Post by @memewarrior@hear-me.social

2026-08-25 04:56 UTC

@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol I agree with you on pity, but I don't think that was the point Nietzsche was actually making. It was a suicidal empathy point, with eugenicist overtones, straight up Elon Musk's alleyway in all the worst ways. I say "eugenicist" because he says, "By and large, pity runs counter to the law of development, which is the law of selection. Pity preserves things that are ripe for decline, it defends things that have been disowned and condemned by life, and it gives a depressive and questionable character to life itself by keeping alive an abundance of failures of every type". This is in the same book as he says "the weak and the failures should perish (...) And they should be helped to do this." Also, you do write exceptionally. Really really exceptionally. One level below Nietzsche & a lot closer to him than you think. I have not seen another contemporary who is as good at writing as you, although I am sure one must exist.

Replies (1)

@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol 2026-08-25 05:06

@memewarrior@hear-me.social Thank you! well, there's always room for improvement. That's a journey which may...toil on upwards towards the light, along a road one may never see the end of, if I may paraphrase Ursula LeGuin. I am struggling with the Nietzsche passage because even though he's hitting this eugenicist wall as it were, this fixed assumption that must have prevailed throughout the Western intellectual world. That stuff was once considered mainstream. So yeah, it's distasteful and over the edge. But I still feel like there's a glimmer of an actual phenomenon here, that he's not just off the rails. There is definitely a kind of weaponized or marketed "pity" which behaves just as Nietzsche describes and which is wielded for eugenicist purposes. Oh dear. Do you suppose there's a lot of Ayn Rand fans very very fond of this particular little snippet of Nietzsche? They do love their intellectual samplers and assortments in the "intellectual dark web".

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