To all wormy wood, to all stinking rags
October of Zarathustra
Leopold Aschenbrenner is the CEO of the hedge fund Situational Awareness, which you probably remember hearing about this summer. It's an AI-focused hedge fund that is highly opinionated. It plays very aggressively, and one of its trades cost it dearly this year, but it's probably still ahead.
In 2024, Aschenbrenner went on the Dwarkesh podcast, and described his background. He is from Germany, but he persuaded his parents to move him to the US because he was so unhappy in Germany. He was an ambitious kid, and, as he tells it on the podcast, that did not go over in Germany. As he put it, they had a serious case of tall poppy syndrome.
That is, if you stood out, if you excelled, that was cause for reining a young person in.
Tall poppy syndrome is showing up here, too. Every few months, some kind of furious debate comes up online about hustle culture. Is it good or is it bad in startup culture that you really have to set your life aside to succeed and compete? Is it a terrible thing that the ones who do ultimately excel tend to be the types that can work round the clock?
If you scratch the surface, though, you see an unspoken assumption in all of this discourse: that any recommended course of action must apply to everyone.
This is the tension.
But these two chapters of Thus Spoke Zarathustra really seem to get to the heart of the matter. Nietzsche seems to be going to extravagant lengths to get this idea through to everyone: not everyone is the same.
Some people have higher aims than others. Some people have much more potential. That's not a comforting thing to hear, but it's real.
And, to that end, different people will have very different paths. What's wise for one is not wise for their neighbor.
Or as Zarathustra puts it at the end of "On the Spirit of Gravity":
And it was only reluctantly that I ever asked the way — that has always offended my taste! Rather I questioned and tried the ways themselves.
A trying and a question has been all my traveling — and truly, one must also learn how to answer such questioning! But that — is my taste:
—not good, not bad, but my taste, of which I am no longer ashamed and which I have no more wish to hide.
"This — is now my way — where is yours?" thus I answered those who asked me "the way." For the way — that does not exist!
On the three evils
The three evils are sex, the lust to rule and selfishness. When I read the list, I thought: "I bet Zarathustra doesn't honestly think these things are so bad."
He doesn't.
The funny thing is that, as far as we can tell from the book, Zarathustra keeps giving gifts of his time and energy to other people, he walks away from the followers who would give him power and he never has any sex. As far as I can tell, he barely talks to any women at all.
On the Spirit of Gravity
You could say that this one delves deeper into the theme of selfishness, or at least self-determination.
- Zarathustra says: "To learn to love oneself is no commandment for today and tomorrow. Rather it is of all arts the finest, subtlest, last and most patient."
- Zarathustra also says: "Much that is inside man is like the oyster, that is, repulsive and slippery and hard to grasp — so that noble shell with noble adornment must plead for it."
Make of that what you will.
One line
"Sex: a sting and stake to all hair-shirted despisers of the body and cursed as 'the world' by all afterworldly: for it mocks and makes fools of all teachers of confusion and error.” —Zarathustra
- Lots of bangers in these two chapters. Tough to pick.
—Brady Dale
October 18, 2026
Next Zarathustra: The goad of freedom