When the Socialist, with righteous indignation, cries for "justice," "rights," "equal rights," it only shows that he is oppressed by his inadequate culture, and is unable to understand why he suffers: he also finds pleasure in crying;—if he were more at ease he would take jolly good care not to cry in that way: in that case he would seek his pleasure elsewhere. The same holds good of the Christian: he curses, condemns, and slanders the "world"—and does not even except himself. But that is no reason for taking him seriously. In both cases we are in the presence of invalids who feel better for crying, and who find relief in slander.
374.
Every society has a tendency to reduce its opponents to caricatures,—at least in its own imagination,—as also to starve them. As an example of this sort of caricature we have our "criminal." In the midst of the Roman and aristocratic order of values, the Jew was reduced to a caricature. Among artists, "Mrs. Grundy and the bourgeois" become caricatures; while among pious people it is the heretics, and among aristocrats, the plebeian. Among immoralists it is the moralist. Plato, for instance, in my books becomes a caricature.
375.
All the instincts and forces which morality praises, seem to me to be essentially the same as those which it slanders and rejects: for instance, justice as will to power, will to truth as a means in the service of the will to power.
376.
The turning of man's nature inwards. The process of turning a nature inwards arises when, owing to the establishment of peace and society, powerful instincts are prevented from venting themselves outwardly, and strive to survive harmlessly inside in conjunction with the imagination. The need of hostility, cruelty, revenge, and violence is reverted, "it steps backwards"; in the thirst for knowledge there lurks both the lust of gain and of conquest; in the artist, the powers of dissimulation and falsehood find their scope; the instincts are thus transformed into demons with whom a fight takes place, etc.
377.
Falsity.—Every sovereign instinct makes the others its instruments, its retainers and its sycophants: it never allows itself to be called by its more hateful name: and it brooks no terms of praise in which it cannot indirectly find its share. Around every sovereign instinct all praise and blame in general crystallises into a rigorous form of ceremonial and etiquette. This is one of the causes of falsity.
Every instinct which aspires to dominion, but which finds itself under a yoke, requisitions all the most beautiful names and the most generally accepted values to strengthen it and to support its self-esteem, and this explains why as a rule it dares to come forward under the name of the "master" it is combating and from whom it would be free (for instance, under the domination of Christian values, the desires of the flesh and of power act in this way). This is the other cause of falsity.