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I've been reading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals lately and in order to understand it better I thought this might be the right place to start the discussion. This is my understanding of the first two parts of the book (part three will follow soonish). Here we go! Part I In the beginning, the ruling elite (i.e. slave masters) define good and bad. Originally they only refer to qualitative differences. Good is nothing more than someone / something better, higher, stronger than the average. In a similar way bad only means something low, weak and ugly – the plebs and the products of their work. No morality has been invented yet, might makes right – the nobility takes what they think naturally belongs to them in a similar way as wolves hunt elks. It is hardly a coincidence that most heraldic signs of the nobility have lions, eagles and bears in them. Morality gets invented by the slave class as a survival mechanism for themselves: whatever the slaves must do in order to survive becomes a virtue. Since the slaves cannot openly be rebellious and keep the product of their own labour they define weakness, lack of courage and even obedience as virtues. In the slave morality 'good' means someone not like the slave masters, it defines good purely by negation of the 'noble' good. To describe slave masters in these new terms it uses the word 'bad'. At the bottom of this morality is the feeling of resentment hiding in plain sight – instead of avenging masters in the real world, what the slave morality offers as medicine is the idea of the spiritual world after death, where a rightful judge will punish the slave masters for their sins and reward the slaves for their virtues. To propagate these ideas, you'll need a new class, the priests. Part II – conscience and bad conscience If I understood correctly Nietzsche thinks that the origin of conscience follows roughly this causal chain: Active forgetting → Active remembering → Being able to give and keep promises → Seeing every human transaction through the lenses of validity of promises to others and/or to yourself == conscience. Remembering with regard to promises is a manifestation of your own strong will to power (yearning for freedom) – you can only give promises if you believe you're strong enough to be able to keep them even in the face of accidents etc. Older societies needed to 'remind' people of the necessity of remembering with different forms of torture. In order to understand bad conscience we need to grasp the origin of guilt. The most primitive form of agreement (promise) is the contract between the debtor and the creditor. Nietzsche claims that in the ancient world people enjoyed causing each other pain – usually this privilege was reserved for the masters, but even the plebs had sometimes this luxury. If your debtor was unable to pay you, you could demand your payment in pound of flesh – either as some organ of your debtor or as your debtors freedom all together (i.e. your debtor would become your slave). In a similar way, tribes we're thought to be indebted to their ancestors (gods). Amount of debt would be directly proportional to success of the tribe. Therefore, to please the gods they would sacrifice cattle and even humans to their ancestors. Original sin ('Schuld' means both guilt and debt!!) is precisely this feeling of indebtedness to your forefathers. This is also the bad conscience people feel and religions – such as environmentalism and multiculturalism - utilize in order to keep the slaves in check; “polluting the Earth by existing” and “white guilt”. Christianity claims to solve this problem by sacrificing the God himself on a cross for the unpayable debts of mankind. Bad conscience is formed once the human animal recognizes he cannot escape the society – his natural aggression and cruelty now turn inwards. Original sin would be one form in which this phenomenon manifests itself. So what do you think? Did I miss something crucial here? Should I read 'Beyond Good and Evil' before I even start to tackle this book? One of the most important parts was the link between guilt and credit. Could this ancient moral link be the real cause why nobody has succeeded reinventing the money and making it popular - instead of it (credit money system that is) having been the monopoly of the governments for so long? Anyway, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.

Donald Hoffman presents to us a new way on how we perceive reality. Simply put: Instead of our senses developing in order to provide an accurate observation of reality, the mind instead simulates reality according to biological filters that ensure reproduction.