Timothee Chalamet won the SAG Award for Best Actor last week, and in his acceptance speech he said something that I haven’t been able to get out of my head:
"I know the classiest thing would be to downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me… I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats. I’m inspired by the greats here tonight. I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there. So I’m deeply grateful. This doesn’t signify that, but it’s a little more fuel. it’s a little more ammo to keep going. Thank you so much.”
Social media reaction was mostly positive. But while many users celebrated Chalamet’s vision for himself and his open ambition, others described it as ‘right wing’, ‘a bit of ick’, and ‘something Paul Atreides would say on his genocidal phase’.
But why would it be considered problematic for Chalamet to say that he’s pursuing greatness? Why did Chalamet take care to hedge several times (I know people don’t usually talk like that…)?
Modern culture often valorizes the weak over the strong. You’ll see this pop up in the strangest places. We’ve talked before about the complex PR battle between Hollywood stars Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, but what’s not explicitly laid out is that both Baldoni and Lively are competing through the press to see who can appear to be the weakest. Lively says that Baldoni is a domineering man, a director with power over her who mistreated his female lead. Baldoni counters that Lively is a much bigger star than he is - she’s more famous, she’s got more connections, and she’s likely a billionaire from her husband’s investments. She was the powerful force who bulldozed him and insisted on doing things her way. Whichever of the two more powerful is implicitly assumed to be a worse person and to shoulder more blame for their feud.
Scott Alexander calls these bravery debates, where the side that has less power and less influence is automatically assigned higher moral worth. Once you notice this pattern you’ll begin to see it everywhere - especially in left-of-center social media discussions. Who has it worse in the 2020s - men or women? Prepare to watch both genders argue they’re the ones who have it bad. Is affirmative action a good idea? Depends on whether you’re centering Black students as oppressed or Asian students as unfairly targeted. To be the victim is, paradoxically, to be in a position of rhetorical strength. This phenomenon is so widespread it has its own snarky Wikipedia page - the Oppression Olympics.
Why should we care about any of this? Because the reaction to Chalamet’s speech and these types of fights on social media can tell us something important about the current political moment.
Why do we valorize the weak?
Let’s quit the modern day and take a walk through everyone’s favorite subject: 19th century continental philosophy. I promise it won’t be boring.
One of the most important concepts from Friedrich Nietzsche’s work was his theory of the master-slave moral duality.1 According to Nietzsche, master morality was the original form of morality in which ‘good’ was a self-evident property of the rich and powerful and strong. The archetype here would be a hero out of a classical Greek tale like Achilles. Achilles was good because he was stronger and faster and smarter than anyone else, because he slept with the most beautiful women and killed the most enemies. Strength was its own virtue, its own source of moral good.
Under master morality, to be good is to be noble, strong, powerful and superlative, to be bad is to be weak, timid and cowardly. The ‘will to power’ is natural and right. It’s natural for the strong to dominate the weak. The strong deserve their power, they’ve taken it by right, and the place of the weak is either to support the strong or to be dominated.2
In fact ‘rights’ or ‘liberties’ used to be considered as something pretty much exclusively for the ruling class. Before we thought of rights as universal, rights were for the strong. Liberties were taken, not given. Rights didn’t necessarily protect the vulnerable, they empowered those strong enough to enforce them. This is the Divine Right of Kings, it’s why taking something ‘by right of conquest’ was a thing.
Nietzsche contrasts this with what he calls slave morality - the idea that moral good is assigned to the weak. To have strength or to have power is suspect and likely a sign of ill intent, and suffering is given moral weight. Christianity plays a starring role in helping promote slave morality: The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. The meek shall inherit the earth. It is virtuous and good to willingly martyr yourself. Those statements would be ridiculous under master morality but they were central tenets of early Christian teaching. Christian ethics place virtue on suffering and poverty. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
According to Nietzsche, value systems before Christianity revolved around strength and nobility and achievement, but the introduction of slave morality flipped the paradigm. Victims now aren’t to be despised for their weakness - instead they are hallowed and (often literally) canonized. Today we live in a world where slave morality has completely replaced master morality as the dominant paradigm in society.
While Christianity played a central role in popularizing slave morality, it’s too clean of a story to give them all the credit. Master morality has continued to have a significant place in society for most of the last 2000 years. Western society has often talked left while acting right, promoted slave morality while practicing master morality. Colonization involved a lot of preaching Christian piety and humility to the local population while you claimed everything you could see for yourself and your country. Why were Europeans entitled to those lands? Colonizers would have told you they were more advanced, smarter, stronger, more civilized and more capable. That’s master morality. But at the same time, there were increasingly important voices in society arguing for the fair treatment of powerless groups like women, racial minorities, the lower classes, etc. That balance of master and slave morality, often hypocritical, was a central part of most of Western history.
Modern Morality is Slave Morality
At some point in the last 100 years, slave morality became so dominant as to be virtually the only recognizable paradigm. Society used to more openly valorize expansion and achievement. We’d celebrate putting a man on the moon, we’d throw ticker tape parades for aviators and heroes. We’d build giant buildings and bridges and projects and boast about how they were the biggest, newest, and how fast we could create them. The idea of Progress was venerated. There was a World’s Fair every few years to show off the newest inventions. Then something flipped.
There are a number of potential reasons why the world changed. The World Wars showed us that progress sometimes just meant progress in our ability to brutalize each other. The rise of modern authoritarianism may have made us more skeptical of the inherit virtue of Great Men. Mass literacy may have allowed the lower classes to develop a more sophisticated worldview independent of upper class values. The spread of democracy made the protection of the downtrodden more politically viable.
Whatever combination of factors caused it, the mid-20th century saw the start of a retreat from the idea of Progress. We stopped doing World Fairs. We stopped boasting about our heroes and started to grow more suspicious of them. Our art stopped deifying heroes and started critically deconstructing them . Ticker tape parades basically don’t exist any more, except for sports teams.3 We stopped building giant marvels fast and started placing legal and bureaucratic restraints on large projects. Rather than concentrating power in the hands of a few Great Men, we now distribute power widely via a vetocratic system that distrusts anyone with too much power. We haven’t put a man on the moon since 1972.
This was all happening before modern social justice or wokeness, but wokeness turbocharged slave morality. If anything, Christian slave morality has been defeated by an even more potent version of slave morality that offers protections for weak groups (like LGBT) that even the Christians missed. On the social justice left, goodness is almost totally defined by ideas over actions, by lack of harm rather than by positive accomplishment.4 You can see this almost everywhere in activism, governance, and culture. Even things like rap music have changed. Rap used to be master morality coded - artists sought to prove how they had more money, hotter women, and were more credibly able to do violence to their enemies. Modern rap still has elements of that, but it’s honestly more popular today to rap about your feelings, about societal injustices, about your heartbreaks.
This is is the world that invented degrowth as a concept - that we’ll actually be better off if we have fewer things and accomplish less. This is the world in which PR battles are a competition to seem weaker and more vulnerable - something that would have seemed absurd in previous eras of history. This is the world in which people are surprised and mildly scandalized that a celebrity openly aspires to greatness.
MAGA as the return of Master Morality
We live in a society arguably more dominated by slave morality than at any time in human history. And seen through this lens, I think Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is a backlash against this worldview and a return to master morality.
What does MAGA offer its fans? They offer an unapologetic vision of strength. Trump is constantly saying he’s the greatest. He’s the smartest, the bigliest, he has the best words. He’s a very stable genius and he’s not shy about telling you. It’s easy to laugh at his affectations, but I think it’s significant that Trump is so often claiming outright strength. He’s going to make America great, he’s going to be the strongest and most powerful leader you’ve ever seen.
In the Trumpist worldview strength in and of itself is worthy of praise. He is good because he is strong. Trump, more than he believes in possibly anything in the world, believes in dominance. International trade is not a positive sum interaction where both parties can benefit - it’s a zero sum game where you beat the other guy. Politics is about belittling and dominating your opponents, then making them crawl back to you and kiss the ring. Trump wants to enforce his will on his political rivals. He measures the worth of his followers not by their ideology but by their loyalty to him. He wants to dominate others. This is the essence of master morality.
Elon Musk, similarly, has an attitude that he wants to accomplish great things. He insists that not only can we accomplish great things, but that we must accomplish them, and giving him more authority is the way to do it. Regardless of your political views, Musk has a brilliant track record as an industrialist. The examples are numerous - he single-handedly revived the electric car and space industries, he co-founded PayPal, his Starlink satellites are a technical marvel, his startup xAI has reached virtual parity with industry leaders faster than anyone thought possible, etc.
What’s important about all this is that Musk, like Chalamet, is open and unashamed in his pursuit of greatness and accomplishment. Musk isn’t doing an aww-shucks routine about how he’s just a guy who got lucky, just a guy who was in the right place. He says he’s great and that we need to give him more power so he can do more great things.
This is so far from polite liberal politics that I suspect many people don’t fully see or understand the dynamic. Even though it’s a bit counter-cultural these days, the inclination to admire strength is deeply embedded in most people. There’s some part of our brain that instinctively desires a strongman to follow.
This is what’s really happening when Trump fans on Twitter respond to policy criticism with “Cry more, I love your tears, get ready for four more years of this”. They don’t feel the need to justify Trump’s actions on an object level. The fact that they won is all the proof of virtue they need. This is the core of MAGA messaging and of MAGA’s appeal.
When Trump is accused of being corrupt, he counters that he is strong. When he is accused of breaking the law, he says that making the country great justifies breaking the law. This extends beyond Trump. When Andrew Tate is accused of being a scammer and a sexual predator, Tate’s response that he is rich and good at fighting and sleeps with hot women, that you are weak and poor and pathetic, therefore he is better than you. This is why Trump fans respond to object level complaints with “We won, cry about it”. Power justifies itself.
This explains, at least in part, so many of the political shifts we’ve seen centered around Trump. It explains the increasing gender gap in the youngest generations (whose politics are not yet set in stone). Messaging centered around strength and dominance are more likely to appeal to young men than young women. It explains the emergence of the tech right, who place great value on ambition and accomplishment and who are horrified by cultural movements that scorn progress. It explains why even some recent immigrants love Trump, despite his antipathy to immigration - immigrants almost by definition are ambitious people who’ve taken great personal risks to achieve a better life for themselves.
This messaging around greatness and dominance appeals most to people who feel alienated by the alternatives, which are often status games around victimhood and identity they don’t understand. Naked nationalism and tribalism can be appealing as a way to make yourself a member of the winning group, to give your weak self connection to something great and glorious.
What’s ironic is that even Trump and Musk are not fully bought in to master morality. Trump talks all the time about how he personally is the best and smartest, but he’s also prone to whining about how unfair people are to him. That reporter was unfair, other politicians are mean to him, the media’s oppressing him, the Deep State is out to get him. That’s slave morality. It’s victim coded. Musk also does this kind of whining, positioning himself as simultaneously strong and weak. This is classic far right politics - we are masculine and strong and unstoppable, but also we are just lil’ guys under such unfair attacks by villainous forces. The fascists of yesteryear had the exact same rhetorical strategy.
But there is an important distinction. Trump, Musk and MAGA world might whine about the big mean societal forces that are persecuting them, but they don’t have universalized concern for the persecuted. They rarely speak in the language of uplifting the weak and vulnerable. They only want to uplift themselves - they are the ones who are great. Their greatness justifies itself and isn’t concerned with much else except creating more greatness.
Liberal Politics Must Offer Greatness
Scott Alexander, in a piece about Nietzschean morality, makes the point that the MAGA rank and file don’t fit the standard for master morality:
Meanwhile, as Hanania has noticed, MAGA Republicans are slave moralists. They want the talented (high-skilled immigrants, economists, artists, intellectuals) to be permanently yoked to an underclass of obese conspiracy-theorist hillbillies. They’re raising tariffs to protect weak American companies from stronger foreign competitors, banning IVF and vat meat and any technology that makes them uncomfortable, and trying to retvrn to some kind of crunchy organic notion of life which probably doesn’t even have any skyscrapers. Even the right’s so-called Nietzschean vitalists are mostly LARPing steppe nomads instead of building rockets.
This is an important point. Musk, Trump and Tate are more-or-less true master moralists, give or take some whining about unfairness. Most of their fans are not actually living by master morality. They want to be protected from mean liberals and scary immigrants and international trade. But they love the performance of master morality on the political and civilizational stage. They love being associated with greatness. They don’t have the drive to achieve greatness like Napoleon or Achilles or Michael Jordan, but they sure do love when Trump promises them they’re going to win so much they’ll get tired of winning. And that has implications if you’re not a fan of the MAGA movement.
Nietzsche says that slave morality is usually built around ressentiment5, the hostility and jealousy that the weak feel towards the great and accomplished. I think this isn’t a great descriptor of modern politics. Most people who dislike Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t angry that Trump talks about greatness or that Elon wants to accomplish things. They dislike them because they think they’re corrupt, or dangerous, or because they have strong policy disagreements.
But in the course of disagreeing with those disagreeable men, ressentiment sometimes rears its ugly head. Left-of-center folks are prone to minimizing the idea of greatness itself, of belittling the idea that Elon’s accomplishments are worth anything, or that we should strive for new things. And that’s dangerous. It risks ending up in a place where the pursuit of greatness is bad in and of itself.
One piece of advice for those practicing politics - and especially if you’re practicing politics in opposition to Musk and Trump - is to present a vision of strength. There’s no complicated theory behind this. People just like greatness. Even in our modern culture, we still flock to superhero movies where the protagonist is smarter, stronger and better than us. Have you seen the collective box office haul of the MCU? We still admire legendary sports stars who, through dedicating their life to their game, can accomplish incredible feats. When Timothee Chalamet made that appeal to greatness, I found myself cheering him, thrilled that someone was unapologetic about the pursuit of glory (especially in an deeply progressive industry like Hollywood).
There’s no reason that appeals to greatness should be exclusively right-coded. Voters still want strong leaders who present a vision of a strong society. And no, you can’t redefine ‘strong society’ to mean ‘a society where we take care of poor and downtrodden people’. Trump says he’s going to make America strong and respected worldwide. Musk is selling a future with self-driving cars and revolutionary AI and flights to Mars. What vision of greatness are you selling to counter that?
Liberals need to have something positive to sell beyond just fairness and compassion and uplifting the victims of the world. I’m not telling you to abandon those values if they’re important to you. Compassion is a good thing. Uplifting the weak is a moral good, and it’s for the best that society no longer subscribes to pure master morality. But don’t abandon the idea of achievement. Don’t ever reach the level where you are, by default, skeptical of actors, businessmen and politicians who strive for great feats. If you choose to fully reject every aspect of master morality and the pursuit of greatness, you’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Fair warning - I am not a philosopher or a Nietzsche scholar, so I’m probably going to muddle this up somewhere.
One of the ironies of Nietzsche is that while he wrote about the Übermensch and master morality, Nietzsche himself was a loser. He was sickly to the point of disability for much of his life, repeatedly rejected by the woman he pined for, addicted to various drugs, and eventually had a complete mental breakdown. In modern parlance, he was a cuck soyboy.
Sports remain one of the last bastions of unapologetic master morality, where striving for greatness is considered its own moral virtue that needs no justification. But even there, modern sports are more friendly and less cutthroat than in decades past - LeBron James is friendlier and more pro-social than Michael Jordan.
It’s easy to hold the correct, socially acceptable ideas. It’s much harder to actually do things. CC: Activism is not a social club
Which is different from ‘resentment’ because it’s French and thus more sophisticated.
The fact that a depressive affect in online speech is left-coded shows how negative polarization has created this greatness/weakness divide in politics.
Good overarching analysis.
So glad Jonah Goldberg pointed me to this article. It confirms and puts into words everything that I’ve been thinking and feeling for the past 8 years. Bravo.