A comment I once saw under a discussion about social blame and personal responsibility brought up Nietzsche’s idea of the “Übermensch.” It made a useful distinction: the Übermensch needs a higher conviction and does not depend on outside authority. The mother in that case had broken rules and exercised a kind of will to power, but her motive was entirely self-serving, and her justification relied completely on external authority. She treated the problem as a flaw in the system and cast herself as someone pushing the system forward. People like this often have a polished explanation for everything. They dress themselves up as exceptional, but what they actually resemble is Nietzsche’s “last man.”
That distinction matters, because many people confuse the Übermensch with elitism. A higher conviction, and freedom from dependence on external authority, is exactly where the discussion of free will should begin.
Freedom Is Terrifying
After collecting cases over the years, and after looking back at many of my own decisions, I have gradually formed a fairly consistent philosophical instinct: a theory of cost.
By “cost theory,” I mean this: people have the right to choose, but they must also bear the cost of what they choose. In this sense, it is close to Sartre’s position. Existence precedes essence; human beings are born free, and they are responsible for that freedom. Faced with such absolute freedom, people feel anxiety and emptiness. Their attitude toward life is their response to this condition.
Where I differ from Sartre is that I do think there is a real moment of freedom inside the act of choosing. That is the part I would call free will.
Sartre said freedom is terrifying. Human beings are free from the beginning, and therefore must answer for themselves. The feeling of nothingness does not come from somewhere outside the person; it comes from the person himself, because the person is free, empty, and never fixed in essence. That is why people need a unity of knowledge and action: to resist that emptiness. In this respect, Sartre’s thought unexpectedly fits very well with Wang Yangming’s idea of knowing and doing as one.
But are people free in their final outcomes? I am not so sure.
Imagine a “white room.” A person grows up in a completely white room with no channel to communicate with or understand the outside world. Even the mirror in the room is a programmed device, able to show him whatever others want him to see. Does that mean he may never understand the truth of the world? If he is released one day, he may find the outside world incomprehensible and run back into the white room. Part of that white room is what we call cognition.
So I think the free part is cognition, while the world cognition can see is indeed restricted and unfree.
Think of the world as a ten-floor cognitive structure. Most people can climb to the third floor and look out at the scenery there. But once they reach the fourth floor, the scenery becomes abstract. It is filled with analogy, metaphor, and kinds of logic that exceed ordinary perception. People are comfortable on floors one through three because most things there can still be understood through experience, reasoning, and emotional intuition.
Now we have entered the age of AI. But AI has not necessarily given people a tool to break beyond the third floor. It has merely installed an elevator on floors one through three, allowing everyone to move more quickly through what is already knowable.
To reach the fourth floor, one may have to sacrifice some kind of ordinary freedom: hallucinatory synesthesia from marijuana, abstract perception produced by mental illness, near-death experience, or something similar. Only then might one glimpse the strange, dazzling landscape of the fourth floor. In other words, perhaps people are not allowed above the fourth floor because the human spirit would be contaminated there. Unable to understand the essence of the world, a person’s reason may collapse or be destroyed.
So freedom is limited. But that does not mean people have been deprived of the freedom to enter the fourth floor. It means that once they enter, they may have to pay an unimaginable price.
Freedom becomes terrifying only when people understand both the benefits of unfreedom and the harms of freedom.
Fate as a Protective Mechanism
What fatalism determines, in my view, is the ceiling of the floor each person can ultimately touch. It sounds cruel, but perhaps this is precisely fate’s protective mechanism.
There was once a person in my extended family whom everyone called “mentally ill.” When I was in middle school, he was often compared with me because we were the same age. Because of that illness, his perception of the world was abstract, and he had remarkable artistic talent. Before his diagnosis, he almost became a model for me: good grades, artistic ability, and a background in a military family. His future seemed already laid out.
Then one day, adults in the family warned me to avoid him as much as possible. I only learned the reason years later: he had escaped from a psychiatric hospital. All the relatives avoided mentioning it as if avoiding a plague.
His madness shattered that military family almost overnight. After the elder who had served as a public security bureau chief passed away, the whole family scattered. I never heard news of that child again. The story stopped at its most dramatic point and turned into several different versions of a fate story.
At the height of that family’s prosperity, almost the entire family’s cognition revolved around power and money. When other relatives asked them for help, they openly discussed exchanges of power and money. The most extreme example was the old lady of that family. On the very day her mother was cremated, she demanded that my grandmother divide their mother’s inheritance equally at once, so there would be no disputes later. I have to admit, it was the most efficient way to handle it. But it also limited them to the view from the second floor.
Then someone appeared in that family who could climb to the fourth floor in one breath. People living on the second floor could not understand what happened on the fourth. They might even see it as dangerous. So in the end, they chose to use force to drag the person on the fourth floor back to the second, back to a world they were capable of understanding.
Fatalism determined that this family could only see the second-floor scenery. That, to me, is the so-called protective mechanism: at least by sacrificing one “madman,” the family preserved its overall stability.
There is another example. An assistant once told us in our final conversation that she felt like a frog living at the bottom of a well. During the years we knew her, we had indeed brought her to the mouth of the well and shown her the outside world. But she also realized that we were not, in essence, the same kind of animal. We told her she could go look at a pond not far from the well. To us, that pond might be one jump away. To her, reaching even that farthest distance from the well would require enormous effort.
Was she truly born a “frog”? Perhaps. From the perspective of bazi or astrology, everyone seems to have their own limitations. Even whether a person suffers from internal friction, when they awaken, and what causes that awakening can all appear strangely predetermined. But there is another question worth examining: perhaps this is the happiest way for her to live. Just as in the debate between Socrates and Hume, not everyone is suited to fully examine their own life. For some people, doing so only turns life into exhausting self-consumption.
After she left, she later wrote something on social media:
I always feel that I don’t have much experience of the world. So whenever someone says I lack experience, I can’t help following that person to gain a little more. I used to think experience meant opportunity, seeing the world. But after being dragged into someone else’s world and covered in mud, I realized: the world is the world’s world. What does it really have to do with me?
So the real question is not how far she herself wanted to jump. It is that fatalism functioned as a final protective mechanism, preventing her from seeing floors she should not see, because those floors are full of danger and mud.
The Übermensch, Elitism, and Refined Self-Interest
With this in mind, it becomes easier to talk about the Übermensch and elitism.
Some may think that using floors as a metaphor, and saying that some people will never reach certain floors, is itself elitist. But elitism means something specific: the belief that a small minority of social elites, possessing knowledge, wealth, and status, should make political decisions and guide the direction of society.
The thing that determines whether a person can enter a certain floor is not that elites have locked the door. This is not the terrifying white room, where free speech and thought are restricted to manufacture obedient citizens. No elite and no political system can fully accomplish that. Choosing which floor to visit is precisely what Sartre calls freedom, and what I also regard as freedom. Because this freedom is filled with emptiness, people need the unity of knowledge and action to improve cognition and understand the rules of the world they inhabit.
Nietzsche’s Übermensch, like Sartre’s theory of freedom, is also a response to emptiness. Nietzsche declared that “God is dead.” After the collapse of morality and Christian faith, after nihilism arrives, he believed people should turn toward an active, affirmative nihilism, face the meanings and values within themselves, and build life according to those meanings.
There is one crucial judgment about freedom in the theory of the Übermensch: the Übermensch is absolutely free, self-sufficient, and selfish.
First, I believe absolute freedom exists. For example, you can pick up a weapon and kill your enemy. The problem is that in a civilized society, this freedom is restricted. But I still think such restriction is a kind of cost demonstration. If you can bear the cost, such as the maximum penalty of death, then killing is also a freedom. It is we, as modern people, who have chosen a way of life based on relative freedom.
Second, self-sufficiency is what that earlier comment pointed to: an internal self-sustaining drive, such as a belief that regards oneself as god; and an external self-sustaining drive, meaning creativity that does not rely on outside authority.
Finally, selfishness. This is not necessarily a derogatory word. It is simply that people’s habitual thinking treats selfishness as “bad,” and therefore assumes the Übermensch is no different from egoism. But the definition of selfishness is interesting: it means placing one’s own considerations or interests above those of others. In other words, for selfishness to be established, another person’s interests must be used as the reference point.
If a celebrity does not donate money to earthquake victims, is that selfish? Of course not. Who the hell made donating mandatory? You can see that most people use selfishness as a relative evaluation system to judge those who have not adjusted their interests according to public expectation. In the context of the Übermensch, because freedom and self-sufficiency exist at the same time, “selfishness” is an external relative judgment. Internally, the Übermensch has already formed a highly complete system of self-consistency.
This is where things become interesting. The theory of the Übermensch, elitism, and refined self-interest are not scripts arranged by fate. They are choices made through free will, and each has its own cost. The Übermensch may be judged as “selfish.” Elitism requires more effort, and may even require the fatalistic support of being born into the right conditions. Refined self-interest looks like the easiest option, and it can indeed produce the concrete result called “benefit.”
So stop saying you had no choice. Having no choice is also a choice made by free will. It means you chose not to resist, and accepted the option that seemed to carry the lowest cost.
Free Will That Cannot Withstand Examination
Return to the Chinese mother living in Germany. She publicly showed off how she used power exchange to secure a kindergarten place for her daughter. That was her choice, and therefore she naturally had to face questions about her behavior.
What she did cleverly was shift the cause outward. Her implied argument was roughly this:
- institutional failure is prior to individual behavior;
- procedural justice may not produce substantive fairness;
- intervention by power may be the only solution.
Then the real question appears: who decided that she had to live in Germany? Did fascists hold a gun to her head and force her to settle there? If Germany’s institutional defects are already so “rotten,” then she can choose to start over somewhere else. Will she make that choice? Obviously not. Then she must accept the cost of living in Germany.
If you can understand this theory of cost, then you have already climbed to a higher floor than the refined self-interest represented by that mother.