Will to Equality

Will to Equality is presented as a moral ideal that Zarathustra distrusts because, in the tarantula preachers’ hands, its language of justice conceals revenge against the powerful. Their claim to virtue does not, in his account, seek a world without domination so much as a reversal of who dominates. Zarathustra opposes that leveling demand to a future of difference and striving, directed toward the Superman.

The Tarantulas’ Virtue

In Zarathustra’s parable, the preachers of equality appear as Tarantulas: beneath their appeal to justice, he says, revenge poisons the soul. Their rhetoric works by concealing its force. Zarathustra describes himself as drawing at their web so that rage will lure them out of hiding and revenge will emerge from behind the word “justice.” The image makes equality’s supposed moral neutrality suspect: the web is a structure of words and concealed motives, not simply a public argument about fairness.

The Tarantulas’ own imagined declarations make that charge concrete. They would have the world filled with the storms of their revenge and call those storms justice; they promise themselves outrage against all who are unlike them. In this account, the demand is not merely that existing inequalities be named. It carries hostility toward people who possess power and toward those who differ from the preachers themselves. Zarathustra’s accusation is therefore directed at the purpose he sees beneath the doctrine, not only at the word equality.

A Virtue That Conceals Power

The most revealing formulation is the preachers’ decision that “will to equality” shall henceforth be the name of virtue, accompanied by an outcry against everything that has power. Zarathustra reads this naming as a disguise: the “tyrant-madness of impotence” cries out for equality, while an appetite for tyranny hides beneath the language of virtue. The irony is that a doctrine voiced as opposition to power can, in his interpretation, still desire power—only exercised by those who currently lack it.

He traces the force of this resentment through self-conceit and envy, which may be inherited from fathers and become more explicit in sons. The son, he says, can reveal what the father kept silent. This generational image complicates the preachers’ claim to speak in the name of justice: their doctrine may voice a buried family grievance as though it were an impersonal moral truth. Zarathustra also associates them with harm directed at those who currently hold power and with preaching death where such preaching is most at home. He recalls that they were once world-slanderers and burners of heretics, suggesting that their present protest does not erase a history of intolerance.

Zarathustra’s Rejection of Equalization

Zarathustra explicitly refuses to be confused with these preachers. His answer is categorical: “Men are not equal.” He adds that they should not become equal, either, since such a position would contradict his love of the Superman. Equality, in this passage, is not the destination toward which humanity should converge. Zarathustra imagines people pressing toward the future across a thousand bridges and gangways, with more war and inequality among them. The plurality of paths and ranks matters because humanity is to move beyond its present condition, not settle into sameness.

His opposition is not presented as a defense of revenge in the other direction. Zarathustra says that freedom from the bonds of revenge is a bridge to his highest hope, and likens that hope to a rainbow after prolonged storms. The contrast is between the Tarantulas’ storm of retaliation, renamed justice, and a future in which revenge no longer binds people. Yet he does not equate release from revenge with equality: the bridge leads toward the Superman, while difference and struggle remain part of the passage.

War, Obedience, and the Measure of Difference

The neighboring account of warriors gives this hierarchy a broader ethical setting. Zarathustra addresses his brothers in war as both loved companions and his best enemies, asking them to accept truth even from someone who belongs to their kind. A worthy enemy, in this account, is not simply an object of hatred: pride in the enemy can make that enemy’s success one’s own. The contrast helps clarify why Zarathustra does not treat conflict itself as proof of injustice. He distinguishes honorable opposition from the concealed resentment he attributes to the Tarantulas.

That ideal also values discipline over mere rebellion. Zarathustra says that rebellion shows nobility in a slave, but urges the noble to show nobility in obedience, and describes the good warrior as preferring “thou shalt” to “I will.” This is not a direct definition of Will to Equality; it is a nearby expression of the work’s preference for command, rank, and demanding forms of self-direction over undifferentiated sameness. A separate passage prescribes training men for war and women for the warrior’s recreation, making the gendered boundaries of this surrounding ideal explicit. Together these passages show the order against which the Tarantulas’ demand is staged: Zarathustra’s alternative to leveling is not an absence of hierarchy, but a hierarchy justified by striving, discipline, and the hope of going beyond humanity.