Nietzsche's Herd Power Mentality
August 20, 2025โข350 words
"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"The price of freedom is death." - Malcolm X
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
"I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." - Nelson Mandela
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." - Desmond Tutu
The herd was never a harmless abstraction in Nietzsche's mind; rather, it was a dark prediction of the periodic patterns of history. He cautioned that the majority of people would prefer the security of belonging to the alienation of truth when faced with the challenge of independent thought. He maintained that the herd seeks safety rather than justice. It thrives on conformity rather than reason, and it uses ritualistic cruelty to punish those who don't fit in.
Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and many other dissenters who opposed segregation or the hideous violence of white supremacy during the American Civil Rights Movement were labelled agitators, communists, or traitors to the "American way of life." Dressed in moral respectability, the herd used law enforcement brutality, assassinations, illegal wrongful termination of employment, and arrests to try to put an end to them.
Those who opposed apartheid in South Africa were crushed under the same weight of popular hatred, whether they were White intellectuals who dared to criticize the apartheid government or people of colour activists who organized in the townships. They had their freedoms taken away, their reputations damaged, again dismissals from employment, structured state brutality, their lives watched, and they were called state enemies. In each instance, herd unethical morality pretended to be righteousness when it was really a front for dominance and terror.