Helen Lewis

But you've trapped your opponents at the level of kind of going, ah, ah, ah, about the exact words in which you're rapping it.

I mean, I think that's probably why Nietzsche is such a reference point, because you have the sense both of an intellectual who is not appreciated or known in his own time.

Nietzsche goes mad after seeing a horse being beaten in the street and spends the last decades of his life just sitting in a corner, his mind completely broken.

An icon of masculinity.

Massive moustache, to be fair.

He did have a very impressive moustache.

But also had these delusions of grandeur.

He's got a book that's, I believe, literally called Why I Am So Great.

you know and the idea of the the ubermensch is that everybody around you is essentially cattle and you're not and that is like that is every member of the kind of intellectual dark webs theory of the universe right was oh they're a sheeple and everybody else is them but i alone have seen through it so there is this inherent kind of narcissism to it about the idea of kind of being an ubermensch that i think you really that that doesn't surprise that's a reference point to me there um

The Christianity I struggle with more.

So I'm not religious myself, but I was raised in a very religious household.

My parents are Catholic.

My dad was a deacon in the Catholic church.

My mom was a religious studies teacher.

And their practice of Christianity was, I think, an incredibly positive one.

They would go and give the sacrament to the sick, you know, and they'd go and visit nursing homes, people who didn't have anyone else to visit them.

They would volunteer in soup kitchens, for example.

Their idea of Christianity was one that was based around service to other people.

And I don't really see a great deal of link between that and the version of, even in the persona of Jesus, right?

So the persona of Jesus in the Gospels, he says, blessed are the meek.