A baleful influence

What I know about Nietzsche is entirely second-hand. I have never read him. I have read much about him by scholars, historians, political theorists, and theologians who deplored his ideas and their consequences. Theodore Dalrymple doesn't like him much either. From his review of a recent book:

I grant that Nietzsche was brilliantly clever and was possessed of certain important insights, psychological and sociological, sometimes expressed with wit and pithiness reminiscent of La Rochefoucauld. His main insight was that the loss of religious belief would entail philosophical, social, and psychological problems more severe than most people realized at the time, but as far as I am aware he provided no new philosophical arguments against the existence of God, nor was he the first person to question the metaphysics of morality in a world without transcendent meaning. ....

Between what he sometimes wrote and what Himmler said in his infamous speech about the SS’s glorious work of mass extermination there is, as Wittgenstein might have put it, a family resemblance (though of course Nietzsche cannot be held responsible for all that was done by his most brutish of admirers). His exegetes in turn accuse those who take him literally of being unsophisticated and incapable of understanding his depths; but this reminds me of attempts to turn the seventy-two virgins into seventy-two raisins. ....

A thinker can be important in more than one way. He may be original and illuminating (though originality is not a blessing in itself), or he may be important because he has a great influence on his society and successors. I think that Nietzsche was important in the second sense, but that his influence has been almost wholly baleful. His originality was in his mode and vehemence of expression, not in the underlying thought. He was one of the patron saints of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and I see in this neither intellectual nor moral advance.

He influenced a great variety of people, from the free-market fascist Ayn Rand, for whom superior types had the right and duty to ride roughshod over multitudes in pursuit of their self-proclaimed superior goals, all protestations to care for the welfare of others being but disguised egotism, to figures such as Foucault, for whom statements of truth were likewise instruments in the lust for power, except when he made them. .... (more)

Theodore Dalrymple, "The Grating Roar," The Lamp, August 2, 2024.