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He's only evil when you see the world as a delusional butterfly. Most of what he talked about, power, is what truly rules the world. I think if all of us unders

He's only evil when you see the world as a delusional butterfly. Most of what he talked about, power, is what truly rules the world. I think if all of us understood his lessons, we would be less susceptible to being manipulated and used for evil. I think he was so far ahead of his time that he's even ahead of us in the present. Have we gone beyond good and evil yet? Have we learned how weak those concepts make us? How easily they permit us to be controlled? Just look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others are the "bad." How could such a modern people be so ignorant of the forces that shape their lives, even when we have such great teachers?

1000units 7y ago
Just look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others are the "bad." Does this change if we instead consider ourselves "powerful" and "weak"?
- BucketSort 7y ago
  "Good" and "evil" placate the mind, they encourage us to think less about the nuances of issues, they are traps.
  - 1000units 7y ago
    I agree there.
btilly 7y ago
Given the long-standing decline in violence over recent centuries, the real "delusional butterflies" are the ones who think that their ideas shouldn't be called evil because might inevitably makes right, and therefore everything from slavery to genocide is simply the natural order that we shouldn't try to escape.
- BucketSort 7y ago
  Where did Nietzsche advocate slavery and genocide? Just because someone points out that our nature tends towards complete domination of others doesn't mean one advocates it! He hated what we are! This is the greatest misconception of Nietzsche. People find him contemptuous because they derive all their power from the binds he sought to liberate people from. They also read him way to literally. He was a poet philosopher. He wrote in a way meant to invoke an intellectual experience, rather than lay out a systematic dogma.
  - btilly 7y ago
    As soon as you take the step of saying don't read him literally, you can read anything you want into him. And have given up your right to complain that anyone else read something else into him. Now consider quotes like these: "The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men." "Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative." "I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all!" "Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?" Read this as poetry for your own enjoyment if you wish. But these "poems" both can be and have been used to justify atrocities.
    - misterdoubt 7y ago
      Cherry-picking sentences out of a famously enigmatic writer is a disservice to both his thought and your own.
      - projektir 7y ago
        Being hard to understand is not a virtue, and maybe it's overthinking to claim that someone saying "The great majority of men have no right to existence" somehow means something other than what that sentence quite plainly implies. So far, I haven't seen a clear exposition of what Nietzschd meant by these phrases, if not the obvious thing. The guy quite clearly had an obsession with concepts of "great men". People have thought that some people are more fundamentally valuable than others in some moral is-ought sense for most of existence, there's nothing new or enigmatic about it and most reasonable people are done with it.
tarsinge 7y ago
I disagree. Sure, power rules the world, everyone knows it and knew it before Nietzsche, "good" and "bad" are the results of the choice of people to tune up or down their desire for individualistic power over other's people good. I fail to see how Nietzsche is innovative on our understanding of this, I mean that's even the core teaching of christian philosophy. What's original in Nietszche thought is not that power rules the world and that people are longing for it, it is the challenge of the western and christian values that power and individualism is "bad".
- BucketSort 7y ago
  It wasn't that he just talked about power ruling the world, that wasn't his main thing, he critiqued what people use it for and what the ultimate aim of it should be. He deepened our understanding of what power IS. For Nietzsche, most people possess a fake type of power, they simply use it to maintain "wretched complacency." I think the ultimate conclusion he made was that the most noble goal we can have is to overcome ourselves, and when power is used for that purpose, it is great. "What is great in man is that he is a bridge, not an end." If you are satisfied with complacency, with pleasure seeking modern society, you will hate him.

1000units 7y ago

Just look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others are the "bad." Does this change if we instead consider ourselves "powerful" and "weak"?

BucketSort 7y ago
"Good" and "evil" placate the mind, they encourage us to think less about the nuances of issues, they are traps.
- 1000units 7y ago
  I agree there.

btilly 7y ago

Given the long-standing decline in violence over recent centuries, the real "delusional butterflies" are the ones who think that their ideas shouldn't be called evil because might inevitably makes right, and therefore everything from slavery to genocide is simply the natural order that we shouldn't try to escape.

BucketSort 7y ago
Where did Nietzsche advocate slavery and genocide? Just because someone points out that our nature tends towards complete domination of others doesn't mean one advocates it! He hated what we are! This is the greatest misconception of Nietzsche. People find him contemptuous because they derive all their power from the binds he sought to liberate people from. They also read him way to literally. He was a poet philosopher. He wrote in a way meant to invoke an intellectual experience, rather than lay out a systematic dogma.
- btilly 7y ago
  As soon as you take the step of saying don't read him literally, you can read anything you want into him. And have given up your right to complain that anyone else read something else into him. Now consider quotes like these: "The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men." "Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative." "I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all!" "Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?" Read this as poetry for your own enjoyment if you wish. But these "poems" both can be and have been used to justify atrocities.
  - misterdoubt 7y ago
    Cherry-picking sentences out of a famously enigmatic writer is a disservice to both his thought and your own.
    - projektir 7y ago
      Being hard to understand is not a virtue, and maybe it's overthinking to claim that someone saying "The great majority of men have no right to existence" somehow means something other than what that sentence quite plainly implies. So far, I haven't seen a clear exposition of what Nietzschd meant by these phrases, if not the obvious thing. The guy quite clearly had an obsession with concepts of "great men". People have thought that some people are more fundamentally valuable than others in some moral is-ought sense for most of existence, there's nothing new or enigmatic about it and most reasonable people are done with it.

tarsinge 7y ago

I disagree. Sure, power rules the world, everyone knows it and knew it before Nietzsche, "good" and "bad" are the results of the choice of people to tune up or down their desire for individualistic power over other's people good. I fail to see how Nietzsche is innovative on our understanding of this, I mean that's even the core teaching of christian philosophy. What's original in Nietszche thought is not that power rules the world and that people are longing for it, it is the challenge of the western and christian values that power and individualism is "bad".

BucketSort 7y ago
It wasn't that he just talked about power ruling the world, that wasn't his main thing, he critiqued what people use it for and what the ultimate aim of it should be. He deepened our understanding of what power IS. For Nietzsche, most people possess a fake type of power, they simply use it to maintain "wretched complacency." I think the ultimate conclusion he made was that the most noble goal we can have is to overcome ourselves, and when power is used for that purpose, it is great. "What is great in man is that he is a bridge, not an end." If you are satisfied with complacency, with pleasure seeking modern society, you will hate him.