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Sometimes we need to recognize – and with any luck overcome – entrenched biases in our own characters. We might need a strong dose of something we are missing. It isn’t the whole truth, but it is a part of the truth we need to attend to, because it is the bit we lack.
Nietzsche thought that we are often (without realizing it) passive and reactive. We don’t think and feel and act for ourselves. We are not ‘noble’ enough. In fact we are frightened. And in our fear we tell ourselves falsely consoling stories: I didn’t really want that promotion; I don’t really want to make a lot of money (and inequality is wrong anyway). He wants to waken a kind of inner aristocrat who doesn’t much care what others think and just gets on with being who they really are.
At times Nietzsche sounds incredibly snobbish. It makes more sense – and is more useful to us – when we keep in mind that Nietzsche was not himself especially like the nobles he so admires. That is a compensating, corrective vision which he makes for himself. Rather than reading this as a discussion of two different kinds of people, it is helpful to regard it as a discussion of contending aspects of one person. It enables us to see more clearly certain aspects – noble and base – of our own character.
The idea that power is bad, that the strong and dominating are the enemy, is one that occurs very naturally to almost everyone.
The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment [French for ‘resentment’] itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside’, what is ‘different’, what is ‘not itself’; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye – this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself – is of the essence of ressentiment; in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all – its action is fundamentally reaction.
One should not overlook the almost benevolent nuances that the Greek nobility, for example, bestows on all the words it employs to distinguish the lower orders from itself; how they are continuously mingled and sweetened with a kind of pity, consideration and forbearance, so that finally almost all the words referring to the common man have remained as expressions signifying ‘unhappy’, ‘pitiable’ – and how on the other hand ‘bad’, ‘low’, ‘unhappy’ have never ceased to sound to the Greek ear as one note with a tone-colour in which ‘unhappy’ preponderates: this as an inheritance from the ancient nobler aristocratic mode of evaluation, which does not belie itself even in its contempt. The ‘well-born’ felt themselves to be the ‘happy’; they did not have to establish their happiness artificially by examining their enemies, or to persuade themselves, deceive themselves, that they were happy (as all men of ressentiment are in the habit of doing); and they likewise knew, as rounded men replete with energy and therefore necessarily active, that happiness should not be sundered from action – being active was with them necessarily a part of happiness – all very much the opposite of ‘happiness’ at the level of the impotent, the oppressed, and those in whom poisonous and inimical feelings are festering.
While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself, the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble. A race of such men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer than any noble race; it will also honour cleverness to a far greater degree: namely, as a condition of existence of the first importance; while with nobler men cleverness can easily acquire a subtle flavour of luxury and subtlety – for here it is far less essential than the perfect functioning of the regulating unconscious instincts or even a certain imprudence, perhaps a bold recklessness whether in the face of danger or of the enemy, or enthusiastic impulsiveness in anger, love, reverence, gratitude and revenge by which noble souls have at all times recognized one another. Ressentiment itself, if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison: on the other hand, it fails to appear at all on countless occasions on which it inevitably appears in the weak and impotent.
To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long – that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mould, to recuperate and to forget. Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine ‘love of one’s enemies’ is possible – supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies! – and such reverence is a bridge to love. – For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honour! In contrast to this, picture ‘the enemy’ as the man of ressentiment conceives him – and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived ‘the evil enemy’, ‘the Evil One’, and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a ‘good one’ – himself!
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This, then, is quite the contrary of what the noble man does, who conceives the basic concept ‘good’ in advance and spontaneously out of himself and only then creates for himself an idea of ‘bad’! This ‘bad’ of noble origin and that ‘evil’ out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred – the former an after-production, a side issue, a contrasting shade, the latter on the contrary the original thing, the beginning, the distinctive deed in the conception of a slave morality – how different these words ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ are, although they are both apparently the opposite of the same concept ‘good’. But it is not the same concept ‘good’: one should ask rather precisely who is ‘evil’ in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The answer, in all strictness, is: precisely the good man’ of the other morality, precisely the noble, powerful man.
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That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no grounds for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb – would he not be good?’ there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: ‘We don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.’
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect – more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a subject’, can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect. Scientists do no better when they say ‘force moves’, ‘force causes’, and the like – all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the ‘subject’ (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, as is the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’); no wonder if the submerged, darkly glowering emotions of vengefulness and hatred exploit this belief for their own ends and in fact maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb – for thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey.
The oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: ‘Let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and just’…
(On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887)
Nietzsche now imagines a kind of underground factory in which actual weakness is converted into fake morality; things that are merely matters of powerlessness (like a lamb being unable to take revenge on an eagle) are fabricated into moral attitudes. This is really a story about how – in our own moments of weakness – we hide what is really going on. Instead of strengthening ourselves for competition, we blame others, and then pat ourselves on the back for not being like those dreadful people.
Weakness is being lied into something meritorious, no doubt of it … and impotence which does not requite into ‘goodness of heart’; anxious lowliness into ‘humility’; subjection to those one hates into ‘obedience’ (that is, to one of whom they say he commands this subjection – they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weak man, even the cowardice of which he has so much, his lingering at the door, his being ineluctably compelled to wait, here acquire flattering names, such as ‘patience’, and are even called virtue itself; his inability for revenge is called unwillingness to revenge, perhaps even forgiveness …
(On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887)
There are plenty of people who are too arrogant already. But there are lots of decent people who are not arrogant enough. Don’t complain that the Cabinet is stuffed with idiots, or that bankers are crooks, but instead compete, do it better.