Nietzsche at Christmas — A Will to Joy Special

Joy, peace on earth, and good will to all men: Christmas is supposed to be a Christian festival. But what might it mean after the death of God?

In this special end-of-year episode of The Will to Joy, we explore Nietzsche’s surprising relationship with Christmas — from his childhood enchantment with the festive season, through intimate Christmases with the Wagners, to his darkest and loneliest winters marked by estrangement, illness, and radical self-overcoming.

Drawing on Nietzsche’s letters, notebooks, and major works (The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil), this episode asks what remains of joy, peace, and generosity once Christian metaphysics has collapsed. Why did Nietzsche continue to value festivals? What role do communal celebrations play in culture after God’s death? And why did he believe that joy needs no justification?

We examine Christmas through a Nietzschean lens: Dionysian ecstasy and deindividuation, war and repose, otium and overwork, generosity without phoney morality, and joy as the unmistakable signal of life ascending. Along the way, we confront Nietzsche’s critiques of peace, pity, altruism, and slave morality — and recover a harder, more honest, more life-affirming vision of cheerfulness as overflow rather than consolation.

The episode concludes with a Nietzschean Christmas tale that touches on the role and function of celebration in human culture.

A Christmas episode for atheists, skeptics, and anyone interested in joy without illusion, generosity without guilt, and affirmation without God.

Raise a cup of good cheer — and prepare for a New Year of self-overcoming.

Music recommendations:

It's a Big Country by Davitt Sigerson

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Other music credits: Nacht Silent - Vienna Boys Choir

Transcript

Nietzsche at Christmas - a will to joy special

Joy, peace on earth, and good will to all men—these are the sentiments we associate with Christmas. At this time of year, we are encouraged to be festive and full of good cheer. 

Nietzsche often appears misanthropic, polemical, solitary and dark - hardly the sort of person you want over at your place for drinks and nibbles on Christmas Eve. But, of course, if you’re a regular listener to the WTJ podcast, you’ll know that Nietzsche is more complicated than that. He put great store in the joyful and affirmative aspects of life. A truly Nietzschean avatar brings the party - at least at times - though at other times they may pursue a stern regime of creative discipline, ascetic self-control, and steely tenacity in the execution of formidable endeavours. Remember what it means to be Dionysian - it is to be overwhelmed with intoxication, to be unable to contain one’s need to dance, to be overflowing with generosity and the need to bestow—it is to be ecstatic.

Now sure, the proclamation of the death of god and a celebration of the birth of baby Jesus might seem somewhat at odds. So it may be surprising to discover that Friedrich Nietzsche was a fan of the festive season. He decried Christianity in the most savage terms, but Christmas retained an allure for him that persisted throughout his life. Why was that?

Like most of us, as a child Nietzsche was especially caught up in its excitement. At age 13 he asks himself in his diary why he loves Christmas even more than birthdays and concludes that Christmas is: 

‘The most blessed festival of the year because it doesn't concern us alone, but rather the whole of mankind, rich and poor, humble and great, low and high. And it is precisely this universal joy which intensifies our own mood’. 

These sentiments seem quite out of character with his adult convictions - anti-democratic, elitist, individualistic, and amoral. But even in his adult life, Christmas brought out the softer side of Nietzsche. At Christmas 1864, when he was a 20 year old student, he was unable to afford the fare home and so he writes to his mother and sister: 

‘I do hope you will have a Christmas tree with lights… We will light a tree in the tavern but naturally that's only a pale reflection of how we celebrate at home, for the main thing, the family and circle of relatives, is missing… Do you remember what wonderful Christmases we had?… It was so lovely; the house and the village in the snow, the evening service, my head full of melodies, the togetherness… and me in my nightshirt, the cold, and many merry and serious things. All together a delightful atmosphere.’ 

As a young man, Nietzsche also spent many Christmases with the Wagners. This speaks volumes regarding his intimacy with the great composer Richard Wagner, as Christmas is very much a time for family among the Germans. 

Wagner’s wife, Cosima, had her birthday on the 25th December, so these occasions were a double celebration. An excerpt from Cosima’s diary from Christmas 1870, when Nietzsche was 26, reads: 

‘As I awoke, a swelling sound came to my ear, ever louder. I could no longer imagine it a dream, it was music sounding, and what music!... I was in tears but so was the entire household’. 

Nietzsche was among the family members waiting on the landing with the fifteen-piece orchestra that awoke Cosima on that Christmas morning. Later he gifted her a copy of his essay ‘The Origin of Tragic Thought’ which was really a dry run for his first major work The Birth of Tragedy. His own Christmas gift from the Wagners that year was a copy of the collected works of the philosopher Michel de Montaigne, of whom Nietzsche was an avid fan. 

The giving and receiving of presents delighted Nietzsche. During Christmas 1873 he wrote to a friend and enthusiastically reeled off his booty: 

‘A gilt photo album for large photographs, a wooden letter holder with a carved floral design from Elizabeth [his sister], items made of Russian leather from Princess Therese of Altenburg and a large Raphael reproduction.’

[his father had been tutor to princess therese] 

Not too shabby. 

Other Christmases were spent among friends of an intellectual bent, with dinner, wine and piano music late into the night (Nietzsche was a very capable piano player, as were many of his friends). This was interspersed with readings of thinkers from Plato to Voltaire, which inspired lively debate. 

Not every Christmas was so full of joy however. 

Christmas day 1882 came on the heels of a very upsetting estrangement from his best friend, Paul Reé, and the woman Nietzsche may have fallen in love with, Lou Salomé. Whether there was anything amorous in Nietzsche feelings for Lou or not (and we only have her word for it), the pair, Lou and Paul, had run off together and left Nietzsche alone. Poor Nietzsche wrote to his friend, Overbeck, of his despair. He was taking enormous doses of sleeping pills and hiking up to eight hours a day, yet he still could not sleep. It didn’t help that he had also alienated himself from his mother and sister - the latter having taken a pathological dislike to Salomé. 

Nietzsche writes: 

‘This bite of life… is the hardest I have ever had to chew’. 

He adds that he is ‘going through all phases of self-overcoming’ as a consequence of the loss of Salomé and Ree and worries that he is not up to it: 

‘If I don't invent the alchemist's art of making gold from filth - from this too - I am lost. Here I have the best possible opportunity to prove that, to me, ‘all experiences are useful, all days holy and all men divine!’’ 

The latter is a quote from Emerson that Nietzsche repeats in his own writings.

Another grim Yule, that of 1887, sees him writing to his sister, Elizabeth, on Christmas day regarding her marriage to notorious anti-semite, Bernhard Förster: 

‘You have committed one of the greatest stupidities - for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chiefexpresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy… It is a matter of honour with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings… that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times.’ 

This is one of many instances of Nietzsche making his disapproval of anti-Semitism clear. Naturally, these views were glossed over by the Nazis when his philosophy was misappropriated for their cause. 

It is true that Nietzsche had some rotten Christmases. Haven’t we all? And yet, as is the case for many of us, it still possessed for him a glimmer of something just a little magical. Why might this be? 

Well let’s consider those wonderful Christians feelings: to be festive and full of good cheer. To wish joy, peace on earth, and good will to all men.

Even after Nietzsche’s wholesale rejection of Christianity and its morality of loving thy neighbour, the idea of the great festival was of crucial importance to his conception of positive human culture—and make no mistake, Nietzsche project was ultimately about the elevation of culture.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s madman says that the only way humanity can atone for the murder of god is to invent ‘festivals’ and ‘sacred games’. For Nietzsche, his atheism notwithstanding, such communal comings-together held a quasi-religious importance, as they forged a cultural identity - a cultural identity in which the individual was subsumed within the whole. This is that essential existential dynamic of the Dionysian realised at a societal level. He believed that at an early stage of Greek culture, such festivals were a key means of consolidating a powerful and productive culture through communal passion. 

This was achieved both through individual initiatory experience - a letting go, a throwing off of convention, a reconnection with repressed and forbidden wild instincts that could temporarily be given free reign within a safe space and at an allotted time: I’m talking here about the orgiastic dionysia or roman festivals of saturnalia that enabled an occasional letting off of steam, and so benefitted social cohesion by alleviating psychic tensions that threatened order. That movie, the purge, plays with the same idea, though in that fictional world the purge festival supposedly maintains social order by allowing a once a year night of mayhem and murder. For the classical world, cutting loose had more erotic and hedonic undertones. 

And then of course, the experience of Dionysian Tragic theatre is the immersion the the self in the all - in the all of the community but also the all of existence itself, and the dissolution of ego identity in the womb of being, gaining comfort in the face of mortality and an unjust, uncertain, and indifferent universe by identifying oneself with the totality.

Nietzsche’s hope at one stage had been that Wagner’s art could be a means of achieving a contemporary renewal of European culture through tragic art. This is the thrust of his book The Birth of Tragedy. These hopes were not realised, however. And Wagner disappointed him, ultimately.

But regarding Christmas, recall the words of the 13-year-old Nietzsche: 

‘It doesn't concern us alone, but rather the whole of mankind… It is precisely this universal joy which intensifies our own mood.’ 

For Nietzsche, despite its defunct Christian trappings, the festival of Christmas is a time for a mass coming-together, an experience of the ‘universal’ (rather than the individuated) and a time for one to be immersed in the ‘joy’ of self-transcendence through the loss of one’s own identity in the greater body of the community. 

So communal festival holds great import for Nietzsche. Even the exceptional individual is valuable only because they move human culture forward, they forge new values. Cui bono? Who benefits? The community ultimately—‘the herd’. The exception is the mutant gene that, if it prevails, facilitates the evolution of the whole super organism.

A tale:

There was once a village that celebrated the birth of its god each midwinter.

They lit fires against the dark.

They drank, sang, exchanged gifts, embraced strangers.

They told the old story again and again — that a light had entered the world and that a divinely ordained order had been established.

But one winter, something happened that no one had prepared for.

The god died.

He withered away as things wither when they can no longer be believed in.

And when it happened, it was as though the sea had been drunk up in a single night.

As though someone had taken a sponge and wiped away the whole horizon.

The earth seemed suddenly unchained from its sun.

People asked one another:

Where is the world heading now?

Where are we heading?

Are we not falling — backwards, sidewards, forwards — in all directions?

They walked as if through an infinite nothingness.

The air felt colder.

Night seemed to fall earlier each year.

When midwinter came again, the village was silent, cups remained empty—people stayed home huddled around their hearths.

But then a little boy slipped out the door of his home. He went to the village square and, lost in his own imaginings, began playing, skipping, turning in circles, and dancing under the cold stars. 

Villagers peered from their windows at the boy, and one of them lit a torch and went out to fetch the child. But it wasn’t quite as chill in the square as he imagined. So why spoil the child’s game. Instead he lit a bonfire in the square, to impart a little light.

Others saw the fire and were drawn outside too.

A few people brought torches, some brought benches to sit by the fire. A crowd soon gathered and flasks of wine suddenly emerged. Lanterns were lit. Then a fiddler struck up a tune. The villagers spilled out of their homes. Soon there was laughing and drinking and dancing.

As the unmoored planet hurtled through the vacuum of space—falling backwards, sidewards, forwards—the village made their festival. A new festival—a festival in celebration of…

Peace on earth

But let’s talk about an aspect of Christmas that is more problematic for Nietzsche. Peace on earth. As Nietzsche writes in Z, “You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace more than the long. I do not exhort you to work but to battle. I do not exhort you to peace, but to victory.” 

In many places Nietzsche valorises war and denigrates the peace-loving Christian type as degenerate. He even often talks of “conducting a war against oneself” in BGE.200 and elsewhere. And that should make it obvious that he is talking about war in the metaphysical sense. Like Heraclitus, who wrote “war is the father of all’, Nietzsche believed that relentless war was the condition of existence, of becoming. Everything is in a productive tension — this is the nature of a universe that is the will to power and nothing besides. Without this roil of wills, nothing could not exist—it is the power disparities and their shifts that create the phenomenonal world. If the lion were to lie down with the lamb, as in Christian ethics, then the lions all starve to death. And without predation, the population of sheep explodes and overgrazes the pasture on which they depend, and thereby the sheep starve go extinct too. So conflict and competition are an inescapable reality and the condition of existence. The implications for human conflict are complex, controversial, and profound, and this is such an enormous topic it requires its own episode, so I’ll say no more here. But Nietzsche did sing the praises of an intermittent peace—what he called repose and otium. Repose means rest. Otium means the leisure of one whose time is their own.

I’ve quoted parts of this before, but I’ll quote this at length with some abridging because it is so utterly on the money, more so today than when Nietzsche wrote it: So this is from JS.329

“Leisure and Idleness. - “One is now ashamed of repose: even long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stop-watch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the financial newspaper; we live like men who are continually " afraid of letting opportunities slip." "Better do anything whatever, than nothing "-this principle also is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be strangled. […] one has no longer either time or energy for ceremonies, for roundabout courtesies, for any esprit in conversation, or for any otium whatever. For life in the hunt for gain continually compels a person to consume his intellect, even to exhaustion, in constant dissimulation, overreaching, or forestalling: the real virtue nowadays is to do something in a shorter time than another person. 

And so there are only rare hours of sincere intercourse permitted: in them, however, people are tired, and would not only like " to let themselves go," but to stretch their legs out wide in awkward style. […] If there be still enjoyment in society and in art, it is enjoyment such as over-worked slaves provide for themselves. Oh, this moderation in "joy" of our cultured and uncultured classes! Oh, this increasing suspiciousness of all enjoyment! Work is winning over more and more the good conscience to its side: the desire for enjoyment already calls itself " need of recreation," and even begins to be ashamed of itself. " One owes it to one's health," people say, when they are caught at a picnic. Indeed, it might soon go so far that one could not yield to the desire for the vita contemplativa (that is the life of contemplation), without self-contempt and a bad conscience.-

Well! Formerly it was the very reverse: it was "action" that suffered from a bad conscience. A man of good family concealed his work when need compelled him to labour. The slave laboured under the weight of the feeling that he did something contemptible :- the "doing" itself was something contemptible. "Only in otium and bellum (that’s leisure and war) is there nobility and honour:" so rang the voice of ancient prejudice!”

Isn’t that just so apt today? We live in an age where work is exalted as the highest virtue. Where influencers never tire of bragging about how hard they work, how many hours per week they put in. But as Nietzsche says this is the virtue of those with slave psychology. Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself. In our culture that valorises hard work we do well to ask once more, cui bono, who benefits, really? Great triumphs require effort but it is the triumph that is of real value, not the effort. There is something nihilistic hiding in the heart of today’s productivity cult, I suggest. Are you a function or are you a fact?

So Nietzsche praises peace. The peace of free time, the peace of a schedule that isn’t stuffed with errands, activities, and obligations. The peace of being in charge of your own day. As he writes in HH.283: 'Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.’

Perhaps that’s something for us to aim for.

Whatever the case, don’t pack out your Christmas with obligations. Create time to relax and breath. Take your repose. Cultivate otium.

And so to music. No Christmas without music, and as I will never tire of reminding you, Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, art, and the aesthetic among many other things. For this show, I’ve picked something that reflects the intimacy of Christmas as a time for reaching out to friends and family. Sure, family can be a problem at Christmas, but this song is not about feeling obligated to have everyone round your house for dinner on Christmas Day, it’s more about sending a simple card to your loved one’s who are scattered in distance parts. I really like the smallness of this song. There’s a line: ‘just a word from me and Anne to say we’re fine.’ There’s something so human about this little humdrum sentiment. 

Smallnesses and little gestures can be petty and objectionable, but some smallnesses are precious. Little moments of humanity that affirm what’s important to us—other people. 

Nietzsche so often extols the grand and the radical, but he values the simple and the modest too. Nietzsche was a passionate friend, sensitive, passionate, one who valorised courtesy as a virtue, and lover of simplicity. Remember this passage:

“I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule—and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness” that’s in an unpublished note from 1880 

Anyway, the song is It’s a big country by Davitt Sigerson. Links in the show’s description. This song really chimes with me at this time of year, and is for me so moving in its unpretentious naiveté. One might even think of Nietzsche on that Christmas of 1864, wishing he could be with his family for the celebrations.

Check out the track.

Let me know what you think.

Good will to all men

Now let’s turn to an only less complicated Christmas sentiment: good will to all men. Again we may well feel that Nietzsche is a fish out of water here. His invective frequently criticises and condemns swathes of people. He also has no time for good will that is really just disguised fear - hiding behind feigned agreeableness; good will as a social requirement rather than a heartfelt disposition. He is contemptuous towards this culture. True, but contempt is not the same as hatred. Indeed Nietzsche thinks you can only really hate those who are or could be your friends. This is the hatred of competition, and we only really feel competition for those who are rivals on the same tier as us—who posses a more or less comparable quantum of power. Those who are less powerful do not factor, and neither do those who are more powerful than us. 

Think of it this way. If you are a wrestler, you won’t waste time with bouts with those who are in way lower league than you—the outcome is a forgone conclusion. They offer you no challenge. You might feel contempt for them, look down on them, despise them as Nietzsche says, because they don’t factor as significant for you, but you don’t hate them. They are no threat to you. They are nothing to you.

Similarly, those who are in a way higher league than you might be inspirations to us, or you might resent their power over you, but you don’t hate them. You aspire to be in their league some day and to defeat them, and when that time comes you might start to hate them, because for Nietzsche, only approximate equals can truly hate each other, each posing a mutual threat to each other’s positions. In this conception, the fact of your hatred for someone suggests you estimate their power as potentially comparable to your own.

“You may have enemies whom you hate, but not enemies whom you despise.”

And also from Z: "in a friend one should have one's best enemy." 

Your enemies, by definition are those who threaten your position, make you stronger and sharper because they challenge your security. And your true friends are your friends by virtue of the fact that they are, spoken or unspoken, your rivals. The friend should be your enemy—it is only by being your enemy that they constitute a friend. And your enemy is your friend because they keep you on your toes.

So in this scheme you can only hate those you consider your approximate equals, which of course are those who are your friends and/or enemies: frenemies. This is why Nietzsche writes “The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.” That’s Z too.

I’m probably dwelling on this too much, but Nietzsche does emphasise that rank reveals itself in the direction of one’s hardness: the higher type is severe with themselves and their equals, but restrained and even generous toward those beneath them — for cruelty downward is a sign of weakness and insecurity. And cruelty upward is impossible, of course. 

Nietzsche writes of the noble type “In the foreground, there is the feeling of fullness, of power that wants to overflow, the happiness associated with a high state of tension, the consciousness of a wealth that wants to make gifts and give away. The noble person helps the unfortunate too, although not (or hardly ever) out of pity, but rather more out of an impulse generated by the over-abundance of power.” BGE.260

This overflowingness is a repeated motif in Nietzsche’s writings—the powerful one doesn’t just accumulate they express, they squander. Recall Zarathustra at the start of his journey down from the mountain (and I’m abridging here): “one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus: Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine! [..] we waited for you every morning, took from you your superfluity and blessed you for it. Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it. I should like to give it away and distribute it […] Bless the cup that wants to overflow, that the waters may flow golden from him and bear the reflection of your joy over all the world! Behold! This cup wants to be empty again,”

And elsewhere in Z: ‘the highest virtue is a bestowing virtue... You thirst to become sacrifices and gifts yourselves; and that is why you thirst to heap up all riches in your soul. Your soul aspires insatiably after treasures and jewels, because your virtue is insatiable in wanting to give. You compel all things to come to you and into you, that they may flow back from your fountain as gifts of your love.’

So overflowingness, squandering, and generosity are part and parcel of the higher type’s disposition—the gift giving virtue, as he says. And consider this: what’s really interesting about this is it is extra-moral—by which I mean it is beyond moral - that’s what ‘extra’ means in the original Latin. The higher type gives not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it gives them pleasure to do so.

Now we might criticise this. Isn’t such a person really just pleasing themselves? Isn’t this egoism dressed up as charity? Well no. Think of it this way. Let’s say I give you food when you are hungry. Morality says I should do this because it is the right thing to do—it is a duty. Or it says that I should do this because if I end up in the same position, this person might then give me food? Or perhaps it is pity and guilt that drives me to charity?—I have plenty and this person has nothing. This is unjust.

But notice that there’s something non-moral in all of these motivations. If I help you from a sense of duty, then it pleases me to fulfil that duty. I am serving my own needs and desires when I help you, and only yours indirectly. This is egoism. It’s really all about me, right?

Then if I help you because I would want you to help me if the situation becomes reversed, this is transactional. I am making a self-serving investment that is ultimately about my own benefit. There’s no altruism in this - my kindness is a kind of an insurance policy.

And if I help you out of pity and guilt, well then I am succumbing to my social conditioning and giving you food in order to assuage my own unpleasant feelings. By feeding you I feel better.  

You see, there is no way to take ego out of the equation. We can only act in ways that we believe benefit ourselves in some way, even if indirectly. Pure altruism is a metaphysical impossibility. The notion that one can act truly selflessly is absurd. It is almost as if it’s designed to make you feel bad about yourself. Which Nietzsche believes it is.

With moral actions, we serve ourselves, but in secret ways. I do my duty to protect my reputation. I am generous that I might benefit myself at some point. I help out because the conscience that society has instilled into me pricks me, and I find that difficult to bear. 

Than consider the Nietzschean position. You are hungry and I feed you just because I want to—because it pleases me. Not because it’s my duty, or because I want to know that you might feed me in return at some point, or because I have bad feelings I want to ameliorate. Just because I want to. Quoting Z again:

‘He who feeds the hungry refreshes his own soul: thus speaks wisdom.’ 

Inasmuch as we only ever please ourselves when we act, isn’t there something more moral about being honest about this. We only ever serve ourselves, even when we serve others, and so instead of the moral rationalisations, the higher type is honest about this inescapable egoism—free of shame. To abandon phoney moral posturing and say unashamedly ‘I feed you when you are hungry because I want to’. 

It is good, not because it’s moral, but because it’s what I want. What I want is the original and natural good in itself.

Instead of pretending I gain nothing from my kindness and generosity, isn’t there something innocent and positive about saying, without pretension: it makes me happy to make you happy.

That’s real good will. But of course, that’s not enough for the herd. Good will must be enforced. But then can that be good will?

Joy

It is this orientation to one’s innermost instinctive desires, uncontaminated by the values of herd life and slave psychology, that Nietzsche thinks is the true sign of the great health. It is the Dionysian journey - on a trajectory towards life ascending, which is the exaltation of ever increasing beauty, strength, health, abundance, and complete self-affirmation through unending self-overcoming. The sure signal of which is the feeling of joy emanating as if from a homing beacon. It’s a signal we must use to navigate our way towards that transcendence—what the philosopher and Nietzsche translator, R. J. Hollingdale, calls a “this-world transcendence’. Joy is your proof that life is ascending. As hollingdale wrote: 

“the joy which is synonymous with this self-overcoming: that would now be the meaning of life - for joy is to Nietzsche, as it is to common-sense, the one thing that requires no justification, that is its own justification.” 

So in these darkest days of the year, it is an act of life-affirmation to celebrate this season of joy. Give and enjoy giving, receive with gratitude so that others may take pleasure in their beneficence—to receive a gift gracefully is itself the giving of a gift. Come together with those you cherish. Raise a cup of good cheer.

Personally, confirmed atheist and anti-christian I may be, but I love Christmas. Really, what else is there to look forward to in those spare winter months. The solstice, which is really what Christmas represents IMO, is the festival of the rebirth of the sun. How else does a healthy culture deal with the darkest time of year, but to defiantly make merry in the depths of the shadow - this to me is truly life affirming. To celebrate that the worst is just about over and with each day the light is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger.

I’m fleeing into solitude to work on my book: Nietzsche sex power, but I will be maintaining a presence and producing some content monthly for members over on Patreon. In the next week I will be sharing a practice for assessing and quantifying your own relative power within the constellation of your social relationships as a way of undertstanding social dominance hierarchies in a range of domains. So if that interests you consider becoming a member and supporting this project into 2026. Great things are going to happen in 2026, and so this is the time to get on board . Whatever the case…

To all you listeners of the will to joy podcast, I wish you a Christmas filled with Dionysian ecstasy, though perhaps go easy on the Dionysian intoxication, and I wish you a New Year full of Nietzschean Self-Overcoming.

See you in 2026.