Freeform Monday at the Uberrensch

It’s Wild West week out here in Oregon, so saddle up, pardners. We’re gonna be doin’ a short mosey through a liddle puzzle I got for ya. Can ye create yer own values?

This is just a classic Nietzsche musing that’s, IMO, the core conceit of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I could write pages and pages on this, but I don’t want Freeform Mondays to devolve into Freeform Years or Freeform Decades, so excuse my brevity in giving you my answer and encouraging you to find yours.

My answer is no. Nietzsche often argues that values are not some metaphysical creation inherent to the world, but instead bred into us through our upbringings, cultures, and experiences. We are, in my reading of his work, slaves to societal expectations and to our own refusal to examine whether these values are truly our own or have been placed upon us. I would be feigning ignorance if I were to claim I don’t see any reality in his point of view; I think we can all agree that we are raised within certain value structures and taught what is important. A Christian goes to church on Sundays and learns of the Ten Commandments, just as a Shinto adherent goes to a shrine and offers gifts to spirits for good fortune. Those values are imparted to us through cultural experience. You are, in essence, not creating your own values but distilling principles that you have been raised upon and applying them to your own life in a unique manner. Do you have the same values as a woman from Hokkaido or a child from Chile? Maybe.

I’ll take a single sarsaparilla before I continue.

My answer is yes. Nietzsche created the concept of the Übermensch, which has unfortunately been co-opted by Nazis and other far-right groups to raise themselves above what they see as the cattle of the world; those are their ideas, not mine. The Übermensch is, in Nietzsche’s original philosophy, a person who suffers greatly, refuses to collapse beneath societal values when they are pressed upon them, tears down those values, and rebuilds them with the joyousness and love of a child. I think the Übermensch that Nietzsche envisioned is less a white Aryan man and more a person of any color who decides for themselves what they believe and has the strength to follow those beliefs regardless of society. In a way, we all do that—or most of us. We take a value that we have been taught and necessarily change its interpretation to fit our daily lives and struggles. A boy takes the lesson of Jesus to be generous and gives an ant a tiny speck of cheese from his lunch. Has that boy followed a societal value or manipulated the abstract thought into his own value? Maybe it’s his own value.

I’m going to close this out by saying I don’t believe in the Übermensch. I think it’s a stupid elitist concept that attempts to place a small group of people above others as inherently more worthy. I don’t think Nietzsche meant it quite this way, but the world we live in is filled with such self-consciousness that we must admit our concepts can be taken out of context for the selfish purposes of others. I’m sorry to Nietzsche for his writings being taken so poorly, and I also respectfully disagree.

I will properly contend in a future book that values are not inherent and they’re not definite, but they are formed by us all. Each of us has our own interpretations, and those interpretations collectively are the Übermensch that Nietzsche foresaw. Only together can we actually tear down the falsehoods and create a better world. That’s hundreds of pages of work, so don’t @ me for not pontificating properly here.

Yee-haw. Let me know what you think, pardner.