Neitzsche

Poor old Nietzsche said some funny things.  'That which does not destroy me makes me stronger' is a popular one, opening Kanye West's song 'Stronger'.  'Do you go to a woman?  Remember your whip,' is usually saved for "[Category], what stupid jerks they were/are" where Category takes the value men, philosophers, 19th Century men, Germans, people with syphillus, people who go mad and so on... Still another: 'A woman is a thousand riddles, and the answer to all of them is pregnancy.'

The thing is, he is saying something that not everyone always believed was false.  In this post I will try to give a miniblog example for each which shows the sense of it.  All of them are also indefensible nonsense in many important modern contexts.  Please, ladies, there is no need to comment on that.

"That which does not destroy me makes me stronger."  Andy Morgan of Yale Uni has done some research on post-traumatic stress disorder which shows that people who are resistant to it have a high ability to produce and release neuropeptide Y, which damps the response to cortisol/stress reaction and helps people keep their heads.  It is the physical equivalent of the psychological moment of 'the fear is there to help me respond well.' Neuropeptide Y and other stress control hormones (DHEA, Testosterone) and patterns grow in strength by being released regularly but not exhausted.  If exhausted, they start to kick in later and the stress becomes higher and when they do kick in they are inadequate. You need to be stressed, but not exhausted, and you will grow stronger.  (One way to practice releasing them is exercise to beyond 30% of V02max)

'Do you go to a woman? Remember your whip.'  When I was engaged, my fiance asked how I was feeling about the approaching nuptials.  I was excited but very anxious about maintaining my autonomy, and likened marriage to being trapped in a cage with a tiger. (She was happy to hear that.)  I think that is the true sense of this.  In marriage, romantic notions of smooth peaceful self-sacrifice quickly give way to the alarming realisation that you are sharing your living space with a top predator, a member of the most successful species ever to walk the earth (except beetles I suppose. and bacteria.).

'A woman is a thousand riddles, and the answer to all of them is pregnancy.'  To save this one, I'm going to have to make it gender neutral.  My example is the ADFA cadet who distributed video of sex with a woman to his friends.  They are just an example of the theme picked up in this essay in the Atlantic - that men seem to want sex to be more. If offered sex on generous terms, there seems to be an impulse to go for more. Video her - now she's really ****ed.  But of course, she's not. Or at least, not in a way that doesn't leave you even more so. Why why why would this be part of what men do?  I think the answer might be pregnancy. It takes a special kind of motivation to cause a pregnancy, given that, as an alarming work colleague once described it 'Some o' that shit (pause to marvel horrifiedly) you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.'

Well, that should be a lesson for me.  Never try to defend the indefensible.