Nietzsche: The Real Genealogy Of Morality

and for society.

The real genealogy of morality

Nietzsche repudiates the above view, saying that it is obvious that “the judgment ‘good’ does not stem from those to whom ‘goodness’ is rendered” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, page 10). Instead, Nietzsche considers morality as ultimately derived from strength and superiority, saying that “it was ‘the good’ themselves, that is the noble, powerful, higher-ranking, and high-minded who felt and ranked themselves and their doings as good, which is to say, as of the first rank, in contrast to everything base, low-minded, common, and vulgar” (10). In other words, morality is the strong simply being strong, exercising their own strength over those who are weak. Even on an etymological level,

the origins of the words for “good” in various languages originally meant “noble” or “aristocratic,” while the concept of “bad” was derived from the words that meant “common,” “vulgar,” or “base” (12-13).
With his morality based on the strong exercising their own strength, Nietzsche turns to the animal kingdom for an analogy. When someone is strong, it is right for them simply to be strong, just as it is right for birds of prey to feed upon defenseless lambs (25). For the strong to do anything but exercise their strength would be against nature – to do so would be utterly irrational.
How morality became upside-down
Over the course of history, morality became flipped upside down.

This happened when weak people wanted to become strong, but they were unable to do so by acquiring physical strength, riches, or status, so they gained power by reversing morality. For example, instead of valuing strength, they sought to contain the strong by condemning many uses of strength and instead praising the “virtue” of mercy - those who refrain from using their strength. Similarly, they turned the tables on those who gave orders by condemning pride and praising the “virtue” of obedience. Man naturally wants to get revenge for wrongs committed against him, but the weak people unable to exact revenge instead gained power over the strong by creating the “virtue” of forgiveness. When the weak, low-born people were tired of being subjugated but were unable to physically control the powerful people, the weak people instead controlled the powerful people through their new, twisted

morality.
This reversal of morality was done by the “priests,” and their role as the who are the main facilitators of this atrocity has made them the “most evil enemies” of mankind (16). The specific group of priests that has been most successful in their work are the Jews and their descendants, the Christians. Christianity has successful engulfed Europe for centuries, and Nietzsche sees a pervading, suffocating fog of Judeo-Christianity as the source of many of the problems of the modern European man.
Nietzsche views this reversal of morality as both as a tragedy and as an amazing accomplishment.

On the one hand, Nietzsche sees the work of the priests as a grotesque dis-figuration of morality coughed up from the bowels of Jewish hatred. A radically diseased morality that paints weakness as virtue and strength as dangerous vice. The priests took the natural order of humanity and managed to make the strong guilty for exercising their strength. It is akin to criticizing an animal predator for chasing down its prey - would you really morally criticize the bird of prey for preying upon and eating the lamb or the lion for preying upon and devouring the gazelle? To do such a thing would be

absurd.
On the other hand, it worked. The priests have won. Christianity has taken over Europe, drenching Europe in its reversed morality. Out of their powerlessness, the hate of the priests grew “into something enormous and uncanny, into something most spiritual and most poisonous,” successfully infecting all of Europe (16). The Judeo-Christian priests were able to win against “their enemies and conquerors through a radical revaluation of their values, that is, through an act of spiritual revenge” (16).