The Nietzschean Friend You Need
There is something captivating about the “Battle Rounds” on The Voice. It is a rather mystical experience where two singers challenge each other in a flawless performance until one of them transcends their limits and does something out of the ordinary, leaving the audience in awe. Prior to that moment, they were not aware that the performers could produce such an instance of brilliance.
What this magical experience resembles is far more than the final entertaining outcome. It uncovers how much potential we as people still have; we are just in desperate need of that commanding and opposing force to drive us out of our comfort zone and compel us to discover our true capabilities.
We need these relationships and connections that challenge our current position in life, and that illuminate the long road ahead that we still need to take. The people in these ties keep contending with us till we achieve things we might not have otherwise accomplished without them.
That antithetical voice and these daring relationships are everything Friedrich Nietzsche was attempting to represent. He found progress to only be possible through the clash of conflicting ideas. If he had a life motto to live by, it would be to combat dominant ideology.
The Priest
“Undoubtedly if they succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps said one to another: ‘it is disgraceful to be fortunate: there is too much misery!’”
—Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo.
Our memories are all filled with stories, or rather lessons from the stories, we experienced. Screaming parents are kids’ first realisation of electrical safety, and their potty-training celebrations are their first indication of how to navigate toilets.
We go through life extracting lessons from all the shows we binge-watch, the friendships we build, the teachers we meet, the love we share, and the heartbreaks we experience. These different story formats end up constructing the ideas that inform our beliefs in life. Once we formulate a set of concepts and theories to follow, we seek conformity in groups that assure us of the path we are on, and priests that offer us direction and certainty.
Guidance in this case is rarely educating. Instead, it is indoctrinating and is done in a manner where students demand consistent suffering from fear and shame. They are pushed to suspect that they should seek an ultimate medication for their ugly nature, and that they can find a cure in submission. Compliance here is not a conscious punishment; as humans, we are more comfortable obeying than examining.
On one level, the priest in Nietzsche’s narrative is just an authoritarian church priest. Yet, in some deeper sense, the priest is the totalitarian tribe leader in almost every group that shares common beliefs. You can find him on the left and on the right, in politics and in religion.
The role of priests is to push us into surrendering our independence and have faith in the formulations made by others without questioning any of their presumed axioms; they need us to be submissive and lazy. To make matters worse, if one considered interrogating their rules of commandment, they are reduced to sinners and are threatened with losing their social standing and getting knocked down, if not out, of the hierarchy of the group.
According to Nietzsche, the priests here exemplify the beginning of the end. They form the evil genius system of reward and punishment measured by the amount of guilt they can inflict on the non-obedient members of the tribe. If guilt does not work, they crucify or cancel anyone promoting a different set of values. Science and reason are not part of the equation in this system. Here, there is only an idealistic vision of holiness, justice, and humility.
As the flock of sheep continues to get brainwashed, solely focusing on their motives regardless of the ideas on which they are built, the priests grant them a higher goal of destructing and shaming every party that has any dissimilar beliefs. This significant goal fills the herd with anger, a thirst for vengeance, and a lust for revenge, or as Nietzsche sums up in one word, ressentiment. That ressentiment is embodied in the religious right’s fight against the left’s sexual liberation, and in the radical left’s contempt of the right’s lavishing economic success.
But before we start pointing fingers at each other, it is important to understand priests. The illusion of attaining truth is perhaps more valuable than any other possession because, by and large, the truth is loud enough to be liked, shared, and retweeted by hundreds, if not thousands, of people in any tribe. It is the most powerful feeling that a human can achieve and is the key to man’s superiority.
Priests in this position do not hear questions they cannot answer, and they do not engage in any arguments that might shake their unconditional confidence in their beliefs. They can even experience pleasure at the expense of their followers’ pain. Nietzsche views their humility as a weapon—a method of revenge—and this revenge results from their own suffering. The painted picture then makes the case understandable, but does it make it excusable?
What the Nietzschean friend would do is invite us to step outside the priests’ shadows and leave behind these hiding places that provide us with psychological safety. The primary goal is to realise that the chances of priests holding absolute truth are slim to none, and all it takes for us to discover that is a bit of honesty and straightforwardness with ourselves.
The goal is not to avoid negative feelings altogether. Not only are they often useful, but we also cannot control the thoughts and emotions that enter our minds. Instead, Nietzsche urges us to channel them in a better way. Understanding the impact our thoughts have on our actions can help us not take them in such an acute manner. As we realise the implications of ressentiment and how much it consumes our thoughts, we grasp that it hurts and troubles us more than anyone else.
The Individual
“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
We live in a time when social media has shattered every inch of our attention. We are glued to our phones, eager for any sign of acknowledgement. Every time we scroll on our devices, we crave the pleasure of any like, follow, or text we might receive. This has become the new norm, one that we are still clueless about how to manage.
The number of kids that want to become influencers is exponentially increasing. There is a pleasure in envisioning yourself followed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. The fact that you might become the new ideal that others would one day want to imitate has a certain appeal.
Had social media always existed, it would be easy to imagine that Nietzsche would have had 50 Facebook friends and 10 followers on Instagram and Twitter combined. Apart from his walrus moustache, it is hard to say what else stood out about the German genius during his lifetime; he was a young, shrewd university professor, yet none of his work brought him fame. Things were bad enough that he eventually had to draw on his own funds to publish several of his books.
After he received the recognition that he deserved, his audience learnt that he did not want any followers. This was not a man that was founding a new religion or trying to brainwash his readers with a set of practices that would earn them a spot in paradise. The only party he enjoyed siding with was the one where he was alone.
Walter Kaufmann, who wrote extensively on Nietzsche, discerned him as the man that represented the enemy of all versions of the state. Nietzsche found delight in toying with any set of prominent ideas and, in return, expected to be read with the same degree of critique. Zarathustra is not a figure to be followed, he is to be understood and opposed. Nietzsche discovered value in giving people a critical framework that would help them navigate their life’s road map. That framework is not a path; it is to help them find their own path with the hopes that it will be enough for them to find themselves.
He believed in the immense value of the individual human soul. The cornerstone of his framework and his most famous concept, will to power, serve as an escape from the idea that our lives are just thoughtless accidents. It urges man to live dangerously as he tries to understand what makes life worth living, discovering his unique role in this play along the way. But man can only find this role when he faces the worst enemy he can confront: himself.
Nietzsche posits that our lack of will to power makes us deny our very own selves the opportunities to love and hope in this life. The inadequacy of our will to power has created these fragmented beings that are effortlessly swayed by the opinions of others, both good and bad. As a result, people are made submissive and fall under the control of the likes, shares, and retweets of their companions. They are fragile and cannot stand on their own, becoming slaves to churches, cults, religious groups, and political parties. They allow themselves to grow into puppets of these systems to convince themselves that their lives have meaning.
To grow in the will to power, one needs to move far from that image and closer to the tamed monster Jordan Peterson repeatedly mentions when quoting Nietzsche. The aim here is to become the kind of person who can pick from a buffet of moral and immoral choices while continuing to favour ethical alternatives. As we become more in tune with our will to power, we develop more wisdom in how we view and organise our own values. We are able to analyse the values fed to us by our societies, and to locate the lies that distort how we function in the world.
Courage is fundamental to this process. Nietzsche inspires us to face what we know to be hurtful, for there is beauty in the endurance of suffering, ill treatment, misery, and despair. After we go through the pain of terrible losses, depravations, and insults, we discover our way of life. We only find true beauty after we encounter this ugliness, and how much truth we can tolerate defines the essence of our character.
The Truth
“If God had locked up all truth in his right hand, and in his left the unique, ever-live striving for truth, albeit with the addition that I should always and eternally err, and he said to me, ‘Choose!’— I should humbly clasp his left hand, saying: ‘Father, give! Pure truth is after all for thee alone!’”
—Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
Nietzsche’s life purpose was to explain to the world the difference between the truth and the belief that something is true. He wanted to disrupt the peace and certitude in his society by paving the way for those who are honest seekers.
Our belief structures are not as simple as one might expect. For instance, you can change your opinion about your favourite burger place: its quality could decline, you may discover a hidden gem, or a new international chain could open in your neighbourhood. But not all our beliefs are of the same importance, or lack thereof, as our favourite burger place. Whether we like it or not, we organise our beliefs in a hierarchy, and the more sacred our beliefs are, the less chance they will change.
It is perhaps one of life’s biggest challenges for a person to doubt his most sacred beliefs. Jonathan Haidt maintains that one of the main reasons it is so difficult is that we are wired to never pursue the truth. Instead, we begin our enquiry with our favorite conclusions in mind, and we look for evidence to convince others and ourselves of why that belief is correct.
We often operate by striving for our own pleasure and the peace of our souls, so we choose not to see certain things to avoid their consequences. In our agenda, what makes something true is how useful it may be. The goal here is not the object of faith itself, but rather the effect this object produces, and as long as this object serves our social evolution, we consider it more important than finding the truth.
The closer we lean towards the truth, the more we find ourselves in a hard place—a place of absolute chaos—striding into uncertainty. It is our first step towards suffering. So instead of going through the pain and misery, we opt to stick with Sam Harris’ definition of dogmatism:
“Dogmatism is just holding to an idea no matter what else comes into view. So, there’s nothing you can say to challenge this, ‘I’ll talk to you about all this stuff, but over here, there’s something that I care about, some proposition, some assertion that something is true that I care about so much, I’m so emotionally attached to it that not only is it non-negotiable, if you continue to push over here, I’m going to get angrier and angrier. I’m going to threaten you with violence.’”
The emotional outbursts that happen when defending our beliefs indicate how important, precious, and vital they are to us, and the entire scope of Nietzsche’s work highlighted that as the precise reason we should question them. We should switch our efforts from trying to save the system and start a journey of enquiry and suffering in the unknown world.
Nietzsche himself was no stranger to suffering, as Kaufmann detailed in his book Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. He lost his father and brother at a young age, and his medical records show that he was shortsighted and prone to headaches. He went on to experience several heartbreaks in friendships and in love, including his estranged friendship with Richard Wagner, his complicated feelings for Wagner’s wife, his unrequited love for Lou Salomé, and the betrayal he experienced in his friendship with Paul Rée and Lou. It was a life filled with such misery that Irvin D. Yalom went on to write a novel about the philosopher’s struggle with his mental disorder titled When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession. Yet, in his fight against this suffering, Nietzsche arrived at the ingenious side of himself that influenced many people’s lives, including Sigmund Freud who said, “He had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.”
There is a wide spectrum of conditions between absolute, uninterrupted comfort, and endless excruciating torture. As we experience a tough day or a long week at work, we daydream of a state of complete rest, and we crave downtime from the busy lives we lead. However, at the cosy, relaxed end of the spectrum is a man who cannot handle one more day of pointless rest, eager to find a new problem to engage with. Nietzsche distinguished between pleasure and happiness: we often need pleasure in our lives, but what we genuinely seek is to look at our lives and feel happiness and satisfaction in the grand scheme of things. That is seldom ever fulfilled without the pain that we conquer.
This takes us back to Nietzsche’s will to power and our ability to cope with different levels of pain and agony in life, overcome them and turn them to our advantage in the long run. It posits that the beautiful people we meet in life are the ones that experience the highest levels of sickness and suffering.
But the will to power is never complete if we do not understand the will to truth, as only under these circumstances will we be able to surpass our own biases. Our will to truth is our craving for suffering; we should not wait for catastrophes to occur so we can learn to resist them, we ought to subject our most cherished ideas to the harshest intelligent criticism to examine their rationality.
The truth is more often than not found on the side of the more difficult, and reason is usually the result of a sickness that we go through. Nietzsche, for instance, considered his fickle health to be one of his biggest advantages in life as it guided him to his most noble ideas. The question then becomes how an intrinsically biased being could voluntarily choose to enter pain, sickness, and suffering, and how this pain could cure them and make them impartial in their search for truth.
Nietzsche would agree with Haidt’s ideas on how we could reach truth. “The only known cure is other people who don’t share your confirmation bias,” Haidt says. “If you talk only among people who share your views, you’re not likely to find the truth. Other people that disconfirm our beliefs, they are like an extension to our brain, they are doing us a favor—the brain sometimes actually works by having opposing processes.”
It follows that we will only find a remedy for our longing for strong faith in discovering adversaries with enough intellectual rigour to challenge our treasured ideas. If we believe that knowledge is more important than certainty, we are obligated to experience frequent disagreements with our friends and colleagues. We are bound to explore diverse forms of books, articles, and podcasts that will confuse the algorithms of our phones so they fail to indoctrinate us. Scepticism is not indifference; it is our ability to think that we might be wrong and enter conversations willing to learn what the opposite side has to say.
It is as Nietzsche said, “If we train our conscience, it kisses us while it hurts us.” These conditions are not easy by any stretch of the imagination. In a sense, we are creating a battlefield in our brains that can only result in our own hell, but who is to say that this format is not the only way we can create our own heaven? Nietzsche also said, “The most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me.” We need to be more like these Christians; we need to find the right kind of enemies—successful enemies—that would challenge our lives and mindsets so we can view the big picture with a wide lens and recognise that this is the closest to heaven that we can create.