Derek Thompson

So independently and authentically, we were all assholes, but we would pretend to kindness for the sake of heaven.

He said it'd be far better if we just behaved like our actual, true, instinctive, agentic selves.

And he despised external forces of morality and invited people to reject those traditions and get in touch with their own instincts.

He called them the Dionysian impulses.

And

you know, create a life and a system of values that was true to us and not just true to whatever system enforced itself on us.

And in a way, although Nietzsche is famous for criticizing systems and not being particularly clear about what we should do instead, I take a lot of Nietzsche as essentially being a lot of weird poetry that sums up as get in touch with your instincts again.

Don't be who Christianity wants you to be.

Don't be who external systems of values want you to be.

Be the kind of person that is most authentic and even playful and artful that you can possibly muster.

And in a way, what you're doing without being, I think, explicitly Nietzschean is saying, let's have more art.

Let's have more play.

Let's have more instinct.

Let's have a class whose grading is determined by the instincts of the class and not determined by the administration that I happen to be employed by.

Don't be played by the metrics and the games that you find yourself sort of fallen into.

Develop your own sense of what is valuable to you and play that game that you choose.

And so I guess I wonder...

And again, I might completely regret ending the podcast this way.

I wonder even if you completely disagree with my summary of an aspect of Nietzsche, whether that too is a way of grasping at what you want is a reemergence of instinct which comes from the self and cannot possibly come from a metric or from the rules of some game that we've fallen into.

That was a beautiful answer.