The day before yesterday, Nietzsche came up in conversation. I interpreted parts of its content based on a quote from him that was aptly used to describe the lack of self-insight. A deeper humanity. The quote reads, “under peaceful conditions, the warlike man turns the axe against himself.” I first read Zarathustra when I was 16, but it was only much later that I understood that we all attack ourselves with what we have to confront within ourselves in solitude and in silence under peaceful conditions. That we become Zarathustra then. Some of us have to go into what we have to face there and do it in our own way because we are no longer able to impose it on others. Many others lack that courage and need support to endure it because of what we have come to deny in ourselves. We suffer intensely from our lack of this content, which belongs to us, but we habitually deny it as we experience it as a threat and inferiority whose content we cannot take in, and instead inflict it on others by blaming them for what belongs to our larger, more mature person. All the conflicts we create around us have their basis in this. When I was young and tried to approach the experience that I thought Nietzsche was trying to convey, I only experienced it as a rejection, as the academic convention surrounding the book dominated and made our own experiences of its content inferior. No one seemed to formulate their own experience of it. So I understood it then as only the academic view that was possible to share. Not the experience itself that each of us translates it within ourselves. Not even how Nietzsche himself did it through how he described it in his books when he formulated it. In this way, I, like others, had to learn to suppress what was not the surrounding custom or the social convention for different types of community. He tried to give expression to the reality that we all encounter within ourselves in our own way, the individual insight and the intense trials it consisted of within him, through Zarathustra. When our attitude in self-observation turns its axe against ourselves in what we today call psychology.