Beyond Good and Evil, by Freidrich Nietzsche

Preconceptions: None. I've already read it.

Reaction: Though generations of screwballs have hijacked his works since the 19th century, Nietzsche's basic premise--that our conceptual models and "common metaphors" may be more arbitrary than we like to believe--seems almost a truism.

The god of our faiths is largely our own creation: he embodies our dreams, our wishes, our neuroses. He, like so many of our principles, is a fiction agreed upon.

Of course, Nietzsche's nutty sister Elizabeth tirelessly promoted her brother's work for the fascists, and they happily embraced anything that told them they could invent their own morality. Of course, they skipped the very important passages of Nietzsche in which he suggested that, if god is indeed effectively dead, we still need to invent a human morality.

I guess that's easy to miss.

Verdict: I don't feel any more evil having read this book, but then maybe this book is what has precipitated my decline into evil in the first place.

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