Crime and Punishment

Nietzsche studies the psychological phenomenon behind bad conscience and traces it back to the time in history when man lost contact with his natural instincts to hunt and conquer. When this primitive lifestyle suddenly became morally demonized, man turned against himself and thus invented bad conscience. Nietzsche also examines the origins of crime and punishment, linking it to the time when people started to form social relations based upon promise and trust. An example is a master lending out money to his worker: the only guarantee the master has that he will ever see his money again is based upon human trust.

Of course, not all of these promises were kept and eventually the master had to invent a counter-promise: if the worker cannot keep his promise, the master has a right to inflict harm upon him - and so the notion of punishment was created. Nietzsche remains critical to all of these moral systems that he sees as phenomenons originating from pre-moral situations. He raises a series of thought-worthy questions: can the master really be paid back on a broken promise by means of punishment? Can the loss of one individual be equally measured to that of another?

Again we see a pattern emerge: once we establish moral laws that don't coincide with our natural human behaviour, we suddenly feel bad about being ourselves. The slave believes this is his way out of being oppressed by his master, but as Nietzsche reveals, all of humanity suffers from the inversion of the master morality, the hierarchical laws of nature.

The three Judeo-Christian belief systems (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) made enormous victories worldwide, conquering culture after culture. To Nietzsche, this was a disease of monumental proportions. He saw a group of slaves fooling their masters into obeying a God that proclaimed a moral system not in accordance with natural laws. Reality is built upon natural selection, which says that only he who is most fit in accordance with his natural environment will survive. The wave of Christian revolution across Europe could therefore not last forever. Nietzsche knew this and believed that he lived in an age that could come to put a stop to the religion of slave revolt.