Nietzsche: “Independence is a Privilege of the Strong”

In his book Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues that independence is for ‘very few’. With individualism being the order of the day, we tend to think of independence as a democratic institution — guaranteed as a right. But, for Nietzsche, independence is not for everyone. It is a ‘privilege of the strong’ — one that requires ‘daring to the point of recklessness’. To live independently is to enter ‘into a labyrinth’ and multiply ‘a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case’.

Nietzsche elaborates on this in his Genealogy of Morals. There he writes that ‘the strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate’.

The anthropologist Ernest Gellner calls this sort of congregation the ‘tyranny of the cousins’ — referring to the phenomenon among primates in which beta males join forces to take out an alpha male. In his book, The Goodness Paradox, Richard Wrangham writes that these sorts of coalitions, which were heavily-reliant on the development of language, were self-domesticating, creating a more democratic and egalitarian species:

Language-based conspiracy was the key, because it gave whispering beta males the power to join forces to kill alpha-male bullies. As happens in small-scale societies today, language allowed underdogs to agree on a plan, and thereby…