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Can You Resist Tyranny? The average person today is incapable of governing themselves, which is why so many yearn for a new “system.” They desire an external imposition of control to order their lives in a way they feel incapable of doing for themselves. Riddled with fear, they trade liberty for protection. Ideology recasts their resentment as righteousness. Loneliness drives them to find a herd to become one with. Internal chaos creates a demand for imposed order. When you tell people that the answer to collective madness is not collective action in the opposite direction, they often mistake this for rolling over and accepting defeat. But chaos does not defeat chaos. As Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Think about every hero story you’ve ever admired. The hero doesn’t take to the streets and try to convince everyone of his cause. Rather, he confronts evil head-on and puts himself in the line of fire. A well-ordered individual is not harmless or ineffectual. A single competent, strong, and courageous person can carry more weight and value than a mob of NPCs. As Carl Jung said, “a million zeros do not add up to one.” Nor does being well ordered mean being harmless or indiscriminately nice. Such a person must possess strength, aggression, ambition, judgement, competitive instinct, the capacity for force, and the desire for achievement. The question is what these qualities serve. Money, power, and lust, or love, family, and God? If no strong internal ordering principle exists, a movement, leader, ideology, or State will fill the vacuum externally. No one looking for a solution to increasing social insanity can afford to overlook it. All others are contingent on it. The answer is not to dissociate from the world and simply pull yourself together. It is that a disordered individual cannot possibly bring order to his environment. By becoming a man of virtue, he can then carry that order into the roles individuals occupy: father, teacher, pastor, judge, journalist, leader, neighbour, police officer, and citizen.

“Socialism Was Good in Theory” That assumes socialism’s theory was never seriously challenged. It was—long before the Soviet Union, Lenin, or any national-scale experiment. Five thinkers attacked its foundations from different directions. Tocqueville: Equality Can Become Servitude In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville distinguished democracy from socialism. Both pursued equality, but democracy sought it while preserving individual freedom. Socialism risked achieving equality by expanding state power. Equality, he warned, is not automatically liberty. Bastiat: Redistribution Can Become Plunder In 1850, Frédéric Bastiat examined what happens when the state takes from some to give to others in the name of justice. He called this “legal plunder.” His concern was that politics could become a permanent struggle to control redistribution. Nietzsche: Equality Can Become Resentment Nietzsche attacked socialism psychologically. He saw egalitarianism as potentially rooted in resentment toward exceptional individuals, ambition, strength, and hierarchy. The danger was a culture that treated excellence as morally suspect—not lifting people upward, but bringing the exceptional downward. Böhm-Bawerk: Challenge the Economics In 1896, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk attacked Marx’s economic theory, arguing that Marx’s labor theory of value could not adequately explain the relationship between labor values and actual prices. He challenged socialism’s claim to a scientific economic foundation. Mises: The Calculation Problem In 1920, Ludwig von Mises asked a devastating question: even if socialism is morally desirable, how would planners know what to produce? The sequence is clear: Tocqueville challenged the political premise. Bastiat challenged redistribution. Nietzsche challenged egalitarian psychology. Böhm-Bawerk challenged Marxian economics. Mises challenged central planning. All of them preceded the Soviet experiment. So “socialism was good in theory, but bad in practice” is not an argument. It is a historical claim that requires explaining why these objections were wrong.

The Individual as an Antidote to Tyranny The average person today is incapable of governing himself, which is why so many yearn for a new system. They desire external control to order their lives in ways they feel unable to manage themselves. Riddled with fear, they trade liberty for protection. Ideology recasts resentment as righteousness, while loneliness drives them to join a herd. The answer to collective madness is not collective action in the opposite direction. Chaos does not defeat chaos. As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “Madness is something rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Think of every hero story you admire. The hero does not retreat from danger or surrender to evil. He confronts it directly and places himself in the line of fire. A well-ordered individual is not harmless or ineffectual. One competent, strong, and courageous person can carry more weight and provide more value than a mob. As Carl Jung said, “A million zeros do not add up to one.” Being well-ordered does not mean being harmless or indiscriminately nice. It means possessing judgment, competitive instinct, the capacity for force, and a desire for achievement. The question is what those qualities serve: money, power, and lust—or love, family, and God? This kind of person is an antidote to tyranny. If no strong internal ordering principle exists, a movement, leader, ideology, or state will fill the vacuum from the outside. The well-ordered individual is not incapable of rage, vanity, resentment, cowardice, or cruelty. Awareness of these shadow aspects helps prevent ideological capture and frees him from the seductive belief that “they are evil and we are good.” Anyone seeking a solution to increasing social insanity must recognize that a disordered individual cannot bring order to his environment. By becoming a person of virtue, he can carry that order into every role he occupies—as a parent, teacher, pastor, judge, journalist, leader, neighbor, police officer, or citizen.

“Socialism Was Good in Theory” That sentence assumes the theory was never seriously challenged. It was. Long before the Soviet Union existed, before Lenin seized power, and before socialism had been tested on a national scale, major thinkers were already attacking its foundations—from very different directions. Five of them stand out. Tocqueville: Equality Can Become Servitude In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville drew a sharp distinction between democracy and socialism. Both spoke about equality. But Tocqueville believed they pursued it in fundamentally different ways. Democracy, in his view, sought equality while preserving individual freedom. Socialism risked achieving equality by expanding the power of the state over the individual. His warning was essentially this: equality is not automatically liberty. A society can pursue equality so aggressively that it begins sacrificing the independence that makes political freedom meaningful. Bastiat: Follow Where Redistribution Leads Two years later, Frédéric Bastiat attacked socialism from a different direction. His question was deceptively simple: What happens when the state acquires the authority to take from some people and give to others in the name of justice? Bastiat called this “legal plunder.” His concern was not merely that redistribution might be expensive. It was that once government becomes the instrument through which competing groups obtain benefits from one another, politics can turn into a permanent struggle over who controls the machinery of redistribution. The problem, therefore, wasn’t simply how much the state redistributed. It was the principle that made redistribution legitimate in the first place. (bastiat.org⁠) Nietzsche: Equality Can Become Resentment Nietzsche approached socialism neither as an economist nor as a constitutional theorist. He attacked its psychology. He saw modern egalitarian movements as part of a much older moral impulse: resentment toward exceptional individuals and suspicion of strength, ambition and hierarchy. For Nietzsche, the danger was not simply that everyone might become economically equal. It was that a culture could begin treating excellence itself as something morally suspect. The goal would cease to be lifting people upward. It would become bringing the exceptional downward. Böhm-Bawerk: Challenge the Economics Then came Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. In 1896, he turned his attention specifically toward Marx’s economic system. His criticism was not primarily moral or political. It was technical. Böhm-Bawerk argued that Marx’s theory of value did not adequately explain how the labor values developed in Capital could be reconciled with the actual prices Marx subsequently needed to explain. In other words, he attacked socialism where it claimed to possess a scientific economic foundation. The argument became one of the central criticisms of Marxian economics and helped launch a debate that would continue for generations. Mises: The Calculation Problem Then, in 1920, Ludwig von Mises attacked an even more fundamental question: Even if socialism is morally desirable, how would a socialist economy actually know what to produce? A functioning economy has millions of competing uses for scarce resources. Build a bridge or a hospital? Use steel here or there? Produce more machinery or more consumer goods? Under private ownership and markets, prices for capital goods provide information about relative scarcity and opportunity costs. Mises argued that abolishing private ownership of the means of production also removes the genuine market prices necessary for rational economic calculation. The problem wasn’t simply that socialist planners might make bad decisions. It was that the system deprived them of the very economic signals required to systematically compare those decisions. (Mises Institute⁠) And that was the sequence. Tocqueville challenged the political premise. Bastiat challenged the moral and legal mechanism of redistribution. Nietzsche challenged the psychology behind egalitarianism. Böhm-Bawerk challenged Marx’s economic theory. Mises challenged the possibility of rational central economic calculation. Five different thinkers. Five different objections. And all of them came before the Soviet Union had demonstrated what large-scale socialist government would actually look like. So “socialism was good in theory, but bad in practice” is not an argument. It is a historical claim that requires you to explain why these theoretical objections were wrong. The interesting question isn’t whether socialism had critics. It did. The interesting question is whether socialism ever adequately answered them” - ChatGPT

From Powerlessness to Collective Madness The world has gone crazy, but there is a pattern behind it. More people seem to be losing their grip on reality, swept up in ideological movements that demand conformity and punish dissent. This progression begins with powerlessness, continues with possession, and ends in resentment disguised as justice. The first stage is the breakdown of what can be called the power process. Human beings need to set goals, work toward them, and achieve them in order to feel whole. Once, daily life revolved around hunting, farming, building, and creating. Today, survival and progress are often managed by vast systems and institutions. As a result, many people feel alienated and powerless. They turn to movements for a sense of purpose, drawing progress not from their personal lives, but from the causes they embrace. Carl Jung described what happens next. Inside a movement, individuals can become possessed by collective identities. Those who refuse the difficult task of becoming themselves may dissolve into the group mind. This is why ideologies such as communism, nationalism, feminism, socialism, and environmentalism can exert such power: they offer ready-made identities and moral clarity. Individuals gradually stop thinking for themselves and become mouthpieces for the collective identity that has seized them. Nietzsche revealed the final stage: resentment. In *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, he described the “tarantulas”—moral preachers who spin ideological webs in the name of justice. They claim to champion the weak, but their motivation may be envy and revenge, cloaked in noble language. Their goal is not always to uplift, but to tear down the strong. When the world seems to have gone mad, the pattern is clear: people lose the power process in their own lives, surrender themselves to ideologies, and then act out their resentment as justice. The cure is not another movement, but the difficult task of reclaiming individuality in an age of collective madness.

The Age of Experts Is Over If the past two decades—COVID-19, the 2008 financial crisis, and the net-zero charade—have taught us anything, it is this: the age of unquestioned experts is over. Authority issued by corrupt, bloated institutions no longer commands automatic respect. We are entering an era in which trust must be earned, not assumed. Credentials matter less than results. Expertise can become conformity wrapped in a credential; status is no substitute for trustworthiness. The future belongs to those with proven track records, not merely letters after their names. Friedrich Nietzsche warned of this more than a century ago. He distrusted experts who served the spirit of their age—those who mistook consensus for courage and conformity for principle. To Nietzsche, many authorities were functionaries of the status quo: too timid to challenge the sacred assumptions of their time. University professors, state philosophers, and moral enforcers wore obedience as a badge of honor. They did not think; they repeated. They did not challenge; they conformed. They made the ordinary seem profound through jargon, complexity, and ambiguity. Nietzsche saw these not as signs of insight, but as camouflage—cowardice in disguise. He also distinguished knowledge from wisdom. Knowledge can be taught, measured, and tested. Wisdom must be earned through suffering, struggle, and brutal self-examination. Nietzsche admired those who forged their own paths rather than simply climbing institutional ladders. Even in science, he saw a danger. He respected its methods but feared their sanctification. Science, he argued, still required justification; materialists confused method with meaning and data with truth. Experts who presented science as the only path to knowledge were, in Nietzsche’s eyes, dogmatists in lab coats. So the question is no longer, “What are your qualifications?” It is: What have you done? What have you risked? What have you proved? We must recover the courage to think for ourselves—and place our confidence only in those who have earned it through action, not appointment.

Five Lessons on Aggression and Dominance “There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that… it sides even with those who harm it.” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote this nearly 140 years ago, yet it still sounds contemporary. In *Chimpanzee Politics*, Frans de Waal shows that dominance, aggression, hierarchy and confrontation—often dismissed in humans as “toxic masculinity”—also appear in our closest relatives. These behaviors may reflect deep-rooted drives, not merely social constructs. **1. The threat of violence can keep the peace** Most chimp confrontations are displays, not fights. Only about 0.4% of male confrontations become physical. Rank depends on strength, alliances, displays and recognition. Violence matters partly because it is rare: conflict must be allowed to resolve before it escalates. **2. When respect disappears, violence rises** Chimpanzees maintain hierarchy through formal greetings, including bowing. At Arnhem, 22 of 37 serious male fights occurred when males had stopped greeting one another—even though such periods made up less than a quarter of observation time. Violence was nearly five times more likely when recognition rituals broke down. **3. Power requires alliances** Before challenging the dominant male, a chimp often grooms females and plays with their young. Like Machiavelli’s political challengers, he builds support before attempting to seize power. **4. Influence can replace force** Female chimps sometimes recruit males to attack rivals, signaling distress and flattering the enforcer while avoiding the fight. Power can operate through alliances and influence, not just strength. **5. Concentrated resources create conflict** Chimpanzees normally forage for scattered food, limiting competition. When humans provide concentrated food, aggression rises. Larger groups are also harder to govern because familiarity declines and hierarchies become unstable. Stable societies may require hierarchy, respect, controlled confrontation and distributed power. Suppressing every expression of dominance may not eliminate conflict; it may remove mechanisms that keep conflict contained.

De nieuwe partij van Mona Keijzer staat in de traditie van de Katholieke Volkspartij en daarmee van Thomas van Aquino. Forum voor Democratie staat in de lijn van Friedrich Nietzsche en daarmee van de Romantiek en het Darwinisme. Ja21 staat vooralsnog in geen enkele traditie. Het lijkt een soort ‘pragmatisch’ D66 op rechts. Het kan vriezen en dooien. #politiek #Nederland #partijen

The Politics of Pity For a decade, the West has argued whether empathy should be its highest value. Some praise it as a superpower; others call it harmful. Gad Saad’s “Suicidal Empathy” topped the New York Times list. Elon Musk called empathy a weakness; John C. Reilly called it a superpower. Ideas should be judged by consequences. Compassion-justified policies have coincided with worse addiction and homelessness, rising crime, mass migration, social fragmentation, higher living costs, and controversial medical interventions for gender-dysphoric minors. When these fail, advocates often claim it was not implemented “strongly enough.” ## An Inversion of Truth A quote often attributed to Hannah Arendt claims “the death of human empathy” precedes barbarism, but no source supports it, and her writings argued almost the opposite. Arendt contrasted the American Revolution’s institutions and law with the French revolutionaries’ “politics of pity.” Pity is not compassion: it ranks “fortunate” and “unfortunate,” grants the pitier moral authority, and overrides rights. Arendt argued this enabled Robespierre’s Terror. ## The Trojan Horse Empathy can become projection—imposing your values as if they were others’ needs. Adam Smith warned about the “man of system.” Nietzsche described societies so “soft and tender” they side with those who harm them. Orwell noted equality preaching alongside elite privilege. Rob Henderson calls these “luxury beliefs.” I call it suicidal narcissism: acquiring moral status by appearing compassionate while policies erode the foundations others rely on. The reward is immediate; the damage comes later.

The Sweetened Lie I once dated a girl who said she’d go along with “2+2=5” if someone truly believed it—she wouldn’t correct them if it might upset them. In her mind, sharing a delusion was safer than truth and conflict. This mirrors what’s happening in the West: we’re losing the capacity to seek truth. Two forces may play roles: declining testosterone among young men and the feminization of institutions. Testosterone is linked to assertiveness and resistance to social pressure, and research suggests it can reduce short-term deception and conformity to group norms. Testosterone has also fallen in men across wealthy nations since the late twentieth century, making pressure easier to accept. Meanwhile, healthcare, universities, media, and other institutions are increasingly female-dominated. Critics argue that female-led cultures may prize consensus and harmony, making dissent costlier. Combined with less internal resistance, external penalties for resisting pressure can produce enforced conformity. Jung warned that failing to integrate the “masculine” side of the psyche can lead to rigidity and ideological capture. Arendt noted that totalitarianism doesn’t require belief in lies—only behavior that acts as if one believes. My ex embodied that dynamic. Nietzsche argued strength is tolerating truth, while the weak require truth diluted and sweetened. The first step is personal: refuse to participate. Accept the cost of nonconformity, build physical strength to support mental strength, and above all, refuse to tell the lie.

The Fracture That Kills the Family The West’s deepest divide may not be left versus right, but whether young men and women still share a vision of the good life. The nuclear family is society’s foundation, yet households struggle to form when the sexes view each other as opponents. Many women see marriage as patriarchal; many men see women as manipulative or exploitative. Relationships shift from mutual union to zero-sum power struggles. Christianity framed marriage as union—two people becoming one. Nietzsche warned the death of God would remove a shared moral foundation, leaving society vulnerable to nihilism and fragmentation. We are living that fragmentation. Young men often retreat into pornography, gaming, and prolonged adolescence. Young women increasingly frame sexual liberation as empowerment. Both chase proximate pleasures while losing ultimate purposes: family, responsibility, continuity, and creating life. Dating data reflects the fracture: among unmarried Americans aged 22–35, only 26% of women and 36% of men are actively dating. Ideology filters matches too—Gen Z and young millennials cite political compatibility far more than Boomers. Research also finds a mismatch: only 0.6 single liberal men per single liberal woman, and only 0.5 single conservative women per conservative man. Cross-ideological pairing has risen from 6% in the 1970s to 22% today. The consequences extend beyond dating: fertility has fallen below replacement across much of the West, and 42% of American adults were unpartnered in 2023. Policy responses—tax incentives, parental leave, baby bonuses—miss the deeper cultural and spiritual problem: you can debate taxes, but it’s hard to build a family when you disagree on masculinity, whether marriage is oppressive, or whether family is worth sacrificing for. The values gap is the disease. The political divide is the symptom. The household is the casualty—and when it cracks, everything built above it loses stability. The question is whether a civilization can survive when the two people it most needs to unite can no longer agree why they should.

The Psychology Behind Political Violence Political life carries an appetite for violence beneath the surface. A shooter leaves a manifesto; supporters celebrate; online strangers justify killing over insults, misgendering, and fantasies of execution. We’re told these are separate phenomena—different ideologies, grievances, causes—but they’re deeply connected. The murderer, the celebrant, and the online fantasist share one conviction: blood will build a better world. We often assume ideology comes first, violence second—radicalization infecting an otherwise ordinary person. But corrupted people may seek ideologies that rationalize what they already want to believe. Feeling comes first; philosophy follows. Nietzsche called this *ressentiment*: not ordinary anger, but enduring resentment rooted in surrendered agency and perpetual victimhood. Ressentiment is creative: it turns grievance into virtue and revenge into justice. That’s why movements can sound humanitarian while obsessing over enemies. They promise liberation but focus on who must be eliminated; they call violence self-defense while celebrating destruction. Notice the imbalance: energy goes to identifying who deserves punishment, not to explaining how their better society would work. This is the difference between genuine grievance and pathological ressentiment. Genuine grievance seeks repair; ressentiment seeks subtraction. Its “solutions” are fantasies of punishment—heads cut off, privilege liquidated, wrong pronouns punished. These aren’t coherent doctrines of stability; they’re rationalizations for resentment. Ressentiment also despises self-improvement because it requires admitting agency. Its worldview depends on locating suffering outside oneself. The deepest enemy of these movements, then, is not any specific ideology. It is agency itself.

The Victimhood Economy: Why Young People Prefer Socialism Western civilization is increasingly shaped by entitlement and a culture that rewards displays of victimhood. At elite universities, disability claims have risen: 18% of male and 22% of female undergraduates report a disability, and 54% of non-binary students, with higher rates at some wealthy schools than at community colleges. The issue isn’t genuine disability; it’s what happens when accommodations become status and advantage. Extra time, separate housing, and exemptions can turn diagnosis into leverage. When weakness is rewarded, some will learn to perform it. This matters because today’s students become tomorrow’s institutional elites. If grievance produces rewards, the lesson may spread into journalism, government, HR, academia, and business, letting beneficiaries inherit the power to expand the system. Research on victimhood signaling raises uncomfortable questions: people who habitually emphasize victim status, on average, show higher narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—not to say genuinely suffering people are manipulative, but that systems rewarding victimhood create incentives for manipulators to exploit the category. Rob Henderson describes this as a status game: in elite institutions, grievance can become the currency of virtue signaling. For some, the rational strategy is to manufacture grievance and convert it into status. Nietzsche similarly argued that displays of helplessness can become covert power, while pity can create moral superiority for the caregiver. The danger isn’t compassion; it’s a culture that turns suffering into currency and teaches ambitious people that the easiest route to power is to claim they are powerless.

The Noble Enemy: Why You Must Respect the Man You Fight Respect your enemies—and even be thankful. It isn’t weakness; it’s discipline and a mental edge that makes victory possible. Hatred costs you home-field advantage: it hijacks your attention, clarity, and preparation. Anger also misfires. It directs you, exhausting yourself to entertain others. It exposes you, making destruction your only goal so you forget what to preserve—and what the enemy is doing. Lastly, contempt blinds you: if you think you’re superior, you stop training, studying, and preparing, deciding the fight is won before it starts. In Heat, the cop and thief recognize they’re two sides of the same danger. They don’t become less dangerous; they see each other clearly—making the final confrontation tragic. In The Dark Knight, the Joker’s “You complete me” reflects a deeper truth: each gives the other purpose. The hero is defined partly by the villain he must face; the villain by the hero who provides something worthy to oppose. As Nietzsche suggests, be proud of your foes—not to concede, but to commit to discipline. Disrespect makes you stop training; contempt makes you stop scouting; hatred makes you stop listening. The worthier the foe, the worthier the man required to meet him. What you don’t understand, you can’t defeat.

Leftist “Empathy” Is Actually Narcissism Leftist “empathy” is often narcissism, not real compassion. Over the past decade, Western politics has debated whether empathy is the highest value—yet many policies justified in its name have produced serious unintended consequences: safe-supply programs, lenient bail, mass migration, identity-based social policy, and gender medicine for minors. Hannah Arendt helps explain why. In *On Revolution*, she contrasted the American Revolution’s focus on institutions and limits on power with the French Revolution’s “politics of pity,” an effort to eliminate suffering through political action. Robespierre’s compassion for the masses helped justify terror. Pity isn’t compassion: it creates a hierarchy between the person who pities and the person pitied. Once you claim to represent “the oppressed,” you can stop listening to real people. Much progressive “empathy” projects idealized versions of others, erasing cultural differences and treating disagreement as ignorance or prejudice. Adam Smith warned about the “man of system,” who thinks society can be rearranged like chess pieces, ignoring human wills. Dostoevsky argued abstract love is easy; loving real people is hard. Nietzsche described a morality that flatters weakness and condemns what rises above the herd, while Orwell questioned whether some socialist intellectuals truly loved workers or simply used them to vent resentment. Rob Henderson calls these “luxury beliefs”: status-providing ideas for elites that impose costs on those below them. The moral prestige is immediate; the damage unfolds over decades. So “suicidal narcissism” may fit better than “suicidal empathy”: projection, superiority, and power disguised as compassion.

Why Therapy Culture Is Making Us Weak Why, despite unprecedented mental-health awareness and therapy language, does mental health seem to worsen? If both “the cure” and “the disease” expand together, we should ask what culture produces them. Modern therapy culture often teaches us to prioritize feelings, explain flaws through trauma, and treat negative emotions as reactions to others. Carl Jung proposed a different order: consciousness—judgment, values, and will—should govern the unconscious, including instincts and emotions. Health means understanding these forces without letting them rule. Today that hierarchy is frequently reversed: emotion outranks reason, and “lived experience” can outrank evidence. Jung warned this resembles “psychological Bolshevism,” where lower impulses overthrow higher faculties in the name of freedom. Nietzsche cautioned that “for every drive wants to be master.” The key question isn’t only where feelings come from, but whether we govern them. Therapy culture can also weaken self-criticism, treating conscience, guilt, and shame as oppressive rather than corrective. With “concept creep” (trauma/harm expanding to cover normal discomfort), personal agency can shrink: if everything is done to us, responsibility becomes harder to exercise. This can spread socially: victim identities bond through grievance, replacing judgment with collective resentment. History shows where that leads. The defense is older than therapy: govern yourself before demanding the world be changed.

A Culture of Violent Ressentiment A lust for violence is spreading through the worst among us. After shootings, murders, and attempted political violence, some celebrate and idolize the attackers—while others online applaud harm done to those deemed deserving, even for things like “misgendering.” People claim these are unrelated, but I see a shared conviction: blood is the only route to a better world. We debate which ideology “caused” a given attack—incel culture, Marxism, anti-Zionism—but the pattern is similar. Radicalization is often treated like infection: belief first, impulse second. I think the reverse is more common. Corrupted people don’t stumble into dangerous ideas. They go looking for them. Ressentiment—Nietzsche’s term for the slow poison of hopeless victims—builds moral systems that make a grudge feel like justice. The feeling takes the throne first; philosophy follows, recruiting whatever justifies what the person already wants. Ressentiment focuses on enemies and punishment while offering vague utopias. It subtracts, locating suffering entirely outside the self and proposing removal of its “source.” That’s why it rejects self-improvement: it requires agency. What we face is not one ideology, but the spirit that turns failure and frustration into someone else’s crime—and therefore treats violence as justice.

Why Good Times Make Weak People The pinnacle of tyranny is a society in which people are controlled without force because they love their servitude. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World explored this idea. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, its citizens are controlled not through terror but pleasure. Soma provides instant relief from discomfort—a “holiday from the facts.” Huxley’s people are not prisoners but satisfied customers: the State produces children, promiscuity is normalized, and entertainment fills every empty moment. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell feared that truth would be hidden from us, while Huxley feared that we would become so distracted that we would no longer care about it. The Softening of Man Good times can make bad times possible. When safety and luxury become normal, people can lose sight of the struggles that created them. Andrew Lobaczewski argued that prosperity can weaken profound reflection. Pleasure becomes dominant, while uncomfortable truths are dismissed because thinking about them requires effort. Those who think critically may even be ridiculed. This creates a dangerous cycle: societies lose the capacity for psychological reasoning and moral criticism, allowing catastrophe to develop unnoticed. Sterilizing Genius Nietzsche understood that comfort, elevated above all else, can destroy the qualities that made civilization possible. Struggle, ambition, discipline, passion, and courage helped create prosperity—but prosperity can weaken the virtues that produced it. The Odyssey illustrates this. The Lotus-Eaters simply lose the desire to return home. Odysseus must drag his men back while they weep to remain. He rejects Calypso’s offer of immortality and endless comfort, choosing the difficult path home. We admire that choice because comfort without purpose is not a life worth admiring. Nietzsche imagined the endpoint in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a society where safety and sameness become the highest ideals, producing “no shepherd, and one herd.” Anyone who seeks greatness becomes an aberration.