 Recall Nietzsche’s paradigmatic worry: that a nascent creative genius will come to take the norms of MPS so seriously that he will fail to realize his genius. Rather than tolerate (even welcome) suffering, he will seek relief from hardship and devote himself to the pursuit of pleasure; rather than practice what Nietzsche calls “severe self-love”, and attend to himself in the ways requisite for productive creative work, he will embrace the ideology of altruism, and reject “self-love” as improper, and so forth. It is not, then, that Nietzsche thinks people practice too much altruism — after all, Nietzsche tells us that egoistic actions “have hitherto been by far the most frequent actions” (D 148) — but rather that they believe too much in the value of altruism, equality, happiness and the other norms of MPS. Even though there is neither much altruism nor equality in the world, there is almost universal endorsement of the value of altruism and equality — even, notoriously (and as Nietzsche seemed well aware), by those who are its worst enemies in practice. So Nietzsche’s critique is that a culture in the grips of MPS, even without acting on MPS, poses the real obstacle to flourishing, because it teaches potential higher types to disvalue what would be most conducive to their creativity and value what is irrelevant or perhaps even hostile to it. Nietzsche’s worry, in short, is that the man in the grips of MPS becomes “imprisoned among all sorts of terrible concepts [schrekliche Begriffe]” that leave him “sick, miserable, malevolent against himself: full of hatred against the springs of life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy” (TI VII:2, emphasis added).