How I outgrew Nietzsche His philosophy compensated for not being good at life

Like every other young man inclined towards Right-wing politics, in my late teens and early 20s, I fell under the spell of Friedrich Nietzsche. In particular, his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published between 1883 and 1885, became something of a guide to life for me. A work of historical philosophy, the book follows the prophet Zarathustra as he descends from solitude to teach humanity about the Übermensch — the “Overman” who is supposed to transcend the merely human — delivering parables while confronting disciples, doubters, and his own evolving insights. Zarathustra is a stand-in for the author, and the reader is likewise drawn in.

Zarathustra, coming a mere 24 years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, is best known for its prophet’s declaration that “God is dead.” The main character’s moniker makes a mockery of the Christian deity — Zarathustra is the Germanized name of the Persian prophet who founded Zoroastrianism, a precursor to Christianity that may have later influenced it. With God dead, Zarathustra was to be a counter-gospel.

What was to replace God? Nietzsche explains: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” He goes on: “All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.…”

Zarathustra speaks in parables grouped under various headings, often on themes dear to the hearts of reactionaries. “On Women” is a moving, and deeply un-PC, reflection on the animal passions that motivate relations between the sexes, with a bit of trolling thrown in. “Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: that is pregnancy.” As Zarathustra is about to part from the old woman he is talking to, she promises him a “little truth”: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!”

Zarathustra occasionally hits on politics, and when he does, it is to denounce the rabble and peddlers of equality. The Christian and his spiritual descendant, the socialist, he says, preach egalitarianism as a cover for a desire to tear down what is strong, life-affirming, and healthy in man. 

If you think much of this sounds like Andrew Tate and other manosphere influencers, you are correct. But Nietzsche deserves full credit for getting there first. 

While young reactionaries today look back at a simpler time, in which supposedly all normal people had a community, a partner, and a secure job, Nietzsche was already living a lonely, sexually frustrated existence in 19th-century Germany. He might have had sex once at a brothel — where he may or may not have contracted syphilis — but otherwise he either was rebuffed by women or kept them at a distance. The man who effusively praised conquerors like Napoleon and Alexander, and expressed contempt for Christian morality, was constantly sick, felt overwhelmed by social gatherings, and had trouble tolerating bright lights and loud noises. As the intellectual historian Peter Gay wrote in the introduction to The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, the philosopher’s “life was a dramatic one, but all his drama was interior.”

More than a century after Zarathustra was published, I became one of a countless number of young men who found solace in Nietzsche’s thought. A life-affirming philosophy compensated for not being very good at life. Wasn’t I smart enough to reject God, and strong enough not to need a supernatural crutch? Didn’t I see through both Christianity and Left-wing political ideas that denied the obvious truth that some human beings were more valuable than others? When Nietzsche discussed the Overman, I thought he meant me. Or at least, someone I might one day become. 

In truth, just about anyone else in the world would have been a better candidate. Like Nietzsche, I was smart and introverted, with poor social graces. I had ideas about the opposite sex and what women should or did want, but little practical experience with them. To understand Nietzsche as cope for losers, though, would be to miss out on his continuing relevance.

If many of us began thinking of ourselves as Übermenschen without much evidence, the fault was with us, rather than Nietzsche, whose real message was that although life was ultimately tragic, we were to find meaning in the struggle. He stressed resilience, self-assurance, and emotional and intellectual detachment from the mob. In the Nietzschean worldview, genetic determinism coexists alongside an obsession with individual and collective transformation. We are naturally unequal, but we can all become something better than we currently are. Nietzsche was, to some extent, a 19th-century self-help guru.

Much of the intoxication of reading him comes from his seductive combination of depth and lightness. With the death of God, this world is all we have left, and we must take it seriously. There is profound beauty in the journey toward becoming something better. At the same time, we have no choice but to remain self-aware enough to poke fun at ourselves. (“I no longer trust myself since I aspire to the height, and nobody trusts me any more; how did this happen? I change too fast: my today refutes my yesterday.”) Nietzsche uses humor not in the modern way that avoids judgment or responsibility; rather, his trolling works because the underlying point is deadly serious. He taught that there was hope, and even if you failed, you could get some laughs along the way, many of them at your own expense. What else to make of a man who published an autobiography with chapter titles such as “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” and “Why I Write Such Excellent Books”?

Nietzsche’s ideas today sometimes seem banal, but only because we have fully incorporated his worldview. I now take for granted that humans are often driven by resentment, and the desire to tear things down rather than any positive vision of the good. Also, people aren’t always honest about their motivations, even with themselves, and this is especially true on sensitive and emotional topics like politics, or what a person looks for in a romantic partner. Freud admired Nietzsche and hit on many of the same themes, as does some of the most up-to-date work in psychology and anthropology.

When people make Nietzschean points on X (formerly Twitter), we roll our eyes at the lack of originality. But Nietzsche showed remarkable foresight in understanding the motivations behind socialism in the late 19th century, before it would come to dominate large swaths of the world. The entire 20th century in a sense stands as a testament to his prescience, with one nation after another witnessing Left-wing revolutions descend into barbarism, despite their association with beautiful words and ideals. Echoes of these instincts can be found among wokes and degrowthers, and in the self-pitying rhetoric of the populist Right. Even many stock phrases in use today originate with Nietzsche: “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” 

The other great tragic force of the 20th century was German nationalism, particularly in its most virulent form, Nazism. Nietzsche’s ideas took off in his native country beginning around 1890, and were an inspiration to militarists up to 1945. Pocket editions of Zarathustra were distributed to soldiers on the front lines in World War I, and according to the historian Steven Aschheim, it was among the three most popular books taken into battle, along with Goethe’s Faust and the New Testament. His thought also became an inspiration for the Nazis — this, despite the fact that he opposed anti-Semitism, mocked German nationalism, and condemned conformity and obedience to the state.

As with many continental philosophers, it is often difficult to pin down exactly what Nietzsche believed, and if you start with the assumption that writers will see their work bastardized in the popular imagination, it is easy to understand how Nietzscheism in practice came to be co-opted by fascists. Praise for the salutary effects of war and contempt for weakness are staples of his books. Aschheim writes that although Hitler and his followers appropriated other figures from German history, “the particular Nazi emphasis on Nietzsche derived from his peculiar capacity to legitimate them.” It is no accident, then, that in addition to being praised and cited by Hitler, Nietzsche today has disciples that include race-obsessed far-Right intellectuals like Costin Alamariu, better known as “Bronze Age Pervert.”

Left-leaning adherents of Nietzsche blamed his sister’s appropriation of his legacy after his death for the way he was supposedly misread. Some German nationalists agreed. Ernst Krieck, a prominent Nazi theoretician, sarcastically remarked in 1937 that the only things keeping Nietzsche from being a National Socialist thinker were that he was not a nationalist, not a socialist, and rejected a racial worldview. Nonetheless, such critiques were ignored by Nazi dogma, which promoted the philosopher’s love of war and contempt for Christianity. The most charitable thing one can say about attempts to absolve Nietzsche for his impact on German nationalism is that if a thinker gets interpreted wrongly again and again, he surely deserves at least some of the blame. (Though admittedly, the idea of trying to cancel Nietzsche in his grave strikes me as amusing.)

The truth is that it has been possible for individuals and movements with wildly contradictory views to embrace Nietzsche. There are postmodern Nietzscheans, nationalist and anti-nationalist Nietzscheans, and, in my heart at least, Nietzschean liberals. This last philosophy accepts his insights into human inequality and the psychology of resentment, while remaining skeptical of his attempts to assert a positive vision that can be imposed on society. Celebrating the idea of a heroic struggle, or one man’s will to overcome obstacles, can be useful in terms of self-improvement or even creating a cultural movement, but such impulses are likely to end in disaster if they are elevated to a governing philosophy.

We continue to see demonstrations of some of the same pitfalls of Nietzscheism today. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, there is a venture capitalist telling himself he is the Overman because he is investing in an app that more efficiently separates sports fans from their money. Nietzsche did not spell out the politics he supported, but he did provide an endless number of quotes that can be easily appropriated by those wanting to commit atrocities. And young people on X and TikTok, particularly those attracted to far-Right influencers, are often getting a bastardized version of Nietzsche, twisted to fit a political agenda. Better to go back to the original source. If you think the lesson of Nietzsche is that he agrees with your politics, it is more likely that you are a member of the rabble than a champion of individualism standing apart from it. 

Still, there are few books that I am certain changed the path of my life, and Zarathustra was one of them. I discovered Nietzsche in an era before iPhones and ubiquitous social media, when something closer to the kind of solitude Zarathustra experienced was still possible. If my feelings of superiority were at first unjustified, over the years, I did develop a genuine — and, I like to think, well-earned — understanding of myself as a lone hero willing to stare down the mob. Seeing myself through the eyes of Zarathustra stamped out any fears of social isolation and rejection, and has allowed me to withstand — and even enjoy — the frequent demands for my banishment from public life. 

If one day the world does reject me, I will return to the void I emerged from, and look back at the whole thing with a laugh. Nietzsche went mad, perhaps from syphilis, but the sense that life is a cosmic joke is so intensely apparent in his writing that I find it difficult to imagine him ever having truly suffered.

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