Ask Disastrously Misapplied Nietszche

By Evan Bernstein

July 23, 2014

Dear Disastrously Misapplied Nietzsche,

My boyfriend won’t stop emailing with his ex. He told me that he’d stopped talking to her, but I logged on to his email account and saw several emails to and from her in the past few days. What should I do? If I confront him about it, he’ll know I looked at his emails and he’ll get mad at me for not trusting him. But if I don’t say anything, I’m afraid they might get back together. Disastrously Misapplied Nietzsche, what should I do??

Worried,

Maggie

Dear Maggie,

Life is a jumble of perspectives; there is no one objective truth. Truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The things that you regard as fact, then, are merely consequences of your inscribed value-system and your previous life-experience. What may be fact for you may not be fact for your boyfriend, and thus what may appear as a lie to you may in reality be a truth from a different perspective. Truth is like a prism: it is different from every angle.

Your boyfriend’s actions are merely a symptom of his will to power, a perfectly normal trait of human beings. Right now, his will is manifested outwardly, towards his ex. The trick is to turn this force inward, to strive for a self-mastery and to become the overman.

Your situation sounds like a classic case of Dionysian versus Apollonian thinking. Your boyfriend personifies the Dionysian spirit, exuding the qualities of primal nature and frenzied excitement. You, Maggie, seem to be a manifestation of the Apollonian: the restrained, the rational. Both of these forces are necessary to create art or, in this case, a successful relationship.

So, Maggie, you needn’t worry. You mustn’t impose your morality on your boyfriend. After all, morality is merely a fiction devised to justify the instincts and urges consequential to the will to power.

Always happy to help,

Disastrously Misapplied Nietzsche