The idea of the superman—as distinct from the hero of Greek myth—is often associated with Nietzsche and, by extension, with the blond-haired Aryan soldiers of Nazi propaganda. But most of the time Nietzsche’s Übermensch comes across as a mess of contradictions. Entirely selfish at one moment, the next he “gives away and does not want to preserve himself.”¹⁶ The Übermensch doesn’t only celebrate the self; he is someone who overcomes it.

Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra quickly, in a haze of pain as much as inspiration. At the time, his eyesight was failing and his digestive system so weak that his doctor forbade him from drinking coffee or smoking after meals. He held to his personal maxim, virescit volnere virtus (power grows through wounds), consoling himself with the thought that those who were weak and wounded could most easily see through the weeds of custom. The superman, for him, was not the strongman. Those already strong stood to benefit most from keeping the established order in place.

It’s important to note, though, that Thus Spoke Zarathustra was written as poetic prophecy, not as a philosophical tract. Amid the calls for self-overcoming, it left space for doubt, and in this space darker readings of his work have always festered. The Übermensch, for example, is often pictured as a swooping eagle or a lion. “To create freedom for oneself,” wrote Nietzsche, “the lion is needed.”¹⁷ Fascists would take lines like these and imagine themselves as roaring Übermenschen, tearing up decadent European society and remaking it in their image.

“Better to live a day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,” Benito Mussolini is supposed to have said. In February 2016, Donald Trump retweeted this quotation with #MakeAmerica GreatAgain. Asked about whether he felt comfortable retweeting a fascist dictator, he said to NBC’s Chuck Todd: “It’s OK to know it’s Mussolini…It’s a very good quote, it’s a very interesting quote.”¹⁸ (As an aside, not that this makes Trump look better, the Mussolini quotation itself was tweeted by a bot set up by an editor at Gawker to bait Trump into retweeting it—its avatar featured a grumpy Mussolini sporting a Trumpian bouffant.)

After Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, the alt-right website Breitbart heralded “The Age of the Lion.”¹⁹ If you look at one of Breitbart’s thousands of invectives against the contemporary world it’s clear that the lion’s vocabulary, as Nietzsche predicted, is limited to a loud “No.” This was why Nietzsche added that the lion needed to transform itself into the child. Whereas the lion can only say “No,” the child is “innocence and forgetting…a sacred ‘Yes.’ ”²⁰ The Nietzschean superman is a mixed being, denying and affirming, forceful and passive. But the final form the superman takes should be that of a child, defined not by strength but vulnerability.