Dreams, we all have them.  They come as the mind moves from deep sleep to REM sleep in the nether world before waking.  Most dreams evaporate  from memory within moments of rising from sleep.  A few linger in memory, a haunting message that demands attention.

Nietzsche recounts such a dream.  His character Zarathustra stands on a promontory, a high outcropping of mountain rock, and is able to view a sweeping expanse of the world.  In the dream he sees himself holding a scale with which he is to “weigh” the world.  His audacious, bold project of world-weighing is approached with awareness of the violence involved when number is applied to a anything finite.  To weigh is to evaluate, to pass judgment by means of a scale, the application of number. 

“Where force is, there number becomes the master: it has more force.”

At the same time, paradoxically, Zarathustra regards the world as a “humanly good thing” which he compares to a big round, ripe apple and a broad branched strong-willed tree.  He is no cold, unsympathetic analyst.

The weirdness of the dream continues.  Zarathustra chooses to place three conventionally evil dispositions on his scale, or in his words, “the three best-cursed things in the world”: Voluptuousness (luxury), passion for power (naked ambition), and selfishness.  Have we not learned from childhood that it is wrong to acquire too much, to bully others, and to be self centered?  In most situations these are indeed anti-social behaviors.  Christianity has stipulated  that these tendencies are unqualified evils, in any situation, in all contexts.  There is never a place or time when it is commendable to be selfish.

Nietzsche begs to differ.

I will render here a few descriptive lines from his dream, those that pertain to selfishness.  Consider what he has to say…..

And then it happened also,—and truly, it happened for the first time!—that his word blessed selfishness, the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springs from the powerful soul:—

—From the powerful soul, to which the high body is concerned, the handsome, triumphing, refreshing body, around which everything becomes a mirror:

—The pliant, persuasive body, the dancer, whose symbol and epitome is the self-enjoying soul. Of such bodies and souls the self-enjoyment calls itself “virtue.”

With its words of good and bad does such self-enjoyment shelter itself as with sacred groves; with the names of its happiness doth it banish from itself everything contemptible.

Away from itself does it banish everything cowardly; it defines: “Bad- that is cowardly!” Contemptible seems to it the ever-solicitous, the sighing, the complaining, and whoever nit-picks to the most trifling advantage.

It despises also all bitter-sweet wisdom: for verily, there is also wisdom that blooms in the dark, a night-shade wisdom, which ever sighs: “All is vain!”

Sly distrust is regarded by it as dishonorable, and every one who wants a contract instead of a handshake: also all over-distrustful wisdom,- for

such is the mode of cowardly souls.

Baser still it regards the obsequious, doggish one, who immediately lies on his back, the submissive one; and there is also wisdom that is submissive, and doggish, and pious, and obsequious.

Hateful altogether, and loathed, is he who

will never defend himself, he who swallows down poisonous spittle and bad looks, the all-too-patient one, the all-enduring one, the all-satisfied

one: for that is the mode of slaves.

Whether they be servile before gods and threat of divine judgment, or before men and stupid human opinions: at all kinds of slaves does it spit, this blessed selfishness!

–excerpt Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #54 The Three Evil Things by Friedrich  Nietzsche p. 183