On the Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche thought that the psychic pain that often overwhelms us as we make our way through the haunted wood impels us to identify an enemy or hate-figure on whom we can vent our revenge for the sufferings we are undergoing.

For more and more people now it seems that it is their hatred and their prejudice and their scapegoating that actually keeps them going. As though we are tempted more than ever by what Nietzsche calls in On the Genealogy of Morals ‘a will to nothingness, a counter-will to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life’.