What's original in Nietszche thought is not that power rules the world and that people are longing for it, it is the challenge of the western and christian values that power and individualism is "bad".

Does this change if we instead consider ourselves "powerful" and "weak"?

Now consider quotes like these:

"The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men." "Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative." "I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all!" "Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?"

Read this as poetry for your own enjoyment if you wish. But these "poems" both can be and have been used to justify atrocities.

I'd like to remind you that even Jesus has been used to justify atrocities. It's not the words of men that justify things, it's the authority others give them and those who distort their words for their own purposes. Don't blame the messengers, blame yourself, blame us, blame our weaknesses for falling for the same thing over and over again.

Which is a well-known logical fallacy. Look up, "No true Scotsman."

Back in the real world, people who read him, thought they understood him, and didn't agree with your interpretation, proceeded to literally kill people by the millions. Justifying it by what they understood him to be saying.

I have no particular reason to trust your interpretation over theirs. And when it comes to my best judgment, I find him wrong again and again. So I don't really care which interpretation I'd find more palatable.

So far, I haven't seen a clear exposition of what Nietzschd meant by these phrases, if not the obvious thing. The guy quite clearly had an obsession with concepts of "great men".

People have thought that some people are more fundamentally valuable than others in some moral is-ought sense for most of existence, there's nothing new or enigmatic about it and most reasonable people are done with it.

Example: https://rafal.io/posts/nietzsche-slave-morality.html

Please point me to the correct interpretation of Nietzsche, because I'm apparently failing to find it.

Or maybe we all who are not fans of him understand what it seemed Nietzsche wanted to get at just fine and are not interested in sugar coating the consequences of such belief sets.

> I think you'll witness first hand what happens when weak people rule and excellence is abandoned for equality.

Question: do you consider Stalin a weak or a strong person in this context?

I don't consider people that terrorize others to be strong, that's what weak people do.

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10109.html

If you want a single source for a "correct interpretation" (a term that's hard to take seriously), read that book.

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” - K

you've got no sense of humor if you think kierkegaard is a dullard. either/or is basically one long stand-up special, especially the bit about the trophonean cave

I'm frankly unwilling to reread him at this stage of my life, so I don't have any details for you, but my strong overall impression was that he essentially despised all that went before him, rejected Western values of good and evil (obviously, and as some here do), and left the reader with nothing beyond the essence of an Aleister Crowley "do what thou wilt" disregard for the idea of objective good and evil.

Others here have said that violence has declined, which is ridiculous in light of the many genocides perpetrated over the last century. The two atom bombs dropped on Japan at the end of WWII likely killed more people in a couple of days than most despots did in a lifetime. And those barely register on the timeline of mass killings in the 20th century.

He didn't think well of the state of European philosophy, but "despised all that went before him"? Not at all. He didn't think very highly of his contemporaries working in European philosophy (and politics), but was deeply embedded in classical philology.

> rejected Western values of good and evil (obviously, and as some here do)

That's a broad brush. To use a slightly narrower brush, he starts from the (by no means unique!) position that no God is the source of morality in the world.

> and left the reader with nothing beyond the essence of an Aleister Crowley "do what thou wilt" disregard for the idea of objective good and evil.

Sigh. At the heart of Nietzsche's philosophical project are attempts to re-ground morality on something other than the crumbling foundations of 'Western values.' He gave you a dozen books with which you can think along with him and try to solve that problem.

If you can't get more than 'do what you want' from reading Nietzsche, that's not his failing.

And in the process of doing so, he did a really good job of destroying what was left of traditional western values. The problem was, he didn't build anything adequate in their place. That doesn't necessarily make him evil. But it left the road wide open for those who were evil to use his destruction of values as their rationale for not having any (or rather, for having an evil set of values, and actions to match).

> If you can't get more than 'do what you want' from reading Nietzsche, that's not his failing.

It can be. He's not known for clarity. That's on him.

The key point being that Nietzsche believed that superior people should rule over inferior people, and should achieve that rule through violence and war. Which are uplifting activities for those who engage in it. And once it is established who is superior, what is done to the inferior doesn't matter.

This was an inspiration to the Nazis who, of course, decided that Germans were superior, should establish this through war, and inferior people should be killed or enslaved as the Germans saw fit.

It doesn't surprise me to learn that Pinker also manages to misrepresent and malign Nietzsche.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment-...

[2] https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlight...

What a complete waste of time. It feels like his knowledge of intellectual history comes from skimming Wikipedia articles.