An introductory lecture summarizing the key ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morality.
Companion Lectures & Interviews
Girard’s Defense of Christianity:
Nietzsche’s Attack on Free Will (6/9/24 launch)
Reference Texts (Affiliate)
0. Introduction
Nietzsche thinks this book is gonna be wasted on most of you, but for his rightful readers, it will free you to achieve greatness. Nietzsche wrote his books to cultivate what he called “higher men.” people like Beethoven, Napoleon, and, Goethe. Now, before you get too excited, Nietzsche's got some bad news for you. Higher men are born to be higher men, they are born with noble aristocratic natures which he thinks is incredibly rare. So if your highest aspirations are just a beautiful house with a nice car, doing well in your 9-5, then this book is not for you. In fact, you might want to turn off this lecture because Nietzsche thinks herd morality is good for the herd. Now, if that doesn’t sound like you, if you aspire to a lot more, Nietzsche's still got some bad news for you. Your potential is being deliberately stunted by the herd. And If you want to achieve greatness, you need to abandon everything you've learned to call morality: altruism, equality, moderation… These values are manufactured precisely to restrain people like you. But there is some good news amidst all this bad news and the good news, is that this book will set you free.
What I'm going to do to ease you in into Nietzsche's ideas is I'm going to share with you a bit about my first introduction to Nietzsche and the Genealogy.
When I first got into college, all I wanted to be was an entrepreneur. So I dropped out freshman year, freshman spring, to build a company. And if you had asked me then and there why I was building the company, I would've told you something ridiculous, like, “I want to make the world a better place.” That's complete nonsense. To this day, I've not met one single person actually motivated by that as their primary motivation. I wanted to build the company for the same reasons that Achilles wanted to sack Troy: pride, greed, glory, maybe even a bit of lust.
It didn't work. Company failed. I was very distraught. I went back to school. I got into philosophy because I wanted to figure out what had gone wrong. And the type of thinkers that I was really attracted to were the Tibetan Buddhists as well as the Christians. People like Augustine, people like Girard. And those thinkers pulled me so much because they tried to wean me off of these worldly desires: pride and money and reputation. And instead, they tried to direct me to this other worldly set of desires: compassion, egolessness, contemplation.
And so in the middle, under their influence, in the middle of my college career, I started having this otherworldly phase. I rejected technology. I switched from Computer Science to Philosophy. I deleted all my social media. I moved to Nepal to go and practice in a Tibetan monastery.
And I thought I was making tremendous progress until I encountered Nietzsche's Genealogy. The Genealogy exposed me as not only having made no progress but actually as having deepened in my perversion. It exposed me that I was motivated by what Nietzsche called ressentiment, resentment. Resentment is the state where you feel bad, where you feel unpleasant, but there's nothing you can do about the source of that unpleasantness. And because you can't change the world, you change your interpretation of the world.
So the classical example here is Aesop's fox. The fox wants the grapes. The fox can't get the grapes. What does the fox do? The fox says, “Well, the grapes are sour anyways.” My sour grapes was my failed company. I was mad at myself, and I was envious of my peers who had dropped out, who had built successful companies. And so even unbeknownst to me... And this is why Nietzsche was so important. It's not like I was consciously planning this fox-like maneuver. Even unbeknownst to me, I had latched on to the asceticism, to the otherworldliness of Buddhism, of Christianity, of philosophy itself in order to more forcibly reject technology. Those silly entrepreneurs, don't they know all desire is suffering and all ambition is vanity?
Nietzsche exposed me as being a little more than just a little resentful loser, motivated by the same pride, the same desire for superiority, but even more perverse, because it was now packaged in this compassionate and egoless shell. And when he pointed that out to me, I started seeing it everywhere in the social world.
So one example is that I have an acquaintance, and in freshman year, I thought he was the most selfless, most moral person I've ever met, because every time I would see him, he would talk so passionately about welfare, about socialism, about communism, helping the poor, helping the little guy. He later confessed to me, sophomore year, that what motivated that wasn't a love of the poor, but a hatred of the rich. He had grown up in an upper middle-class environment, but he was in the middle class. So he was always made to feel lesser than his richer peers. And so his orientation away from wealth was not for its own sake, but to get back at the people he was envious and resentful of. Now, the funny bit is he's now in investment banking. Never had an issue with wealth and equality in the first place, or the only issue he had was that he was on the wrong side of it.
1. Nietzsche’s Project
So that was my first encounter with the Genealogy. But what I want to do now in the part one of this lecture is to properly introduce you holistically to Nietzsche's project, because resentment is only going to be the tip of the iceberg with what Nietzsche thinks is wrong with our culture.
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