Fundamentally, my term immoralist involves two negations. For one, I negate a type of man that has so far been considered supreme: the good, the benevolent, the beneficent. And then I negate a type of morality that has become prevalent and predominant as morality itself—the morality of decadence or, more concretely, Christian morality. It would be permissible to consider the second contradiction the more decisive one, since I take the overestimation of goodness and benevolence on a large scale for a consequence of decadence, for a symptom of weakness, irreconcilable with an ascending, Yes-saying life: negating and destroying are conditions of saying Yes.
Let me tarry over the psychology of the good human being. To estimate what a type of man is worth, one must calculate the price paid for his preservation—one must know the conditions of his existence. The condition of the existence of the good is the lie: put differently, not wanting to see at any price how reality is constituted fundamentally—namely, not in such a way as to elicit benevolent instincts at all times, and even less in such a way as to tolerate at all times the interference of those who are myopically good-natured. To consider distress of all kinds as an objection, as something that must be abolished, is the niaiserie [folly] par excellence and, on a large scale, a veritable disaster in its consequences, a nemesis [Schicksal] of stupidity—almost as stupid as would be the desire to abolish bad weather—say, from pity for poor people.
In the great economy of the whole, the terrible aspects of reality (in affects, in desires, in the will to power) are to an incalculable degree more necessary than that form of petty happiness which people call "goodness"; one actually has to be quite lenient to accord the latter any place at all, considering that it presupposes an instinctive mendaciousness. I shall have a major occasion to demonstrate how the historical consequences of optimism, this abortion of the homines optimi [best men], have been uncanny beyond measure. Zarathustra, who was the first to grasp that the optimist is just as decadent as the pessimist, and perhaps more harmful, says: "Good men never speak the truth."
[Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, 56, 7.]
"False coasts and assurances the good have taught you; in the lies of the good you were hatched and huddled. Everything has been made fraudulent and has been twisted through and through by the good."
[Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, 56, 28.]
Fortunately, the world has not been designed with a view to such instincts that only good-natured herd animals could find their narrow happiness in it: to demand that all should become "good human beings," herd animals, blue-eyed, benevolent, "beautiful souls"—or as Mr. Herbert Spencer would have it, altruistic—would deprive existence of its great character and would castrate men and reduce them to the level of desiccated Chinese stagnation.— And this has been attempted!— Precisely this has been called morality.
In this sense, Zarathustra calls the good, now "the last men,"
[Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 5.] now "the beginning of the end"; above all, he considers them the most harmful type of man because they prevail at the expense of truth and at the expense of the future.
"The good are unable to create; they are always the beginning of the end; they crucify him who writes new values on new tablets; they sacrifice the future to themselves—they sacrifice all man's future."
"The good have always been the beginning of the end."
"And whatever harm those do who slander the world, the harm done by the good is the most harmful harm." [Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, 56, 26.]
