After reading several of Thomas Carlyle’s political essays, we’ve gained a budding sense that the morality that raised us and nurtured our worldview may have been overly sanitized, hypochondriac, and (likely) anti-masculine. To continue tending this new growth, we’ve turned to Nietzche.
That is, the original Nietzche, not a repackaged translation through Frank Herbert’s Dune or Bronze Aged Mindset’s… rhythms. Though we recognize the aforementioned and their ilk as frens, there is a compelling duty to satisfy curiosity from as close to a source as possible given the means available.
Carlyle defined ‘the good’ along similar lines to the Greeks - the noble, wise, strong, true, valorous, and heroic. Even upon first reading, it was obvious to us that these are the values that define a ‘good’ aristocrat; and thus also an aristocracy worthy of the title more broadly.
‘Good and Evil, Good and Bad’ pushes this understanding further by first asking: Where does the word ‘good’ come from anyways?
Our Values Descend From Slave Morality
“Much rather has it been the good themselves, that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high station, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that their actions were good, that is to say of the first order in contradistinction to all the low the low-minded, the vulgar, and the plebeian.”
Nietzche traces the etymology for the word ‘good’ and its derivatives as descriptors of the noble class. Likewise all origins of ‘bad’ arise from synonyms or descriptors of the lower classes. This perspective shifts our understanding of reality as a morality play between Good and Evil, to a hierarchy of human ability. Distinctions between people exist, but they have no inherent moral valence.
To be low-born is to simply not be noble. You are low-class. It simply is. There is nothing good or bad about it. Thus as readers, we can reacquaint ourselves with the natural order. Nietzsche offers the metaphor of the Eagle and the Rabbit to illustrate this.
Although the Eagle preys upon the Rabbit; doing violence to it and consuming it. It does not consider the Rabbit ‘evil’ in any way. The Rabbit is merely tasty and the Eagle hungry.
However, the Rabbit views the arrangement very differently. He hates the Eagle with all his capacity, as the Eagle means the end of all things green and delicious. Everything that lends the Eagle its strength–; the wings, the talons, the beak– is Evil. And so the Rabbit tells himself the Eagle must be Evil as well.
Thus we have our first key takeaway from Nietzsche. If Evil exists, it arises from a primordial lack of strength.
This morality born of resentment is entirely foreign to the nobility– who are primarily movers. A Knightly Noble would sooner address his own inadequacies before he resented an enemy; and that enemy would be another noble, not a peasant. The naturally strong need not brood and allow their thoughts to fester over their lessers.
Nietzsche’s analysis goes further. Harboring these Evil feelings towards those stronger than yourself and the impotence of your position spawns a morality built upon the basis of slave values. Anything stronger than is inherently ‘bad’. The weak, the lowly, and the sufferers are inherently good and deserving of pity. To the rulers, only scorn.
This is the slave morality with which we are familiar. Its parallels to Christianity are searingly apparent.
Priestly Aristocracies Praise Frailty and Inaction
“Yet the method was only appropriate to a nation of priests to a nation of the most jealously nursed priestly revengefulness. It was the Jews who in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods) dared with a terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation and indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of weakness) this contrary equation, namely, “the wretched are alone the good; the poor; the weak; the lowly are alone the good; the needy; the sick; the loathsome are the only ones who are Pious and the only ones who are blessed, for them alone is salvation-but you, on the other hand, you Aristocrats, you men of power, you are to all eternity, the evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiate, the Godless; eternally also shall you be the unblessed, the cursed, the damned!”
Though Nietzche observed different types of aristocracies, he focuses mostly on the Priestly as opposed to the Knightly in this essay.
He asserts that Priestly aristocracies will push beyond mere social distinctions such as natural ability when discerning good and evil. Positive action itself will begin to be suppressed. Don’t fuck, don’t eat, don’t hate, don’t even think. Instead, look inward and focus on your conscience and guilt. Allow it to paralyze you. Inaction is benevolence.
You must first have a clean conscience (no one can) before acting. You can clean your soul by fasting, abstaining, and denying the vitality bubbling within you.
Strength and Action without guilt are redefined as hate, and to be avoided less you accrue a debt with God.
Conclusion
Christianity is the real Conservatism.
Thus our current state in the year of our Lord 2024 comes into sharper focus. The space around us is claimed, the constraints placed upon those participating in it form a suffocatingly restrictive environment that seeks to strangle out all natural impulses to action. Before finding yourself ‘touching grass’ you must first navigate out of a maze of entertainment and pharmaceuticals purposely designed to mellow you out, keep you sedentary, and still your soul.
Little surprise, then, that we find many Men turning inward in 2024, tending to their own bodies and spirits through various pop practices. Their authority is so compressed that it ends at the limits of their skin; yet, some heroes still find a way to take control and expand that at least.
To better understand our present, let’s reflect on a past argument. Was Jesus Divine? And if so, was he also Human? Does his Human nature make Him subordinate to God the Father, or are they equal? These questions were debated near Christianity’s founding and only settled by successive councils of Bishops meeting throughout the ancient world. Of particular note in this case is the Council of Chalcedon– which sought to settle the question of whether Jesus was subordinate to God the Father.
The council decreed that in fact the Father and the Son were on equal footing, a decision influenced by the desire to keep the Church sovereign from the Roman State. The Emperor sought to subordinate the Church to his State by taking on the patriarchal role of the Father over the early Christian Church. Simultaneously reducing the disciples of Jesus Christ and the Son to subordinates of the Father. The compromise made by the council, to place the Son and the Father on equal footing, was one of the earliest faults leading to the Great Schism that broke Christianity into East and West. Perhaps these Bishops could not hear God through the clamor of Roman shields.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals seems to me fundamentally Satanic in the way that it criticizes the underpinnings of the Chrisitan faith, mocking Good and Evil as mere byproducts of a weakling’s view of the world. It elevates cruelty, despises pity for the poor and the diseased, and justifies oppression of the powerless. It is the first work I’ve read that takes the consequences of skepticism in God and Christ as Savior seriously.
Let us yield to Nietzsche, look to Rome, and see if healing can begin. Take a friend to the gym with you when you go boys. There is no force yet known to man stronger than the power of male friendship. Everything you see in front of you that did not come from nature came from two or sometimes three men starting some shit together. Do that and know that this empire’s problems started well before two thousand and fourteen years after the death of Christ.