Herd-instinct#
Summary#
The herd-instinct is an innate need for obedience that has developed in mankind through millennia of living in groups where the many obey the few. This instinct manifests as an unconditional drive to follow commands from parents, teachers, laws, and public opinion, and has become so dominant that even rulers suffer from bad conscience and must pretend they too are merely obeying higher orders. Nietzsche argues that the preponderance of this instinct over the art of command explains the limitation and retrogression of human development, and that contemporary European morality is essentially herding-animal morality elevated to the status of the only acceptable morality.