The Strength to Be Kind: Power Beyond Domination
Rethinking Nietzsche on Strength, Fear, and True Power.
»Von der Stärke verlangen, dass sie sich nicht als Stärke äussere, dass sie nicht ein Überwältigen-Wollen, ein Niederwerfen-Wollen, ein Herrwerden-Wollen, ein Durst nach Feinden und Widerständen und Triumphen sei, ist gerade so widersinnig als von der Schwäche verlangen, dass sie sich als Stärke äussere.«
“To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a will to overpower, a will to subdue, a will to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), First Essay, Section 13.
I love Uncle Friedrich, I really do. He’s one of Germany’s greatest writers and, in my view, the most important philosopher of the past one-and-a-half centuries. (I will clash swords over this claim.) He communicated a deep understanding of the human soul, unseen, perhaps, since Plato. Without him, there would be no Freud, no Jung, no modern psychology at all. And that’s before we even touch on his impact on art, language, politics, metaphysics, evolution, history, and much, much more.
Now that I’ve lavished him with much glaze and deservèd praise, I have a retort. A jab back at him. A stab. Perhaps it will penetrate and draw blood.
Nietzsche’s passage is bold and unambiguous: Strength must express itself as strength. Power, by its very nature, must seek to dominate. To ask otherwise is to demand the absurd: that weakness should behave as strength.
If we expand a bit, Nietzsche is writing in the context of his larger critique of Christian morality, particularly its elevation of meekness as a virtue and its inversion of traditional power structures. He argues that Christianity has falsely rebranded weakness as strength, leading to a moral system that shackles the strong and lionizes the feeble.
But is he correct?
Did Christianity, as Nietzsche claims, masquerade weakness as strength for 2,000 years? Did the Catholic Church – arguably the most politically powerful institution in European history – exercise humility and meekness as it waged crusades, deposed kings, and maintained inquisitions? Christianity’s rhetoric may have venerated the weak, but its institutions operated on the very principles of power and domination that Nietzsche praises. In this view, those principles and deeds were far from noble – they were corrupt, even evil.
This raises a deeper question: If power and domination define strength, does that definition hold at all levels? Do the same rules apply to individuals as they do to institutions?
Nietzsche’s argument applies not just on the macro level (world religions, institutions, systems of power) but also on the micro level, at the scale of the individual man. If we accept his framework, then the logic should remain consistent: strength in the individual should also be expressed through conquest, struggle, and the bending of the world to one’s will.
But is this truly strength? Must strength only be defined by dominance? Is there no interplay between strength and what is commonly seen as its opposite?
And what if Nietzsche’s premise, this instinctive drive to overpower, actually conceals a deeper drive?
Power, Misunderstood
The true power of a man – an ἀνήρ, an hombre – is exhibited not by his capacity to dominate, but through his ability to extend kindness.
Why? Because domination is, paradoxically, an expression of insecurity. A man who seeks to control others confesses, through his very need for control, that he fears them. He relates to them as potential threats. To overpower, to subjugate, to crush – it is the weak man, not the strong one, who feels compelled to act this way. His strength is a false armor, his aggression a mask for his frailty.
Such a man has been molded by Thomas Hobbes, who, in Leviathan, envisions a world where every man is locked in war with every other. His political theory is not one of strength but of perpetual fear. Power, in the Hobbesian framework, is nothing more than the preservation of one’s own weakness.
And Nietzsche? He builds upon this Hobbesian foundation, taking the fear of powerlessness and elevating it into a virtue, transforming it into a key component of the will to power, the relentless drive to dominate. But in doing so, he exposes the very weakness he claims to reject. This key aspect of his philosophy reveals itself not as a celebration of strength but a confession of its absence.
In the end, his own life provided the ultimate contradiction.
When Nietzsche saw a horse being beaten in the streets of Turin, he did not stand idly by, nodding in approval at the master’s exercise of strength. He did not revel in the whip’s crack as an expression of life-affirming power. He ran to the creature, weeping, throwing his arms around its neck in a desperate attempt to shield it from suffering. He defended the weak against the strong – and then collapsed into madness.
What does that tell us?
Contrast this with the man who acts with kindness.
When a man extends kindness to another, he displays something far more powerful than brute strength. He demonstrates confidence, self-mastery. He signals that he sees no enemy in the other, that he has no need to assert himself through violence or intimidation. In offering kindness, he acknowledges the humanity of the other, recognizing their potential, their dignity, their worth.
This is what true strength looks like.
It is such an incredible tragedy that humanity, for the most part, remains unable to relate to its fellow human beings in this way.
The Collapse of Western Culture and the Absence of Kindness
Mistrust, fear, selfishness, relentless domination drives… these are among the most insidious sicknesses that have brought Western culture to the brink of collapse.
And yet we still refuse to question our hyper-individualism, our self-destructive consumption for the sake of endless treats, the casual surrender of our private data to the broligarchy with hardly a huff, or our out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude toward the world beyond our doorstep. As a result, we are lonelier and meaner, less happy and more atomized, advantage-seeking yet whiny little betas, shallower and stupider, cynical yet easily manipulated. We are unfocused, unable to sustain relationships, clumsy, unsubtle – self-loathing.
And what is missing? The healing principle of kindness.
Not just kindness in words, but in action. Not just the performance of kindness, but the embodiment of it.
An act of kindness communicates something fundamental: You are seen. You are felt. You are included.
It is an invitation. A welcome, an extended open hand. Unconditioned. A hope that you will accept. And while a perfectly acceptable response might be the simple, “thank you, no,” very few will reject it outright with hostility. Why? Because kindness is universally intuitive, universally intelligible. Regardless of language, culture, or creed. Kindness is understood for what it is – not as an act of self-interest, but an act which recognizes our humanity.
And that is where its power lies.
Kindness is the force that humanizes power. Without it, strength remains rooted in fear, expressed as mere brutality. But armed with kindness, power becomes something far greater: the ability to uplift the world. To guide it toward peace, toward happiness.
That is the highest expression of strength.
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So the will to power operates (regardless of the underlying motivation of fear/insecurity, which I don’t dispute though would argue is a simplification of the totality of motivating factors; not strictly a problem here but just an observation) on the simple assumption that other people exist, at worst, as competition for dominance and at best as passive beings to be dominated.
The will to kindness exists in a more paradoxical state. To operate with full kindness requires an assumption that every other human (/animal/conscious entity, depending on one’s worldview) is capable of reciprocal kindness, or at a minimum of acknowledging and responding more positively to kindness than to other paradigms of interaction. However, to do so successfully requires knowledge of humans’ power to do evil and to exploit those who treat the world with kindness. One can thus never be fully kind without being naive and open to exploitation, and so it’s difficult for a kindness to succeed as a means of governance because it must allow for some assumption of bad faith - and how one bypasses/overrides/triumphs with kindness over bad faith is impossible to design as a one-size-fits-all solution.
Which is widely known, in terms of truisms like “the price of freedom is constant vigilance”, but much harder to apply practically since each individual kind actor’s approach for identifying and neutralising bad faith will vary. One reasonably logical endpoint of this is the idea of the benevolent dictator, where the means of gaining and maintaining power may be indistinguishable from that of someone pursing pure dominance for its own sake, and whose efficacy is judged by the society which emerges from such dictatorship rather than by its cause or origin, which feels like a contradiction that Freddy Neetch himself might have appreciated.