Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
A Criticism of the Words: Improvement, Perfecting, Elevation§397 One must be very immoral in order to make people moral by deeds. The moralist’s means are the most terrible that have ever been used; he who has not the courage to be an immoralist in deeds may be fit for anything else, but not for the duties of a moralist. Morality is a menagerie; it assumes that iron bars may be more useful than freedom, even for the creatures it imprisons; it also assumes that there are animal-tamers about who do not shrink from terrible means and who are acquainted with the use of red-hot iron. This terrible species, which enters into a struggle with the wild animal, is called “priests”.
* * * Man, incarcerated in an iron cage of errors, has become a caricature of man; he is sick, emaciated, ill-disposed towards himself, filled with a loathing of the impulses of life, filled with a mistrust of all that is beautiful and happy — in life in fact, he is a wandering monument of misery. How shall we ever succeed in vindicating this phenomenon, this artificial, arbitrary and recent miscarriage, the sinner which the priests have bred on their territory?
* * * In order to think fairly of morality, we must put two biological notions in its place: the taming of the wild beasts and the rearing of a particular species. The priests of all ages have always pretended that they wished to “improve” –. But we, of another persuasion, would laugh if a lion-tamer ever wished to speak to us of his “improved” animals. As a rule, the taming of a beast is only achieved by deteriorating it: even the moral man, is not a better man; he is rather a weaker member of his species. But he is less harmful —