Derek Thompson

But reading it, I hope you take this the right way, I kind of thought of you as like a kinder, softer, less authoritarian Nietzsche.

Because one thing that Nietzsche did, and from my limited reading of Nietzsche, he did many, many things.

Yeah.

One thing that he did is he rejected the teachings of Judeo-Christianity because he thought it offered a system of values that kept us from our instincts, that essentially it, for example, made us be kind, not for the sake of kindness, but for the sake of getting into heaven.

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.