Natural, Willing Slaves

“That some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” – Aristotle

It is hardly much of a revelation to say that the modern American Left – a group comprised of college-aged infants and men convinced they can menstruate, “democratic socialists” and quadrupled-jabbed believers in science – is a movement riddled with inconsistencies and rife with contradiction.

The Starbucks Marxist is perhaps the most meme-worthy example. Tweeting out furious anti-capitalist talking points from behind their slave-assembled iPhone (laptop stickers proclaiming ‘give peace a chance’ alongside support for NATO’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine) these latte-sipping paradoxes are an exasperating but ultimately benign embodiment of the hypocrisy which has come to define the progressive worldview. More troubling still are the mobs of media-mobilized rioters who spent 2020 torching black neighborhoods in the name of racial justice, or the self-styled anarchists conscripted to enforced Big Pharma diktats. Hell, even these pale in comparison to the emissions-obsessed eco-alarmists boarding private jets to their latest rendezvous in Davos, and yet for observers of a more academic persuasion, even this behavior can be explained, far from an expression of mere ideological incoherence, by a complex and deeply-engrained psychological phenomenon first articulated by one Mister Friedrich Nietzsche.

Theory of Master-Slave Morality

Before delving into the specifics of Nietzsche’s competing ethical frameworks, it is first necessary to understand where he believed these originated. As illustrated by his most famous (and often misapplied) quote “God is Dead,” the notoriously arcane philosopher was dispensing, at least in part, with the idea of objective truth, the rightness or wrongness of an action dependent not from any telelogical laws, but rather the innate human desire to exert oneself on their surroundings – a drive which Nietzsche dubbed "The Will to Power.”

For the strongest within society - a group he variously refers to as “Nobles”, “The Higher Man”, and the Übermensch - this is pretty straight-forward. Writing in his seminal work On the Genealogy of Morals, the author outlines how this princely class, in possessing both the vision and resolve to pursue their goals, will come to define “good” and “bad” based wholly on whether these are facilitated or impeded. But this is not some callous megalomania. In viewing themselves beneath the gaze of eternity (as opposed to the fickle judgement of their peers), the Übermensch is guided not by fleeting externalities or transient social norms, but by his own self-determined notion of personal excellence - courage, integrity, trustworthiness, but above all nobility the virtues most highly prized by adherents of Nietzsche’s “Master Morality.”