What Nietzsche (and Conservatives) Get Wrong About Envy

There’s a passage in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra that’s become all the rage on the political right:

“Vengeance will we use, and insult, against all who are not like us” — thus do the tarantula-hearts pledge themselves.

“And ‘Will to Equality’ — that itself shall be the name of virtue; and against all that hath power will we raise an outcry!”

“Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant-frenzy of impotence crieth thus in you for ‘equality’: your most secret tyrant-longings disguise themselves thus in virtue-words!

“Fretted conceit and suppressed envy — perhaps your fathers’ conceit and envy: in you break they forth as flame and frenzy of vengeance.”

For conservatives, leftists agitating for social justice are nothing more than these “tarantula-hearts,” whose calls for justice are mere pretext, their protests and boycotts mere “virtue-signalling,” and who at bottom are motivated by envy of the rich and powerful, and impotent rage at their own frustrated ambitions.

But if the right is going to dismiss all calls for social justice by appealing to Nietzschean ethics, in particular his concept of envy, it makes sense to at least ask whether Nietzsche’s theory of ethics stands up to scrutiny.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche develops his theory of master morality versus slave morality. Nietzsche engages in a bit of armchair philology to prove that the ancients…