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A chief characteristic of Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) is autonomy or self-determination, i.e., creating yourself out of yourself and taking responsibility for who you are on your own terms.  To be autonomous or “sovereign” is to be fully in charge of your life from top to bottom, fully and completely morally responsible for your life, for who you are, for being the man you determine yourself to be. Friedrich Nietzsche’s description of the origin of such a Sovereign Individual that is presented below is a clear recipe for what is needed by any man today who wants to embark upon his personal MGTOW journey.

Nietzsche begins his analysis of the origin of moral responsibility  in Sections I-V of Essay 2 in The Genealogy of Morals focusing on the notion of forgetfulness.  Forgetfulness works in opposition to the ability to make promises, Nietzsche asserts. Forgetfulness is not merely a kind of passive inertia (“vis inertiae“), a mere resistance to moving memory to recall.  Rather, forgetfulness is an active power that keeps certain experiences from entering our consciousness, just as in the process of digestion we don’t merely passively absorb everything into our system.

Forgetfulness is thus a positive power in the sense that it keeps us from being overwhelmed by all that is happening to us.  If we are in the midst of an ongoing problem with our significant other, for example, it is helpful to be able to forget that relationship trouble when we must focus on studying our philosophy or on following a recipe to make a cake.  Otherwise, actively remembering the problem would interfere with our ability to get our work done.

Thus, without forgetfulness, Nietzsche claims, we would not be able to be focused and present to anyone or anything.  If we can’t forget the cares of our day, we will have difficulty focusing on what is happening at work or in school.  To be unable to forget is like being unable to digest, Nietzsche claims, in yet another pregnant metaphor taken from the realm of sensuous lived life.

          But human beings have also developed memory in opposition to the positive power of forgetfulness.  Memory keeps forgetfulness in check, which is necessary to do if we are going to make promises and not forget them.  Memory is an active power of not letting something be forgotten, and not merely the passive indigestion of something we are unable to forget.  Memory is an active power that can keep a promise in mind even though other events intervene between the time the promise was made and the time it is carried out. Thus, Nietzsche refers to this power as “an actual memory of the will” (115d). And insofar as memory is always oriented toward the future, most importantly toward the future keeping of a promise, it is a power to regulate the future.

          But who is capable of thus regulating the future? According to Nietzsche, only the person who can distinguish between what is necessary and what is merely accidental, that is, what truly needs to be done and what doesn’t need to be done; a person who can think according to cause and effect, who has foresight, who knows exactly what he or she wants and who also has the power to get it; a person who knows how to calculate his or her moves in advance, like knowing how to get to be CEO of a corporation, or being able to figure out what a teacher is going to put on a test—this ability to calculate your moves in advance is perhaps the most important of all the qualities of the person seeking to be MGTOW.  The person capable of making promises, who has taken his life in his hands and determined or calculated who he will be at some point in the future and has been able to see this in advance.  This is the person who has control over his life, the person who is capable of guaranteeing himself a future, of designing it and knowing how to bring it about (116a).

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The ability to make promises and keep them is responsibility, an ability which has developed only after a long period of customary morality.  Customary morality is the morality of the herd. Here individuals do not calculate themselves but are calculable and predictable; they go along with the customs and norms of the times; they do not think for themselves. Thus, Nietzsche argues that autonomy and (customary) morality (all ‘morality’ is customary for Nietzsche) are mutually exclusive.  To be MGTOW means to rise above the conventional morality of everybody and nobody and live by the values that you choose.

The autonomous, MGTOW man who breaks free of the herd, who breaks free of the predictable uniformity of the masses (“the masses” are people who go along with conventional customs and norms thoughtlessly); the person who breaks free of customary morality and creates his own morality through his personal competency to make promises and keep them … this person has risen above the common morality and is “‘supermoral’” or a “sovereign individual,” Nietzsche pronounces, someone who resembles only himself, for whom there is no adequate measure other than himself … in short, the man of the personal, long, and independent will” (116b).  This is the noble, and thus free individual.  He is superior to all (lesser animals) who are unable to bind themselves by promising.

          The man who is competent to promise has gained freedom in the sense of having power over his life, power to control the circumstances around himself, power even over nature.       Because he is free from the influence of cultural values (values proffered by TV and popular culture and vigorously promoted by the big three powerbrokers of customary morality—big business, big government, and big religion), the morally responsible man makes his decisions based on his own free will as his “standard of value” (116c).  He honors others who are like himself, who know they are superior because they make promises only rarely, with caution and good judgement and somewhat reticently, and thus who disdains those who make promises at the drop of a hat and who break them as easily with a glib “I’m sorry” that rolls off their lips with the same ease as the meaningless promise.  For these “lean and empty jackasses,” Nietzsche says, the noble and free person “will have the heel of his foot ready.”

The “privilege” of being this kind of proud man, this responsible man, becomes second nature (i.e., habitual), like an “instinct” is second nature.  This instinct that is the result of being a responsible man (i.e., a noble man, superior man, self-controlled man, an in-charge-of-one’s-future mand, disinterested, dispassionate, not swayed by mere emotion but moved by a deep feeling of self-confidence and mastery over oneself and one’s world, beyond the reach of fate, answerable to no one, MGTOW all the way…), this core instinct of such a person is called conscience (116d).

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The conscience of the noble person has taken a long time to form, Nietzsche claims.  It is a strange thing, uncommon.  What is conscience?  Conscience is the ability to “guarantee oneself with all due pride, and also at the same time to say yes to oneself…” i.e., to be competent to promise with self-assurance, which is the power of memory.  In pre-historic times people did not make promises.  Even now, young people need to be taught to make and keep promises.  This is the same as saying that one must develop memory.

The development of memory was historically thought to need a painful experience in order to make what was supposed to be remembered stick: “only that which never stops hurting remains in his memory.”  Mnemonics, a system of remembering which associates the thing to be remembered with a negative experience that is not easily forgotten (the tedium of endless repetition, for example) was the old-school approach.  Perhaps negative things even today are a reminder of this old approach to remembering.  The heaviness of the past is remembered in all “seriousness.”  Perhaps all forms of horror and cruelty can be traced to this demand to remember, the way punishment associates pain with transgression so as not to forget.  Perhaps this is what asceticism is all about, like yoga and transcendental meditation, Nietzsche muses, a process of using difficult methods to keep in mind certain ideas while forgetting others.  Here Nietzsche seems to be talking about memory as a collective phenomenon of mankind and not just individual memories which reflect the collective.

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The collective memory power of a people, their relative place on the scale of nobility, could be determined by how memory and forgetfulness were manifested in their culture.  Strict penal laws indicate a low power of memory; a person’s word in this culture isn’t worth a plugged nickel.  Here Nietzsche is criticizing the Germany of his time for being irresponsible, commoners lacking nobility and sovereignty.

The Germans had a hard time breeding themselves a memory, Nietzsche argues, breeding a conscience, the competency of responsibility, as is evidenced by the severe means they use to help themselves learn to remember, i.e., be responsible before the law.  Nietzsche seems to be saying here that society is built on the power of memory, the power or competency of promising, i.e., responsibility or nobility, the way of the truly autonomous person.  The ability to remember allows us not only to make promises but also to attain reason; for without memory we could not reason.  Alas, developing memory is painful, like developing a conscience, the consciousness of sin.  The development of the consciousness of sin, bad conscience, seems to be a stage along the way toward the development of responsibility, or an aberration of this process.

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How did bad conscience, the consciousness of sin, come into the world?  The genealogists of morals are no help (those who wish to show the origin of ethics or moral responsibility in transcendental values of Good and Evil) because they are only focused on what is happening at present and have no sense of the past, no memory of the past, no ‘second sight’ (which is what is required for an understanding of ethics).  These don’t know the truth; they are moral philosophers caught up in the herd mentality of forgetfulness.

          The ‘ought’ of morality is derived, not from some otherworldly God or abstract first principle, but from the concrete and naturalistic idea of owing someone something.  Punishment is developed out of retaliation, a systematized form of retaliation (equal to the crime), and not out of some abstract notion of freedom.  In the same way, Nietzsche sees that memory or responsibility is not something commanded from on high, but which is the result of a natural process.  Nietzsche was against any form of extrinsic, transcendental authority if it interfered with the self-assertion of the natural sovereign individual, whether this interference came in the form of a vengeful God, the threat of karma, cultural values, or any other form of authoritarian suppression of the sovereign individual’s exercise of personal moral power, which would try to diminish the ultimate value of the free or noble (responsible) individual.  The highest value for a MGTOW is to get beyond all values to where he is the creator of his own values through the competency of making promises.  This is what Nietzsche calls the transvaluation or revaluation of all values, a kind of taking your life into your own hands and abiding by only the rules you establish for yourself, while avoiding the short-sighted interference of lesser mortals who are still in thrall to conventional morality sleepwalking through life.  The Sovereign Individual is above the conventional law because he is the origin and creator of a higher law for himself.  When we can truly make and keep promises, we do not need the laws established by others.  The word of the MGTOW sovereign individual is his bond.  End of story.