There is more to Nietzsche than meets the eye. He is one of the first great writers to confront the fact that Jesus Christ was losing his grip on us after 2,000 years. G.K. Chesterton later explained it. The problem was not that people would believe in nothing [nihilism]- but that they will believe in pathological philosophies like nazism or communism. Nietzsche believed that the platonic Christian pursuit of god’s truth would result in the destruction of all myths necessary for human sanity. The Christian myth being the first casualty. Nietzsche believed in going back to pre-platonic Ancient Greece where the tragedy of life was a more prominent theme & heroic myths and legends were what strengthened people’s minds. It is worth bearing in mind that, without Nietzsche, there would be no Freud and no Jung; these are the founders of modern psychoanalysis. He is regarded as as influential as Darwin and Einstein.

So, if religion is ‘opium for the people’ and Marxism is ‘cocaine for the middle class’, Nietzsche says it is time we stopped taking these religious drugs and political sedatives. After 2,000 years European people need to re-evaluate their values. After 2,000 years even the finest bottle of wine might be past its best. Nietzsche’s main point is that modern ‘philosophy’ is pretentious scholarship and not, as it used to be, a way of life. Nietzsche’s psychological framework is compelling and will transform the way you think. Beyond Good and Evil may be sub-titled as ‘Beyond Christianity’ - Nietzsche returning to pre-christian ethics & wondering how these might be reconstituted for us today. Beyond Good and Evil is so hard to understand that Nietzsche had to write The Genealogy of Morals to explain what he was talking about. Having read both books I went further and listened to youtube lectures on these books. Nietzsche is misunderstood because his recipe was so easily used by others to brew-up their own ideological poisons - notably the Nazis - who emerged 30 years after Nietzsche’s death. You can use Nietzsche's ideas to develop and set-out your own personal ideology and system of ethics - see BGE aphorisms 6 ['who he is'?], 8, 13 [will to power is N's deepest conviction], 186, 187, 188, 194. I might try doing this in an article on medium sometime. The Recipe for becoming an individual.