The Nietzschean idea that suffuses all of modernity is the idea that “values” are idiosyncratic to each individual and group. When people refer to their “values”, “what we value” etc, they get this idea from Nietzsche, through however many layers of indirection

The idea of the overman is that a fully realized, post-theistic man should be able to create his own moral values and live by them according to his own good taste. How this has played out in practice is quite different to what Nietzsche intended

Nietzsche hated the values of what later came to be called “humanism” — he spends considerable time in Zarathustra describing and excoriating this psychological or social type. They cry out “no shepherd, and one herd!” https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1118919121440104448

But at some level the architects of our present internationalist homo-maximalist regime have done precisely what Nietzsche described. They have created values, synthesized, admittedly, from the corpse of Christianity’s god. Well, you use the materials you have

But I was thinking about another crypto-Nietzschean entity that is ubiquitous in our society: the corporation. Most companies these days explicitly define and write down their “corporate values”

As an entity, a corporation is much closer to the Nietzschean ideal of the overman than any mere human. From within a company, we are aware of it’s all-too-human foils, but from without we see an organism that is truly the author of itself

Nietzsche thought the overman would create new values by listening to the pure chaos in his inner heart, and then live according to those values by the strength of his will. After generations, these new values would settle into the blood

It’s an irony of Nietzsche that he writes always as if to the most refined of tastes, to spirits of rarefied quality, and yet his work is among the most accessible works of philosophy. Did he truly intend it for those few, elevated, free spirits?

Narrow souls of all stripes will tell you that you need their special expertise to properly understand Nietzsche, but this is simply false. His books mean precisely what they seem to mean, and academic exegeses serve no purpose but to distort

The overman can only be an object of terror and alienation in the eyes of the merely human. Does this not describe the way we regard the corporations that rule us, the infernal machinations of “capitalism”?

Nietzsche admired the caprice and the cruelty of the Roman “masters” — is this not of a kind with the necessary indifference of the corporation to its constituent humans? This indifference stems not from malice, but from attunement to imminent existential struggle

But this is also maybe the most dubious of Nietzsche’s ideas: is it really possible to _create_ moral values? Or do we secrete them as oysters create pearls, in response to an intrusion, according to predetermined adaptations of the soul?

The true moral law is the one that cannot be created or destroyed, and it’s far less human than any religious or legal code. I am referring, of course, to Omohundro’s convergent instrumental goals https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1080557381342248960

Any entity, whether it’s a human or a corporation or a nematode worm or a hurricane has to function within a certain operational matrix, or it stops existing. So anything that exists, as long as it exists, must develop certain “moral” behaviors to secure its future

Moral law zero: persist. This is the only moral imperative that is genuinely self-evident, (unlike that famous claptrap about all men being created equal) because if you break it, then, tautologically, you become zero

And in order to persist, you have to either deliberately or emergently maintain your spatial integrity, your temporal integrity, and your future optionality, and so on.

Temporal integrity is the ability to share a goal or a commitment with your future self. Without temporal integrity, there can be no trust, there can be no sanity.

Nietzsche understood at least the inescapability of maintaining temporal integrity. “The breeding of an animal that CAN PROMISE—is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man?” https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1157307525915480064

The overman may yet create values for himself, but he must first conform to the zeroth moral law and its corollaries: persist. Can there be any doubt that all art, music, philosophy, literature, and science are modalities BY WHICH man tries to persist?

Culture and even, yes, religion, are mechanisms for coordinating large groups of people, mechanisms that allow entities to form out of disparate masses of people. The object of art is god. The object of god is union. The object of union is persistence. https://americanmind.org/features/the-deep-state-vs-the-deep-right/the-new-tlon/

“Corporate values” as such are mediations between the humans that compose them (i.e, corporations) and zeroth moral law. Corporations are more closely /aligned/ with the zeroth moral law, which is the law of nature, because their existence is as yet far more Hobbesian.

But our institutions begin to fail us—as do our friends—when they know their failures hold no existential threat.

Indeed we suspect that a perfectly honed survivalist would be a joyless creature, a reptile at best. Supposing we could become perfectly aligned to the laws of nature— what then? https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1093546821316632578

Is there not ground to suspect that our failures to coordinate have propelled us to perform those labors which we cherish most of all?