A popular YouTuber and an influencer with 9.5 million Instagram followers grin into the camera. They brandish fistfuls of twenty dollar bills. The total amount is two-hundred-and-fifty bucks. A toothless homeless man looks bewildered behind them. The YouTuber endeavours to put his arm around the homeless and points into the camera.
‘Tell them what we’re doing,’ he says, grin widening.
‘They’re giving me two hundred dollars,’ the homeless man says.
‘Two-fifty,’ the influencer corrects.
‘This is the best day of my life,’ the homeless man says. ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’
‘It’s not over yet.’ The YouTuber doesn’t relinquish the cash. ‘We’re going to get you a brand new pair of sneakers. And after that we’re going to Chick-fil-A, where you can order anything on the menu.’
‘Really, mister?’
‘That’s right. We’re gonna film the whole thing!’
End scene.
Cut to Friedrich Nietzsche adding to the YouTube video view count from beyond the dead. He fires up his smartphone from the afterlife and goes into Twitter. A ticker tape parade of virtue signalling social justice warriors bloats his news feed.
Welcome to the modern day’s cave of the tarantulas.
If you’re going to read Nietzsche, I recommend you start with one of the most ever relevant, ever poignant, evergreen passages in the history of philosophy: ‘Of the Tarantula’s’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (Get the edition edited by R. J. Hollingdale as he perfectly captures the sonorous song-like quality of Nietzsche’s voice).
When you read ‘Of the Tarantulas’, you realise that virtue-signalling social justice warriors aren’t a new sociological phenomenon. It’s only the vehicle of their self-righteousness (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, television) that has been updated.
Nietzsche’s contention:
Preachers of equality are dealers in hidden revenge.
‘your revenge may bound forward from behind your word ‘justice’
Be wary of all who preach equality, tolerance, and virtue, Nietzsche warns. These are buzzwords that cover a sense of outrage against those who are not as they are.
Virtue/justice often = revenge.
‘You preachers of equality, thus from you the tyrant-madness of impotence cries for ‘equality’: thus your most secret tyrant-appetite disguises itself in words of virtue.’
Why do we find virtue signalling so abhorrent?
Because the people preaching are little Hitlers in disguise.
We can also look to the current-day coronavirus crisis.
Every single person I’ve encountered being rude and abrasive in public regarding two meter rules and social distancing have all been preachers of justice and virtue – both thin disguises for what’s really going on: revenge.
‘Revenge rings in all their complaints, a malevolence is in all their praise; and to be judge seems bliss to them.’
Before the coronavirus pandemic, it was what Dave Chapelle called “open hunting season” on celebrities online.
People would dig up your old tweets, like they did with Kevin Hart, and would try to ruin your entire life.
‘Mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong! Mistrust all those who talk much about their justice!’
Those who claim virtue have spent no time reading Aristotle.
They know nothing of vice. They know nothing of the mean. And they do not realise that when it comes to virtue, motive is important!
The urge to punish and the urge to be superior are not urges we wish our judge and jury to harbour.
It’s like when Plato talks of politicians and educators – these people should not want such power! They should be taken to the political office kicking and screaming, compelled to do what is distasteful to them because they’re the best for the job, not because they’re on a sadistic power trip.
‘And when they call themselves ‘the good and just’, do not forget that nothing is lacking to make them into Pharisees except – power!’
Read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
Read Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
Look at Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment.
What happens to the people who fight against the power and are then given the power they protest against?
They become animals. Sick, evil, bloodthirsty fiends.
‘I do not want to be confused with these preachers of equality, nor taken for one of them. For justice speaks thus to me: ‘Men are not equal.’ And they should not become so, either!’
Anyone who says all men are created equal is dishonest.
One life ≠ another life.
Let’s take the train track scenario.
Ten rapist murderers are tied to one train track, whilst Elon Musk is tied to another. The train is on course to steamroll Elon, but with a flick of the switch you can change its course and set it hurtling towards the ten men. In this instance, the one life here far outweighs the other ten lives. And you should distrust anyone who cannot concede that.
No two lives are equal.
‘let us also be enemies, my friends! Let us divinely strive against one another!’
Ultimately Nietzsche’s contention comes from a good place.
We are not equal, he says. Some of us are strong, some weak. Some rich, some poor. But let’s challenge each other and in doing so make each other better.
There should be something of the enemy in your friendships.
Iron sharpens iron.
It’s tough love.
It’s about protecting your neighbour who is both your enemy and your friend.
Friendship, enemies, collectivism, social responsibility – it’s all here in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
It amazes me that so many people misread Nietzsche.