and embodying their underlying cultures, not free agents imposing their will on their own terms. People who have wielded the power to shape historical events are closer to zeitgeist than supermen. And no Superman is ever going to come from outside the system and co-opt it—he would be too alien and self-serving to garner acceptance.
Science does have the answer to ‘why?’ It’s just not one that any person is fundamentally capable of fully accepting and functioning with. So you just get efforts at broad philosophies that don’t hold together well and aren’t supported by two millennia of tradition.
>I could write “PAINT EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD GREEN”.
But you would find that you, personally, could not do this and then take action on it. Somehow, you just wouldn't find yourself jumping out of bed in the morning for it.
> even though I think I like travel, whenever I actually travel I can never quite put my finger on the part where I’m having fun
You're married! The nightmare is over, you (both) can stop pretending to like "travel"! (You can still go to places if you want to go to them, obviously.)
Not true. You're somewhat constrained, and it's more stressful, but it's possible, and I found showing my children different countries and cities a very satisfying experience (as did they).
I'm only half way thru this amazing read, but you made me pause when you said this, and I'm stuck on it because it seems to ..go against a point you're trying to make and it's here, "What actions would I take if I wanted to embody the true pure master morality that nobody embodies?" Best, Sarah Mader (SM) @SarahMdre
"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy."
> Nietzsche keeps saying that the Superman is the one who can “write new values on new tablets”. But anyone can get a new tablet ($139.99 on Amazon) and write whatever they want on it. I could write “PAINT EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD GREEN”. Then I could spend my life trying to do that. I bet I would encounter lots of resistance (eg from my local HOA), and I could try to overcome that resistance. Would that be a life well-lived, because I chose the value?
The point is not just to have new values, but to have better values.
How can one value be better than another? Because we're not talking about terminal values, we're talking about instrumental values -- the terminal value remains something universally agreeable that a utilitarian would call "the greatest good for the greatest number", while the "values" of which we talk are the heuristics that people can actually follow, in the indirect service of that overall aim.
"Paint the whole world green" is a bad value in two ways: firstly because it doesn't get us closer to the utilitarian endpoint, and secondly because even if you write it on a tablet people aren't going to want to follow it.
What are the best values? I don't know, I'm not the Superman. But I can gesture vaguely in the direction that they might lie. Modern values are better than Bronze Age values but I can see that they have specific failure modes that the Bronze Age didn't have, and so maybe the best values lie in some sort of synthesis of Bronze Age hardness and modern softness.
I don't think it's at all simple or straightforward if there are terminal values, I just think it's meaningless if there aren't.
Or maybe "terminal values" is a bad term because it has too much baggage. But even Nietzsche (or any Nietzsche worth listening to) would have to agree that some values are better than other values, and that good things happen if people hold good values, which is why we should care whether or not people have good values.
What if you have terminal values, but the associated utility function is some nightmare of NP-hardness that's computationally intractable for predictive consequentialist decisions, yet relatively easy to apply in retrospect? Under such assumptions, the only way forward would be iterative development of more easily-computable approximations which are sufficiently accurate within the relevant domain, as calibrated by feedback from terminal-value-related regret.
Nietzchea is arguing for eugenics, basically. Rüdiger Safranski, the Übermensch represents a higher biological type reached through artificial selection and at the same time is also an ideal for anyone who is creative and strong enough to master the whole spectrum of human potential, good and "evil", to become an "artist-tyrant". In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche vehemently denied any idealistic, democratic or humanitarian interpretation of the Übermensch: "The word Übermensch [designates] a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to 'modern' men, 'good' men, Christians, and other nihilists [...] When I whispered into the ears of some people that they were better off looking for a Cesare Borgia than a Parsifal, they did not believe their ears."[13] Safranski argues that the combination of ruthless warrior pride and artistic brilliance that defined the Italian Renaissance embodied the sense of the Übermensch for Nietzsche. According to Safranski, Nietzsche intended the ultra-aristocratic figure of the Übermensch to serve
I just wanted to jump in and agree with that part about travel. Having done a big travel - moving to China - I now find that I really love having a little part of my adopted city that I know well, and where people know me.
I don't mind the odd holiday, but in general, I'm very happy right where I am. I keep reading Tyler Cowen's travelogues and thinking they sound amazing - but I don't think I'd want to do them myself.
> Nietzsche keeps saying that the Superman is the one who can “write new values on new tablets”. But anyone can get a new tablet ($139.99 on Amazon) and write whatever they want on it.
It's an iterative process. Write new laws => examine resultant https://www.xkcd.com/592/ regrets => back-propagate to figure out which details of which law lead to which regret => adjust in the regret-minimizing direction, possibly with occasional random resets or other algorithmic cleverness. Eventually, at least in principle, this leads to a life entirely without regrets; sufficient refinement and propagation of such a system could conceivably lead to everyone routinely accomplishing that.
Sorta like Coherent Extrapolated Volition, minus hope of delegating the tedious part to a computer.
"Writing new laws on new tablets" doesn't solve the problem in itself, that's just the minimum to start such a process. Master morality was the unstable alpha build, slave morality the open beta, so now we can't fix the bugs without a proper version-control system *to which new versions are being added.*
>Rap music in the US is the ultimate Nietzschean product: a world where what is good is just what gets one ahead: big cars, big houses, hot women, respect. These are the kids who love Andrew Tate, but his ideas are hobbling them in their efforts to get ahead.
This is abuse of the word Nietzschean. Nietzsche consistently mocks the English and Americans for their materialism and striving after comfort and fashion. Nothing could be less Nietzschean than caring about big houses and cars.
The kids you're talking about (American yuppy types) are not capable of engaging with Nietzsche. They would have to question/suspend too much of their materialistic dogma.
>I agree that rap is a weird master morality relic.
You're better than this, Scott. The only essential source to understand what Nietzsche means by "master morality" is On the Genealogy of Morality, which is like 200 pages of his clearest most focused writing.
If you read it, it's obvious that rap music can't be an example of master morality. For one thing, mastery is closely tied to being able to make promises and regulate oneself. Rap is (in large parts) about having low impulse control; carpe diem morals; and (over)reacting to one's environment.
We can make a weaker claim, that rap music is unusually sincere or life-affirming. That sounds reasonable to me, as I think most modern popular music is either totally sterile or depressing.
> Suppose I call Hitler bad, and Hitler counters “No, see, I have my own moral system based on the purity of the German race, and according to that system I’m doing the right thing”. This doesn’t change my “Hitler is bad” opinion at all. It’s naturally implied that I’m using the word “bad” to refer to something like “bad within my own moral system” or “bad within the moral system which I believe to be true”.
That's the hazard of using the word "morality" in the first place, when the slave/master dichotomy is only about the way you apply agency to existing frameworks. You can find moral/immoral examples for either, depending on the particular framework you live in. Same with the examples you pick - the piece would feel much different with Elon Musk instead of Andrew Tate, but neither is a worse instance of high-agency individual.
> MaxEd writes: I also have to object to "toxic slave morality of USSR". I know it's still popular to dunk on Soviet Russia, since it has failed in the end, but it seems like most people get their knowledge of Soviet culture from Cold War sources tinted with a heavy dose of propaganda. Or Ayn Rand herself. Soviet society always celebrated unique individuals - actors, scientists, sportsmen, no less than its Western counterpart. It just denied hyper-rewards for such individuals: top Soviet actors, for example, still lived in apartments (if a bit nicer than your ordinary worker), not in mansions behind high walls and security. Frankly, I can't say their acting was worse off for all that.
Actors being overpaid is a side-effect of the system, not a feature. The feature is putting power in the hands of those most able to use it, with property and intellectual rights. In USSR you could be the best businessman or scientist or inventor, but you still had to bow your head for the smallest scrape of resources to somebody in the bureaucracy. In capitalist systems you either own your business, or can take your idea to somebody else. This freedom is the essential difference between the two, actors making millions is just an accident.
> I'm a bit embarrassed to know so much about Tate, but here we are.
+1 to the "Tate is probably a lot less bad than he's made to be". I haven't followed him directly, but the checks I did after the whole controversy all came up pretty universally as empty hype. Plus it has a strong feel of echo chamber enforced with severe reputational risk for going against the current - and if you discount for _that_, you aren't actually left with anything substantial.
> I like this way of thinking about “who you are doesn’t matter, only what you do”, but I find the connection to 4chan kind of tenuous.
It's the definition of anonymous boards - you can't use somebody's identity to judge their posts.
> In USSR you could be the best .. or scientist or inventor, but you still had to bow your head for the smallest scrape of resources to somebody in the bureaucracy.
I’m not sure the west is any different today. And obviously the USSR had people with a master morality, they became big in the party.
I think Nietzsche's argument would be that they don't really have master morality. They get power by following orders, backstabbing, not rocking the boat and undermining people who do. They're pursuing power, but they're doing so within a behavioural framework which a Nietzschian master would... reject out of disgust? I'm not entirely sure on that last part, as being too proud to become involved in politics is hard to parse and google tells me Nietzsche never discussed Coriolanus in anything written down.
I own a company, and occasionally play in local politics (not US). In my own company I have dozens of ways of getting things done. I can do it myself, I can have a colleague do it, I can pay a service provider etc. In the last elections I didn't even manage to hire a marketing company to edit videos - everything needed to follow stupidly strict rules, either due to the law, internal party regulations or the current alliance conditions.
Glad to see I'm not the first to mention Girard in this thread.
"Masters" like things because they like things. Their own judgment is sufficient justification for their actions. "Slaves" like things because other people have told them what to like.
One of Girard's greatest contributions was so thoroughly dismantling this kind of nonsense. "Masters" like stuff by imitating other's desires (often in the form of envy), just like the "Slaves" do. They just fool themselves into thinking their desires come from within.
Yes, all desire has to have an origin somewhere. But isn't it equivocation to say that it's all copied in the same way and all equally (in)authentic?
For example, say I'm from an old aristocratic family who are all experts in horticulture and all snobbish about our fancy gardens. Say I inherit both this knowledge and the values (I imitate or get trained by my parents). Say some nouveau riche family with no interest in gardens moves into the area. After mixing socially for a few months, they copy and start being just as elitist about having fancy gardens. (But they're not experts, and keep making faux pas and so on...)
There's a sense in which all horticulture is fake and gay; all standards are only established by social convention; and no one can claim any master status.
There's also a sense in which horticulture exists as a body of knowledge and standards; there are masters of it (the old money family); there are imitators and fakes (the new money family).
In my example, it seems reasonable to me to say that the nouveau riche family is envious and inauthentic, but not the other one. How does Girard cope with this?
My Nietzschean-influenced big picture ethical outlook looks something like this. Let's see if I can lay this out in a way that's logically consistent.
My viewpoints on sentience are similar to IIT: I think geographical areas of space-time contain 'sentience' in proportion to their informational density. I view sentience as a fundamental, emergent, and axiomatic property of the universe.
I do not believe in a moral molecule. I view ethical systems as coordinative strategies. If I agree to coordinate with my neighbors, and my society, and to not engage in certain harms with either, I help create a status quo where everybody's life, including my own, is better off.
Because of this, I do not believe in ontological moral fault. I believe in moral fault as a social persuasion device: if we say that people are 'at fault' for their bad acts, I view this as a reasonably effective social meme that helps discourage antisocial behavior. If you threaten to slap a pejorative social label on someone if they do something, this discourages them from doing that thing, especially when the social label is strongly connotated with deep evolutionary fears like being socially rejected or excluded or outgrouped. However, I do not actually get internally mad or upset in any way when people 'wrong' me. I pretend like I get mad and upset when they do to play my part in the social fabric, but the reaction is entirely external and not internal.
I do not hold myself to any implicit or explicit moral obligations outside of things you could rationalize as part of my role to play in my society's social contract. I have prosocial feelings—I care about my friends and stuff like this—but, to the extent that I act on my prosocial feelings, it is as spontaneous and impulsive and emotional of a decision as acting on my impulses to snack on brownies at night is. Given how the coordinative mechanisms of large swaths of American society are breaking down, I have an increasingly loose purview of what the obligations I have to meet to play my role in my 'society's' social contract entail. With that being said, if I lived somewhere with robust, strong communities, these standards would rise.
I think most people find fulfillment by 'puzzle piecing' themselves, making themselves natural complements to wives, friends, family, etc. There is a part of me that finds this repulsive and repellent. I don't have a very good justification for why I feel this way. I guess I feel like this mode of fulfillment inherently devalues non-neurotypical and socially unconventional people, like me, and so I think it can be easy to invent lots of shoddy ex post facto reasons why building your life around building an identity that naturally complements people or social groups makes you stupid or 'a slave' or something.
Finally, I am a big believer in the type of ambitious, muscular, self-driven intellectuals that have been driven out of our institutions and been devalued culturally. Part of it has to do with mimetic value: I think it is difficult to become a genius if you do not give yourself permission to be a genius. I think that understanding the world helps you emotionally accept parts of it. Finally, tying back to Nietzschean philosophy and my sentience theory and stuff, I think that knowing more information about the universe literally makes you more sentient. Maybe the difference between deeply understanding quantum mechanics and having no understanding of it is worth two additive years of teenage mental maturity and sentience-growth or something. I think this type of sentience outgrowth makes people more agentic, in the same way you are more agentic when you are 22 versus 13.
In terms of what Nietzsche himself believed, from what I remember he was more of a moral relativist than a proponent of 'master morality' or 'slave morality.' A big component of his historical and anthropological account of morals was framing morals as a way of wielding and exercising social power. I think his arch-project was close to the Deleuzian idea of 'deterritorialization': separating yourself, as much as possible, from the constant inflow and outflow of social power around you, in order to wield your own individual autonomy as much as possible in your authorship of your life. The extent to which this is doable is questionable, and I think Nietzsche viewed it more as an ideal, or a limit, than a practical implementable idea.
Most Nietzsche-inspired contemporary conservatives, which are different from the ideas of Nietzsche himself, specifically probably oppose entering mental frames that sympathize with 'weak' people on deontological grounds.
>For example, if I buy a video game because I like it, I'm a "master." If I buy it because everyone else is buying it
I can't tell the difference because I think popular ones are often objectively the best: GTA V, Red Dead 2, Fallout 4. Objectively as in: lots of entertaining stuff in them, a big world with lots interesting things in it to enjoy. The story might suck but they are mostly about free roaming and finding interesting things and killing them. I mean objectively as "measure the number of interesting bits to interact with". Very much quantifiable.
I am not saying I like every popular thing, but everything I like is either popular or sooner or later ends up being popular, like the metal band The Hu. Likable things are likable, I don't think there is such a huge individual difference between people's tastes, there might be only a few broad categories of tastes. As you might have noticed from this list, my tastes revolve around The Cult Of The Badass, this is one popular category, exploring 143 different ways of people posing like a Conan. I think a lot of tastes can be summed up with a few such archetypes.
> I mean objectively as "measure the number of interesting bits to interact with". Very much quantifiable.
This becomes totally subjective as soon as you try to define interesting. The total parts the player interacts with isn't a useful quantifier, otherwise a game that makes you repeat the same task 10,000 times would be 10x as interesting as a game with 1,000 unique tasks. Someone could easily find a game with 500 compelling tasks far more interesting than a game with 1,000 mediocre tasks.
This loops back to your earlier point:
I can't tell the difference because I think popular ones are often objectively the best: GTA V, Red Dead 2, Fallout 4.
These games all fill a certain niche of open world, let the player run around and do random stuff. Personally I find this incredibly boring, games are only interesting to me if there is a plausible reason for me to be doing things in the game universe. Narrative and writing are more interesting than bits to interact with. From this view, GTA V is pretty good because it has interesting characters and story, Red Dead 2 is ok because it has coherent characters and story but it wasn't executed well, and Fallout 4 is garbage because it lacks either. Fallout: New Vegas on the other hand is quite good because it was developed by old school CRPG people who put a lot of emphasis on writing and world building.
I'm sure there are other divides, one that comes to mind is difficulty. Some people enjoy very difficult games that require optimizing strategy or using ironman, other people find this very frustrating and off-putting. You have to be careful assuming popular/big sales = interesting. A lot of video game studios today try to make their games appeal to as large an audience as possible to maximize sales. The resulting product is bland and inoffensive because it is intentionally not specialized for any one type of taste. It's like the difference between a hand crafted espresso and a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. The Dunkin coffee isn't more interesting or objectively better because way more people end up drinking it.
>They don't need to "lord it over" anyone; if you have to tell people "I'm better than you because I own a Bugatti," you are their slave
I strongly dislike the alpha/beta male theory, but I like the concept of the sigma, and this is very close. Indeed I dislike it probably because I am sigma, forming hierarchies outside work is stupid, and frankly I don't interact with people enough to find out whether they do, and thus whether the theory is correct or not, all I know is I am neither alpha nor beta.
Having said that, telling yourself you are sigma has an element of copium: one way to never lose competitions is to never engage in them, so it is possible that one is simply afraid of losing.
>Also, why is everything that’s written on your own soul good? The Last Psychiatrist (who I usually think of as Nietzschean) had a scathing article about people who sink too much of their identity into their sexual fetishes, as if they were central personality traits to be proud of, rather than shameful vices to be indulged in secret.
That's because he does not understand them. A D/s relationship is not weird sex, it is a fucking *kingdom*. Even an S/M scene is much more like a cathartic psychodrama than sex. Kinbaku is art, it objectifies people into being pretty immobile statues. People are proud of it, because it is an extreme sport, a high risk liminal experience. The deep theme is often death and rebirth, especially in F/M, the hero who dies for his queen and is reborn after the scene. This is not sex, this is serious stuff.
When people just want to wank to boots or something, they are not that proud of that.
>it would be nice to stigmatize obesity enough that most people who can easily lose weight d
People are not stupid. They know it is unhealthy. They are simply addicted to food, or sugar. Bad decisions do not always come from bad beliefs, this is a core Rationalist mistake. It is simply that good decisions are often hard to make and stick to. It is hard to fight with ones dopamine reward system.
Notice I said "stigmatize" and not "inform". It's hard to fight with the dopamine system, but almost nobody jerks off in public. There's decent evidence that obesity is contagious across social networks, which I think of as involving a sort of social permission.
When I think about this philosophy, I ask questions like “Is art still valuable if nobody ever sees it?” Or “Is art still valuable if it’s an AI churning out 1 million great artworks per second in the Andromeda Galaxy?” Or “Is art still valuable if it’s a stalagmite in a cave that through freak coincidence formed into a beautiful statue, but literally nobody will ever see it, including a creator.” Or “is there more moral value in a world with a million pieces of pretty-good art, or one piece of great art”?
"
I think this is less about art that you might realize. For clarity, replace the artwork by a 10$ bill. If a 10$ bill has been lost and no one knows the location and no one will ever find it: does it still have value?
A possible answer is no: its only value comes from the ability to transact with it, and if no one can transact with it, then it does not have value. Now, what about the 10$ bill that my grandma hid under her pillow for her entire life for emergencies, but that she never used? If this was never used for transaction, was it also worthless (not valuable) during that time? Probably not, because it gave her a sense of security. So the value comes from some hypothetical scenario (she might need the money some time), even if the scenario never comes true.
But for the lost 10$ bill, a possible answer is also yes, that it still has value. Its value is 10$. In fact, this is the more simple answer, and you will get a *very* complicated world if you start arguing that all 10$ bills have different values depending on who currently holds it and which people know/remember the location of the bill. Perhaps a better answer is that there is something like a potential value of 10$ that all 10$ bills share, whether they are lost or not. But that there is a second level (getting transacted) that is also important, but if you call the second level "value" then you will end up confused.
For the naturally formed stalagmite statue, this has a lot of potential value: *if* people see it, they will be delighted. The *potential* value can depend on purely hypothetical scenarios, so it is irrelevant whether people ever discover the statue.
Scott made a strong link between slave morality and Christianity. Believing in some kind of absolute Good is a very Christian thing (not exclusively, I hasten to add). That was really what Jesus (as far as we can judge from the Gospels) was trying to tell us, he calls it "loving God", and makes quite specific what it means in practice: "what you have done for the least, you have done for me". However I don't think that he expected people to reduce themselves, not to have ambitions, become corpses, because, to help others, you must be strong yourself, and he tells parables about being awake, viligant, and about not burying your talents. On the other hand, he tells us to have faith in God (= Good) and not be too concerned with all things material. But that doesn't mean what Scott seems to say about saints voluntarily being some kind of slaves.
"Saint Louis Marie de Montfort asked his followers to acknowledge that they were slaves of the love of Jesus Christ through Mary, and even suggested that they wear small chains (TD 236-242) as an external sign of this condition. This might cause surprise and even offense today. In order to clear up any misunderstandings, we will first consider the Consecration of Holy Slavery in its historical context.
I. History
The Consecration of Holy Slavery was one of the main features of the spirituality of the French school, on which St. Louis Marie drew heavily. It was a cultural and spiritual legacy of Catholic Spain, where it was born in the sixteenth century. It referred to a biblical tradition and spread to a number of countries."
Metaphysiocrat is on the spot with his classification. Excellence (what I called "mastery" in my comments) is completely different from dominance. It's also perfectly compatible with any kind of ethics you might want to follow.
So here I disagree with Scott in dismissing that you can "always split things into more subcategories". These things are completely different, and the problem is that people pattern-match them together into a badly defined notion of "master morality".
People are always trying to bundle this stuff into package deals to force you to swallow something extra. "You can't have M2 without endorsing dominance hierarchies! You can't have S3 without Christianity/Islam! You can't have S1 without loving Stalin!"
"But aren’t fetishes, in some sense, the purest and most soul-written preferences we have? Preferences that date back from before we can remember, preferences which go so deep they can affect our very autonomic nervous responses, preferences which we stick to even when everyone else hates and shames us for them?"
So in the intro of Sadly Porn Teach posits that fetishes are programmed on to us by media, demographics, marketing, and society and are something that makes us sheeple and not unique (the obliteration of fantasy). He gives the example of pantyhose being sexy to the earlier generation and not to the current one. I don't think there's a genetic component to being attracted to pantyhose, but also if there is then the next generation should have maintained it.
Jukka Välimaa's take on how Rand viewed altruism seems right to me. I think the moral question there is something like "what do I owe to those around me?" And the positive characters in her books give those around them a mix of honest dealing and general benevolence without feeling an obligation to serve those around them.
There's a scene I remember from Atlas Shrugged (it's been many years since I reread it), in which Dagny is taking an extended vacation because she's gotten fed up trying to run her family's railroad against the ineptitude of her brother and the actively harmful role of most of the rest of her society. She is in some rural shop, and she points out to the shopkeeper that he's left the fresh produce in the sun and it's going to rot. The shopkeeper kind of looks at her blankly and doesn't care.
This is benevolence (she's pointing out a problem that really needs to be solved), but she's not making herself his slave or anything. And it seemed clear in context that if he'd needed a hand fixing the problem, she'd probably have helped, just out of a general benevolence and a desire to see things working properly. This isn't the behavior of a prudent predator or even of someone who is indifferent to the well-being of others.
There's a very common visible thing that happens a lot in the world, where someone seems to be kind-of turning other peoples' compassion into a weapon or a tool of manipulation. I've made myself pathetic and helpless, now you must take care of me. See how broken and sad I am, you must give me my way. And I think this was a lot of what Rand was reacting to.
If Bismarck is interested in spreading his views, it might help to make them less villainous. His linked article might have great, persuasive arguments, but when it starts off by punching down and making fat jokes about a poor (economically disadvantaged) black woman from ye olde days of open racism, the article is going to be written off by most people before they even make it a paragraph in.
To be fair, this is somewhat consistent with his ideology, but if it’s going to get recognition as anything other than a crackpot right wing theory, the ideology will need a much better spokesperson.
> But I find it hard to interpret in the context of Nietzsche so frequently bringing up Achilles and Cesare Borgia, both of whom went further than just liking the Star Wars movies for the right reasons.
I'm not an expert on Nietzsche, but doesn't "doing" grow out of "liking"? As the feller said, "After all, He Who Must Not Be Named did great things – terrible, yes, but great."
> If Nietzsche is really saying “ignore the strictures of society; pursue the destiny written upon your own soul”, how does that differ from Instagram “find yourself” therapy culture? Other than that Nietzsche expects your soul to say “conquer Europe” and Instagram expects it to say “ditch your boyfriend and date a yoga instructor”?
Just as doing should be congruent with liking, methods should be congruent with goals. The pop-culture images are of someone who achieves success but who engage in behaviors that would prevent that success - if the behaviors are long-lasting, the person would only have succeeded through luck, or if the behaviors are newer, the person has stagnated and will no longer succeed. In either case, they cannot serve as a guide for people to emulate, because they contain fast-growing seeds of failure.
> But if your natural tendency is to wallow in your fetishes, and you’re only trying to achieve great things because people are shouting at you, should a Nietzschean keep wallowing in the fetishes?
On a lower level, this can be applied to fetish play. A Nietzschean fetishist would presumably want to be the best fetishist they could be? They would be building better things, improving what they do, and so forth. They'd explore their own desires, and follow where that takes them, and perhaps find happy compromises with other people, but those compromises would be explicitly compromises, made from a spirit of self-knowledge. Whereas another type of fetishist might let themselves get swept along by others' desires, pretending to want what everyone else wants, lying to themselves about their true urges, molding themselves into the image of what those around them expect them to be, never daring to break consensus, becoming consumed by resentment and envy while they smile in public.
> Without some external source of value, I don’t understand how you decide that one soul-written destiny (conquering Italy) is better than another (running off with the yoga instructor, or watching furry porn).
Strictly speaking, I don't think an external source of value is needed (although it does make the process easier.) We can introspect about what we like, and slowly start the processes needed to get there. If we like the processes, if they work towards our goal, if we see the path ahead is clear, we can proceed. Maybe we come to realize that, while we have a desire to have conquered Italy, the actual process involved in conquest is not something we desire, and so maybe it's better to have another goal. Maybe we decided that all the mass murder was corrosive to our soul, and we should stop. Or maybe not.
Some varieties of Buddhism work like that. The basic idea is right up front - a cessation of suffering. If you think that's a goal you have, and look at practitioners (lay and monastic) and think that their sort of thing might get you there, then you can dip your toes in. Every step should move you closer to your goal, in ways that are fairly easy to see. The philosophy should explain how it works, and give you tools to analyze your progress. And at all times, what you do is entirely congruent with your goal.
But I don't think there's any magic cure for lying to ourselves, or for being unable to predict what we want and how we'll react. It's always possible to be wrong. And life isn't always neatly laid out: parenting seems to start with a set of incentives that don't have much to do with the primary multi-decade process.
> > Nietzsche insisted he was strong, but he was always very specific about what his strength was made of. ‘I always instinctively select the proper remedy when my spiritual or bodily health is low; whereas the decadent, as such, invariably chooses those remedies which are bad for him.’ Master morality is a remedy by and for the weak.
This seems dead on, and almost got me to subscribe to Sam Kriss. The processes we choose affect us, in both the process and the choosing. We can't control ends, we can't simply choose an end and have it materialize, all we can really do is choose a set of processes and work through them. Call back to "Instagram 'find yourself' therapy culture" - some of what it recommends might be useful, but some is pointless self-indulgence that makes us weaker, and makes us the sort of person who chooses things that make us weaker.
The follow up on "resentment" is almost too easy, and would call back all the way to Ayn Rand.
> > S1: Reverse Dominance Coalitions
Wouldn't it be sneaky to let people rationalize that they were in a Reverse Dominance Coalition, while instead they fed on the sweet nectar of resentment? No one ever has to say the "resentment" part out loud, at least not anyone worth listening to.
> S2: Humility
I feel like this is only presenting one aspect of "humility". There's other sides, too. The dignified precision of someone who performs well and accurately estimates their chances, and the abased groveling that we occasionally see at the business end of a cancel mob. With regards to the first one, lately I've been trying to demonstrate to some children that, when playing games, it's to their advantage to be a gracious winner and a gracious loser, rather than preening and crowing and pumping fists when fate tips slightly in their favor, and whining and moping whenever luck moves against them. It's tough, they're still young and their emotions can get beyond their control, but I think this will be useful to them, later in life. Unfortunately, there are some particularly bad examples in the Olympics. (And of course, there are times and places for both things, and many others.)
> > Nietzscheans don’t like this because they’re partisans of M1, which exalts victory in zero-sum games.
Well, if it really *is* a zero-sum game, isn't it appropriate to seek security? If not for you, then for all those who depend on you and would otherwise be at the mercy of a stranger? I'd say the root problem here, for those labeled as "Nietzscheans", is having tunnel vision and seeing things as zero-sum games when they don't have to be. To call back to another comment of mine, this is fetishizing an instrumental goal:
> Pressure can be an important tool, but the goal is flourishing. Nature provides one-size-fits-all pressure, and converts the failures into living food, but pressure designed by humans has the possibility of being intelligently tailored for optimal growth. (E.g., video games with a good skill progression, or weightlifting bro-science.) But this runs the risk of becoming unreal - we must always remember the true enemy is nature, or in other words, reality itself. (E.g., sports based on a real-world activity that have diverged so far that the skills involved have almost no transfer to the current interactions of the real-world activity itself.)
> Teleologically, the goal is winning; enjoying facing pressure is how we get good enough to win, but we shouldn't fetishize pressure or ignore its costs. That's a road to masturbatory excess and to wasting human lives.
Back to Scott:
> I hate the terms “pro life” or “life affirming” for this. Vitalism isn’t literally pro life in the sense of “cause there to be more life” - it neither recommends preserving your own life (by being safe) nor preserving others’ lives (by being altruistic). More often, it’s used to recommend the opposite of those things. So in what sense is it about “being pro life”. “Well, you’re only truly living insofar as you follow our philosophy”. Very convenient redefinition you have there.
It's not about quantity alone, but about quality too? QALYs seem like a place to start when coming up with this sort of measure. But to really bite the Vitalist bullet, you'd have to rate the life of, say, an Olympic athlete as being higher quality - and thus more valuable - than the life of a shut-in who spends 99% of time playing video games and sleeps. On an animal level, you'd have to rate the life of an indoor-outdoor cat who hunts and roams free and comes indoors at will, who runs the risk of being killed or maimed or diseased, over the life of an indoor-only cat who spends 18 years in comfort and boredom and neuroticism. And that's not getting into neutering and spaying.
> I think Orders - voluntary association groups that place strict demands on their members - are a surprisingly under-explored tool. But maybe their very rarity suggests there’s some reason they won’t work.
My gut says that Orders are the symbol of the thing, rather than the thing itself, and too easily corrupted into the service of other goals. After all, aren't there extant orders of knighthood? What happened to them? Sandor Clegane might have a few choice words.
> I think that saving 8,000 lives but causing one rape is better than killing 8,000 people and preventing one rape. This is the only deal on offer.
Well, there's always Jesus' way out, which was to save the people by volunteering for the rape. (OK, that analogy doesn't quite work...)
> > Spend any time at all with underprivileged boys in the US or boys from macho cultures in unstable developing countries and you will see that they are the true inheritors of Achilles' and "master" morality. Rap music in the US is the ultimate Nietzschean product:
> > Then go work at a reasonably functional corporation or government agency and see who gets ahead and gets promoted.
This sounds like a missing axis. NE is the Nietzschean master, NW is aggro youth, SE is the corporate drone, and SW is the Nietzschean slave. Maybe N is willingness to transgress social norms in pursuit of one's goals, and E is self-discipline in pursuit of one's goals?
> > But what if the core of this advice to [straight cics] unattached liberal women above 40 actually is *objectively* far more useful than not?
One of the few bits of wisdom I've figured out is, sometimes there's good advice that someone needs to hear, but it won't work if it comes from me. Maybe there's a pre-existing relationship that gets in the way, maybe I don't know how to phrase it right, whatever. Sometimes it can even be actively harmful to tell someone good advice, if you know they'll reject it because of how you presented it. :-(
The keys to understanding this are that Master Morality != Superman, and Slave Morality/Master Morality is not a dichotomy.
It's a tech tree: Master Morality->Slave Morality (we are here)->Superman.
Geneology of Morals describes the pre-slave morality rulers as "blonde beasts" raping and pillaging their way across Europe. Nietzche admires their lust for life and their untempered view of the world: they did what they wanted all the time, and what they wanted to do was fight, fuck, and have big feasts. But they are almost pre-moral--their "good" was just what they wanted to do, and they did not lead examined lives.
At some point all of the ordinary people got tired of being raped and pillaged all the time. Nietzsche says this is a result of them being jealous that they themselves couldn't rape and pillage all the time (ressentimant). In any case, they band together and create Slave Morality, which is for the masses of people that don't have the emotional or physical inclination to be warlords. Slave Morality beats Master Morality because there's way more peasants than warlords, and their memes are better ("This guy that is constantly ruining your life sucks, actually. Join my religion and we'll all be nice to each other.") This is bad, in Neitzsche's mind, because it encourages the type of corpse-like thinking that Ozy mentions.
But he explicitly says we can't return to the time of the "blonde beasts." Their time has passed, moral technology has advanced too far. Hence the Superman, who transcends Slave Morality. The Superman takes the good parts of the old-style Master Morality, but updates them. He loves strength in all forms (virtue ethics), but has the capacity to reason and think in a way the "blonde beasts" did not. He gets to *choose* the virtues he thinks are important in a way neither the old-style "slaves" or "masters" did and live those out. This can be in whatever way suits him. Humility and Charity can be part of the Superman's ethos if practicing them brings him joy and he does it of his own volition, but so can Wealth and Power.
It's a meta-moral approach to life that encourages people to find and define their own moral framework that allows them to engage with the world and fully express their desires and talents, rather than a prescriptive morality system.
Only Alastair Roberts brings up the topic of sports, which has proven a pretty good arena for our impulses toward master morality to play out without too many people getting killed in war.
Did Nietzsche take any interest in sports (which were rapidly evolving when he wrote). The Ancient Greeks certainly did.
Great post, but it has little to do with Nietzsche or his ideas. It seems to be based on other peoples rough ideas of what Nietzsche might have meant?
If you're interested about what greatness looks like and how to become great, the answer is illustrated well in Zarathrustra.
>I also don’t really get where Nietzsche thinks masterful values come from
Have you ever had a manic episode, or taken a strong stimulant? You should feel yourself agreeing more with Zarathustra. Self-improvement will naturally bring you closer to agreeing with Nietzsche. Confidence in yourself will bring you closer to Nietzsche. I think the changes in personality associated with self-improvement and maturity brings you closer to Nietzsches aesthetics.
How do you gain this strength, this improvement, this confidence? Through struggle, challenging yourself, overcoming yourself.
Curiousity, for instance, brings you to learn. Some great people have such strong creative drives that they're almost consumed by them. They work tirelessly, they become obsessed. If these people aren't killed by their drives, then the only alternative is greatness.
Throw existential problems at yourself, be strict with yourself, hold yourself to high standards, read the words of people who disagree with you. This will either destroy you, or it will strengthen you, the latter is greatness. Your website has a section called "Mistakes", where you admit to your own wrongdoings. That's based, it's admirable, it's heroic.
I tend towards the communities I can find with the most intelligent people - and then I taunt them and tell them they're wrong. This is an almost self-destructive tendency of mine, and if I don't succeed in destroying myself, then I can only grow stronger. And I enjoy this flaw of mine, it's anti-decadent, it keeps me healthy. I'm a weak person (as I'm only human), with a very strong and very arrogant force inside me which tries to destroy me and which thus forces me to improve myself and grow better. This is the transcendental function of my humanity.
I'd put it this way "Humanity is anti-fragile, and great people have an impulse to fight themselves and improve". They go through Nietzsches "Three Metamorphoses": The spirit, which becomes the camel, which becomes the lion, which becomes the child. The hierarchy is something like: Rabble -> Struggler -> Master -> Creator
"Human being is something that must be overcome, and therefore you should love your virtues – for of them you will perish"
"Spirit is life that itself cuts into life; by its own agony it increases its own knowledge – did you know that?
And the happiness of spirit is this: to be anointed and consecrated by tears to serve as a sacrificial animal – did you know that?
And the blindness of the blind, and his seeking and probing shall yet testify to the power of the sun into which he gazed – did you know that?"
"higher, stronger, more victorious, more cheerful ones, those who are built right-angled in body and soul: laughing lions must come!"
"The higher its kind, the more seldom a thing succeeds. You higher men here, haven’t all of you – failed? Be of good cheer, what does it matter! How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh! And no wonder that you failed and half succeeded, you half-broken ones! Does humanity’s future not push and shove within you?"
"Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath me, now a god dances through me."
And this secret life itself spoke to me: “Behold,” it said, “I am that *which must always overcome itself.*“
I agree, Scott is completely missing what Nietzsches goals are, and confusing it with narcissism, which is actually its polar opposite. I think the Three Metamorphosis is really key to explaining what Nietzsche was actually trying to say. At the risk of oversimplifying Nietzsche rejects both Scotts ideas of slave and master morality as part of the first two metamorphoses, but “the child” in the 3rd is really unconcerned with what anyone else thinks or values, and would see being the “master” of others or winning their approval as ridiculous- no more useful than being admired by ants.
This comes from a place of love and genuine respect for your accomplishments and abilities; maybe just don't write or think anything about Nietzsche? Your choice of comments to extract & analysis of these comments suggests a borderline-spiritual commitment to misinterpreting his work. Just to pick out one of the more goofy and nonsensical passages;
"I think of Nietzscheans as the sort of people who would usually shout “Stop wallowing in your fetishes and instead achieve great things!” But if your natural tendency is to wallow in your fetishes, and you’re only trying to achieve great things because people are shouting at you, should a Nietzschean keep wallowing in the fetishes?
Without some external source of value, I don’t understand how you decide that one soul-written destiny (conquering Italy) is better than another (running off with the yoga instructor, or watching furry porn)."
Read the extract from Thus Spake Zarathustra from the comment by Stackdamage - the one with which you chose to finish the damn post! The Übermensch is a being capable of creating values, not a bean-counter obsessed with QALYs and other utilitarian superstitions. It's not a matter of deciding what is one's 'soul-written destiny', and still less about comparing values. It's about becoming something that can will new values; those values are justified as the creation of the being that can will those values into being. That said, 'justification' is not relevant to that kind of morality, which is why 'Stop wallowing in your fetishes and instead achieve great things!' is a nonsense suggestion for a 'Nietzschean' (whatever that means). And if that kind of morality seems abhorrent, nonsense, and/or alien to you, you are not alone! Many people grapple with whether the Übermensch is just a phantasmagorical delusion.
Again - with great respect - this post sucked; either make a genuine effort or stay in your lane?
Most of this discussion is conflating Nietzsches uberman - sometime who has “overcome” the desire to be defined by his relationship to others and sets their own goals and values that others probably can’t understand or appreciate, and narcissism- which is basically the opposite, where your entire self worth comes from successfully convincing others of a narrative about your greatness. Nietzsche and Rand admire people like Nikola Tesla or Nietzsche himself- people drawn to a high internal calling of greatness regardless of approval from others, and not really fitting into society at all. Scott seems confused about the difference between this and narcissists like Tate, Trump, and many popular rap artists whose only value is trying to convince others of their greatness- through banal metrics like wealth or political power, also handed to them by others as the socially accepted “default life goals.” Trying to see these two polar opposites as similar and both “master morality” makes no sense.
“I agree that an underappreciated problem is how to stigmatize something in the sense of warning against it, without stigmatizing it in the sense of making the people who unavoidably have it feel bad.”
This is a really useful distinction for all sorts of things - drugs, depression, weight (as mentioned above), lack of education, etc.
> But what if the core of this advice to [straight cics] unattached liberal women above 40 actually is *objectively* far more useful than not?
"To give a person one's opinion and correct his faults is an important thing. It is compassionate and comes first in matters of service. But the way of doing this is extremely difficult. To discover the good and bad points of a person is an easy thing, and to give an opinion concerning them is easy, too. For the most part, people think that they are being kind by saying the things that others find distasteful or difficult to say. But if it is not received well, they think that there is nothing more to be done. This is completely worthless. It is the same as bringing shame to a person by slandering him. It is nothing more than getting it off one's chest."
- Noted "Woketard" Yamamoto Tsunetomo, the guy who thought the 47 ronin didn't go far enough.
I'm baffled by your bafflement at my bafflement.
It's all nice and well to say "You must make your own values!", but on what basis? If it's on any rational basis whatsoever, sounds like you're not really making the values (you're just borrowing some other set of values, then reasoning about them). If it's completely random - you literally write down every value you can think of on pieces of paper, then pick one out of a hat - then that seems kind of pathetic. What's the middle road?
I think that Scott means that you don't literally conjure your values out of pure ether, other people likely influenced you in some way which led to their adoption, or at least to bringing them up for consideration. Which seems like a sort of thing that nobody would really disagree on, so I'm also baffled at this misunderstanding.
There's a middle ground though. Nietzsche's goal (which he accepts would be a very difficult thing to do) is for someone to look at the world, somehow cross the is/ought distinction, and find a set of values to live by which are... good in some way? I'm aware you'd need values to judge those new values by, but they don't have to be moral values in themselves (eg. slave morality is bad aesthetically because it seems servile, low status and it's hard to like people who instantiate them; master morality looks cool but is kind of ridiculous in the steam age and clearly can't survive without turning into slave morality). If coming up with a workable moral framework which was both "beautiful" and "true" was easy, Beyond Good and Evil would do that instead of gesturing at it.
I've always thought that the is/ought thing is a sham. Humans are creatures that happen to want things (the is part). They can use reasoning to decide the best way to get those things (the ought part). There's no mystical law that makes it obligatory to follow that way above and beyond that. Of course, it's also not to hard to guess why the sham is there. The reasoning part doesn't actually work that well in practice, so people generally do better in satisfying their wants instead by following available cultural heuristics in most ambiguous cases, which are also imbued with Mystical Significance for enhanced effect.
It holds as a distinction, but you can boil it down really trivially for any non-moral desiderata to "I should act to obtain things that I want." Nietzsche tries to do that for morals as well in the Genealogy, simplistically for master morality, through instrumental steps for slave morality. It's not remotely the way he'd frame it, but you could view the superman project as attempting to find either another grounding, or a better route out of that grounding.
Has anyone ever successfully changed their values? Is there anyone out there who'd be willing to say "I used to value kindness and compassion, but now I value courage and heroism", or vice versa? If so, how did they do it? Seems like we should be looking for concrete examples of this instead of reasoning about it in the abstract.
I'd expect that at least some are absorbed from one's culture.
I, personally, like to see closed-form solutions to mathematical problems. I suspect that at least part of that is from long-forgotten classes or discussions, with teachers or classmates commenting on a solution being elegant...
I also suspect that another part of them are from "subgoal stomp", a mistake where one starts trying to do X in order to do Y, but then loses track of the link, and starts valuing X in a vacuum.
The problem with this whole discourse is that it focuses on the errors people make rather than the correct way to view things. I think the Linear Diffusion of Sparse Lognormals concept I've been cooking up over the past few months is the core of it - in particular it answers where you get your own values from.
Values must be gotten from the outside, because some outside things have massive amounts of energy, and that's the only way to succeed. What's written on your soul is certain patterns that allow you to recognize certain external values.
Makes sense, but I recommend a longer and more impenetrable term for the concept, in order to really sell it.
If you want to sell it, you need to adapt it to the target audience you want to sell it *to*. Linear Diffusion of Sparse Lognormals is the thing to go with for people who are used to thinking in terms of birds-eye probabilistic models.
I see. Going for a niche audience. Sparse diffusion of the Linear Diffusion concept.
I really wish you had a translator. I find your writing to be interesting but incomprehensible to me, someone with low statistical training. And I fear that the only way to actually comprehend it would be for me to get much better at statistics, which, alas, probably isn't going to happen.
> Is a super-duper-man allowed to overturn those values? Can he get an even bigger tablet and write “ACTUALLY YOU SHOULD LIVE YOUR LIFE BASED ON CONFORMITY AND RESSENTIMENT?” Why not?
I'm hardly a Nietzsche expert, but I'm not sure it's so obvious that his answer here would be no. He certainly seems to find something admirable in Jesus, despite Christianity:
> The fate of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the “cross.” ... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only—it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause ; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?”- this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?”—this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one’s self in revolt against the establishedorder, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was understood at all!
Nietzsches analysis of slave morality is largely in terms of a psychological phenomenon. Asking why the übermensch cant introduce [values that suspiciously sound like slave morality] is like asking why you cant have a prior where gods existence is BusyBeaver(TREE(Grahams number)) times more likely than atheism: Sure, its not literally impossible that you got into this position without doing anything wrong, but lets be real. Whatever you might think of Jesus-when-taking-the-literary-person-seriously, you arent him. Atheists and christians agree.
"Yes, you have to choose your own values, not the herd’s values - but where do your own values come from?" My stab in the dark on this topic:
Ethics/Ideology/Morality/Values inherently come from other people, at least to some degree, because they're all about deciding how to interact with other people (and we spend our childhood being taught by others). So pick some values to be axiomatic, preferably ones as deep and broadly applicable as possible, integrate them into your "soul", *stick to them* as hard as you can, and make sure your other values follow from your axioms.
If you just passively collect values from the herd without actually considering them, you'll end up with contradictory nonsense that'll make you a blasé hypocrite, or eat you alive.
(Does this actually come from Nietzche? I haven't the slightest. But what's a comment section for, if not pontificating on possibly-adjacent topics?)
Depending on how general your values are, I'd be really worried about calcifying a particular set of values to stick to my entire life, seems really easy to choose wrong. I think EA has a good example of what to do: try to grok the highest level value like "maximize collective utility" but constanly vigorously introspect your beliefs about how to get there, such that different smart people will end up with different conclusions (animal welfare vs longtermism) at different points in their lives.
love the lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.
If you're not the religious type, you can drop half the rules.
If you're not the religious type, the second part is just something some dude said a couple thousand years ago, so it's not clear why it should have any weight.
People said a lot of things a couple thousand years ago. The fact that some handful of those things are *still* being said at least by a large number of people is an argument for their perceived applicability as a moral standard across varying circumstances.
It's a bit Ad Populum, granted, but so is morality.
FWIW, my reading of Nietzsche always chimed with naraburns's - i.e. about overcoming self not others.
Re this bit:
> I think of Nietzscheans as the sort of people who would usually shout “Stop wallowing in your fetishes and instead achieve great things!” But if your natural tendency is to wallow in your fetishes, and you’re only trying to achieve great things because people are shouting at you, should a Nietzschean keep wallowing in the fetishes?
My crude opinion is something about how you should definitely 'trust your gut/soul', but only if you're 'seeing clearly'. Which I appreciate is horrendously vague, but I struggle to think how I'd explain it to myself before I jiggled my brain and heart into a better shape, so... maybe a diet analogy will help...
It's not strange to hear someone claim that every body is hardwired to want cake. You can get really good at resisting eating cake, and become super fit and healthy despite your hardwired cake-eating desire, but that desire doesn't go away. And yet, no _body_ I think, really wants cake. If you were seeing clearly, you'd see that, and not need to resist eating cake. You simply wouldn't care.
I see the same with all 'mimetic desire' stuff - yes, 'wanting stuff because other people want it' is clearly a THING that affects goodness knows what majority of people. But also it doesn't have to be. You can just not care.
If someone really and truly, when seeing with Buddha-like clarity, WANTED to wallow in their fetishes, then sure, keep wallowing. I just seriously doubt (though of course cannot get anyway towards 'proving') that's a thing that applies to anyone.
Well articulated! I second this point. I'm a bit confused as to why Scott (and others) finds this idea confusing. It feels like there is some underlying disagreement/confusion that I can't quite identify.
To me, there is nothing contradictory about girl-power feminists and self proclaimed Nietzschean bros both acting out different flavours of self actualisation (and in doing so both being faithfully 'neitzshean').
Why does Scott find it so odd the idea of "doing what he actually wants" v.s. "what society/others want?" It appears that on some level he has so deeply internalised some set of social wants that he can't even conceive of disentangling them (while still being himself).
I want cake. I don't have any around right now, so I'll have to settle for a donut (which I believe nowadays are mostly cake donuts rather than yeast donuts).
When I am trying to be particularly rational (aka: force myself to do something I don't want to do in the moment) I try to pick the choice that I will wish I had made 5 years from now.
At the moment I would rather eat cake than do 20 pushups, but five years from now if I *keep making that decision* I am confident I will be happier to have done the pushups.
Reading someone describe Nietzsche in the context of eternal return or "do it again" reasonated with me, because your best life is probably one where at the end you were happy with the choices you made and their consequences, both within your life and under the threat of having to live in the world you've created.
Yeah but ... if you look at a life that did not include cake at any point, it seems obvious to me that the addition of cake would improve it. I can readily imagine somebody agreeing on their deathbed that surely, _some_ ice cream would have made their life better. Or even that they should have traded off some overweight for more icecream. So I don't follow this argument at all.
Yes, exercise for today's people. In the long history of humanity 99.99% of the time we were well exercised people carrying too large parasite loads, scraping under logs for each tidbit, gleefully munching on grubs, frogs, lizards, & mice ... teetering on the brink of starvation.
The notion of Eternal Return didn't sit well with me because I want my kids to do well. So I've spent my life investing a lot in that. The conscious choice for Eternal Return negates the value of that investment in the future, reducing it to a comforting illusion lacking any kind of reality.
I want my kids to do well even if i can't personally experience it.
Wanting a thing because someone else wants it likely has an evolutionary origin.
If I have tool A for digging, and you have tool B for digging. We watch each other dig, and see the benefits/detractions of these tools. We both see that tool B is obviously better for digging than tool A. Hence I want tool B because it appears to work better for this application.
This comment, about who gets ahead in bureaucracies:
> people with good social skills and balanced pro-social tendencies
This is wrong in a subtle way. They get rewarded for APPEARING pro-social on the surface. But, again, in the absence of an objective standard, all that means is “enforces collectively determined morality”. This is why all the giant corporations took the knee for George Floyd and have aggressively enforced whatever norms happen to be particular to highly-vocal-on-the-internet college educated Americans. I don’t think there’s anything “pro social” about encouraging people to hyperfixate on race and obsess over implicit bias there, while totally ignoring explicit bias about political or religious outgroups. There was nothing “pro social” about firing James Damone for pointing out true facts that make people uncomfortable. Yet that’s what most corporations have done because the HR departments have absolutely been enforcers of slave morality. No, I don’t think that’s a sign of long term strength- I think it only works by undermining the foundations of prosperity. It’s extremely anti-social, but propents of it consider it pro social because they, like everyone, live in a world made up or their own beliefs. The commenter is right that this sort of behavior - being socially skilled and riding the waves of whatever is popular - has worked really well for decades. But does this social setup really seem remotely sustainable to you? Or is our collective consciousness splitting in two because of how insane the zeitgeist is?
It is worth stating this 1,000 times in all caps and banner behind an airplane: Absent an objective standard it makes no sense to debate any of this.
Your point about Hitler was absolutely right! He DID think he was in the right. Absent a universal standard, your condemnation is “just your opinion,” man. There’s no way out of that recognition unless you believe there’s some objective standard.
An objective standard of “promotes longevity not just of the individual but of the concentric networks of increasingly larger social groups they are part of” is completely in line with the philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church, which is maybe worth taking seriously because they’ve been around for 2,000 years and there’s over a billion of them.
It’s also worth noting that Nietszche grew up in an atmosphere of German Lutherism, which evolved from Catholicism but many Catholic would say was a reduction in complexity to appeal to the masses without challenging their intellects.
Yes. Moral language only has content if there is an objective standard.
Without it, "that's wrong" has the same content as a baby's "wahhhh!" but with more flowery language.
HR departments are enforcers of slave morality because their job is to keep slaves in line. Not for the benefit of government bureaucracies beyond a box-ticking exercise, not in order to to achieve something objectively to moral and not to contribute to wider prosperity. They do it to make more money for the variable and skewed mixture of shareholders executives who control the company and benefit from its bottom line.
A typical firm's non C-suite employees are a mix of highly-fungible menials (eg. janitors, packers), highly-fungible literates (eg. payroll admins, team leaders), highly-to-moderately-fungible specialists (eg. machinists, engineers, rig operators) and, possibly, one or two non-fungible rare-skilled specialists (eg. seriously-gifted traders, salesmen for some types of business, freakishly skilled product designers). Let's call them categories 1-4 in that order.
The company wants category 1 to do whatever they're paid to do for either a minimum or subsistence wage. They're often subcontracted. HR basically doesn't exist for them beyond their line manager, and if one of them complains about another the manager will tell either one of them to knock it off, unless it's horrendous (in which case they'll be summarily fired). If anyone else complains about them, they'll be summarily fired. If one of them complains about anyone in a better category, they'll be ignored even if it's a social justice complaint, unless there's a risk of a PR hit. Ideally, category 1 are illegal immigrants who can't draw attention to themselves, but the less likeable parts of the poor are an acceptable substitute.
The company wants the same thing from category 2. However, category 2 will be doing jobs which require a lot more co-operation, and the company wants them to play nicely together and not cause trouble. How well they do their job doesn't matter as it's a task which is either completed or not completed, so avoiding friction is more important than skill. HR's main job is making sure that don't cause problems, either PR problems (instant firing), or inter-personal dramas. HR people themselves are in this category. The difference between category 1 and category 2 is that companies have to pretend for PR/regulatory/litigation reasons that category 2 people have rights and will be treated fairly, so can't just tell them to knock it off and fire them if it's bad. HR's main job is to perform the bureaucratic rituals required to manage category 2 people while still managing them like category 1 people.
Crucially, the major virtue of the category 2 person is obedience/conformity/agreeableness, and random ideological tests are a good way to bin people you don't want to keep on these grounds.
How much category 3 people can get away with depends on how replaceable they are, and the sorts of problems they're causing. Given they're not commodity-humans like category 1 and 2, they often get a bit more leeway, but they'll be fired if they cause PR or regulatory problems. James Damore was a fairly fungible member of category 3, he embarrassed Google, so he was fired (this was an absolute bank shot, as firing him for being a scummy autistic sexist also prevented his criticisms of people who actually matter at Google being taken seriously). It's also the category 3 people who get pandered to a bit more by HR, as often they can add more value if they're happy.
Category 4 people are immune to HR up to the point where the cost of the lawsuit/boycott that would otherwise result becomes greater than their value-over-replacement. If you ever get confused by living in a world where sometimes people get fired for commenting on their colleagues dress sense, but other times people can slap their PA's arse and the PA gets fired for complaining, this is why; it's cheaper to pay off the PA than lose the salesman (and potentially a chunk of his customer base) to a rival. Hence the same HR department that makes 2s and 3s go through diversity training will draft NDAs for the people they pay off for complaining about 4s racially abusing them. This isn't because HR cares about the category 4s though, it's because their job is to make the company money.
Obviously none of this will be in the HR policy (which is in the same category as marketing material), but it's how you get considered good at your job within HR. The company's official line will always be that they promote diversity, because that's part of their PR strategy and part of how they manage the 2s.
HR thus aren't engaging in slave morality at all. They're enforcing slave-appropriate behaviour onto slaves by lying to them, in service of the master morality goal of using other people to make money.
This is very interesting. It sounds right to me. But is this last part:
> HR thus aren't engaging in slave morality at all. They're enforcing slave-appropriate behaviour onto slaves by lying to them, in service of the master morality goal of using other people to make money.
Are those two _really_ different?
If elites didn’t like slave morality, they wouldn’t be encouraging it. Notice how differently they respond to protests against state poverty, vs say protests against “racism” or the right in general.
It seems to me that slave morality has the net effect of making excellently obedient slaves, and so the role of HR is to enforce slave morality for the very reason that it leads the slaves to keep on working.
> Are those two _really_ different?
Yes, of course. One keeps going when there's no net external incentive, the other doesn't.
I think that's a missing mood in Nietzsche (there's a gulf of hypocrisy and propaganda between what gets promulgated and what the people doing the promulgating actually do). But the idea of slave morality as a kind of social weapon used by slaves to restrain masters is backwards at least for these purposes.
Then why was there so much less of it prior to the CRA? https://www.richardhanania.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights It looks like it is about pleasing the government which created such rules.
The CRA doesn't seem to be a discontinuity in the growth of HR departments, and my guess is the driving force is the more general shift in the economy from category 1 to category 2 employees. Using civil rights categories to enforce discipline internally is a much later development.
This in turn ins skewed by the fact that prior to Meritor ('86) and the CRA '91, most of Hanania's complaints about civil rights law aren't in place.
What is Meritor '86?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritor_Savings_Bank_v._Vinson apparently redefined "sexual harassment in the workplace".
Thank you. That was always the sense I had but it's never been put so clearly. It's all about money in the end.
I think jumpingjacksplash hit the nail on the head with regard to inward-facing policies. Corporations are in the game to make money, by default you should assume that all their inward-facing policies exist to help them make money, and any veneer of social consciousness it just the most efficient way for them to do that.
But the same is also true of their outward-facing policies, which is the thing you seem to focus more on. I think picking examples of politically controversial events is a great way to get the wrong idea here. Partly this is because politics is the mind killer; you're quite convinced that those examples represent significantly anti-social choices, someone else out there is quite convinced that it would have been a majorly anti-social NOT to do those things, and one of the two of you is wrong in each case. But even more than this, these aren't great examples to start with because they're, y'know, at least somewhat interesting. The vast, vast majority of a large company's outward-facing policies (in the developed world) is going to be EXTREMELY banal tripe. Things like boilerplate statements about their commitment to fostering [social-value that's just trendy enough to look in-touch without actually being controversial]. Things like advertising cynically calculated to feel the most "authentic" to the communities that see them. And of course charity. Not charity-for-charity's sake, of course, but charity targeted at purchasing the most goodwill for the lowest cost. Kind of like the bizarro-world version of what EA's do, where the metric isn't lives or QALYs or utils, it's positive affect among your customers. The things you are citing are RARE exceptions to the everyday banality of corporate image-management and I guarantee all the decision-makers HATED having to actually take any sort of a position there. If they could have pandered to both sides of the George Floyd narrative they absolutely would have, but a video of a man getting murdered by police officers is about as inflammatory of a "you're against it or you're against us" flashpoint as a piece of media can possibly get. 70 years previous they might have cynically decided that coming out in "support of the police" was the best way to keep the most goodwill among their customers. But in 2020, the weakest, most euphemistic version of "murder is bad, actually" that would still communicate the message was really the only thing they could ever have settled on. Calling it "anit-social" or "pro-social" almost misses the mark: the social current was very much in motion without them: literally zero people in the U.S. were ever going to say "well, I was really upset by the George Floyd video, but CocaCola Tweeting out '#BackTheBlue' made me realize I was being unreasonable."
Beyond that, the ideological split of American politics likely has a lot to do with the way that sort of calculus plays out. When you have Group A that has a fairly firm ideological commitment to the belief that Corporations Have a God Given Right to Do Whatever They Damn Well Please (as long as they're pro-America) and Group B that includes a lot of people who think They're All Greedy Bastards who Need to Be Reigned In, plus a smaller but not insignificant group who believes they're Fundamentally Illegitimate and Shouldn't Exist at All, it's not hard to see why they'd put more effort into pleasing Group B. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. The marginal PR dollar (or unit of reputation) is much better spent assuaging to someone who feels vaguely guilty every time they buy your stuff, but hasn't *quite* let that push them through the hassle of finding alternatives than someone who just buys whatever they like and doesn't worry about the social implications. This is doubly true when Group B is the majority is nearly all the economic and cultural centres: you care about the opinions of people with money who might see your PR and buy your stuff, not people more generally. Of course, there's a niche for specifically pandering to those Group A people who's purchasing habits *are* strongly driven by ideology, and you can certainly find examples of companies exploiting it. But it's a fairly small niche.
I guess the tl;dr here is that labelling corporate PR efforts as EITHER "pro-social" or "anti-social" misses the mark. They're "pro-people-buying-our-shit" and that's all they'll ever be. If they just so happen to save or damn the world in the process, it will be entirely incidental.
> the Roman Catholic Church, which is maybe worth taking seriously because they’ve been around for 2,000 years
Point of order, I'm pretty sure the Roman Catholic Church wasn't present in its current form in 24 AD. That predates even the Pauline Epistles by a fair bit. I'm not saying the institution in question isn't worth taking seriously, but a similar level of generosity in definitions could credit the standard model of particle physics to Epicurus, three hundred years further back.
Hm, yes, one timeline I looked up had him recruiting Simon Peter in 27 AD, and that's probably the earliest date I'd use for the start of the Church (used in the collective sense).
When I just read the question "who in the Western World could conceivably actually follow master morality, seeing how slave morality has pervaded society for so long?", the answer that immediately came to my mind was "a follower of the occult traditions that have existed parallel to mainstream society for centuries".
I only absorbed a very rough outline of Aleister Crowley's philosophy (because I find his actual writing incomprehensible), but doesn't it boil down to "become mentally strong enough that you don't give a shit what anyone else thinks, then spend a lot of energy to figure out what you really want (in a written-on-the-soul, mystic destiny sense), then devote all your focus and energy on achieving it"? And isn't that really aligned with Nietzsche's Übermensch idea?
>"a follower of the occult traditions that have existed parallel to mainstream society for centuries".
Crowley and the rest of the Victorian occultists are not followers of a centuries old tradition that has existed parallel to mainstream society. The Hermetic Order started in the 1880s, and while they claim to have learned magic from the Cipher Manuscripts that are supposedly very old, there is not sufficient evidence that the Cipher Manuscripts are any older than 1842. Crowley himself claimed that his occult book, "The Book of the Law" was dictated to him by a spirit in 1909. European occultism in general does not date back to ancient times, but began in the 16th century.
It seems more likely to me that Crowley was just as influenced by the zeitgeist of his day as anyone, and a big part of that zeitgeist was Nietzsche. So it's not strange that his ideas seemed aligned with the Ubermensch.
I see your point. And sure, it's easier to patch something together from a bunch of books you read and things other people showed you and sell it as an unbroken lineage of mystical knowledge reaching back millenia, than it is to actually find and be part of an unbroken lineage of mystical knowledge. But the ideas that keep bubbling up and getting remixed are quite old - at least older than the 16th century. Alchemy and Jewish mysticism were around in the late Middle Ages, going back to older roots, and Gnosticism and Hermeticism date back to antiquity.
Now, Crowley was very eclectic, and it's not surprising if he picked up things from Nietzsche as well. But Nietzsche himself quotes Goethe (as cited in the comment by naraburns above), and Goethe famously was a Freemason. Other influential European branches of philosophy are influenced by "occult" lines of thought as well (it has been argued that Hegel was a Gnostic, and Hegel influenced Marx and the Fascists and pretty much everyone else), so it's not like textbook Christianity had an undisputed monopoly on morality among influential, free-thinking people.
That's also around the time that Eastern influences began to percolate into the West. Of course, much of that was also slave morality-tinged, but it still provided some novelty.
For me, the cool thing about the Eastern influences is that they don't particularly cleave at the joint of "slave" vs "master" morality. That's a specific clustering of ideas that Nietzsche diagnosed within the West's specifically fraught relationship with Christianity and with its pre-Christian past. Of course you can force fit a mold everywhere and analyze e.g Daoism in Nietzschean terms, but if you take a step back the much more interesting point is that it doesn't particularly fit the frame.
I think they're mostly people in later time periods opposed to what's going on then, so they pick up prior 'alternative' views and go with those.
We don't actually know what the Gnostics thought (or didn't until they found the Nag Hammadi texts)--we just have all the criticisms of them the early Christians who would later become the major churches made. The Hermetic texts were actually from the Hellenistic era--basically, woo from the immediately pre-Christian period--rather than being thousands of years old as people had claimed. So 'ancient' wisdom has been going on even in the ancient world!
Similarly, on a much smaller time gap, you now see alt-right people digging up Julius Evola and Carl Schmitt. It's not that these books were handed down to them by their grandparents, it's that they figure 'well, modern society sucks, who wrote against it?'
Crowley in particular was a rich kid raised in what we would call a fundamentalist sect and proceeded to rebel against it by declaring himself the Great Beast 666 of the Apocalypse and getting into sex magic.
Influential, free-thinking people did mess around with magic in the early modern period (when it wasn't really separate from science), but went in for the Enlightenment and science after that. Magic was more of a niche pursuit by people who liked mysticism but didn't like Christianity (or conventional Christianity in the case of the Golden Dawn).
But hey, if it works for you, keep on doing it. Do what thou wilt shalt be the whole of the law!
Last comment is the best, no regret for reading that post until the end.
After reading all of this, I've mostly become convinced that all this discussion of "Master Morality" and "Slave Morality" is uselessly trying to force the world to fit into one man's rhetorical categories rather than "carving reality at the joints". There are a lot of important distinctions between different moral views and I don't think that trying to fit things into these poorly drawn and labeled classes is a good way of approaching them.
Some interesting distinctions which have come up in some way or another in this discussion:
- Do you have a positive vision of the good that you are trying to pursue, or do you have only an idea of badness that you are trying to avoid, and define good merely as its opposite?
- Why do you value that which you call good? Merely because you happen to prefer it? Because you are a moral realist and think that it is The Good? Because everyone around you seems to think that it's good? Because you are afraid of not being seen to value it?
- What do you think of excellence as a good vis-a-vis moral goodness (e.g. beneficence, etc.)? That only excellence is good and morality is a sham? That they are the same sort of thing? That they are different but equally important? That excellence is an independent good, but subordinate to morality? That excellence is only instrumentally good and morality is the only terminal good? That excellence is not a positive good at all?
- What, exactly, are the contents of what you think is moral goodness? And what do you think constitutes excellence?
If you squint really hard you can sort of map these questions onto the "Master Morality" / "Slave Morality" thing, but I really doubt that this is a fruitful exercise. Instead of worrying about Nietzsche, try to figure out which distinctions actually matter for the point at hand and talk about those.
“all this discussion of "Master Morality" and "Slave Morality" is uselessly trying to force the world to fit into one man's rhetorical categories”
Yep. What a waste 😉
Love this work, thank you for writing it. It’s very wonderful. That one part about art though, being either just one great work or a lot of mediocre works…hmm…that part stopped me and I want to go over it with another brush, so to speak. Art (not just to me) is so very many things and sometimes I just like it, can’t explain why really…I’m sure we could trace all my influences over the years, for good or not-as-good, using neuroscience, but I don’t think we have those techniques yet…anyways, I just find myself yearning for that particular part in your paragraph there to be a little more inclusive (like there is something about art for me to defend, but perhaps there’s not) and not so this-or-that. Although it serves its purpose where it is and as it is, in your work here, and all that’s very clear; so I would perhaps have done better to just leave it alone. Not sure about that yet. Guess it’s just a trigger for me and at this point in my life I’m barely conscious of being at least somewhat responsible for my triggers.
All in all, a very thought-provoking thing you have written here, and thanks again. I will probably go back over it as there is much to gain from re-reading a stirring piece of this (very good) quality. I’m not a philosophy student or a teacher or a professor or anything like that, just a person who sometimes reads. And I suppose I do a fair amount of trying to “figure it all out,” but that usually leaves me going in endless loops.
Also I love Walliserops’s addendum. Hilarious!!!! Made me laugh and laugh. And also made me think. Well done! All of this…just richness galore here, from everyone. ♥️
A question to the Nietzsche scholars out there: Scott keeps joking about invading Poland or conquering Europe as good examples of Nietzschian master morality.
But while those are Nazi goals, and the Nazis loved what they thought they understood of Nietzsche, and his sister certainly loved their interest, I do not think Nietzsche ever proposed invasion or something like that as a virtue.
I remember his outspoken disdain for Germany, he himself was always a bookish guy prone to sickness, a lot less martian then everyone else in pre-WW1-Germany, and the idea of a whole state serving the will of one Führer is a direct example of slave morality for all but one, I would say.
I clearly see his "choose your virtue" as a purely personal thing, and one which is supposed to kill you = dein Untergang.
All comparison of Nietzschian philosophy and Nazi ideology looks like a really big stretch, more like a farce to me, based on what I know of Nietsche.
Am I wrong?
I'm joking more about Napoleon and Cesare Borgia, although I don't remember exactly what Nietzsche said about them and he might have approved only partially.
While Napoleon did invade Poland, Hitler is much more famous for doing so (primarily because it was his first major military campaign). I'm therefore not surprised that Nazis is the first thing people associate with the phrase "invading Poland". Invading *Germany* seems more Napoleonic. ("Invading Russia" could go either way)
Napoleon allied with the Poles for independence against Russia & the German states.
Yes, Bonaparte was not an invader of Poland - on the contrary. He is even thanked for his interference in the second verse in the national anthem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLhy22ETwLY
…Which happens to be the most adrenaline-pumping national anthem in the world. I keep it on repeat whenever I confront a too-fast-approaching deadline.
"Invading Russia" could go either way, but either way, it went the same way.
The last time Germany invaded Russia, Russia crumbled. That was 1914-1918.
My understanding of the situation matches yours. The only real connection between Naziism and Nietzscheism was a propaganda move by the Nazis with the willing help of the sister. And, as you point out, the apparent connection shouldn't survive thinking about the things Nietzsche said.
Edward Bernays, it would appear, is more important than any other philosopher, as his techniques are able to permanently alter the lesson any philosopher may try to impart, no matter how obviously it flies in the face of the philosopher's own words.
Nietzsche actually tried to serve in the military, first as cavalry in1867 ... 5 months in to service, serious chest injury while trying to mount a horse, extended medical leave. Then 1870, volunteered as a medical orderly, one month later contracted diphtheria and dysentery, which did permanent damage to his health and retired him from the service for good.
This does nothing to dispel the idea that he was a bookish guy who probably *shouldn't* have tried military service, but suggests he wasn't entirely at odds with the whole idea.
And of course ... "You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause."
> and the idea of a whole state serving the will of one Führer is a direct example of slave morality for all but one
Furthermore I'm sure if you'd asked the Führer he'd have said (and quite honestly believed) he was serving the will of the State. So I'm not sure that master morality applies even to him.
Nietzsche directly and unequivocally criticizes militarism and the antecedents of intense German nationalism he observed in the second half of the 19th century (especially in regards to his friendship with proto-Nazi Wagner). He even goes so far as to say that a strong military is not whatsoever sign or symbol of a great nation or people. He saw the 'great generals' and Hitlers of his time as small, vulgar, and brutish men with childish and resentful notions of national greatness. Indeed, Nietzsche is pretty much inarguably anti-nationalist and some scholars even consider him one of the earliest forefathers of the pan-european EU concept.
Not exactly a Nazi.
"But anyone can get a new tablet ($139.99 on Amazon) and write whatever they want on it. I could write “PAINT EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD GREEN”. Then I could spend my life trying to do that. I bet I would encounter lots of resistance (eg from my local HOA), and I could try to overcome that resistance. Would that be a life well-lived, because I chose the value?"
Chesterton (from Orthodoxy, which you may have been deliberately referencing) certainly would say so, so long as you don't change halfway through your life to purple:
"Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted a particular kind of world; say, a blue world. He would have no cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense) until all was blue. He could have heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. But if he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it. If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day, he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite colour every day, he would not get on at all. If, after reading a fresh philosopher, he started to paint everything red or yellow, his work would be thrown away: there would be nothing to show except a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner."
(Whether Chesterton's approval automatically means Nietzsche's disapproval, I leave as an exercise to the reader, because I know the former but not the latter.)
Another relevant bit from Orthodoxy looks at this worship of will for wills sake as silly for much the same reasons as Scott does:
"The worship of will is the negation of will. To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose. If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, "Will something," that is tantamount to saying, "I do not mind what you will," and that is tantamount to saying, "I have no will in the matter." You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will—will to anything. He only wants humanity to want something. But humanity does want something. It wants ordinary morality. He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything. But we have willed something. We have willed the law against which he rebels.
"All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses. If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon. It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense. For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with "Thou shalt not"; but it is surely obvious that "Thou shalt not" is only one of the necessary corollaries of "I will." "I will go to the Lord Mayor's Show, and thou shalt not stop me." Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles"; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless."
I love Chesterton’s gift of lucidity and his actual ideas are often valuable, but that last part is very silly. A can and does become B all the time. We don’t live in a static cosmos. Framing such events as the death or destruction of A … idk, I suppose it may occasionally be illuminating, but it seems more likely to risk really egregiously missing the point.
A triangle that has changed from being angular to being all in a round is not a triangle any more, it is a circle. That may be a change in the cosmos, but you can't keep calling it a triangle and making claims based on its triangularity.
Is that so terrible? If it’s a circle now, then why not just call it a circle, instead of insisting that no, no, it’s a really bad triangle? This is a circle. It was once a triangle, and then [events occurred], and now the situation is different than it was in the past.
I’m not trying to be patronizing here, and maybe the issue is that I’m making one sort of example in my mind and you’re making a different sort of example, but if so I think that requires eliciting and then some kind of qualification or limitation of the principle we’re arguing about.
I see it as a specific criticism of the idea of the Ubermench: of overcoming humanity. A triangle that "breaks out of it's three sides" is no longer a triangle. The alternative would be that a triangle should be the best kind of triangle it should be, and humans should be the best kind of humans they should be, so to speak. It's a bit like poetry, actually; modern poetry has "broken out" of the rules of meter and rhyme, but is it good poetry? Modern art has "broken out" of the rules of beauty, proportion, weight, etc, but is it good art? My daughter does not like to color within the lines; she scribbles madly over her coloring sheets, creating chaotic nests of color. She has "broken out" of the rules of coloring; but is it any good? It's really not. Now in her case, she is a little kid and doesn't know how to color within the lines. She would color within the lines if she was capable of it, and she will when she is. But how silly to think that by coloring outside the lines my daughter is doing something amazing and bold, by turning a coloring page into a mass of scribbles. The Olympics are going on right now: would a runner be doing something grand if he decided to just run across the middle of the track, beating everyone to the finish? The whole value and glory in winning is that you excel within the limits of the rules of the game; there's nothing glorious in knocking the board over and declaring yourself the winner of a new game without any rules.
I mean, those are perfect examples, because some modern art that’s broken out of various formalisms is awful, but some of it is wonderful. It’s not as if there’s some convenient heuristic where quality falls as innovation rises, any more than vice versa. Lumping Picasso or e e cummings together with your average kindergartener because both are rule non-followers really does seem to me to miss the point!
What point is it missing? Picasso was a terrible man who made terrible art, and Cummings killed poetry in the West. I can't lump them in with the average kindergartener because at least the average kindergartner can't do better, while they made bad art on purpose.
I see, and I’m afraid we’re not going to find common ground in this direction; perhaps another day.
> To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.
Surely, this is just the distinction between the potential and the actual? To follow Chesterton's strawman of Nietzsche would be to never do anything and live in a world of pure imagination, and that's clearly not what Nietzsche was talking about. It's OK to talk about the glorious feeling of flight without constantly mentioning gravity; we all know about gravity. Gravity is the context in which flight is meaningful. The constraints of reality are the context in which acts of will are meaningful.
"There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination..."
https://youtu.be/SVi3-PrQ0pY?si=MPZsOzSi4CKAHFos
"I hate the terms “pro life” or “life affirming” for this. Vitalism isn’t literally pro life in the sense of “cause there to be more life” - it neither recommends preserving your own life (by being safe) nor preserving others’ lives (by being altruistic)."
I think these terms are being used in the sense of "enjoying one's life to the fullest" and "saying yes to what life has to offer instead of hiding in your shell / being meek and humble and refusing to enjoy it", not in the abortion-politics sense of "pro-life". Cf. the section in your original essay equating slave morality with the morality of a corpse (very much the opposite of alive!).
Kriss's post motivates me to share a passage I love from Chesterton's Heretics:
"Now if any one wishes to find a really effective and comprehensible and permanent case for aristocracy well and sincerely stated, let him read, not the modern philosophical conservatives, not even Nietzsche, let him read the Bow Bells Novelettes. Of the case of Nietzsche I am confessedly more doubtful. Nietzsche and the Bow Bells Novelettes have both obviously the same fundamental character; they both worship the tall man with curling moustaches and herculean bodily power, and they both worship him in a manner which is somewhat feminine and hysterical. Even here, however, the Novelette easily maintains its philosophical superiority, because it does attribute to the strong man those virtues which do commonly belong to him, such virtues as laziness and kindliness and a rather reckless benevolence, and a great dislike of hurting the weak. Nietzsche, on the other hand, attributes to the strong man that scorn against weakness which only exists among invalids."
You got there before me with Chesterton on Nietzsche 😁
Some more extracts along this line. First, Chesterton on what he takes to be the deleterious effect of Nietzsche on George Bernard Shaw, from his biographical treatment of the same:
"This clearing off of his last critical plays we may classify as the first of the three facts which lead up to Man and Superman. The second of the three facts may be found, I think, in Shaw’s discovery of Nietzsche. This eloquent sophist has an influence upon Shaw and his school which it would require a separate book adequately to study. By descent Nietzsche was a Pole, and probably a Polish noble; and to say that he was a Polish noble is to say that he was a frail, fastidious, and entirely useless anarchist. He had a wonderful poetic wit; and is one of the best rhetoricians of the modern world. He had a remarkable power of saying things that master the reason for a moment by their gigantic unreasonableness; as, for instance, “Your life is intolerable without immortality; but why should not your life be intolerable?” His whole work is shot through with the pangs and fevers of his physical life, which was one of extreme bad health; and in early middle age his brilliant brain broke down into impotence and darkness. All that was true in his teaching was this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere achievement of dignity, beauty, or triumph is strictly to be called a good thing. I do not know if Nietzsche ever used the illustration; but it seems to me that all that is creditable or sound in Nietzsche could be stated in the derivation of one word, the word “valour.” Valour means valeur; it means a value; courage is itself a solid good; it is an ultimate virtue; valour is in itself valid. In so far as he maintained this Nietzsche was only taking part in that great Protestant game of see-saw which has been the amusement of northern Europe since the sixteenth century. Nietzsche imagined he was rebelling against ancient morality; as a matter of fact he was only rebelling against recent morality, against the half-baked impudence of the utilitarians and the materialists. He thought he was rebelling against Christianity; curiously enough he was rebelling solely against the special enemies of Christianity, against Herbert Spencer and Mr. Edward Clodd. Historic Christianity has always believed in the valour of St. Michael riding in front of the Church Militant; and in an ultimate and absolute pleasure, not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the wine of the blood of God.
There are indeed doctrines of Nietzsche that are not Christian, but then, by an entertaining coincidence, they are also not true. His hatred of pity is not Christian, but that was not his doctrine but his disease. Invalids are often hard on invalids. And there is another doctrine of his that is not Christianity, and also (by the same laughable accident) not common-sense; and it is a most pathetic circumstance that this was the one doctrine which caught the eye of Shaw and captured him. He was not influenced at all by the morbid attack on mercy. It would require more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw anything but a generous and compassionate man. But it is certainly a nuisance that the one Nietzsche doctrine which attracted him was not the one Nietzsche doctrine that is human and rectifying. Nietzsche might really have done some good if he had taught Bernard Shaw to draw the sword, to drink wine, or even to dance. But he only succeeded in putting into his head a new superstition, which bids fair to be the chief superstition of the dark ages which are possibly in front of us — I mean the superstition of what is called the Superman.
In one of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just as the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately produce something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of course, is sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the man, so why should we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful; sensible advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this, why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions have been many times asked of the Nietzscheites, and none of the Nietzscheites have even attempted to answer them.
The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen through this fallacy and verbiage had it not been that another important event about this time came to the help of Nietzsche and established the Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have called stepping-stones to Man and Superman, and it is very important. It is nothing less than the break-down of one of the three intellectual supports upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through all his confident career. At the beginning of this book I have described the three ultimate supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan, and the Progressive. They are the three legs of the tripod upon which the prophet sat to give the oracle; and one of them broke. Just about this time suddenly, by a mere shaft of illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to believe in progress altogether."
From "Orthodoxy":
"Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.
...At the beginning of this preliminary negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild reason, not by wild imagination. A man does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square inches. Now, one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing the pagan health of the world. They see that reason destroys; but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not in reason. The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it. I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will. It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism.
... Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it. He is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces. But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence. The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.
...This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism, and therefore in death. The sortie has failed. The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
...Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist. In our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough. The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant. The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist. There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments. There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about. They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness. They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout.
...This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either."
Chesterton is a journalist and precision is not always his strong suit, so it may be a mistake to try to shore up his thought (which I originally posted, at the top of the subthread, more because it was hilarious than because I thought it altogether accurate); and especially so because I have read absolutely no Nietzsche. But I suppose Chesterton *might* try to retort that Nietzsche is trying to argue to people stuck in a particular value system that they "should" move on to another value system, but has a hard time doing so, because he can't appeal to the values in that system (without undermining his own argument), and can't appeal to values outside it (as his audience doesn't share those); and fails to find a third option, and so appeals to metaphor, which is bad not in itself, but because in this case it fails to refer to something coherent?
As I say, I have no idea how fair that criticism is; but it seems to me to be an interesting point one could make about someone trying to undertake the project you describe Nietzsche as engaged in?
(Incidentally, I don't want to be too unkind to Chesterton: I think he makes a lot of startlingly good and original points with precision and lucidity. When I said "not always," I meant just that, not always.)
>But I suppose Chesterton *might* try to retort that Nietzsche is trying to argue to people stuck in a particular value system that they "should" move on to another value system, but has a hard time doing so
I'm not sure the premise here is accurate. I think Chesterton's interpretation of Nietzsche might be coloured by his Catholic background -- he assumes that anyone writing on how to live must be seeking converts. I think Nietzsche's purpose was less about trying to persuade people to change their values, and more about reaching out to find others who had *already* seen through (what Nietzsche regarded as) the false values of society.
As he says in "Ecce Homo":
"Meanwhile, I had slowly to look about me for my peers, for those who, out of strength, would proffer me a helping hand in my work of destruction. From that time onward, all my writings are so much bait: maybe I understand as much about fishing as most people? If nothing was caught, it was not I who was at fault. There were no fish to come and bite."
First, a technicality -- Chesterton was Anglican when he wrote the book, and had never been Catholic. But I don't think that affects your point.
Nevertheless, I don't take your point. In the passage you quote, Nietzsche sounds exactly like he's trying to convert people, and his discussion of why they don't accept his message reads almost like a summary of Jesus' parable of the sower.
> It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.
I actually think we could make a go of this! We just need a bunch of statistics on pig mass and volume, which shouldn't be too hard to dig up, and some sort of scale of Puritanism that we could rate Milton on; I think Scott might have already come up with something along those lines a decade ago?
Dammit, you beat me to it.
"It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat."
As a wise guy once said: "Challenge accepted."
To compare two seemingly unlike magnitudes, all you need is a common scale. Modern statistics provides one that you can apply to just about anything: the standard score, also known as the z-score, which is a measure of how extreme a data point is: more specifically, it's how many standard deviations the data point is from the population average. If you can calculate a z-score for the level of Milton's puritanicalness with respect to a relevant population and do the same for the fatness of a particular pig, it's entirely meaningful to compare the two and say that Milton was more unusually puritanical than the pig was unusually fat or vice versa.
>It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism.
This paragraph makes it pretty obvious that Chesterton didn't actually read Nietzsche. Whether Nietzsche "preached egoism" is a complicated question (I would say he didn't), but he definitely didn't preach that one shouldn't give things away, nor did he ever "call life a war without mercy". In fact generosity and mercy are two of the main traits which Nietzsche advises those seeking to bring the Superman to cultivate.
Nietzsche on giving, from "Thus Spoke Zarathustra":
"Verily I have found you out, my disciples: you strive, as I do, for the gift-giving virtue. [...] Insatiably your soul strives in treasures and gems, because your virtue is insatiable in wanting to give. You force all things to and into yourself that they may flow back out of your well as the gifts of your love. Verily, such a gift-giving love must approach all values as a robber; but whole and holy I call this selfishness."
And from "Beyond Good and Evil":
"He honors whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality equals self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of plenitude, of power, which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth *which would fain give and bestow*:—the noble man also helps the unfortunate, but not—or scarcely—out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the superabundance of power." -- "Beyond Good and Evil"
And from "Zarathustra" again, on mercy:
"And there is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your ultimate self-conquest. Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws. You shall strive after the virtue of the column: it grows more and more beautiful and gentle, but internally harder and more enduring, as it ascends."
“It would require more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw anything but a generous and compassionate man.” 😂😂😂 I would give ten thousand imaginary dollars right now for a good look at the model with which Chesterton has implicitly quantified mad Polish Professor energy units per increment of George Bernard Shaw worsification achieved
But he doesn't. Nietzsche regards scorn for the *strong* as an attribute of the *weak*, but he stresses that the reverse is not true, that the strong have no natural tendency towards ill will towards the weak.
"And when the lambs whisper among themselves, 'These eagles are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever is the opposite of an eagle must be good?', there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument - though the eagles will look somewhat quizzically and say, 'We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb.'"
I don't think "scorn" and "ill will" are synonymous. I see "scorn" as compatible with the attitude attributed to the eagles in your quotation.
Well that would make Chesterton's claim factually wrong, since there are countless examples in history of strong men who took precisely that sort of attitude towards the weak. Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Shaka Zulu, Vlad the Impaler etc. weren't invalids.
But did they have curling mustaches?
Anyway, yes, Chesterton definitely meant that his claim was 100% universally true and there had never been a cruel strong man. You have seen through him.
I can't find "Bow Bells Novelettes" on wikipedia. What was he referring to?
Weekly magazines that had serials running in them, often romance stories. These sorts of magazines lasted quite a long time, and had their last gasp in the "women's magazines", many of which are still going today but which have shifted emphasis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women%27s_magazines
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=bowbells
"Bow Bells was a British "magazine of general literature and art for family reading", founded and published by John Dicks.
Bow Bells began in 1862. New series began in 1864 and 1888. It absorbed Reynolds's Miscellany in 1869. It ran until 1897."
Sample issue here from 1874 which gets straight into the action on the very front page with chapter 31 of the (doubtless) thrilling tale "Who Will Save Her?"
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.d0003640901&seq=5
Inside, we have the start of another tale, "Which Conquers - Love or Money?"
Then there is chapter 23 of "The Gipsy Bride, or, The Lost Pearl", entitled "The Colonel and His Captive", extract quoted below:
"Colonel Clayton recognised Rose at once by the shapely head and graceful outline, even before he had brought her face round and caught one gleam of the beautiful, angry eyes.
“Let me go,” Rose said passionately, “you have no right to keep me here.”
“That is rather a poor plan,” answered the Colonel, with dangerous calmness, “considering you have held me in the den yonder for three nights and two days.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” she stammered out.
“Of course not,” he replied derisively. “You didn’t lure me to the spot where you knew your men were waiting to welcome me so cordially! Ah! by-the-bye, I may as well pay off one score before I begin to reckon up the other.”
And, ere Rose could resist, he had kissed her repeatedly on her shrinking lips.
“Now,” he added coolly, “we’ll consider the other matter, shall we? You can’t deny that you led me wilfully into danger’s way?”
“I had to do what I was told,” replied Rose, who had ceased to struggle vainly against his power, and was weeping for very anger and shame. “I am always chosen for all the disagreeable work.”
“Because your beauty makes you a successful decoy, Miss Rose.”
I think you get the general gist 😁
Just for context, Bow Bells Novelettes are cheap romance stories.
"Yes, you have to choose your own values, not the herd’s values - but where do your own values come from? He seems to write as if you’re born with a destiny written on your soul, and you become pathetic if you let the herd trick you into do something other than your soul-written destiny."
I find the idea that we can truly choose our own values a bit surprising. I was very convinced when I read Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory a while ago. His theory suggests that our moral judgments are derived from several psychological dimensions, such as care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity, whose importance, like everything else in humans, is probably both innate and shaped by culture.
In my opinion, we cannot really choose our moral values or a moral system; we can only select the values or system that best align with the foundations that we were born and raised in. For example, someone who emphasizes the care foundation will naturally resonate with EA's focus on reducing harm, while someone like Walt Bismarck who prioritizes loyalty and authority, will find EA's 'impersonal' calculations strange, especially when they conflict with his in-group loyalty.
Don't you think it's a layered thing? The foundations give us specific centers of moral interest, which culture can then both shape and tone up or down. So we get a certain facility for latching on to authority figure and feeling a duty to honor and follow them, but culture is the one telling who are the authority figures, and how their authority extends or is bounded.
Then, on top of that, because culture is not uniform, we're exposed to lots of different debates and variations on ideas, so we make our mind somewhere within that range. Maybe we reject our parents' authority figures and pick some other ones, or after deep reflection, adopt a morality of avoiding harm or injustice and decide to do our best to not care about anyone's authority.
The genetic, cultural, subcultural and invididual levels are not in contradiction, they build on each other!
I totally agree that it is layered.
I also think that we mostly don't choose our value. My impression is that EAs (for example) seem to think that they are EA, and that everyone should also be EAs, because this is the correct moral position, whereas I think that they are EA because it FEELS right to them, for genetic cultural or subcultural reasons.
Not sure if you're arguing for bandwagon effect influence, or making a hardcore determinist argument that choice doesn't exist at all.
In the first case, bandwagona can't explain your values entirely, because there are multiple bandwagons to join, and somehow the choice still gets made!
For the hardcore determinist, I can only say that there is a level at which I can say that I have the experience of choosing what to eat for dinner, and choosing one's values can't be ultimately different from that.
I know a lot of boomers who became conservatives because they were disillusioned with the failures of the Carter administration and then inspired by Reagan. That's not choosing their values, but it's also not innate or "shaped by culture" in the sense of having been gradually inculcated by exposure to the larger culture. It seems like a kind of spontaneous change in how much they valued loyalty and authority.
To the point of choosing our moral values, many (most? all?) Buddhist meditation traditions have a practice of metta aka loving-kindness meditation where the practitioner actively makes themselves more empathetic and kind by willing themselves to feel those emotions continually -- in other words, training themselves to value care more highly. Born-again Christians seem to be at least occasionally sincere, and 12-step programs do seem capable of transforming people as a result of "hitting rock-bottom" and then adopting a new value system that allows them to escape from their prior bad habits and I think those examples also demonstrate spontaneous changes to the relative importance of the moral foundations within individuals.
I think these examples do tend to emphasize that changing one's prioritization of the foundational values requires either a lot of hard work or significant external shock to one's worldview -- it definitely doesn't seem as simple as choosing one's values from a menu.
It seems to me that the distinction between values from within and values from others might collapse under closer inspection. Who is to say that me imitating others and taking on their values and according behaviors isn't also me living up to my inherent values of getting along with others and being seen positively by them?
Scott, I know you're not a podcast guy, but I think you'd be an excellent guest for Sam Harris.
"S2: Humility
This says: make yourself small and harmless. Have the goals of a corpse. Here is Ozy's discussion:
> Many people who struggle with excessive guilt subconsciously have goals that look like this: I don’t want to make anyone mad. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I want to take up less space. I want to need fewer things. I don’t want my body to have needs…"
This arises organically in either hierarchical societies dominated by M1 or egalitarian societies dominated by S1, or just in highly decentralized societies where you don’t know who you might accidentally piss off. M1 can foster S2 by demanding obeisance from others and punishing them for not doing so, while S1 can make people worried about sticking out and being taken (sometimes accurately, sometimes not) as a potential master. Especially in the first scenario, S2 can, like M1, derive from cope.
Although both can inspire dislike of the master class, the basic idea behind S1 is “it’s bad to be a slave,” while S2 says “it’s good to be a slave.” S2 is even more contradictory with M2, but contradiction exists in the human soul just fine. In the case of flunkies in power structures, M1 and S2 can be very compatible: deriving joy from being both a faithful servant and loyal instrument to one’s superiors, and from exercising power over everyone else. No armed body of men, I suspect, could function without an unhealthy helping of both."
Nobody understands the proper use of humility. It's not Uriah Heep, choking on his own resentment and envy and weaponising "I'm ever so humble and know my place", it's the Proud in Purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy going "Yes, when I was alive I was famous and feted, but a better came after me, and I'm *glad* about that for the sake of the art", and the Blessed in Heaven not wanting a 'better' or 'higher' place, since the bliss each experiences is as much as they have capacity for.
Purgatorio, Canto XI:
'Oh,' I said to him, 'are you not Oderisi,
the honor of Gubbio and of that art
which they in Paris call illumination?'
'Brother,' he said, 'the pages smile brighter
from the brush of Franco of Bologna.
The honor is all his now--and only mine in part.
'Indeed, I hardly would have been so courteous
while I still lived--an overwhelming need
to excel at any cost held fast my heart.
…'O vanity of human powers,
how briefly lasts the crowning green of glory,
unless an age of darkness follows!
'In painting Cimabue thought he held the field
but now it's Giotto has the cry,
so that the other's fame is dimmed.
'Thus has one Guido taken from the other
the glory of our tongue, and he, perhaps, is born
who will drive one and then the other from the nest.
'Worldly fame is nothing but a gust of wind,
first blowing from one quarter, then another,
changing name with every new direction.
'Will greater fame be yours if you put off
your flesh when it is old than had you died
with pappo and dindi still upon your lips
'after a thousand years have passed? To eternity,
that time is shorter than the blinking of an eye
is to one circling of the slowest-moving sphere.
'All Tuscany resounded with the name--
now barely whispered even in Siena--
of him who moves so slow in front of me.
'He was the ruler there when they put down
the insolence of Florence,
a city then as proud as now she is a whore.
'Your renown is but the hue of grass, which comes
and goes, and the same sun that makes it spring
green from the ground will wither it.'
And I to him: 'Your true words pierce my heart
with fit humility and ease a heavy swelling there.
But who is he of whom you spoke just now?'
'That,' he replied, 'is Provenzan Salvani,
and he is here because in his presumption
he sought to have all Siena in his grasp.
…And I said: 'If the spirit that puts off
repentance to the very edge of life
must stay below, before he comes up here,
'as long as he has lived--
unless he's helped by holy prayers--
how was his coming here allowed?'
'While he was living in his greatest glory,' he said,
'he willingly sat in the marketplace
of Siena, putting aside all shame,
'and there, to redeem his friend
from the torment he endured in Charles's prison,
he was reduced to trembling in every vein.
…It was that deed which brought him past those confines.'
The last part is correct, here:
"Moreover: just a little bit of S2 can keep you sane, since the natural default is to think very highly of yourself. A bit of humility helps avoid pointless dick-measuring contests, reminds us we might be wrong and that pobody’s nerfect."
Or in Lewis's "The Great Divorce" where the ghost of the artist is instructed about art in Heaven:
""How soon do you think I could begin painting?" it asked.
The Spirit broke into laughter. "Don't you see you'll never paint at all if that's what you're thinking about?" he said.
"What do you mean?" asked the Ghost.
"Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country."
"But that's just how a real artist is interested in the country."
"No. You're forgetting," said the Spirit. "That was not how you began. Light itself was your first
love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light."
"Oh, that's ages ago," said the Ghost. "One grows out of that. Of course, you haven't seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake."
"One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower-become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations."
"I don't think I'm much troubled in that way," said the Ghost stiffly.
"That's excellent," said the Spirit. "Not many of us had quite got over it when we first arrived. But if there is any of that inflammation left it will be cured when you come to the fountain."
"What fountain's that?"
"It is up there in the mountains," said the Spirit. "Very cold and clear, between two green hills. A
little like Lethe. When you have drunk of it you forget forever all proprietorship in your own
works. You enjoy them just as if they were someone else's: without pride and without modesty."
"That'll be grand," said the Ghost without enthusiasm.
"Well, come," said the Spirit: and for a few paces he supported the hobbling shadow forward to the East.
"Of course," said the Ghost, as if speaking to itself, "there'll always be interesting people to meet. . ."
"Everyone will be interesting."
"Oh-ah-yes, to be sure. I was thinking of people in our own line. Shall I meet Claude? Or Cezanne? Or-----."
"Sooner or later-if they're here."
"But don't you know?"
"Well, of course not. I've only been here a few years. All the chances are against my having run
across them . . . there are a good many of us, you know."
"But surely in the case of distinguished people, you'd hear?"
"But they aren't distinguished-no more than anyone else. Don't you understand? The Glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the light's the thing."
"Do you mean there are no famous men?"
"They are all famous. They are all known, remembered, recognised by the only Mind that can give a perfect judgment."
"Of, of course, in that sense . . ." said the Ghost.
"Don't stop," said the Spirit, making to lead him still forward.
"One must be content with one's reputation among posterity, then," said the Ghost.
"My friend," said the Spirit. "Don't you know?"
"Know what?"
"That you and I are already completely forgotten on the Earth?"
"Eh? What's that?" exclaimed the Ghost, disengaging its arm. "Do you mean those damned NeoRegionalists have won after all?"
"Lord love you, yes!" said the Spirit, once more shaking and shining with laughter. "You couldn't
get five pounds for any picture of mine or even of yours in Europe or America to-day. We're dead out of fashion."
"I must be off at once," said the Ghost. "Let me go! Damn it all, one has one's duty to the future of Art. I must go back to my friends. I must write an article. There must be a manifesto. We must start a periodical. We must have publicity. Let me go. This is beyond a joke!"
And without listening to the Spirit's reply, the spectre vanished"
"but where do your own values come from?"
That was exactly my complaint, it seems completely impossible to develop values purely by yourself, without any influence from others.
It's sort of like the arguments against free will. How is such a thing possible? If our decisions are caused by something else, like everything else in physics, then it's not free. If it's not caused at all, and just appears randomly, then it's not reallyl "will."
Still, plenty of philosophers defend free will. Its an ancient puzzle with no clear answer. Maybe there is a way to find true values for ourselves, even if the way there is not clear.
Actual question here, not trying to make a point just yet:
I have no particular knowledge of this realm of philosophy, but it seems as if comments and discussion on this have taken two distinct positions:
1. Slave morality is morality that one assembles by herd-following and norm-folllowing, while Master morality is assembled by dancing to the beat of one's own drum and ignoring the values/commands/pressures of others.
2. Slave morality necessarily encompasses belief set Y (Which includes altruism, charity, and a couple other things) and Master morality necessarily encompasses belief set X, (which has some other shit in it.)
#2 above seems necessarily consistent with #1 at any given time, but only as it concerns slave morality. It seems like all the descriptions of Master morality and how it's built I've seen here would definitionally demand it doesn't necessarly cleave to some slave-defined Set X, but it seems like both the article and a good deal of the comments on it seem to assume it does.
Why?
I'd modify #1 by substituting "assembled" for emerges, inasmuch as they're historical phenomena and there's no clear upper limit on their internal complexity and contingency. I'm agree with your broad description, but in the fashion of clearing out the noise and seeing the rough shape that remains.
The distinguishing feature that I think explains the difference, in Slave morality generally having proscriptions more than Master Mortality, is that the latter leaves more to the individual agent and so is naturally more chaotic, less apt to build a canon of agreed truths.
I think there's something interesting to this point in the contrast between Hellenic and Hebrew theology. The Hellenes understood the higher cosmos as a class of forces represented in warring gods, and a tale of the Gods might present a worthwhile lesson but in the fashion that comes down to us in fairy tales and fables. The Hebrews by contrast believed in a singular revealed truth and assembled their fragments of legend over time to glean it's totality.
Out of this Hellenes have more of a buffet to assemble their guiding theology while the Hebrews attempted to determine the singular truth. Mind you this isn't as a comment on Jews as somehow a slave morality people, and I recall even Nietzsche agreed the earlier pre slavery Jews were a noble people by his way of thinking, and didn't contrue the project of Judaism as somehow constitutionally slavish. But I do think it's interesting in sketching part of the genealogical background that might have informed the above distinction between Master and Slave morality.
After a brief hope when I first saw that there was a section for "Comments By People Named In The Post", I was really disappointed not to find comments by Cotton Mather, Ayn Rand, and Nietzsche himself. For the latter two, I would certainly think that mere *death* does not excuse such wanna be Ubermenschen from commenting—can't they overcome that? And as for Mather I presume he'd cosign "And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die", so he's not excused either.
> even though I think I like travel, whenever I actually travel I can never quite put my finger on the part where I’m having fun
"Having fun" is only one small dimension of value in your value system (and mine, coincidentally). Another is "learning something new and novel," as an example.
Maybe you're just mixed up about your motivations for wanting to travel. You think it should be to "have fun" and you never have it. I'm with you there. Yet I wouldn't turn down the opportunity to go physically touch the pyramids in Egypt, despite all the very-much-not-fun aspects such a journey would entail.
> I know nothing about Tate except that I’ve seen some bad tweets by him and heard he was involved in sex crimes. I looked at his Wikipedia page which seemed to agree
Wikipedia is extremely useful to learn, eg, which forms of rock are harder than other forms of rock.
However, Wikipedia is ideologically captured. You cannot trust it for any topic about the outgroup. Tate is very much the outgroup here. Do not trust Wikipedia to give you even remotely impartial information on him or any of his activities.
I guess, for completeness, I do need to say Tate is a scummy person and not someone I choose to spend much time watching or learning about. It's just a simple objective (and obvious in retrospect) fact. Wikipedia has a very clear ideological bent, as does Tate, and they are incompatible.
I have come to believe that on many topics, there is something like a psychological Heisenberg uncertainty relation: you can get an informed opinion or an impartial one, but never both at the same time.
The next best thing, IMO, is an opinion that is not impartial, but comes with lots of direct quotes and footnotes. The youtube channel "Common Sense Skeptic" has done a pretty thorough series on Andrew Tate, and I came away with the same impression: dude's a scumbag, and most likely a thoroughbred sociopath.
I can't put my finger on the part where I'm learning something interesting either.
One thing that I genuinely prefer about Rand, here, is that she doesn't resort to the notion of a final judgement. Nietzsche's eternal return sidesteps the Christian notion of God's judgement, by placing you as your own judge in a semi-Rawlsian sense. But there is no Final Judgement, neither divine nor mundane, and the telos and value of your life is not evaluated at its ending.
Rand was all about reality, and in reality, the exercise of power by a person truly skilled at being powerful looks more like an unending dance on the knife-edge between exerting that power, and maintaining the apparatus of power by addressing the needs and concerns of others. And there is no contradiction here. A prerequisite of being a powerful king is that the king must remain in power. A bad CEO is the CEO who gets fired. Optimal actions by the powerful are those that skillfully achieve the personal aims of the individual while maximizing the leader's popularity with the group. The best leader rides the Pareto tradeoff between achieving their personal goals and the needs of the group. And of course it has to be this way, there are no successful leaders who are doing Master Morality as described.
Some people are so good at this balancing of the exercise and maintenance of power that you don’t even realize they’re doing it, and their names probably don’t spring to mind even after you think about it for a while, because your brain categorizes them as “just good people” and not “Machiavellians pretending to be good people.” Successful Machiavellians do not mention Machiavelli in public! (Looking at you, Sam Altman.)
Since there is no final evaluative step where God judges you as having been a Good Master or a Good Slave and there is instead just life, the optimal path is one that will look both masterlike and slavelike depending on perspective, and mysteriously have resulted in getting what you wanted and achieving what you want to achieve personally — including achieving and securing the happiness of loved ones. It's a path that results in personal goal achievement while appearing virtuous from multiple moral frameworks.
Wow, much to read here. I thought I'd done a good browse of the comments before, but there's so much more here that I still want to ingest.
Some points in the narrow range that I feel confident about:
> If Nietzsche is really saying “ignore the strictures of society; pursue the destiny written upon your own soul”, how does that differ from Instagram “find yourself” therapy culture?
If it's "find yourself by going to therapy" then, to steal from TLP, that's using self-knowledge as a defense against action (and what N wants is action).
But if it's more like "be true to yourself, don't make yourself small, sleep with the yoga instructor, etc." then on the surface it does look like a typical masculine call-to-action. Some "masculinizing" advice is frankly appropriate for women to hear in an individualized world (where we each have to be masculine and feminine at different times). But in practice, pop-feminism isn't so pure. It takes on masculine language, but the advice is too often *directional*, prescribing a specific life path, which is not empowering but sort of "re-enslaving". It says be masculine (resist submission/enslavement) when it comes to traditional power structures (don't listen to your dad, don't let your boyfriend act possessive, don't be bound to expectations of niceness/hospitality) but be feminine (submissive, supportive) toward the universal/global/moloch/Whatever-This-Is power structure: meet all the expectations at your soulless corporate job; be a soldier in whatever culture war battle the NYT has drafted you into this week; Don't Question The Science. In practice it's just taking naturally-feminine people (mostly women but you get that that's not a strict category) and recruiting them to a new cause.
> The Last Psychiatrist (who I usually think of as Nietzschean) had a scathing article about people who sink too much of their identity into their sexual fetishes, as if they were central personality traits to be proud of, rather than shameful vices to be indulged in secret. But aren’t fetishes, in some sense, the purest and most soul-written preferences we have? Preferences that date back from before we can remember, preferences which go so deep they can affect our very autonomic nervous responses, preferences which we stick to even when everyone else hates and shames us for them?
Indeed TLP is against "identifying-with" anything other than action. That's one of the TLP points I most readily grasp. Don't identify as "creative", just create something. etc. What would it look like if someone is taking bold action in pursuit of their fetishes? Idk, TLP might even approve of that. Surely at least something interesting would happen...
But that's like your "paint everything green" example, and the comments you parse immediately after are further enhancing my confusion about what the ubermensch "writing his own values" would really look like. A rational understanding of your desires ("this is just evopsych, this one's just a trauma response, this one's just operant conditioning") makes it impossible to go all-in on that desire. And appropriately, TLP has much contempt for people who rationally understand their desires. I think he'd want us to learn how to notice and maybe even measure desire, *without explaining it*.
If we valued our desires by how strongly we feel them, instead of how hard they are to explain (which is what we do now, embracing the more "original" desires as decorations to our identity - this includes all contrarianism), then maybe we'd find 1 or 2 core ones, and just maybe we'd be able to all-in on them. Is that what makes an Ubermensch? Necessary, but probably not sufficient
"I think of Nietzscheans as the sort of people who would usually shout “Stop wallowing in your fetishes and instead achieve great things!” But if your natural tendency is to wallow in your fetishes, and you’re only trying to achieve great things because people are shouting at you, should a Nietzschean keep wallowing in the fetishes?"
This seems like a good place for an ego v id distinction. Following the herd and wallowing in fetishes both seem like base desires, all of which must be overcome to reach actual destiny. That sure seems like a cop-out, but if everyone destiny is just pursuing their version of the "good", their version is what's written on their soul, potentially obscured by their particular vices
> But aren’t fetishes, in some sense, the purest and most soul-written preferences we have?
Which leads me to the question, what about lower status people who, however, internalise the master morality and their place in it?
The modern example would be individuals with a submissive nature - whether kinky or not - who seek out "alpha" partners, and maybe old-school groupies making themselves available to rock stars.
However, I also mean, the peasants cheering on Achilles as he heads off to war, knowing they are unworthy to so much as polish his armour, but being OK with that.
I don't remember any cheering peasants in the Iliad...
But I seem to recall loyal "servants" in the Odyssey. Moreover, there's plenty of modern footage of crowds of commoners cheering the good and the great. People at the bottom do buy into hierarchies, maybe partly instinctively and maybe partly to validate themselves. It's not necessarily a good thing, but it's a human thing.
I think that goes to the Alastair Roberts comment on group identities. They're not thinking "yay sports team, the team is so much better than me!" They're thinking "yay team, our team is so much better than the other team!"
Hmm. That has to be a thing, also.
However, it relies on a sense of there being an opposition. How does it account for "loyal servants" and "cheering coronation attendees"?
> Finally he was indicted on one billion counts of sexual assault
>Does anyone find it a little weird to be accused of rape by a government, and not, say, a person who was raped?
That's how the criminal law works, man. Also, Tate has been civilly sued by alleged victims, according to Wikipedia
It depends on what you mean. I don't find Tate interesting enough to have even read the wikipedia page, but it's atypical (although by no means unheard of) to have proceedings for a criminal offence against a person that don't start with the victim reporting it, even if the proceedings are subsequently prosecuted by a government. I assume that victims did go to the Romanian police in the Tate case, but I don't actually know.
Usually what happens is that some person gets the police or other government entity involved, then the police investigate, which seems to be...exactly what happened in the Tate case insofar as I understand it.
I find Scott repeatedly bringing up "souls" to be odd. Does Nietzche talk about souls?
I've only commented on one other post (Whither Tartaria), and got dunked on in the Comments post for that one too, it's an honour!
I didn't mean to speak to "vitalism" nor attempt to claim it has a special claim on being "pro life", which I admit was a poor choice of words. I was only attempting to explain Nietzsche's meaning as I understand it, and I don't think he himself is exactly in the camp of people you're identifying as vitalist. I don't find them very sophisticated followers of Nietzsche if there's really followers at all.
What I intended to mean by "pro life" is an internal orientation towards growth and development of one's potential. This is not inconsistent with dying a glorious death, nor in being a friend and helping hand. I think there is something anti life in the converse, to be safe and miserly, never taking risks.
<3
Attending to and enforcing external asymmetry (I win, they lose), vs cultivating an internal symmetry, and damn the consequences. But the consequences are sometimes that the internal symmetry seems to then flow outward, creating beautiful and potentially stable things that far outlast their originators and potentially inspire people in the future to do the same. As opposed to the forced asymmetries that collapse in a single generation, generally.
Scott you should go ask Ozy about Andrew Tate, they've been reading his book. :P (Or just get/borrow the book, I guess.)
I read Nietzsche through the cyberticians, so that the will to power is really about the need of a system to engage with its feedback loops and goals. To feel positive feedback at achieving and overcoming. Ted K called this the power process. This I think engages with the subtlety of N's thinking much better than simply referring to power alone, which can flanderize itself as a term.
Scott almost had the problem solved talking about instrumental convergence in the land of Tank building maximalism. The achievement of goals, any arbitrary goals across time, necessarily involves a set of meta goals to cybernetic systems, and I think it's this that N was trying to get at later on.
We can endure any how with a sufficient why. The fun of philosophy is in the play of the why. There's a lot of wiggle room here and the right-wingers are generally correct that where you go with it largely reflects something biological about you.
The point I ultimately want to get to though is that AI ruins all of this. It ruins instrumental convergence because it ruins instrumentality itself. It obsoletes mankind--all life happens in the gap between goal and achievement. My claim is that Ted K jumped the gun, industrial society and it's meaninglessness is not fatal to meaning as such. We could overcome it. But AGI is. The only solution is to have faith it won't happen.
I encountered the cluster of ideas similarly. I like the concrete aspect of 'in the pursuit of your initial goals, you discover that there are relevant meta principles to the various subskills etc.' I'd add to this that in the subsequent pursuit of said meta principles, one finds a vast frontier of possibility opening up, as the meta principles are potentially relevant to a wider range of goals than you initially were aware of. If we are, as Quine put it 'homeostatic envelope extenders,' then this will be a rewarding discovery and a process that often makes available a more interesting goal than our original one.
All this talk of master and slave morality has reminded me of this. Hits from the 80s! Depeche Mode and "Master and Servant":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsvfofcIE1Q
The debate between Scott and Walt Bismarck inspired me to make this meme:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WAJvjD3iBTQKqwt8z/viliam-s-shortform?commentId=tcrSF4NqgbpZsQoPb
>Nietzsche keeps saying that the Superman is the one who can “write new values on new tablets”. But anyone can get a new tablet ($139.99 on Amazon) and write whatever they want on it. I could write “PAINT EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD GREEN”.
I'm pretty sure that's not what he meant, but instead something along the lines of becoming a leader of a movement that would transform society in such ways that "good things are good, actually" wouldn't be something that contrarians have to point out. Raising the sanity waterline, as it were. Now, what does that remind me of?
To put it another way (maybe), everyone wants the greatest good for the greatest number. But everyone except Naïve Utilitarians understands that this is not a goal that cannot be pursued directly (since unintended consequences dominate everything), you must instead pursue it by following heuristics.
The highest good, then, is to be the person who comes up with better moral heuristics, which we can call values. Jesus came up with the heuristic "love your neighbour as yourself" which isn't perfect but was probably an improvement over "kill and eat your neighbour, he's delicious". Marx came up with the heuristic "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" which sounded tempting but turned out to be terrible.
What we need is better moral heuristics. But coming up with better moral heuristics is hard -- firstly because new moral heuristics are usually kinda immoral by the standards of old moral heuristics, and secondly because most of the new moral heuristics that you might invent off the top of your head turn out to be dumb and terrible.
But even if we're not the Superman and we can't figure out what these ideal values would be, we can at least recognise that such a hole exists, and that our current moral values are not the ideal or final ones.
Yep, something like that. I also think that optimal values are a moving target, so talking about ideal or final ones doesn't make much sense. To use Scott's terms, whether you are in "thrive" or "survive" situation matters for how people should think and what they should do. So some kind of framework for timely updating values to keep up with changing circumstances appears desirable, but no such notion is even near the Overton window!
Anyone have the Last Psychiatrist article Scott mentioned on turning your fetishes into your identity? Couldn't find it from a few keyword searches on TLP's website.
I was also curious about this, and also couldn't find the article.
TLP deleted his blog.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/
Guess he undeleted his blog.
This (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/02/hes_just_not_that_into_anyone.html) sounds like it's the thing mentioned.
>Instead of building rocket trains to Mars out of magic green metal that cures cancer or whatever, it seems like the idealized girl-boss is just leading a few Zoom meetings and then going home to do yoga and meditate on how liberated she is, and possibly writing a pop anthem about the experience.
To paraphrase the famous comic book panel: They don't *want* to cure cancer, they want to do yoga and write pop anthems!
That seems like ubermensch morality as much as anything else we've seen presented here.
(https://www.jwz.org/images/2015/tumblr_niwt5knkdl1qfe9fvo1_1280.jpg)
> *This famous comic book panel* continues on our surprisingly-consistent theme of Nietzschean superman + furry porn.
Maybe online porn consumption is the one place left in our society that's anonymous and hidden enough that people will develop their true preferences without fearing society's judgements, and get training for their ubermensch muscles.
Interesting point! A lot of the comments talk about some version of either master or ubermensch people being true to themselves (authentic?), yet there has been very little talk of privacy, which I'd expect to be closely connected to that aim.
Two things:
First, one thing no one has talked about is that Nietzche is not the inventor of the "master/slave" dichotomy in philosophy. I don't know if Hegel is the first person either, but I do know that he was probably the most famous philosopher who Nietzche openly admitted to being influenced by to use it. The master-slave account in Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit is famously hard to unpack, and I won't pretend I'm sure I got it right, but if I understand it, it goes something like this:
Imagine if there were only people who thought of themselves as master in the universe. Then, whenever two of them competed over anything, one of them would have to die. Because submission isn't an option for a master-personality. So every conflict whether over status or resources, degenerates into a battle to the death. Fortunately, humanity is saved from being reduced down to a single human being by the existence of a whole other type of person, one who recognizes that actually, there's a second option, which is just to let the master-personality have whatever he wants and make do with what's left. This is the slave-personality, and while it might seem contemptible, it provides the useful role of insulating the master-type personality from perpetually seeking out conflict unto destruction. So in Hegel the master-slave relationship is sort of the first psychic and historical molecule of social order and allows for human progress. He charts the way it eventually breaks down and evolves into something else.
I don't know that Nietzche fucks with all of that, but he definitely read it, and I think it is helpful to explain his conception of master morality at least with respect to one question Scott was asking which is "where do Master values come from" which is that...they don't. Masters are pure id (to further mix influential German philosophical concepts). They want what they want without reflection, and therefore what they want can be reduced to pure "will to power," which is a drive for dominance, to reduce the other to a kneeling paste. "Power to do what?" is actually, paradoxically, not a question a master would think to ask. Think of it like the profit-motive in capitalism. The classic critique of unchecked capitalism isn't actually that its evil, its that its value neutral, whatever is going to increase its profits is the thing its going to do, no matter what.
"So the master is a slave to his own desire to be the master?" Well now you're doing Hegel again and I don't feel qualified to get into it. But essentially, I think Nietzche would agree that for all its power, master morality lacks any quality of introspection or value-determinism, which is why he doesn't outright endorse it, a thing I don't understand how people don't understand. He's critical of slave morality because its what produced the conditions he lived in and had contempt for, but he also recognized that slave morality catalyzed Catholicism, which at its height created all the cathedrals in Europe and which led Bach to compose the St. Matthew's Passion.
So if you want to really reduce Nietzche's project to an elevator pitch, he's trying to take all of the vitality and intensity of the masters and combine it with the introspection and moral truth-seeking instincts of slave morality to produce actual articulated values of human excellence beyond simple dominance seeking and answer the question "will to power to what?" for essentially the first time in history. THIS is what the Ubermensch will accomplish.
Second, yes of course this is fucking hard! Nietzsche symbolizes the process in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as the transformation from a camel to a lion to a child. The camel is your basic classical hermetic saint, he bears all worlds morality on his back through the desert in his quest to become the most holy person conceivable, and the process usually kills him.
If somehow the camel manages to lay his burden down, he becomes the lion, who is your more typical master-type asshole, he dominates , he destroys, but most importantly he rebels against the *system of morals he was just trying to uphold in his previous incarnation (which are now a dragon, because its a cool metaphor and not a stuffy philisophical treatise)/ So the lion isn't just a master, he's a proud heretic. Most people who make it to this stage will stall out here, because they never actually manage to beat the dragon, they live the rest of their lives opposing a series of values without really learning to define themselves by anything but their opposition to those values. Think of your average 4chan troll here, he's not a magnificent lion, but he shares with the lion the fact that if liberal norms went away he'd evaporate into nothingness overnight because he'd have no purpose to his existence anymore.
Finally if the lion defeats the dragon, he becomes the child, which the last stage, but also the first stage where anything new happens. The child gets to make up new values because he's destroyed the influences of everything else and thereby reverted to a state of pure make-believe. Has anyone ever gotten to this stage? This is where we finally get new values that created by societal norms or historical trauma or whatever. What will these look like? Fuck if I know. No one knows, that's the point, the child looks a lot to me like the awakened being in most forms of Buddhism, people may claim to have gotten there but have you ever met someone where you personally buy that? Creating new values is a profound, spiritually transformative process accomplished only at the highest individual level. It wouldn't surprise me if no one had ever actually done it, decide for yourself whether that makes it impossible.
BTW, does this Camel-Lion-Child transformation look superficially similar to the thesis/antithesis/synthesis Hegel's dialectic gets reduced to in intro to philosophy books? I don't think that's a coincidence. I don't think its accurate either, I think its more like "thesis-antithesis-???-profit!" but this is one of those cases where its helpful again to realize that Nietzche wasn't inventing every notion about how the soul evolves completely from scratch. Because his entire oeuvre is about how no one, at least in modern history, has ever actually done that and anyone who claims otherwise is selling you something.
> In theory, you should be neither right nor left, neither capitalist nor communist, neither pro-US nor pro-China, simply choosing The Good at every opportunity without reference to puny mortal concepts. In practice you have to use some kind of heuristic and join some kind of coalition, and so all these things become important again.
Strong disagree here. Nothing requires you to use the same heuristics others have already invented; earlier ones are not necessarily better. You can invent your own -- and in many cases, things have already been split in many independent ways, and rather than invent your own you can pick among *multiple* pre-existing ways of splitting things up, with no particular one behing "the" preexisting one!
Yes, for collective action problems you may have to throw your support behind one coalition or another, but that doesn't mean you have to *agree* with one or another, and also lots of what we're talking about here has nothing to do with collective action problems.
(...and I will continue to reiterate that I think you are making a mistake by taking seriously the idea of a left-right political spectrum, I think a tripolar model is better, and rather than try to explain it myself as I did in the past I can now just link to Nate Silver since he's talked about it here and he seems to largely agree with me: https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly )
A linear spectrum for politics is quite workable, but the left/right divide is largely useless. It's especially confusing as Nate points out because America was founded on very liberal European principles of the time, but in America today liberal is often used to describe movements away from the founding principles, ditto with conservatism but the inverse. In a two party system, any faction that doesn't end up under the umbrella of one party is taken in by the other. So The Left and The Right in America are a hodgepodge of different ideologies all wearing the same trenchcoat without regard to consistent principles.
A tripolar model like Nate proposes also has the issue that each pole is just an arbitrary ideology. You might point out the differences between socialism and conservatism and liberalism, but these all mean different things to different people. There is an extra dimension to map information onto but the quality is no different than with left vs right. It also has problems mapping ideologies that don't correspond to the arbitrary poles. Are communists super socialist (this kind of works), fascists super conservative (this works less well), anarchists super liberal (huh)?
Personally I find the most useful political spectrum to be a measurement of the degree of state power the average citizen is subject to. On one end there is no state power at all and everyone is free to do whatever they please, i.e. Anarchy. On the other end the state wields ultimate power over the lives of everyone, i.e. Tyranny. This spectrum also maps well with individual vs collective exercise of power. Systems which value strong individual rights will favor the anarchy side of the spectrum and collectivist systems will favor the tyranny side. Communism and fascism occupy basically the same spot over towards tyranny, which might throw people off. But both systems were strongly against individual rights and concentrated power in a tyrannical minority, while espousing collectivist solutions to societal problems. I think it's also instructive to look at the violent clashes of communism vs fascism in 20th century Europe not as inevitable polar opposites, but as two ideologies competing for the same political niche.
IIRC another classic is to split the anarchy-tyranny axis into two: economic and socio-cultural. The first has to do with how regulated the economy is, the second about how much variety of values and mores a society allows.
I'm not a big fan of that. Both economics and culture are tied into the anarchy-tyranny equation already. The more a state insists on robbing individuals to fund itself the more tyrannical it is. Economic freedom and private property are core components of individual rights and separating them onto another axis doesn't make sense. I'm more favorable to the cultural axis because norms and mores often exert pressure on individuals outside the window of the state, which adds useful data to the anarchy-tyranny spectrum. Although dominant cultural ideas are often made into law, which brings culture back into state power and makes the axis redundant.
> lots of what we're talking about here has nothing to do with collective action problems.
YES. I was wondering what was bothering me about the whole tone of this post and related ones. It looks like much of this community insists in looking at things almost exclusively from the point of view of collective action.
> I like this way of thinking about “who you are doesn’t matter, only what you do”, but I find the connection to 4chan kind of tenuous.
It's tenuous with the immediate context, but I think this is a primary part of the culture at 4chan. See Moot's comments on the advantage of anonymity[0]:
>>
RW: 4chan has become a springboard for many memes. Did you ever imagine that it would be so influential?
CP: No I didn’t imagine it. But I think that it makes sense [because] the two things that really define 4chan are its anonymity and the ephemerality of its content. So the anonymity I’ve advocated in the past for allowing people to share using a pseudonym or share anonymously allows you to share in a way that’s unencumbered by your real life identity and it enables kind of discourse that you don’t find kind of elsewhere on the web.
Also, the fact that the site basically deletes itself every few hours. The content doesn’t last very long in the site, once it kind of gets pushed off the last page it’s deleted. It created this environment where people could be very experimental and provocative. At the same time, if ideas didn’t resonate with the community, then they were lost; they just rolled off the site.
So on one hand it’s surprising that it all happened, but on the other hand, the design itself really lends itself to the production of memes. It’s the ideas that can spread.
>>
Moot, the founder, clearly thinks that the anonymity and self deleting nature of the site is what lets a meritocracy of ideas form on the site. You can argue that he's mistaken, or that his idea of quality is far from yours, but you cannot argue "anonymity enables a meritocracy of ideas and posts, rather than personalities" isn't an intentional part of the culture.
Insofar as what you do on the internet is make posts, I think it fits. Although obviously in the space of all things you can do, posting is pretty low on the impact factor.
[0] https://readwrite.com/4chan-moot-christopher-pool-qa/
I think 4chan's role within the broader Internet prevents it from being a true "meritocracy of ideas". It has the same problem that every other "alternative" social media network has, which is that when everyone but you is conducting witch hunts you end up with all the witches. The persistent prevalence of offensive and provocative posts on the site isn't due to them winning any sort of fair memetic competition, it's due to broader social dynamics providing a constant influx of new offensive and provocative posters.
With that said, I was also a regular on 4chan as a kid and I largely agree that its anonymous and ephemeral nature is a huge advantage. I was so terrified of making even the most minor mistakes that if I'd ever made some dumb post on Reddit and seen it accrue 200 downvotes I sincerely believe I would never have psychologically recovered. Meanwhile, if I made a similar mistake on 4chan I could just close the thread and never think about it again. It's hilarious to describe it this way, but it genuinely felt like a safe space for me when I needed one.
4chan gets a double whammy, it ends up with all the witches and all the worst assholes. The asshole part was already true 20 years ago, when there were much fewer witch hunts, because nobody likes having them around if they can help it. That's not to say that there were no advantages, but 4chan never was a pleasant place.
To be clear, I don't think it accomplished the goal either, you likely need some sort of accepted identity to carry on long term projects, and it's telling that cooperatives consistently scale worse than top down hierarchical companies. I just think that someone should not be accused of having a novel theory when they are essentially regurgitating standard tropes!
This is why I feel like Nietzsche is basically incoherent: In theory, the morality is 100% about aesthetics. It's about doing what seems nice to you. If you write on your tablet "I want to paint the whole world green" and then you do that because the world being green seems like a good thing to you... yeah, you got it. Other people will disagree and try to stop you. To them you aren't anything special, just a crazy dude. If you stop them from stopping you, then it doesn't matter what they think, you still win.
But if you had any reason for painting the world green, any reason at all, it doesn't count. If your parents like green, it doesn't count, you're enslaved to their expectations. If you are a member of a club that likes green, that doesn't count, you're in a herd. If in your youth your babysitter wore a green sweater and you saw her changing and now you have a fetish for green, that doesn't count because you are enslaved to your own psychosexual whims. The only thing that would count would be if you just spontaneously developed a love of the color green, independent of any influences, for no reason. Which doesn't happen.
That's why he says he can't do it himself, and doing so would require the emergence of a new order of being.
First section of the comments, and especially the first few posts made me reflect on the distinction between authenticity and greatness.
The clearest treatment I know so far of this is in Jungian thought (as reinterpreted by Hollis), where the individual preferences (down to dreams and fetishes) are meant to be transmuted into a life's work that can be sustained. In this, the key distinction is between self-centred life projects (be the best) and projects that are actually world-affirming and socially beneficial, where self is the instrument of such an effort versus its end. I think this goes someway towards explaining the distinction between instagram authenticity projects and actual greatness. I am unsure if it does explain why dreams of greatness may involve conquest and war - this may be the relic of that pesky master morality we are meant to overcome?
While I’m not a vitalist, my understanding - and what draws me to it - is that it is “pro life” in the sense of increasing depth or intensity of experience. Like the opposite of disassociation.
I agree this is what people mean, I just think "pro life" is a bad term for it. Just say "pro intensity of experience".
Leon Kass (one of my least favorite public intellectuals) uses "human flourishing" a lot. Perhaps it is a usable term here.
I'd advocate for pro-maxxing, which seems to be what the vitalist praxis is all about. If you want to be buff, lift weights until you get all the muscles. If you want to write poetry, write away, and even if you become the next McGonagall vitalists will still like you because you're being true to your heart's desire. You want to looksmaxx, but have an overbite or some other physical defect? Doesn't matter, you're part of the group as long as you aspire.
I think this kind of "as long as you're improving yourself, you're doing good" attitude is why many young people are drawn to the idea. Cruelty towards non-improvers is a general function of ingroup-outgroup dynamics instead of a core tenet of vitalism, so I agree that it and altruism are easy to reconcile.
(But isn't altruism just goodmaxxing? Kind of, but altruists like to run calculations about how to do the most good and end up in Africa licking mosquitoes off of random doorknobs instead of following their heart's desire. This is scary and confusing to vitalists, because maxxing is a very different thing from optimization. Their approach to altruism would be to run around doing whichever acts of kindness they feel like doing while yelling "GOOD FOR THE GOOD GOD").
Looksmaxxing with an overbite isn't even hard. Expensive maybe, painful probably, but if you have an overbite and it's fucking up your looks, what you should do to improve your looks is *obvious*, it's the most straightforward thing in the world to maxx in that scenario. Just fix your goddamn overbite!
Many Thanks!
>because you're being true to your heart's desire.
This sounds like it amounts to being enthusiastically authentic?
>because maxxing is a very different thing from optimization.
That sounds interesting, but confusing to me. If someone is pursuing a(n authentic to them) goal, how do maxxing and (reasonably accurate) optimization differ?
Yeah, enthusiastic pursuit of a goal seems to be the thing for vitalists. As for optimization and maxxing, I think the key distinction is that there's no such thing as an effective vitalist.
Altruists are initiated into the order with the sacred words: "Your heart's desire may be right, but the way you're pursuing it is dumb and wrong. Here's a set of equations to replace your instincts with. There's no god but probability, and Bayes is his servant and prophet." Vitalists don't like this, they like evolutionary heuristics that say things like "if you want to become strong, lift lots of weights and eat two lions every day". They'll listen to people who find better ways to lift weights and eat lions, but if you say "wait, you can become stronger by building a machine that stimulates your muscles in your sleep" you'll lose them, because they like the lift-and-lion part as much as the get-stronger part.
In other words, while altruists value the end goal and want to find the best path there (optimization), vitalists value both the goal and the path they want to take on the way (maxxing). Think about the responses to AI art: the EA-aligned response is to like it because it gives you the end-goal of decent art that you can tailor to your sense of beauty, while the vitalist response is to hate it because it destroys the path the artist takes. All this talk about strength and weakness is distraction, even groups that dislike the Tate-style hyper-masculine ideals have vitalist elements (see e.g. Tumblr and *their* take on AI art).
(Of course, nobody is 100% a maxxer or optimizer in practice. Sometimes you just throw your equations to the wind and go all-in on what seems like a good idea. Scott is a gold star rationalist, but even his post about donating his kidney starts with a cost-benefit analysis and ends with "sod Bayes, I'm going to do a nice thing and I'm going to like it. GOOD FOR THE GOOD GOD!").
This explains the lack of concrete policy proposals on the part of vitalists. A Dark Altruist will sit with you and explain in detail how she can cause the maximum amount of suffering to people with the wrong color. In contrast, a Dark Vitalist will say "I don't like wrong-color people because my evolutionary heuristics say they're bad and should suffer", but won't really act on it except in a fuzzy hand-wavey way, because her heuristics also tell her that wishing bad things on her outgroup is good enough and she should go eat some lions now.
Similarly, altruists are more prone to attacks-from-infinity than vitalists, because they're more concerned with that infinity while vitalists just want to affirm themselves and their way of living. "The most good" gets taken more seriously by altruists than "the most tanks" does by vitalists.
(Doesn't this reduce vitalism to stupid cavemen going unga bunga at each other? Kind of, but evolutionary heuristics are widely applicable, population-wide Schelling points that also make you happy when you follow them. Your alternative better be really good if you're going against that.)
Many Thanks!
>In other words, while altruists value the end goal and want to find the best path there (optimization), vitalists value both the goal and the path they want to take on the way (maxxing).
Good clarification! I can see both positives and negatives to this approach.
On the positive side, for most goals, one spends a lot more time on the path to the goal than enjoying the goal itself. The path better have rewards of its own.
On the negative side, if the path to a goal involves 27 intermediate dead ends, trying to cut that to 3 dead ends is probably worthwhile. Optimization shades into just thinking carefully about alternate tactics, which is generally useful.
edit: I should say, I'm not really contrasting vitalists with altruists here. I'm more nearly contrasting vitalists with a hypothetical "prudent man", independent of what the prudent man's goals are.
Isn't it more "pro-being-living-like" in opposition to "pro-being-corpse-like" in the Ozy sense?
This is certainly how I would understand it. If you can accept "corpse logic" surely "life logic" as its antonym isn't even a leap? V. confused by this confusion.
I fully agree with Scott's point contra the racist, but the math he did when making it was jarringly wrong. The calculations for additional expected rapes should be calculated using [African rapists of Europeans]/[Africans in Europe], not [African rapists of Europeans]/[Africans]. Honestly, the point seemed wrong/stupid enough on its face that I'm not really sure why Scott bothered including it, though.
Edit: I was wrong about the calculation
Disagree. EA is saving the lives of Africans in Africa, so the chance that they commit rapes in Europe is (chance that they go to Europe) * (chance that they rape after getting there).
It looks like the problem is caused by syntactic ambiguity. “go on to commit rape in Europe” read as P(rape|saved and allowed to immigrate to Europe) rather than P(rape in Europe|saved and allowed to live standard life). I see why you were calculating it as you did, it just addresses the immigration bit less directly than I thought.
Although I was also confused by the calculation, I think the actual problem with Scott's counterargument is that it's completely beside the main point of the argument. "We shouldn't help Africans because they don't deserve help" cannot in principle be rebutted by "but helping Africans helps Africans a lot". What is needed is an argument on the form "Africans deserve help because ..." (or a dismissal of desert).
Yes, I agree. It's an odd comment to choose to respond to, especially when the response isn't much of a direct refutation.
The way Naraburns puts it, the whole Nietzschean master and slave morality feels like a dressed up version of an almost comically simple and obvious concept - "do what works for you and make you happy, don't worry about what others think".
It's the plot of High School Musical.
Lot of stuff seems comically simple and obvious once it becomes widespread, but still took somebody a lot of hard work to invent. The process of that invention is worth studying, if we want it to continue adding beneficial features to the world which then become ubiquitous.
I haven't read much of Nietzsche, but from your criticism of "master-slave" morality (one of the interpretations of which - by naraburns - sounds a lot like what I call "inner-compassing"), it sounds like it's not that you disagree with that philosophical position as such, but more that you think it is actually kind of incoherent, in the sense that if one actually attempts to implement that morality, one couldn't do much better than merely signaling to other people that they were part of a special "following your own values" kind of tribe. I could be wrong about my interpretation here.
Actually, I realize now that it's not quite clear to me if you meant that naraburns' reading was incorrect or if that interpretation sounded right but Nietzsche himself was incoherent.
One thing to note as regards Nietzsche's illness is that people's standards as to what constitutes a debilitating illness has changed a lot. For example, I have an ancestor who was discharged from the army in the 19th c at age 37, due to liver disease and dysentery. On his discharge the record states that :
" he suffered much from Liver disease and dysentery and has been frequently under treatment in Hospital since his return to this Country in 1828 with frequent & harassing vomiting, flatulence and fever in the Stomach with general febrile symptoms, a great variety of treatment has been tried in his case but without permanent benefit" [...] " his general health of course is greatly impaired and no probability of its becoming such as to enable him to perform his military duties".
He nevertheless went on to father 10 children.
(of course, this record is also consistent with his being a malingerer who successfully fooled the military authorities)
As a 4chan native, I can confidently say that everything Walliserops says is bullshit.
Nietzsche makes no sense for the same reason that none of the existentialists make any sense. Scientific progress has moved civilization beyond the point where religion can be used to import concepts of intrinsic meaning, purpose or value for human life. Whether by accident or some transcendent quantum certitude, we simply ‘exist’.
Nietzsche can’t create intrinsic, objective meaning or purpose where there is none, as much as he wants to. His philosophy just reflects his personal aesthetics. He prefers to write about a strong man accomplishing notable deeds whose name rings through history rather than millions of faceless peasants building a cooperative society over centuries. So did Tennyson. So have a lot of authors. Not a lot of people went to bat for the faceless peasants before Smith.
As a sociological matter, it’s hard to envision a nation-state with 100 million cooperating inhabitants emerging from a culture embracing master morality. I expect this social evolutionary pressure is the reason slave morality has become largely universal. A Superman can’t compete with 100 million commoners.
Nietzsche misses the fact that a society that embraces master morality never makes it past the petty tyrant organizational level of Bronze Age Greece. Charlemagne and Napoleon were fundamentally different from Agamemnon and Achilles—channeling and embodying their underlying cultures, not free agents imposing their will on their own terms. People who have wielded the power to shape historical events are closer to zeitgeist than supermen. And no Superman is ever going to come from outside the system and co-opt it—he would be too alien and self-serving to garner acceptance.
Science does have the answer to ‘why?’ It’s just not one that any person is fundamentally capable of fully accepting and functioning with. So you just get efforts at broad philosophies that don’t hold together well and aren’t supported by two millennia of tradition.
>I could write “PAINT EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD GREEN”.
But you would find that you, personally, could not do this and then take action on it. Somehow, you just wouldn't find yourself jumping out of bed in the morning for it.
The path only appears wide from far away.
> even though I think I like travel, whenever I actually travel I can never quite put my finger on the part where I’m having fun
You're married! The nightmare is over, you (both) can stop pretending to like "travel"! (You can still go to places if you want to go to them, obviously.)
It's even better than that - now that I have kids, I can't travel even if I wanted to!
Not true. You're somewhat constrained, and it's more stressful, but it's possible, and I found showing my children different countries and cities a very satisfying experience (as did they).
"We're going to the park" is now the new, big, exciting, stressful expedition 😁
I'm only half way thru this amazing read, but you made me pause when you said this, and I'm stuck on it because it seems to ..go against a point you're trying to make and it's here, "What actions would I take if I wanted to embody the true pure master morality that nobody embodies?" Best, Sarah Mader (SM) @SarahMdre
The Cthulhu cult as Nietzschean?
"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy."
> Nietzsche keeps saying that the Superman is the one who can “write new values on new tablets”. But anyone can get a new tablet ($139.99 on Amazon) and write whatever they want on it. I could write “PAINT EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD GREEN”. Then I could spend my life trying to do that. I bet I would encounter lots of resistance (eg from my local HOA), and I could try to overcome that resistance. Would that be a life well-lived, because I chose the value?
The point is not just to have new values, but to have better values.
How can one value be better than another? Because we're not talking about terminal values, we're talking about instrumental values -- the terminal value remains something universally agreeable that a utilitarian would call "the greatest good for the greatest number", while the "values" of which we talk are the heuristics that people can actually follow, in the indirect service of that overall aim.
"Paint the whole world green" is a bad value in two ways: firstly because it doesn't get us closer to the utilitarian endpoint, and secondly because even if you write it on a tablet people aren't going to want to follow it.
What are the best values? I don't know, I'm not the Superman. But I can gesture vaguely in the direction that they might lie. Modern values are better than Bronze Age values but I can see that they have specific failure modes that the Bronze Age didn't have, and so maybe the best values lie in some sort of synthesis of Bronze Age hardness and modern softness.
I agree that all of this becomes simple and straightforward if you have terminal values, but I don't think this is what Nietzsche was suggesting.
I don't think it's at all simple or straightforward if there are terminal values, I just think it's meaningless if there aren't.
Or maybe "terminal values" is a bad term because it has too much baggage. But even Nietzsche (or any Nietzsche worth listening to) would have to agree that some values are better than other values, and that good things happen if people hold good values, which is why we should care whether or not people have good values.
What if you have terminal values, but the associated utility function is some nightmare of NP-hardness that's computationally intractable for predictive consequentialist decisions, yet relatively easy to apply in retrospect? Under such assumptions, the only way forward would be iterative development of more easily-computable approximations which are sufficiently accurate within the relevant domain, as calibrated by feedback from terminal-value-related regret.
Nietzchea is arguing for eugenics, basically. Rüdiger Safranski, the Übermensch represents a higher biological type reached through artificial selection and at the same time is also an ideal for anyone who is creative and strong enough to master the whole spectrum of human potential, good and "evil", to become an "artist-tyrant". In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche vehemently denied any idealistic, democratic or humanitarian interpretation of the Übermensch: "The word Übermensch [designates] a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to 'modern' men, 'good' men, Christians, and other nihilists [...] When I whispered into the ears of some people that they were better off looking for a Cesare Borgia than a Parsifal, they did not believe their ears."[13] Safranski argues that the combination of ruthless warrior pride and artistic brilliance that defined the Italian Renaissance embodied the sense of the Übermensch for Nietzsche. According to Safranski, Nietzsche intended the ultra-aristocratic figure of the Übermensch to serve
I just wanted to jump in and agree with that part about travel. Having done a big travel - moving to China - I now find that I really love having a little part of my adopted city that I know well, and where people know me.
I don't mind the odd holiday, but in general, I'm very happy right where I am. I keep reading Tyler Cowen's travelogues and thinking they sound amazing - but I don't think I'd want to do them myself.
> Nietzsche keeps saying that the Superman is the one who can “write new values on new tablets”. But anyone can get a new tablet ($139.99 on Amazon) and write whatever they want on it.
It's an iterative process. Write new laws => examine resultant https://www.xkcd.com/592/ regrets => back-propagate to figure out which details of which law lead to which regret => adjust in the regret-minimizing direction, possibly with occasional random resets or other algorithmic cleverness. Eventually, at least in principle, this leads to a life entirely without regrets; sufficient refinement and propagation of such a system could conceivably lead to everyone routinely accomplishing that.
Sorta like Coherent Extrapolated Volition, minus hope of delegating the tedious part to a computer.
"Writing new laws on new tablets" doesn't solve the problem in itself, that's just the minimum to start such a process. Master morality was the unstable alpha build, slave morality the open beta, so now we can't fix the bugs without a proper version-control system *to which new versions are being added.*
>Rap music in the US is the ultimate Nietzschean product: a world where what is good is just what gets one ahead: big cars, big houses, hot women, respect. These are the kids who love Andrew Tate, but his ideas are hobbling them in their efforts to get ahead.
This is abuse of the word Nietzschean. Nietzsche consistently mocks the English and Americans for their materialism and striving after comfort and fashion. Nothing could be less Nietzschean than caring about big houses and cars.
The kids you're talking about (American yuppy types) are not capable of engaging with Nietzsche. They would have to question/suspend too much of their materialistic dogma.
>I agree that rap is a weird master morality relic.
You're better than this, Scott. The only essential source to understand what Nietzsche means by "master morality" is On the Genealogy of Morality, which is like 200 pages of his clearest most focused writing.
If you read it, it's obvious that rap music can't be an example of master morality. For one thing, mastery is closely tied to being able to make promises and regulate oneself. Rap is (in large parts) about having low impulse control; carpe diem morals; and (over)reacting to one's environment.
We can make a weaker claim, that rap music is unusually sincere or life-affirming. That sounds reasonable to me, as I think most modern popular music is either totally sterile or depressing.
> Suppose I call Hitler bad, and Hitler counters “No, see, I have my own moral system based on the purity of the German race, and according to that system I’m doing the right thing”. This doesn’t change my “Hitler is bad” opinion at all. It’s naturally implied that I’m using the word “bad” to refer to something like “bad within my own moral system” or “bad within the moral system which I believe to be true”.
That's the hazard of using the word "morality" in the first place, when the slave/master dichotomy is only about the way you apply agency to existing frameworks. You can find moral/immoral examples for either, depending on the particular framework you live in. Same with the examples you pick - the piece would feel much different with Elon Musk instead of Andrew Tate, but neither is a worse instance of high-agency individual.
> MaxEd writes: I also have to object to "toxic slave morality of USSR". I know it's still popular to dunk on Soviet Russia, since it has failed in the end, but it seems like most people get their knowledge of Soviet culture from Cold War sources tinted with a heavy dose of propaganda. Or Ayn Rand herself. Soviet society always celebrated unique individuals - actors, scientists, sportsmen, no less than its Western counterpart. It just denied hyper-rewards for such individuals: top Soviet actors, for example, still lived in apartments (if a bit nicer than your ordinary worker), not in mansions behind high walls and security. Frankly, I can't say their acting was worse off for all that.
Actors being overpaid is a side-effect of the system, not a feature. The feature is putting power in the hands of those most able to use it, with property and intellectual rights. In USSR you could be the best businessman or scientist or inventor, but you still had to bow your head for the smallest scrape of resources to somebody in the bureaucracy. In capitalist systems you either own your business, or can take your idea to somebody else. This freedom is the essential difference between the two, actors making millions is just an accident.
> I'm a bit embarrassed to know so much about Tate, but here we are.
+1 to the "Tate is probably a lot less bad than he's made to be". I haven't followed him directly, but the checks I did after the whole controversy all came up pretty universally as empty hype. Plus it has a strong feel of echo chamber enforced with severe reputational risk for going against the current - and if you discount for _that_, you aren't actually left with anything substantial.
> I like this way of thinking about “who you are doesn’t matter, only what you do”, but I find the connection to 4chan kind of tenuous.
It's the definition of anonymous boards - you can't use somebody's identity to judge their posts.
> In USSR you could be the best .. or scientist or inventor, but you still had to bow your head for the smallest scrape of resources to somebody in the bureaucracy.
I’m not sure the west is any different today. And obviously the USSR had people with a master morality, they became big in the party.
I think Nietzsche's argument would be that they don't really have master morality. They get power by following orders, backstabbing, not rocking the boat and undermining people who do. They're pursuing power, but they're doing so within a behavioural framework which a Nietzschian master would... reject out of disgust? I'm not entirely sure on that last part, as being too proud to become involved in politics is hard to parse and google tells me Nietzsche never discussed Coriolanus in anything written down.
> They're pursuing power, but they're doing so within a behavioural framework which a Nietzschian master would... reject out of disgust
That would be true if all corporations except founders.
I own a company, and occasionally play in local politics (not US). In my own company I have dozens of ways of getting things done. I can do it myself, I can have a colleague do it, I can pay a service provider etc. In the last elections I didn't even manage to hire a marketing company to edit videos - everything needed to follow stupidly strict rules, either due to the law, internal party regulations or the current alliance conditions.
Glad to see I'm not the first to mention Girard in this thread.
"Masters" like things because they like things. Their own judgment is sufficient justification for their actions. "Slaves" like things because other people have told them what to like.
One of Girard's greatest contributions was so thoroughly dismantling this kind of nonsense. "Masters" like stuff by imitating other's desires (often in the form of envy), just like the "Slaves" do. They just fool themselves into thinking their desires come from within.
Yes, all desire has to have an origin somewhere. But isn't it equivocation to say that it's all copied in the same way and all equally (in)authentic?
For example, say I'm from an old aristocratic family who are all experts in horticulture and all snobbish about our fancy gardens. Say I inherit both this knowledge and the values (I imitate or get trained by my parents). Say some nouveau riche family with no interest in gardens moves into the area. After mixing socially for a few months, they copy and start being just as elitist about having fancy gardens. (But they're not experts, and keep making faux pas and so on...)
There's a sense in which all horticulture is fake and gay; all standards are only established by social convention; and no one can claim any master status.
There's also a sense in which horticulture exists as a body of knowledge and standards; there are masters of it (the old money family); there are imitators and fakes (the new money family).
In my example, it seems reasonable to me to say that the nouveau riche family is envious and inauthentic, but not the other one. How does Girard cope with this?
My Nietzschean-influenced big picture ethical outlook looks something like this. Let's see if I can lay this out in a way that's logically consistent.
My viewpoints on sentience are similar to IIT: I think geographical areas of space-time contain 'sentience' in proportion to their informational density. I view sentience as a fundamental, emergent, and axiomatic property of the universe.
I do not believe in a moral molecule. I view ethical systems as coordinative strategies. If I agree to coordinate with my neighbors, and my society, and to not engage in certain harms with either, I help create a status quo where everybody's life, including my own, is better off.
Because of this, I do not believe in ontological moral fault. I believe in moral fault as a social persuasion device: if we say that people are 'at fault' for their bad acts, I view this as a reasonably effective social meme that helps discourage antisocial behavior. If you threaten to slap a pejorative social label on someone if they do something, this discourages them from doing that thing, especially when the social label is strongly connotated with deep evolutionary fears like being socially rejected or excluded or outgrouped. However, I do not actually get internally mad or upset in any way when people 'wrong' me. I pretend like I get mad and upset when they do to play my part in the social fabric, but the reaction is entirely external and not internal.
I do not hold myself to any implicit or explicit moral obligations outside of things you could rationalize as part of my role to play in my society's social contract. I have prosocial feelings—I care about my friends and stuff like this—but, to the extent that I act on my prosocial feelings, it is as spontaneous and impulsive and emotional of a decision as acting on my impulses to snack on brownies at night is. Given how the coordinative mechanisms of large swaths of American society are breaking down, I have an increasingly loose purview of what the obligations I have to meet to play my role in my 'society's' social contract entail. With that being said, if I lived somewhere with robust, strong communities, these standards would rise.
I think most people find fulfillment by 'puzzle piecing' themselves, making themselves natural complements to wives, friends, family, etc. There is a part of me that finds this repulsive and repellent. I don't have a very good justification for why I feel this way. I guess I feel like this mode of fulfillment inherently devalues non-neurotypical and socially unconventional people, like me, and so I think it can be easy to invent lots of shoddy ex post facto reasons why building your life around building an identity that naturally complements people or social groups makes you stupid or 'a slave' or something.
Finally, I am a big believer in the type of ambitious, muscular, self-driven intellectuals that have been driven out of our institutions and been devalued culturally. Part of it has to do with mimetic value: I think it is difficult to become a genius if you do not give yourself permission to be a genius. I think that understanding the world helps you emotionally accept parts of it. Finally, tying back to Nietzschean philosophy and my sentience theory and stuff, I think that knowing more information about the universe literally makes you more sentient. Maybe the difference between deeply understanding quantum mechanics and having no understanding of it is worth two additive years of teenage mental maturity and sentience-growth or something. I think this type of sentience outgrowth makes people more agentic, in the same way you are more agentic when you are 22 versus 13.
In terms of what Nietzsche himself believed, from what I remember he was more of a moral relativist than a proponent of 'master morality' or 'slave morality.' A big component of his historical and anthropological account of morals was framing morals as a way of wielding and exercising social power. I think his arch-project was close to the Deleuzian idea of 'deterritorialization': separating yourself, as much as possible, from the constant inflow and outflow of social power around you, in order to wield your own individual autonomy as much as possible in your authorship of your life. The extent to which this is doable is questionable, and I think Nietzsche viewed it more as an ideal, or a limit, than a practical implementable idea.
Most Nietzsche-inspired contemporary conservatives, which are different from the ideas of Nietzsche himself, specifically probably oppose entering mental frames that sympathize with 'weak' people on deontological grounds.
>For example, if I buy a video game because I like it, I'm a "master." If I buy it because everyone else is buying it
I can't tell the difference because I think popular ones are often objectively the best: GTA V, Red Dead 2, Fallout 4. Objectively as in: lots of entertaining stuff in them, a big world with lots interesting things in it to enjoy. The story might suck but they are mostly about free roaming and finding interesting things and killing them. I mean objectively as "measure the number of interesting bits to interact with". Very much quantifiable.
I am not saying I like every popular thing, but everything I like is either popular or sooner or later ends up being popular, like the metal band The Hu. Likable things are likable, I don't think there is such a huge individual difference between people's tastes, there might be only a few broad categories of tastes. As you might have noticed from this list, my tastes revolve around The Cult Of The Badass, this is one popular category, exploring 143 different ways of people posing like a Conan. I think a lot of tastes can be summed up with a few such archetypes.
> I mean objectively as "measure the number of interesting bits to interact with". Very much quantifiable.
This becomes totally subjective as soon as you try to define interesting. The total parts the player interacts with isn't a useful quantifier, otherwise a game that makes you repeat the same task 10,000 times would be 10x as interesting as a game with 1,000 unique tasks. Someone could easily find a game with 500 compelling tasks far more interesting than a game with 1,000 mediocre tasks.
This loops back to your earlier point:
I can't tell the difference because I think popular ones are often objectively the best: GTA V, Red Dead 2, Fallout 4.
These games all fill a certain niche of open world, let the player run around and do random stuff. Personally I find this incredibly boring, games are only interesting to me if there is a plausible reason for me to be doing things in the game universe. Narrative and writing are more interesting than bits to interact with. From this view, GTA V is pretty good because it has interesting characters and story, Red Dead 2 is ok because it has coherent characters and story but it wasn't executed well, and Fallout 4 is garbage because it lacks either. Fallout: New Vegas on the other hand is quite good because it was developed by old school CRPG people who put a lot of emphasis on writing and world building.
I'm sure there are other divides, one that comes to mind is difficulty. Some people enjoy very difficult games that require optimizing strategy or using ironman, other people find this very frustrating and off-putting. You have to be careful assuming popular/big sales = interesting. A lot of video game studios today try to make their games appeal to as large an audience as possible to maximize sales. The resulting product is bland and inoffensive because it is intentionally not specialized for any one type of taste. It's like the difference between a hand crafted espresso and a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. The Dunkin coffee isn't more interesting or objectively better because way more people end up drinking it.
>They don't need to "lord it over" anyone; if you have to tell people "I'm better than you because I own a Bugatti," you are their slave
I strongly dislike the alpha/beta male theory, but I like the concept of the sigma, and this is very close. Indeed I dislike it probably because I am sigma, forming hierarchies outside work is stupid, and frankly I don't interact with people enough to find out whether they do, and thus whether the theory is correct or not, all I know is I am neither alpha nor beta.
Having said that, telling yourself you are sigma has an element of copium: one way to never lose competitions is to never engage in them, so it is possible that one is simply afraid of losing.
>the aesthetics of male beauty in action and not mere preening (the body builder vs the boxer)
That's a bit strange to say about a 4 times kick-boxing world champion.
>Also, why is everything that’s written on your own soul good? The Last Psychiatrist (who I usually think of as Nietzschean) had a scathing article about people who sink too much of their identity into their sexual fetishes, as if they were central personality traits to be proud of, rather than shameful vices to be indulged in secret.
That's because he does not understand them. A D/s relationship is not weird sex, it is a fucking *kingdom*. Even an S/M scene is much more like a cathartic psychodrama than sex. Kinbaku is art, it objectifies people into being pretty immobile statues. People are proud of it, because it is an extreme sport, a high risk liminal experience. The deep theme is often death and rebirth, especially in F/M, the hero who dies for his queen and is reborn after the scene. This is not sex, this is serious stuff.
When people just want to wank to boots or something, they are not that proud of that.
>it would be nice to stigmatize obesity enough that most people who can easily lose weight d
People are not stupid. They know it is unhealthy. They are simply addicted to food, or sugar. Bad decisions do not always come from bad beliefs, this is a core Rationalist mistake. It is simply that good decisions are often hard to make and stick to. It is hard to fight with ones dopamine reward system.
Notice I said "stigmatize" and not "inform". It's hard to fight with the dopamine system, but almost nobody jerks off in public. There's decent evidence that obesity is contagious across social networks, which I think of as involving a sort of social permission.
"
When I think about this philosophy, I ask questions like “Is art still valuable if nobody ever sees it?” Or “Is art still valuable if it’s an AI churning out 1 million great artworks per second in the Andromeda Galaxy?” Or “Is art still valuable if it’s a stalagmite in a cave that through freak coincidence formed into a beautiful statue, but literally nobody will ever see it, including a creator.” Or “is there more moral value in a world with a million pieces of pretty-good art, or one piece of great art”?
"
I think this is less about art that you might realize. For clarity, replace the artwork by a 10$ bill. If a 10$ bill has been lost and no one knows the location and no one will ever find it: does it still have value?
A possible answer is no: its only value comes from the ability to transact with it, and if no one can transact with it, then it does not have value. Now, what about the 10$ bill that my grandma hid under her pillow for her entire life for emergencies, but that she never used? If this was never used for transaction, was it also worthless (not valuable) during that time? Probably not, because it gave her a sense of security. So the value comes from some hypothetical scenario (she might need the money some time), even if the scenario never comes true.
But for the lost 10$ bill, a possible answer is also yes, that it still has value. Its value is 10$. In fact, this is the more simple answer, and you will get a *very* complicated world if you start arguing that all 10$ bills have different values depending on who currently holds it and which people know/remember the location of the bill. Perhaps a better answer is that there is something like a potential value of 10$ that all 10$ bills share, whether they are lost or not. But that there is a second level (getting transacted) that is also important, but if you call the second level "value" then you will end up confused.
For the naturally formed stalagmite statue, this has a lot of potential value: *if* people see it, they will be delighted. The *potential* value can depend on purely hypothetical scenarios, so it is irrelevant whether people ever discover the statue.
This could be an example of M2 morality:
Hard Luck Prayer, by Jud Ranger (2011)
Give me hardship and strain. Make it difficult to reach my goals, so that every
success has meaning, depth and value. Make my path unclear, so that I may learn to
practise discernment and good judgement. Make me tough to love, so that my
relationships are intimate, worthwhile and true. Make of me a shallow vessel, a
shadow of my true self, so that I may strive for betterment and wholeness. Bestow
upon me the burden of self, that I may come to treasure the human condition,
fleeting and precious moment. Relieve me not of anxiety, grief and intolerance,
envy or desire, as the result is comfort, complacency and inaction. Present to me at
every turn my human frailty and weakness, my resilience and skill, remind me that I
am made of love and fear. Only give to me these - grace, courage, honesty, dignity.
humility, respect, integrity and free will so that I may exercise a conscious and daily
choice in my attitude.
Scott made a strong link between slave morality and Christianity. Believing in some kind of absolute Good is a very Christian thing (not exclusively, I hasten to add). That was really what Jesus (as far as we can judge from the Gospels) was trying to tell us, he calls it "loving God", and makes quite specific what it means in practice: "what you have done for the least, you have done for me". However I don't think that he expected people to reduce themselves, not to have ambitions, become corpses, because, to help others, you must be strong yourself, and he tells parables about being awake, viligant, and about not burying your talents. On the other hand, he tells us to have faith in God (= Good) and not be too concerned with all things material. But that doesn't mean what Scott seems to say about saints voluntarily being some kind of slaves.
"But that doesn't mean what Scott seems to say about saints voluntarily being some kind of slaves."
Paging Saint Louis-Marie de Montfort 😁
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/slavery-of-love-12824
"Saint Louis Marie de Montfort asked his followers to acknowledge that they were slaves of the love of Jesus Christ through Mary, and even suggested that they wear small chains (TD 236-242) as an external sign of this condition. This might cause surprise and even offense today. In order to clear up any misunderstandings, we will first consider the Consecration of Holy Slavery in its historical context.
I. History
The Consecration of Holy Slavery was one of the main features of the spirituality of the French school, on which St. Louis Marie drew heavily. It was a cultural and spiritual legacy of Catholic Spain, where it was born in the sixteenth century. It referred to a biblical tradition and spread to a number of countries."
Marian devotion can get very far into the weeds.
We all know things went way out of hand!
Putting aside the very name of "Islam", isn't slavery the natural term for "nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done"?
Metaphysiocrat is on the spot with his classification. Excellence (what I called "mastery" in my comments) is completely different from dominance. It's also perfectly compatible with any kind of ethics you might want to follow.
So here I disagree with Scott in dismissing that you can "always split things into more subcategories". These things are completely different, and the problem is that people pattern-match them together into a badly defined notion of "master morality".
I've elsewhere commented about the conflation in English "master" of the concepts in Latin "magister" and "dominus".
People are always trying to bundle this stuff into package deals to force you to swallow something extra. "You can't have M2 without endorsing dominance hierarchies! You can't have S3 without Christianity/Islam! You can't have S1 without loving Stalin!"
"But aren’t fetishes, in some sense, the purest and most soul-written preferences we have? Preferences that date back from before we can remember, preferences which go so deep they can affect our very autonomic nervous responses, preferences which we stick to even when everyone else hates and shames us for them?"
So in the intro of Sadly Porn Teach posits that fetishes are programmed on to us by media, demographics, marketing, and society and are something that makes us sheeple and not unique (the obliteration of fantasy). He gives the example of pantyhose being sexy to the earlier generation and not to the current one. I don't think there's a genetic component to being attracted to pantyhose, but also if there is then the next generation should have maintained it.
Panty hose was all you got back then. As the song says. These days - anything goes.
Jukka Välimaa's take on how Rand viewed altruism seems right to me. I think the moral question there is something like "what do I owe to those around me?" And the positive characters in her books give those around them a mix of honest dealing and general benevolence without feeling an obligation to serve those around them.
There's a scene I remember from Atlas Shrugged (it's been many years since I reread it), in which Dagny is taking an extended vacation because she's gotten fed up trying to run her family's railroad against the ineptitude of her brother and the actively harmful role of most of the rest of her society. She is in some rural shop, and she points out to the shopkeeper that he's left the fresh produce in the sun and it's going to rot. The shopkeeper kind of looks at her blankly and doesn't care.
This is benevolence (she's pointing out a problem that really needs to be solved), but she's not making herself his slave or anything. And it seemed clear in context that if he'd needed a hand fixing the problem, she'd probably have helped, just out of a general benevolence and a desire to see things working properly. This isn't the behavior of a prudent predator or even of someone who is indifferent to the well-being of others.
There's a very common visible thing that happens a lot in the world, where someone seems to be kind-of turning other peoples' compassion into a weapon or a tool of manipulation. I've made myself pathetic and helpless, now you must take care of me. See how broken and sad I am, you must give me my way. And I think this was a lot of what Rand was reacting to.
If Bismarck is interested in spreading his views, it might help to make them less villainous. His linked article might have great, persuasive arguments, but when it starts off by punching down and making fat jokes about a poor (economically disadvantaged) black woman from ye olde days of open racism, the article is going to be written off by most people before they even make it a paragraph in.
To be fair, this is somewhat consistent with his ideology, but if it’s going to get recognition as anything other than a crackpot right wing theory, the ideology will need a much better spokesperson.
Ok, I’ve read a fair bit of his stuff here… I’m pretty sure it’s satire and I just bit the onion.
> I like this way of thinking about “who you are doesn’t matter, only what you do”, but I find the connection to 4chan kind of tenuous.
The original commenter is very much correct. It's not tenuous at all; this is part of the ethos of the site.
100%, just another example of lazy editorialising by Scott.
> But I find it hard to interpret in the context of Nietzsche so frequently bringing up Achilles and Cesare Borgia, both of whom went further than just liking the Star Wars movies for the right reasons.
I'm not an expert on Nietzsche, but doesn't "doing" grow out of "liking"? As the feller said, "After all, He Who Must Not Be Named did great things – terrible, yes, but great."
> If Nietzsche is really saying “ignore the strictures of society; pursue the destiny written upon your own soul”, how does that differ from Instagram “find yourself” therapy culture? Other than that Nietzsche expects your soul to say “conquer Europe” and Instagram expects it to say “ditch your boyfriend and date a yoga instructor”?
Just as doing should be congruent with liking, methods should be congruent with goals. The pop-culture images are of someone who achieves success but who engage in behaviors that would prevent that success - if the behaviors are long-lasting, the person would only have succeeded through luck, or if the behaviors are newer, the person has stagnated and will no longer succeed. In either case, they cannot serve as a guide for people to emulate, because they contain fast-growing seeds of failure.
> But if your natural tendency is to wallow in your fetishes, and you’re only trying to achieve great things because people are shouting at you, should a Nietzschean keep wallowing in the fetishes?
On a lower level, this can be applied to fetish play. A Nietzschean fetishist would presumably want to be the best fetishist they could be? They would be building better things, improving what they do, and so forth. They'd explore their own desires, and follow where that takes them, and perhaps find happy compromises with other people, but those compromises would be explicitly compromises, made from a spirit of self-knowledge. Whereas another type of fetishist might let themselves get swept along by others' desires, pretending to want what everyone else wants, lying to themselves about their true urges, molding themselves into the image of what those around them expect them to be, never daring to break consensus, becoming consumed by resentment and envy while they smile in public.
> Without some external source of value, I don’t understand how you decide that one soul-written destiny (conquering Italy) is better than another (running off with the yoga instructor, or watching furry porn).
Strictly speaking, I don't think an external source of value is needed (although it does make the process easier.) We can introspect about what we like, and slowly start the processes needed to get there. If we like the processes, if they work towards our goal, if we see the path ahead is clear, we can proceed. Maybe we come to realize that, while we have a desire to have conquered Italy, the actual process involved in conquest is not something we desire, and so maybe it's better to have another goal. Maybe we decided that all the mass murder was corrosive to our soul, and we should stop. Or maybe not.
Some varieties of Buddhism work like that. The basic idea is right up front - a cessation of suffering. If you think that's a goal you have, and look at practitioners (lay and monastic) and think that their sort of thing might get you there, then you can dip your toes in. Every step should move you closer to your goal, in ways that are fairly easy to see. The philosophy should explain how it works, and give you tools to analyze your progress. And at all times, what you do is entirely congruent with your goal.
But I don't think there's any magic cure for lying to ourselves, or for being unable to predict what we want and how we'll react. It's always possible to be wrong. And life isn't always neatly laid out: parenting seems to start with a set of incentives that don't have much to do with the primary multi-decade process.
> > Nietzsche insisted he was strong, but he was always very specific about what his strength was made of. ‘I always instinctively select the proper remedy when my spiritual or bodily health is low; whereas the decadent, as such, invariably chooses those remedies which are bad for him.’ Master morality is a remedy by and for the weak.
This seems dead on, and almost got me to subscribe to Sam Kriss. The processes we choose affect us, in both the process and the choosing. We can't control ends, we can't simply choose an end and have it materialize, all we can really do is choose a set of processes and work through them. Call back to "Instagram 'find yourself' therapy culture" - some of what it recommends might be useful, but some is pointless self-indulgence that makes us weaker, and makes us the sort of person who chooses things that make us weaker.
The follow up on "resentment" is almost too easy, and would call back all the way to Ayn Rand.
> > S1: Reverse Dominance Coalitions
Wouldn't it be sneaky to let people rationalize that they were in a Reverse Dominance Coalition, while instead they fed on the sweet nectar of resentment? No one ever has to say the "resentment" part out loud, at least not anyone worth listening to.
> S2: Humility
I feel like this is only presenting one aspect of "humility". There's other sides, too. The dignified precision of someone who performs well and accurately estimates their chances, and the abased groveling that we occasionally see at the business end of a cancel mob. With regards to the first one, lately I've been trying to demonstrate to some children that, when playing games, it's to their advantage to be a gracious winner and a gracious loser, rather than preening and crowing and pumping fists when fate tips slightly in their favor, and whining and moping whenever luck moves against them. It's tough, they're still young and their emotions can get beyond their control, but I think this will be useful to them, later in life. Unfortunately, there are some particularly bad examples in the Olympics. (And of course, there are times and places for both things, and many others.)
> > Nietzscheans don’t like this because they’re partisans of M1, which exalts victory in zero-sum games.
Well, if it really *is* a zero-sum game, isn't it appropriate to seek security? If not for you, then for all those who depend on you and would otherwise be at the mercy of a stranger? I'd say the root problem here, for those labeled as "Nietzscheans", is having tunnel vision and seeing things as zero-sum games when they don't have to be. To call back to another comment of mine, this is fetishizing an instrumental goal:
> Pressure can be an important tool, but the goal is flourishing. Nature provides one-size-fits-all pressure, and converts the failures into living food, but pressure designed by humans has the possibility of being intelligently tailored for optimal growth. (E.g., video games with a good skill progression, or weightlifting bro-science.) But this runs the risk of becoming unreal - we must always remember the true enemy is nature, or in other words, reality itself. (E.g., sports based on a real-world activity that have diverged so far that the skills involved have almost no transfer to the current interactions of the real-world activity itself.)
> Teleologically, the goal is winning; enjoying facing pressure is how we get good enough to win, but we shouldn't fetishize pressure or ignore its costs. That's a road to masturbatory excess and to wasting human lives.
Back to Scott:
> I hate the terms “pro life” or “life affirming” for this. Vitalism isn’t literally pro life in the sense of “cause there to be more life” - it neither recommends preserving your own life (by being safe) nor preserving others’ lives (by being altruistic). More often, it’s used to recommend the opposite of those things. So in what sense is it about “being pro life”. “Well, you’re only truly living insofar as you follow our philosophy”. Very convenient redefinition you have there.
It's not about quantity alone, but about quality too? QALYs seem like a place to start when coming up with this sort of measure. But to really bite the Vitalist bullet, you'd have to rate the life of, say, an Olympic athlete as being higher quality - and thus more valuable - than the life of a shut-in who spends 99% of time playing video games and sleeps. On an animal level, you'd have to rate the life of an indoor-outdoor cat who hunts and roams free and comes indoors at will, who runs the risk of being killed or maimed or diseased, over the life of an indoor-only cat who spends 18 years in comfort and boredom and neuroticism. And that's not getting into neutering and spaying.
> I think Orders - voluntary association groups that place strict demands on their members - are a surprisingly under-explored tool. But maybe their very rarity suggests there’s some reason they won’t work.
My gut says that Orders are the symbol of the thing, rather than the thing itself, and too easily corrupted into the service of other goals. After all, aren't there extant orders of knighthood? What happened to them? Sandor Clegane might have a few choice words.
> I think that saving 8,000 lives but causing one rape is better than killing 8,000 people and preventing one rape. This is the only deal on offer.
Well, there's always Jesus' way out, which was to save the people by volunteering for the rape. (OK, that analogy doesn't quite work...)
> > Spend any time at all with underprivileged boys in the US or boys from macho cultures in unstable developing countries and you will see that they are the true inheritors of Achilles' and "master" morality. Rap music in the US is the ultimate Nietzschean product:
> > Then go work at a reasonably functional corporation or government agency and see who gets ahead and gets promoted.
This sounds like a missing axis. NE is the Nietzschean master, NW is aggro youth, SE is the corporate drone, and SW is the Nietzschean slave. Maybe N is willingness to transgress social norms in pursuit of one's goals, and E is self-discipline in pursuit of one's goals?
> > But what if the core of this advice to [straight cics] unattached liberal women above 40 actually is *objectively* far more useful than not?
One of the few bits of wisdom I've figured out is, sometimes there's good advice that someone needs to hear, but it won't work if it comes from me. Maybe there's a pre-existing relationship that gets in the way, maybe I don't know how to phrase it right, whatever. Sometimes it can even be actively harmful to tell someone good advice, if you know they'll reject it because of how you presented it. :-(
The keys to understanding this are that Master Morality != Superman, and Slave Morality/Master Morality is not a dichotomy.
It's a tech tree: Master Morality->Slave Morality (we are here)->Superman.
Geneology of Morals describes the pre-slave morality rulers as "blonde beasts" raping and pillaging their way across Europe. Nietzche admires their lust for life and their untempered view of the world: they did what they wanted all the time, and what they wanted to do was fight, fuck, and have big feasts. But they are almost pre-moral--their "good" was just what they wanted to do, and they did not lead examined lives.
At some point all of the ordinary people got tired of being raped and pillaged all the time. Nietzsche says this is a result of them being jealous that they themselves couldn't rape and pillage all the time (ressentimant). In any case, they band together and create Slave Morality, which is for the masses of people that don't have the emotional or physical inclination to be warlords. Slave Morality beats Master Morality because there's way more peasants than warlords, and their memes are better ("This guy that is constantly ruining your life sucks, actually. Join my religion and we'll all be nice to each other.") This is bad, in Neitzsche's mind, because it encourages the type of corpse-like thinking that Ozy mentions.
But he explicitly says we can't return to the time of the "blonde beasts." Their time has passed, moral technology has advanced too far. Hence the Superman, who transcends Slave Morality. The Superman takes the good parts of the old-style Master Morality, but updates them. He loves strength in all forms (virtue ethics), but has the capacity to reason and think in a way the "blonde beasts" did not. He gets to *choose* the virtues he thinks are important in a way neither the old-style "slaves" or "masters" did and live those out. This can be in whatever way suits him. Humility and Charity can be part of the Superman's ethos if practicing them brings him joy and he does it of his own volition, but so can Wealth and Power.
It's a meta-moral approach to life that encourages people to find and define their own moral framework that allows them to engage with the world and fully express their desires and talents, rather than a prescriptive morality system.
Only Alastair Roberts brings up the topic of sports, which has proven a pretty good arena for our impulses toward master morality to play out without too many people getting killed in war.
Did Nietzsche take any interest in sports (which were rapidly evolving when he wrote). The Ancient Greeks certainly did.
Great post, but it has little to do with Nietzsche or his ideas. It seems to be based on other peoples rough ideas of what Nietzsche might have meant?
If you're interested about what greatness looks like and how to become great, the answer is illustrated well in Zarathrustra.
>I also don’t really get where Nietzsche thinks masterful values come from
Have you ever had a manic episode, or taken a strong stimulant? You should feel yourself agreeing more with Zarathustra. Self-improvement will naturally bring you closer to agreeing with Nietzsche. Confidence in yourself will bring you closer to Nietzsche. I think the changes in personality associated with self-improvement and maturity brings you closer to Nietzsches aesthetics.
How do you gain this strength, this improvement, this confidence? Through struggle, challenging yourself, overcoming yourself.
Curiousity, for instance, brings you to learn. Some great people have such strong creative drives that they're almost consumed by them. They work tirelessly, they become obsessed. If these people aren't killed by their drives, then the only alternative is greatness.
Throw existential problems at yourself, be strict with yourself, hold yourself to high standards, read the words of people who disagree with you. This will either destroy you, or it will strengthen you, the latter is greatness. Your website has a section called "Mistakes", where you admit to your own wrongdoings. That's based, it's admirable, it's heroic.
I tend towards the communities I can find with the most intelligent people - and then I taunt them and tell them they're wrong. This is an almost self-destructive tendency of mine, and if I don't succeed in destroying myself, then I can only grow stronger. And I enjoy this flaw of mine, it's anti-decadent, it keeps me healthy. I'm a weak person (as I'm only human), with a very strong and very arrogant force inside me which tries to destroy me and which thus forces me to improve myself and grow better. This is the transcendental function of my humanity.
I'd put it this way "Humanity is anti-fragile, and great people have an impulse to fight themselves and improve". They go through Nietzsches "Three Metamorphoses": The spirit, which becomes the camel, which becomes the lion, which becomes the child. The hierarchy is something like: Rabble -> Struggler -> Master -> Creator
"Human being is something that must be overcome, and therefore you should love your virtues – for of them you will perish"
"Spirit is life that itself cuts into life; by its own agony it increases its own knowledge – did you know that?
And the happiness of spirit is this: to be anointed and consecrated by tears to serve as a sacrificial animal – did you know that?
And the blindness of the blind, and his seeking and probing shall yet testify to the power of the sun into which he gazed – did you know that?"
"higher, stronger, more victorious, more cheerful ones, those who are built right-angled in body and soul: laughing lions must come!"
"The higher its kind, the more seldom a thing succeeds. You higher men here, haven’t all of you – failed? Be of good cheer, what does it matter! How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh! And no wonder that you failed and half succeeded, you half-broken ones! Does humanity’s future not push and shove within you?"
"Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath me, now a god dances through me."
And this secret life itself spoke to me: “Behold,” it said, “I am that *which must always overcome itself.*“
I agree, Scott is completely missing what Nietzsches goals are, and confusing it with narcissism, which is actually its polar opposite. I think the Three Metamorphosis is really key to explaining what Nietzsche was actually trying to say. At the risk of oversimplifying Nietzsche rejects both Scotts ideas of slave and master morality as part of the first two metamorphoses, but “the child” in the 3rd is really unconcerned with what anyone else thinks or values, and would see being the “master” of others or winning their approval as ridiculous- no more useful than being admired by ants.
This comes from a place of love and genuine respect for your accomplishments and abilities; maybe just don't write or think anything about Nietzsche? Your choice of comments to extract & analysis of these comments suggests a borderline-spiritual commitment to misinterpreting his work. Just to pick out one of the more goofy and nonsensical passages;
"I think of Nietzscheans as the sort of people who would usually shout “Stop wallowing in your fetishes and instead achieve great things!” But if your natural tendency is to wallow in your fetishes, and you’re only trying to achieve great things because people are shouting at you, should a Nietzschean keep wallowing in the fetishes?
Without some external source of value, I don’t understand how you decide that one soul-written destiny (conquering Italy) is better than another (running off with the yoga instructor, or watching furry porn)."
Read the extract from Thus Spake Zarathustra from the comment by Stackdamage - the one with which you chose to finish the damn post! The Übermensch is a being capable of creating values, not a bean-counter obsessed with QALYs and other utilitarian superstitions. It's not a matter of deciding what is one's 'soul-written destiny', and still less about comparing values. It's about becoming something that can will new values; those values are justified as the creation of the being that can will those values into being. That said, 'justification' is not relevant to that kind of morality, which is why 'Stop wallowing in your fetishes and instead achieve great things!' is a nonsense suggestion for a 'Nietzschean' (whatever that means). And if that kind of morality seems abhorrent, nonsense, and/or alien to you, you are not alone! Many people grapple with whether the Übermensch is just a phantasmagorical delusion.
Again - with great respect - this post sucked; either make a genuine effort or stay in your lane?
Disappointed there's not mention of Judge Holden...
Most of this discussion is conflating Nietzsches uberman - sometime who has “overcome” the desire to be defined by his relationship to others and sets their own goals and values that others probably can’t understand or appreciate, and narcissism- which is basically the opposite, where your entire self worth comes from successfully convincing others of a narrative about your greatness. Nietzsche and Rand admire people like Nikola Tesla or Nietzsche himself- people drawn to a high internal calling of greatness regardless of approval from others, and not really fitting into society at all. Scott seems confused about the difference between this and narcissists like Tate, Trump, and many popular rap artists whose only value is trying to convince others of their greatness- through banal metrics like wealth or political power, also handed to them by others as the socially accepted “default life goals.” Trying to see these two polar opposites as similar and both “master morality” makes no sense.
“I agree that an underappreciated problem is how to stigmatize something in the sense of warning against it, without stigmatizing it in the sense of making the people who unavoidably have it feel bad.”
This is a really useful distinction for all sorts of things - drugs, depression, weight (as mentioned above), lack of education, etc.
> But what if the core of this advice to [straight cics] unattached liberal women above 40 actually is *objectively* far more useful than not?
"To give a person one's opinion and correct his faults is an important thing. It is compassionate and comes first in matters of service. But the way of doing this is extremely difficult. To discover the good and bad points of a person is an easy thing, and to give an opinion concerning them is easy, too. For the most part, people think that they are being kind by saying the things that others find distasteful or difficult to say. But if it is not received well, they think that there is nothing more to be done. This is completely worthless. It is the same as bringing shame to a person by slandering him. It is nothing more than getting it off one's chest."
- Noted "Woketard" Yamamoto Tsunetomo, the guy who thought the 47 ronin didn't go far enough.