master morality
Article
master morality is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 30, 2024 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Sometimes it sounds like the Superman is the guy who brings master morality back in style”; “Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places”; “master morality “the bad one”“. It most often appears alongside 4chan, Achilles, Agamemnon.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: July 30, 2024
- Last seen: August 08, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 4chan (2 shared issues)
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- Achilles (2 shared issues)
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- Agamemnon (2 shared issues)
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- Andrew Tate (2 shared issues)
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- Ayn Rand (2 shared issues)
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- Bentham’s Bulldog (2 shared issues)
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- Bugatti (2 shared issues)
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- Christianity (2 shared issues)
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- effective altruism (2 shared issues)
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- Friedrich Nietzsche (2 shared issues)
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- God (2 shared issues)
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- Jason Crawford (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Value systems naturally flow from elite to commoners. But a commoner can’t do much with this kind of master morality besides conclude “yeah, I suck”. Commoners are poor, sickly, and live in mud huts. They’re unlikely to achieve many goals beyond “not die”, and they’ve probably had their spirits crushed. But “I suck” isn’t a psychologically stable proposition. So sometime around the Iron Age, the slaves started working on a morality of their own, one where they’re the good guys and the masters are the losers.
Nietzsche speculates that slave morality originated with the Jews (an especially downtrodden and persecuted race) but caught on after the rise of Christianity. Sometime around the fall of Rome it took the lead over master morality, and it’s been gaining ever since. As time goes on, slave morality will become more and more dominant, master morality will fade into a dimmer and dimmer memory, and at some point we’ll come to what he calls the Last Man - someone so completely poisoned by slave morality that he worships mediocrity, feels no emotion but envy, and refuses to ever do anything because doing things seems insufficiently humble.
As an alternative, Nietzsche proposed the Superman. This concept is confusing, everyone gets it wrong, and I will also get it wrong. Sometimes it sounds like the Superman is the guy who brings master morality back in style. Other times it sounds like he reconciles both systems, keeping the best parts of each. Still other times, it sounds like he transcends them entirely.
The Nietzschean Overman is above others in the sense of being able to act independently of their resentment; the ubermensch could even arguably be "altruistic" in ways a slave simply cannot, because master morality allows a person to actually act "unselfishly" if that is what they deem best. Slaves are always comparing themselves to masters and/or to the herd, often in self-negating ways but never in self-sacrificing ways, because they lack the proper perspective to make a sacrifice (a slave cannot consent, because they are not free).
Nietzsche scholar here (bona fides: an academic book and several journal articles on Nietzsche). I just want to note that Nietzsche is often misunderstood as defending master morality, or wanting it reinstated, or something like that. None of that is true. In fact, he describes the ancient nobles as so crude, unreflective, and unsymbolic as to be scarcely imaginable by moderns. After 1900 years of slave morality (Christianity, natch), our psychology is fundamentally altered. He writes in The Genealogy of Morals that “the bad conscience [guilt, a consequence of slave morality] is an illness, but as pregnancy is an illness.” We can’t go back to the old masters way of thinking, but we also need to get rid of slave morality, which he thinks is decadent (=anti-life] and fosters ressentiment. We need to give birth to something new.
One of the things Nietzsche is trying to do is undermine the idea that morality is immutable and absolute; instead moral concepts have changed and altered over time. In fact, slave morality flips master morality on its head: the old virtues of strength and dominance are no longer good, but now are seen as evil. The ancient dichotomy of good (strength, power) vs. bad (weakness, impotence) has been replaced with good (humility, poverty, chastity) vs. evil (strength, power). So when Nietzsche wants to move beyond good and evil, he is not talking about good vs. bad.