The aphorism above comes from Laeth’s Wee Wisdom on his Trees and Triads blog.
I am inclined to agree with Laeth to a certain degree here. On its own, morality is superior to immorality. After all, who could argue that virtue is inferior to vice, that wrong is infinitely better than right, or that the unprincipled is nobler than the principled?
However, things take on a different hue when the word slave becomes an attributive noun for morality. Even after you have set aside Nietzsche’s strict and venomous definitions of what slave morality comprises, you’re still left with something that is perceptibly inferior, faux, and mendacious because slave morality is constructed upon a spiritually fatal foundation of resentment and value inversion.
Within that context—and contrary to what Laeth appears to suggest—slave immorality is probably far better than slave morality, provided that the slave’s apparent wickedness involves reversing or overcoming resentment and value inversion. In that sense, abolishing slave morality may make men somewhat more free.
Nevertheless, the abolishment of slave morality alone is no guarantee of spiritual freedom. On this Laeth is correct. Master morality—the aristocratic antithesis of democratic slave morality—is certainly more positive and life-affirming, yet it leaves the strong-willed value-creators just as enslaved as their slavish counterparts.
Slave morality and master morality are mostly about power and authority. More precisely, this-worldly power and authority. Both inevitably fall short concerning the fundamental problems of fear and death.
Morality alone, regardless of its flavor or inclination, cannot make men spiritually free. On the contrary, morality alone often enslaves as much or perhaps even more than it liberates. Spiritual freedom requires confronting fear and death head-on, and the only way to do that, at least as far as I can confirm, is by following and believing on Jesus.
Christ was a free man, the freest of the sons of men. He was free from the world; He was bound only by love. Christ spoke as one having authority, but He did not have the will to authority, and He was not a master.
- N. Berdyaev