Abstract
In this essay, I explore the influence Nietzsche had on Huey Newton, the co-founder of The Black Panther Party. Newton was particularly inspired by The Genealogy of Morals, which he used as practical advice to instigate a form of psychological warfare to support his socialist political project. I start with an analysis of Newton’s choice of the group’s name, which I look at through the lens of Hans Kruuk’s concept of ‘surplus killing‘. This approach helps explain §349 of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche elucidates his critique of common evolutionary theory and offers an enticing attitude towards life. This is followed by a discussion of Newton’s use of Christianity as a model for his Marxist-Leninist project and the problem this raises given Nietzsche’s position on Christianity. After an explanation of the master/slave morality in Genealogy, I extend the idea further by looking at modern anthropological research by Richard Wrangham and Christopher Boehm. I claim that understanding this broader picture gives us great insight into modern culture and morality, which Nietzsche described as the Christianization of humankind.
Table of Contents
- Surplus Killing and the Panther
- Whites, Cops and Psychological Warfare
- Nietzsche’s Lion King
- Utility and the Creation of Slaves
- Self-Domestication
- Murderous Good Guys
- Conclusion
1. Surplus Killing and the Panther
Before going into the way in which Nietzsche’s work was used as a political tool, namely The Genealogy of Morality, I want to start off with the name of the Black Panther Party, since it offers a good segue into an important and useful critique of evolutionary theory that Nietzsche offers in The Gay Science. Why did Huey Newton choose the panther to represent his political party? While he admits it to be ‘a fierce animal‘, he adds the caveat that a panther won’t attack until it’s ‘backed into a corner; then [it] will strike out.‘ Considering the fact that panthers are predatory, infanticidal, and known to kill for the sake of killing, Newton’s description is an ironic whitewashing of panthers. Indeed, its original name was the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
The scientific euphemism for pleasure-oriented murder is surplus killing, a term coined by Hans Kruuk. A memorable example comes to us from Bhutan, where a singe leopard (a synonym for panther) killed twenty-one sheep in a single attack. Most cats are surplus killers, and the cute domestic variety is responsible for the extinction of entire species of birds, mammals and reptiles. It would have been inappropriate for Kruuk to have talked about pleasure in his landmark paper on surplus killing, opting instead to talk of adaptation, survival value, and ecological balance, since subjectivity still mounts a strong defense against the growing claws of scientific inquiry. I think it’s an understandable professional fear—speculating on subjective consciousness is dangerous uncharted waters—but judging by my own experience, I don’t usually think about evolutionary advantages of my activities—I’m motivated by what feels good and bad, even if those concepts get muddy when taking into account my ability to plan and sacrifice for the future.
Kruuk brings up an interesting point when discussing the surplus killing perpetrated by lions (Panthera leo): even an abundantly sated predator will take down easy prey if the opportunity presents itself. This should be obvious; if they have the power to kill, and the pleasure of killing, then it’s simply a matter of mood and opportunity that dictates when they will strike. Necessary things give pleasure. For example, cursorial mammals (i.e., mammals adapted to running) have the same chemical reward systems humans do, including the infamous endocannabinoids which is the built-in marijuana generator of mammals—the inner weed drip-feed. This is to make sure that animals won’t avoid running for their lives because it’s too much effort, which humans have exploited by running around the block to pump their bodies full of yummy drugs.
Understandably, predatory aggression was downplayed by Newton in favour of highlighting fear-induced aggression; for example, a frightened caged lab rat biting a grad student. Generally, it’s rare to see political movements be genuine about their willingness to let off steam by killing for fun (usually it’s couched in some kind of righteous ideal) although its artistic representation is more common and even beautiful. One of my favourite songs is the DJ Screw remix of Mo Murda by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, which takes the original song’s celebration of murder, replete with the group’s signature dense staccato rap and melodic curlicues, but Screw pitches the voices to sound demonic, and cuts up the song in a frenzied way to match the bloodthirsty lyrics.
While Newton played with giving off a scary image, given his interest in Marxist-Leninist politics and the lofty ideals of a peaceful community where everyone lived in harmony and abundance, a more appropriate name for the group would have been the Red Rodents, especially since panthers are solitary animals and the Maoist literature they were fond of carrying around looked down on bourgeois individualism.
But the most fascinating remark from Kruuk’s paper is that people reporting incidences of surplus killing were unanimous in characterizing it as wasteful. I believe that this is influenced by the common characterization of life as a struggle for existence, which Nietzsche criticizes with his trademark poetic flourish in §349 of The Gay Science:
The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation. […] But a natural scientist should come out of his human nook; and in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity.
We don’t need the animal kingdom to make this clear to us: human life is a perpetual fountain of squandering. Human population has exploded, has gushed frantically, and not because of timid and humble attempts at survival that just happened to result in billions of bodies. No—it’s because human beings are best surplus killers on the planet. The state of desperate survival is an interlude to the instinct to expand and squander. When I have the ability to waste without having it rip my conscience apart, I feel a state of great psychological health, of relief, freedom, power—the euphoria is heightened when accompanied with the strength to get even more.
Toddlers, those reservoirs of joy, delight, and health, make this clear for us. Take this memorable tweet from a mother: Just walked in on my three year old pumping all of our hand soap into the bathroom sink, chanting “wasting soap… wasting soap…” to himself. The toddler’s evaluation of ‘waste’ is not just free of moral shame, but is rather its opposite: an affirmative joy. The toddler’s entire existence is surplus; did there really need to be another person? Was it an efficient use of resources to give birth to this little human that has infinite demands? The contrary is the case, as explained by the deranged villain in the UK show Utopia; giving birth to a child in a first world country is an indisputable blight on resources and ecology.
To stretch out one’s power, to make the world a tool for pleasure and play, what else is there to do? This is a common disconnect between kids who want to be YouTubers, musicians, painters, dancers (the pinnacle of life), versus parents who know that the flipside of this common ambition is that there’s winners and losers, and the losers become part of the tool of the winners. Ideally, we learn to sacrifice our desires to get in their good graces ad grab a slice of the pie.
When parents are trying to make ends meet, there comes the onset of weariness, a diminishing energy, a wish to conserve, to survive, to just make it through the day. This is an alien attitude to most young children, who jump out of their beds in the early morning, dizzy with infinite options and possibilities, craving fun, that most wasteful of activities. On some days, my will to live is not just paper thin—rather, it takes the form of data on a hard drive: invisible charges, fragmented in space, and prone to disappear as easily as they crop up. Rearing children with this mind state would be a punishment, a burden, a form of recklessness. How could I offer children a proper life? How will I make sure that they are well-nourished emotionally and physically, well-educated, successful? This is the fruit of my weariness and weakness; my great grandfather, Ion Borșan, simply had sex for pleasure whenever he could and absorbed the consequences with his strength and wily skills to get resources. He would always be the one to eat first at the table, and my grandma—the only one of his seven children that is still alive—would sometimes go hungry as a result.
This squandering of sexual energy is all-too-common on the planet; how many people are born without any thought to their tenability, let alone their utility? If the thought for reproduction is anything more complex than the satiation of the sexual drive, then it tends to be a simple one: I want children. These births are often couched in terms of survival, ‘we are but poor, humble families trying to get by‘, when it’s actually the most successful predator on earth whitewashing its own behaviour, reveling in its ability to copy itself and spread its reach through both time and space. Amaroq Weiss, a skilled whitewasher at the Centre for Biological Diversity, tries to weasel out of this fact by suggesting that predators don’t kill for fun, because killing is sometimes hard and dangerous; they might even get hurt! Pleasure, for Weiss, is incompatible with challenge and danger. Remind me: when children are playing, just how common is it for them to avoid danger at all costs? The motto for the Center for Biological Diversity is “because life is good“, and the website is adorned with pictures of butterflies and cute wolf cubs. Being torn apart by the fangs of these wolves is, I suppose, part of a good life, part of a natural harmony; just workin’ wolves tryna get by.
2. Whites, Cops and Psychological Warfare
Newton was a student of Nietzsche, which makes his whitewashing seem more politically calculated than naïve. To be fair, he was facing a most formidable predator: the police. Nietzsche’s genealogical study of morality, which demonstrated how the weak used insidious psychological techniques to defeat the strong, was a great inspiration for Newton. His insistence to describe the police as pigs was an explicit form of psychological warfare, which meant to weaponize guilt to gain power:
[Calling police ‘pigs’] raised the consciousness of the people and also inflicted a new consciousness on the ruling circle. If whites and police became caught up in this new awareness, they would soon defect from their own ranks and join us to avoid feelings of guilt and shame.
Nietzsche pointed out that this tactic had been used to good effect by the Christians against the Romans. In the beginning the Christians were weak, but they understood how to make the philosophy of a weak group work for them. By using phrases like “the meek shall inherit the earth,” they imposed a new idea on the Romans, one that gave rise to doubt and led to defections to the new sect. […] People like to be on the winning side. We have seen the same principle work on college campuses in this country. Many white youths now identify with Blacks; the identification is manifested in clothes, rhetoric, and life styles.
While Nietzsche’s genealogical method makes it clear that morality is an amorphous and historically contingent phenomenon, he did also have some strong criticism of Christianity. Take, for example, §62 of The Antichrist:
I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. […] This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind will be able to see…. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race..
Such harsh language is used because the price that was paid for toppling Rome was an insidious form of nihilism, and not just a devaluation of strength, health, and beauty, but of life itself, replacing the importance of the body with the ghostly fantasy of a ‘soul’, devaluing the current world and all of its details, ignoring human difference, trying to eradicate individuality, and so on. A example of this is Pope Innocent III and his De miseria humanae conditionis:
Man was formed of dust, slime, and ashes; what is even more vile, of the filthiest seed. He was conceived from the itch of the flesh, in the heat of passion and the stench of lust, and worse yet, with the stain of sin. […] Men strive especially for three things: riches, pleasures, and honors. Riches lead to immorality, pleasures to shame, and honors to vanity.
In a way, it seems Newton was kinda taking the opposite lesson that Nietzsche was trying to teach. After all, despite its avowed atheism, Nietzsche saw in socialism the continuation of this Christian attitude; the veneration of the weak, the projection of a golden age in the future where all classes were abolished and exploitation vanished, a paradise where everything was provided in abundance, where harmony, justice, and creativity let humans express their full potential. Newton helped publish a program in his twenties that outlined this fantasy—full equality, free housing, food, healthcare, education and so on. He even saw himself as something of a martyr, writing books with titles like Revolutionary Suicide and To Die For The People. In reality, however, Newton was prone to demonstrate some rather worldly behaviour, but more on this later.
Anyway, what was Newton supposed to do? Just suck it up? The polemical statement in The Antichrist is just that; a strident polemical point of view, but as always, Nietzsche is not that easy to pin down once and for all. The Christians, being in a position of weakness, had no choice but to use cunning to gain power—though power was their ultimate goal. As Nietzsche puts it, even if they practically longed for death and an escape from the world, they were still willing; humans will rather will nothingness than not will. A fun way to frame this conflict, in keeping with our theme of big cats, is Disney’s The Lion King.
3. Nietzsche’s Lion King
In this cartoon universe, there is a harmonious kingdom where the strong and beautiful run the show, and everyone else knows their place—the Circle of Life, they call it. But it would have been boring to simply watch the administrative procedure of Mufasa, the king, instructing Simba, his heir, on the details of rule, so Scar is introduced: a disfigured, emaciated weakling who tries to defy the natural order (remember that beautiful people are less concerned with egalitarian policies). He connives to murder Mufasa and frame his nephew, thereby usurping the throne from its rightful heir. Being Disney, the beautiful, strong, healthy and honorable Simba triumphs over the thin, treacherous Scar and his troupe of hideous hyenas.
But as John Holbo explains, a more Nietzschean (and historically accurate) version would be that Simba is instructed not in the joys of a harmonious circle of life, but in the pleasure of ripping apart weak (and innocent) prey. Scar is resentful because Mufasa murdered his family, but he’s too weak and powerless to fight back, so he teams up with the weak and ugly to launch a powerful psychological attack: strength is tyranny, beauty is vanity, weakness is virtue. And most importantly, Scar wins.
What about more human history? Nietzsche figured that in the very early stages of society, it was understood that the community had to be prioritized over individuals, and long-term planning was more important than immediate gratification. Such communes were not just egalitarian, but went to great lengths to avoid anybody asserting their egoic needs over others. However, it was a different story with strangers outside the group. The strong, aggressive tribes went around and conquered the weaker ones, imposing an axiomatic valuation which deemed the conquered population to be fundamentally inferior: ‘political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority‘.
The subjugated population (now the ‘commoners‘) outnumbered the conquerors, but since they weren’t organized in a way comparable to the invading militaristic tribe, the vanquished became instruments for material comfort and survival. The conquerors, now nobles, or the ‘knightly aristocratic masters‘, lived their lives for their own sake, possessing ‘a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health’, choosing to focus on ‘war, adventure, hunting, dancing, competitive sports, and in general all that involves vigorous, free joyful activity.’
4. Utility and the Creation of Slaves
As someone with a constitution that makes me an unwilling disciple of Scar, spectator sports tend to seem like a stupid waste of time and energy. But what better illustration can we find of the knightly aristocratic masters today? For athletic superstars, material abundance is simply taken for granted, vigorous exercise nourishes their fantastic health, worthy enemies are battled, trophies are hunted, adventures are travelled, and eager sexual partners abound. And it’s all for nothing: a toy gets passed back and forth.
This shines in brilliant contrast to the grim duty of working life which drains mental energy, where a missed paycheck might mean a lack of food, warmth or shelter, where each resource is acquired painfully and managed dutifully, and utility reigns supreme. Sports are anti-utilitarian when considering the fact that most people’s calories are spent on survival, rather than passing a toy back and forth for fun. For superstar athletes, obstacles are not overcome wearily and desperately, as in the case of a worker, but are voluntarily created for the joy of overcoming them with an abundance of strength.
The fact that sports are stupid and wasteful is therefore a feature, not a bug. But this joyful activity of masters in deep history could easily turn ugly, as a love of power and domination bred ‘a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture … as if it were no more than a student’s prank’. The peaceful slave would be the victim of these pranks, too impotent to retaliate, and forced to swallow one bitter pill after another. Over time, the subjected population needed to use their creative powers to develop their own sense of morality to escape the sense that their lives were going to be miserable from beginning to end, focusing instead on things like patience and humility.
Such oppression fostered creativity in moral directions, ushering in clever new forms of revenge that topped the violence of simple brutes. Indeed, Nietzsche claims that ‘human history would be too fatuous for anything were it not for the cleverness imported into it by the weak‘. Using this weakness, the mighty masters of power were transformed into stunted and contemptible monsters; covetous, evil, horrible, godless—rather than wealthy, strong, fearless, and free. On the other hand, weakness and poverty were refashioned as deserving of love, a love which exploded in intensity and complexity owing to its roots embedded in the most profound hatred.
Consider the relish of the misery inflicted on enemies in Revelation, where people are ‘tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels … and the smoke of their torment shall ascent up forever and ever‘. Or the vision of a saint’s happiness as described by Thomas Aquinas, which is said to be delightful since a saint is ‘allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned‘.
While this hatred is much deeper, a new form of love grew out of that hate, ‘as its crown, as its triumphant crown, circling wider and wider amid the clarity and fullness of the sun, and pursuing in the very kingdom of light and height its goal of hatred, its victory, its spoil, its strategy, with the same intensity with which the roots of that tree of hate sank into everything which was deep and evil with increasing stability and increasing desire.’
5. Self-Domestication
Nietzsche’s genealogy of ‘good’ as self-affirmation by the powerful followed by the resentful inversion of the weak has some interesting support in the latest anthropological research, which shows that human bodies themselves show the marks of a ‘self-domestication’. It solves an interesting puzzle posed by natural selection: how can people evolve a sense of loyalty to a large group when they are naturally predisposed to serve only themselves and their immediate kin? The answer is that over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, the weak members of human tribes have used weapons and language to band together and cooperatively execute the members who posed a threat to their own success—Richard Wrangham’s targeted conspiratorial killing model which builds on the work of Christopher Boehm. In other words, our ancestors who were too competitive, strong, and selfish were murdered so consistently and systematically that it has significantly altered our genetic make-up. One of the strange results of domesticating animals (selecting for tameness, or a ‘reduced propensity for reactive aggression‘) is that it brings with it a trove of common changes to their bodies: their faces become shorter and they have smaller teeth, their cranial capacity is diminished, they are more social, more playful, and more tolerant.
I want to dwell on the skull as it’s a most striking example: one of the hallmarks of domestication is neotenous crania, meaning that the skulls of the adult start to resemble what was once only the juvenile phase of development. Notice how similar the human skull looks to that of a juvenile chimpanzee, which is appropriate given the fact that humans have dramatically lower levels of reactive aggression:
Skull of a baby chimpanzee [source]
The idea of self-domestication in non-human animals came quite late, in 2012, when it was pointed out that adult bonobos—the more friendly version of chimps—have the skulls of teen chimps. Bonobos and chimps are separated by the Congo River, but a dry period allowed their ancestors to move around, and somewhere between 0.87 and 2.1 million years ago, they began to diverge into different species. It’s not entirely clear what selective pressures initiated the self-domestication of bonobos (might have something to do with the relative abundance of food) but both their appearance and behaviour shows that self-domestication occurred: bonobo males are much less aggressive and have the common traces of domestication as explained earlier; more gregarious, more tolerant, lighter, and with smaller teeth, brains, and skulls.
6. Murderous Good Guys
If, in fact, morality is a matter of power to execute whoever steps out of line, then we have a somewhat different picture of who the good guys are. If someone is harmless because they are physically incapable of retaliation, that doesn’t mean they have a pure heart—it just means they are harmless. However, if someone is harmless because they know that stepping out of line means severe punishment, and they relish in dishing out cruelty to other transgressors when given the opportunity, these are prudent souls. With this in mind, let’s return to the Black Panther Party and their manifesto:
The swiftly developing revolution in America is like the gathering of a mighty storm, and nothing can stop that storm from finally bursting, inside America, washing away the pigs of the power structure and all their foul, oppressive works. And the children of the pigs and the oppressed people will dance and spit upon the common graves of these pigs.
Notice the revenge fantasy directed against the powerful, and the similarity between this language and the conspiratorial killing model; there are so many of us, the losers, the oppressed, and so few of them, the powerful pigs. Of course, it simply assumes that whoever is doing the killing is doing so because they are morally pure agents wiping away the morally corrupt, rather than one group killing for the sake of establishing their own power.
As Lenin explained, once the morally superior take the reins of society, they will ‘exercise control over the parasites, the sons of the wealthy, the swindlers and other guardians of capitalist traditions‘, using ‘swift and severe punishment’ by people who are not sentimental intellectuals‘. And only until it’s fair—so the story goes.
As Boehm puts it, ‘a human group consumed with moral outrage can become a still more efficient killing machine‘, The moral outrage directed at class enemies during the Russian Revolution was vast, efficient, powerful, and often lethal, but the flourishes of creativity also shows that a great deal of delight was found in the torture of their enemies: skinning people alive, scalping them, twisting their necks off, and most in keeping with our theme, attaching an iron tube to the enemy and having rats dig through their bodies alive by burning the other end.
The Black Panthers were no strangers to this; take Alex Rackley, a rank-and-file 19-year-old Panther member. Because of the paranoia about informants, the party tortured Rackley by tying him down and pouring boiling water over him, then letting him stew in pain and filth for three days. Driven mad by pain, he decided to confess to all of his accused crimes, and as a reward, they drove him to a swamp and put a bullet in his head. Eldridge Cleaver, the minister of information, said he raped white women as form of revolution and staged an ambush where two cops were injured and a teen Black Panther was killed. Betty Van Patter, an idealistic woman who joined the BPP to become their bookkeeper, started to realize that the party was lying about its money, and as a prize for her scrupulous honesty, they raped and tortured her to death, dumping her body in the water. Her corpse washed up after many weeks and it took three days to identify her with dental records.
Finally, we have Huey Newton; he shot a 17-year-old woman in the face for calling him ‘Baby’, then he ordered the murder of a witness set to testify. He got caught up in the free love philosophy of the 1960s and declared that a man and woman can’t own each other, because ownership is about borders, control, tyranny—for good, moral people like him, this would be criminal. What ended up happening, really, is Newton taking advantage of his popularity and power, using it to bed multiple sexual partners because it’s fun to have lots of sex with different people. Later on, he sheepishly admitted that ‘part of it was exploitative‘. Finally, he had to disband the Black Panthers because he got caught embezzling funds.
7. Conclusion
Nietzsche lamented that what he called Christianization, or the rabbleization, of the world is thorough: ‘the progress of this poisoning throughout the entire body of humankind seems unstoppable, even though its tempo and pace now might tend to be slower, softer, quieter, calmer.’ A clear example of this trend in recent times comes via Mari Matsuda, who has written that the outcast, the weak, the oppressed, and the poor, hold a monopoly on objectively correct morality:
What is suggested here is not abstract consideration of the position of the least advantaged. The imagination of the academic philosopher cannot recreate the experience of life on the bottom.
[…]
When notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, are examined not from an abstract position but from the position of groups who have suffered through history, moral relativism recedes and identifiable normative priorities emerge.
Or, more succinctly, she has advised us to ‘turn the world upside down by standing in solidarity with the bottom‘. Notice the lack self-affirmation, absence of strength, and a desire to be given direction by a master—though the master is now at the bottom of the hierarchy to signal a commitment to harmlessness. Matsuda accurately echoes the popular understanding of morality as something that is synonymous with focusing on the weak and the common.
As Nietzsche explains, the ‘artists of violence‘ which established states by conquering pacific populations, had an active force which he termed the will to power, or the instinct for freedom. This will to power, however, has incarnated itself in a psychological battleground as well as a physical one. In the same way that the master gave a new form to the society of the people it conquered, the master of the self is someone whose inner life is shaped by creative action rather than passive acquiescence. Where the slave performs good actions because he is commanded to by an external agent, the master lives a life of autonomy; the master’s life is a creative act driven by an inner strength and health of the will that loves challenge and strives to become great.
It’s hard to know what that looks like systemically. Given that hundreds of thousands of years of human history point to the necessity of conforming to the group, it’s simply prudent to kneel before weakness, or the ideology of supporting weakness, lest one is torn apart by a pack of resentful creatures—remember that humans are the greatest surplus killers. If the oppressed are sanctified, the Scars of the world will compete in cunning—there is ever greater subtlety, the daggers become smaller, more concealed, and standing aside will be punished. In my own life, this has been fascinating to watch; I’ve butted heads with people who will talk at length about their commitment to making their life about helping those at the bottom, all the while making calculated moves in order to increase their wealth and power. The concrete jungle breeds panthers that look like lambs, and sing beautiful songs about the virtues of being a lamb.
In terms of advice, I’d like to end with a thought provoking aphorism (§292) from The Gay Science:
I do not wish to promote any morality, but to those who do I give this advice: If you wish to deprive the best things and states of all honor and worth, then go on talking about them as you have been doing. Place them at the head of your morality and talk from morning to night of the happiness of virtue, the composure of the soul, of justice and immanent retribution. The way you are going about it, all these good things will eventually have popularity and the clamor of the streets on their side; but at the same time all the gold that was on them will have been worn off by so much handling, and all the gold inside will have turned to lead. Truly, you are masters of alchemy in reverse: the devaluation of what is most valuable.
Why don’t you make the experiment of trying another prescription to keep from attaining the opposite of your goal as you have done hitherto? Deny these good things, withdraw the mob’s acclaim from them as well as their easy currency; make them once again concealed secrets of solitary souls; say that morality is something forbidden. That way you might win over for these things the kind of people who alone matter: I mean those who are heroic. But to that end there has to be a quality that inspires fear and not, as hitherto, nausea. Hasn’t the time come to say of morality what Master Eckhart said: “I ask God to rid me of God.”
