Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche - A 30-Minute Summary

Since the dawn of civilization, the world has been gradually becoming a better and better place – or at least that’s what many of us would like to believe. Sure, there are still all sorts of problems, but, overall, society has progressed from the barbarism of the past. We live in one of the least violent eras in history, don’t we? We’re also far more free and equal than previous generations, are we not? Well, Friedrich Nietzsche would beg to disagree. Writing in the late nineteenth century, the iconoclastic German philosopher thought that most people in the West were suffering from an acute case of dogmatic thinking, which was preventing them from seeing the world as it truly is – a place predicated on violence and inequality. More than a century later, Nietzsche’s ideas remain as provocative as they were back then. In Beyond Good and Evil, one of his seminal works, he takes aim at many of the moral principles, concepts, and values that many of us still hold dear. In these blinks, we’ll take a look at how he sought to peer beneath the surface of Western thought and expose the myriad prejudices, falsities, and unsavory motivations that he believed to be lurking there.