Nietzsche, The Misunderstood
While reviewing Mr. Robot, I kept circling around themes that are hardly exclusive to hacking: alienation, morality, power, control, identity, resentment, and what happens when the values or structures around us stop making sense. Those questions are also very Nietzschean.
A large part of Nietzsche’s philosophy begins with that discomfort: what happens when people become dissatisfied with the systems, values and expectations they inherit, but can no longer simply accept them as unquestionable truths? What do you do when the structures around you feel hollow? Do you reject them? Do you replace them? And if you do, what exactly do you put in their place?
That is where Nietzsche becomes interesting.
About Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, philologist and cultural critic whose work challenged many of the moral, religious and philosophical assumptions of European society. Writing in a style that mixed aphorisms, polemics and literary experimentation, he explored themes such as morality, nihilism, religion, truth, power, individuality and self-overcoming. His ideas would become enormously influential across philosophy, psychology, literature and political thought, while also becoming some of the most frequently misunderstood and misappropriated in modern intellectual history.
Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers I started reading when I was younger. While Thus Spoke Zarathustra is probably his most famous and celebrated work, The Antichrist is actually my favorite and the book that pushed me to read more of his philosophy. And no, despite the title, there is nothing particularly Satanic about The Antichrist.
It is an attack on Christianity. A very aggressive one. Nietzsche tears into Christian morality, its institutions and what he believed it had done to European culture. Compared with Voltaire, another philosopher I quickly grew fond of, the tone could hardly be more different. Voltaire could destroy clerical hypocrisy and superstition through satire, ridicule and wit. Nietzsche usually chooses a hammer.
Both attacked dogma, but they were attacking it from different directions. Voltaire was often concerned with superstition, intolerance and the abuses of religious authority. Nietzsche’s criticism goes deeper into morality itself. He believed Christianity had helped create a value system that glorified weakness, guilt, self-denial and resentment at the expense of strength, creativity and affirmation of life.
Calling Christianity an existential poison is probably not far from the intensity with which he approached it. That intensity is also part of why Nietzsche is so easily misunderstood.
The Misreading
Nietzsche is often represented as the dark philosopher of nihilism: the man who announced that God was dead, stared into the abyss and apparently concluded that nothing matters. Except that this is almost the opposite of the problem Nietzsche was trying to solve. Nietzsche did not celebrate nihilism. He diagnosed it. As traditional religious and moral frameworks lost their authority in Europe, Nietzsche believed the values supported by those frameworks would eventually lose their credibility as well. “God is dead” was not simply a victorious atheist slogan. It was a warning about the consequences of demolishing the foundations of a moral system without knowing what would replace them.
If the old values collapse, what comes next? Nothing? That is nihilism.
Nietzsche’s project was largely concerned with getting through that problem rather than surrendering to it. If inherited values can no longer be accepted simply because tradition, religion or society says so, then humans have to confront the much harder task of creating and affirming values themselves.
That also leaves the individual in an uncomfortable position. Once you begin questioning the values, institutions and traditions that previously gave life its structure, it becomes difficult to simply return to them unquestioningly. There is a kind of alienation in that: no longer fully belonging to the old framework, while not yet having created anything capable of replacing it.
That is where concepts such as self-overcoming, the will to power and the Übermensch enter the picture. The Übermensch is perhaps the most famously abused idea in Nietzsche’s work. It has also been translated as the Superman, which probably did the concept very few favors in the twentieth century. It does not simply mean a biologically superior human being or someone entitled to dominate everyone else. The Übermensch can instead be understood as a figure of overcoming: someone capable of moving beyond inherited values, herd conformity and comfortable mediocrity, and creating a way of living that can genuinely be affirmed. The will to power is related, but broader and considerably more difficult to reduce to a single definition. Nietzsche’s language of power goes far beyond political domination, often encompassing overcoming resistance, transformation, growth, creative force and the ability to shape oneself and one’s world. In that sense, the Übermensch can represent this process turned inward as much as outward: overcoming one’s own limits rather than merely gaining power over other people.
Which makes what happened to Nietzsche’s reputation particularly ironic.
His ideas were later appropriated by fascists and Nazis, especially concepts such as the Übermensch and the will to power, and turned into ideas of racial superiority and domination. Yet Nietzsche repeatedly showed contempt for German nationalism and for the antisemitic political movements of his own time. His sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, did his legacy few favors either. After Nietzsche became incapacitated, she took control of his literary estate and helped shape a version of his philosophy far more compatible with her own nationalist and antisemitic politics.
Nietzsche is more complicated than simply saying “the Nazis got him completely wrong”. There are uncomfortable, elitist and deliberately anti-egalitarian parts of his philosophy that cannot simply be wished away. But racial nationalism was not his project. And reducing the Übermensch to some blond Aryan conqueror is an extraordinary distortion of the concept.
“Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
To Shock
Nietzsche’s writing makes misunderstanding almost inevitable because he deliberately writes to provoke. He does not sound like someone patiently constructing an academic proof. He uses aphorisms, irony, insults, exaggeration and outrageous claims. He wants the reader to react.
His attacks on Christianity are a perfect example. Beneath the anger is a broader question: what if the moral values people consider unquestionably good are actually preventing them from becoming something greater? Nietzsche believed Christian morality had elevated humility, obedience and self-denial while becoming suspicious of pride, strength, ambition and earthly pleasure. Through his concept of slave morality, he argued that values can emerge from resentment: the powerless reinterpret the qualities of those stronger than them as evil, and their own inability to act as goodness.
But Nietzsche’s more unsettling move is that he does not always attack a belief by trying to prove it false. He asks where the belief came from.
What psychological need does it satisfy? What kind of person benefits from seeing the world that way? Under what conditions did the value emerge? Was it created from strength, or from resentment? Does it encourage life and creation, or does it exist primarily to condemn someone else?
That changes the nature of the argument. A moral principle can sound noble in isolation while having considerably less noble origins. Nietzsche’s genealogy tries to expose those origins, the conditions that produced them and the purposes they came to serve. It forces us to examine not only what we believe, but why such beliefs emerged in the first place and what kind of life they encourage.
Whether one agrees with him or not, that is an extremely uncomfortable exercise. Which is precisely the point. Nietzsche does not want a passive reader. He wants someone arguing with him. His philosophy is not particularly useful if you read it looking for commandments. In fact, turning Nietzsche into another source of commandments would be hilariously contrary to much of what he was doing.
He was suspicious of dogma, including the possibility of his own ideas becoming dogma. The goal is not necessarily to agree with Nietzsche, but to have your assumptions dragged into the open where they can be examined.
Life After Nihilism
Underneath all of the aggression, there is something surprisingly affirmative about Nietzsche’s philosophy. He spends an enormous amount of time talking about decline, nihilism, resentment, suffering and the collapse of values, but he does so because he is searching for a way to say yes to life despite all of them.
That is where amor fati becomes important. Love your fate. Not merely tolerate it. Not simply accept that something happened because you cannot change it. Affirm it as part of the life that made you who you are.
The idea reaches its most extreme form in Nietzsche’s thought experiment of eternal recurrence: imagine being told that you would have to live your exact life again, every pain, mistake, joy and embarrassment, over and over for eternity. Would that horrify you? Or could you live in such a way that you would welcome it?
That is not the philosophy of someone telling you that nothing matters. Quite the opposite. It is an almost absurd demand that life matter so much that you could affirm the whole thing.
Nietzsche’s Last Man represents the opposite possibility. The Last Man does not seek greatness, creation or transformation. He seeks comfort. Safety. Convenience. An easy life with as little risk, suffering or ambition as possible. He has found happiness. And blinks.
Against that complacency, Nietzsche offers the image of someone willing to create, struggle and transform.
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The Harder Problem
But rejecting inherited values creates another problem that is much harder to solve.
If values are no longer guaranteed by God, tradition or some objective moral order, what makes the values we create any better than the ones we rejected?
It would be easy to turn Nietzsche into a philosophy of “make your own rules”, but that seems far too shallow. Nietzsche himself constantly distinguishes between higher and lower ways of living, between creation and resentment, affirmation and denial, growth and decadence. Clearly, not every value becomes valuable simply because someone chose it.
And that creates an uncomfortable tension. If there is no external authority standing above us to determine our values, value creation cannot simply mean freedom from judgment. It means that the burden of judgment becomes ours.
Perhaps that is one consequence of the kind of freedom Nietzsche’s philosophy points toward. Escaping dogma does not mean escaping responsibility for what we value. Quite the opposite. It means losing the convenient authority to which that responsibility could previously be outsourced.
“What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
Self-Overcoming
This is also where I think Nietzsche sometimes comes surprisingly close to the Stoics, despite arriving there through a very different road. Both value resilience and self-mastery. Both refuse to treat suffering as sufficient reason to reject life. Both demand a certain independence from external circumstances. But the temperament is completely different. The Stoic wants composure. Nietzsche wants vitality. The Stoic tries not to be ruled by the storm. Nietzsche occasionally seems interested in becoming the storm. And perhaps that is what I find most compelling about him.
Nietzsche believed humans were capable of transformation. That we could overcome inherited assumptions, comforts, fears and identities rather than treating them as fixed. Not everyone would. Nietzsche was certainly no egalitarian, and he could be extraordinarily contemptuous of what he called the herd.
But his philosophy constantly pushes toward becoming rather than simply being. Toward self-overcoming instead of stagnation. Toward creation instead of resentment. Toward affirmation instead of nihilism.
Which makes the popular image of Nietzsche as some permanently depressed philosopher staring hopelessly into darkness rather amusing. He certainly stared into the darkness. He just wasn’t recommending that we stay there.
And that is probably the misunderstanding that bothers me the most. Nietzsche wrote brutally about nihilism, suffering and the collapse of traditional values, but his philosophy constantly returns to transformation, creation and the affirmation of life. That makes him considerably more optimistic than his reputation suggests.
The Uncomfortable Nietzsche
There is also a danger in making Nietzsche too agreeable.
It is tempting to extract the attractive parts of his philosophy: individuality, self-overcoming, courage, creativity and affirmation, while quietly leaving everything else behind. But Nietzsche’s criticism of morality goes considerably further than simply telling us to question religious dogma. He also challenges ideas many modern readers would consider moral progress: egalitarianism, universal moral obligations, altruism and even compassion when it becomes an unconditional moral ideal.
That is where reading Nietzsche becomes genuinely difficult. If the purpose is to question inherited values, we cannot conveniently stop the exercise when he reaches the values we happen to like.
We do not have to agree with his conclusions. I certainly don’t agree with all of them. But if we celebrate Nietzsche for attacking other people’s dogmas while becoming defensive the moment he attacks our own, we may have understood his provocation less than we thought.
Relevance Today
That is still an uncomfortable idea today. Perhaps even more so.
We live in an age where finding information has become almost trivial, while genuinely challenging our own beliefs remains remarkably difficult. Search engines and social media can expose us to almost every perspective imaginable, but they can just as easily be used to construct perfectly comfortable intellectual bubbles. Communities form around shared assumptions, people select sources they already trust, and disagreement increasingly becomes evidence that the other person belongs to the wrong tribe.
The result is something Nietzsche would probably have recognized immediately: herd thinking with better infrastructure.
What makes that more uncomfortable is that modern people often like to think of themselves as highly individualistic. We reject old authorities, inherited traditions and conventional morality, and assume that this makes us independent. But abandoning one framework does not necessarily mean escaping conformity. It may simply mean replacing one herd with another, then congratulating ourselves for having escaped the first.
That is where Nietzsche becomes difficult to use honestly. His philosophy is very convenient when pointed at other people’s conformity, but far less comfortable when turned inward. Where did our convictions come from? Which assumptions do we protect because they are true, and which because they are familiar? Which beliefs would survive if the people around us stopped reinforcing them?
Confirmation is easier to seek than contradiction. Finding arguments that support what we already believe takes little effort; deliberately engaging with the strongest case against those beliefs is much harder. That does not mean every opposing idea is correct. Some ideas are simply wrong. It means independent thought requires the willingness to risk discovering that we might be wrong.
And that can be uncomfortable. Sometimes extremely uncomfortable.
That is why philosophers such as Nietzsche remain useful. Not because Nietzsche had all the answers. He very clearly did not. Not because we should replace one set of dogmas with Nietzsche’s. That would completely miss the point. But because he forces questions we would often prefer not to ask. Where did my values come from? Why do I believe what I believe? Would I still believe it if everyone around me disagreed? Is this conviction actually mine, or did I inherit it? Am I pursuing something because I value it, or because I am afraid of questioning it?
Those questions are timeless.
Nietzsche’s answers are debatable, occasionally brilliant, occasionally disturbing and often deliberately infuriating. But perhaps that is precisely why he is worth reading. A philosopher who spends so much time attacking herd thinking would probably be disappointed if his readers merely joined another herd bearing his name.