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Comment by a_bonobo | Hacker News Reader

>It’s easy to see why Nietzsche sociopathic ravings would have inspired so many repugnant movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of libertarianism, and the American alt-Right and neo-Nazi movements today

I can't square that with the Nietzsche I read, the one who hated anti-semitism and who was against nationalism and for a unified Europe. See this random point in 475: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=hQ6FDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lp...

But that's what makes Nietzsche so interesting I guess, you can find contradictory positions everywhere.

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It's not just what Nietzsche actually wrote and published, but to some effect the forgeries by his sister, who had control over his manuscripts after his mental breakdown. She twisted fragments of his writing, sometimes to say the contrary of what her brother actually intended to express.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Power_(manuscript)

Seriously, I like Steven Pinker, but I find this view naive. Here is a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti9zdpLlXf0 called "How Hollywood Gets Nietzsche Wrong".

I haven't read the source texts yet (Twilight of the Idols e.g.) but my understanding is that his main goal was to ask people to not-systematize and live the lives of others or wholly subscribe to someone else's philosophy but to live life as a self-creative act in which we are the authors of what gives our lives meaning and purpose. I don't see anything offensive about that.

This is the milquetoast interpretation of Nietzsche to make him digestible for the mainstream.

Yea, he wished suffering on his friends, to forge them into beings worthy of respect. Etc. He did have an aggressive and elitist perspective. Ayn Rand's views are a decent comparison.

Yes, one can certainly find a lot of material in Nietzsche's work supporting this interpretation. But there is so much more to it. Giorgio Colli wrote that "Nietzsche has said everything, and the opposite of everything." Depending on how you pick and choose, you can construe it to mean pretty much anything you want. Which is also what enabled his sister to use her brother's work for her own nationalistic, antisemitic goals.

It's an effort to smear Nietzsche by association more than anything else. His influence was wide throughout the twentieth century; most of the people who read and drew from his ideas weren't fascists or communists. But I wouldn't expect Pinker to be able to engage with any modern philosopher with any depth.

Why wouldn't Steven Pinker be capable of engaging with any modern philosopher? He is certainly in the top 1% of rational and intelligent human beings on Earth. If he doesn't stand a chance, what does that say about the rest of us? Sounds more like an indictment of modern philosophy than anything else.

I’ve seen this touched on elsewhere and I think the conclusion is that, though Nietzsche himself would never have countenanced these movements, nor his philosophy taken as total, that there are fragments of his writings that very much speak to this mindset.

No, he wasn't a Nazi. But he rejected the idea of objective truth, and thought societies were established through violence and myth. If you try to make that into a political philosophy for today, you end up with something rather like fascism, and certainly not marxism or liberalism.

Where do you have this interpretation from that "societies are established through violence and myth" and how is that idea contrary to Marxist political philosophy?

I said this because I not a Marxist, but I have studied it. According to Marx, human beings are social creatures who have always lived in societies, and governmental violence against citizens came later when humans moved from foraging to agriculture. Liberalism has a similar view, and science has confirmed that this view is correct and the Nietzschean one is mistaken.

No one actually reads Nietzsche. He is just used as a boogeyman for anything bad.

>>It’s easy to see why Nietzsche sociopathic ravings would have inspired so many repugnant movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of libertarianism, and the American alt-Right and neo-Nazi movements today

One of those things is not like the others.

Presumaby you mean Bolshevism but that really depends on your parameters for evaluation. Presumably the author in this case wasn’t talking about economic principles ...

Actually, I was trying to defend Ayn Rand-style libertarianism, but it just goes to show how people's perspective differs.

that is one that I occasionally struggle with. I am fairly liberal but I find the absolutist attitudes that many libertarians have to be naive and often repugnant. I don't think it's a stretch at all to place them in the same bucket as those other groups. They all have taken simple defensible ideas to extremes and tend to offer no compromises.

Well, you could order those groups by death toll? I'm not aware of Ayn Rand-style Libertarianism killing people.

Opposition to building codes? vaccination? pretty much any organized effort to make society safer (or avoid societal catastrophe)?

Libertarianism is pretty much "the tragedy of the commons" as a political ideal.

The US healthcare system definitely leads to more death than other developed nations, and the arguments against fixing it are generally Randian in nature.

As St. Randall of Munroe has put it: I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone'.

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