“Critique of the morality of decadence. — An ‘altruistic’ morality — a morality in which self-interest wilts away — remains a bad sign under all circumstances. This is true of individuals; it is particularly true of nations. The best is lacking when self-interest begins to be lacking. Instinctively to choose what is harmful for oneself, to feel attracted by ‘disinterested’ motives, that is virtually the formula of decadence. ‘Not to seek one's own advantage’ — that is merely the moral fig leaf for quite a different, namely, a physiological, state of affairs: ‘I no longer know how to find my own advantage.’ Disintegration of the instincts! Man is finished when he becomes altruistic. Instead of saying naively, ‘I am no longer worth anything,’ the moral lie in the mouth of the decadent says, ‘Nothing is worth anything, life is not worth anything.’ Such a judgment always remains very dangerous, it is contagious: throughout the morbid soil of society it soon proliferates into a tropical vegetation of concepts — now as a religion (Christianity), now as a philosophy (Schopenhauerism). Sometimes the poisonous vegetation which has grown out of such decomposition poisons life itself for millennia with its fumes.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 35)

the nature of oppression

pretty good compliment for women 🥰👍🏼

“Whether we have become more moral. — Against my conception of ‘beyond good and evil’ — as was to be expected — the whole ferocity of moral hebetation, mistaken for morality itself in Germany, as is well known, has gone into action: I could tell fine stories about that. Above all I was asked to consider the ‘undeniable superiority’ of our age in moral judgment, the real progress we have made here: compared with us, a Cesare Borgia is by no means to be represented after any manner as a ‘higher man,’ a kind of overman. A Swiss editor of the ‘Bund’ went so far that he ‘understood’ the meaning of my work — not without expressing his respect for my courage and daring — to be a demand for the abolition of all decent feelings. Thank you! In reply, I take the liberty of raising the question whether we have really become more moral. That all the world believes this to be the case merely constitutes an objection.

We modern people, very tender, very easily hurt, and offering as well as receiving consideration a hundredfold, really have the conceit that this tender humanity which we represent, this attained unanimity in sympathetic regard, in readiness to help, in mutual trust, represents positive progress; and that in this respect we are far above the men of the Renaissance. But that is how every age thinks, how it must think. What is certain is that we may not place ourselves in renaissance conditions, not even by an act of thought: our nerves would not endure that reality, not to speak of our muscles. But such incapacity does not prove progress, only another, later constitution, one which is weaker, frailer, more easily hurt, and which necessarily generates a morality rich in consideration. Were we to think away our frailty and lateness, our physiological senescence, then our morality of ’humanization’ would immediately lose its value too (in itself, no morality has any value) — it would even arouse disdain. On the other hand, let us not doubt that we moderns, with our thickly padded humanity, which at all costs wants to avoid bumping into a stone, would have provided Cesare Borgia's contemporaries with a comedy at which they could have laughed themselves to death. Indeed, we are unwittingly funny beyond all measure with our modern ‘virtues.’”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 37)

“The decrease in instincts which are hostile and arouse mistrust — and that is all our ‘progress’ amounts to — represents but one of the consequences attending the general decrease in vitality: it requires a hundred times more trouble and caution to make so conditional and late an existence prevail. Hence each helps the other; hence everyone is to a certain extent sick, and everyone is a nurse for the sick. And that is called ‘virtue.’ Among men who still knew life differently — fuller, more squandering, more overflowing — it would have been called by another name: ‘cowardice’ perhaps, ‘wretchedness,’ ‘old ladies' morality.’

Our softening of manners — that is my proposition; that is, if you will, my innovation — is a consequence of decline; the hardness and terribleness of morals, conversely, can be a consequence of an excess of life. For in that case much may also be dared, much challenged, and much squandered. What was once the spice of life would be poison for us.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 37)

“To be indifferent — that too is a form of strength — for that we are likewise too old, too late. Our morality of sympathy, against which I was the first to issue a warning — that which one might call l'impressionisme morale — is just another expression of that physiological overexcitability which is characteristic of everything decadent. That movement which tried to introduce itself scientifically with Schopenhauer's morality of pity — a very unfortunate attempt! — is the real movement of decadence in morality; as such, it is profoundly related to Christian morality. Strong ages, noble cultures, all consider pity, ‘neighbor-love,’ and the lack of self and self-assurance as something contemptible. Ages must be measured by their positive strength — and then that lavishly squandering and fatal age of the Renaissance appears as the last great age; and we moderns, with our anxious self-solicitude and neighbor-love, with our virtues of work, modesty, legality, and scientism — accumulating, economic, machinelike — appear as a weak age. Our virtues are conditional on, are provoked by, our weaknesses. ‘Equality’ as a certain factual increase in similarity, which merely finds expression in the theory of ‘equal rights,’ is an essential feature of decline. The cleavage between man and man, status and status, the plurality of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out — what I call the pathos of distance, that is characteristic of every strong age. The strength to withstand tension, the width of the tensions between extremes, becomes ever smaller today; finally, the extremes themselves become blurred to the point of similarity.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 37)

“All our political theories and constitutions [Staats-Verfassungen] — and the ‘German Reich’ is by no means an exception — are consequences, necessary consequences, of decline; the unconscious effect of decadence has assumed mastery even over the ideals of some of the sciences. My objection against the whole of sociology in England and France remains that it knows from experience only the forms of social decay, and with perfect innocence accepts its own instincts of decay as the norm of sociological value-judgments. The declining life, the decrease in the power to organize — that is, to separate, tear open clefts, subordinate and superordinate — all this has been formulated as the ideal in contemporary sociology. Our socialists are decadents, but Mr. Herbert Spencer is a decadent too: he considers the triumph of altruism desirable!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 37)

mental health, liberal therapy culture

“My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make [one] small, cowardly, and hedonistic [genüsslich] — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.

These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of ‘pleasure.’ The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 38)

“How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by ‘tyrants’ are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves… This is true politically too; one need only go through history. The peoples who had some value, attained some value, never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong.

Those large hothouses for the strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been known — the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice, understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one conquers.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 38)

we make each other complete crazier

🫶🏼🥰❤️

The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’

— Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

It is with morality [Sittlichkeit] like it is with the family. Many people break with morals [Sitte], but with the conception of ‘morality’ it is more difficult. Morality is the ‘idea’ of morals, their spiritual power, their power over the conscience; morals, on the other hand, are too material to rule over the spirit, and do not hold captive a ‘spiritual’ man, a so­-called independent, a ‘freethinker.’*

* Freigeist : literally ‘free spirit’; can refer both to freethinkers and to libertines.

Because faith in Protestantism became a more inward faith, the enslavement has also become a more inward enslavement; the person has taken these sanctities into himself, intertwined them with all his hopes and endeavors, made them into a ‘matter of conscience,’ prepared from them a ‘sacred duty’ for himself. Therefore, what the Protestant's conscience cannot get away from is sacred to him, and conscientiousness most clearly defines his character.

Protestantism has actually made the human being into a ‘secret police state.’ The spy and lookout, ‘conscience,’ monitors every movement of the mind, and every thought and action is a ‘matter of conscience,’ i.e., a police matter. The Protestant consists in this frag­mentation of the human being into ‘natural desire’ [Naturtrieb] and ‘conscience’ (inner populace [Pöbel] and inner police). Biblical reason (in the place of the Catholic ‘Church reason’) is considered sacred, and this feeling and consciousness that the biblical word is sacred is called—conscience. With this, then, sacredness gets ‘shoved into one's conscience.’ If one doesn't free himself from conscience, the consciousness of the sacred, he can indeed act unconscientiously, but never without conscience.

The Catholic finds himself satisfied when he fulfills the command; the Protestant acts to ‘the best of his knowledge [Wissen] and conscience [Gewissen].’ The Catholic is in fact only a layman; the Protestant is himself a clergyman [Geistlicher]. This is precisely the progress of the Reformation period over the Middle Ages, and also its curse: that the spiritual [Geistliche] became complete.

— Max Stirner, The Unique and Its Property

emancipatory politics, "natural order"
(Mark Fisher quote)

“The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing antagonizes its ‘modern spirit’ so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called ‘freedom.’ …

With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on ‘love’ — it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast — physiologically too — to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning — consequently one abolishes it.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 39)

A few of the quotes shared here, especially from Nietzsche, although rarely, might be a little reactionary, but in that case... they're only shared if they seem interesting in some sense, but not out of (complete) agreement with the quote...
as it's well known that Nietzsche sometimes said quite radical, anarchistic things and at other times reactionary things.

for example, here, in the quote tagged above...
whether (more likely) favorably or critically, Nietzsche at any rate accurately described the nature of the marriage institution as being founded on domination, that it can't be founded on love (that resonates with, e.g., Emma Goldman's critique of marriage)... etc

To expand upon it...

Nietzsche HATED the antisemites of his time, including his own sister and brother-in-law, and cut off relations with many people simply because they were antisemites. He took it so seriously that it even seems a little amazing given that he was not even jewish. He, in fact, considered himself an anti-antisemite.
Nietzsche literally wrote: “I will have all antisemites shot.” (Nietzsche's letter to F. Overbeck, 4 Jan 1889)

He was also generally critical of the racism of his time, although he still certainly had some racist prejudices of his own. He was in favor of mixing of races.

Like J.W. von Goethe—whom he praised—and Arthur Schopenhauer, F.W.J. von Schelling and other great minds of that time from Germany, Nietzsche was an anti-nationalist, a staunch critic of nationalism, foremost of all German nationalism. He in fact hated German culture, criticizing it in the strongest terms. He hated Germans so much that he assigned himself a (although dubious) Polish ancestry, claiming that he had not a single drop of "bad German blood".

Nietzsche was also for the most part very critical of statism. He wrote some great, although brief, critiques of the State, calling it the “coldest of all cold monsters” (TSZ). He considered the State to be an antagonist of culture (see this)

All in all, he was against nationalism, antisemitism, liberalism/capitalism, statism... often displaying very anarchist tendencies, in a fundamental sense even.

Most of the quotes of Nietzsche that I post on this channel are just of this sort: anarchistic ones. (I have posted many already, over a hundred... and will post more in the future)

Decades before Foucault and others, and even before Nazis appropriated it, Nietzsche's philosophy was popular among a section of anarchists, especially individualist anarchists, who considered Nietzsche a great influence alongside Stirner. There were already beautiful and powerful anarchist interpretations by many anarchist thinkers, such as by Emma Goldman, Renzo Novatore, Rudolf Rocker, Gustav Landauer, etc.

In addition to the aforementioned aspects, Nietzsche was also a critic of work, and, like Stirner, a critic of morality. And, although one shouldn't overemphasize the similarities of Stirner and Nietzsche, there are some undeniable similarities in their ideas and are both definitely very individualist and anarchistic (although Stirner would come out as the more preferable thinker given Nietzsche's frequent reactionary ramblings).

Considering all this, it's very hard to synthesize Nietzsche's philosophy with fascism, even in spite of some of his reactionary views or remarks.

There's no doubt that fascism is like ressentiment par excellence...
It is like the antithesis of much of Nietzsche's philosophy...

Unfortunate that such a hideous reactionary appropriation of Nietzsche is still popular while the anarchist interpretations are still on the fringe (but well, that's just what we'd expect)

We lose ourselves in each other's arms…
find ourselves anew in each other's souls.

The fire of our passions can only be put down by the calm of our love,
but nay, they will only add to each other and burn down the world.

You and I, our union, a beautiful madness
like a double pendulum, a deep chaos.
Each of us, an uncontrollable frenzy...
and together are we a violent great sea.

“‘Freedom which I do not mean.’ — In times like these, abandonment to one's instincts is one calamity more. Our instincts contradict, disturb, destroy each other; I have already defined what is modern as physiological self-contradiction. Rationality in education would require that under iron pressure at least one of these instinct systems be paralyzed to permit another to gain in power, to become strong, to become master. Today the individual still has to be made possible by being pruned: possible here means whole. The reverse is what happens: the claim for independence, for free development, for laisser aller is pressed most hotly by the very people for whom no reins would be too strict. This is true in politics, this is true in art. But that is a symptom of decadence: our modern conception of ‘freedom’ is one more proof of the degeneration of the instincts.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 41)