Jordan Peterson Doesn't Understand Nietzsche.

So the structure of this episode is going to be a bit different than usual because what we're doing here today is a responso or a pmic uh however you want to look at it in so many words this is essential salts Contra Jordan Peterson on how to interpret n or more specifically how to interpret n's project of what Peterson calls values creation so to begin with I'm going to read a transcript of statements that Peterson has made in his 2016 personality lecture this is part nine and it's a bridged I've only included the relevant statements

to what we're talking about and I've removed all the filler words and kind of cleaned up the transcript a little bit after this we'll have a sense of Jordan's claims about n and for the rest of the episode after that I'm going to respond but I'm going to devote a lot more of this episode than usual to Simply reading n's own Words it's going to be very Source heavy episode rather than interpreting and giving commentary which I will do a little bit more so at the end but I think the necessary commentary is minimal and

there is a wealth of material in n's notes especially that in my opinion just refutes Jordan Peterson's interpretation on the face of it so without further Ado here is Jordan's interpretation from that lecture which will be linked in the Description quotes n talked about the development of the being he called the Overman which is often translated as Superman and his idea was that people would have to take onto themselves the burden of creating new systems of meaning and new moralities that were suited to them that they would have to create new values the nian idea

is that it's possible for human beings to create their own values now there's a problem with that and there's a variety of Problems with that and one is that it doesn't exactly seem true if you come up with your sister system of values and I come up with mine there's no reason to assume that they're going to be sufficiently integratable so that we don't have to fight each other to the death that's a big problem you'd have every single person with their own system of beliefs that's a structured kind of philosophical Anarchy well okay maybe

that's good if you happen to live Alone on an island but if you're stuck with all these other people then that becomes a very difficult thing to manage there's another problem with the idea that people should create their own values and that is that it's not so simple the problem seems to be that you don't obey yourself very well you can say here's my code I'm going to live by it you say well I'm going to study very hard and do well at my classes but you procrastinate and you have a paper You're supposed to

read and you know you're supposed to read it and you need to read it for reasons that are important to you but there's no damn way you can get yourself to sit down and read it your attention wanders and you go to do three or four stupid things and you feel terrible about it like you feel like you're betray traying yourself and maybe this is a continual pattern in your life but one of the things you find out is that you don't get to create your Own damn values because for some reason you're not in

charge of yourself and of course that's where the psychoanalytic ideas start to come from there's many subu inside of you and they don't all want the same thing the idea that you can generate your own meaning is an insufficiently developed idea because there's a lot of meaning making generators residing within you and not only do they not all point in the same direction which is a huge problem but They don't even necessarily lay themselves out in some integrated fashion across time and they don't necessarily operate together in a way that's going to enable you to

find your place with other people and in society end quote so again I I cut out a lot but those are all Jordan's words and that is Jordan Peterson's reading of nche that many of you are probably familiar with because he's made reiterations or Elaborations on these statements many times over the years years and there are many problems with Jordan's reading and I've broken it up into four different critiques I'm going to make for the purposes of this episode first Jordan and N are talking about two different things when they talk about values secondly Jordan's

understanding of what creating values means differs from what n says about what creating values means third all of the apparent problems that Jordan raises in this lecture cease to be problems once you have a coherent reading of n's philosophy and finally this is more of a minor Point Jordan's understanding of the role of the Overman seems to be mistaken as well so uh first of all the first issue Jordan Peterson and N are talking about two fundamentally different things when they talk about values Jordan's conception of values seems to be the colloquial understanding of values

which might be What is invoked when we talk about uh moral values or even say family values values used in that sense of the word so for Jordan values are a consciously determined set of principles it's an ethical standard that you adopt voluntarily as an act of the will and to which you attempt to conform your behavior so in so many words values for Jordan would seem to be almost synonymous with morals and his definition seems to include the Philosophical baggage that is important to his project mainly uh the infusion of terms such as meaning

now n's conception of values is quite different first of all n does not conceive of moral values as the only kind of values C wil to Power number 106 quote hitherto moral values have been the highest values does anybody doubt this if we bring down the values from their pedestal we thereby alter all values the principle of their order of rank which has prevailed Hitherto is thus overthrown end quote so obviously from this passage moral values have been placed at the top of the order of rank of values which and N suggest that we could

overthrow that order and presumably place other values at top the hierarchy of value uh other values besides moral values and that would mean that values are not synonymous with morals for n in fact values are more fundamental than morality morality is uh we might say the abstraction the Reification the universalization of values so in other words a value for n could become consciously expressed as moral but it could also become consciously expressed any number of other ways perhaps we could say aesthetic cultural social there could potentially be many different ways of expressing values which none

of them are fundamental they're all signifiers and what is really being signified is a valuation that's the long Form of the word value for n that's what's meant by the word value in n philosophy evaluation is what it's an estimation of worth evaluation is the Judgment of a given underlying Instinct a drive that's what's making the judgment about the Worth or the value of something and these valuations are not rationally derived they are not created by the Consciousness they are laundered through the Consciousness but they're not created by it and we could see Beyond Good

and Evil Book one section 3 quote behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement there are valuations or to speak more plainly physiological demands for the maintenance of a definite mode of life end quote so two key Concepts here valuations are physiological and valuations are demands and demands for what well the maintenance or the preservation of a certain modus vindi a way of living in Other words like all organisms human beings are driven by instinct to seek certain conditions to seek those conditions which Foster their survival or their uh flourishing and upon finding what

those conditions are we come to Value those conditions we make a positive valuation of them so you might see Will To Power number 685 quote the standpoint of value is the same as that of the conditions of preservation and enhancement in regard to complex Creatures of relative stability appearing in the course of evolution end quote so what are the factors that would shape how an organism or a group of organisms values how it does its valuing nche would say that these factors are physical and physiological the valuations of an organism spring from its own Necessities

so to speak the demands that are placed upon it by life and by its environment we might say by What the organism is and what is around it so in eomo why I am so clever uh this is part 10 quot quote these trivial matters diet locality climate and one's mode of recreation the whole kist of self-love are inconceivably more important than all that which has hitherto been held in high esteem it is precisely in this quarter that we must begin to learn aresh end quote furthermore according to n groups tend to Define their valuations

in contrast To those of their enemies this is part of n's assertion that every form of life is we might say arbitrary unjust aimed at becoming different from other forms of life this is from zarathustra's thousand And1 goals quote much that seemed good to one people was regarded with scorn and contempt by another thus I found I found much that was called evil in one place was in another decked with purple honors one neighbor never understood another his soul always Marveled at his neighbor's Madness and wickedness a tablet of the good hangs over over every

people behold it is the tablet of their overcoming behold it is the voice of their Will To Power truly my brother if you only knew a people's need and land and sky and neighbor you could surely Divine the law of its overcoming and why it climbs up that ladder to its hope truly men have given to themselves all their good and evil truly they did not take it they did not Find it it did not come to them as a voice from Heaven end quote so there's a lot in that passage but the main points

values did not spring into being right it's not something that mankind passively discovered they do not uh values don't refer to Eternal truths and like other natural phenomena values had to develop over a long course of time it's also clear from this passage that values can neither be absolute or Universal I mean such a prospect would Fly in the face of nich's entire um project of perspectivism instead values are relative reflective of the nature and the necessity of those who hold them and contingent dependent on changing and external factors such as conditions necessary for the

uh flourishing or enhancement or survivability of human life and obviously there can be many possible sets of conditions that human beings could thrive in and thus come to value and that's precisely why they Contrast themselves with their neighbors and rivals in terms of what they value because they are testing one another for whose way of life is more so more survivable more enhancing of the type human being right so we have values which are relative yes contingent yes but physical and in fact physiological demands and following from this man as a conscious animal right man

is the rational animal the thinking animal would then make conscious these Valuations and establish these valuations as a law over the community and it is at this point that we have the creation of morality this is a Will To Power number 514 quote a moral that is to say a method of living which long experience and experiment have tested and proved efficient at last enters Consciousness as a law as dominant and then the whole group of related values and conditions become part of it it becomes venerable unassailable holy true A necessary part of its evolution

is that its origin should be forgotten that is a sign that it has become Master end quote so there's a great flaw involved in this operation of making values into morals and that is that Consciousness for n is primarily a tool of communication between human beings and conscious thought is advantageous precisely because it allows for groups of humans to communicate and coordinate but because of that it inclines toward The advantage of the collective rather than towards the advantage of the individual and it creates and expresses the concepts which are useful on the collective level and

this is in Beyond Good and Evil uh book five number 199 quote in as much as in all ages as long as mankind has existed there have also been human herds family alliances communities tribes peoples States churches and always a great number who obey in proportion to the small number Who command and view therefore of the fact that obedience has been most practiced and fostered among mankind hither to one may reasonably suppose that that generally speaking the need thereof is now innate in everyone as a kind of formal conscience which gives the command Thou shalt

unconditionally do something unconditionally refrain from something in short Thou shalt this need tries to satisfy itself and to fill its form with a Content according to its Strength impatience and eagerness it at once seizes as an omnivorous appetite with little selection and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by all sorts of Commanders parents teachers laws class prejudices or public opinion end quote so this understanding of how moral values are created will be very important as we move forward but the key point to understand is that n sees mankind is developing an instinct for obedience

as a consequence of living Within the social order the conscious world is a world imposed upon by Collective judgments which is to say the valuations made on a collective rather than individual level and he goes on to say In this passage that even those who act as leaders of the society generally have to justify themselves by presenting themselves as mere instruments of the public will or of the common good but we should notice here at no point in nich's conception of Values does he ever present values as voluntarily adopted on the individual level as a

function of reason right because on the physiological level even a strictly individual and unique value you might say would still be a demand and not a voluntary exercise of the will right in the way that any think about your drives and impulses that's where values really come from right and it would be a demand in the way that hunger is a demand and uh so it's not a moral Imperative in that sense and to the extent that values do become moralized which is the process that we've been sketching out here this is not as a

function of you know voluntarily adopting it of you know by an individual will as a part of a rational choice because what's really happening is the physical and physiological conditions that over uh that obtain over the entire Community which are experienced as you know external forces right that's what Fosters the strength of a given value and that's what the community then transmutes into a moral value so to put this in in straightforward language it's not a rational Choice whether the bedan tribesmen living a nomadic existence in the heart environment of the desert you know in

vicious competition with other tribes for their very survival it it's not a rational Choice whether they are going to Value something like bravery or whether they're going to Value something Like self-sacrifice those traits are in some sense unquestionably valuable to the bin Collective we might say and the process by which one who does not live up to this value has his behavior adjusted to that value it's not on the level of rational argument right right or moral imperative I mean it might become expressed as a moral imperative later on but the conditions of their very

existence select against it and so to to Summarize the creation and the development of values is for n a natural process and a physiological process and one which can be more helpfully understood as a tension of competing forces rather than a dialogue between competing moral philosophies uh that's just not what it is in the same way that the Greek and the Persians didn't have a dialogue about which one of their tablets of values was the appropriate one to hold the norm historically is to Have a violent competition to determine these things but we'll get to

that in a little bit uh for right now though all of this is why Jordan doesn't understand the fact that he doesn't understand what a value is in nich's philosophy is why he's making a category error when he talks about quote unquote creating values because he doesn't understand what that means to n this is the second major problem with his interpretation second major critique I'll make here the Way Jordan talks about this conversation about creating values a major problem with it is that it only seems to arise in response to the death of God and

I've already covered Jordan Peterson's Miss understanding about the death of God and other videos I'll include a link in the description if you'd like to hear more about this topic the important thing for our purposes here is that Jordan tends to bring up nich's challenge to create our own values as as if it's something That n believed might happen in the future right it it could happen in response to the death of God and this is very clear when we see the connection to the Overman and his interpretation in Jordan's reading it's the Overman who

will create values at some point in the future and this is a novel task like a new task for mankind that was not necessary before the death of God uh in other words as Jordan interprets it and largely correctly the collapse of the Central orienting value structure of the West right but this is another misreading because n thinks that mankind has created its own values many times in the past as he says in zarathustra's three Metamorphoses of the spirit and uh this passage is you know the famous allegory of the camel The Lion and the

child so n is writing with metaphors here but so we'll explain some of the background metaphors before I read uh this section of the passage so he names The first phase of psychological development that he's talking about in which one attempts to take on the many past ideas of mankind and carry them so to speak nche uses the metaphor of the camel and then He suggests that in order to proceed in one's development you have to turn against these past Traditions utter a no even against sacred duties and obligations he names that phase by the

metaphor of the lion but sort of paired with that metaphor of the lion Another metaphor he uses to kind of uh oppose against the lion is the the dragon a great Beast with shimmering golden scales Each of which is inscribed with the words Thou shalt the dragon's representative of those Collective traditionally pass down moral values which the lion has to attack in order to move forward son Nicha writes in that passage quote what is the Great Dragon which the spirit no longer wants to call Lord and God the Great Dragon is called Thou shalt but

the spirit of the lion says I will Thou shalt lies in its path sparkling with gold a scale covered beast and on every scale Glitters golden Thou shalt values of a thousand years glitter on the scales and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons all the values of things glitter on me all values have already been created and all created values are in me truly there shall be no more I will thus speaks the dragon to create new values even the Lion is incapable of that but to create freedom for itself and a sacred no

even to duty the lion is needed for that my brother to seize the right to new values that is the most terrible proceeding for a weightbearing and reverential spirit truly to this Spirit it is a theft and a work for an animal of prey once it loved Thou shalt as its holiest thing now it has to find illusion and Caprice even in the holiest that it may steal freedom From its love the lion is needed for this theft end quote so every Thou shalt was once and I will in other words every moral dictate presented

as an eternal and universal law binding on all was once simply the statement of a value and an arbitrary and a physiological demand for a certain way of life in other words it was the expression of a drive or an Impulse or we might say a will and N believes furthermore that these thou shouts were not fashioned democratically But by the activity of those he calls lawgivers but also he uses he uses different names like commanders legis lators self legislators it all refers to the same thing um in fact n believes this activity of lawg

giving is the real reason for being of the philosopher that this legislative activity represents the highest aspiration of the philosophical mind the the type of philosophical mind that doesn't just merely survey the ideas of their time and place but Reorders and reorients them in other words enacts a reevaluation and a revaluation is really what n is describing when we talk about creating values as Jordan always puts it there's a lengthy passage in Will To Power he gives two examples for such figures of legislators Plato and Muhammad this is wilta power number 972 quote the lawgivers

of the future after having tried for a long time in vain to attach a particular meaning to The word philosopher for I found many antagonistic traits I recognized that we can distinguish between two kinds of philosophers one those who desire to establish any large system of values logical or moral two those who are the lawgivers of such valuations the former try to seize upon the world of the present or the past by embodying or abbreviating the multifarious phenomena by means of signs their object is to make it possible for us to survey to Reflect upon

to comprehend and to utilize everything that has happened hither to they serve the purpose of Man by using all past things to the benefit of his future the second class however are commanders they say thus shall it be they alone determine the Wither and the wherefore and that which will be useful and beneficial to man they have command over the previous work of scientific men and all knowledge is to them only a means to their Creations this second Kind of philosopher seldom appears how often have they not intentionally blindfolded their eyes in order to shut

out the sight of the small strip of ground which separates them from the abyss and from utter destruction Plato for instance when he persuaded himself that the good as he wanted it was not Plato's good but the good in itself the Eternal treasure which a certain man of the name Plato had chanced to find on his way this same will to blindness Prevails in a much coarser form in the case of the founders of religion there Thou shalt must on no account sound to their ears like I will they only dare to pursue their task

as if under the command of God their legislation of values can only be a burden they can bear if they regard it as Revelation in this way their conscience is not crushed by the responsibility as soon as those two comforting expedients that of Plato and that of Muhammad have been Overthrown and no thinker can any longer relieve his conscience with the hypothesis God or Eternal values the claim of the lawgiver to determine new values Rises to an awfulness which has not yet been experienced end quote so in other words the legislator or the lawgiver whether

he's a founder of a great philosophy or a world religion he proceeds by misleading others and indeed misleading even himself as to the nature of values rather than presenting his Value as an I will he presents it as a Thou shalt rather than presenting the good as Plato's good Plato presents it as the good in itself uh Muhammad doesn't present this as my Revelation it's God's revelation so the legislators of value are AR itic in this way they distort reality they turn these physiological demands for the preservation of a certain way of life into a

powerful and unquestionable abstraction and so in other words Morality is an artistic product and the Artistry in creating or legislating moral values is in the fact that the value is being transmuted from that physical demand into an idea and here I mean the double meaning with the plat iic sense of the word idea is apropo here and so the sense in which moral values are quote unquote created is actually in the sense that morality itself is a sort of artistic illusion or artistic creation of forgetting the Origin of where the value came from but it's

not a creation X nio as Jordan often presents it and he presents it this way in order to call it impossible right so there's an agenda there but it's a creation using the existing physiological value ation as the raw material so it's creation X Materia right which is clearly not impossible and the legislators of value proceed by making a reassessment of which valuations are to be upheld as a moral Law and which are to be minimized or excised from the collective moral Consciousness so and this is the way n talks about art in many places

in his work that the artist sort of exaggerates certain things uh minimizes others the way uh you know the subject of portrait a painting of someone's portrait emphasizes puts something puts someone in the foreground and then everything else Fades into the background right so it's artistic in that way but it's not As if n believed that this was you know the creation of values would be a type of creation that happens out of whole cloth which would be an inhuman understanding of values creation and so even the turn a phrase you know create our own

values that Jordan uses all the time in my opinion it's something of a misnomer now in the interest of intellectual honesty n does occasionally use this language we can find a passage in which he does uh put it this way in Willl to power 979 quote fundamental concept the new values must first be created this remains our duty the philosopher must be our lawgiver new species end quote but we should first notice that Nisha does not say we ought to create our values as Jordan often puts it it's you know and he doesn't say it's

in the form of a structured philosophical Anarchy to be honest with you I'm not even sure where he's getting that nich's conception of how value's Creation happens is decidedly monarchical and it's not anarchic this is Will To Power 999 quote the order of rank he who determines values and leads the will of millenniums and does this by Leading the highest Natures he is the highest man end quote but let us suppose for the sake of argument that anarchic values creation could happen I think it is justifiable to say that n would have claimed that that

state of Anarchy will Eventually yield up an order of rank according to the competition between forces that are in tension with one another and in fact n sees no permanence no enduring truths of what has been valued across the history of human life he sees value constantly fluctuating according to that uh According to which centers of power have coalesced and are able to as n puts it subjugate others into their value system this is Wil to power 7:15 quote there are no such Things as lasting and ultimate entities no atoms no monads here also permanence

was first introduced by ourselves from practical utilitarian and other motives the forms that rule the sphere of the subjugated is continually extended or it decreases or increases according to the conditions nourishment being either favorable or unfavorable value is essentially the standpoint for the increase or decrease of these dominating centers pluralities In any case for Unity cannot be observed anywhere in the nature of development end quote uh very important points there uh for understanding nitian postmodernism so to speak but in any case consider the language used nche says that the philosopher quote unquote determines values and

further that it is according to nourishment the favorable or unfavorable conditions that settle which form of life shall rule so in other words we have language that does Not point to whole cloth values creation we get the sense instead that this is a matter of how values shall be determined or we might say ordered how the order of rank of values is to be determined and we can even cross reference nich's invocation of creating values in these unpublished notes with what he explicitly says that phrase means in his published work and we can find this

in that same Passage I referenced earlier zarus thousand one uh goals quote only Man assigned values to things in order to maintain himself he created the meaning of things a human meaning therefore calls he himself man that is the evaluator evaluation is creation hear this you creators valuation itself is of all valued things the most valuable treasure through valuation only is their value and without valuation the nut of existence would be Hollow hear this you creators change of values that is a change of creators whoever must be A Creator always destroys end quote so n's

understanding follows from that famous protagorean dictum man is the measure of all things this is what is meant when n calls man the evaluator the power of human consciousness is found in the fact that we're able to make these sophisticated evaluations and presumably less complex life forms can't reevaluate their values in this way they have to Simply continue pursuing whatever their instincts have come to find valuable Over long epochs right so perhaps their physiology will do the revaluating or perhaps an extinction level event does the revaluating but mankind has the capacity to consciously rank order

its values and that's the the real meaning of the creation of values or to speak more precisely the revaluation of values it means to place a value on the values themselves and determine which of them are the healthiest or most beneficial which have the most utility and for what Purpose but the the important point is that n tells us straightforwardly evaluation is creation the creator of values is he who changes the existing evaluations who redetermined them this is both a creative and destructive act as any reordering would be C Will To Power 1007 quote transv

value values what does this mean it implies that all spontaneous motives all new future and stronger motives are still extent but that they now appear under false names And false valuations and have not yet become conscious of themselves we ought to have the courage to become conscious and to affirm all that which has been attained to get rid of the humdrum character of old valuations which makes us Unworthy of the best and strongest things that we have achieved end quote thus the Act of Creation is not creating the values themselves the values are physiological as

we've already gone over they're axiomatic in some sense and they Can't be created by the conscious mind the Act of Creation is in changing the way they are rank ordered the creation is a new tablet of values a new rank ordering of values daring to re-evaluate those laws that were once held as holy or sacred I I mean this is why it's also an act of Destruction to take those and place them on a lesser position in the order of rank or daring to elevate that which has perhaps been denigrated to a higher position so

it would be an Oversimplification to summarize n's position by claiming that the legislator creates the values themselves what he does is author a new tablet of values he authors a new valuation of values and once again we have to recognize this as Downstream from the instinctual and physical Necessities upon which the values are based what they're rooted in and we have to recognize this as a process not that might possibly happen in the future but has happened many Times such as in the case of Plato or Muhammad and it's not as if Socrates and Plato

created uh you know they create the new value of Truth seeking through the dialectic but they don't create that out of nothing you know as if human beings had never heard of such a thing as as truth seeking before Socrates came along right rather Socrates and Plato Elevate the worth the value of Truth seeking through the dialectic above other things that were previously valued More highly such as the pride of the Athenians you know the mindset in which the powerful person felt that having to give reasons for their beliefs was a sign of weakness right

platonic philosophy conversely sees this ability to answer for your beliefs as a strength that's the nature of the re-evaluation that Plato makes or one aspect of it and it would seem indisputable that he indeed did transform the moral universe of the Greeks and the whole Western World as a consequence I mean another figure that achieved such a revaluation was Jesus in whose wake European cultures in n's reading begin to turn away from worldly value they begin to turn away from biological or physical quality and they seek for otherworldly value they seek for you know what

what the the thing of value is that which is a at the world of spirit and it would seem hard uh to believe that Jordan would deny that Jesus accomplished such A revaluation right if Jesus indeed accomplished such a revaluation in the past however why would such a thing be impossible in the future unless Jordan really is just a dogmatic Christian at bottom who believes Jesus was God and Jesus can do a revaluation because he has a special power to do it um you know that's neither here nor there if he believes that if we

look at what n said on the other hand n obviously doesn't think Jesus was a supernatural entity But he does suggest that it is through religion that these revaluations have been achieved and again this is throughout all of human history so this is Wil to power 957 quote legislative moralities are the principal means by which one can form mankind according to the fancy of a creative and profound will provided of course that such an artistic will will of the first order gets power into his own hands and can make its creative will prevail over long

Periods in the form of legislation religions and morals end quote and N goes on to say in this same passage that his goal is aimed at returning the right to legislate values to the strong and well- turned out type of individual because the types of individuals who have been legislating up to this point have been the holy men that's who we've entrusted the task to uh there's another passage in Will To Power I'm not going to quote from here where he talks about The Manu law book the cast system of India where he says uh

you know you might expect n to endorse such a thing um which I believe he does in one aspect of his published works but in his uh um Will To Power He suggests by placing the bromine the Priestly class as the effectively the people who get to set the the values right who get to be the moral Arbiters of the community uh this is this just shows that India is Fallen victim to the same thing that every Other Society you know in the west has fallen victim to so uh returning to wil of power 957

quote the aim should be to prepare a transvaluation of values for a particularly strong kind of man most highly gifted in intellect and will and to this end slowly and cautiously to liberate in him a whole host of slandered instincts hitherto held in check whoever meditates about this problem belongs to us the free Spirits end quote so notice what n says there Where we can already see the revaluation occurring we need to liberate in this new strong kind of person a host of slandered instincts right so that which was previously denigrated is going to be

we're going to adjust the tablet of values and remember instincts that's the root EV valuations right and this is because of the problem that n sees with our current tablet of values the priests the Aesthetics the a type that n would say is Dri by resentment and defined by Worldly weakness and vindictiveness that's who's been allowed to take control of the legislation of values so see for example eom why I am so clever this is uh part 10 Again quote all those things which mankind has valued with such earnestness here to for are not even

real they are mere creations of fancy or more strictly speaking lies born of the evil instincts of diseased and in the deepest sense noxious Natures all the concepts God Soul virtue sin Beyond truth eternal life but the greatness of human nature its Divinity was sought for in them all questions of politics of social order of Education have been falsified root and Branch o to the fact that the most noxious men have been taken for Great Men and that people were taught to despise the small things or rather the fundamental things of life end qu also

see wil to power 685 my general view of the world of values shows that in the highest values Which now sway the destiny of man the happy cases among men the select specimens do not Prevail but rather the decadent specimens perhaps there is nothing more interesting in the world than this unpleasant spectacle end quote so again to summarize this second critique to create values is to reevaluate them what is authored a new is a new evaluation of the rank order of what is valued a new determination of what that order shall be and N would

say This is not something that only might potentially happen in the future it has happened in the past and in fact his entire project ceases to be comprehensible if we fail to understand that a revaluation of values is precisely what Christianity was now let's move on to directly refute Jordan's so-call problems with n's project Jordan's problems with the uh values creation project of n they all fail his main three problems are uh the Way he raises them in this particular lecture that we quoted from at the beginning are as follows first if multiple people all

create their own values then we may quote fight each other to the death end quote so in other words Jordan is focused on the utility of the collective Thou shalt in maintaining the social order and he believes that allowing individuals to create their own values will lead to a breakdown of the social order secondly People in general cannot obey themselves if we create a value and attempt to impose it we have no guarantee that we will have the strength to actually live out that value and then uh finally he says we consist of multiple competing

drives many of which may have their own values which may be contradictory so it's essentially the first problem but uh taken from the macro scale down to the micro scale we should note that in light Of the two misunder understandings that we've already sort of exposed here some of the language that Jordan uses already sort of undermines his attempt to problematize n but if we look at that first objection as I've kind of broken it down within this critique here n would argue that people fighting each other to the death over their values is simply

a fact of life this dog eat dog reality is what creates the Necessities that bind a people together under that Same tablet of values whatever it might be if two neighboring peoples find themselves divided with fundamentally different interests or opposing ways of life they have to fight it out to determine which of the two valuations of value is stronger uh does that bode well for the peace and Harmony of society no but that's not n's concern and he doesn't promise that that will arise from his philosophy uh Nia never says that in fact what he

says is that it's The collectives desire for Safety and Security that does uh encourage them not to take on the dangerous task of reevaluating values right that's something that the collective tends to fear but that that will not in the end preserve them it will be their undoing you know supposing that if we take n at his word that the values that have govern mankind up to this point are in fact nihilistic and harmful then we will have to reevaluate them it's not really A choice so uh this is Willl to power 957 quote at

present and probably for some time to come one will seek such lossy creative men such really great men as I understand them in vain they will be lacking until after many disappointments we are forced to begin to understand why it is that they are lacking and that nothing bars with greater hostility their rise in development at present and for some time to come than that which is now called The Morality In Europe just as if there were no other kind of morality and no other kind than the one we already characterized as herd morality it

is this morality which is now striving with all its power to attain to that Green Meadow happiness on Earth which consists in security absence of danger ease facilities for livelihood and last but not least if all goes well even hopes to dispense with all kinds of shepherds and Bell weathers end quote so I picked that Passage to read because I wanted to just point out how Jordan's entire orientation in his reading of n the problem that he raises is just it's completely uh within what n would say the herd morality that wishes to present itself

as the morality as if there's no other kind of morality uh and that anything that might disrupt security absence of danger ease all of these things um just the order and stability of society I know Jordan tells people to Go out and face their fears and face danger or whatever but in terms of the the collective level he thinks we should cleave to the traditional values and N says yes that's what the traditionalist herd moralist will always tell you to do and furthermore uh n doesn't imagine each individual becoming their own lawgiver or legislator as

we've already outlined I mean I'll just throw another quote at you Beyond Good and Evil Book Two Section 29 quote it is the business of the very few to be independent it is a privilege of the strong end quote so this you know first problem that he kind of brings up that we're all going to fight each other to the death we need the collective Thou shalt to maintain the social order well it's misreading because nich is not advocating for an anarchic process where everyone just determines their own values and secondly nich's entire problem with

our current Tablet of values is that it's degenerative so it it has to be shaken up we can't just hold on to it and the the very problem are those like Jordan Peterson who are going to tell us no you can't do that and another thing to understand n is not a Universalist this is something that Jordan's never really grasped n does not write to the entirety of mankind he doesn't write to the great masses of people he doesn't tell everyone to go out and create completely Novel moral codes that's a misreading n imagines that

the vast majority of people as what did he say earlier they're accustomed by instinct to obey so what will happen will be more like a competition between Geniuses or or even between on the scale of Nations right so extremely rare and extraordinary people like Plato or Jesus or Muhammad will Author new tablets of values they're going to win over great numbers of people to new ways of living not only Are the majority incapable of becoming legislators most will not even want to and though n didn't imagine a chaotic Anarchy of like every atomized individual becoming

a legislator even if that happened he would argue that the competition between them would be productive it would eventually lead to a new rank ordering it would be a test right that would eventually produce a new tablet of values that would be widely accepted uh as it became Determined unmistakably which values are the strongest so in other words N welcomes the testing of values but Jordan presents this as if it's a problem but why is it a problem and he doesn't really say right uh it's just assumed to be a problem because the stability of

the existing social order is assumed to be good a priority and I would also question I mean in what world does Jordan imagine that people will simply rationally debate their mutually Exclusive moral values and and not battle to the death I mean did the Soviets and the Nazis settle the batt Battle of Stalingrad by appealing to Universal moral Norms or Traditional Values or did they fight it out by violence right we we know we all know the answer to this Jordan knows the answer to this um I brought up earlier the the Greeks and the

Persians but Jordan wants to imagine there's like a way out of this situation by means of The dialectic which to that extent his thinking is platonist so let's look at it another one of his objections the second objection that people are not masters of themselves uh this is even funnier to me given Jordan's somewhat dogmatic position on Free Will Jordan believes that human beings do have free will and that the denial of Free Will is like a a denial of human experience and agency but if that is the case then how could It be that

we can't obey ourselves right isn't that a denial of free will the immovability of the will is actually an ancient problem in religion it's not limited to people who create their own values so many people accept the traditional values of Christianity Chastity for example or at least abstinence from sex until marriage whatever it might be Fidelity within marriage and then they still end up engaging in adultery pronography or Masturbation or premarital sex so Jordan would of course you know I think he would have some explanation that involves sin the propensity for human beings to miss

the mark like our inherent imperfections as it were but what is that if not precisely the absence of Free Will right and isn't the inability to obey yourself isn't that an in in inability in that case to make one's will conform to the traditional and widely accepted Tablet of values if that can happen under the traditional value systems why is this a special objection to nich's self- legislated Value systems if that makes sense right he says your will can't conform to your own legislation of morality but also your will can't conform to the collective legislation

of morality your will can't conform to your I will but it also can't conform to the thou shalts right right so what's the special problem that he sees with the Self- legislation of values um this isn't a point I'm really drawing on n's work it's just a logical inconsistency in what he's saying that that the problematizing evaporates if we consider it this way now ultimately nche would argue that the people will obey these new valuations because the valuations become morals which have force behind them so you know what begins as valuation is that physiological demand

becomes a moral code which becomes a law Which becomes enforced it could be enforced by religious law right he discusses that in the case of Muhammad Muhammad's revaluation of values ends with the imposition of the social order of sharia upon the Arab world and Beyond right it could be enforced through culture sort of through soft power it could be enforced through like raw political force and state violence and so whatever the case may be n would argue the way that these moral codes Succeed in enforcing or imposing themselves has little or nothing to do with

voluntary rational Ascent on the individual basis um it's whatever reevaluation succeeds is going to be according to whatever new code of morals is best suited to the needs of the situation and once that is discovered so to speak it will be enforced by the collective C Will To Power 1008 quote any Doctrine would be Superfluous for which Everything is not already prepared in the way of accumulated forces and explosive material a trans valuation of values can only be accomplished when there is a tension of new needs and a new set of needy people who feel

all old values as painful although they are not conscious of what is wrong end quote so in other words for the same reason that all values in the past attained power over human minds and human cultures the new values will attain their own power According to necessities and as he says here According to which forces have accumulated right and why will there be a tremendous necessity because the old values are not working anymore and people will follow follow those values that prove themselves life promoting life preserving and so on however long and painful this process

may be to find our way there and N I think is actually optimistic about this that's the whole basis for his faith in the Overman which We will get to in a little bit but the fact that the human the individual human will is ever Wayward right ever misses the mark That's not really a strike against n's understanding his argument of how values are formed because Paul himself says in the Book of Romans quote for to will is present with me but how to do good I find not for the good that I would do

I do not but the evil that I will not that I do end quote so here's Paul the great lawgiver of the Christian Faith who codifies the new set of values and gives meaning to the story of Jesus he attaches a morality to the story of Jesus in the manner that say Plato did with Socrates and here is Paul admitting he can't follow his own will and yet he still manages to affect a revaluation of values in spite of that so Paul by his own admission didn't need to be a master of himself in order

to revaluate all values which completely undermines Jordan's objection and I think what Jordan is really attempting to put forward is this conception of like just weakness and inadequacy of the individual again under the assumption that each ordinary individual will have to create a new tablet of values for themselves from scratch entirely on their own again that's I mean if I thought he was being cynical about this I would say it's a straw man but I think he just genuinely doesn't understand n but Psychologically his approach reveals something about how Jordan Peterson really thinks you know

what he really thinks about theed power of the individual that he talks about so much he thinks individuals are weak he thinks they're prone to sin that is what I really think is at the bottom of this objection to nche now finally the the third problem as I've identified it is that you know we have a number of competing drives or subu within you as Jordan puts it that want different things and one might attempt to follow one set of values and a different impulse could attempt to follow another contradictory set of values but as

Jordan himself goes on to point out later in the lecture n himself was aware of this in fact n is one of the first thinkers in the west to promote this subversive view of the self denying the supremacy of the ego Consciousness and arguing that the physiology is where the Activity is within the individual the greater activity as nche says is unconscious the self is a multiplicity and a Unity I'm not going to go as deeply into this uh aspect of n's thought here because we've done a number of episodes on this topic as well

I'll also put some links in the descript description for this but it's just another funny objection given that it's it's a quote unquote objection to n's philosophy that's actually found in Nich's philosophy so it's not really a problem it's another aspect of n's thought that Jordan I would argue just misreads so see Will To Power 492 quote the body and Physiology are the starting point why we obtain a correct image of the nature of our subject entity that is to say as a number of regions at the head of a community not as souls or

as life forces as also of the dependence of each of these regions upon their subjects and upon the conditions of a Hierarchy and of the division of labor as the means ensuring the existence of the part and the whole we also obtain a correct image of the way in which the living entities continually come into being and expire and we see how eternity cannot belong to the subject we realize that the struggle finds expression in obeying as well is in commanding and that a fluctuating definition of the limits of power is a factor of life

end quote so a number of Regents to use Jordan's language subus are what comprise the individual's uh you know subjectivity really their body is what nche would say uh although he's careful not to essentialize them right perhaps Jordan's subu is sort of essentialized because they're not souls or life forces but we'll leave that to one side for now that there's a a flu U ating power dynamic in which the drives enter into relations of command and obedience with one another can put it like that and so We might say that just as this third problem

is really like a microcosmic version of Jordan's first problem the answer to this is the really the same uh solution as it is to that first problem just on the microcosmic scale right the tension between various drives within yourself is not actually anarchic as Jordan presents it it is a competition it is a tension but it it's productive it produces an order of rank and ideally this would result in one strives Following the most powerful powerful of your values right but we know that that doesn't always happen in real life and sometimes people follow life

destroying values but as n says in the Antichrist the ill constituted Shall Perish right so people who follow after harmful and self-destructive things naturally shorten their lives so even in apparently quote unquote incorrect outcome is part of an experiment conducted by life or by nature which Eventually produces a rank order of we might say the survivability of human behaviors so above all we can notice in all three of these so-called problems that Jordan raises we can notice where his attention is Jordan's eye is on the social utility of the value structure he's concerned with whether

a set of values Fosters you know whether it allows people to live peaceably and in harmony whether the tablet of values allows the great many to live virtuous Productive lives but that has nothing to do with what the way n thinks right n believes that life itself is already undertaking this process right he constantly opposes himself to morality as such not because he wants to destroy everything but because he says most forms of morality have been anti-at and this is a result of the fact fact that Civilization has pres been presided over by these decadent

types of people right Aesthetics priests and philosophers who Are really just like a subspecies of priest um and they all have the aim of quote unquote improving mankind but you're trying to improve on something that nature has already figured out and I mean n explicitly says he's not concerned with improving mankind morally so this is in Will To Power 981 quote we must not make men better we must not talk to them about morality in any form as if morality in itself or an ideal kind of man in general could be taken For granted but

we must create circumstances in which stronger men are necessary such as for their part will require a morality or better still a bodily and spiritual discipline which makes men strong and upon which they will consequently insist and they will need one so badly they will have it end quote now what NCH is getting at here is what really makes people quote unquote better are conditions that Foster that great necessity and this ties in with Some of the most famous and quotable lines from n which have become cliches but they're actually among the most well understood

of n's thoughts because they're so straightforward so you know from the gay science live dangerously build your temples on the slopes of vvus or in Twilight of Idols where he says that which does not kill me makes me stronger or in Beyond Good and Evil what creates a free spirit is danger in the alley and in the heart it's it's not Under conditions of peace and stability and comfort that human beings improve but under conditions of hardship and tension and competition that people are forced to become better so and I again I know Jordan does

encourage people to face their fears accept challenges and so on and so forth but what we're talking about here is his moral agenda and it's not by giving people moral imperatives that they are improved it's it's not a choice and in fact Improvement happens when there is no choice so morality for n it's a post Haw development it's a codification of a set of valuations that have already been determined to Foster life and then you know a legislator comes along a genius philosopher or a religious prophet they come along and they give a conscious and

artistic order to that set of valuations they make it conscious they make it obtain over a whole culture or whole civilization and to the extent That this improves them it's for one it's not in any objective or Progressive sense since the values that Foster life are relative and contingent as we've already gone over but in a in a sort of a broader sense it's already been determined what the stronger values shall be or what the most life-promoting values shall be or at least there are we might say there might be a limited set in according

to the given conditions or Necessities that a people faes and this Is why a set of valuations that was appropriate in one circumstances in one context it could become out of dat it could become harmful in a future context and so for n the future always requires new reevaluations but you know so there are some areas where it almost seems like Jordan grasps what n is saying but if he really grasped it he would understand you can't stay within your old tablet of values forever which he always has sort of denied and ignored Now the

final aspect of Jordan's presentation that I'm going to take issue with it's only tangentially related to this overall topic but it's worth discussing however briefly because of the fact that Jordan Peterson explicitly ties n's project of values creation to the Overman both in this lecture that I cited but multiple times he does this he sort of assigns the Overman as the figure who will create values and that's another misreading as We've discussed in past episodes need for one he doesn't use the language of becoming the Overman he uses the language of letting ourselves go under

which means somewhat poetically to die undergo a downfall and he says go under and bring forth the Overman perish attempting the great and impossible so make your life one further step and a vast almost inconceivably vast project across time for Humanity and he says the over man shall be the meaning of the Earth that the Overman is a thing still to come it's a flash of lightning in the distant future quote I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the Dark Cloud that lowers over man they Herald the coming

of the lightning and perish as Heralds lo I am a Herald of the lightning and a heavy drop out of the cloud the lightning however is the Overman end quote in other passages in zarathustra N also sounds the theme of becoming Forefathers and Heralds of the Overman but you will not find a line in zarathustra in which Nisha writes that the point is for you to become the Overman or for the individual human being to overleap their Humanity because that's sort of a denial of what you are right the relation of our own lives to

the Overman is not in so far as we should strive to become the Overman but again that we should live in such a way that it creates the Overman so we Self-consciously manifest those values which are aimed at health and passion and ambition and worldly happiness and well-being in contrast to the sickly values of the priests which aim I mean in so many words they aim at death and that means to bring forth the over man it means living not for self-preservation which is ultimately of no value I mean the world is flux right uh

it means living as the full expression of your own will become who You are live dangerously and so on be willing to die because by living to the fullest you take Humanity a further step in the direction of becoming something greater than humanity and N makes it explicit no one is an Overman in the present day he writes in the section entitled the priests quote never yet has there been an Overman naked I have seen both of them the greatest man and the small man all too similar are they still to each other even the

greatest I found All to human end quote so it's a common confusion among new readers of n to conflate the Overman with the higher man because n has invoked the concept of the higher man to describe those philosophers who legislate values but notice who's been included among those I mean Plato St Paul Muhammad and so on are these over men well clearly not no these figures are From nich's perspective sick purveyors of aesthetic values for the most part the fact that They are quote unquote higher men does not necessarily make them Worthy the a imulation

they're all lawgivers and yet they're not the Overman right so that should be rather clear n conceives of the Overman as like if we have to put it in concrete terms it's sort of like a successor organism to mankind but um I mean there's serious complications on that but just as man evolved from a less complex organism such as the ape or you know our common ancestor with the Apes We have to understand mankind too as something living and developing and growing and changing so we're not a final form that's really the claim that's being

made at the basis of the Overman idea it would be as ridiculous for us to claim that we are the goal and endpoint of nature as it would be for the ape to claim that the goal of nature was to produce the ape right so the Overman as a concept that arises out of this understanding that life is moving And our option is not whether to change or stay the same see Jordan would have us stay the same right but that's not an option the option is rather we will change into something better and stronger

and healthier and happier or into something weaker and sicker and more World weary uh this is also from zarathustra quote I teach you the Overman mankind is something to be overcome what have you done to overcome mankind all beings so far have created Something Beyond themselves do you want to be the E of that great tide and revert back to the Beast rather than overcome mankind what is the ape to man a laughing stock a thing of Shame and just just so shall a man be to the Overman a laughing stock a thing of Shame

you have evolved from worm to man but much within you is still worm once you were Apes yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the Apes end quote so the reason why this is important uh Is that the Overman is not the creator of values so much as the notion of the Overman is itself nich's attempt at creating a new value so it's a little backwards the way Jordan has it it is the new value right the Overman is the new value he's not the creator of new values n never

says become an Overman and then you can create values what he really says and here I'm paraphrasing is I've created a new value and that value's name is the Overman and it's unmistakably the language of a new value when he says the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth and that means we shall rank order the worldly the physical the physiological over and above the otherworldly and the spiritual and the moral so this is n's own attempt to change the tablet of values move some valuations up uh more highly on the order of rank

which have previously been denigrated and demote others and it's Not some impossible task again it's been achieved many times and N is open about the fact that he's been inspired by other great lawgivers in this regard even though he finds all higher men to be human All Too Human um n's attemp attempting to become a lawgiver in his own right which is why he puts the words uh of zarra into the mouth of an inspired Prophet right zarathustra instantiates that revaluation of values in the image of the Overman among other Images because if we look

to all these past evaluations usually I mean in the case of strict philosophy it can be but usually it's not in an abstract logical argument it's an image and symbol and Parable and narrative so the religious lawgiver has always been a really powerful kind of lawgiver who doesn't Teach an explicit abstract philosophical ideas and that's why n tries to harness That Power by writing zarathustra and The style of the New Testament and that's why he fills the text with stories and riddles and enigmatic scenes and so on and so forth now again this is really

not the most important part of my argument but it it simply reveals yet another frankly unforgivable misstep in Jordan's reading the confusion about what the Overman even is and the idea that it would require an Overman or that it would require that we ourselves become the Overman in order to legislate Values but again there has never been an Overman but there have been past legislators of value I hope that's clear from the direct sources that we've looked at today and from a careful reading of those sources the Overman isn't a savior who comes and gives

us a new tablet of values the Overman itself is a new Central orienting value in the same way thatr Christians you know used God or Christ in their old value structure in so far as the Overman is The new thing to sacrifice for it's the new thing to give one's life for to give one's life meaning as Jordan would would put it meaning is very important to Jordan right so um and just see thus book zarus are the Isles of the Blessed quote once did people say God when they looked out upon distant Seas now

however I have taught you to say over man end quote and so those are all my major critiques here and so we'll we'll conclude um nich's project has nothing Whatsoever to do with telling the average person that each of us needs to make up a completely new morality as if such a thing would be possible or desirable and I would argue it's hardly even conceivable and if that's what you know n's project was then Jordan would be correct that it's an inadvisable philosophy to guide us into the future but as with many aspects of n's

philosophy much of what he has to say about the legislation of values is Descriptive rather than prescriptive he's explaining to us how moralities came into being how this happened in the past right and how the spark that fires that creative process that creative destructive process is like it's the genius within a philosopher or a prophet or a religious figure who that's who provide takes that raw material of the physical physiological demands and affects a revaluation through this Artis IC Act of reordering of making it Conscious and of turning it into an idea and N recognizes

that the end result the universal moral law that thou shalt is as we said at the outset it's a reification of instinct it's an abstraction a universalization and it the the lawgiver misleads himself and everyone else by forgetting what it was in its orgins what Jordan is talking about on the other hand is like the individual applying his own intellect to come up With some new consciously articulated set of ethical maxims according to like his own strength of reason and his own discipline and quite in agreement with n Jordan concludes that most will be unable

to do this but as Nicha tells us you know philosophy really needs to be studied psychologically and we have to think about the moral or immoral germ out of which the entire plant of Jordan Peterson's philosophy has grown and it's very clear the entire purpose of Jordan's rhetoric on this topic is to direct us back to the Traditional Values to convince us that in spite of the death of God the alternative to the old Central orienting value structure of Christianity is anarchic chaos right or or Worse totalitarianism so we just can't go there and he

invokes a Christian conception of Mankind's weakness frankly by pointing out the limitations of our intellect the waywardness of our will in in fact all Of our hubris and sinfulness look at you you sinful wretch how could you be so prideful as to think that you could re-evaluate your values right that's impossible people are so pathetic and unable to have self-discipline and unable to follow their own willpower and therefore the only option is the pre-existing Doctrine and dogma of Christianity now aside from all the interpretive problems that I have raised this just fundamentally fails to tangle

With n 's actual criticisms of Christianity n's actual criticism of Christianity is that it's a secret path to nothingness n argues that it represents the investment of all of our valuing capacity into the world beyond orienting our lives around a moral project to be humble and unambitious and follow the conventional rules and values and reject the pleasures of the Flesh and so on so that we can have salvation in an afterlife and Christianity Promotes values such as pity and raises those values to the highest rank and what does pity do that gets us to turn

our attention primarily to the suffering of the world which is very Central to Jordan's ideology and Christianity spreads suffering that's what n says about it it makes it contagious and what does that do makes life look less appealing than it would be otherwise which in turn makes Christianity even more appealing because it offers Salvation from life and finally Christianity is fueled by resentment and the bad conscience and just all these path IES of the conscious apparatus which effectively deal with unexpressed cruelty within the human organism by turning it back unto itself and so the guiltier

you are under the Christian set of valuations the better of a person you are the more you say I'm a sinful wretch the more penitent you are there's no Real possibility for a human being to be good in the Christian view they can only really repent for being bad and so people strive to repent as hard as they can to feel guilt as thoroughly as they can as a path to Holiness these are the sick values that n criticized that he saw as effectively poisoning the human psyche for thousands of years and it's not an

option for Nisha to Simply cling to the wreck of Christianity because Christianity has Shipwrecked for a very good reason it's a dead end it's a form of nihilism and without a revaluation those sick values will just continue to push Mankind in a sick Direction and if that happens rather than you know the next phase of human existence being happier and healthier uh it will be a form of life that is sadder and sicker and just worse in every way and in all of his discussion of n Jordan never answers those criticisms of Christianity he Prefers

to portray n's assessment of the death of God as if it's all about like scientific truth overcoming biblical Revelation or whatever right but he ignores the passage in sarra for example where it's stated God died he choked to death on his all too great pity he never talks about that when we contrast Jordan's statements with what n actually wrote none of his problematizing of n's projects really it doesn't work it doesn't work on any level whatsoever It's a complete misreading at best and it's a straw man at worst and arguably that's because his goal is

really to get us to ignore all of these problems with Christianity and flee back back into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age in which the old values are worshiped again without the chaos of a potential revaluation coming along but as we've already gone over that's exactly what n warned about was this type of person and so at this point it has to be recognized Jordan Peterson's entire project is diametrically opposed to n to the extent that he uses n it is a misuse you should not trust his interpretation of a philosopher who

he's entirely opposed to in every way and not only does he employ n in order to pursue exactly what n rejected but just you know his entire understanding of n's philosophy turns out on its head for whatever virtues um that many people find in Jordan Peterson's project I would just conclude By saying his interpretation of n's project badly misses the Mark if you enjoyed the N podcast or found it helpful you can visit us and support the show at patreon.com untimely Reflections the link is in the description or just share the show with any of

your friends that you think might enjoy it or on social media thank you for your support