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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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I don't really know. I think it depends on the person doing it, and why they are doing. Master Morality and Slave Morality are primarily about why you do things and not what you do. Wokeness is largely nebulous and poorly defined, some people like it out a will to power, out of an overflowing sense of self. Others like it as a spite against those they resent.

But the grand irony of Nietzsche has always been this: those who crow about Master Morality are always engaging in Slave Morality. The people who call out the dominant culture as Slave Morality, who imagine a world where they will overthrow all the existing beautiful and good and make themselves kings, are life's losers, their hatred for everything that exists is fueled by resentment of their betters, of those luckier and taller and prettier and richer than they are.

This goes back more or less to Nietzsche, who was a luckless loser. He was no conqueror, no Blond Beast. He got laid once with a prostitute and caught syphilis, which slowly destroyed his career and body and mind. When he railed against the philistines and the slave morality of the majority, he was railing against the actually powerful and successful people liking the things that they like.

Catholicism is essentially the original of Nietzsche's slave morality, but it is also the religion of Charlemagne and the Lionheart and Don John of Austria.

My own journey with religion is very like this. As a child I was raised Catholic. As a teenager and college student, I explored other religions. As an adult, I realized that no other religion is meaningful to me, that I only considered them out of their opposition to Catholicism.

I think this is an egregious misreading of Nietzsche, which was wrong when Bertrand Russell argued it and wrong when religious "anti-Nietzscheans" do it - but the best cure to that is probably to keep on with Junger, "Nietzsche's only true student".