I find master morality vs slave morality as another unnecessary division because both concepts have flaws and merits and i find it a bad idea to have to choose from one or the other, when the better choice tries to avoids the flaws of each.
Scott doesn't seem to get it, nor is he interested to get it.
The idea is that Jews and Christians used slave morality to invert values and to promote pathological altruism for their outgroup as a way to get their way. And after that, of course in modernity more besides those groups have done so.
In confronting people who think that their groups also have rights, and want to put their group first, Scott's response is to accuse them of cruelty. He doesn't get it whatsoever, or he doesn't want to get it and finds it convenient to double down. This isn't an approach that sees the nuance.
The reality is that the typical liberal ideologue whether Marcuse, Yglesias, Ozy or even Scott are not the kindest people because they think they should rule over us. Their will to power, also does not make them supermen, although they might share some of the pathology of the people they accuse of adopting master morality. Additionally, there is something very cruel in the disregard of the interests and rights of specific groups that people like Scott want to put other groups (like Africans) on the pedestal above their own interests. I don't buy Scotts own conception of his own kindness (and nor of others he shares ideology) and I disagree with him trying to disregard right wingers as just cruel. He is not charitably taking seriously and engaging with their argument, but tries to just dimiss it.
Moreover, there is a connection between the self conception of far left radicals as the best people ever, and their right wing opposition as evil, cruel, etc, and their willingness to inflict cruelty, under the idea that these left wing radicals are just out to do good.
Ultimately, I find it a convenient way to sneakilly disregard the interests of right wingers and their favorite groups, while virtue signalling.
So, that is my problem with slave morality. That it can be abused, and that pathological altruism when coming internally, not incited from manipulative outsiders is also detrimental. Which is part of what most people complaining about slave morality have an issue with.
As for master morality, I actually agree with people like Scott that it can lead to disregarding morality. It can lead into an ideology that is in favor of preying towards the weak.
Right wingers and their associated ethnic groups have rights, interests, and it is fine to put their own first. It is grossly immoral for anyone to act outraged at the suggestion of such groups having rights, community, interests and not being pathological altruists. Demand for people to be pathological altruists and condemning them as evil when they are not is immoral, cruel, hostile, and inhumane.
The fact that there are authoritarian oppressive organizations which are hostile against right wingers, and associated ethnic groups and for disregarding their rights while talking of love, doesn't change the reality. They just use in their propaganda the idea that they are about love, when in actuality they are about hatred and keeping their outgroup down.
That being said, I do think you have a certain obligation to not harm outsiders and justice is about the golden rule and reciprocity. Is about mutually respected red lines. For example, within a society a parent should put their children first, but do so by working hard, not by stealing and harming others.
Some component of altruism can be part of it, but never pathological altruism which is immoral and often demanded by people who often enough identify more with the interests of foreign tribes (we see liberals to have in polls strong antiwhite views for example and a strong negative bias towards whites) who try to subvert people to act against their own interests. So, trying to make the weak and incompetent to be equal to those doing better, is not justice but rules that protect the weak from predation from the strong is part of justice. Nor is it moral to be forcing others to sacrifice everything and lose what is very important and precious to them for the sake of outsiders.
I would say, that reciprocity can exist even in a system where there is some level of limited redistribution and help under the idea that if they were in the same position, they would help us. And by not demanding too destructive sacrifices on people, like accepting their ethnic group's destruction. This is definitely NOT the deal offered today by those demanding pathological altruism in favor of Africans.
So yeah, I think both slave morality and master morality in the way they tend to be understood are not the best paths. They aren't always opposite since sneaky extreme nationalists can pretend to be pathological altruists motivated just by sympathy towards the weak and underdogs when promoting rules that harm their ethnic outgroups. Or, genuine slave morality by one group can help feed into another group's hubris and that group would then in turn be acting rapaciously and with extreme entitlement and believing themselves to have zero moral obligation towards others.
I always thought of Ozy Brennan as something of a pretentious intellectual lightweight, who only achieved the status she currently enjoys by bestowing romantic affection on a handful of socially awkward geniuses for whom this was a relatively new experience, and who were so pathetically grateful for the favour that they were only too eager to allow her to ride their coattails for years, despite having very little of meaning or substance to contribute.
However, the observation that, in trying to minimize the harm and offense you cause you're optimising for being a dead person, is a genuinely penetrating insight, and my respect for her has grown significantly. When people talk about her, that should be in her greatest hits, not her incoherent rambling about the trans experience and "cis by default".
I've heard the same argument from radical environmentalists who (optimistically) say that it's not enough to just reduce your harm, you need to be better than a corpse and actually help the environment. Pesimistically they use it as a dogwhistle to call for people to commit eco terrorism.
Why should your freedom of speech trump a trans person’s right not to be offended?” Newman asked. Peterson, ever the gentleman, answered the question without guffawing: “Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive. I mean, look at the conversation we’re having right now. You’re certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth. Why should you have the right to do that? It’s been rather uncomfortable.”
Newman misdirected: “Well, I’m very glad I’ve put you on the spot.” But Peterson pursued: “Well, you get my point. You’re doing what you should do, which is digging a bit to see what the hell is going on. And that is what you should do. But you’re exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me, and that’s fine. More power to you, as far as I’m concerned.”
I can certainly see parallels, but I think the idea that by making yourself so small you're approximating being a dead person is a unique and surprising framing which is absent from the argument Peterson made here.
I would also like to use the same disclaimer here.
I’m an expert on Nietzsche (I’ve read some of his books), but not a world-leading expert (I didn’t understand them). So take all of this as a riff on the concept, rather than a guide to Nietzsche’s original intent.
In my interpretation of slave morality vs master morality is a matter of being passive with your values vs being active with your values. To become the superman you want to actively decide what is important for you and live accordingly despite norms and structures of society. In a way consumerism is a slave morality, you buy your values to show off for others. And in a way Andrew Tate talks Master morality but he is just a Slave when buying a car to show the trappings of success. That is why there is the example of the MAGA Republicans as having Slave morality, most of them have just passively adopted the opinions of their tribe. Then there there are the woke tribe doing the same, passive values virtue signaled with the subtlety of throwing a brick at your face. Slaves locked in eternal conflict as we know as the Culture War.
To become the superman you want to actively decide what is important for you and live accordingly despite norms and structures of society. In a way consumerism is a slave morality, you buy your values to show off for other
How are you supposed to find values purely by yourself, with no influence from society? At most you could say, someone is just following their genes and brute instincts like an animal, devoid of all social consciousness. At worst's like asking for some sort of pure "free will" that is not influenced by anything, a causeless cause. It just seems like an impossible ideal that no on could possibly live up to.
I didn't write anything about creating values ex nihilo, the point was slave morality is the passive values that is foisted upon the masses and never questioned. This forum is a rejection of slave morality essentially because the purpose is to come here and discuss our values, not come up with new ones but make our values more well grounded and well though out.
Not to say anything about your wider point, but just because I'm seeing this everywhere and this is the first comment currently: the Superman is not the same as the man of master morality. Master morality is not the morality of the Superman. The Superman is beyond both and transvalues both, though to us in a slave-moral society he would look comparatively masterly by contrast.
Yes, thank you for the precision that my language lacked. But yes master morality and the transformation to superman requires being active, so they look masterly to the slaves because they are passive.
“Note to unattached liberal women above 40: you are ugly hags who have lost your chance with men and all your eggs have dried up and nobody will ever value you anymore, you should either beg for some fat alcoholic guy to take you in since that’s the only man you can get, or resign yourself to being a cat lady growing old with nothing to do but dwell on your regrets and what could have been.”
This bit seemed both out of place and oddly unremarked upon. How low does the total fertility rate have to go before this level of shaming becomes prosocial?
How low can they go? This is one of the few places in modern society where true Darwinism shines through. At some point, we've selected for the people whose reproductive drive is strong enough to overcome the hurdles presented to it by the modern world. At that point, rates go up.
Shame only has utility for steering behavior. You don’t shame someone who can no longer modify their behavior (40 and no children), you shame them only when their behavior is malleable. For this problem, it is prosocial to shame young people who don’t settle down, so that they modify their behavior in the relevantly prosocial way. (You can also make them afraid of not settling down, which is distinct from shame, and you can heap praise and respect on those who do settle down, which would be purely positive reinforcement; or you can make them desire it through the awareness of contingent rewards, which is what we used to do through female-centric media and rituals, but contingent reinforcers compete with each other — you can’t desire girlmom and girlboss at the same time, sorry).
The discourse on shame in America is so confused that it’s hard to even talk about it objectively. But shame is just the felt sensation of not meeting a social standard, and it occurs as a necessary consequence wherever there is a social standard. There is no social standard without esteem and shame working together to modify behavior. This is obfuscated in mainstream discussions, where one day a person might complain about “shame culture” (a nonsensical term), and the next day they take to social media specifically to shame a petty social infraction, like cutting in line or a gross Tinder message. What we mean by shaming is the expressed disapproval at someone else’s actions explicitly or implicitly, which (by the way) can only induce shame when the recipient is actually tied in some way to a social group. A homeless person probably can’t shame you, because they don’t matter to you, but a peer can, and a boss can even more. If shame discourse were an Olympic sport America would have the most gold medals in gymnastics right now.
Shame only has utility for steering behavior. You don’t shame someone who can no longer modify their behavior (40 and no children), you shame them only when their behavior is malleable.
Society is not a two-person game. Shaming those who have made bad, but irreversible choices also acts as an exemplar to those who have not yet made the bad choice by acting as a counterweight to whatever benefits the bad choice appears to bring. Pour encourager les autres actually works in some circumstances.
Does shame really work? I see it come up over and over from a certain subset of posters. They seem to earnestly believe shame works. That if we shame people they will change.
But every time I try to shame someone into changing they just get defensive or go into an avoidant spiral or start self flagellating, none of which consist of the actual behavioral change I wish to engender.
What does seem to work is getting close to them, understanding their problems, earning their trust, helping them to see how their faults are hurting them, entering their control loop, and actively helping them to positively reconstruct themselves. This is hard. So I can see why it can be tempting to jump to the much simpler sounding solution of making them feel bad until they change.
But I suspect that even in shame cultures, the shame is correlative, not causative. It's the stern standard for a specific form of excellence and the availability of social tech that leads to that excellence that changes people in those cultures. The shame emotion itself seems like it can jolt you into realizing you need to change if you didn't know, but it seems unfit for providing sustained motive force towards personal change.
I can’t imagine any scenario of social negative evaluation which does not come with shame, so in my interpretation shame is literally the feeling of negative evaluation by others. It can occur at the micro scale, like if you were to eat a coworker’s lunch because of carelessness, you would feel shame commensurate with how annoying that is for your coworker. If someone didn’t feel shame at that, it would mean that they don’t actually care / haven’t sympathized in their coworker’s inconvenience. An absence of shame means an absence of responsiveness to negative social evaluation. In that sense it’s a necessary part of social learning.
every time I try to shame someone into changing they just get defensive or go into an avoidant spiral
If your friend were talking too loudly in a movie theater, and you told him, he would feel shame (small, briefly), and then correct his behavior, no? That isn’t shaming, but there’s a standard which induces shame. The shame doesn’t last long, but it is memorable so that we remember not to do that thing again. People who don’t feel shame are more liable to repeat social mistakes.
But re: spiraling, I think in some cases shame goes awry and people feel too much shame or feel shame at the wrong thing. Is that kind of what you are referring to? These can be complicated but I don’t know what kind of problem you’re talking about.
The shame emotion itself seems like it can jolt you into realizing you need to change if you didn't know, but it seems unfit for providing sustained motive force towards personal change
If you were to consider shouting out loud at a professor during a lecture, what would you feel? Shame and embarrassment (small shame). That’s actually what prevents you from even considering doing that, though. It’s an instinctive “this is wrong and it’s not even worth thinking about”. It’s not about “living in shame” or anything, which is a disorder. But if promiscuity as an action is negatively evaluated in a culture then it would lead to shame in the person doing it and hence would modify their behavior. An example of this is maybe: in some countries, the age of consent is 18, but in others it is 17. so a 21yo with a 17yo in one country would result in immense shame, but zero shame in a different country. The only difference is the negative evaluation of others, not anything objective.
Mmm. I think our conversation has thus-far been ambiguous. I think English is natively poor at distinguishing 'felt' and 'functional' emotion.
When I refer to shame the emotion, I'm referring to a sort of sharp painful valence that feels a bit like being stabbed.
Regret feels wider, a slower more manageable burn that feels like its seeping through me and performing some sort of backprop operation in my psyche.
Then there's Compassion. Compassion feels more like a slow euphoria, this feeling is associated with modeling the internal structures of a targeted person or object (or I would label it something else, valence be damned) and then the euphoria is blended with the valence predicted by the model of the target. (The euphoria of knowing persists, but I simultaneously feel the target's emotions.)
Embarrassment refers to a valence that isn't even negative. It's a fast euphoria and feeling of increased bloodflow to the cheeks. Sometimes it is accompanied by a sort of panic, which feels stabby in a similar way to shame. But the embarrassment itself is a positive emotion.
So when another person tells me that they are in pain because of something I have done... Mechanistically my mind seems to take the steps of feeling regret, simultaneously looking at the person being unhappy in my model of their present and happier in my simulation of their future, feeling compassion for that future instance of them, and letting that vision flow into the present as my regret changes me.
If I overuse the shame valence, I end up in a state of chronic pain, which is what I believe I am seeing in many other people when they are subjected to shaming. The regret valence too, grows agitated if it's chronically recurring (and justly so. If it's chronically recurring I am chronically doing something wrong and pain grows as a sort of wake up call). But regret can be repeated more often as long as my higher order processes are judging it to be effective. The compassion valence however, is much more sustainable, largely pleasurable, and seems to cause me to become more extroverted the more I use it. Yet it still allows for the similar behavioral shifts in similar contexts. (and can also be used in contexts without regret, such as helping others with pain that I am not the cause of.)
If I imagine shouting out loud to a professor... well I do remember feelings of shame from my own college experience. These were largely damaging though, as I also felt them regarding the prospect of getting questions wrong or raising my hand or saying anything during class whatsoever and they majorly inhibited my ability to participate in lectures.
Looking back and imagining the scenario anew however... I'm sitting in class, the idea to shout at/to the professor spontaneously arises... and... I find the idea funny. Laughable. A vibrant euphoria that feels like a vibrating diaphragm. Then the next thing that happens is I start contemplating what the effects of shouting would be and whether the tradeoffs would be justified in the specific scenario. It would seem that Humor has been slotted into where shame used to be in this social script, and is serving the same purpose of interrupting my thought-flow enough to prevent me from spontaneously shouting during a lecture, while enabling a more productive follow up strategy than the stabby feeling of shame permits.
When I refer to shame the emotion, I'm referring to a sort of sharp painful valence that feels a bit like being stabbed
Perhaps this is shame at its strongest, but there must also be a smaller shame, right? I'm pretty sure smaller shame is just embarrassment. I don’t think embarrassment is typically coded as a "positive emotion". People want to flee being embarrassed. When they talk about their least favorite memories of the week, it will be memories of embarrassment. To me, someone is embarrassed if they leave the bathroom with toilet paper on the bottom of their shoe. Because of this experience, they will double-check their shoes next time, because the shame is mildly painful and memorable. If instead they left the bathroom and entered an important business meeting and embarrassed their team, that transforms into a more serious shame. Sometimes this is colloquially expressed as “being mortified”. This shame may lead them to double-check not just the bottom of their shoes but how they generally approach their appearance and conduct. The shame they feel is the salience that they have damaged their social identity. We can go even stronger: the strongest shame is something like a DUI resulting in a death. This should be an extreme amount of shame that ought to result in a traditional “prayer and fasting”: loss of appetite, no desire to give oneself pleasure, and a natural speaking out and expression of regret and self-hated. But even here, the shame is still instrumental: even a DUI homicide offender should not live in shame in perpetuity, but should have some weeks or months of it and then move on in a forgiven state.
I find the idea funny. Laughable. A vibrant euphoria that feels like a vibrating diaphragm. Then the next thing that happens is I start contemplating what the effects of shouting would be and whether the tradeoffs would be justified in the specific scenario.
Surely this is not an efficient and adapted mindset? This means that if you were bored and wanted a laugh, you would consider ruining the vibe of the classroom. And then you have to do a bunch of mental processes to weigh whether your laugh is worth the negatives. Shame is extremely beneficial in place of this cognitive operation because it immediately induces a social conformity that doesn’t require cognitive operations. Now that’s not always good — sometimes we want to override instinctive shame — but where manners are concerned and where young people are concerned it’s great because it saves our cognitive energy. Imagine if in every social context you had to manually weigh the costs and benefits: do I cut in line here? Do I insult a friend there? Etc. If we have experienced shame before then we know not to do these things without abstract cognition.
So, I've been reflecting on this for a couple of days. My introspection has let me to a few things.
I agree with you that the toilet paper on shoe scenario is a scenario where even I might describe it as "I was embarrassed". In terms of my earlier breakdown of felt emotions though- What I feel in those situations is what I call shame. What my earlier breakdown was referring to as embarrassment is more- the glowy feeling of a cute person flirting with you, or of being seen and safe and vulnerable. But I think we can set this valence aside. It seems to be a separate emotion. I suspect these are fully different occasionally correlated things both called 'embarrassment', and only the one you are describing is really relevant to our discussion of the merits of shame in society.
Looking back on times when embarrassing (in your sense) things have happened to me... they were rather devastating. They felt like being stabbed. And- I find that these experiences have often wound up swept into my shadow. For much of my life I didn't have the emotional management tech to emotionally defuse those memories. I recall a rather materially trivial event, where during some social banter I mixed up the words 'quirky' and 'kinky'. Materially, it was laughed off by the group within seconds, but it stuck disproportionately in my psyche as a painful event that I couldn't think about.
This conversation with you has allowed me to access some other similar memories and defuse the strength of their valence. So thank you.
So- having considered this these last days- I don't necessarily think shame is bad, but I do think that in order for shame to do the work we want it to in society, the subjects of that shame need to know what to do with it. In so-called shame cultures, I expect there's a much better scaffolding for making sure people know what to do with this stabbing feeling, how to regulate it to a useful magnitude, and how to respond to it optimally. And even then... Japan still produces a stream of NEETs, many of which seem to be suffering this over-sensitivity to shame. In America- shame seems like even more of a crapshoot...
I conjecture that any "just add more shame" solution is an oversimplification. A society also needs a refined zeitgeist around how to use shame in order for the effects of adding more to be positive.
As for whether I would ruin the vibe of the classroom in my hypothetical, I might if this were my first rodeo. I don't think Shame is necessary for me to learn from my mistakes there though. The things that I labeled 'compassion' and 'regret' can serve a similar purpose. (though, perhaps they are related to the weaker forms of shame that you posit). Part of the reason that the idea of shouting at the class is funny is because it is unexpected for my mind to output it as an option. My subconscious has already learned structures and biases towards certain classes of thoughts, and this 'yell in lecture' thought is out of distribution and somewhat absurd. But- it's not shame that stops me from thinking it (at least in the present. perhaps it's meaningful to posit a form of 'shadow' or 'dark' shame in the negative space where my mind doesn't go). And- if I were bored I have other tools for that. I can just hallucinate pleasure. I suspect that I can hallucinate emotions more wholly than most people in general... and that this is responsible both for my ability to wirehead just by imagining pleasure- and my ability to have traumatic emotional flashbacks to trivial situations.
In terms of weighing the costs and benefits in every social situation- I think you are correct. Many of my social algorithms do slow down my ability to respond in social situations. But in our current environment that is merited. Taking 10 seconds to respond to a situation really isn't a problem except in a high speed competitive environment. And neither high trust socializing nor deciding when to speak out in a lecture are high speed competitive environments. It's good to play war games sometimes to stay sharp. But outside of that it seems better to take one's time.
"shame culture" is a technical term of anthropology where it refers to a culture where people judge their own actions through the lens of "what will other people think of me if I do this" rather than through the lens of law or morality. Like most confusing technical terms, this is not nonsense if you understand the technical meaning. America profoundly isn't a shame culture in this sense.
If "shame culture" is being used by very online people to refer to a culture with a lot of social shaming, then that is dumb and may be nonsensical to boot. But that isn't something I have come across.
Shame only has utility for steering behavior. You don’t shame someone who can no longer modify their behavior (40 and no children), you shame them only when their behavior is malleable. For this problem, it is prosocial to shame young people who don’t settle down, so that they modify their behavior in the relevantly prosocial way.
These seem related to each other. Young people who don't settle down eventually become 40 years old, and many of them don't have children due to not settling down. If such people are shamed, then young people have an incentive to avoid growing up to become one of those people.
You’re imagining something like “24yo woman witnesses 40yo being shamed and doesn’t want that to happen to them”, but there’s a better and more accurate reinforcement structure to put in place. 24yo woman don’t put themselves in social contexts where they see the social shame of 40yos because of how age-specific social contexts are, and humans are bad at making 15-year plans, so even if we enacted that plan it wouldn’t work, and that’s implying “shame every older childless woman always” is an acceptable amount of pain administration for prosocial result. We can just shame the 24yos whose lifestyle deters them from fertility, which winds up promoting a lifestyle which is pro-fertility. We don’t have to shame the 40yo at all; when they turn 40, we can completely stop promoting the fertility behavior with shame, because by that point it’s too late. People care most about immediate social pride, rather than what happens when they are 40.
It’s like with shaming bad students. You can shame a bad student because you want to promote study habits so they get the best job they can. Shaming their poor habits is beneficial and for their greater good. But shaming people whose occupation you deem inferior would be sociopathic, even if it had the byproduct of (in theory) promoting good study habits among poor students. This relates broadly to the concept of forgiveness and mercy, which I suppose is very apropos the article…
Society actively maintains a heavy dose of smoke-and-mirrors around the beauty-value-fertility tradeoff. It might not be deliberate, and more an emergent property of our civilization. But, the degree of obfuscation is mind-boggling.
Childbirth transforms a woman's body, yet before-after images are nigh impossible to find. Vaginal tearing is the norm (9/10) during childbirth and never mentioned. The impact of breast feeding on a woman's permanent beauty/perceived value is never part of the breast-feeding conversation. Childbirth comes at a heavy cost, despite what you believe, this cost is hidden away in a box.
Note: maternal mortality has cratered in the last few decades, but our civilization evolved in an era where child-birth was indeed a woman's 9-11 / Vietnam. She signed up for a 9 month deployment, and god only knows if she'd come back unscathed or at all.
We can't speak the truth, because truth leaks from both sides. DINK couples & spinsters help maintain the peace out of politeness, and married-couples reciprocate. Once the 'shaming is okay' pandoras box is open, we have no clue how the spinsters will respond.
All societies operate under polite fictions. It may seem redundant, but they're lindy. Abolish them with great caution.
My 2050-2100 prediction:
Embryo selection, Crispr and mechanical wombs will be figured out.
Fertility will recover. The tech will spread like wild-wire, becoming the prominent form of childbirth. Once the negative risk of childbirth is eliminated, the spinster-shaming will begin at earnest.
In the process, we will lose our humanity. A woman's brain changes after pregnancy. Mothers have been the gatekeepers of all humanity since time eternal. Once women stop undergoing pregnancy, a new type of motherhood will emerge, and with it, a new type of humanity.
If schools instilled the fear of growing up to be childless and dying alone with the same vigor that they instill the fear of not going to college and working at McDonald’s one’s whole life, I suspect there would be more families started.
I don't think my teachers ever told me to go to college by telling me I would die alone and friendless regretting my every life choice, but we may have gone to different schools.
I'll offer another take, from what I think was my first AAQC over at the old motte, a further interpretation of Master/Slave Morality, the Perks of Being a Wallflower theory, the Jocks vs the Emo Kids, from my review of the Abercrombie and Fitch documentary White Hot from Netflix. I'm going to quote the old comment, then expand on it in the context of SA's essay here.
How do you read an interview headlined "youth, sex and casual superiority” with quotes like "In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” And not think of Nietzche. How do you look at the displays of beefcake male nudes and hear Bruce Weber talk about restoring the aesthetic glory of Classical Greece, and not think of Friedrich’s modern interpreter BAP? A&F’s aesthetic was to sell the image of the Blonde Beast, in the literal and philosophical senses. They sold the fantasy of youth, strength, vigor, and total lack of self-reflection; a total spontaneity of desire and the satisfaction of that desire through action. Their marketing tried to use Nietzche’s idea of the natural tendency of the healthy and beautiful and vigorous to self-determine what is cool, by creating an artificial Aristocracy of models and images, then hiring cool local kids as representatives, which then co-opted the locals. And how do you watch the haters without thinking “pure ressentiment all the way down.” The grand narrative is of an upper class which set its own standards, and a lower class which sought to eliminate the right of the upper class to set its own values if it excluded the lower class.
...
Overall, it was a fascinating piece, especially the coverage of the aesthetic of beauty and sex that they built. The core question for me is this: Was the feeling that people got from buying and wearing the clothing worth the costs, both economic and moral, that we paid for them? By creating the brand and the feeling, A&F provided value. One talking head on the doc, who would later be a plaintiff suing A&F for discrimination, said she had one A&F shirt which she wore as often as she could to every party. Clearly that had some value for her, and it was created by the very brand-building discrimination she herself would later decry. Is that value redeeming, or is it bad in and of itself, a false happiness that must of necessity lead to more suffering than it is worth?
Not that I'd expect Scott to think about Abercrombie and Fitch a lot, but I think this provides a frame that is a lot more understandable to a modern American or American-adjacent: rather than Master/Slave morality, think of it as Preppy Jock vs Emo Kid conceptions of what is cool. Like ol' Freddy Nietzche we are dealing in archetypes not actualities, these are myths which, like all myths, deal in an imagined past not in our own present.
The archetypal Preppy Jock likes things that he likes, that his friends like, and thinks those things are cool because he and his friends like them. Sports are cool, he's good at them and his friends are good at them, and if some other person is good at them then that person must be cool too. Being rich is cool, having money lets you do cool things. Hooking up with pretty girls is cool. He, and his friends, and the pretty girls he wants to hook up with, all wear A&F, so A&F must be cool. Wanting to be strong and beautiful and admired and have a pretty partner are basic human traits, these desires are inherently humanistic.
The archetypal Emo Kid isn't good at sports, isn't rich, and can't get the pretty girls to make out with him. So he creates his own version of cool where every aspect of the Preppy Jock system is inverted. Sportsball is stupid, jocks are dumb, they'll be working for us nerds some day!. Rich kids are arrogant and cruel, and because they have everything handed to them they don't really build character or know the real world. He obviously lusts after the pretty girls too, but they aren't into him, and the entire corpus of Emo love songs is largely built around the fantasy that he, the Nice Guy, would be a better partner than the Jock who actually gets her; hooking up with pretty girls is lame, having deep unfulfilled longing for them which is finally sanctified when consummated in a mega-deep way that the dumb Jocks and Players will never get, the Pretty Girl will finally realize that she really wanted the Emo Kid all along. The Preppy Jocks wear A&F, so A&F is for lame, arrogant, idiots, who pay for overpriced T Shirts. His values are built on negating the values of his bullies.
This example illustrates how it interacts with the classic Barber Pole of fashion to produce some of the contradictions re:Christianity that different commenters have noted. Master morality is what masters like, and it is possible to change what they like, which will then become master morality. A&F was able to get hot teenagers in their clothing, other hot teenagers realized it was the hot teenager thing to do, and without overly self examining purchased A&F. There's nothing inherent to being a jock about wearing loose or tight (or now loose again) jeans from a certain mall brand, but they naturally become part of the story. ((Though I will argue that for aesthetic reasons all WASPy people with decently athletic bodies look best in trad ivy fashions))
Christianity was a religion of slaves, until it became the religion of the masters. At that point, Christianity became master morality. There is a Marxian Base/Superstructure aspect to it. To return to our high school, there is more master morality in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes than in the Wiccan Club, even if the members of the Wiccan Club can successfully offer a lecture about Master Vs Slave Morality in Nietzche and the FCA kids can't.
Which is the final contradiction: talking constantly about Master Morality is often a form of Slave Morality. It is the effort to negate the values of your bullies, to claim that your own values are higher and finer and better than those that oppress you. This goes back to Nietzsche himself, of course. But also stays true in the ACX comment section: the incomparable Walt Bismarck, annoyed at being derided as cruel and weird, proceeded to prove how cruel and weird he was, with his yass-ified AI avatar just being so ridiculous that I can never take anyone who would do that seriously. The kind of people that talk about Master Morality are using the concept as a Slave Morality, as a cope to deal with how downtrodden they actually are. They aren't natural Achilles types, reveling in their own dominance. They are sad losers, talking about the grand conspiracy against them, about how if it weren't for the "Longhouse Ethics" of the world they coulda been a contenda.
“Civil religion” is a surprising place for social justice to end up. Gay pride started at Stonewall as a giant fuck-you to civil society. Homeless people, addicts, and sex workers told the police where they could shove their respectable values.
But there was another major world religion that started with beggars, lepers, and prostitutes, wasn’t there? One that told the Pharisees where to shove their respectable values. One whose founder got in trouble with the cops of his time. One that told its followers to leave their families, quit their jobs, give away all their possessions, and welcome execution at the hands of the secular authorities.
The new faith burst into a world dominated by the religio Romana, the civil religion par excellence. Emperor Augustus had just finished moral reforms promoting all the best values: chastity, family, tradition, patriotism, martial valor. Lavishly dressed procurators and proconsuls were building beautiful marble temples across the known world, spreading the rites with all the pomp and dignity befitting history’s greatest empire.
The problem was, nobody really believed religio Romana anymore. Everyone believed it was important to have all the best values, like chastity and military valor and so on. But nobody took Jupiter very seriously, or thought the Emperor was legitimate in some kind of sacred way.
When the new religion of beggars and lepers encountered the old religion of emperors and philosophers, the latter crumbled. But as Christianity expanded to the upper classes, it started looking, well, upper-class. It started promoting all the best values. Chastity, family, tradition, patriotism, martial valor. You knew the Pope was a good Christian because he lived in a giant palace and wore a golden tiara. Nobody ever came out and said Jesus was wrong to love prostitutes, but Pope Sixtus V did pass a law instituting the death penalty for prostitution, in Jesus’ name. Nobody ever came out and said Jesus was wrong to preach peace, but they did fight an awful lot of holy wars.
I haven't really seen what you describe in the last paragraph. Where I've seen Nietzsche discussed, master morality is usually seen with some sympathy. Personally, I feel like aspects of slave morality as Nietzsche describes it were acting as deep unconscious forces in my psychology that I am very glad to have made conscious to more easily push back against where they are unproductive, and I feel like conversations like these help with that. To manage emotions it helps to be able to identify them, and reading your post I actually felt the ressentiment reading about the jocks, I noticed it, and I let it go. That is not something I used to be able to do so easily.
I think the issue with the jocks and nerds view is by definition you are dealing with youth coming into the world with whatever background they happened to have, and little of their own choices has had an effect on where they are. The question is what happens for the rest of the adult lives of the slave morality kids? Are they doomed, or can they change their outlook? Can someone think themselves into being a master moralist or onto some kind of middle road? I tend to think we have some kind of agency and can alter the course of our lives in some way. Elon Musk takes ketamine for depression, he probably grew up immersed in slave morality and forged some kind of master morality for himself, but still has parts from his childhood that hate himself. That's the kind of complexity that is happening for most people who aren't totally immersed on one side or the other.
I haven't really seen what you describe in the last paragraph. Where I've seen Nietzsche discussed, master morality is usually seen with some sympathy.
Because you're reading it from the guys doing it. I say it goes back to Nietzsche because Nietzsche himself was, well, not a powerful vital warrior aristocrat. I love his work and and what he contributed to the western tradition, but he was a loser. When you read a Nietzschean, and he's not a big powerful dominant successful warrior, there's an element of a kind of jealous undermining of one's real enemies with one's imaginary friends. "Hey, look, you might act like you're better than me, and you might be taller and richer and better looking and have a hotter girl and a bigger bench press, but you ain't shit, because you don't have the real perfect pure master morality you're still a SLAVE maaaaan." There's a lot of that in the more white-identitarian corners of the online right.
I think the issue with the jocks and nerds view is by definition you are dealing with youth coming into the world with whatever background they happened to have, and little of their own choices has had an effect on where they are.
Well we're dealing with myth, not history, but to engage with extending the metaphor...
The question is what happens for the rest of the adult lives of the slave morality kids? Are they doomed, or can they change their outlook? Can someone think themselves into being a master moralist or onto some kind of middle road?
Yes. People do this all the time. It might even be called "maturity" or "growing up." Learning to love the things you love without worrying about others. A lot of it has to do with finding one's space, one's social grouping where one is mature or even dominant at least on occasion. Nerdy hobbies often provide this: the same guy who is a loser at school or work might be a great guild leader in WoW or whatever. So do social organizations: you might be the bottom tier loser at work, but at the Elks lodge everyone knows your name.
I like your framing of it, in real life we all contain both genuine human desire and emotion and ressentiment. In my mind, Elon is both engaging in things he loves for the sake of things he loves, and he is desperate to gain approval from or undermine the values systems of those who hate him. He builds a crazy, insane vanity project like the Cybertruck. But then he's fighting petty internet feuds on Twitter.
Personally, the way I apply this in my everyday life is simple and libertarian: let people enjoy things. People having fun doesn't imply that I must have a take on it. People resenting other people having fun is bad.
I see what you're saying, the far right areas where he is discussed are pretty unknown to me. I wouldn't necessarily characterize Nietzsche as a loser, though. If he hadn't succumbed to sickness as young as he did, he would've been celebrated in his own lifetime and his long, prolific, but isolated journey would have payed off.
I think the loser attitude is putting too much stock in the American high school analysis because the things Nietzsche accomplished aren't valued there, and he would be seen as lesser for basically having a problem with women, something obviously Jay-Z would never have an issue with. But to an adult in the room, hopefully they'd see that Nietzsche's influence and power far exceeds Jay-Z's, along with the metaphorical jocks, to the world's benefit or profound harm depending on which of his disciples you are looking at.
I just think there has to be room for the "sigma male" in the analysis of things, where the truly powerful don't necessarily match the vital youth imagery, a lot of times they are weirdos taking big risks to even the odds in their favor, and if it doesn't pan out in their lifetimes, I'd hope they don't get necessarily lumped in with slave morality unless they were actually expressed ressentiment and were preoccupied with being part of the mob/morality police etc. (which I do think you can still argue Nietzsche was doing himself to a degree, at least with the former)
Don't get me wrong, I've read Nietzsche, I love Nietzsche, but we have to admit that by any standard of Master Morality, Nietzsche was lacking. He never conquered in his lifetime. His tangible achievements more or less crowned at becoming the youngest professor of philology, from which he then lived off disability the rest of his life. Was a lot of this the result of bad luck and disease? Yes, undoubtedly. But equally undoubtedly, the lot of many of the weak, those most Nietzscheans are so willing to throw away as the "superfluous men" from Zarathustra, are the result of bad luck, disease, etc. I don't think I'm being unfair when I call him a loser, he lost.
This is where I think the complication of Master Morality comes in. To defend Nietzsche's life on Nietzsche's own terms, one must reject all tangible evidence of success in favor of talking about forms of success that are totally interior to the individual, that involve a small circle of the also-weak, or that post-date his present day in such a way that they are unknown to his contemporaries. His later reputation, and later published writings, might allow us to judge Nietzsche, but to his contemporaries he was who he was, they had no knowledge that he would be famous in the future. Rejection of all real tangible symbols and signs of worldly success, and the people who hold them, as evil; in favor of a mystical, interior definition of virtue that will pay off after one's death, which is the real definition of the Good. It tracks perfectly to the Christianity that Nietzsche decries as Slave Morality, as the ressentiment of the loser against the beautiful and the strong.
Now, one way to square this circle is to say that Freddy was self aware, that he knew what he was saying, and we're meant to read his work with a certain degree of irony. We're meant to see and to know that the man telling us to honor strength had none, that the man telling us to be suspicious of those who reject the value determinations of the great and the powerful is telling us this while in the act of rejecting the value determinations of the great and the powerful! We're not meant to wholesale adopt the positions he argues so vehemently, but to consider and synthesize them into our worldview. This is my preferred view.
Another is to attempt to categorize Masters in such a way that there is a carve-out for the writer. Masters are the brave and powerful Achilles, plus little ol' me. This strikes me as a kind of mystical cope, exactly the kind of thing that Slave Morality is made out of, a transvaluation of values by which earthly success becomes a sign of future damnation. Just as the Christian peasant says: being rich is bad because the rich are greedy and spoiled and sinful, he ain't making it through the eye of that needle! The Nietzschean loser says: being successful is bad, because it means you're conforming to the Longhouse Ethics and not striking out on your own, I may be a loser today but in the future I'll be remembered and the winners will not.
P.S.: I'll admit to not knowing the term Sigma male? Could you define it for me?
I think the contradictions only arise if you ignore the good things Nietzsche says about slave morality (I’ll have to go digging for quotes but basically it made man "interesting", added depth to his soul and made him more cunning).
Nietzsche spends a lot of time praising master morality because it is the side which needs to be rehabilitated, but the Nietzchean project isn’t about going back to the Vikings. The higher type of aristocratic development he is aiming for is only possible in the man of mixed slave/master heritage, and it’s as much about creative ability and aesthetic sense as anything else – Shakespeare, Goethe and Da Vinci are mentioned as higher men alongside the military geniuses.
I agree! part of it is a rhetorical or philosophical test for the reader! You're meant to read the text and think about the guy talking to you, and examine his extremely persuasive arguments, and say, hey wait let's apply this brilliant analytical framing to his own statements! And that second level of analysis is what frees the reader, takes the reader to the level of someone who can examine the world, rather than one who just accepts what he is told!
I think one should pair Nietzsche with Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground in philosophical study.
I was going to do a post about this essay, but you beat me to it! I agree with most of the other posters here in thinking that Scott fell off significantly after his doxxing and especially after his abandonment of the SlateStarCodex brand; however, it swells my heart to see that he still has the occasional total banger left in him.
When I started getting interested in right-wing/anti-liberal political ideas, it was largely due to my major disillusionment from the progressive mainstream around a handful of issues: race, policing, the gross excesses of feminism, the humorless sanctimony, and the general sense of ugly resentment and spirit of destructive envy I was witnessing.
As I got deeper down the right-wing online rabbit hole, it was only natural to start developing sympathies and framings regarding various other hobbyhorses considered important by the commentators to whom I was constantly exposed; while some of those sympathies stuck and I still endorse them, others are sufficiently divorced from (or even directly at odds with) the reasons I got into this scene in the first place that I’ve had to consciously resist the pressure to toe the line on those issues: pro-Confederate sympathies; rural populist aesthetics and a focus on the issues most salient to downscale heartland whites; hardline anti-abortion sentiments, etc. These are not things that were remotely salient to me initially, and I have no direct skin in any of those games. But when all of the commentary one imbibes about those topics comes from the same catastrophizing perspective, it’s easy to find oneself subconsciously adopting the priorities of others within one’s coalition.
For example, during the recent kerfuffle about the Olympic opening ceremony, I saw the deluge of posts about how it mocked The Last Supper before I even watched the ceremony itself, so I was already primed to be hyper-aware of that interpretation and to be offended/scandalized by the scene in question. I even briefly thought, “You know, this is the kind of thing that makes you sort of believe in demonic forces.” It wasn’t until I really took a step back, sought out some alternate interpretations of the situation, and reflected on what my younger self would have believed, that I had to remind myself, “Wait a minute… I’m not even a Christian. Why would it bother me so much that they’re parodying a centuries-old painting depicting a scene from the life of a man whose central message and ethos I don’t believe in or care about? How have I absorbed the superstitions of people with whom I don’t even agree?”
As the online right continues to polarize and coalesce around two warring poles - Christian theocrats and Nietzchean Vitalists - I find myself increasingly alienated from both factions. I do think the extreme slave morality Nietzche criticizes in Christianity is just plainly present at every level of both the textual basis for the faith and in the behavior and values of the early church and the various saints and martyrs it venerated. The fact that over the course of the next thousand and a half years Christian culture sanded off the most unwieldy and counter-productive aspects of the religion doesn’t change the fact that such a substrate exists within the religion; hence why movements have periodically emerged within Christian and post-Christian societies which have sought to take seriously, and enact in reality, the slave morality core of the faith.
However, Scott is correct that the Vitalists are simply a repellent lot with mostly execrable values. Glorifying pirates and barbarian warlords is just a total moral and spiritual dead end. If you sympathize more with the Viking savages who looted Lindisfarne Abbey than you do with the monks whom they massacred, I don’t think you and I are on the same team. I have no desire to live amongst Nietzchean übermenschen, nor to compete with them, nor to be ruled by them. Achilles is not an admirable man, and I don’t want my children to be like him when they grow up.
It brings me joy to see Scott defend the ideology that brought us the World’s Fair and the moonshot. When I read writers like Dave Greene indict the Enlightenment - and to attempt to establish this stance as a non-negotiable element of what it means to be “truly right-wing”, I have to wonder why I’m still wasting my time taking some of these people seriously at all. The Enlightenment did not, in fact, inherently contain the seeds of its own inevitable destruction. Like Christianity, the Enlightenment has meant many different things to many different people, and had contained many competing strains with mutually-incompatible goals. The men who organized the World’s Fair were, at least nominally, Christian; however, there’s a very good reason why they so gleefully incorporated so much explicitly Hellenistic/Greco-Roman imagery as well. (A syncretic synthesis of Hellenism and pseudo-Christianity, shaving off all of the obsolete cruft, dangerous extremes, and degenerate strains of both traditions describes the strain of the Enlightenment I’d like to RETVRN to.)
And of course the greatest project of the Progressive era - the great unrealized dream, the one whose untimely abandonment and subsequent repudiation by every extant political coalition in the Western world - could still be the one that truly rescues humanity and wholly redeems the Enlightenment: I’m talking, of course, about eugenics. Any right-winger who hates and fears eugenics is no ally of mine. Nor, though, is any right-winger who idolizes the rapacious animal morality of the warlord and the mafioso - the sacker of cities and the enemy of peace. One day we will have Hellenistic-inspired Art Deco megacities on other planets, and it will be thanks to the Promethean spirit of industry and science, directed toward the glorification of humanity - not to the self-fulfilling doomsaying of the collapsitarian online right, nor to the pathologically weakness-worshiping left, nor to the amoral scumbags of the Walt Right.
Why would it bother me so much that they’re parodying a centuries-old painting depicting a scene from the life of a man whose central message and ethos I don’t believe in or care about? How have I absorbed the superstitions of people with whom I don’t even agree?
"I shouldn't assist in the defense of those people who aren't 100% on my team" has been a popular philosophy throughout history. Usually briefly.
We call the tactic that exploits that philosophy "Divide and Conquer", but if you drill down into the details it's amazing how many instances could have been better described as "Watch Them Divide Themselves, and Conquer".
The trouble is identifying when a group is N% on your team and choosing a reasonable threshold of N, of course. There are groups of Christians who would shun you socially and economically for your differences if they had enough power (at which point their most zealous kids would start pushing the Overton Window back into "arrest the blasphemer" territory), and there are diametrically opposed groups of Christians who would literally turn the other cheek if you hit them (which sounds like a friendly group of neighbors to have, until you realize they won't assist in your forceful defense when a threat starts hitting you), but there are still other groups of Christians who can actually play Tit For Tat correctly when it's called for. At one point the third group was so numerous as to be able to build modern civilization; it might be reasonable to decry the mockery of any who remain, for old times' sake, even if you can't find reason to decry it on general principles.
the extreme slave morality Nietzche criticizes in Christianity is just plainly present
Do elucidate, because it seems like at least one of the following is true:
People making this criticism just have moral intuitions that I find alien and abhorrent.
People criticizing what they call "slave morality" can't keep track of what the thing they are trying to criticize even is.
People claiming that Christianity exemplifies "slave morality" have a ludicrous caricature of Christianity in their head, and hate that rather than the real thing.
I'd previously assumed that it was just a matter of (1), but from Scott's post and some of the commentary on it I suspect that the others are at play here.
Christianity praises (and frequently venerates as Saints) radical ascetics (even if they don't do anything, and just hold out their asceticism as an example to others, like the Stylites), passive victims of persecution (Crusaders who die in battle are not considered martyrs, randos picked up in Roman persecutions of Christians are), and people who make great sacrifices in order to support ineffective charity (like Mother Theresa). From a vitalist perspective, all of these groups are Losers.
Christianity doesn't condemn Will to Power per se, but it tends to reserve its strongest condemnation for the vices which are correlated with it like pride, avarice, and wrath.
I think the core Nietzschean claim that Christianity embodies slave morality is obviously correct. Given the problems with societies that tell every man (or even just every aristocrat) he ought to be a master, I don't see why this is a problem. Even if we take on master morality religion at its own game, the military conflict between Christian civilisation and Islamic "civilisation" had been back-and-forth with no sign of an ultimate winner for over 1000 years by the time we invented the machine gun and settled the issue.
If the only thesis here is that Christianity has different values than pagan warrior types, this is indeed obvious and not a penetrating insight. In that case I have no idea why any of this is worth discussing at all, and the language about "master morality" and "slave morality" is nothing more than vacuous rhetorical dressing invented out of sophistry and a dislike of the Christian values. Maybe that's what it is; I don't have a very high opinion of Nietzsche or his sycophants.
On the other hand, all the talk of "slave morality" being based on resentment and cutting down tall poppies and exalting incapacity to do things seems to suggest some additional substance to the characterization; the problem is that this additional substance does not describe Christianity at all! If you read what people actually said about ascetics, you will find that they are frequently described as disciplined athletes (this is literally what the word means), or as fighting battles against demons; they are lauded not for sitting around doing nothing, but for successfully pursuing explicit, positive values; the physical deprivations of the ascetic are not ends to themselves, nor suffered because they must be, but are deliberately and with great difficulty enacted in service of spiritual goals. And similarly the martyrs are held up as examples not for their bad luck in becoming victims, but for their willingness to endure torture or death rather than give up and renounce their faith. "From a Vitalist perspective, all of these groups are Losers" is just another way of saying that they have radically different values; it's not a point in favor of the Christian values being different in the way that is being claimed.
If the only thesis here is that Christianity has different values than pagan warrior types, this is indeed obvious and not a penetrating insight. In that case I have no idea why any of this is worth discussing at all, and the language about "master morality" and "slave morality" is nothing more than vacuous rhetorical dressing invented out of sophistry and a dislike of the Christian values. Maybe that's what it is; I don't have a very high opinion of Nietzsche or his sycophants.
FWIW, I agree with you on this point - Nietzsche (like a lot of right-wing edgelords) found civilisation enervating and was trying to make an emotional appeal for barbarism by using the loaded terms "master morality" and "slave morality". But I read your previous post as arguing that Nietzsche was wrong to tie Christianity to what he calls "slave morality" and I call "civilised behaviour". Whereas I think Nietzsche was right that Jesus killed Superman (or more strictly outcompeted him memetically rendering him irrelevant), but wrong about this being a bad thing.
War is who we are, who we have always been. War is to men what motherhood is to women. You may not like it, you certainly wouldn't enjoy war..but nevertheless your brain would keep telling you 'this is it'.
I don't like violent lunatics, but there's undeniable glory in defeating such.
Vitalism of that type depicted in Homer is v completely obsolete.
Modern war requires entirely different philosophical/moral approaches.
And war is now way too expensive to be anything but a last resort.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No_one 1mo ago
War is to men what motherhood is to women.
The vast majority of soldiers who are able to speak on the issue have said that war is hell. The vast majority of mothers have said the opposite about motherhood.
I think this is partly because modern warfare is a lot less like a fistfight and a lot more like crawling through the landscape for weeks knowing you might die any second. It's also because the anti-war soldiers are very strongly signal-boosted. Everyone has Sassoon and that gas poem shoved down their throat at school, nobody gives you Storm of Steel or George MacDonald Fraser.
A high-ranking officer once told me privately that you have to keep a close lid on soldiers because young men very much enjoy killing things and blowing stuff up and you can lose control of them very easily.
Isn't there an obvious sense that no Matt Yglesias is not a Nietzschean superman, in the same way that a communist drill sergeant is not a Nazi?
The drill sergeant might wear jackboots, he might inculcate strict discipline, he's part of a hierarchy in a large and powerful Army, he's part of a war machine with vast ambitions to rewrite the old order (and hey he might've put some people in an unmarked grave in Eastern Europe). But he is turning all these things that we associate with Nazism to the purpose of communism, the workers revolution, international proletarianism, levelling of distinctions...
Yglesias is using elements of master-morality to strengthen and serve slave morality. Yglesias wants to bring in hundreds of millions of people to the US to cement the current system as it is, to beat America's overseas competitors who might otherwise strain the system to its breaking point. He wants to turn the energies of dissenters to favour the system. There's no compromise, just appreciation for effective tactics.
All this is far too complimentary of mattY. From my POV, he's quite clear. He knows he is a partisan and a liar. He just happens to like redistribution and progressivism. So the rest of what he does is lying for those ends. He has become quite explicit in this recently.
It is one hell of a performance of intellectual gymnastics to turn someone who spends all day tweeting, reporting people for minor traffic violations, and shilling his substack, into a Nietzschean Superman.
If I may be permitted a tangent, I always had a problem with the idea of master/slave morality purely on historical terms - Nietzsche's archetypes of them are simply invented, largely based on stereotypes, and don't correspond to any real history. If you're determined to push the Christian-slave aspect, you have to ignore not only what Christian martyrs or ascetics thought they were doing, but also the vast numbers of other committed, deeply pious Christians doing stereotypically 'master' things. If I try to think of a person who behaved like a stereotypical 'master', the best example to spring to mind is actually Cortes, and more generally conquistadors, and those are all the products of a Christian civilisation, frequently using explicitly Christian justifications for their actions. We may question Cortes' piety, but we can't do the same for every crusader or king or warlord who seems to fit the same bill - Charlemagne seems to have been sincerely pious, after all.
But more importantly than that, the master morality model fails to accurately describe or predict even pagan Greek aristocrats. If you read Homer somewhat more attentively, you'll notice that the Mycenaean warrior class was, far from being bold amoral power-seekers disregarding any law or constraint in favour of their own desires, intensely concerned with duty, obligation, and right. Their concepts of obligation weren't necessarily ones we would find sympathetic today, but they absolutely exist, and moreover are extremely communally oriented. That's the common theme in Odysseus' voyages - he is repeatedly offered bliss or the achievement of all the world's desires (the Lotus-eaters, Calypso, etc.), and he rejects these because he is nothing outside of the ordered community, the polis, which gives his life meaning. Without the community of which he is a member he is literally nobody, to the extent that he uses that as a pseudonym in the story (and it's also why he recklessly boasts of his name to Polyphemus afterwards; he must place himself within a community, identifying himself as a man with a history, reputation, family, and so on: "Say that Odysseus, sacker of cities, Laertes' son, a native of Ithaca, maimed you!"). Likewise when he returns to Ithaca, when he conceals his name, he appears a poor beggar, because that is all he can be without the name that locates him within the community.
So even the Bronze Age Greek warlord isn't this Nietzschean stereotype. He may be violent, glory-hungry, desperate for achievement, etc., but none of these amount to being unconstrained or amoral.
I also feel obligated to note that the motivations of the Greek warrior aristocrat are actually parallelled pretty well in later Christian and chivalric literature - the readiness to use violence to defend one's personal honour, obsession with family feuds, devotion to one's family, reverence for hospitality and social obligation, and especially the urgent need to accumulate glory to one's name through public deeds. It doesn't even need to be violent (pagan emperors and Christian kings both patronised the building of monuments, in order to bring shine to their name), but in the case of literature it often is - Achilles is desperate to go to the Trojan War to win glory, and in the same way, Yvain picks fights and is desperate to go on the tournament circuit. For a noble warrior class, glory and reputation are the fundamental concerns.
Now it can be a bit more complicated than that, and both traditions but especially the Christian do problematise this desperation somewhat. The shade of Achilles appears in the Odyssey and confesses that he would rather be alive, even if a poor slave, than one of the glorious dead, in a way that seems to cast some doubt on his earlier values. Likewise for a character like Yvain, that glory-lust is presented as a character flaw, which leads to his downfall and he must redeem himself through anonymous service before finally reclaiming his name.
Anyway, this is not to say that there aren't any shifts or transformations in the way people thought about morality through the rise of Christianity, and it's true that Christianity prizes compassion and humility in a way that the ancient Greeks did not, or at least did not explicitly. But I think Nietzsche projects his master/slave distinction on to them in a way that does not accurately describe either world.
I want to stick a fork in the outlet here: famous writings such as Odysseus are probably best understood to depict not how things were, but how things were modeled, saying more about an ancient collective aspirational conception of self than as how we'd parse their society if we were alongside them.
Oh, certainly. To the extent that Homeric heroes model the values of Mycenaean elite society, they do so aspirationally. I think the overall thesis survives that, though.
I think what you are saying is mostly true; however, people like Charlemagne and Cortez exist in a Christianity that was reimagined by Germanic warrior aristocrats after the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, something you also saw earlier with Constantine, an Illyrian warrior aristocrat.
The same is true, from the other direction, with Homer, who is 'writing' about these bronze age warrior elites in a post-collapse iron age society that has largely moved away from that old model of aristocratic chariot riding warriors, into a form of warfare and social organization that is more broad based and reliant on large numbers of middle class hoplites.
I also feel obligated to note that the motivations of the Greek warrior aristocrat are actually parallelled pretty well in later Christian and chivalric literature - the readiness to use violence to defend one's personal honour, obsession with family feuds, devotion to one's family, reverence for hospitality and social obligation, and especially the urgent need to accumulate glory to one's name through public deeds.
This is again, just because Christianity was Germanized. The German warrior elites kept doing their warrior things, things inherited from their proto-Indo-European ancestors and culture they share, because of it, as well as the influence of the Indo-Iranian, chariot riding elites, that so influenced both cultures.
There isn't any mystery to why members of an Indo-European warrior caste share similar values and traditions.
I think what you are saying is mostly true; however, people like Charlemagne and Cortez exist in a Christianity that was reimagined by Germanic warrior aristocrats after the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, something you also saw earlier with Constantine, an Illyrian warrior aristocrat.
Charlemagne's ancestors specifically (and famously) converted to Catholic, Chalcedonian Christianity, not one of the sects morphed to the convenience of the Germanic conquerors. They built an enduring connection to the Roman Church and built a church (and empire) at home under the influence and with the assistance of that Church. The Franks were very much orthodox Christians by the time of Charlemagne, unlike their Arian cousins in North Africa and Spain (at least early on, in the latter case).
While a form of Christianity (hard to call it fully formed, though, tbh) did spring up in Charlemagne's time catering to German warrior aristocrats (and their peasant foot soldiers -- Saxon society was complicated, as was Saxon warfighting), it did so in the Saxon lands, aimed at converted the Saxons, not the Franks, who had been Catholic Christians for centuries and centuries by this point.
They built an enduring connection to the Roman Church and built a church (and empire) at home under the influence and with the assistance of that Church.
something you also saw earlier with Constantine, an Illyrian warrior aristocrat.
Chalcedonian Christianity is already a Christianity controlled and morphed by domineering Indo-European warrior aristocrats. The Arian Goths you so despise often fought for Rome under the command of Illyrian commanders.
Arianism wasn't something created by the Goths or Vandals, nor something adopted for any reason other than it was the first Christian faith brought to them. It isn't actually anymore barbaric than regular Christianity, I've seen that claim here a few times and it always confuses me.
My point is that after the Germans took control of the Western world they changed the church from the inside, there wasn't any sudden break in theology, just a change in emphasis.
I think you might be putting too much weight on Germanic descent or identity? As I noted, we have Western European warrior-aristocrats (partially Germanic) behaving substantially similarly to Mycenaean warrior-aristocrats (not Germanic), and if you want I'm perfectly happy to extend the comparison to Chinese or Japanese or Nahua peoples, or really anything else you like. I think there's probably a successful warrior-aristocrat package, so to speak, which recurs even across very different ethnic contexts, and it doesn't descend linearly from a single ur-warrior group so much as it's convergent evolution or natural selection. Samurai have much of the same package despite no connection to any other groups we're considering.
That said, even if you think it's distinctively PIE or Germanic, that doesn't undermine the specific observation, as you grant - that Nietzsche's historical analogies are extremely strained and implausible. Neither Christians nor Greek pagans resemble his caricatures.
I think there's probably a successful warrior-aristocrat package, so to speak, which recurs even across very different ethnic contexts, and it doesn't descend linearly from a single ur-warrior group so much as it's convergent evolution or natural selection.
It could recur without being descended from an original ur package; but, in reality, it did just occur as a package. All horses are descended from proto-Indo-Iranian horses. Horses bred to be used for war in their chariots. This spread throughout Eurasia, horses and chariots together. It could have been invented independently, but it wasn't.
The Greeks and proto-Germans traded very heavily with each other something we have very clear archaeological evidence of. They, especially the Greeks, show heavy influence from the Indo-Iranian groups on the steppe, with certain grave goods found at their sites, and certain gods they worshipped.
The warrior aristocat was a thing created of a certain time and a certain place; and, we know that time and that place. Samurai still rode those horses of Indo-Iranian provenance. They also had contact with eastern steppe people who mostly copied the culture of the Indo-Iranian steppe people.
I don't know how this comment went unreported for seven days, but this account has a bad habit of showing up out of the blue and dropping antagonistic takes and outright troll posts. Based on what went down last time, I'm going to go ahead and just permaban you.
I find the Master v Slave morality discussion not very useful. Which one did the Spartans adhere to? They were selfless and self-subjugating, they did not seek personal glory, they fasted and disciplined themselves, they did not pursue personal riches, and they worked exclusively for the collective Good of Sparta. Amongst themselves they adhered to slave morality, but as a group towards others they adhered to master morality. Why did the Spartans, which the Greco-Roman world esteemed, teach their master soldiers how to be slaves? Because humans are cooperative creatures. If you train humans to be hyper-cooperate then they will dominate other groups. It didn’t matter how many fierce, Superman-y fighters the Celts had; the Romans with their intense training of obedience and selfless cooperation destroyed them.
If you have a group and you are trying to set a standard, there are actually serious problems with making the standard “being the best”. It leads to people being the best at all costs, such as in ways that harm the group; it leads to potentially extreme waste for showboating (Bezos’ yacht); it is not useful for 99% of people who need positive reinforcement yet aren’t the best; it is psychologically damaging to those who fail, depending on the stakes. The proper balance IMO is the sophisticated Christian balance: doing your best to glorify God and glorifying God in the best of others. This means positive reinforcement for all, but no cutthroat competition to be the best SBF or Elizabeth Holmes.
The recreations of the Spartans consisted of feasting, hunting, and making war: their every-day life was too hard. On the whole, however, their state is merely a caricature of the polis; a corruption of Hellas. The breeding of the complete Spartan—but what was there great about him that his breeding should have required such a brutal state!
Nietzsche on the question of obedience:
A man who wills - gives orders to something in himself which obeys or which he thinks obeys. But now observe what is the strangest thing about willing - about this multifaceted thing for which the people have only a single word: insofar as we are in a given case the one ordering and the one obeying both at the same time and as the one obeying, we know the feelings of compulsion, of pushing and pressing, resistance and movement, which habitually start right after the act of will[...]
Nietzsche is a complex and difficult theorist. A general rule for these discussions could go something like: "In cases where the discussion isn't based on an egregious misreading of Nietzsche, an answer to the objection is almost certainly already in Nietzsche." As No_one suggests, it's probably best to think of this as a discussion of a couple pop-Nietzschean terms, and how they've come to be used in ordinary language, rather than a philosophical analysis.
Nietzsche’s evasion isn’t convincing and Sparta continues to be a stumbling block for his philosophy. It was the ideal of a strong and militant people in the ancient world, including those whom Nietzsche idolized. Nietzsche saying the Spartans were too hard (lol) and essentially calling them fake (lmao) makes me lower my opinion of him even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Does he like the Supermen or not? Well, there they are, the fiercest fighters who enslaved others, with a slave morality among themselves.
Nietzsche does not uncritically endorse master morality, or military conquest as an end in itself. Neither a state entirely devoted to master morality, or to military conquest, would be Nietzschean states (to the extent that such a thing is a coherent concept, like with Plato's Republic). The Superman is not just the biggest, baddest Bronze Age warlord - there are higher worlds to conquer.
The next aphorism after the Sparta one:
The political defeat of Greece is the greatest failure of culture; for it has given rise to the atrocious theory that culture cannot be pursued unless one is at the same time armed to the teeth. The rise of Christianity was the second greatest failure: brute force on the one hand, and a dull intellect on the other, won a complete victory over the aristocratic genius among the nations. To be a Philhellenist now means to be a foe of brute force and stupid intellects. Sparta was the ruin of Athens in so far as she compelled Athens to turn her entire attention to politics and to act as a federal combination.
Cooperation is not necessarily a sign of slave morality - individuals in warrior cultures cooperate because it is in their best interest to do so, rather than being quasi-forced to co-operate (primarily through commiseration) by the innate seethe and cope one experiences by being at the bottom of the totem pole. Fasting and discipline may be vital one's greater interest of becoming fit and healthy. In contrast, the modern day's Body Positivity movement is a direct slave moralist reaction to this and to fitness and health in general - it seeks to denigrate the achievements of those who are fit and healthy, deny the effects of their lifestyle on their health and repurpose their lack of Will Save vs Food as an expression of personality.
It is also not the case that a culture (or indeed a person) is entirely one or the other - N said that people and cultures are usually a mix of both in some proportion.
It may make sense for something like fat acceptance, but it loses coherence when you look at Christians in the wild, as OliveTapenade points out above. It’s not enough to get people to cooperate based on what is in their best interest, because an individual’s best interest often conflicts with the group. Once they have riches they may act like Nero, or maybe they realize that their best interest is to defect. It is never in a Japanese Kamikaze pilot’s best interest to fly his plane into a ship rather than surrender, but (were that tactic to work) it would be in Japan’s interest. If cooperation is the ultimate Good in a civilization then it makes sense to “quasi-force” members to develop an extreme and maximal commitment to cooperation, one predicated on dogma and stories and rituals rather than self-benefit.
Christian culture accomplished this well: A loving Messiah teaches loving maxims and standards, based on identifying with your peer as identical to you in worth, and being as prosocial as possible. Because it is a figure in a story it taps into the human instinct of social reciprocation and imitation, rather than logical persuasion. This loving figure suffers a gruesome death unjustly to save you (reminiscent of Plato’s mention of the truly just man being tortured and crucified), which furthers the reciprocation. And there are then rewards of punishment based on your imitation of the figure. This is the most efficient way to turn someone cooperative if done right, because it needs to come from a place of personality and social environment rather than flimsy philosophy.
Also, modern critics like Scott see a story about a self-denying saint and forget that these are the superhero cast of Christianity, not an actual standard that is set for believers. The extreme acts of the Saints are, in practice, a way to jolt a rich person into realizing they should donate a library or fund a school. Because their conduct was so unlivably self-denying, when you remember them you feel an obligation to do your small part. It’s definitely not as simple as “Christianity tells you to sell all your possessions”, which no one does.
Nero also has an even worse reputation in the era of Gibbon that he had in the era of Suetonius because he was particularly associated with early persecution of Christians.
On the other hand, he did murder his own mother...
Honestly, so few people read Nietzsche that the popular idea of 'nietzschean' might be totally off base.
being the best”.
All the examples of being best you give are rich people. I'm pretty sure Greek and Nietzsche's ideas on excellence also accepted greatness in other domains, at the very least power, valour, bravery etc..
Collapsing human value to purely money is a modern afflici..
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
coffee_enjoyer 1mo ago
It didn’t matter how many fierce, Superman-y fighters the Celts had; the Romans with their intense training of obedience and selfless cooperation destroyed them.
Not the Caledonians, or the barbarians of the Teutoburg forest. It is unlikely that those guys were better drilled and more selfless than the Romans.
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Notes -
I find master morality vs slave morality as another unnecessary division because both concepts have flaws and merits and i find it a bad idea to have to choose from one or the other, when the better choice tries to avoids the flaws of each.
Scott doesn't seem to get it, nor is he interested to get it.
The idea is that Jews and Christians used slave morality to invert values and to promote pathological altruism for their outgroup as a way to get their way. And after that, of course in modernity more besides those groups have done so.
In confronting people who think that their groups also have rights, and want to put their group first, Scott's response is to accuse them of cruelty. He doesn't get it whatsoever, or he doesn't want to get it and finds it convenient to double down. This isn't an approach that sees the nuance.
The reality is that the typical liberal ideologue whether Marcuse, Yglesias, Ozy or even Scott are not the kindest people because they think they should rule over us. Their will to power, also does not make them supermen, although they might share some of the pathology of the people they accuse of adopting master morality. Additionally, there is something very cruel in the disregard of the interests and rights of specific groups that people like Scott want to put other groups (like Africans) on the pedestal above their own interests. I don't buy Scotts own conception of his own kindness (and nor of others he shares ideology) and I disagree with him trying to disregard right wingers as just cruel. He is not charitably taking seriously and engaging with their argument, but tries to just dimiss it.
Moreover, there is a connection between the self conception of far left radicals as the best people ever, and their right wing opposition as evil, cruel, etc, and their willingness to inflict cruelty, under the idea that these left wing radicals are just out to do good.
Ultimately, I find it a convenient way to sneakilly disregard the interests of right wingers and their favorite groups, while virtue signalling.
So, that is my problem with slave morality. That it can be abused, and that pathological altruism when coming internally, not incited from manipulative outsiders is also detrimental. Which is part of what most people complaining about slave morality have an issue with.
As for master morality, I actually agree with people like Scott that it can lead to disregarding morality. It can lead into an ideology that is in favor of preying towards the weak.
Right wingers and their associated ethnic groups have rights, interests, and it is fine to put their own first. It is grossly immoral for anyone to act outraged at the suggestion of such groups having rights, community, interests and not being pathological altruists. Demand for people to be pathological altruists and condemning them as evil when they are not is immoral, cruel, hostile, and inhumane.
The fact that there are authoritarian oppressive organizations which are hostile against right wingers, and associated ethnic groups and for disregarding their rights while talking of love, doesn't change the reality. They just use in their propaganda the idea that they are about love, when in actuality they are about hatred and keeping their outgroup down.
That being said, I do think you have a certain obligation to not harm outsiders and justice is about the golden rule and reciprocity. Is about mutually respected red lines. For example, within a society a parent should put their children first, but do so by working hard, not by stealing and harming others.
Some component of altruism can be part of it, but never pathological altruism which is immoral and often demanded by people who often enough identify more with the interests of foreign tribes (we see liberals to have in polls strong antiwhite views for example and a strong negative bias towards whites) who try to subvert people to act against their own interests. So, trying to make the weak and incompetent to be equal to those doing better, is not justice but rules that protect the weak from predation from the strong is part of justice. Nor is it moral to be forcing others to sacrifice everything and lose what is very important and precious to them for the sake of outsiders.
I would say, that reciprocity can exist even in a system where there is some level of limited redistribution and help under the idea that if they were in the same position, they would help us. And by not demanding too destructive sacrifices on people, like accepting their ethnic group's destruction. This is definitely NOT the deal offered today by those demanding pathological altruism in favor of Africans.
So yeah, I think both slave morality and master morality in the way they tend to be understood are not the best paths. They aren't always opposite since sneaky extreme nationalists can pretend to be pathological altruists motivated just by sympathy towards the weak and underdogs when promoting rules that harm their ethnic outgroups. Or, genuine slave morality by one group can help feed into another group's hubris and that group would then in turn be acting rapaciously and with extreme entitlement and believing themselves to have zero moral obligation towards others.
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I always thought of Ozy Brennan as something of a pretentious intellectual lightweight, who only achieved the status she currently enjoys by bestowing romantic affection on a handful of socially awkward geniuses for whom this was a relatively new experience, and who were so pathetically grateful for the favour that they were only too eager to allow her to ride their coattails for years, despite having very little of meaning or substance to contribute.
However, the observation that, in trying to minimize the harm and offense you cause you're optimising for being a dead person, is a genuinely penetrating insight, and my respect for her has grown significantly. When people talk about her, that should be in her greatest hits, not her incoherent rambling about the trans experience and "cis by default".
I've heard the same argument from radical environmentalists who (optimistically) say that it's not enough to just reduce your harm, you need to be better than a corpse and actually help the environment. Pesimistically they use it as a dogwhistle to call for people to commit eco terrorism.
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Isn’t that what Peterson said in his infamous Ch 4 interview?
I have no idea, maybe? Do you have a timestamp?
From an NR interview summarizing the exchange:
I can certainly see parallels, but I think the idea that by making yourself so small you're approximating being a dead person is a unique and surprising framing which is absent from the argument Peterson made here.
Gough Whitlam had a similar (though more vulgar) formulation: "Only the impotent are pure".
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I would also like to use the same disclaimer here.
In my interpretation of slave morality vs master morality is a matter of being passive with your values vs being active with your values. To become the superman you want to actively decide what is important for you and live accordingly despite norms and structures of society. In a way consumerism is a slave morality, you buy your values to show off for others. And in a way Andrew Tate talks Master morality but he is just a Slave when buying a car to show the trappings of success. That is why there is the example of the MAGA Republicans as having Slave morality, most of them have just passively adopted the opinions of their tribe. Then there there are the woke tribe doing the same, passive values virtue signaled with the subtlety of throwing a brick at your face. Slaves locked in eternal conflict as we know as the Culture War.
How are you supposed to find values purely by yourself, with no influence from society? At most you could say, someone is just following their genes and brute instincts like an animal, devoid of all social consciousness. At worst's like asking for some sort of pure "free will" that is not influenced by anything, a causeless cause. It just seems like an impossible ideal that no on could possibly live up to.
I didn't write anything about creating values ex nihilo, the point was slave morality is the passive values that is foisted upon the masses and never questioned. This forum is a rejection of slave morality essentially because the purpose is to come here and discuss our values, not come up with new ones but make our values more well grounded and well though out.
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Not to say anything about your wider point, but just because I'm seeing this everywhere and this is the first comment currently: the Superman is not the same as the man of master morality. Master morality is not the morality of the Superman. The Superman is beyond both and transvalues both, though to us in a slave-moral society he would look comparatively masterly by contrast.
Yes, thank you for the precision that my language lacked. But yes master morality and the transformation to superman requires being active, so they look masterly to the slaves because they are passive.
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This bit seemed both out of place and oddly unremarked upon. How low does the total fertility rate have to go before this level of shaming becomes prosocial?
How low can they go? This is one of the few places in modern society where true Darwinism shines through. At some point, we've selected for the people whose reproductive drive is strong enough to overcome the hurdles presented to it by the modern world. At that point, rates go up.
Conditions change. Hurdles may be different in a century.
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Shame only has utility for steering behavior. You don’t shame someone who can no longer modify their behavior (40 and no children), you shame them only when their behavior is malleable. For this problem, it is prosocial to shame young people who don’t settle down, so that they modify their behavior in the relevantly prosocial way. (You can also make them afraid of not settling down, which is distinct from shame, and you can heap praise and respect on those who do settle down, which would be purely positive reinforcement; or you can make them desire it through the awareness of contingent rewards, which is what we used to do through female-centric media and rituals, but contingent reinforcers compete with each other — you can’t desire girlmom and girlboss at the same time, sorry).
The discourse on shame in America is so confused that it’s hard to even talk about it objectively. But shame is just the felt sensation of not meeting a social standard, and it occurs as a necessary consequence wherever there is a social standard. There is no social standard without esteem and shame working together to modify behavior. This is obfuscated in mainstream discussions, where one day a person might complain about “shame culture” (a nonsensical term), and the next day they take to social media specifically to shame a petty social infraction, like cutting in line or a gross Tinder message. What we mean by shaming is the expressed disapproval at someone else’s actions explicitly or implicitly, which (by the way) can only induce shame when the recipient is actually tied in some way to a social group. A homeless person probably can’t shame you, because they don’t matter to you, but a peer can, and a boss can even more. If shame discourse were an Olympic sport America would have the most gold medals in gymnastics right now.
Society is not a two-person game. Shaming those who have made bad, but irreversible choices also acts as an exemplar to those who have not yet made the bad choice by acting as a counterweight to whatever benefits the bad choice appears to bring. Pour encourager les autres actually works in some circumstances.
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Does shame really work? I see it come up over and over from a certain subset of posters. They seem to earnestly believe shame works. That if we shame people they will change. But every time I try to shame someone into changing they just get defensive or go into an avoidant spiral or start self flagellating, none of which consist of the actual behavioral change I wish to engender.
What does seem to work is getting close to them, understanding their problems, earning their trust, helping them to see how their faults are hurting them, entering their control loop, and actively helping them to positively reconstruct themselves. This is hard. So I can see why it can be tempting to jump to the much simpler sounding solution of making them feel bad until they change.
But I suspect that even in shame cultures, the shame is correlative, not causative. It's the stern standard for a specific form of excellence and the availability of social tech that leads to that excellence that changes people in those cultures. The shame emotion itself seems like it can jolt you into realizing you need to change if you didn't know, but it seems unfit for providing sustained motive force towards personal change.
I can’t imagine any scenario of social negative evaluation which does not come with shame, so in my interpretation shame is literally the feeling of negative evaluation by others. It can occur at the micro scale, like if you were to eat a coworker’s lunch because of carelessness, you would feel shame commensurate with how annoying that is for your coworker. If someone didn’t feel shame at that, it would mean that they don’t actually care / haven’t sympathized in their coworker’s inconvenience. An absence of shame means an absence of responsiveness to negative social evaluation. In that sense it’s a necessary part of social learning.
If your friend were talking too loudly in a movie theater, and you told him, he would feel shame (small, briefly), and then correct his behavior, no? That isn’t shaming, but there’s a standard which induces shame. The shame doesn’t last long, but it is memorable so that we remember not to do that thing again. People who don’t feel shame are more liable to repeat social mistakes.
But re: spiraling, I think in some cases shame goes awry and people feel too much shame or feel shame at the wrong thing. Is that kind of what you are referring to? These can be complicated but I don’t know what kind of problem you’re talking about.
If you were to consider shouting out loud at a professor during a lecture, what would you feel? Shame and embarrassment (small shame). That’s actually what prevents you from even considering doing that, though. It’s an instinctive “this is wrong and it’s not even worth thinking about”. It’s not about “living in shame” or anything, which is a disorder. But if promiscuity as an action is negatively evaluated in a culture then it would lead to shame in the person doing it and hence would modify their behavior. An example of this is maybe: in some countries, the age of consent is 18, but in others it is 17. so a 21yo with a 17yo in one country would result in immense shame, but zero shame in a different country. The only difference is the negative evaluation of others, not anything objective.
Mmm. I think our conversation has thus-far been ambiguous. I think English is natively poor at distinguishing 'felt' and 'functional' emotion.
So when another person tells me that they are in pain because of something I have done... Mechanistically my mind seems to take the steps of feeling regret, simultaneously looking at the person being unhappy in my model of their present and happier in my simulation of their future, feeling compassion for that future instance of them, and letting that vision flow into the present as my regret changes me.
If I overuse the shame valence, I end up in a state of chronic pain, which is what I believe I am seeing in many other people when they are subjected to shaming. The regret valence too, grows agitated if it's chronically recurring (and justly so. If it's chronically recurring I am chronically doing something wrong and pain grows as a sort of wake up call). But regret can be repeated more often as long as my higher order processes are judging it to be effective. The compassion valence however, is much more sustainable, largely pleasurable, and seems to cause me to become more extroverted the more I use it. Yet it still allows for the similar behavioral shifts in similar contexts. (and can also be used in contexts without regret, such as helping others with pain that I am not the cause of.)
If I imagine shouting out loud to a professor... well I do remember feelings of shame from my own college experience. These were largely damaging though, as I also felt them regarding the prospect of getting questions wrong or raising my hand or saying anything during class whatsoever and they majorly inhibited my ability to participate in lectures.
Looking back and imagining the scenario anew however... I'm sitting in class, the idea to shout at/to the professor spontaneously arises... and... I find the idea funny. Laughable. A vibrant euphoria that feels like a vibrating diaphragm. Then the next thing that happens is I start contemplating what the effects of shouting would be and whether the tradeoffs would be justified in the specific scenario. It would seem that Humor has been slotted into where shame used to be in this social script, and is serving the same purpose of interrupting my thought-flow enough to prevent me from spontaneously shouting during a lecture, while enabling a more productive follow up strategy than the stabby feeling of shame permits.
Perhaps this is shame at its strongest, but there must also be a smaller shame, right? I'm pretty sure smaller shame is just embarrassment. I don’t think embarrassment is typically coded as a "positive emotion". People want to flee being embarrassed. When they talk about their least favorite memories of the week, it will be memories of embarrassment. To me, someone is embarrassed if they leave the bathroom with toilet paper on the bottom of their shoe. Because of this experience, they will double-check their shoes next time, because the shame is mildly painful and memorable. If instead they left the bathroom and entered an important business meeting and embarrassed their team, that transforms into a more serious shame. Sometimes this is colloquially expressed as “being mortified”. This shame may lead them to double-check not just the bottom of their shoes but how they generally approach their appearance and conduct. The shame they feel is the salience that they have damaged their social identity. We can go even stronger: the strongest shame is something like a DUI resulting in a death. This should be an extreme amount of shame that ought to result in a traditional “prayer and fasting”: loss of appetite, no desire to give oneself pleasure, and a natural speaking out and expression of regret and self-hated. But even here, the shame is still instrumental: even a DUI homicide offender should not live in shame in perpetuity, but should have some weeks or months of it and then move on in a forgiven state.
Surely this is not an efficient and adapted mindset? This means that if you were bored and wanted a laugh, you would consider ruining the vibe of the classroom. And then you have to do a bunch of mental processes to weigh whether your laugh is worth the negatives. Shame is extremely beneficial in place of this cognitive operation because it immediately induces a social conformity that doesn’t require cognitive operations. Now that’s not always good — sometimes we want to override instinctive shame — but where manners are concerned and where young people are concerned it’s great because it saves our cognitive energy. Imagine if in every social context you had to manually weigh the costs and benefits: do I cut in line here? Do I insult a friend there? Etc. If we have experienced shame before then we know not to do these things without abstract cognition.
So, I've been reflecting on this for a couple of days. My introspection has let me to a few things.
I agree with you that the toilet paper on shoe scenario is a scenario where even I might describe it as "I was embarrassed". In terms of my earlier breakdown of felt emotions though- What I feel in those situations is what I call shame. What my earlier breakdown was referring to as embarrassment is more- the glowy feeling of a cute person flirting with you, or of being seen and safe and vulnerable. But I think we can set this valence aside. It seems to be a separate emotion. I suspect these are fully different occasionally correlated things both called 'embarrassment', and only the one you are describing is really relevant to our discussion of the merits of shame in society.
Looking back on times when embarrassing (in your sense) things have happened to me... they were rather devastating. They felt like being stabbed. And- I find that these experiences have often wound up swept into my shadow. For much of my life I didn't have the emotional management tech to emotionally defuse those memories. I recall a rather materially trivial event, where during some social banter I mixed up the words 'quirky' and 'kinky'. Materially, it was laughed off by the group within seconds, but it stuck disproportionately in my psyche as a painful event that I couldn't think about.
This conversation with you has allowed me to access some other similar memories and defuse the strength of their valence. So thank you.
So- having considered this these last days- I don't necessarily think shame is bad, but I do think that in order for shame to do the work we want it to in society, the subjects of that shame need to know what to do with it. In so-called shame cultures, I expect there's a much better scaffolding for making sure people know what to do with this stabbing feeling, how to regulate it to a useful magnitude, and how to respond to it optimally. And even then... Japan still produces a stream of NEETs, many of which seem to be suffering this over-sensitivity to shame. In America- shame seems like even more of a crapshoot...
I conjecture that any "just add more shame" solution is an oversimplification. A society also needs a refined zeitgeist around how to use shame in order for the effects of adding more to be positive.
As for whether I would ruin the vibe of the classroom in my hypothetical, I might if this were my first rodeo. I don't think Shame is necessary for me to learn from my mistakes there though. The things that I labeled 'compassion' and 'regret' can serve a similar purpose. (though, perhaps they are related to the weaker forms of shame that you posit). Part of the reason that the idea of shouting at the class is funny is because it is unexpected for my mind to output it as an option. My subconscious has already learned structures and biases towards certain classes of thoughts, and this 'yell in lecture' thought is out of distribution and somewhat absurd. But- it's not shame that stops me from thinking it (at least in the present. perhaps it's meaningful to posit a form of 'shadow' or 'dark' shame in the negative space where my mind doesn't go). And- if I were bored I have other tools for that. I can just hallucinate pleasure. I suspect that I can hallucinate emotions more wholly than most people in general... and that this is responsible both for my ability to wirehead just by imagining pleasure- and my ability to have traumatic emotional flashbacks to trivial situations.
In terms of weighing the costs and benefits in every social situation- I think you are correct. Many of my social algorithms do slow down my ability to respond in social situations. But in our current environment that is merited. Taking 10 seconds to respond to a situation really isn't a problem except in a high speed competitive environment. And neither high trust socializing nor deciding when to speak out in a lecture are high speed competitive environments. It's good to play war games sometimes to stay sharp. But outside of that it seems better to take one's time.
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"shame culture" is a technical term of anthropology where it refers to a culture where people judge their own actions through the lens of "what will other people think of me if I do this" rather than through the lens of law or morality. Like most confusing technical terms, this is not nonsense if you understand the technical meaning. America profoundly isn't a shame culture in this sense.
If "shame culture" is being used by very online people to refer to a culture with a lot of social shaming, then that is dumb and may be nonsensical to boot. But that isn't something I have come across.
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These seem related to each other. Young people who don't settle down eventually become 40 years old, and many of them don't have children due to not settling down. If such people are shamed, then young people have an incentive to avoid growing up to become one of those people.
You’re imagining something like “24yo woman witnesses 40yo being shamed and doesn’t want that to happen to them”, but there’s a better and more accurate reinforcement structure to put in place. 24yo woman don’t put themselves in social contexts where they see the social shame of 40yos because of how age-specific social contexts are, and humans are bad at making 15-year plans, so even if we enacted that plan it wouldn’t work, and that’s implying “shame every older childless woman always” is an acceptable amount of pain administration for prosocial result. We can just shame the 24yos whose lifestyle deters them from fertility, which winds up promoting a lifestyle which is pro-fertility. We don’t have to shame the 40yo at all; when they turn 40, we can completely stop promoting the fertility behavior with shame, because by that point it’s too late. People care most about immediate social pride, rather than what happens when they are 40.
It’s like with shaming bad students. You can shame a bad student because you want to promote study habits so they get the best job they can. Shaming their poor habits is beneficial and for their greater good. But shaming people whose occupation you deem inferior would be sociopathic, even if it had the byproduct of (in theory) promoting good study habits among poor students. This relates broadly to the concept of forgiveness and mercy, which I suppose is very apropos the article…
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Society actively maintains a heavy dose of smoke-and-mirrors around the beauty-value-fertility tradeoff. It might not be deliberate, and more an emergent property of our civilization. But, the degree of obfuscation is mind-boggling.
Childbirth transforms a woman's body, yet before-after images are nigh impossible to find. Vaginal tearing is the norm (9/10) during childbirth and never mentioned. The impact of breast feeding on a woman's permanent beauty/perceived value is never part of the breast-feeding conversation. Childbirth comes at a heavy cost, despite what you believe, this cost is hidden away in a box.
Note: maternal mortality has cratered in the last few decades, but our civilization evolved in an era where child-birth was indeed a woman's 9-11 / Vietnam. She signed up for a 9 month deployment, and god only knows if she'd come back unscathed or at all.
We can't speak the truth, because truth leaks from both sides. DINK couples & spinsters help maintain the peace out of politeness, and married-couples reciprocate. Once the 'shaming is okay' pandoras box is open, we have no clue how the spinsters will respond.
All societies operate under polite fictions. It may seem redundant, but they're lindy. Abolish them with great caution.
My 2050-2100 prediction:
Embryo selection, Crispr and mechanical wombs will be figured out.
Fertility will recover. The tech will spread like wild-wire, becoming the prominent form of childbirth. Once the negative risk of childbirth is eliminated, the spinster-shaming will begin at earnest.
In the process, we will lose our humanity. A woman's brain changes after pregnancy. Mothers have been the gatekeepers of all humanity since time eternal. Once women stop undergoing pregnancy, a new type of motherhood will emerge, and with it, a new type of humanity.
"Motherhood will be dead. Long live motherhood."
Every step will be defensible but what emerges might not be humanity.
As long as that which emerges loves itself, explores and embraces and seeks to understand the alien, and pursues greatness, that is Humanity.
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Why do you think it would ever be prosocial to do so?
If schools instilled the fear of growing up to be childless and dying alone with the same vigor that they instill the fear of not going to college and working at McDonald’s one’s whole life, I suspect there would be more families started.
I don't think my teachers ever told me to go to college by telling me I would die alone and friendless regretting my every life choice, but we may have gone to different schools.
It was not-so-subtly implied.
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I'll offer another take, from what I think was my first AAQC over at the old motte, a further interpretation of Master/Slave Morality, the Perks of Being a Wallflower theory, the Jocks vs the Emo Kids, from my review of the Abercrombie and Fitch documentary White Hot from Netflix. I'm going to quote the old comment, then expand on it in the context of SA's essay here.
...
Not that I'd expect Scott to think about Abercrombie and Fitch a lot, but I think this provides a frame that is a lot more understandable to a modern American or American-adjacent: rather than Master/Slave morality, think of it as Preppy Jock vs Emo Kid conceptions of what is cool. Like ol' Freddy Nietzche we are dealing in archetypes not actualities, these are myths which, like all myths, deal in an imagined past not in our own present.
The archetypal Preppy Jock likes things that he likes, that his friends like, and thinks those things are cool because he and his friends like them. Sports are cool, he's good at them and his friends are good at them, and if some other person is good at them then that person must be cool too. Being rich is cool, having money lets you do cool things. Hooking up with pretty girls is cool. He, and his friends, and the pretty girls he wants to hook up with, all wear A&F, so A&F must be cool. Wanting to be strong and beautiful and admired and have a pretty partner are basic human traits, these desires are inherently humanistic.
The archetypal Emo Kid isn't good at sports, isn't rich, and can't get the pretty girls to make out with him. So he creates his own version of cool where every aspect of the Preppy Jock system is inverted. Sportsball is stupid, jocks are dumb, they'll be working for us nerds some day!. Rich kids are arrogant and cruel, and because they have everything handed to them they don't really build character or know the real world. He obviously lusts after the pretty girls too, but they aren't into him, and the entire corpus of Emo love songs is largely built around the fantasy that he, the Nice Guy, would be a better partner than the Jock who actually gets her; hooking up with pretty girls is lame, having deep unfulfilled longing for them which is finally sanctified when consummated in a mega-deep way that the dumb Jocks and Players will never get, the Pretty Girl will finally realize that she really wanted the Emo Kid all along. The Preppy Jocks wear A&F, so A&F is for lame, arrogant, idiots, who pay for overpriced T Shirts. His values are built on negating the values of his bullies.
This example illustrates how it interacts with the classic Barber Pole of fashion to produce some of the contradictions re:Christianity that different commenters have noted. Master morality is what masters like, and it is possible to change what they like, which will then become master morality. A&F was able to get hot teenagers in their clothing, other hot teenagers realized it was the hot teenager thing to do, and without overly self examining purchased A&F. There's nothing inherent to being a jock about wearing loose or tight (or now loose again) jeans from a certain mall brand, but they naturally become part of the story. ((Though I will argue that for aesthetic reasons all WASPy people with decently athletic bodies look best in trad ivy fashions))
Christianity was a religion of slaves, until it became the religion of the masters. At that point, Christianity became master morality. There is a Marxian Base/Superstructure aspect to it. To return to our high school, there is more master morality in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes than in the Wiccan Club, even if the members of the Wiccan Club can successfully offer a lecture about Master Vs Slave Morality in Nietzche and the FCA kids can't.
Which is the final contradiction: talking constantly about Master Morality is often a form of Slave Morality. It is the effort to negate the values of your bullies, to claim that your own values are higher and finer and better than those that oppress you. This goes back to Nietzsche himself, of course. But also stays true in the ACX comment section: the incomparable Walt Bismarck, annoyed at being derided as cruel and weird, proceeded to prove how cruel and weird he was, with his yass-ified AI avatar just being so ridiculous that I can never take anyone who would do that seriously. The kind of people that talk about Master Morality are using the concept as a Slave Morality, as a cope to deal with how downtrodden they actually are. They aren't natural Achilles types, reveling in their own dominance. They are sad losers, talking about the grand conspiracy against them, about how if it weren't for the "Longhouse Ethics" of the world they coulda been a contenda.
Touching on another of Scott's posts I've mentioned several times on here.
Good pick!
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I haven't really seen what you describe in the last paragraph. Where I've seen Nietzsche discussed, master morality is usually seen with some sympathy. Personally, I feel like aspects of slave morality as Nietzsche describes it were acting as deep unconscious forces in my psychology that I am very glad to have made conscious to more easily push back against where they are unproductive, and I feel like conversations like these help with that. To manage emotions it helps to be able to identify them, and reading your post I actually felt the ressentiment reading about the jocks, I noticed it, and I let it go. That is not something I used to be able to do so easily.
I think the issue with the jocks and nerds view is by definition you are dealing with youth coming into the world with whatever background they happened to have, and little of their own choices has had an effect on where they are. The question is what happens for the rest of the adult lives of the slave morality kids? Are they doomed, or can they change their outlook? Can someone think themselves into being a master moralist or onto some kind of middle road? I tend to think we have some kind of agency and can alter the course of our lives in some way. Elon Musk takes ketamine for depression, he probably grew up immersed in slave morality and forged some kind of master morality for himself, but still has parts from his childhood that hate himself. That's the kind of complexity that is happening for most people who aren't totally immersed on one side or the other.
Because you're reading it from the guys doing it. I say it goes back to Nietzsche because Nietzsche himself was, well, not a powerful vital warrior aristocrat. I love his work and and what he contributed to the western tradition, but he was a loser. When you read a Nietzschean, and he's not a big powerful dominant successful warrior, there's an element of a kind of jealous undermining of one's real enemies with one's imaginary friends. "Hey, look, you might act like you're better than me, and you might be taller and richer and better looking and have a hotter girl and a bigger bench press, but you ain't shit, because you don't have the real perfect pure master morality you're still a SLAVE maaaaan." There's a lot of that in the more white-identitarian corners of the online right.
Well we're dealing with myth, not history, but to engage with extending the metaphor...
Yes. People do this all the time. It might even be called "maturity" or "growing up." Learning to love the things you love without worrying about others. A lot of it has to do with finding one's space, one's social grouping where one is mature or even dominant at least on occasion. Nerdy hobbies often provide this: the same guy who is a loser at school or work might be a great guild leader in WoW or whatever. So do social organizations: you might be the bottom tier loser at work, but at the Elks lodge everyone knows your name.
I like your framing of it, in real life we all contain both genuine human desire and emotion and ressentiment. In my mind, Elon is both engaging in things he loves for the sake of things he loves, and he is desperate to gain approval from or undermine the values systems of those who hate him. He builds a crazy, insane vanity project like the Cybertruck. But then he's fighting petty internet feuds on Twitter.
Personally, the way I apply this in my everyday life is simple and libertarian: let people enjoy things. People having fun doesn't imply that I must have a take on it. People resenting other people having fun is bad.
I see what you're saying, the far right areas where he is discussed are pretty unknown to me. I wouldn't necessarily characterize Nietzsche as a loser, though. If he hadn't succumbed to sickness as young as he did, he would've been celebrated in his own lifetime and his long, prolific, but isolated journey would have payed off.
I think the loser attitude is putting too much stock in the American high school analysis because the things Nietzsche accomplished aren't valued there, and he would be seen as lesser for basically having a problem with women, something obviously Jay-Z would never have an issue with. But to an adult in the room, hopefully they'd see that Nietzsche's influence and power far exceeds Jay-Z's, along with the metaphorical jocks, to the world's benefit or profound harm depending on which of his disciples you are looking at.
I just think there has to be room for the "sigma male" in the analysis of things, where the truly powerful don't necessarily match the vital youth imagery, a lot of times they are weirdos taking big risks to even the odds in their favor, and if it doesn't pan out in their lifetimes, I'd hope they don't get necessarily lumped in with slave morality unless they were actually expressed ressentiment and were preoccupied with being part of the mob/morality police etc. (which I do think you can still argue Nietzsche was doing himself to a degree, at least with the former)
Don't get me wrong, I've read Nietzsche, I love Nietzsche, but we have to admit that by any standard of Master Morality, Nietzsche was lacking. He never conquered in his lifetime. His tangible achievements more or less crowned at becoming the youngest professor of philology, from which he then lived off disability the rest of his life. Was a lot of this the result of bad luck and disease? Yes, undoubtedly. But equally undoubtedly, the lot of many of the weak, those most Nietzscheans are so willing to throw away as the "superfluous men" from Zarathustra, are the result of bad luck, disease, etc. I don't think I'm being unfair when I call him a loser, he lost.
This is where I think the complication of Master Morality comes in. To defend Nietzsche's life on Nietzsche's own terms, one must reject all tangible evidence of success in favor of talking about forms of success that are totally interior to the individual, that involve a small circle of the also-weak, or that post-date his present day in such a way that they are unknown to his contemporaries. His later reputation, and later published writings, might allow us to judge Nietzsche, but to his contemporaries he was who he was, they had no knowledge that he would be famous in the future. Rejection of all real tangible symbols and signs of worldly success, and the people who hold them, as evil; in favor of a mystical, interior definition of virtue that will pay off after one's death, which is the real definition of the Good. It tracks perfectly to the Christianity that Nietzsche decries as Slave Morality, as the ressentiment of the loser against the beautiful and the strong.
Now, one way to square this circle is to say that Freddy was self aware, that he knew what he was saying, and we're meant to read his work with a certain degree of irony. We're meant to see and to know that the man telling us to honor strength had none, that the man telling us to be suspicious of those who reject the value determinations of the great and the powerful is telling us this while in the act of rejecting the value determinations of the great and the powerful! We're not meant to wholesale adopt the positions he argues so vehemently, but to consider and synthesize them into our worldview. This is my preferred view.
Another is to attempt to categorize Masters in such a way that there is a carve-out for the writer. Masters are the brave and powerful Achilles, plus little ol' me. This strikes me as a kind of mystical cope, exactly the kind of thing that Slave Morality is made out of, a transvaluation of values by which earthly success becomes a sign of future damnation. Just as the Christian peasant says: being rich is bad because the rich are greedy and spoiled and sinful, he ain't making it through the eye of that needle! The Nietzschean loser says: being successful is bad, because it means you're conforming to the Longhouse Ethics and not striking out on your own, I may be a loser today but in the future I'll be remembered and the winners will not.
P.S.: I'll admit to not knowing the term Sigma male? Could you define it for me?
I think the contradictions only arise if you ignore the good things Nietzsche says about slave morality (I’ll have to go digging for quotes but basically it made man "interesting", added depth to his soul and made him more cunning).
Nietzsche spends a lot of time praising master morality because it is the side which needs to be rehabilitated, but the Nietzchean project isn’t about going back to the Vikings. The higher type of aristocratic development he is aiming for is only possible in the man of mixed slave/master heritage, and it’s as much about creative ability and aesthetic sense as anything else – Shakespeare, Goethe and Da Vinci are mentioned as higher men alongside the military geniuses.
I agree! part of it is a rhetorical or philosophical test for the reader! You're meant to read the text and think about the guy talking to you, and examine his extremely persuasive arguments, and say, hey wait let's apply this brilliant analytical framing to his own statements! And that second level of analysis is what frees the reader, takes the reader to the level of someone who can examine the world, rather than one who just accepts what he is told!
I think one should pair Nietzsche with Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground in philosophical study.
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I was going to do a post about this essay, but you beat me to it! I agree with most of the other posters here in thinking that Scott fell off significantly after his doxxing and especially after his abandonment of the SlateStarCodex brand; however, it swells my heart to see that he still has the occasional total banger left in him.
When I started getting interested in right-wing/anti-liberal political ideas, it was largely due to my major disillusionment from the progressive mainstream around a handful of issues: race, policing, the gross excesses of feminism, the humorless sanctimony, and the general sense of ugly resentment and spirit of destructive envy I was witnessing.
As I got deeper down the right-wing online rabbit hole, it was only natural to start developing sympathies and framings regarding various other hobbyhorses considered important by the commentators to whom I was constantly exposed; while some of those sympathies stuck and I still endorse them, others are sufficiently divorced from (or even directly at odds with) the reasons I got into this scene in the first place that I’ve had to consciously resist the pressure to toe the line on those issues: pro-Confederate sympathies; rural populist aesthetics and a focus on the issues most salient to downscale heartland whites; hardline anti-abortion sentiments, etc. These are not things that were remotely salient to me initially, and I have no direct skin in any of those games. But when all of the commentary one imbibes about those topics comes from the same catastrophizing perspective, it’s easy to find oneself subconsciously adopting the priorities of others within one’s coalition.
For example, during the recent kerfuffle about the Olympic opening ceremony, I saw the deluge of posts about how it mocked The Last Supper before I even watched the ceremony itself, so I was already primed to be hyper-aware of that interpretation and to be offended/scandalized by the scene in question. I even briefly thought, “You know, this is the kind of thing that makes you sort of believe in demonic forces.” It wasn’t until I really took a step back, sought out some alternate interpretations of the situation, and reflected on what my younger self would have believed, that I had to remind myself, “Wait a minute… I’m not even a Christian. Why would it bother me so much that they’re parodying a centuries-old painting depicting a scene from the life of a man whose central message and ethos I don’t believe in or care about? How have I absorbed the superstitions of people with whom I don’t even agree?”
As the online right continues to polarize and coalesce around two warring poles - Christian theocrats and Nietzchean Vitalists - I find myself increasingly alienated from both factions. I do think the extreme slave morality Nietzche criticizes in Christianity is just plainly present at every level of both the textual basis for the faith and in the behavior and values of the early church and the various saints and martyrs it venerated. The fact that over the course of the next thousand and a half years Christian culture sanded off the most unwieldy and counter-productive aspects of the religion doesn’t change the fact that such a substrate exists within the religion; hence why movements have periodically emerged within Christian and post-Christian societies which have sought to take seriously, and enact in reality, the slave morality core of the faith.
However, Scott is correct that the Vitalists are simply a repellent lot with mostly execrable values. Glorifying pirates and barbarian warlords is just a total moral and spiritual dead end. If you sympathize more with the Viking savages who looted Lindisfarne Abbey than you do with the monks whom they massacred, I don’t think you and I are on the same team. I have no desire to live amongst Nietzchean übermenschen, nor to compete with them, nor to be ruled by them. Achilles is not an admirable man, and I don’t want my children to be like him when they grow up.
It brings me joy to see Scott defend the ideology that brought us the World’s Fair and the moonshot. When I read writers like Dave Greene indict the Enlightenment - and to attempt to establish this stance as a non-negotiable element of what it means to be “truly right-wing”, I have to wonder why I’m still wasting my time taking some of these people seriously at all. The Enlightenment did not, in fact, inherently contain the seeds of its own inevitable destruction. Like Christianity, the Enlightenment has meant many different things to many different people, and had contained many competing strains with mutually-incompatible goals. The men who organized the World’s Fair were, at least nominally, Christian; however, there’s a very good reason why they so gleefully incorporated so much explicitly Hellenistic/Greco-Roman imagery as well. (A syncretic synthesis of Hellenism and pseudo-Christianity, shaving off all of the obsolete cruft, dangerous extremes, and degenerate strains of both traditions describes the strain of the Enlightenment I’d like to RETVRN to.)
And of course the greatest project of the Progressive era - the great unrealized dream, the one whose untimely abandonment and subsequent repudiation by every extant political coalition in the Western world - could still be the one that truly rescues humanity and wholly redeems the Enlightenment: I’m talking, of course, about eugenics. Any right-winger who hates and fears eugenics is no ally of mine. Nor, though, is any right-winger who idolizes the rapacious animal morality of the warlord and the mafioso - the sacker of cities and the enemy of peace. One day we will have Hellenistic-inspired Art Deco megacities on other planets, and it will be thanks to the Promethean spirit of industry and science, directed toward the glorification of humanity - not to the self-fulfilling doomsaying of the collapsitarian online right, nor to the pathologically weakness-worshiping left, nor to the amoral scumbags of the Walt Right.
"I shouldn't assist in the defense of those people who aren't 100% on my team" has been a popular philosophy throughout history. Usually briefly.
We call the tactic that exploits that philosophy "Divide and Conquer", but if you drill down into the details it's amazing how many instances could have been better described as "Watch Them Divide Themselves, and Conquer".
The trouble is identifying when a group is N% on your team and choosing a reasonable threshold of N, of course. There are groups of Christians who would shun you socially and economically for your differences if they had enough power (at which point their most zealous kids would start pushing the Overton Window back into "arrest the blasphemer" territory), and there are diametrically opposed groups of Christians who would literally turn the other cheek if you hit them (which sounds like a friendly group of neighbors to have, until you realize they won't assist in your forceful defense when a threat starts hitting you), but there are still other groups of Christians who can actually play Tit For Tat correctly when it's called for. At one point the third group was so numerous as to be able to build modern civilization; it might be reasonable to decry the mockery of any who remain, for old times' sake, even if you can't find reason to decry it on general principles.
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Do elucidate, because it seems like at least one of the following is true:
I'd previously assumed that it was just a matter of (1), but from Scott's post and some of the commentary on it I suspect that the others are at play here.
Christianity praises (and frequently venerates as Saints) radical ascetics (even if they don't do anything, and just hold out their asceticism as an example to others, like the Stylites), passive victims of persecution (Crusaders who die in battle are not considered martyrs, randos picked up in Roman persecutions of Christians are), and people who make great sacrifices in order to support ineffective charity (like Mother Theresa). From a vitalist perspective, all of these groups are Losers.
Christianity doesn't condemn Will to Power per se, but it tends to reserve its strongest condemnation for the vices which are correlated with it like pride, avarice, and wrath.
I think the core Nietzschean claim that Christianity embodies slave morality is obviously correct. Given the problems with societies that tell every man (or even just every aristocrat) he ought to be a master, I don't see why this is a problem. Even if we take on master morality religion at its own game, the military conflict between Christian civilisation and Islamic "civilisation" had been back-and-forth with no sign of an ultimate winner for over 1000 years by the time we invented the machine gun and settled the issue.
If the only thesis here is that Christianity has different values than pagan warrior types, this is indeed obvious and not a penetrating insight. In that case I have no idea why any of this is worth discussing at all, and the language about "master morality" and "slave morality" is nothing more than vacuous rhetorical dressing invented out of sophistry and a dislike of the Christian values. Maybe that's what it is; I don't have a very high opinion of Nietzsche or his sycophants.
On the other hand, all the talk of "slave morality" being based on resentment and cutting down tall poppies and exalting incapacity to do things seems to suggest some additional substance to the characterization; the problem is that this additional substance does not describe Christianity at all! If you read what people actually said about ascetics, you will find that they are frequently described as disciplined athletes (this is literally what the word means), or as fighting battles against demons; they are lauded not for sitting around doing nothing, but for successfully pursuing explicit, positive values; the physical deprivations of the ascetic are not ends to themselves, nor suffered because they must be, but are deliberately and with great difficulty enacted in service of spiritual goals. And similarly the martyrs are held up as examples not for their bad luck in becoming victims, but for their willingness to endure torture or death rather than give up and renounce their faith. "From a Vitalist perspective, all of these groups are Losers" is just another way of saying that they have radically different values; it's not a point in favor of the Christian values being different in the way that is being claimed.
FWIW, I agree with you on this point - Nietzsche (like a lot of right-wing edgelords) found civilisation enervating and was trying to make an emotional appeal for barbarism by using the loaded terms "master morality" and "slave morality". But I read your previous post as arguing that Nietzsche was wrong to tie Christianity to what he calls "slave morality" and I call "civilised behaviour". Whereas I think Nietzsche was right that Jesus killed Superman (or more strictly outcompeted him memetically rendering him irrelevant), but wrong about this being a bad thing.
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I largely agree.
Points of disagreement: vitalism isn't repellent.
War is who we are, who we have always been. War is to men what motherhood is to women. You may not like it, you certainly wouldn't enjoy war..but nevertheless your brain would keep telling you 'this is it'.
I don't like violent lunatics, but there's undeniable glory in defeating such.
Vitalism of that type depicted in Homer is v completely obsolete.
Modern war requires entirely different philosophical/moral approaches.
And war is now way too expensive to be anything but a last resort.
The vast majority of soldiers who are able to speak on the issue have said that war is hell. The vast majority of mothers have said the opposite about motherhood.
I think this is partly because modern warfare is a lot less like a fistfight and a lot more like crawling through the landscape for weeks knowing you might die any second. It's also because the anti-war soldiers are very strongly signal-boosted. Everyone has Sassoon and that gas poem shoved down their throat at school, nobody gives you Storm of Steel or George MacDonald Fraser.
A high-ranking officer once told me privately that you have to keep a close lid on soldiers because young men very much enjoy killing things and blowing stuff up and you can lose control of them very easily.
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Isn't there an obvious sense that no Matt Yglesias is not a Nietzschean superman, in the same way that a communist drill sergeant is not a Nazi?
The drill sergeant might wear jackboots, he might inculcate strict discipline, he's part of a hierarchy in a large and powerful Army, he's part of a war machine with vast ambitions to rewrite the old order (and hey he might've put some people in an unmarked grave in Eastern Europe). But he is turning all these things that we associate with Nazism to the purpose of communism, the workers revolution, international proletarianism, levelling of distinctions...
Yglesias is using elements of master-morality to strengthen and serve slave morality. Yglesias wants to bring in hundreds of millions of people to the US to cement the current system as it is, to beat America's overseas competitors who might otherwise strain the system to its breaking point. He wants to turn the energies of dissenters to favour the system. There's no compromise, just appreciation for effective tactics.
All this is far too complimentary of mattY. From my POV, he's quite clear. He knows he is a partisan and a liar. He just happens to like redistribution and progressivism. So the rest of what he does is lying for those ends. He has become quite explicit in this recently.
It is one hell of a performance of intellectual gymnastics to turn someone who spends all day tweeting, reporting people for minor traffic violations, and shilling his substack, into a Nietzschean Superman.
I'm in a way pretty sure it's some sort of joke, but I didn't have the time to figure out how exactly Scott meant it.
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If I may be permitted a tangent, I always had a problem with the idea of master/slave morality purely on historical terms - Nietzsche's archetypes of them are simply invented, largely based on stereotypes, and don't correspond to any real history. If you're determined to push the Christian-slave aspect, you have to ignore not only what Christian martyrs or ascetics thought they were doing, but also the vast numbers of other committed, deeply pious Christians doing stereotypically 'master' things. If I try to think of a person who behaved like a stereotypical 'master', the best example to spring to mind is actually Cortes, and more generally conquistadors, and those are all the products of a Christian civilisation, frequently using explicitly Christian justifications for their actions. We may question Cortes' piety, but we can't do the same for every crusader or king or warlord who seems to fit the same bill - Charlemagne seems to have been sincerely pious, after all.
But more importantly than that, the master morality model fails to accurately describe or predict even pagan Greek aristocrats. If you read Homer somewhat more attentively, you'll notice that the Mycenaean warrior class was, far from being bold amoral power-seekers disregarding any law or constraint in favour of their own desires, intensely concerned with duty, obligation, and right. Their concepts of obligation weren't necessarily ones we would find sympathetic today, but they absolutely exist, and moreover are extremely communally oriented. That's the common theme in Odysseus' voyages - he is repeatedly offered bliss or the achievement of all the world's desires (the Lotus-eaters, Calypso, etc.), and he rejects these because he is nothing outside of the ordered community, the polis, which gives his life meaning. Without the community of which he is a member he is literally nobody, to the extent that he uses that as a pseudonym in the story (and it's also why he recklessly boasts of his name to Polyphemus afterwards; he must place himself within a community, identifying himself as a man with a history, reputation, family, and so on: "Say that Odysseus, sacker of cities, Laertes' son, a native of Ithaca, maimed you!"). Likewise when he returns to Ithaca, when he conceals his name, he appears a poor beggar, because that is all he can be without the name that locates him within the community.
So even the Bronze Age Greek warlord isn't this Nietzschean stereotype. He may be violent, glory-hungry, desperate for achievement, etc., but none of these amount to being unconstrained or amoral.
I also feel obligated to note that the motivations of the Greek warrior aristocrat are actually parallelled pretty well in later Christian and chivalric literature - the readiness to use violence to defend one's personal honour, obsession with family feuds, devotion to one's family, reverence for hospitality and social obligation, and especially the urgent need to accumulate glory to one's name through public deeds. It doesn't even need to be violent (pagan emperors and Christian kings both patronised the building of monuments, in order to bring shine to their name), but in the case of literature it often is - Achilles is desperate to go to the Trojan War to win glory, and in the same way, Yvain picks fights and is desperate to go on the tournament circuit. For a noble warrior class, glory and reputation are the fundamental concerns.
Now it can be a bit more complicated than that, and both traditions but especially the Christian do problematise this desperation somewhat. The shade of Achilles appears in the Odyssey and confesses that he would rather be alive, even if a poor slave, than one of the glorious dead, in a way that seems to cast some doubt on his earlier values. Likewise for a character like Yvain, that glory-lust is presented as a character flaw, which leads to his downfall and he must redeem himself through anonymous service before finally reclaiming his name.
Anyway, this is not to say that there aren't any shifts or transformations in the way people thought about morality through the rise of Christianity, and it's true that Christianity prizes compassion and humility in a way that the ancient Greeks did not, or at least did not explicitly. But I think Nietzsche projects his master/slave distinction on to them in a way that does not accurately describe either world.
I want to stick a fork in the outlet here: famous writings such as Odysseus are probably best understood to depict not how things were, but how things were modeled, saying more about an ancient collective aspirational conception of self than as how we'd parse their society if we were alongside them.
Oh, certainly. To the extent that Homeric heroes model the values of Mycenaean elite society, they do so aspirationally. I think the overall thesis survives that, though.
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I think what you are saying is mostly true; however, people like Charlemagne and Cortez exist in a Christianity that was reimagined by Germanic warrior aristocrats after the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, something you also saw earlier with Constantine, an Illyrian warrior aristocrat.
The same is true, from the other direction, with Homer, who is 'writing' about these bronze age warrior elites in a post-collapse iron age society that has largely moved away from that old model of aristocratic chariot riding warriors, into a form of warfare and social organization that is more broad based and reliant on large numbers of middle class hoplites.
This is again, just because Christianity was Germanized. The German warrior elites kept doing their warrior things, things inherited from their proto-Indo-European ancestors and culture they share, because of it, as well as the influence of the Indo-Iranian, chariot riding elites, that so influenced both cultures.
There isn't any mystery to why members of an Indo-European warrior caste share similar values and traditions.
Charlemagne's ancestors specifically (and famously) converted to Catholic, Chalcedonian Christianity, not one of the sects morphed to the convenience of the Germanic conquerors. They built an enduring connection to the Roman Church and built a church (and empire) at home under the influence and with the assistance of that Church. The Franks were very much orthodox Christians by the time of Charlemagne, unlike their Arian cousins in North Africa and Spain (at least early on, in the latter case).
While a form of Christianity (hard to call it fully formed, though, tbh) did spring up in Charlemagne's time catering to German warrior aristocrats (and their peasant foot soldiers -- Saxon society was complicated, as was Saxon warfighting), it did so in the Saxon lands, aimed at converted the Saxons, not the Franks, who had been Catholic Christians for centuries and centuries by this point.
Chalcedonian Christianity is already a Christianity controlled and morphed by domineering Indo-European warrior aristocrats. The Arian Goths you so despise often fought for Rome under the command of Illyrian commanders.
Arianism wasn't something created by the Goths or Vandals, nor something adopted for any reason other than it was the first Christian faith brought to them. It isn't actually anymore barbaric than regular Christianity, I've seen that claim here a few times and it always confuses me.
My point is that after the Germans took control of the Western world they changed the church from the inside, there wasn't any sudden break in theology, just a change in emphasis.
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I think you might be putting too much weight on Germanic descent or identity? As I noted, we have Western European warrior-aristocrats (partially Germanic) behaving substantially similarly to Mycenaean warrior-aristocrats (not Germanic), and if you want I'm perfectly happy to extend the comparison to Chinese or Japanese or Nahua peoples, or really anything else you like. I think there's probably a successful warrior-aristocrat package, so to speak, which recurs even across very different ethnic contexts, and it doesn't descend linearly from a single ur-warrior group so much as it's convergent evolution or natural selection. Samurai have much of the same package despite no connection to any other groups we're considering.
That said, even if you think it's distinctively PIE or Germanic, that doesn't undermine the specific observation, as you grant - that Nietzsche's historical analogies are extremely strained and implausible. Neither Christians nor Greek pagans resemble his caricatures.
It could recur without being descended from an original ur package; but, in reality, it did just occur as a package. All horses are descended from proto-Indo-Iranian horses. Horses bred to be used for war in their chariots. This spread throughout Eurasia, horses and chariots together. It could have been invented independently, but it wasn't.
The Greeks and proto-Germans traded very heavily with each other something we have very clear archaeological evidence of. They, especially the Greeks, show heavy influence from the Indo-Iranian groups on the steppe, with certain grave goods found at their sites, and certain gods they worshipped.
The warrior aristocat was a thing created of a certain time and a certain place; and, we know that time and that place. Samurai still rode those horses of Indo-Iranian provenance. They also had contact with eastern steppe people who mostly copied the culture of the Indo-Iranian steppe people.
It's horses all the way down.
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I will always love Scott no matter how much of a cucked cowardly bitch he becomes. Posts like this remind me of why he’ll always be my love
I don't know how this comment went unreported for seven days, but this account has a bad habit of showing up out of the blue and dropping antagonistic takes and outright troll posts. Based on what went down last time, I'm going to go ahead and just permaban you.
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a 'TheMotte' moment if I've ever seen one.
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I find the Master v Slave morality discussion not very useful. Which one did the Spartans adhere to? They were selfless and self-subjugating, they did not seek personal glory, they fasted and disciplined themselves, they did not pursue personal riches, and they worked exclusively for the collective Good of Sparta. Amongst themselves they adhered to slave morality, but as a group towards others they adhered to master morality. Why did the Spartans, which the Greco-Roman world esteemed, teach their master soldiers how to be slaves? Because humans are cooperative creatures. If you train humans to be hyper-cooperate then they will dominate other groups. It didn’t matter how many fierce, Superman-y fighters the Celts had; the Romans with their intense training of obedience and selfless cooperation destroyed them.
If you have a group and you are trying to set a standard, there are actually serious problems with making the standard “being the best”. It leads to people being the best at all costs, such as in ways that harm the group; it leads to potentially extreme waste for showboating (Bezos’ yacht); it is not useful for 99% of people who need positive reinforcement yet aren’t the best; it is psychologically damaging to those who fail, depending on the stakes. The proper balance IMO is the sophisticated Christian balance: doing your best to glorify God and glorifying God in the best of others. This means positive reinforcement for all, but no cutthroat competition to be the best SBF or Elizabeth Holmes.
Nietzsche on Sparta:
Nietzsche on the question of obedience:
Nietzsche is a complex and difficult theorist. A general rule for these discussions could go something like: "In cases where the discussion isn't based on an egregious misreading of Nietzsche, an answer to the objection is almost certainly already in Nietzsche." As No_one suggests, it's probably best to think of this as a discussion of a couple pop-Nietzschean terms, and how they've come to be used in ordinary language, rather than a philosophical analysis.
Nietzsche’s evasion isn’t convincing and Sparta continues to be a stumbling block for his philosophy. It was the ideal of a strong and militant people in the ancient world, including those whom Nietzsche idolized. Nietzsche saying the Spartans were too hard (lol) and essentially calling them fake (lmao) makes me lower my opinion of him even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Does he like the Supermen or not? Well, there they are, the fiercest fighters who enslaved others, with a slave morality among themselves.
Nietzsche does not uncritically endorse master morality, or military conquest as an end in itself. Neither a state entirely devoted to master morality, or to military conquest, would be Nietzschean states (to the extent that such a thing is a coherent concept, like with Plato's Republic). The Superman is not just the biggest, baddest Bronze Age warlord - there are higher worlds to conquer.
The next aphorism after the Sparta one:
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Cooperation is not necessarily a sign of slave morality - individuals in warrior cultures cooperate because it is in their best interest to do so, rather than being quasi-forced to co-operate (primarily through commiseration) by the innate seethe and cope one experiences by being at the bottom of the totem pole. Fasting and discipline may be vital one's greater interest of becoming fit and healthy. In contrast, the modern day's Body Positivity movement is a direct slave moralist reaction to this and to fitness and health in general - it seeks to denigrate the achievements of those who are fit and healthy, deny the effects of their lifestyle on their health and repurpose their lack of Will Save vs Food as an expression of personality.
It is also not the case that a culture (or indeed a person) is entirely one or the other - N said that people and cultures are usually a mix of both in some proportion.
It may make sense for something like fat acceptance, but it loses coherence when you look at Christians in the wild, as OliveTapenade points out above. It’s not enough to get people to cooperate based on what is in their best interest, because an individual’s best interest often conflicts with the group. Once they have riches they may act like Nero, or maybe they realize that their best interest is to defect. It is never in a Japanese Kamikaze pilot’s best interest to fly his plane into a ship rather than surrender, but (were that tactic to work) it would be in Japan’s interest. If cooperation is the ultimate Good in a civilization then it makes sense to “quasi-force” members to develop an extreme and maximal commitment to cooperation, one predicated on dogma and stories and rituals rather than self-benefit.
Christian culture accomplished this well: A loving Messiah teaches loving maxims and standards, based on identifying with your peer as identical to you in worth, and being as prosocial as possible. Because it is a figure in a story it taps into the human instinct of social reciprocation and imitation, rather than logical persuasion. This loving figure suffers a gruesome death unjustly to save you (reminiscent of Plato’s mention of the truly just man being tortured and crucified), which furthers the reciprocation. And there are then rewards of punishment based on your imitation of the figure. This is the most efficient way to turn someone cooperative if done right, because it needs to come from a place of personality and social environment rather than flimsy philosophy.
Also, modern critics like Scott see a story about a self-denying saint and forget that these are the superhero cast of Christianity, not an actual standard that is set for believers. The extreme acts of the Saints are, in practice, a way to jolt a rich person into realizing they should donate a library or fund a school. Because their conduct was so unlivably self-denying, when you remember them you feel an obligation to do your small part. It’s definitely not as simple as “Christianity tells you to sell all your possessions”, which no one does.
Nero was a pretty good ruler by the standards of the time. Just slandered by the winners.
Nero also has an even worse reputation in the era of Gibbon that he had in the era of Suetonius because he was particularly associated with early persecution of Christians.
On the other hand, he did murder his own mother...
By all accounts she kinda deserved it.
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Honestly, so few people read Nietzsche that the popular idea of 'nietzschean' might be totally off base.
All the examples of being best you give are rich people. I'm pretty sure Greek and Nietzsche's ideas on excellence also accepted greatness in other domains, at the very least power, valour, bravery etc..
Collapsing human value to purely money is a modern afflici..
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Not the Caledonians, or the barbarians of the Teutoburg forest. It is unlikely that those guys were better drilled and more selfless than the Romans.
IIRC Teutoburg occurred as an ambush due to longterm plan and betrayal by Germans enmeshed in Roman army.
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