11. Nietzsche's Will to Power and a new Hierarchy of Needs

In this episode of Becoming Übermensch, we plunge deeper into Nietzsche’s concept of will to power as the underlying principle of life, reinterpreting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs through this radical lens. We explore how all living organisms—plants, animals, and humans—express a form of power not through conscious intention, but through their very being itself. Human consciousness, Nietzsche argues, is simply the latest elaboration of a deeper, inexorable, evolved, physiological will.

This episode introduces a brand new Nietzschean model of human motivation:

1.Maintain Power – preserve the power you already have.

2.Accumulate Power – expand your capabilities, enhance your status, and amass resources.

3.Express Power – invest your power, revel in it, and discharge excess through creation, confrontation, and transformation.

From animal instincts to the most refined expressions of human culture; from dance, to drugs, to brute dominance, to philosophy itself, this show unpacks will to power as the hidden engine of everything we do. Provocative, and unsparing—we go beyond Maslow to uncover the real fundamental drivers of life.

Episode music choice: New Noise by Refused

YouTube 

Spotify

Apple

Transcript

Prologue:

Noon. Shadows have fled the obliterating sun as it attains to its limit. This heat would be luxuriant if one were idling listless under a broadleaved tree, but we are hiking, as we have been for many hours, and the way is steep, and our packs are heavy. It is laboured breathing and sweat rolling off our faces. The sustained toil keeps our eyes downcast, focused on placing one foot in front of the other, each of us lost in our own thoughts.  

Our path occasionally takes us through the blessed shade of woodland, across carpets of needles and crunching pine cones, but there are many open meadows that must be traversed too. In the stifling warmth, fat, droning bees make their rounds of the wildflowers—the slopes are abundantly speckled with blue gentian, golden cowslip, purple alpine snowbells, and scarlet poppies. Songbirds forage without cessation to fatten precious chicks stowed in secret nests. Bug-eyed lizards skitter away as we pass the boulders on which they bask.

We come upon an intersection of paths, with a well-kept trail leading off gently down the mountain. One could follow it and be back in the valley below by dusk. Nearby, small spring with crystal meltwater is burbling out of the mountainside—a most welcome sight. We drop our loads so that we might quench our thirsts and fill our canteens. The water is icy enough to induce a headache. Despite the heat of the day, an otherwise cloudless sky is encroached upon by a ominous thunderhead out towards the east.

A stone’s throw ahead of us we see one of the wild sheep that make their homes on this mountainside. This is a rare, confiding encounter with an animal usually so high-strung and shy of people. It stands strangely stiff, braced, legs quivering. The reason for its strange deportment becomes clear as a pink, wet, muddle of limbs suddenly tumbles from its rear. The newborn lamb, glistening in the sunlight, draped in shreds of amniotic membrane, raises its head, ears flicking, woozy, seeing its world for the first time, breathing its first breath. Its mother turns to tend to her offspring but in that brief moment it is already gone, swept up in the claws of a huge bird of prey which carries it off into the harsh glare of the white sky.

Intro and recap:

“Every animal, thus also la bête philosophe (the philosophical animal), instinctively strives for an optimum of favourable conditions under which it can vent its power completely and attain its maximum in the feeling of power; just as instinctively, and with a keenness of scent that “surpasses all understanding,” every animal abhors troublemakers and obstacles of every kind that do or could lay themselves across its path to the optimum” GM.3,7

Welcome back, to our new fortnightly show. I hope you are well. Last time explored Nietzsche’s idea of will to power as it manifests in human psychology—not just as a thirst for dominance, but as a deeper drive to overcome resistance, grow, and master challenges. This drive isn’t about any final goal or destination; it constantly seeks new obstacles to overcome. That’s why success is never enough—we adapt to it, and to feel fulfilled, we need to keep escalating the difficulty of our goals. This dynamic—resistance-reward, hedonic adaption, hedonic escalation—means that real fulfilment actually requires struggle and even suffering. Nietzsche insists we must rethink suffering not as something to avoid, but as something essential to a flourishing life.

We also made a crucial distinction: our instinctual drives—hunger, sex, achievement—aren’t purposeful. They evolved because they supported survival-for-reproduction, but they don’t consciously aim at that. Just like your sex drive isn’t trying to make a baby—it’s just trying to satisfy itself. Likewise, your will to power doesn’t “want” anything in particular; it just wants to act, to express itself, relentlessly. So, managing this drive well means learning to command ourselves—directing our chaotic bundle of desires with internal discipline. As Nietzsche put it: “He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.”

From there, we broadened the scope—looking beyond psychology to see how will to power plays out in the organic world. While non-human animals (and even plants and fungi) don’t have a psychological will to power like we do, they still exhibit power in their very struggle to live, grow, compete, feed, reproduce, and persist. These biological functions—hunting, digesting, mating, protecting offspring—are all, on Nietzsche’s view, expressions of will to power at work in life itself. Even rest and hygiene serve as strategies of conserving and protecting power.

Nietzsche’s claim is radical: all life is will to power. Not because living things “want” power in any conscious way, but because their very activity is power expressing itself. Even so-called symbiosis isn’t about cooperation in any moral sense—it’s a strategic equilibrium between competing forces. A deadlock created by a power-equivalence, not a partnership, not a friendship. The tree outcompeting others for sunlight, the parasite manipulating its host, the bacterium dividing and colonising its niche—these aren’t metaphors. They’re real power dynamics unfolding with no mind or purpose, just effect. It is only in the human that this natural directedness towards the expression of power becomes psychological, becomes purposive, begins to define goals for itself. That is the greater part of what we tend to call consciousness is—the rational, purposive strategising that takes place in order to meet the non-rational, non-purposive demands of the instincts. Remember Hume: “the reason is the slave of the passions”.

Which brings us to the core point: power is not some mysterious force; it’s our name for the observable effects of phenomena—especially those effects that impress themselves strongly on us. It’s relational. It’s in the eye of the beholder. When we witness power in the world, we are in awe of it, because it has significant effects on us. When we have power ourselves, we feel joy, a physiological hedonic reward because power has been the guarantee of continued survival-for-flourishing in our evolutionary past, and survival-for-flourishing is the function for which we have evolved. 

In this episode, we’ll push even deeper into will to power and develop a new hierarchy of needs based on Nietzsche’s will to power theory as an alternative to the predominant hierarchy of Abraham Maslow.

Ready? Let’s go.

I briefly mentioned Nietzsche’s scepticism about will at the end of the last show, or more accurately, the special sense he has for the term, will. Let’s agree that the tree is not consciously willing when it expresses its power of growth and competes for sunlight with other trees, but is willing always something conscious? Don’t humans often act on unconscious desires, pursuing goals the conscious mind might not even recognise as its own? Might conscious and unconscious will sometimes be at odds with each other, as when your desire overrides staid reason or when your reason overrides impulsive desires? In fact, there are occasions when it is highly advantageous for the body to keep its intentions hidden from consciousness—providing information only on a need-to-know basis. This is both cognitively efficient and, occasionally, prudent. After all, you can’t lie about your intentions if you don’t know what they are. This makes you your own perfect stooge.  

This isn’t to suggest that there is a secret self, a homunculus [explain], doing the real thinking, pulling levers behind a velvet curtain like the Wizard of Oz. Instead the elaborate biological mechanisms of the body determine action simply by expressing their instinctual functions. This flesh and blood machine instantly and automatically enacts its innate, evolved directedness—it’s will—without the bothersome need for mental deliberation. How could we ever fully catalog the intricate, interwoven mechanisms of this extraordinary physio-psychology—an evolutionary masterpiece billions of years in the making? In such a delicately integrated system, could a discrete function ever be definitively ascribed to a specific organ, never mind a specific gene?

Might it even be the case that conscious, deliberative, volitional willing, such as we humans engage in, is a faculty that is surplus to requirements for animals in their natural habitat. As we touched on last time, the tiger doesn’t need to think of hunting as a means to a meal; it just inexorably obeys its innate hunting drive—a drive that is not for obtaining food in any purposive sense, though it evolved because it serves that function. No, the hunting drive is only for hunting: it is a need that aims only at its own satisfaction. As we observed, this is why well-fed domestic cats will still hunt rodents and birds but leave them uneaten. Though these two drives have evolved to work in synchronisation, the need to hunt can be thought of as independent of the need to eat.

Instinct is the architecture of the organism. It is embodied mechanism. It is the incomparably efficient stimulus triggering the right behaviours at precisely the right time. It is an evolved suite of programmed psycho-physiological processes tailor-made to be triggered by any and every situation an animal will (normally) ever face in its habitat. The tiger isn’t something separate from what it does—it just is just what it does. Form is function. 

I’m saying the tiger’s will is designed into its body, it’s not something the tiger has as an abstract psychological faculty. I’m saying the tree’s will is physiological too. It’s function, to use that word in a qualified sense, is written-into its genes, its’ blueprint, as it were.

There’s a difference between the tiger and the tree of course. Though the tiger is an organic machine, it is not an unfeeling plant; there’s every indication that the tiger is sentient, experiencing pleasure and pain, but its actions are the result of feeling rather than thinking. The tiger feels its way though the world led by its instinct. There is little or no gap between stimulus and response. In this way, the tiger’s will is simply an automatic physiological directedness that operates without volition.

If willing can be pure biological mechanism in this way, a physiological directedness written-in to every organism’s biology by millions of evolutionary trial and error experiments, one can see how the morphology of a tree, or a lichen, or a slime mould, can also be an expression of the most basic kind of organic will. Perhaps we should think of willing, not as something you have or don’t have, but as a spectrum, with humans at one extreme and, say, viruses towards the other. Will then is not a faculty circumscribed by the kind of conscious, purposive, deliberative willing humans engage in; this is just a rare and exceptional offshoot of a more fundamental form of will. Most willing is explained, not by what it aims at, but by the long evolutionary history that determined its trajectory.

In an notoriously enigmatic passage in BGE.36, Nietzsche speculates that we could imagine: “our entire instinctual life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will – as will to power, as is my theory”, and in doing so we might be able to “trace all organic functions back to this will to power and could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment”—this problem of procreation and nourishment is what I’m calling survival-for-flourishing. I suggest that unconscious, evolved physiological will to power is manifest in living things as a directedness towards power—for example, the tree competing for sunlight. In complex animals that evolve sentience, this directedness is felt, though it’s still not aimed at power in any conscious way—for example, the tiger vying with a competitor that encroaches on its territory. Finally in humans, this directedness becomes psychological as an unconscious directedness towards power that frequently finds explicitly conscious expressions—the politician who wants to occupy the highest possible office.

Therefore, will in living things is a structural, psycho-physiological directedness—a drive towards behaviours that effect the accumulation, conservation, and expression of power, all of which converge on, and contribute to, the evolutionary imperative of survival-for-reproduction. 

Happiness is the one thing that everybody inescapably wants and strives for. Maslow believed that it could be achieved through meeting the needs identified in his hierarchy but we’ve seen that there’s a more fundamental hedonic dynamic driving these needs: will to power, both as the essential nature of the survival-for-reproduction imperative and, in humans at least, as a psychological meta-drive that takes enjoyment from overcoming resistance—the greater the resistance, the greater the pleasure in the overcoming. Let us take another look as Maslow’s model, tier by tier, to see how this will to power notion fits with his taxonomy.

The tiers are:

1. Biological and physiological needs
2. Safety needs
3. Belongingness and love needs
4. Esteem needs
5. Cognitive needs
6. Aesthetic needs
7. Self-actualisation
8. And Transcendence

Biological and physiological needs:

On Maslow’s bottom tier are those biological and physiological needs necessary for life itself. We’ve discussed the power struggles that cannot be evaded if an organism is to exist and persist—first rule: do not lose the power you already have. Others will try to take it. Life is dangerous work. Food is energy appropriated from other organisms through violence. Sex must be earned and fought for. Reproduction is an expensive luxury.

In a more everyday context, consider the job you must go to if you are too avoid destitution. Or think of the habits you try to abide by to improve your physical health: nutritious diet, exercise, managing alcohol consumption, and plenty of sleep. It’s not difficult to see in the desire for health the will to power. 

Safety needs:

Where possible, the conservation of power requires the management and reduction of risk. Instability, uncertainty, and unpredictability require vigilance and as such are resource-intensive. Therefore measures of security are implemented to aid survival—whether it be a proto-human overnighting in the tree canopy to sleep far from the reach of ground predators, or a modern human society developing and enforcing a system of rights and laws to prevent a dog-eat-dog struggle leading to its disintegration, both seek to prevent a terminal loss of power.

Much more prosaically, consider the aversion to losses that makes you fork out for home insurance (material), handwashing after you use the toilet (health), and acquiescing to the opinions of other people to avoid being ostracised (social status). And let us not forget that ultimate desideratum of the meek modern man: comfort—to not have to struggle is the real aspiration.

Belongingness and love needs:

As a social animal, connections and alliances with a group or community are indispensable for human survival but it’s not just about being in a social group, it’s about where you are in that group’s social dominance hierarchy. The significance of will to power in this matter should need no elaboration. 

Romantic relationships and family, a somewhat different social context, is fundamentally an evolved mechanism that functions as the means of selective propagation and transmission of genes. This is will to power as growth, expansion, and development. 

Esteem needs:

Social status is, unequivocally, social power. The esteem of others feeds our own esteem, but social status is not necessarily an indicator of quality. Plenty of dolts, imposters, and neurotics are catapulted to the upper echelons of our purportedly meritocratic society. The role of luck and right-place right-time serendipity is underestimated. Luck is everything (only the superstitious dismiss luck)—yeah, you heard that right. Moreover, popularity and the widespread approval of others can be a sign that one is over-compromising oneself. Remember Nietzsche’s words: “So long as you are praised, believe that you are not yet on your own course but on that of another.” [AOM.340]

How much more does a person esteem themselves when they have proven their own quality to themselves? To care nothing for the esteem of others and do your valuing for yourself is to claim the right of the masters. The cool self-assurance of pride and confidence in one’s own value that no one can fail to recognise in another. This is where the will to power meta-drive comes into its own: as we I have stated: extraordinary triumphs require extraordinary trials. Is a sword not tempered by fire?

Cognitive needs:

In Nietzsche’s analysis, the value of the human drive for knowledge and understanding lies in its value as a means to successful survival and flourishing. In a hostile wilderness, the unfamiliar and uncertain is a potential danger to life. It is wise to make it familiar, make it certain, make it known. The darkness of the cave could harbour unseen predators; better to illuminate every corner with a flaming torch and either set the mind at ease or get the measure of a lurking threat. As Nietzsche writes, “Familiarising something unfamiliar is comforting, reassuring, satisfying, and produces a feeling of power as well. Unfamiliar things are dangerous, anxiety-provoking, upsetting, – the primary instinct is to get rid of these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none.” [TI.Four Great Errors,5]

Additionally, a successful social group will be a growing entity, eventually requiring more territory and resources, and so a natural curiosity facilitates that expansionist tendency. What is beyond that treeline? What may be found in the next valley?

Quite obviously, this drive for knowledge and understanding has long outgrown its initial relatively modest purview and has been exploited for the prodigious opportunities it offers via the discipline of science and the technological advances it makes possible. The unprecedented power this has granted the human species has made it arguably the dominant life-form on this planet and a peril to most other species. 

In a position highly contrarian in the history of philosophy and philosophers (philosopher means ‘lover of knowledge’ remember), Nietzsche holds that, for all its many benefits, the will to truth is a runaway drive that can have pathological consequences. The fact that modern humanity pursues truth, not just as a means to good things, but as a good thing in itself smacks of the kind of transcendentalism that a secular age is supposed to have eschewed. This is an astonishing, counter-intuitive take on the inherent value of knowledge, but it is not our topic today, so we will let it mellow for now.

Aesthetic needs:

For Nietzsche, the fountainhead of all aesthetic sensibility is found in sexual attraction to individuals who exhibit signs of optimal reproductive fitness—in a word, beauty. There is a fascinating tale to be told here, and I will tell it at length—it may even require its own series, but suffice to say here that beauty triggers a physiological response he calls rausch, a German word which means intoxication, euphoria, or frenzy. Here’s how he describes that feeling, slightly abridged:

‘The condition of pleasure which is called rausch is really an exalted feeling of power. […] strength as a feeling of dominion in the muscles, as agility and love of movement, as dance, as levity and quick time; strength as the love of proving strength, as bravado, adventurousness, fearlessness, indifference in regard to life and death… [WP.800] 

The biological roots of the aesthetic sensibility clearly link to genetic reproduction, growth, expansion, and development, and, as such, as forms of WTP as we’ve defined it. We value the aesthetic for the immediate enjoyment it gives, with only the remotest link to its primitive reproductive function. Yet, aesthetic experience still it evokes that association, that intuition, of life ascending, life transcending, of the will to power.—“Art is the great stimulus to life” as Nietzsche writes in TI ‘Skirmishes’ 8.24

Self-actualisation:

Maslow wrote in Toward a Psychology of Being (1962), “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” It seems a reasonable surmise. Self-actualisation is the attainment and manifestation of your highest capabilities. How is it affected? Only through overcoming the challenges that stand between you and your best self. Do people imagine that their greatest possibilities can be realised without struggles, deprivations, and dark nights of the soul? Can you be born fully formed, needing no lessons from life? Existence is change, becoming, growth. You will be a very different person on the day you die to the one you were when you came into this world—will the story of how one became the other be worth telling? Well, that’s up to you.

Transformation is not optional; it is the law of life. Yet the character of every individual’s transformation can be a matter of choice—a matter of will. That is why Nietzsche admonishes us to live dangerously! What doesn’t kill you make you stronger, right? You do not know what you are capable of until necessity demands it: “First principle: you must need to be strong, or else you will never become it.” TI.8.38 

Transcendence:

If self-actualisation is the drive to be all we can be, transcendence is the drive to become more than we ever thought possible. To transcend implies going beyond—in this case, beyond oneself. Maslow interprets this as the identification of the self with something bigger, whether that be one’s community, a social movement, a political party and what have you. His humanist tendencies are drawn to examples of transcendence that are selfless and altruistic—the desire to create a better world. But ideas differ on what a “better world” might mean. 

But being selfless doesn’t necessarily translate into being for others. Sure, there’s transcendence of oneself as the identification with something bigger, then there’s transcendence as the becoming something more than yourself—a radical self transformative overcoming hat seems to go beyond mere self-actualisation. Then there’s a transcendence of self more like the ego-death of the eastern mystics, in which one’s discovers intimate connection with the cosmos and comes to identify with it wholly, thereby relinquishing one’s limited, individuated self. This is that experience colloquially known as enlightenment.

It hardly taxes the imagination to see all these various expansive, transformative experiences as will to power.

I made mention in a previous show of other human needs that don’t seem to find a suitable place on Maslow’s hierarchy. How do they express the will to power? Will to power manifests in traits such as greed, dominance, cruelty, and war.

Play was mentioned, and even where play does not contain a competitive element as most games do, it can be a creative activity and also a destructive one—both expressions of power. Play is also useful as a way of developing skills for life and it bonds people, generating alliances that also serve survival and flourishing. 

Will to power entails overcoming resistances and this explains why we might enjoy deliberate exposure to fear such as with horror movies or adrenaline sports—a sort of attraction to that which repels us. In the more extreme examples there’s a testing of one’s courage, one’s self, implicit within this dynamic—a compulsion to seek self-overcoming.

As for the human impulse to lose control, we can see in the occasional need to break away from restrictive social convention—a cathartic discharge of pent up energy, part of the essential management of one’s power economy to maintain good physical and psychological health. The desire for freedom and self-determination.

When it comes to pure pleasure, almost all pleasures can be traced to activities that are encouraged by the brain’s hedonic reward system because they have been conducive to survival-for-reproduction in our evolutionary past. Where this is not the case—activities such as smoking, drinking, and drug use—humans have discovered substances that short-circuit the hedonic reward, artificially stimulating the release of dopamine and other pleasure-giving neurotransmitters, rewarding behaviours that are actually contrary to wellbeing. In Nietzsche’s view, pleasure is the feeling that attends will to power, but humans have devised ways of accessing pleasure that do not enhance power. Still, one can see some social empowerment benefits in the use of many substances: young people start smoking to fit in with peers, appear more grown up, and look “cool”, “dutch courage” in the form of alcohol oils the wheels of social interaction, and chemical stimulants like cocaine can instil abnormal levels of confidence (to a fault). 

Another unproductive addiction to which humans are prone is gambling. Gambling simulates the tension-then-release feeling-experience of the wanting→getting dynamic, I suggest, but the triumph of the occasional win, made all the sweeter by its contrast with the many losses, is an ersatz feeling of power because the player enjoys only a illusion they they are responsible for their win; that they are in control. The aversion to losses (and I mean losses of power, because money is power) means a losing streak only tends to increase the tenacity of the gambler to win back what has been lost until, finally, they have nothing left to stake. They hit the bottom and are consumed with despair. 

Even when the gambler wins, no win can ever be enough, the excitement of the gain quickly cools. If only they had staked more on that last toss. And so the gambler almost always keeps playing until his wins turn into losses and so it goes . . .

More cheerfully, it is obvious how dancing connects with will to power: it is both an expression of exuberant, physical, erotic power and it also has a role in collective culture—practices and customs that are socially cohesive confer power benefits on a culture—yes, communties express will to power too. Myth is a component of culture—the stories and legends that undergird and explain a community’s beliefs and values—and Myth’s role in strengthening a culture should not need explicating, but consider that Nietzsche believed the meaning-making inherent in the creation of a worldview to be the most far-reaching and consequential form of will to power. Recall the quote from the start of the show: la bête philosophe (the philosophical animal, or more plainly, the philosopher) exerts will to power by attempting to exhaustively explain the world with their philosophy and thereby encompass it in a system. It’s the most ambitious form of anthropocentric projection. And yes, Nietzsche was well aware that he too is la bête philosophe.

Finally, I cited the connection with nature yearned for by contemporary westerners. In that we can see a desire to connect with something greater than one’s self, something transcendent—a quasi-religious human need that is largely neglected in our secular, individualistic culture. This sense of transcendent connection ameliorates the loneliness of the alienation that plagues modern man and facilitates the intimate identification with something inexhaustibly creative, eternal, and potent beyond all human imaginings.

Let’s turn to this week’s music choice. Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, of dancing, of art, of the aesthetic, of feeling, and so I recommend a track every week that reflects the moods and emotions of this Becoming Übermensch project—at least as I see them.  

So I invite you to have your own feeling experience, framed within the project we are exploring, while listening to New Noise by Refused. This is strident stuff with lyrics that are not entirely irrelevant to this project.

Links in the show’s description. 

Do share your thoughts on how this track made you feel—I’d be really interested in hearing about your impressions and you’d be the first person to do so. 

A new hierarchy of needs

“I consider life itself to be an instinct for growth, for endurance, for the accumulation of force, for power: when there is no will to power, there is decline.” A.6

We have seen that the form of will to power most characteristically (perhaps uniquely) human is seen in the psychological meta-drive for overcoming resistances. But will to power’s roots are also clearly traceable to the wider realm of the biological in the naturally-selected instinctive traits in humans, animals, plants and all organisms that facilitate survival-for-reproduction. Here there is a variety of blind, mechanical, physiological will discernible in the behaviour of all living things. 

(I wonder, are the implications of this becoming apparent to you?)

The will to power meta-drive in humans is only an adaptive elaboration of this more basic, non-purposive organic will, but it is one that has the advantage of being enormously versatile. 

Human psychological will to power is so well developed at this stage in our evolutionary history that it is probably inseparable from all human activity; the fact that human societies all formalise competitions among their members, and indeed between societies, is an indication how embedded it is, not least because encouraging the struggle for distinction serves the community as a whole—for obvious reasons. Organic non-human will to power in non-human life forms, on the other hand, probably always directly serves survival-for-reproduction, albeit unconsciously; human will to power serves itself, only serving survival-for-reproduction secondarily and in some cases, because it is a runaway, non-purposive drive, not at all.

Will to power in this broad scheme can be seen to conform to a number of modes of expression: there is a vacuum that must be filled to achieve temporary satiation (e.g. hunger and thirst), there is a tension that must be discharged (e.g. sexual desire, physical exercise), there is a insatiable appetite to acquire ceaselessly (e.g. the accumulation of wealth, of power itself!), or there is an impulse that must find expression (e.g. social connection, nurturing, creativity, ambition, play). These categories are not discrete: for example, social connection can be about filling a vacuum (loneliness) and expressing an impulse (nurturing).

Let’s now consider then what a more fundamental hierarchy of needs, one that takes account of will to power, might look like.

1. Maintain Power 

At the foundation of our hierarchy would be the concern for self-preservation and preventing deleterious losses of power. Oftentimes calculated investments of power from one’s store are necessary to accrue more, but unplanned losses will not only worsen one’s situation, making you more vulnerable, they can actually make it much harder to accumulate power. 

Existing power is maintained by securing resources and managing the power one already possesses. It is the reactive and defensive aspect of will to power.

Key elements:

 • Physical maintenance though meeting basic survival needs (food, shelter, health) to sustain the body. 

 • Environmental control: managing risks, minimising threats, and maintaining a stable foundation for further striving.

 • Ensuring economic security through protection of territory, and material assets including monetary wealth.

 • Psychological and social stability, ensuring safety, predictability, and emotional resilience. Consolidating one’s current status in the social dominance hierarchy.

Maintaining power is not static. Most resources require constant acquisition e.g. food must be procured continually, money depletes as it is used and can devalue through inflation if effective investments are not made, social status can be challenged by bullies or fluctuations in the wider community.

2. Accumulate Power 

Next comes the need to acquire more power through growth, expansion, and mastery, both over one’s environment and over others. It represents the active and continual pursuit of influence and capability.

Key elements:

 • Personal development: accumulating knowledge, abilities, skills, confidence, and self-discipline to expand personal efficacy. The improvement of health and the enhancement of one’s body, both in terms of its appearance and its performance.

 • Social power: building alliances, networks, and individual influence and authority within a social dominance hierarchy such that one’s status and sway over others increases. Efforts toward the attainment of celebrated social status and fame. The defeat and subordination of external opposing forces and people.

 • Resource expansion: increasing material wealth, opportunities, and control over external factors. 

3. Express power

At the pinnacle, this tier embodies the active, creative, performative, transformative, combative, and ecstatic aspects of the will to power. The onus here is on discharge of an excess—overflowingness—self-expression, celebration of one’s own abilities, experimentation and innovation, the pushing of boundaries, the testing of one’s capabilities, the agonistic engagement with formidable hostile forces, and control of ‘the narrative’ through the artistic creation of new impressions, new realities, and even new laws, values, and quote/unquote truths—such as our bête philosophe engages in.

Key elements:

 • The pleasure in the vanquishing of enemies, either through violence, coercion, and fear or through winning their voluntary fealty, their admiration and love. The celebration of victories. The enactment of justice, taking revenge, acts of mercy and magnanimity, bestowing blessings and boons on subordinates.

 • Artistic and Intellectual creation expressing one’s individuality through art, science, philosophy, politics, or religion. 

 • Shaping or influencing the world, thereby transforming one’s environment, society, culture, or collective values to reflect one’s own will.

 • The showcasing of one’s special social status, constantly refining one’s own style, and taking satisfaction in luxury and exclusivity. 

 • Building a legacy through enduring contributions that affirm one’s power and existence beyond death.

 • Attaining to the apogee of self-overcoming by maximally mastering one’s own self.

Unlike Maslow’s hierarchy, our Nietzschean hierarchy is non-linear and represents an ongoing interplay. It’s three principles are:

 • Maintain power: Conserve and preserve the power you have to avoid regression, collapse, or extinction.

 • Accumulate power: Grow, expand, and strengthen the capacity you have to both maintain and express power.

 • Express power: Expression grants the thrill of feeling one’s own competence, quality, mastery, and predominance. It is the release of accumulated power when circumstance demand it. Expressing power doesn’t always deplete your reserves of power, of course. Sometimes a demonstration of power is necessary in order to stem a loss or accrue more power.

So maintaining, accumulating, and expressing power are not sequential stages like in Maslow but overlapping, interdependent dynamics. Consider too that power is not always quantifiable ‘stuff’. Sure, you might have a quantum of physical energy to put to work today, or you might have a specific quantity of money, because money is power, which you can tally up to a specific figure, but power more often than not is structural, reflecting a system of relations. You have power at work because of your position in the management hierarchy. You have social power because you are more sexually attractive than a majority of the people around you. 

And there you have it. A nietzschean Hierarchy of needs that goes beyond Maslow’s model of human motivation to isolate the truly fundamental imperatives:

1. Maintain power.

2. Accumulate power.

And…

3. Express power.

So that’s enough for today, I would say that our next show is going to be more about developing your will to power using evidence based techniques of behaviour change for power, but I have a mind to do something a bit different. I’m keen to get outdoors, so I just might do some recordings out in the field for the next show. Nothing is decided yet, but stand by.

In the meantime, I’m going to leave you will a wtp quote form thus spoke Zarathustra, where Nietzsche is always at his most enigmatic. Please remember to like, share, review etc. And don’t forget you can help ensure that this material keeps coming by sponsoring the show for a few shekels—see the link in the show’s description—and for those who are ready to go deeper, perhaps even darker, you can become a De Profundis member on Patreon and get exclusive content—again see the show’s description. In order to keep expressing power, the Becoming Übermensch podcast needs to maintain it and accumulate it. Your support for the endeavour is welcomed and sincerely appreciated.

And so to our final quote:

“Listen now to my teaching, you wisest men! Test in earnest whether I have crept into the heart of life itself and down to the roots of its heart! Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master. The will of the weaker persuades it to serve the stronger; its will wants to be master over those weaker still: this delight alone it is unwilling to forgo. And as the lesser surrenders to the greater, that it may have delight and power over the least of all, so the greatest, too, surrenders and for the sake of power stakes–life. The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger and play dice for death. And where sacrifice and service and loving glances are, there too is will to be master. There the weaker steals by secret paths into the castle and even into the heart of the more powerful–and steals the power. And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again. ‘To be sure, you call it will to procreate or impulse towards a goal, towards the higher, more distant, more manifold: but all this is one and one secret. ‘I would rather perish than renounce this one thing; and truly, where there is perishing and the falling of leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself–for the sake of power!”