There are some who crave a much deeper experience of reality than what they have experienced so far. The sad secret of the contemporary West is that there are so many layers of protection against having to experience anything directly and personally, that many people feel a barrenness that they just can’t overcome by themselves.

As someone originally from Africa, I am the direct opposite to this. I am very, very rich in psychological plenitude and resourcefulness. So there are those who want to play with fire — they are attracted to the dangerous possibility of feeling and thinking more deeply than they do. They want to know more, and to risk becoming more than they are presently.

Their not so conscious minds — which are not strong enough yet to admit of such a pure motive — lead them to play psychological games, in an attempt to mess with me. Expressing superficiality and hypocrisy seems acceptable to those who want to flirt with authenticity, without actually taking a deliberate step toward it. It seems like “a lark”, something that can be easily justified and dismissed. But the real unconscious has a much deeper craving, which is to know reality in a way that one has not experienced before.

And this is why people do it — they have a deeper love, a deeper craving, for a much more direct and pure and complex experience of life than that which they have presently been given.

By whom. For all the lauding of Nietzsche as a “great philosopher”, he is not currently well-understood, at least by many of those I meet online. I think the problem has to do with binary thinking — the “either-or dichotomy. It can be initially hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that “will to power” is not “the opposite” of “metaphysics” and moral thinking. Rather, the latter are degraded forms of none other than “will to power”.

If we were able to understand this, very, very deeply, I suppose we may be able to revolutionize our perspectives. There is no “opposite” between the IDEAL of “love”, the IDEAL of formulating the perfect morality, and the IDEAL of managing others (and getting them to conform) and the so-called “will to power”. To create a moral formulation out of perceived necessity merely reproduces a lower caliber of life.

What is superior and what is inferior has to do with mode of valuing. Nietzsche makes a very interesting point regarding how we value things using the very human concept, “evil”. In his view, the higher the type of human being, the less they will resort to viewing situations and people as “evil”. This is because there is very little forbidden to the higher type — they do not easily meet their own destruction. They have the kinds of minds that can work with almost any raw material from life and get some really good results from even something very dire.

To the extent that the great generals did something like this, Nietzsche thinks very well of them indeed. But Nietzsche’s philosophy is, in its own right, a form of coming to terms with the unpleasant features of existence, and making them seem right. The opposite to greatness, according to Nietzsche, is to allow the sensation of “evil” to spread, so that is seems to permeate everything. This indicates a very low caliber of human, who cannot turn “evil” into his own good, and somehow redeem this human concept of evil from the sense of mindless suffering.

They may well understand “you”. But this is a version of you that is separated from the physical world, from the political world and from the experience of the social world. In other words, supposing we were to talk a video of a boxing match, but we remove the image of the opponent, using digital technology. The therapist can see “you”, moving around, ducking and weaving, and “you” showing pain and anguish and at times crumpling on the floor. There is not problem with the therapist’s perception of “you”.

What they cannot understand is the context, the meaning, or the reasoning that you employ to deal with a reality outside of your head.

They may well understand “you”. But this is a version of you that is separated from the physical world, from the political world and from the experience of the social world. In other words, supposing we were to talk a video of a boxing match, but we remove the image of the opponent, using digital technology. The therapist can see “you”, moving around, ducking and weaving, and “you” showing pain and anguish and at times crumpling on the floor. There is not problem with the therapist’s perception of “you”.

What they cannot understand is the context, the meaning, or the reasoning that you employ to deal with a reality outside of your head.

It’s basically a form of gas lighting. Therapists — most of them — have the ideology that all problems reside in the mind. This is to say, they have a moral world view (in the manner critiqued by Nietzsche), that if we rectify our own morality (which can involve straightening out our vision) all things will work out well for us. This is also to say that they believe that there is an intrinsic moral structure to the Universe, and that by bringing ourselves in accordance with it, we can forestall harm, or even remove it entirely from our lives.

This is not the way the actual universe works - not by a long shot. But there are a sufficient number of people wanting to believe that it is true. They hope, and expect, that by conforming to a certain set of rules, they (and others) will receive their “just desserts”.

A bad therapist — which is most therapists — will simply not accept that the world is bigger than you and I. And they will not allow that a lot of the things that affect us most drastically are events that have their origin outside of our heads.

And in this respect, a bad therapist (most of them) will hurt you by giving you something false to believe in — something that caters to your desire to believe in a world where everything is fair and just.