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Prior to the break, I had been working on a series of episodes about Satanism in general, a series in which my own beliefs would be involved but which would focus primarily on its history and practice by others. I will still likely do an episode along those lines at some point, but during my research I came across an interesting thesis that will be the subject of today’s essay. That thesis, courtesy of Ruben van Luijk and his book Children of Lucifer (2016), states that the primary philosophical influence of Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey, the person who had the most significant influence on LaVey’s thought and thus on the general shape and development of the Church of Satan, was the late 20th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Children of Lucifer is a very thorough and well-researched book that extensively documents Satanism as it has existed both as an accusation made towards others and as a religion proper. I disagree with many of van Luijk’s conclusions but the book remains a valuable resource for information about the historical development of Satanism. I knew prior to reading the book that LaVey had been influenced by Nietzsche, but I’ve always found those influences to be largely predicated on misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s work, and to be minimal even when Nietzsche was properly understood, especially relative to the influence of the 20th-century Russian-American author and philosopher Ayn Rand. LaVey himself even stated that his religion was “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added” (Ellis, 2000, p. 180), but I think that this is a claim worth verifying directly. There will be some challenges in parsing this out, as Rand was herself heavily influenced by Nietzsche, but I find that LaVey’s ideas clearly fall in line with those that were either exclusive to Rand or shared between her and Nietzsche, and this is the thesis that I’ll be defending in this essay.
I’ll begin with some brief background on the history of religious Satanism, especially that surrounding LaVey himself and the establishment of the Church of Satan. Following this will be a survey of the thought of LaVey, Nietzsche, and Rand, and then a comparative analysis between them.
Christians have accused others of Satanism for as long as Christianity has been around. Historian of religion Elaine Pagels documented in her 1995 book The Origin of Satan how early Jewish converts to Christianity coopted their concept of Satan to—in a very literal sense—demonize those Jews who had not converted. These accusations continued to manifest in different forms over the next several hundred years. Satanism as an actual religion is a much more recent phenomenon.
The early modern poet John Milton was the first to present Satan in a more ambiguous light. His epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), depicting Satan’s fall from Heaven and corruption of Adam and Eve, has Satan as the antagonist of the narrative but also assigns to him certain noble qualities that were seized upon by some of the Romantic poets towards the end of the 18th century, among them Lord Byron, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Victor Hugo.
This era was accompanied by a great political upheaval, following or encompassing the revolutions in America and France. Belief in Satan as a literal entity had waned, and so Satan became a “free-floating symbol” (Van Luijk, 2016, p. 87). Those favorable to the spirit of the revolution saw in Milton’s Satan an icon of independence, rebellion, and the creative, poetic spirit that the Romantic poets saw as being the essence of divinity. They wrote various works—including Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Byron’s Cain, and Hugo’s Fin de Satan—in which they reappropriated and rehabilitated Satan by way of creating a new mythology for the new era of humanity. More than just a literary icon, this rehabilitated Satan acquired a religious dimension for the Romantics, in that this symbol was their way of relating to the “ultimate conditions of [their] existence” (Van Luijk, 2016, p. 109, citing sociologist Robert Bellah’s definition of religion).
Moving on to our next topic: Friedrich Nietzsche, who was born in 1844, went insane in 1889, and died in 1900, is a thinker I’ve covered extensively on the show and I’m not going to spend much time here retreading the same ground. He was a philosopher and cultural critic, highly influential in the philosophical schools of existentialism and poststructuralism and to 20th century philosophy in general, renowned for his polemical, aphoristic style of writing and his scathing critique of Christian morality. Nietzsche saw morality as not being objectively real, but rather an expression of power dynamics and a tool to manipulate and enforce the same. In his book On the Genealogy of Morality (published in 1887), he describes how the first moral systems originated with warrior-nobles, who saw themselves separated by a “pathos of distance” from commoners. They valued themselves and their characteristic virtues as “good” and those unlike themselves as “bad.” Enslaved peoples, resentful of their position, revaluated this morality into the good-evil axis: they deemed their position of suffering and powerlessness as “good” and the status and power of their oppressors as “evil” (Young, 2010, pp. 461-2).
Nietzsche’s thesis was based largely on etymological research performed with the resources available to him at the end of the 19th century and is probably not to be taken at face value. What is most important in Nietzsche genealogy of morality, especially for our purposes today, is the understanding of morality in relationship to power, and his prophecy of der Übermensch, the future human who has fully transcended both master and slave morality and who instead creates their own values.
On to Ayn Rand, who was born in Russia in 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum, immigrated to the United States in 1926, died in 1982, and easily ranks as one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the modern era. Her impact on neoliberalism, libertarianism, and the political Right is hard to overestimate. Given that the acadamia of philosophy tends to lean strongly Left, this explains the controversy to some degree. But other conservative philosophers, such as John Locke, Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayak, and Robert Nozick haven’t proved nearly so controversial. While many will emphatically disagree with the arguments of such philosophers, only Ayn Rand seems the target of attacks questioning whether she is even worthy of the title of “philosopher” in the first place (one example being Hendricks, 2018). The controversy surrounding her and her work is so thick that it’s difficult to find unbiased information about her life and her philosophical system, which she called Objectivism. My opinion is that one of the reasons that unbiased information about Rand is so difficult to find is that sources that are biased against her and sources that attempt to honestly assess her work often look very similar. My opinion, whether biased or not, is that Ayn Rand is indeed a philosopher, but an especially bad one, and thus that honest assessments of her work will find it severely lacking. But just by way of securing my argument against any potential biases I may have, let’s look to her entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a lauded online resource maintained by a distinguished editorial board which aims to represent the current state of research on every philosophical topic in its full breadth and which, for many a philosopher (myself included), serves as the default starting point for any new philosophical inquiry. A paragraph under the introductory heading reads as follows:
Whereas Rand’s ideas and mode of presentation make Rand popular with many non-academics, they lead to the opposite outcome with academics. She developed some of her views in response to questions from her readers, but seldom took the time to defend them against possible objections or to reconcile them with the views expressed in her novels. Her philosophical essays lack the self-critical, detailed style of analytic philosophy, or any serious attempt to consider possible objections to her views. Her polemical style, often contemptuous tone, and the dogmatism and cult-like behavior of many of her fans also suggest that her work is not worth taking seriously…. It does not help that she often dismisses other philosophers’ views on the basis of cursory readings and conversations with a few philosophers and with her young philosophy student acolytes. Some contemporary philosophers return the compliment by dismissing her work contemptuously on the basis of hearsay. Some who do read her work point out that her arguments too often do not support her conclusions. This estimate is shared even by many who find her conclusions and her criticisms of contemporary culture, morality, and politics original and insightful.
Badhwar & Long, 2020
Rand was trained in philosophy at Petrograd State University, but she acknowledged only Aristotle as having influenced her work (Burns, 2009, Introduction, para. 5). Despite this, reading Rand’s student Leonard Peikoff’s book on Objectivism (1991), one finds numerous ideas found also in Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and the works of other philosophers. Rand read Nietzsche extensively—Thus Spoke Zarathustra was the first book she bought in English (Burns, 2009, ch. 1, para. 5)—but broke with him on several key concepts. A 2006 paper by philosopher Lester Hunt argues that Rand actually engaged critically with Nietzsche in her novel The Fountainhead (originally published in 1943). Hunt claims that Rand’s engagement with Nietzsche is not predicated on a misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s ideas, but Hunt himself seems to me to have misunderstood Nietzsche, and so I think that, to the extent that Hunt’s thesis is correct, it seems the case that Rand has as well. That misunderstanding is one that I’ll be discussing further on. Rand was emphatically opposed to Immanuel Kant, despite their often reaching similar conclusions (Walsh, 2000), and, in reviewing her work, I have not found any indication that she engaged with the various contemporaneous philosophers whose work was most relevant to her own.
And last we have Anton Szandor LaVey, born Howard Stanton Lavey in 1930. I’m not entirely clear on the details of LaVey’s early life; the source for much of what I was able to find ended up coming from LaVey himself, and I’m not entirely confident that this information is reliable. He was undeniably a showman, and claimed to have joined a circus after dropping out of high school. He later worked as a musician and developed an interest in the occult, which, combined with his interest in the works of Nietzsche, Rand, and the social Darwinist author who went by the name Ragnar Redbeard, led him to, in 1966, found the Church of Satan as the bastion of his new religion of Satanism. In 1969, he published The Satanic Bible, a collection of essays detailing the religion, as well as including various magical rituals and invocations. This became the first openly Satanist organization to endure and to operate in any significant capacity.
One of the clearest lines that can be drawn between the thought of Anton Szandor LaVey and that of Friedrich Nietzsche regards modernity, the era of the values of the Enlightenment, encompassing values of individualism, reason, technology, progress, capitalism, and the concept of the nation-state and individual identification therewith.
These are values to which Nietzsche was not altogether opposed. He had at times been accused of being an irrationalist (Kaufmann, 2013, p. 350)—Ayn Rand herself being one of his accusers on this matter (Hunt, 2006, p. 80)—but while Nietzsche’s view of reason was complex, he certainly valued it highly (Kaufmann, 2013). However, along with Sigmund Freud and Max Weber, Nietzsche is seen as an early critic of modernity and even as a kind of proto-postmodernist as a result of his deconstruction of foundational Enlightenment concepts such as objective morality and the individual (Aylesworth, 2015). Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, both poststructuralist thinkers central to philosophy in the postmodern era, were strongly influenced by Nietzsche. Nietzsche repudiated his nemesis, the composer Richard Wagner, in part for his modernity, writing
Precisely because nothing is more modern than this total sickness, this lateness and overexcitement of the nervous mechanism, Wagner is the modern artist par excellence…. In his art all that the modern world requires most urgently is mixed in the most seductive manner: the three great stimulantia of the exhausted—the brutal, the artificial, and the innocent (idiotic).
Nietzsche, 2000, p. 622, emphasis original
Nietzsche described modernity in general as being under the influence of a kind of sickness, resulting in part from the influence of Christianity (cf. the entirity of Nietzche’s The Antichrist) but also simultaneously from the “death of God,” the disappearance of meaning from the human world resulting from the dissolution of religion without any replacement for the values it created (Nietzsche, 1974, §125).
LaVey, in contrast, was an emphatically modernist thinker who uncritically endorsed the values of the Enlightenment wholesale and indeed predicated much of his thought thereon. In Children of Lucifer, van Luijk describes LaVeyan Satanism as being a quintessential Enlightenment religion, “very much a religious vehicle for the values of the Western Revolution” (2016, p. 400). LaVey’s rationalist stance against traditional religion was part of this, as the Enlightenment holds rationalism above religious superstition. Van Luijk describes Nietzsche as “continu[ing] in the footsteps of Enlightenment religious criticism” (ibid., p. 328), but this is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of the foundations upon which Nietzsche based his repudiation of Christianity.
The Enlightenment criticism of religion is, as I have said, based on rationalism: through the use of reason, one can infer that many or all of the claims made by traditional religion are false. Simultaneously, the paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant would say, one can use reason to find objective grounds for morality other than divine command. But Nietzsche rejected moral realism entirely; for him, morality was a matter of power dynamics, and he implicates Christianity as being a consequence of this. Rand, on the other hand, saw things much the way Kant did: rational thought leads one to objective morality—although Rand’s conclusions as to what constituted that objective morality differed quite radically from Kant’s.
The ethical system of Rand’s Objectivism is referred to by philosophers as ethical egoism, which states that “actions are morally right just because they best promote one’s self-interest” (Shafer-Landau, 2015, p. 107, emphasis removed). This is entirely in line with LaVey’s conception of Satanism (cf. LaVey, 2005, p. 34), although one might read LaVey as being a moral anti-realist (i.e. “nothing is truly morally right”) and simultaneously a psychological egoist (i.e. “people can only act in their own self-interest and deceive themselves when they believe they are acting for others reasons”). Like Rand, Nietzsche praised selfishness and self-interest and denigrated altruism (1974, §21), but I would hesitate to describe him as an egoist. Section 162 of The Gay Science reads: “Egoism is the law of perspective applied to feelings: what is closest appears large and weighty, and as one moves farther away size and weight decrease.” This suggests that Nietzsche sees egoistic values as being illusory: we value our self-interest because it is closer to us than the interests of others rather than because self-interest is intrinsically valuable. For all that, Nietzsche still might not repudiate egoism (and never does, so far as I could find), so long as we do not mistake egoistic values as being objective, as Rand does. But while LaVey never stated outright whether he was a moral realist in any sense, we must evaluate his egoistic moral claims in light of his Satanism being a fundamentally rationalist religion (Van Luijk, 2016, p. 336), which places his moral claims as being much more in line with Rand than with Nietzsche.
One area where Nietzsche is often misunderstood—and this is a mistake that I find in the work of both Rand and LaVey, as well as the aforementioned philosopher Lester Hunt—is in his philosophy of power and in the dichotomy between Nietzsche’s master and slave moralities, which I’ve already described in brief. To review, those who hold to the master morality of the warrior-noble see themselves as good and those unlike them as bad, while those who hold to the morality of the slave see themselves and their weakness and powerlessness as good and their oppressors as evil. The mistake lies in reading Nietzsche as advocating for the master morality, or for power as a virtue or an intrinsic good. Nietzsche saw the will to power as the elemental driving force of all human activity (Kaufmann, 2013, p. 193), but also believed that the desire for power caused people to fail to cultivate themselves (ibid., p. 180). “Power makes stupid,” he wrote in Twilight of the Idols (quoted in Kaufmann, 2013, p. 297, emphasis original). (A statement in section 2 of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist might be read in contradiction to this; however, I read this statement not as his valuing power itself but rather reaffirming his belief that morality is essentially an instrument of power). And Nietzsche saw his own ethic as being beyond both master and slave morality. In the words of Nietzsche’s faithful translator and biographer Walter Kaufmann, “[Nietzsche] would like us to conform to neither and become autonomous” (ibid., p. 297, emphasis original). Rand denigrated those who would seek power for its own sake rather than as the rational means to fulfill one’s values, but nevertheless read Nietzsche as advocating for the acquisition of power rather than merely describing it as an intrinsic feature of the world (Burns, 2009, ch. 2, para. 10), and in general lauded and glorified the powerful and successful capitalist businessperson. LaVey, who stated that “…we must… assume the most powerful men on earth [are] the most Satanic” (2005, p. 104), seems to have followed Rand in this rather than drawing directly from Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was ardently anti-nationalist, declaring nationalism to be “dangerous” (Kaufmann, 2013, p. 288). He repudiated the German state and its people throughout his work, preferring to see himself as a “good European” (ibid., p. 296). LaVey and the Church of Satan, in contrast, were explicitly nationalist (with some caveats that I’ll discuss shortly) and fully endorsed the American establishment. He has been quoted as saying that “When Satanism becomes the major religion in the United States, it will be complete with red, white and blue banners flying, accompanied by the blaring trombones of John Phillip Sousa” and that “Satanism IS Americanism in its purest form” (both quoted in van Luijk, 2016, p. 370). LaVey situated the Church of Satan directly in opposition to the countercultural movements of the 1960’s, aligned his movement with state interests (ibid., p. 328), allied himself with the San Francisco police force (ibid., p. 299), and endorsed police state measures to sanction the Satanic elite (ibid., p. 366).
LaVey’s endorsement of American hegemony and simultaneous alignment with Satan the Adversary strikes me as comical. It’s as though someone were to go to Disneyland and spend the entire day there, spending all of their money on the park’s various goods and attractions and taking photos later posted to social media with enthusiastic captions, and then walk out the gate at the end of the day saying, “Ha! Joke’s on them. I don’t even believe in Mickey Mouse.” For all that, LaVey did situate his Satanism, somewhat in contradistinction to his American nationalism, as being anti-consumerist and anti-conformist, mass culture and media being tools of herd indoctrination (ibid., p. 374), but rejecting the tools by which the state apparatus manufactures consent is hardly much of a concern if those in question already consent to the state apparatus itself, just as the Walt Disney Company couldn’t care less how you feel about Mickey Mouse so long as your dollars are flowing into their pockets regardless.
It is not possible to claim Nietzsche for either the political Right or Left, and those who have followed him have landed on both sides of the divide. I’m confident that he would have repudiated the contemporary Republican Party and its increasing populism, but it’s hard to know how LaVey, who died in 1997, would have felt about it. I’ve found nothing to indicate that LaVey distanced himself from the political Right over the 80s and 90s, decades during which the Republican Party and evangelical Christians increasingly associated themselves with each other. The GOP in its current state leans heavily on the work of Ayn Rand, as did LaVey, but this is simultaneously in tension with their populism, which Rand and LaVey would, in theory, likewise have repudiated.
As an additional note, we have one of the goals of LaVey’s Pentagonal Revisionism, his long-term goals for a Satanic society: the ability to live in a total environment of one’s choosing (Van Reijk, 2016, p. 366). Given that another goal of Pentagonal Revisionism was the construction of artificial human companions—a task to which LaVey set himself in his later years (ibid., p. 379)—we can infer that what LaVey had in mind may have been something like the Experience Machine thought experiment of philosopher Robert Nozick. Nozick’s Experience Machine creates an artificial reality of maximal pleasure which users can live in for the rest of their lives, if they so choose. Nozick’s objective in creating this thought experiment was to refute ethical hedonism, the notion that pleasure is the only good. Given Nietzsche’s views on hedonism and the use of alcohol to escape reality, we can guess that he would have been entirely opposed to both the notion of an experience machine and LaVey’s desire for a total reality of one’s choosing. In contrast, Jennifer Burns tells us in her biography of Ayn Rand that “When [Rand] stopped writing novels she continued to live in the imaginary worlds she had created, finding her characters as real and meaningful as the people she spent time with every day” (2009, Introduction, para. 14).
Another important point concerns the philosophy of elitism. Elitism separates humanity into a large group, which we might call the herd, and a much smaller, superior group, the elite. Nietzsche was an advocate of this philosophy, which I can trace back at least as far as Socrates, who, at least in Plato’s interpretation, was ever wont to draw attention to the superior life of the philosopher. The Nazis appropriated Nietzsche’s work and interpreted it to mean that the elite were differentiated from the herd along racial lines, but any authentic reading of Nietzsche will see him opposing such a viewpoint with all the ire at his command: “…Nietzsche looked to art, religion, and philosophy—and not to race—to elevate man above the beasts, and some men above the mass of mankind” (Kaufmann, 2013, p. 285). I myself am an elitist and I identify my satanic religion as reflecting this elitism: I’m no egalitarian and I have no problem saying that there are people to whom I am superior, even if the bar I set for this is a low one. Show me footage of the January 6th insurrection and I’ll show you a mass of people who are inferior to me, intellectually, morally, and spiritually. His idiotic misogyny aside, Nietzsche was perfectly clear that membership among the elite does not relate in any way to one’s demographics, and I believe that both Ayn Rand and Anton Szandor LaVey followed Nietzsche in this regard. But there are other details of philosophical elitism that can help us to distinguish between their respective philosophies.
Nietzschean philosophy is fiercely individualistic, to be sure, but for Nietzsche, this individualism was part of the broader question of what makes entire cultures—or all of humanity—great. Great cultures, Nietzsche believed, are those which allow great individuals to flourish. Contrast this with the views of Ayn Rand as stated by the Atlas Society, a nonprofit organization which exists to promulgate Rand’s philosophy: “The work and virtue that Objectivism admires is not the product of any group. It is not the product of nations, as such, nor of tribes, nor of races, nor of sexes. It is the product of individuals” (Freedom, Achievement, Individualism, Reason, 2004). This is not something that Nietzsche would have repudiated outright, but when he spoke of the “advancement of humanity” (such as in 1974, §4), we might rightly imagine Rand and LaVey—LaVey, who aimed for the literal stratification of society (Luijk, 2016, p. 266)—scoffing at him together.
To wrap up, let’s take a walk through LaVey’s Nine Satanic Statements (LaVey, 2005) and see how they stack up against the thought of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. First, “Satan represents indulgence, instead of abstinence!” Nietzsche was a great proponent of living life to its fullest, but I wouldn’t consider him a hedonist. He was famously opposed to the consumption of alcohol and, speaking from a great deal of experience in this matter, saw discomfort, boredom, and suffering as being valuable. Rand saw indulgence as being an escape mechanism for irrational and neurotic people, saying: “For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality” (Rand, 2014, ch. 6, para. 18). So I conclude that LaVey is drawing here primarily from a misinterpretation of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and his philosophy of Hedonism rather than from either Nietzsche or Rand.
“Satan represents vital existence, instead of spiritual pipe dreams!” This is very much in line with both Nietzsche and Rand. Both advocated living this life for itself rather than for some hypothetical life to come.
“Satan represents undefiled wisdom, instead of hypocritical self-deceit!” This is pure Rand. She called her philosophy Objectivism because she believed it was the first truly objective philosophy and believed that any rational person will be a party to the true universal and objective perspective of the world. Nietzsche, in contrast, would say that everyone deceives themselves, at least to some degree. He understood that knowledge of the world is always knowledge from some perspective, and that we approach objective knowledge asymptotically—but never reach it—when we access and compare different perspectives (Anderson, 2017, section 6.2: “Perspectivism;” cf. also Nietzsche, 1974, §57; Kaufmann, 2013, p. 264; and Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals from Nietzsche, 2000).
“Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it, instead of love wasted on ingrates!” Due to his misogyny, Nietzsche was distrustful of romantic love, but saw platonic love as being a profound virtue (Nietzsche, 1974, §14). I read Nietzsche as advising us to be kind to whom we will and to love whom we will regardless of whether those feelings or actions are reciprocated, as such expresses our power and our love for life. As this begins to border on altruism, I believe Rand would be emphatically opposed to this and would endorse LaVey’s statement here, possibly qualifying it by saying that those who think rationally will automatically love only those who deserve it.
“Satan represents vengeance, instead of turning the other cheek!” This one is a bit complex. I believe Nietzsche would say that we should not believe ourselves morally superior to acts of vengeance, that magnanimity is more often a sublimation of our vital urges, but that being compelled to vengeance would be an indication that the harmful party has power over us. Reading section 14 of The Gay Science, I think that Nietzsche would fully endorse a magnanimous response to some wrongdoing so long as we recognize that doing so is just as egoistic as vengeance would be and so long as we do not pretend that doing so makes us morally superior to the vengeful. As for Rand, I haven’t been able to find much to go off of. Hypothetically, I think that Rand would see the rational person as seeking rectification rather than revenge, the former being a matter of justice and virtue and the latter being a matter of emotional satisfaction. So I don’t think that either would endorse LaVey here, but this statement is probably closer to Nietzsche than it is to Rand.
“Satan represents responsibility to the responsible, instead of concern for psychic vampires!” The first part of this statement is definitively Randian. In The Virtue of Selfishness, she speaks of responsibility extensively, seeing it as one of the central concerns of the rational person (ch. 4, para. 3). Nietzsche did not, so far as I could find, write on the matter of responsibility in the sense that LaVey is referring to here; I imagine he would deconstruct the concept entirely, asking who it is that delegates responsibility and suggesting that those who feel that they have been given responsibility because they are responsible rather than because they are useful are deceiving themselves. Both Rand and Nietzsche would, I think, be in agreement with LaVey on the matter of psychic vampires.
“Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours, who, because of his ‘divine spiritual and intellectual development,’ has become the most vicious animal of all!” Nietzsche saw animals and humans as part of a hierarchical continuum in which the higher humans are above the lower, the lower above animals, and the higher animals above the lower animals. For Rand, to be human is to be a rational animal; thus, we are animals, yes, but distinguished from them in an important way; or, at least, we have the capacity to be so distinguished. So this one is pure LaVey.
“Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification!” Nietzsche saw sin as a manifestation of Christian morality. He would suggest that we evaluate our actions based on their effects in this world rather than on anything supernatural, but wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that we should go around sinning as much as possible. This would be to allow one’s actions and values to be dicated by nihilistic Christian morality, albeit in an inverted fashion. Rand’s views seem to be similar but more specific: the attribution of “sin” is an expression of resentment for another’s rationality and success, and so people should indeed seek to sin as much as possible through being rational and successful (2014, ch. 2, para. 22), but LaVey is here taking “sin” more at face value. Like the first statement, Nietzsche and Rand may both have been an influence here, but this is primarily LaVey’s own thought.
Finally, “Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years!” Nietzsche would disagree; he would likely have believed that the church had “stayed in business” by giving people a way of expressing their ressentiment, their resentment of the powerful. I think Rand would likely agree on that front, and so we have another LaVey exclusive.
Not that the Nine Satanic Statements represent the full breadth of LaVey’s thought, but they are a distillation of it, and we do not see in them the clear and predominant Nietzscheanism that we would expect if Nietzsche were truly LaVey’s primary philosophical influence. His thought diverges from Rand in more places than I expected prior to researching for this essay, but he does follow her on several key points. This characterizes my conclusions in general. LaVey’s thought is less overtly Randian than I had anticipated, especially given his own statements regarding his indebtedness to Rand, but I think I’ve successfully made my case that Nietzsche—at least, Nietzsche according to an honest and faithful reading of his works—is a much less significant influence on LaVey than Ayn Rand.
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