Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Nietzsche's "Slave Morality" is named after how slaves react to being subservient. Slaves are envious & resentful of their masters, so like all revolutionary thought, they turn the status quo values upside-down to form their own competing values. The attitude of slaves is to be against everything their masters represent; if their masters value merit, pride, honor & autonomy, then slaves take the opposite: equality over meritocracy, humility over pride, submission over honor, and group over individual. If control is in the strong then slaves revel in weakness; focus on the competent becomes altruism towards the feeble-minded, and a society that caters to the ineffectual and downtrodden. Slaves, of course, vilify “oppressors,” and their morality is typified by pessimism and cynicism. “Good” is redefined to be the opposite of the winners.

Original Christianity, in passive-aggressive defiance of their Roman masters, is a Slave Morality religion. The Ten Commandments are negative "Do not" values; the opposites of pride, consumption, ambition, etc., which are the established values of those who have control. In the New Testament, rich men are ridiculed, poverty is lauded, and rationality is punished. People who are not slaves, who have control over their lives, have positive values, things to do rather than things not to do. Unfortunately, if slaves eventually become masters, the perversity of Slave Morality dooms their civilization.