The Ubermensch For Manic Pixie Dream Girls: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

In this raw, no-holds-barred episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect how Abraham Maslow repackaged Nietzsche’s Übermensch (Übermensch) into the modern, feel-good concept of “self-actualization” at the top of his Hierarchy of Needs—turning a call for radical self-ownership and moral creation into an elitist, therapy-gated path of perpetual vague self-improvement, peak experiences, and manic-pixie-dream-girl aesthetics.

We explore why the original Übermensch demands you build your own moral framework (independent of society, culture, or ancestors), reject herd morality, and embrace responsibility—while Maslow’s version lets the wealthy progressive elite pat themselves on the back without real introspection. Bonus rants on: the pyramid of sin (Maslow’s hierarchy normalizing indulgence), why strong-willed people are the true “inclusive” ones, Star Wars force analogies gone wrong, and why self-ownership beats self-acceptance every time.

If you’ve ever felt gaslit by positive psychology, therapy culture, or the urban monoculture—this episode is for you. Check out our book The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life (free ebook + audiobook for subscribers) for tools to build your own value system.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] He basically tried to combine the Uber minch with the aesthetics of the manic pixie dream girl.

oh, I like to listen to the songs in my head. I’m sorry, I paid the cab driver in buttons.

When did you first suspect you were dating a manic, pixie dream girl? On her first date and. She said she wanted pancakes for dinner, but I felt alive. But then after a few months, and she can’t feed herself, she can’t pay bills.

She just wonders at the marvel. Every moment, we got married in a bouncy castle.

Do you think it’s possible to ever be truly. In the moment, the Native Americans believe everything is alive.. I told him the best place to see.

The night sky is laying in the middle of the street. It’s the flattest place there. She does seem happy. Happy as she can be, I suppose.

Malcolm Collins: Maslow flips this. Self-actualization is achievable through [00:01:00] education, therapy, supportive environments and personal effort. Not a heroic struggle alone. . So no.

What is actually said here, it’s saying, the Uber minch is elitist because to become an Uber minch, an individual has to overcome suffering.. Who has the potential to be self-actualize if self-actualization requires the fulfillment of all of the lower states of the hierarchy of needs?

Only the elite

and the fun thing about Laslo system. It is a system that makes everyone who is wealthy and sees a therapist think that they’re already at the top of it, and it explains to the rich progressive, who doesn’t want to think about why the poor have different world frameworks than them.

Mm-hmm. It helps them not think about it.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be [00:02:00] talking about the links between the Uber Minch as developed and defined by niche and the rebranding of the term self-actualization into its modern definition, which was done by Abraham Maslow of Maslow Hierarchy of Needs Face.

And you’re

Simone Collins: referring, you’re referring to Nietzsche. He’s just gonna call him Niche. Go with it guys.

Malcolm Collins: It, I don’t, Frederick Niet words have no place on this American tongue. Okay. They, they would dirty my mouth. Anyway, we have another episode. If you want to understand how Maslow rebranded the term self-actualization and how his rebranding was so toxic and largely destroyed the field of psychology and is the seedbed of the urban monoculture.

That is not what we’re gonna be focusing on in this episode. What we’re gonna be focusing on in this episode is, Maslow was pretty explicit in this, in some of his works. Self-actualization was a rebranding, an [00:03:00] explicit rebranding of the concept of the Uber Mitch, but it was rebranded to be palatable to a broadly progressive urban monoculture cultural perspective.

And through the rebranding, in a way, it became an inversion of itself. I think he thought he was just making little tweaks to it and not realizing that he was actually retooling the core of what it meant. Now, broadly speaking, I’m gonna go over what these two mean. And then we’re gonna go over how they contrast with each other in understanding and what we as individuals can take away from this contrast to understand how we can live meaningful lives.

So

Simone Collins: it is so crazy. Can you imagine when they first introduced this to you, like in your college psychology class, they’re like, oh, yeah, like there’s high Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and at the top it’s, it’s basically nietzche iss, [00:04:00] Uber mench. But let’s not talk about that. I’m not gonna, no, let’s not talk about that.

Malcolm Collins: The good thing about Nietzsche’s Uber mech, one of, one of the best things that contrast it was a hierarchy of needs and, and self-actualization is that the definition when you boil it down is actually pretty clear. And it’s, it’s, it’s not like vague, just a bunch of positive things.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: You are an Uber minch if.

You do not get your morality from your culture.

Simone Collins: Oh, so you’re not like, okay,

Malcolm Collins: society. Yeah. If you pick up what you think is right and wrong, because other people told you this is what’s right, and this is what’s wrong, you are not an Uber Mitch.

Simone Collins: Okay?

Malcolm Collins: If you develop what is right versus wrong, because you personally sat down and saw it through.

Now, it’s not saying that you reject morality or you embrace nihilism. It’s actually a specific [00:05:00] refutation of that.

Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has. Use that freedom. Make up your own mind.

Malcolm Collins: There is a way to say society is wrong or society isn’t necessarily right. As we’d see in the pragmatist guide to life, we do not live at the moral nexus of history. Yeah. You cannot assume that just because you, there’s a, a moral understanding today, and this is true of all people in the past.

Wherever you look in the past, there is going to be. Something that they did that today, we consider Absolutely Mortifyingly. Amoral.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And there are gonna be things that we do today that people in the future might find mortifyingly, amoral, like

Simone Collins: eat meat. That’s the most common conclusion.

Malcolm Collins: But that’s the, that’s the easy one I can think of, right.

Especially once lab grown meat is really easy to do. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Future people are gonna be like, how were you able to swallow that? Whereas we see bacon cooking and we’re like, Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So yeah. So I, I, I, and, and people can be like, well, no, morality [00:06:00] moves in like one direction. And I’m like, okay, well suppose you are of this progressive mindset and you think that there have been periods in history where, you know, I go to, let’s say.

A slave owner in the south or something like that, right? Mm-hmm. And I point to earlier periods of European history where like same sex relationships were more acceptable. And they’re like, well, those people were clearly evil. Look, society is always moving towards progress. And yet today, the things that had been normalized in the slave owning South but were less normalized during that period, but more normalized during earlier parts of European history.

And note, I’m not saying here that same-sex relationships were ever totally normalized. Like the, the them being totally normalized in Rome or Greece is just inaccurate. But there were forms of same-sex relationships that were more normalized than during height of slave. That, that they would say like, okay, well then maybe it goes in like a wave or something.

It’s like, no, you just need to, there are going to be things that are normal today that people in the future are gonna find mortifying. [00:07:00] So niche says you have a. Responsibility to not just accept morality, which is, I think interesting in that it goes against a lot of modern rightist philosophy. And that a lot of modern rightist philosophy says learn from your ancestors, embrace your culture.

Mm-hmm. Where Nietzsche says, no, learn from and evolve that culture into something better. That is,

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It’s important to start with because I think a lot of people get the Uber mi wrong. They think it’s some weird racial hierarchy something or I, I do not know what they think it is. They, they, I think they think it’s like a genetically engineered person.

I sort of see this, this or, or the height of like German blood perfection and it’s like, no, that, that never had anything to do with it. That

Simone Collins: would, if I broadly. Were to model the leftist commentators that I constantly listen to online. I think what they would vaguely conjure in their minds is a [00:08:00] proto edge Lord.

And that is what an Uber mench is. And there’s no such thing as someone who’s actually like advanced. It’s just someone who like actively. Edge, lordy, or they would call themselves heterodox, if that makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s funny because they’re actually kind of, right. Yeah. It’s about somebody who defines their own moral truths, because that’s the only, if you’re following a form of morality, like obviously you are better than the pure nihilist if you, if you follow some moral framework.

But if you follow that moral framework only because somebody else told you this is what’s right and wrong, you’re, you’re patently lower on a global moral hierarchy than somebody who developed their own moral norms by putting thought into it. Right? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Well, and and to be fair, Malcolm and I are very, very passionate about this.

Before we knew what Che’s philosophy was all about, because we just didn’t study it,

Malcolm Collins: I thought he was an edge Lord. And then I saw that, I was like, that’s actually a really good definition.

Simone Collins: Well, this was after we published our first book called The Pragmatist Guide to Life, which is 100% about [00:09:00] this. It is saying.

I don’t care what you optimize for in life, morally and logistically, I just care that you show your work and here’s a guide you thinking like thoughts, experiments around common potential, things you may wanna optimize, be it hedonism or serving God or any variety of other things. And we just want people to actually take ownership of that thought process.

So we 100% respect. What he’s doing here and we like it. So, okay. I like this so far. So you’re, I mean, I don’t see then how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is so bad, if that’s kind of the end goal.

Malcolm Collins: Well, because he took all that out of it.

Simone Collins: What?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. He, he

Simone Collins: took it. Wait, so he’s like, I like this concept, but

what,

Malcolm Collins: what, he liked the concept of like the elite philosophical form of human Right.

Simone Collins: Okay. Okay. He was

Malcolm Collins: taking some degree of self ownership. He just didn’t like the actual self ownership part. And

Simone Collins: so, okay, the,

Malcolm Collins: the, the, I think if I’m going to view Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and self actualization is he [00:10:00] handles it disfavorably, I would say what it really is, is just self-acceptance.

Just sort of like you are okay with your place in the world, which you can definitionally be at any point, right? But he’s like, no, you, you have to have all this lower stuff. See our other video on this. And then once you have all that, then you can be okay with where you are in the world and what you have in the world.

And that, that is it, it’s, it’s it’s self-acceptance, self-satisfaction. Now, if you’re going to then take the counter perspective to this and actually know it’s more sophisticated than that, let’s look at what I’ll take an an AI’s sort of rebuttal on this so you can get an understanding of how somebody might steal man his position against that.

Okay. They would say that that’s actually more about esteem needs level four and not self-actualization. Level five, where esteem needs involve feelings of accomplishment, confidence, independence, respect for others, and a stable, positive self-image. This can [00:11:00] include pride in achievement or feeling valued, and it’s more about elevation of the self.

EG, . I like who I am because I’ve succeeded. And I say here, well, yeah, but there’s different types of self-acceptance. And that wasn’t the type that I would be talking about here. But let’s look at what, what they would say as a counter self-actualization is it’s I te of just general self-acceptance.

Right? Masley defined it as a quote unquote desire to become more and more than one is to become everything that one is capable of becoming. Which you can see one how that builds on the concept of the Uber Mitch. Right? Like clearly he liked oh, you know, building yourself, but he removes the concrete definition.

This

Simone Collins: is the substance. There’s no point in building yourself if it’s not just something meaningful, but he just took that away.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And just makes it self,

Simone Collins: it’s the road to nowhere. It’s so stupid

Malcolm Collins: about a sort of perpetual self-improvement without any definition as to what [00:12:00] better is. So,

Simone Collins: although I feel like that’s so.

Maybe it makes sense that this just seems so much like the path that people take. Like I remember so many of the classmates that you had at, at Stanford’s Business School, which this is one of the hardest to get into schools in the entire world. These are incredibly competent, smart, well connected, lucky and well-resourced people.

And so many of them really didn’t seem to have any moral framework or set of values that they really, they didn’t care about. And

Malcolm Collins: I I, that, that actually shocked me when I hit the halls of power in

Simone Collins: society. There were some Israelis and Mormons, I’m gonna say who actually did, I mean, they, they weren’t, I would say like Nietzche and or Uber Manchi in their in because they, this was their default culture.

Maybe they thought through it and come to own it themselves as well. Still, their big thing was just, I’m doing the best thing, I’m doing the correct thing. It was just no, no, no. Perpetual optimization. No.

Malcolm Collins: So you, you think like this means intelligence, that the Uber bench means intelligence. It it does not.

So, you know, Simone got her graduate [00:13:00] degree at Cambridge. I got mine at Stanford. You know, we’ve been in sort of the halls of power in society and the, you know, Peter Thiel, secret societies and everything like that, right? Like, and so I’ve encountered the, the best and brightest of what the institutions that are generally thought of as accumulating the best and brightest bring.

My first question, and this is Simone knows this from me, from our first date, to somebody who’s always like, okay. Like, what are you about? Like what are you attempting to do with your life? Yeah. What’s your purpose? Like, what are you here for? What do you, because I, I need to know how I can align my goals and their goals, and if there’s a useful alignment or if there’s not a useful alignment.

Simone Collins: Yep.

Malcolm Collins: The number of people who, who sputter and start outputting platitudes, when you put that question to them, which I think should be the number one question any individual considers mm-hmm. Is astonishingly high. In these, in these halls of power. I’d say if you are talking about an institution like a Stanford MBA, because that’s, you know, [00:14:00] the, the most exclusive of the, the institutes that we’ve been talking about here, maybe one in 20 people who go through have thought through.

What their purpose in life is and why they exist.

Simone Collins: The rest is just optimization. I am gonna be the best. So I need to go to the best school, get the best grades, earn the most money. We superlatives all the way down, but there’s, there’s no point to it. It’s just whatever is the most prestigious or seen as the highest achieving, then that’s what they’ll do.

You know, climb up to the highest rank of whatever organization, and then if that organization gets capped out, well then I guess I have to run for political office. And then because the government is a bigger organization, I guess I’ll do that. And then after that, who knows what, you know, I’ll be a philanthropist and, and basically pull the strings of multiple organizations by being their primary source of funding.

It just keeps going.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And this is how people in positions of power get so easily captured by mimetic, contagions, like the urban monoculture that [00:15:00] you as a, I don’t know if you watching this, have thought through your own value system but you as a potential Uber minch me look at them and say, wait, but can’t they see how stupid and self-contradictory this value system is? Like, can’t they see the long-term consequences of adhering to this value system? Have they not had an single iota of internal self-reflection about what matters in life and what they live for? And the real answer is, and I say this very unfortunately, it’s, it’s no, they have not they, they, they may even find the concept of doing that offensive because it implies.

You know, sort of self ownership, which, which the urban monoculture, tgt is bad. Because if it can teach you that, then you don’t end up reflecting on these ideas. The next point I make about the Uber inch before I go further here, which is important in this, in this world, is you might be like, oh, that’s quite arrogant to call yourself to Uber inch.

You know, the Uber Mitch is a simply defined thing. Did you build your [00:16:00] own moral framework or did you take it from an outside source?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And it doesn’t

Simone Collins: matter if you are the wealthiest person in the world or impoverished, right? This has nothing to do with wealth.

Malcolm Collins: It doesn’t matter if you’re a genius or like literally mentally handicapped.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: You can be an Uber Mitch. So, so I, that’s really

Simone Collins: important. There’s nothing elitist about it at all, actually, or it’s not even like. I mean it is, it absolutely can come from a place of superior.

Malcolm Collins: Well, there is something elitist about it, and it’s elitist in our conception of it, and it was elitist in Nietzsche’s conception of it.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Uber minch are morally superior to non Uber minch. Which is I think just an objectively and obviously true thing. As soon as you think through it, somebody who has taken ownership and saw it through a value system, even if it’s exactly the same as somebody else’s value system, is doing something of higher moral caliber by following that value system than the person who’s just following what everyone else says is right and wrong.

Mm-hmm. Because they’ve taken on this a, a, a, a additional layer of ver [00:17:00] moral verification. Hmm,

Simone Collins: okay.

Malcolm Collins: Somebody could be like, well, why was that moral verification necessary? Wasn’t that just like self masturbatory work if it ended up at the same place as society’s value? Like no, it wasn’t, because it may not have, and if it didn’t, it would lead to a completely different trajectory of this in person’s entire moral prism through which they see reality.

So, so it is elitist in that it does rank people into a scale of moral hierarchy. But it isn’t elitist in that only the mentally superior can engage with it. It’s more like the mentally superior in terms of I don’t know, being willing to be critical of society or being self-critical. That, that, that puts you in that category, not, not iq.

So back to what it’s saying, self-actualization is here. It is less about feeling good about yourself in a static way, and more about growth, authenticity, and actualizing innate potentials. It includes traits like realistic and [00:18:00] accurate perception of reality, including one’s self without illusions or denial.

Self-acceptance, accepting flaws without shame or defensiveness, but not complacency, autonomy and independence from external approval, creativity, spontaneity, and quote unquote peak experiences, moments of profound joy, insight, or transcendence. Now, note here, what you’ll see in some of these, some of these carry parts of the Uber min within them, right?

Autonomy and independence from external approval is sort of key to building your own moral framework, right? But then other of them are just completely. Like cued, urban monoculture, creativity spontaneity and peak experiences. What does that have to do with actualization? Right? Like what, what does that have to do with like living [00:19:00] as, that has to do with being a manic, pixie dream girl.

He basically tried to combine the Uber minch with the aesthetics of the manic pixie dream girl.

Simone Collins: Yeah. What do you think he was going for there? Just hedonism or something else, some kind of aesthetic or some kind of cultural trend at the time?

Malcolm Collins: So I think what he was trying to go is w with this was to say this uber wrench concept has a lot of baggage, but I want to create, because people love creating a categoried framework of society.

Let’s create a category framework of society. If you’d like to see some of ours, you can check out like our life stages and stuff like that, videos. If you have this category, framework of society and you have something at the top of it you, you, you then look to other systems that have similar things and the two systems that he very obviously pulled pretty hard from to the point of pla authorization is combining the Uber minch.

Twisted through a progressive lens [00:20:00] whiz the Buddha. And, and we talked about that a lot in the last episode there. There’s clearly a lot of Buddhist inspiration in the modern concept of self-actualization. It’s just this thing that is definitionally the best and that if you have to ask how it’s.

Qualitatively or quantitatively different from other states, that’s just proof that you don’t have it. And when you have it, then you’ll know. But because you’re asking about it, then you don’t know. I

Simone Collins: think that’s so much the, oh, as long as you want it, you can never have it. You have to let go completely.

Malcolm Collins: No, I know. I won’t even say that. It’s, it’s one of those, like in our video where we talk about like the lie of love, we point out that like romantic love as people describe it, probably doesn’t exist, but like normal people can’t get away with saying that because then people will be like, well, then you live in a loveless marriage.

Like, ha ha, look at you. Right? So you’ve gotta pretend that love this, this separate romantic attachment as an emotional set rather than as a commitment exists. And and I think that people pointed [00:21:00] out when, when we said that very accurately, that the Bible understood that, right? Like that love is about a choice, not an involuntary emotional state.

That’s just so much more awesome than other emotions. Like when they say love your neighbor as yourself, you know, they’re not telling them to have this emotion towards your neighbor. They’re telling you to treat them in a certain way. And when somebody commits to love and honor their wife, love is the same kind of word as honor in that sentence, right?

It, it means perform a duty to the person not feel a way about the person. But to continue here with traits that the self-actualized man has problem centered focus, tracking issues effectively rather than ego protection. I just love that sounds so Karen. And deep meaningful relationships without possessiveness which again, seems like you see how we go from there to the world of polyamory, right?

Like. [00:22:00] If you get jealous when your partner sleeps with other people, which is giving them happiness and you love them, right? Why are you saying that they can’t do that then? Right? They would say, right? Like, mm-hmm. You’re not self-actualize in that sense. You prove to yourself, yourself, actualization by getting cut, by allowing your partner to sleep with other people, right?

And I, I think where they going with that? The, the point being is, is you can see how it’s melding these ideas together. But, and, and I’ll note here that, that the, an area of overlap is that Maslow also says that self-actualization involves accurate self knowledge and humility. Alright, so, to continue, and I’ll note here, this is coming from Maslow himself because a lot of people are like, well, that just sounds like you’re describing a narcissist, right?

Like a really self-centered narcissist. And so he had to have, you know, his boilerplate argument about why this isn’t just an entire world [00:23:00] framing about how to be a better narcissist, right? And he emphasized itself actual pe actualized people where actually not narcissistic. They have a strong sense of reality testing, humility and resistance to self-deception.

Narcissism by contrast, involve distorted self-perception and a fragmented ego defensiveness, which are antithetical to self-actualization. On selfishness. Maslow noted that someone self-actualizing , often fuses, selflessness and usefulness into a higher utility. They pursue personal growth, but this naturally leads to good for others.

In later frameworks, he added transcendence as a level beyond humanity slash nature slash the universe, getting very Buddhism influence here and helping others grow to explicitly counter any self only interpretation thoughts.[00:24:00]

Simone Collins: This just seems so, seems so pointless, like on on what basis did he choose to, to add these? I feel like this is one of those things similar to all of these childhood wellbeing studies focusing on, on measures like self-esteem. Why self-esteem does that correlate with better health, longer lifespan signs of flourishing, like rates of marriage or wealth creation or family formation, the number of kids they have, like, I just don’t see what this correlates with and, and why he would choose it as a desired outcome.

Because I don’t see it as being correlated with particularly correlating with any sort of desired outcome.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I know, I, I, I see that and I think that we can see that this is the case, by the way, that he developed his theory. He just looked at a bunch of people that mainstream society respects and then boil that down.

And what he got was a system [00:25:00] of values that looks a lot like mainstream society’s value systems, but surprise, surprise, that is more palatable to an average person in mainstream society because they don’t need to adapt. Right? They’re like, oh yeah, that’s, this works. Anyway, to continue here. Sorry, I’m feeling a little lightheaded.

I don’t know what’s going on.

Simone Collins: You’re not sleeping enough. That’s probably part of it.

Malcolm Collins: Oh. But I gotta get work to,

Simone Collins: yeah, maybe.

Maybe though. Maybe

Malcolm Collins: there’s a reason nobody else does fully edited daily podcasts that involve independent research instead of watching somebody else’s dream.

Simone Collins: Well that, and, and you know, the, the other full-time projects you have and also your

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. Reality fabricators really coming along. The agents.

Yes. It’s I mean it’s, it’s, as far as I know, working pretty bloodless now, except for like a problem with reroll from computers. Which is very exciting. Very exciting too. And the advertisements are starting and Yay. Yeah. Yay. And the audio feature is really [00:26:00] cool if you haven’t tried it. It’s a so fun to do inexpensive AI chats.

‘cause we’re not actually have it read by the AI itself. It’s read by a separate AI system. So you could do it in multiple languages really well too.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Here we’re going to go into, a deeper dive into the concept of the Uber Mitch.

Okay. And then we’ll contrast the two and see how they, they relate to each other and are in a way inversions to each other. If they were a dark side and a light side of the force, they almost feel like to me, right?

Simone Collins: They do.

Malcolm Collins: Except the Nietzsche one is a dark side, which is a good side in this analogy.

I mean, I think in most analogies because they’re actually, I, I, I mean, I think actually. I almost wanna do a reworking of how the force is interpreted to show that the light side of the force is actually evil. Oh, that’s gonna make a great episode. And the dark side is actually good. It’s just that the way it’s interpreted in Star Wars always sort of forces dark siders to take on these horrible actions.

But if you look at it completely pragmatically to say a person. Decided [00:27:00] to use the force against the force’s own will for whatever was good for evolving humanity and moving civilization forwards.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: That person would be a dark cider because they would be not obeying the will of a what? A non demographic democratically elected God entity that gets to tell an independent branch of like ninjas who just killed people on the streets.

Like, what is moral and what is not moral? That doesn’t, that doesn’t sound, that sounds like slave morality to me, man.

Simone Collins: Yeah. On, on whose authority does the force get to govern all humans? When the force

Malcolm Collins: didn’t even Right, but who, who voted for this? Why? Who says the force is intrinsically good?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Like

Simone Collins: seriously. I mean, the, the only force that we know to be universal in our universe is entropy. Is that inherently good? I don’t know, man.

Malcolm Collins: It’s not, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s pure evil and that the MIT chlorines, I, I also love that because we know that the force is [00:28:00] controlled by like living organisms that are symbiotes with humans and live in our cells.

So humanity who follows the light side is literally slaves to the hive mind of a parasitic organism.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I guess the analogy is to be like, well, my gut microbiome tells me to this, the toxoplasmosis my subject

Malcolm Collins: to the toxoplasma. They literally obey the toxoplasmosis.

Simone Collins: Yeah. My boys

Malcolm Collins: do an episode. Do it.

They need to get their horse dewormer, you know,

Simone Collins: they need to the, the jet. I need ivermectin.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Anyway, continuing here. So, he introduced the concept of the Uber Minch in his 1883 to 1885 philosophical novel, thus spoke raster. It’s a central idea in philosophy, representing the idea that a human who transcends traditional morality, societal norms, and human weaknesses to create new values and affirm life fully.

Mm-hmm. Now note here how this definition sounds a lot [00:29:00] squier than the definition I gave. And that’s because this is how it is commonly interpreted by people, even though that’s not how it’s actually laid out. Because these, like once you define your own morality, all of these other positive things come to you.

And I agree with that as well. You do get a lot of positive things from taking complete ownership over your own moral framework. Yeah. But yeah. But, but he, I think. Especially the people who have built on him went a little mystical, was what those nice things are afterwards, right? Like you then become a axiomatic good person where no, there’s a lot of people who’ve defined their own moral framework and we’re still really, they, they came up with horrible moral frameworks, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Actually a a lot of the people who have read our book, the Pima Dis Guide to Life and reported back to us of come up with conclusions that we wouldn’t come to, but we’re actually glad ‘cause it means that the book is not biased.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Which was our goal. But can you believe there was ever a time in my life where I strove to be unbiased?

Simone Collins: What’s what you tried to go for with the first [00:30:00] four? Books. So

Malcolm Collins: yeah, four books out there that you could read written by Simone and Malcolm that are like, A dollar

Simone Collins: doesn’t have an ideological agenda, aside from just trying to make you more equipped and informed. Can you imagine?

Those are the days.

Malcolm Collins: So the Uber minch emerged in a world where God is dead, as niche said. Traditional religious and moral foundations have collapsed requiring individuals to overcome nihilism through self-mastery and creativity, and the will to power an innate drive to grow, dominate, and shape one’s existence, niche contextualized it as an evolutionary leap.

Not a biological superman, but a psychological and cultural one that embraces eternal recurrence living in as if one’s life repeats forever. Rejects herd mentality, slave morality, and embodies the idea of fate, love of fate. You know, this is interesting, the idea that your life repeats forever and you should [00:31:00] live as if that we argue for something similar, but different where we say that because the timeline has already played out.

We believe like, like time is just like distance or anything like that. Yes, yes. Another framework and the future is, is predestined, or all possible futures are predestined. Mm-hmm. Because of that, every moment in time is infinite. And therefore you have infinite moral responsibility for how you choose to burn every moment.

And the most important decision you can make is the framework you use and how you build the framework you use for making those individual choices. Which was the point of the book that we mentioned, the Prag Sky to Life Al also, it’s an audio book. If you get the ebook for free, you can just download the audiobook.

So, normally when you’re talking about the Uber minch, the, the key traits would be radical individualism and self overcoming rejection of pity equality, and conventional ethics in favor of aristocratic values. You can already tell this is getting the MAGA people [00:32:00] excited here, right? You know, joyful affirmation of life’s chaos, suffering and impermanence.

And then creativity as a form of power. The Uber minch legislates values for themselves and potentially others. So. You can see this is very psychologically helpful compared to this other framing. Yeah. It, it’s much more about personal responsibility without adding in all of these additional wiggle room.

Definitionally, you should feel good about yourself if you indulge in X or y you know, ex extremist self-image. Right?

Simone Collins: Like, it seems like this is mostly about being at a, being effective at whatever matters to you. And caveat, whatever matters to you is something that you personally take ownership of You.

No one, you’re not doing what anyone else told you to do. You just, you decided what’s best and you’re doing that. That sounds so good. I want that for everyone.

Malcolm Collins: All right. So, how are they actually different from each other, and where would people, like, where [00:33:00] would Maslow be like, oh my God, this needed to be rethought because this comes downstream of nietzschean philosophy. Right? Yeah. If I said package this. The positive psychology community elitism versus inclusivity, and I’d argue that in actuality, the Uber minch is more inclusive and less elitist.

Then self-actualization, but we’ll get to how in a second. Okay. But what a, what an outsider would say is Nietzsche’s Uberin is a rare aristocratic and anti egalitarian, reserved for the strong-willed few who can endure isolation, create new values and potentially scorn.

Or lead the heard the last men complacent masses. It’s forged in crisis suffering and radical self overcoming often with Tempus edge towards ordinary humanity. Maslow flips this. Self-actualization is a universal human potential [00:34:00] achievable by anyone. Once basic needs are met, he estimated one to 2% fully reach it.

But the pathway is open through education, therapy, supportive environments and personal effort. Not a heroic struggle alone. It’s for the democratic age. I think teachers, therapists, managers, and everyday people pursuing growing. And I’d like to point out how twisted this understanding actually is. So no.

What is actually said here, it’s saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You see, the Uber minch is elitist because to become an Uber minch, an individual has to overcome suffering. They have to overcome trials. They have to live a privileged existence to be self-actualized. All you need is an elite education and having all of your needs met all of your

Simone Collins: food.

Oh, don’t forget seeing the therapist even for really well-resourced, [00:35:00] like, okay, wealthy people, we know seeing a therapist is really expensive. So that,

Malcolm Collins: but what’s ironic is as soon as you put it like that, you realize, oh, the huddled masses is who have the potential to become the Uber Mitch. Yeah. Who has the potential to be self-actualize if self-actualization requires the fulfillment of all of the lower states of the hierarchy of needs?

Only the elite self-actualization within Maslow’s system is definitionally reserved for the elite and then gated through elitist institutions like. Therapy and elite education.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: I also find it interesting that the one thing I would think all humans have access to, while not everyone is born equally intelligent mm-hmm.

I think all men have access to, or should be judged by their lack of access to [00:36:00] their own personal willpower. Right? Yes, absolutely. It, it, it says it’s reserved for the strong-willed few being strong-willed. If it is genetic, like let’s assume it is genetic, it is still worth me scorning the individual who is not strong-willed because they will take actions that are immoral at a higher rate and scorn is used to prevent them gaining power, which they will use to take immoral actions.

Mm-hmm. When we make the concept of recognizing, which you can see here in this AI is doing of recognizing, and I think Maslow Maslow did from the perspective of the urban monoculture. That strong will is a negative trait to, to say if I recognize strong will in others.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And I lauded them for that, that is a negative thing for me to do.

Right. Ranking humanity on the amount [00:37:00] of self-responsibility that they are taking in terms of building their own moral frameworks versus ranking humanity by, and I love the entire hierarchy of needs. Pyramid is meant to sort of hand wave that this is being done. Ranking humanity by wealth which is fundamentally what the hierarchy of needs does because it monetizes the things that you need.

It creates a food period of, of basically stuff you need to buy, experiences, friendships, dating, romance, sex, everything like that. Whereas what the Uber Minch does is it says, no, you can just go straight in and get this stuff yourself. You, you can learn to control all of these other needs while building a moral framework and living your life around that framework.

Thoughts Before I go further here, Simone?

Simone Collins: Hmm. Nothing in particular that what you’re saying [00:38:00] makes sense just. I’m just shocked by all of this still.

Malcolm Collins: I also like how it’s like, no, no, no. Anyone can be a self-actualized. They just need therapy. Just go to therapy. Right?

Simone Collins: So therapy, I really, the, the whole you need therapy in order to be a functional or acceptable human thing is so disturbing to me.

Malcolm Collins: Look at our videos where we talk about how modern therapy has become a cult. I used to be a trained psychologist. I am very familiar with the field. Everything they do now is stuff we were told. Do not do this like this. This will cause dependence.

Simone Collins: But, but a lot of this, you can understand why this is the case when you look at incentives, therapists who systematically are very, very good at getting people who have problems, what they need, and helping them get to a good place mentally.

Go out of business therapists who create codependency do really well who are gonna be the therapists left after 20, 30, 40, [00:39:00] 50 years of that the ones who create codependency and, and maintain your problems or better yet make them worse. So you have to up your hours. It’s, it’s just obvious. Then it would end up like this.

Malcolm Collins: And then what you get, and this is why the urban monoculture as an evolving sort of organic entity is so important. Then you can see how a profession like this could co-evolve with a mimetic set where the profession helps put more people in a mental state where they’re willing to accept and then dedicate their time, life and resources to proliferating this mimetic set.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Where that per mimetic set also. Funnels people into this profession, so they are symbiotic. And we talk about how you can also see this with parasites. We talk about all the parasites that can alter people’s sexuality and why we cannot talk about this right now. We cannot talk about how we know now from the research that there is a form of toxoplasmosis that alters people’s [00:40:00] sexual proclivities.

And that’s how it appears to be spreading. It’s going direct human to human now instead of through cats. And it, it, it makes people, for example, more, more attracted to the same sex. And it’s not the only thing that might be doing that. And that if you talk about something like toxoplasmosis, the toxoplasmosis might be literally co-evolving with the urban monoculture.

It reduces threat detection. Reducing threat detection is important. If you’re gonna join a culture where your own people are systematically going extinct, and you were importing a hostile foreign group, a normal person would say, what this seems like a big mistake. But if you have the thing in your brain that is telling mice to go where the cats are and do a little dance so they can eat you, it’s easy to see how it adopted the same circuitry.

To get the progressive to say, yeah, let’s bring the knife wielding man to my country, who is actively saying he wants to kill anyone who is like me. Which they, they often will. There was the case recently in the UK where the, the government in charge, like Stomberg government was [00:41:00] cheering, saying we won a major civil rights victory, bringing this guy back to the UK and freeing him from Egypt.

And he, he’d gotten arrested in Egypt and he had multiple tweets saying that he wanted all white people to die. He genuinely hated all white people, especially the English and the Dutch. Like they are cheering for bringing somebody into their country who actively is a genocide supporter of their people.

But and this is bringing the cat into your country, right? Like this is stupid. But the, the next inversion here that it sees. But I find that first inversion very interesting. But because they’re trying to hide from you from the truth of inclusivity and the reason why this can make sense to, from an elitist perspective.

Whether that’s AI that is often trained on elitist data or to the type of person who you’re going to read because they have reach IE they’re writing books or they’re writing the New York Times. These are wealthy white women often. And so they have all their needs met. So, and everyone they know has all their needs met.

So when they [00:42:00] go out there and they say, well, self-actualization is available to everyone, whereas having willpower is not what they mean is everyone in their evoked set of friends. They know that if they told their set of friends, Hey, you have to take responsibility for the things you’re doing and saying you have to take moral responsibility for your own system.

They wouldn’t do that. And so they’re like, well, then this is an egalitarian thing because my friends wouldn’t engage with this. They don’t consider. If I’m actually talking about somebody who’s struggling in life and in an a, a, a disadvantaged position, which system is more accessible to them because they just genuinely don’t think about those people.

And I I think that this is also really important to understand when they’re talking about being a fem cell, when they’re talking about being a, you know, oh, you know, guy is. Just don’t get it when I, you know, hit on them or whatever. It’s so hard to date when they’re a GA girl. And what are you guys talking about?

When they’re saying all this, it makes perfect sense in their head because [00:43:00] genuinely do not see guys, they do not want to bone as human. If they do not look at a guy and think, I wanna bone that, that person does not clock as meaningfully human. The guy who, who bags her, her food at the grocery store, they are never considering that person when they’re talking about, guys just don’t date me.

Right? Like, they know that that person would date them, right? They’re, they’re saying this yeah,

Simone Collins: I guess the, the more implied statement is eight. Eight outta tens. Don’t take me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think the, well, but it’s, it’s more that morality and moral frameworks do not worry in terms of how they apply to anyone below the eight out of 10.

Mm-hmm. ‘cause I simply don’t consider them in anything I do in my life. So a, a great example of this is in cells versus gays, right? So, these women, right, they’re are gays. They may want to bone, right? Like a lot of women look at our ywe episode, right? Or we talking about this phenomenon, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And [00:44:00] so when you say to them something like, well, I, I do not think that. It is, it is good to normalize that people who are same sex attracted that the default pathway for them, or the only pathway available for them is going into same sex relationships. And to which they would gasp and say, but if they don’t go into same sex relationships, how are they gonna