Notes on the Will to Power and the Anti-mask Movement

As I said elsewhere, one thing I admire about Nietzsche’s philosophy is that he exhorts us to strive to “overcome” what is “human, all too human,” to rise above mediocrity, to defy conformity, and to re-examine all that we consider “true” and irrefutable. What I also admire is the relevance, even vatic quality, of much of what he says. As I pointed out in previous posts, Nietzsche’s theories—particularly when it comes to power—are just as incredibly insightful today as they were a century ago.

However, since I started reading Beyond Good and Evil, I’ve been bogged down by a question that, until yesterday, I couldn’t answer satisfactorily. And the question is this: Given Nietzsche’s emphasis on re-examining our truths and values, as well as his disparagement of the “herd animal,” would it be fair to say that the growing anti-mask movement is in keeping with the spirit of Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially given his two assertions that a) there is no objective truth and b) our misguided sense of privileging “truth” over “deception.”

 On the surface, this would appear to be the case, regardless of how much I may disagree with the anti-mask campaign. And to be fair, it does seem a little weird when we look around and see so many people wearing masks just because the government told us to. But in the eyes of anti-maskers, those of us who comply are being “manipulated” by the government (although to what end, I’m unsure) and that we are all sheep, lacking in will (and, therefore, precisely the kind of herd animal that Nietzsche excoriated). Laws enforcing mask-wearing, they argue, are an infringement of their rights and freedoms. To take it a step further, it would also seem that their choice to disobey such policies is in keeping with the kind of “free spirits” that Nietzsche lauded.

But according to Walter Kaufmann, who points to the example of the Nazis and others, Nietzsche is notoriously easy to misinterpret, and given the degree to which Nietzsche vituperates against, well, just about everything, I also didn’t think he would be on board with the movement, though I couldn’t really come up with a good argument until last night when I began reading Part IX of Beyond Good and Evil. In “What is Noble,” the final part of the book, Nietzsche introduces his concept of master and slave morality (which, Kaufmann explains in the footnotes, will be later developed in Nietzsche’s subsequent book On the Genealogy of Morals). But, to put this as briefly as possible, if the ruling group has historically always had the power to determine what is “good” and “true” (hence, “master morality”), those who are ruled (i.e., slaves) would see those same values in an opposite light. In other words, what the master proclaims to be “good” and “true,” the slave interprets as “evil” and “false.” In section 260, Nietzsche writes: “The slave’s eye is not favourable to the virtues of the powerful: he is skeptical and suspicious, subtly suspicious, of all the ‘good’ that is honored there.” Further down he adds that this longing to be free (“the freedom to choose,” as the anti-maskers like to shout) is, in itself, indicative of a slave morality inspired by the fear that those in power can (and, according to Nietzsche, ought to) invoke. Reading this brought to mind something Nietzsche wrote in section 40: “Whatever is profound loves masks.” At the time I didn’t entirely understand this comment, but in light of his master and slave morality, it makes so much more sense. In other words, while the anti-mask campaign calls for “freedom, it is they who, in a hilariously ironic way, are the ones wearing masks—metaphorical masks that proclaim “truth” but in fact cover up what is at heart a slave morality brought on by fear, weakness, distrust, and a lack of power; no different, really, than those recent post-election, pro-Trump rallies in which its marchers similarly felt not an infringement of freedom but an infringement of power. Finally, just to add, in Part VI (“We Scholars”), Nietzsche writes at length about skepticism, voicing great disdain for certain aspects of it, while praising others. It’s a very obfuscating part of the book that Kaufmann acknowledges in his footnotes, but, again, it seems so much clearer now: that insofar as Nietzsche advocates for a skeptical examination of our values—a kind of skepticism upon which science is founded on—the variety that he censures, I now understand, is that of the “herd animal” whose distrust of all mouthpieces of power is making alarming inroads in society, especially so in the US where a significant portion of the population distrusts those three big institutions of power: government, media, and science. So in answer to the question I posed at the beginning, inasmuch as the anti-mask movement may have the superficial appearance of a Nitzschean approach to a contemporary issue, it would be inaccurate to conceive of it as such because what it really boils down to (as it does with everything for Nitezsche) is a confrontation between “master” and “slave” moralities, a manifestation in other words of the will to power and who, ultimately, gets to determine what is “true” and “good.”