April 25, 2025

When I talk about critical thinking to students, I say that, whatever opinion you have about any subject, there will be someone who holds an opposite point of view that you are obliged to consider. So this week we will look at the case against empathy, the subject of last week’s newsletter. Last week, we did look at the Christian challenge to empathy, embodied in the doctrine of original sin: the assertion that we are simply incapable of it. The human will is corrupt, and we are inherently selfish. Any unselfish feelings or behavior do not come from us but from God, who may—or may not—choose to grant us divine grace, which softens our stony hearts. God’s nature is agape, the compassionate unselfish love that is the greatest of all virtues. His grace, when it fills us, makes us capable of such love to a limited degree, but God gets all the credit. When, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, God sees Adam repenting of his transgression, he remarks:

He sorrows now, repents, and prayes contrite,
My motions in him, longer then they move,
His heart I know, how variable and vain
Self-left. (11.90-93).

But there is a modern case against empathy that is psychological and ethical rather than theological. In a sense, it reverses the Christian position: we are all-too- capable of empathy, but it is a bad thing. The most important source of this rejection is Friedrich Nietzsche, whose contemptuous attacks on “pity” run through all of his work. Some claim that pity is not necessarily the same as empathy or compassion, so that Nietzsche is attacking something different, but the word that Nietzsche typically uses, translated “pity,” is Mitlied, which literally means “suffering with,” so etymology does not seem to support the idea of a distinction. The stakes are high here because the libertarian-style view of someone like Elon Musk ultimately derives, whether Musk knows it or not, from the arguments first formulated by Nietzsche. That is the point at which we began last week, with Musk’s statement that empathy is a symptom of the decadence of Western civilization, which is exactly what Nietzsche believed. So when Musk brandishes his chain saw, joking, like the serial killer in a slasher film, and does not care in the slightest whose lives he is destroying, it is, on the one hand, because he is sociopathic, but at the same time he is proceeding according to the tenets of a certain kind of philosophy, of which Nietzsche is the ultimate origin. The two things are not mutually exclusive.

Speaking of looking at both sides of a picture, there are two views about Nietzsche in this matter. One is that of Walter Kaufmann, who worked tirelessly throughout his career to rehabilitate Nietzsche when he was in eclipse because of the use the Nazis had made of his work. Kaufmann was deservedly influential, partly because he was a superb writer. A more critical judgment, however, was that of C.G. Jung, who devoted a long-running seminar to a close reading, section by section, of Nietzsche’s central work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The published transcription of that seminar comes to 1600 pages. Another thing we all try to teach about critical thinking is that very few cases are black and white. Students are told in high school that they are not to be wishy-washy relativists, but must take a strong position. This is true, but your judgment should be constructed from what is valid about both points of view, while identifying and rejecting arguments that are flawed.

Kaufmann’s treatment does isolate what is valid in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche begins from the problem of suffering as he found it in the magnum opus of Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818, expanded in 1844 and 1859). The work’s title provides the map, so to speak, of Schopenhauer’s vision. The phenomenal world, the world of ordinary life, is a “representation,” that is, merely a surface appearance. Under it lies what Kant had called the thing-in-itself. But whereas to Kant the thing-in-itself, ultimate reality, is unknowable, Schopenhauer names it as the will, a blind, unconscious energy of desire that animates all living things, a kind of life force that is constantly striving. All life is driven by the will’s desire, but that desire can never be more than momentarily satisfied, and its compulsive nature causes ceaseless conflict and suffering. This is not so much philosophy as mythmaking, but the imaginative power of Schopenhauer’s vision affected many people. If Schopenhauer’s will sounds like Freud’s id, the unconscious considered as an energy of desire driven by the pleasure principle, that is influence and not accident. Many writers, including Thomas Hardy and Thomas Mann, were influenced by Schopenhauer, whose conclusion was pessimism. Life is a thing that should not have been, and Schopenhauer advocated a kind of detachment, a negation of the will that he thought he found in Buddhism, although what he actually practiced seems more like the resigned acceptance of something like Stoicism. Nietzsche will not accept pessimism as a conclusion. The goal of his philosophy is to affirm life, without despair, resignation, or religious escapism, but also without denying the first tenet of Buddhism: “All life is suffering.” It follows that he has to argue against the assumption that suffering is bad and to be avoided.

Nietzsche is one of those writers who like to put things in an extreme-sounding way in order to be provoking. But what is valid in his condemnation of pity can be found, up to a point, in the world of everyday common sense. It is easiest to see what he is getting at if we start with self-pity. We often condemn self-pity. We deride it as “wallowing,” satirize those who whine about “poor, poor pitiful me.” We do not respect people addicted to self-pity because they are passive, even take a masochistic pleasure in being victims. They are essentially cowards, and have given up without a fight. Whereas Nietzsche’s whole philosophy is one of self-overcoming. The one thing people tend to know about Nietzsche is that he is the prophet of the “Superman.” But in his translations, Kaufmann translates Übermensch as “Overman,” because, although the prefix “super” does mean over or above, he wants people to see the link between this name and Nietzsche’s constant references to self-overcoming. The Overman is the one who overcomes himself. Not the one who sits “above” other people, lording it over them by force or guile. The distinction is quite close to Milton’s distinction between “license” and “liberty.” Liberty is the freedom that only comes from inner discipline. Most people do not want liberty: they want license, which means “doing exactly what I want, with nobody to tell me what to do”—which means they are in fact slaves to their own inner compulsions, or, as Schopenhauer would say, puppets of the blind will. Inner discipline or self-overcoming is active and not achieved without a certain amount of suffering. It is not achieved by lying there and whining, waiting for someone to solve your problems for you.

Nietzsche’s first book, written while he was still in his 20’s, was The Birth of Tragedy (1873). It is not a work of conventional scholarship but rather of intuitive mythmaking, and it begins by asking why tragedy was to the Greeks the greatest form of literature. Why should any people want to spend their time contemplating suffering, catastrophe, and death? This is Walter Kaufmann’s description of why:

Their magnificent tragedies represent to Nietzsche’s mind a yet unbroken reply to the vicissitudes of fortune, a triumphant response to suffering, and a celebration of life as “at bottom, in spite of all the alterations of appearances, indestructible, powerful, and joyous. Tragic art was the “comfort” which the Greeks created for themselves and which they needed because they were “uniquely capable of the tenderest and deepest suffering.” Nietzsche envisages “the sublime as the artistic conquest of the horrible”; and he celebrates the Greek “who has looked with bold eyes into the dreadful destructive turmoil of so-called world-history as well as into the cruelty of nature and, without yielding to resignation or to “a Buddhistic negation of the will,” reaffirms life with the creation of works of art…..| Schopenhauer’s negativistic pessimism is rejected along with the superficial optimism of the popular Hegelians and Darwinists: one can face the terrors of history and nature with unbroken courage and say Yes to life. (131)

This is a portrait of Nietzsche as an exemplar of Kaufmann’s own kind of existentialist humanism. I have always been inspired by this kind of vision, especially when it is articulated with something like Kaufmann’s combination of clarity and passionate eloquence. One of my favorite poems, Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli,” a poem I loved so much I memorized it when I was young without trying to, despite my lousy memory, was inspired by Nietzsche. Yeats uses Shakespearean rather than Greek tragedy: “All perform their tragic play, / There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, / That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.” But he goes on:

Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

The lines that inspired and continue to inspire are, “All things fall and are built again / And those that build them again are gay.”

I am not an existentialist, and have always, without really thinking about it, supplemented this vision of transience with what I got from Blake, who said that “The ruins of time build mansions in Eternity.” In other words, there is a state beyond the cycles of transience, though only perceptible to the imagination and not the natural self. Yeats himself was influenced by Blake, and at the end of the poem he speaks of a carving in lapis lazuli of three “Chinamen,” who sit on a height, audience to the human tragedy: “On all the tragic scene they stare.” Yet, in the poem’s final lines, “Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, / Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”

I connect this with a passage in Northrop Frye’s The Great Code about the Book of Job. The Book of Job ought to be a tragedy, ending with God’s appearance to Job in the whirlwind, only to say to him, “Your mind is finite, and my mind is infinite. Therefore you will never know why you suffer.” But someone added an ending in prose in which God restores to Job all he has lost, and even gives him three new daughters. Not only does this seem pie-in-the-sky wish fulfilment, but it is borderline offensive. What father would not continue to mourn his dead, innocent daughters, and refuse to be placated by new, improved models? One conclusion is that some hack altered the poem, like Nahum Tate rewriting King Lear with a happy ending. Another is that, as we have said in the past, we have two selves, one natural, the other spiritual and imaginative. The natural self is limited to the vision of transience and death. But Frye goes on, startlingly and unexpectedly:

One of Job’s beautiful new daughters has a name meaning a box of eye shadow. Perhaps if we were to see Job in his restored state we should see, not beautiful daughters or sixteen thousand sheep, but only a man who has seen something that we have not seen, and knows something that we do not know. (218)

Perhaps in this state “what we should call Job’s egocentric perception has disappeared along with its objective counterpart, the leviathan” (218-19). Perhaps, too, the eyes of Yeats’s Chinamen are glittering because they see from the perspective of “Eternity,” which, as Blake says also, is in love with the productions of time.

But this is a terribly difficult problem. The natural self is not privileged to live in Eternity most of the time. For it, loss is loss, and is permanent. As Lear says, in one of the most heartbreaking lines in all of literature, he will “Never, never, never, never, never” see Cordelia alive again. Grief for the death of his daughter and his Fool literally kills him. In what possible way could Lear be called “gay”? Yeats took the word “gay” from Nietzsche, who has a book called The Gay Science, from a phrase la gaya scienza. In Nietzsche’s sense, the word refers to a kind of vitality or life energy that springs up against what he called the “spirit of gravity.” Hamlet and Lear are acting, and as theatre people know, the show must go on despite your private griefs and losses and crises. Get out there on that stage and do not break up your lines. This refusal to just crumple in a heap takes discipline and toughness, the stubbornness of the boxer who refuses to admit he is beaten and fights on. Yeats speaks of “Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.” We are all actors, as Shakespeare says more than once, and you just damned well develop a detachment and keep going. Where does that detachment come from? From the imagination, our second self—Nietzsche took the phrase gaya scienza from the troubadours, who meant by it the poetic art. The theme of The Birth of Tragedy, repeated several times, is that life can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. This sounds like the worst kind of ivory-tower aestheticism, but art is a form of meditation that ideally trains us in a detachment that is not escapism. It does not run away to pretty, conflict-free Neverneverlands, but stares upon the tragic scene and yet at the same time sees it in a detached way, in the perspective of Eternity. There may be some analogy with the Buddhist notion of “mindfulness” that has been popular recently. We must learn to become detached from our own pain, even when that pain is justified, as it is in grieving someone’s death. That does not mean refusing to feel, becoming indifferent, but somehow, paradoxically, grieving and detaching at the same time. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche casts this paradox in mythical form. The part of us that participates in life and suffers, even to the point of being torn apart, he calls Dionysus, the dying god who is literally dismembered. The part that is detached, contemplative, and gives form, meaning, and even beauty to all the suffering is Apollo, god of light and poetry. The union of the Dionysian and the Apollonian gave birth to tragedy, but it is clearly a model for a whole way of living life. We are not just talking literary theory here.

It might be possible to reconcile Aristotle’s famous theory of tragedy with Nietzsche’s from this point of view. The Poetics says that tragedy raises the negative emotions of pity and fear, only to cast them out in what is called catharsis, leaving the onlooker in the state that Milton, in his own tragedy, described as “Calm of mind, all passion spent.” That calm is an Apollonian calm. However, the affirmation of life is a perspective inherent in the form of the work, not a conclusion stated in the text itself. The text itself is more likely to say something like, “Count no man happy until he is dead” or “Not to have been born is best,” which is pure Schopenhauer. Compare Gloucester’s statement in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They use us for their sport.”

Another poem about the active striving against the tragically inevitable is Dylan Thomas’s poem addressed to his dying father, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Do not resign yourself and accept death, Thomas counsels his father, even though “dark is right.” No: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Each of the poem’s four internal stanzas concerns a type of man who rages because his life’s endeavor has failed, because failure is inevitable in this world. The wise men’s words have “forked no lightning”; the good men grieve their “frail deeds”; the wild men realize that their attempt to stop the sun in flight has only grieved it on its way; the grave men realize too late that “Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay”—and upon reading the latter word we realize that Thomas is echoing Yeats and thus indirectly Nietzsche. None of the types of men go gentle, and Thomas counsels his father also to “Rage, rage” like Lear. Sometimes students in discussion feel that Thomas is rather selfishly refusing to let his father go, but what he really wants is for his father to go down fighting, like the doomed warriors in the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” whose leader cries that his men will fight harder even as their strength fails. It is capable of being a troubling poem. Should we not find peace by accepting the way of nature? Isn’t it just egotism to think that we, or those we love, are important enough that an exception should be made in our case? Gertrude tries to counsel Hamlet about what she sees as his excessive grief for his own dead father, but he will have none of it. The point is active striving—life is striving, and peaceable surrender is a failure to live. I am sure that a major influence on Nietzsche in this regard is Goethe’s Faust, who is saved because he continues to striving until the age of 100, even though, as in Thomas, his striving ends in repeated failures.

This means that suffering and conflict are part of life. The attempt to eliminate them is misguided, because they are in fact good. They are the necessary antagonist, the Jacob’s angel that we must wrestle with to obtain a blessing. However, Nietzsche programmatically pushes his thinking to its furthest extreme, and then one step further, because he is convinced that limits are merely the result of intellectual laziness. Sometimes this enables him to break through conventional thinking, but the thrill of taboo-breaking at other times carries him away. If conflict and suffering are necessary for any kind of achievement, he says, then we should wish them not only upon ourselves but upon others—we will be doing them a favor:

Type of my disciples. –To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures. (481)

There is a truth here, although cast in a regrettably unqualified form. The truth is that any time I encourage my students to dream big, to set ambitious goals in their lives, I know my advice, if they follow it, ensures for them a lifetime of struggle, with no guarantee of any success. Yet I do not regret my advice. However, the missing qualification is twofold. First, not all suffering is creative. There is such a thing as stupid, unnecessary suffering. Hitting myself in the head with a hammer because it feels so good when I stop is not a way to become the Overman. It is, of course, hard to tell when suffering is creative and when it is not. Unhappiness in a marriage could be growing pains, necessary as couples grow and develop. But how many marriages consist of the same old bickering, over and over again, with neither party learning anything? It can be hard to decide whether some situation is a dead end, whether it is time to walk away from the pain and begin a new and more fruitful struggle. Nevertheless, the tendency to assume that suffering and deprivation are good in themselves, because they “build moral character” or some such, is neurotic. Nietzsche goes so far as to argue against the supposition that “it cannot possibly be our duty to increase the evil in the world” (199). By no means, he says:

From a superior standpoint one desires the contrary: the ever-increasing dominance of evil, the growing emancipation of man from the narrow and fear-ridden bonds of morality, the increase of force, in order to press the mightiest natural powers—the affects—into service. (208)

However, to desire the “ever-increasing dominance of evil” is not overcoming but overkill.

The second qualification that Nietzsche failed to make is more serious. Like most thinkers of his age, the age of Darwinism, Social Darwinism, and Marxism, Nietzsche assumed that striving necessarily means conflict and competition with others, that life is a zero sum game in which there are winners and losers, and that the whole point is to be a winner. His admiration for Classical Greece encouraged this. The culture reflected in the Homeric poems was what social scientists call a “shame culture.” A shame culture is other-directed: your identity lies in your status in the eyes of your peers, so everything depends on gaining and retaining status or “honor,” and status is measured in competition against everyone else. The tragedy of the Iliad derives from the fact that neither Agamemnon nor Achilles dare back down in their argument over a war prize: they would suffer “shame,” lose status. War was glorified because it was not a regrettable failure of social relations but rather an opportunity for self-proving. They even had a word that Nietzsche should have loved: aristeia, often translated inadequately as mere “excellence,” is the moment when a warrior transcends himself, goes beyond his previous limits to a new level of prowess. Competitive athletes understand this concept very well. Although Athens was a democracy rather than a warrior aristocracy, it had inherited this elitist ideal, even though it tried to come up with various forms of what William James called a “moral equivalent of war,” Olympic competition being a direct attempt at a substitute for war that would preserve the system of competition and status. Drama itself was competitive: the dramatists competed for first, second, and third prizes.

Our own culture has inherited a tradition of competitive elitism from the past, and is very conflicted about it. For the spirit of competition is opposed to empathy: if you empathize with your opponent, you are going to lose, or, if you win, you will feel bad about what you have done to your opponent. I am not fond of watching the Olympics, where the stakes are highest, because, while everyone else is cheering the winner, my eyes are drawn to the stricken look on the faces of the losers. We say “it’s only a game,” but that isn’t totally honest. Likewise in the world of classical music: I have written in the past about the elitist perfectionism of classical instrumental performance. A classical violinist must from early childhood undergo a punishing regimen that would no doubt warm Nietzsche’s heart but which chills mine. If you can’t cut it, what good are you? Less than perfect is not an option. This drives composers like Liszt and Paganini to compose pieces of insane difficulty for the greater glory of the super-virtuosos (starting with themselves) able to perform them.

In recent times, the widening of the scope of empathy has led to some attempts to change the nature of competition for young children—leading to blistering contempt in some quarters about how everyone now gets a trophy just for participating, whether they are any good or not. Nietzsche would share that contempt, without realizing that he has lost sight of his original ideal, that of self-overcoming, not the overcoming of some opponent. You are only really in competition with yourself, striving to excel who you were and become a better self. The others do not matter. This is not, as some people think, some kind of pathetically sentimental idealism. On the biological level, cooperation and interdependence are as important as competition: cooperation and competition are Blakean Contraries. We could have a society in which the ideal is to help lift others up, as they help us. That would be a society that took seriously the implications of the parable of the Good Samaritan. But there is no necessary contrast in this context between Hebraic and Hellenic. Achilles’ true moment of aristeia, of self-surpassing greatness, comes when he steps outside the rules of shame-culture competition and treats Priam, the enemy king and father of the man who killed his beloved Patroclus, with compassion based on empathy, because both have lost the one they loved the best:

“Poor man, how much you’ve borne—pain to break the spirit!
what daring brought you down to the ships, all alone,
to face the glance of the man who killed your sons,
so many fine brave boys? You have a heart of iron….
You must bear up now. Enough of endless tears,
the pain that breaks the spirit. (24.606-09, 642-43, Fagles translation)

What drives Nietzsche’s obsession with struggle and competition is a highly visible masculinism, in which the highest virtue is to be “strong,” the most contemptible thing to be “weak.” Nietzsche himself was a sickly near-invalid, so this is clearly compensation. Not even Walter Kaufmann can make Nietzsche sound tolerable when he gets into this mode:

Finally, woman! One-half of mankind is weak, typically weak, changeable, inconstant—woman needs strength in order to cleave to it; she needs a religion of weakness that glorifies being weak, loving, and being humble as divine: or better, she makes the strong weak—she rules when she succeeds in overcoming the strong. Woman has always conspired with the types of decadence, the priests, against the “powerful,” the “strong,” the men—. Woman brings the children to the cult of piety, pity, love:—the mother represents altruism convincingly (460).

There are two ways to be “strong” according to this definition. One is physical prowess: hence the obsession with physical fitness and the martial arts on the part of Musk, Zuckerberg, and Andrew Tate. The other is to be strong socially, which means to be rich and powerful. Trump is driven to act “strong” in this latter way because he has no physical prowess. Women who buy into this ideology have two choices: they can be “tradwives,” subservient to the “strong” male, or they can become a parody of male aggressiveness like Marjorie Taylor Greene, or, less ridiculously, Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, champion of laissez-faire ruthlessly competitive capitalism. Ayn Rand, not a player herself, wrote books that have inspired any number of would-be strong men, teaching that empathy is a weakness.

There are political as well as gender implications to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche was, to put it mildly, no fan of democracy, extolling aristocracy instead. Yeats unfortunately followed his lead, although, not being of aristocratic birth, the best he could do was to flatter aristocratic patrons in what was after all a time-honored tradition. Both of them despised democracy as the philosophy of herd animals. Both men had to engage in a good deal of self-hypnotism in the attempt to convince themselves that, while democracy leads towards herd-animal collectivism, aristocracy leads towards freedom and individualism:

The more I relinquish my rights and level myself down, the more I come under the dominion of the average and finally of the majority. The presupposition inherent in an aristocratic society for preserving a high degree of freedom among its members is the extreme tension that arises from the presence of an antagonistic drive in all its members: the will to dominate. (493)

This is, of course, the “high degree of freedom” of Mafia dons in gang wars, the “high degree of freedom” that makes it necessary for authoritarians like Putin to take infinite precautions against assassination, the “high degree of freedom” that leads to the kind of cutthroat competition even within families that we see in Succession and its real-life analogues such as the Murdoch family. Freedom and individualism are enjoyed by a few ruthless “winners,” at least until they’re done in by a rival, and the losers are expendable. Given that two strong men will be antagonistic to each other, in the end, there can only be one winner, one supreme ruler, one Führer. Kaufmann argues convincingly that Nietzsche would have despised Hitler, but only because Hitler was a fake, a Wizard of Oz whose godlike impressiveness was based on illusion. Trump is another such fraud, a con artist who knows how to get gullible people to take him for a Fearless Leader. In the same way, the people running the government now are a clown act of losers, grifters, and crazies pretending to be aristocracy. Nietzsche’s true ideal was someone more like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, who despises the smelly and ignorant mob and will not curry favor with them, and the loathing is mutual.

What caused Nietzsche to derail himself, to lose sight of his own vision of the Overman as the one who overcomes himself, who is confident enough to go his own way without falling into a kind of superiority complex? This is the question that preoccupies Jung in his seminar on Also Spoke Zarathustra. Jung was fascinated by Zarathustra because it was a product of a vision that erupted out of Nietzsche’s unconscious and possessed him, exactly like Jung’s Red Book. But Nietzsche did not realize that such inspiration can turn into possession of the ego by the much more powerful collective unconscious. Jung says that Nietzsche was drawn to identify himself with his prophet Zarathustra, and in doing so suffered what Jung called “inflation.” What inflates the ego is the serpent’s promise: “Ye shall be as gods.” Thus the inflated ego, charged with the energy of the unconscious, is intoxicated, feels itself beyond good and evil, falls into megalomania. But Jung’s real interest was not just in the visions of two individuals but in the world crisis of his and our time. This kind of megalomania is erupting repeatedly, producing authoritarian would-be Supermen with cult followings. These people fancy themselves predators, and they have their own version of empathy, summed up by Nietzsche in a parable that I have quoted in a previous newsletter:

That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground 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 fine 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. (The Genealogy of Morals, 44-45).

Make no mistake: Nietzsche actually approves of the birds of prey. But, yet again, credit where credit is due. Nietzsche could be profoundly insightful about the great weakness of egalitarian democratic mass culture. When he is defiant of “morality,” and speaks of going beyond good and evil, by “morality” he means mere conventionality, what Blake called “moral virtue” and distinguished from true morality. Speaking of “morality,” Nietzsche says:

[T]hree powers are hidden behind it: (1) the instinct of the herd against the strong and independent; (2) the instinct of the suffering and underprivileged against the fortunate; (3) the instinct of the mediocre against the exceptional….| [T]he herd instinct speaks. It wants to be master: hence its “thou shalt!” –it will allow value to the individual only from the point of view of the whole, for the sake of the whole it hates those who detach themselves—it turns the hatred of all individuals against them. (156-57)

This is one of Nietzsche’s sharpest insights, expressed in his term ressentiment, the resentment, born of envy, of the gifted by the mediocre, and the consequent urge to set up the least common denominator as the social standard. It is the great weakness of modern democracy, and social media have amplified the problem into a crisis. Nietzsche’s excoriation of it is scathing, yet full of uncomfortable truth. In the name of empathy, ressentiment demands complete equality, because any manifestation of excellence crushes the self-esteem of those who are not excellent, whether by inability or laziness:

Finally: the social hodgepodge, consequence of the Revolution, the establishment of equal rights, of the superstition of “equal men”….everything has become the mob. From this there results a collective instinct against selection, against privilege of all kinds, that is so powerful and self-assured, hard, and cruel in its operation, that the privileged themselves soon succumb to it: whoever still wants to retain power flatters the mob, works with the mob, must have the mob on its side—the “geniuses” above all: they become heralds of those feelings with which one moves the masses—the note of sympathy, even reverence, for all that has lived a life of suffering, lowliness, contempt, persecution, sounds above all other notes (types: Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner). (461)

This nails something. Ressentiment explains why Trump is now president: because of the MAGA hatred of “elites,” by which they mean the economic elite of educated professionals that make up the upper tier of the Democratic party; the scientific elite of experts like Dr. Fauci; the administrative elite of government workers, whom MAGA is delighted to see losing their jobs; the “diverse” elite of those who have their jobs, they think, not by merit but because they are “DEI hires”; the academic elite of institutions like Harvard. Trump, meanwhile, loves the poorly educated.

Nietzsche, however, like many, is reluctant to admit that the members of aristocracies and other elites have often achieved their privileged positions not by the triumph of excellence and disciplined striving but by a system that favors them and excludes others. Aristocracies are largely the spoiled children of the rich, which is why, when in power, like England’s Tories, they behave like spoiled rich children. Equality, yes, should be only equality of opportunity—but that has often been a sham. They take applications and do interviews, but in the end the decision has been made by “good old boys” on the basis of who they want in their club. Hence “legacy admissions” in universities; hence the power of money to talk to the admissions people. Trump has a degree from the Wharton School of Business because his family is rich. JD Vance played upon “liberal guilt” by writing Hillbilly Elegy, and well-intentioned liberals even made it into a movie. He also got into Yale, despite his “hillbilly” background, arguably because of efforts to consider applicants who were not of the normally privileged Yale type. Now that he has made it, though, he has revealed his true colors. The attempts at greater equality and diversity have been driven by empathy for those who have been excluded from opportunity.

However, Nietzsche is far from being the only one to criticize democracies for their tendency to become a tyranny of the average, a tyranny rationalized as empathy for the non-gifted. When I was growing up in the 1950’s, the United States was notoriously anti-intellectual: Adalai Stevenson lost the presidential election because he was said to be an “egghead.” George W. Bush won because Al Gore was, well, an egghead who lectured you from a position of superiority, while Bush was the guy you supposedly wanted to have a beer with. Hillary Clinton lost partly because she was superior and didn’t care who knew it. About physical inequalities we are even more conflicted, because there it is visibly true that we are not all born “equal.”

When I began teaching Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” was in all the anthologies. It has completely disappeared, and I think I know why. It portrays a future society that has decided that all citizens shall truly be equal, both mentally and physically. Athletes and dancers have to wear weights lest their superior strength and prowess hurt the feelings of those who cannot compare with them. Highly intelligent people have to wear earplugs that blast a loud noise every so often, disrupting mental focus, because it’s just not fair that some people didn’t happen to be born smart. That would be a challenging story to teach these days, although I wouldn’t mind trying. It would be interesting, because the challenges would take some new forms. Many people, not all of them troglodytes in my opinion, feel that trans individuals should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports because they have an unfair muscular advantage. But should I complain, on the same grounds, that the guys who are 6’8” have an unfair advantage on the basketball court because I am only 5’6”? Wrestlers compete by weight category, and for some reason we do not regard that as some liberal conspiracy in the name of “fairness.” Why not? In the other direction, students occasionally feel that depression and “social anxiety” should exempt them from ordinary demands to come to class and get their work in on time. They do have genuine afflictions which do indeed handicap them. Should the rules bend in the name of empathy?

Philosophers from Aristotle to Nietzsche have dismissed democracy contemptuously as glorified mob rule. One reply has been that, yes, democracy is a bad form of government, the only problem being that all the other forms are worse. Aristocracies are supposed to be rule by the “better” people, who are better because of “blood”—they are genealogically superior. This kind of thing is being revived, based not on lineage but by genetics. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wants kids to get the measles because it will help weed out the weaklings and build the resistance of the ones who survive. In reality, aristocrats were physically superior because they got enough good food to eat and did not work at physically punishing jobs that destroyed them by the time they were old. Meritocracy, the rule by the mentally superior, whether Plato’s philosopher-kings or modern techbros, is in practice a fraud, because who will watch the watchmen?

But choosing democracy because all the other choices are worse is not enough. The question is whether democracy can surmount its limitations, or whether the limitations are inevitable. The United States has always had to struggle with what Nietzsche calls the herd instinct, a collectivized conformism that has a tendency under the wrong conditions to degenerate into a mob. What Nietzsche never got clear, however, is that herd instinct is not the opposite of aristocracy, elitism, the rule of the strong, call it what you will. No, those are two aspects of a single phenomenon. For years now, we have been asking, in the phrase of Thomas Frank, what’s the matter with Kansas? Why does a financially aggrieved working class choose a con artist billionaire, one who does not even hide the fact that he is a con artist, and cling to him as a “strong” leader who will make them feel great again, even though everything he and his party does is against their best interests? Nietzsche despised Christianity for what he saw as its glorification of the herd instinct. But this is Christ rejecting Satan’s temptation to be a “strong man” populist in Milton’s Paradise Regained:

And what the people but a herd confus’d,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, and well weigh’d, scarce worth the praise?
They praise and they admire they know not what;
And know not whom, but as one leads the other;
And what delight to be by such extoll’d,
To live upon thir tongues and be thir talk,
Of whom to be disprais’d were not small praise?
His lot who dares be singularly good.
(3.49-57)

What Milton’s Christ proclaims is exactly the effort of self-mastery, at times sounding remarkably like Nietzsche: “who best / Can suffer, best can do” (195-96). Milton helped overthrow an aristocracy in the name of such self-mastery, which is what he meant by “liberty.” It is true that, after the failure of the Puritan revolution, he came to doubt whether a whole society is capable of such inward discipline, and rested his remaining hope on a “saving remnant.” It may be that we shall come to that.

But it is too early to declare the idea of democracy a failure. Historian Heather Cox Richardson titled her recent book Democracy Awakening, but I think the meaning of the title can be expanded. In a manner of speaking, democracy has not yet been tried. The problem is that the number of people who want liberty and not license has to reach a kind of critical mass for democracy to function. We have spoken, perhaps a bit condescendingly in the past, of non-Western nations who are struggling with authoritarianism and corruption because they have no prior tradition of democratic government. Well, in a sense, neither have we. Abraham Maslow dreamed of a “Eupsychia,” a state in which all or most citizens were self-actualized, because utopia is not possible when most of the population suffers from the neuroses inevitably spawned by bad conditions. To bring democracy to birth, then, all we can do is to try to improve conditions, so that the seed of individuation will fall on fertile soil, to borrow Jesus’ parable.

This means two things. First, working to see that people’s basic needs are met. Authoritarians deliberately keep their populations deprived and anxious because that breeds the combination of anxious dependency and ressentiment by which they can be manipulated. Second, it means working to expand empathetic inclusion based on a respect for difference and individuality, not on sameness and conformism. There are no guarantees, but democracy is an idea whose time has come, which is exactly why the tyrants and oppressors are trying so hysterically to destroy it. But we will not go gentle, not even when the tyrants tell us that dark is right.

References

Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Edited by Alvin A. Lee. Volume 19 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Fourth Edition. Princeton, 1974.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage, 1967.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. Edited by Walter Kaufman. Vintage, 1967. All quotations from Nietzsche come from this volume unless otherwise stated.