Soul-doctors and pain. – All preachers of morals, and all theologians, share one bad habit: they all try to talk people into thinking they are in a very bad way and need some severe, final, radical cure. And since humanity has for centuries far too eagerly lent its ear to these doctrines, something of this superstition of being very badly off has finally stuck, so that they are now only too ready to sigh and find nothing good in life and make sad faces together, as if life were really quite hard to endure. In reality, they are uninhibitedly sure of and in love with their lives, and are full of innumerable wiles and tricks to get rid of unpleasantness and extract the thorn of pain and misfortune. Talk of pain and misfortune always strikes me as exaggerated, as if it were a matter of good manners to exaggerate here while deliberately keeping quiet about the fact that there are innumerable palliatives against pain, such as an aesthetics, or the feverish haste of thoughts, or a restful position of the body, or good and bad memories, intentions, hopes, and many types of pride and sympathy, which have nearly the same effect as anaesthesia – and at the highest degrees of pain, unconsciousness automatically takes over. We know quite well how to trickle sweets onto our bitternesses, especially onto the soul’s bitternesses; we find aid in our boldness and sublimity, as well as in the nobler deliriums of submission and resignation. A loss is a loss for barely an hour; somehow it also brings us a gift from heaven – new strength, for example, or at least a new opportunity for strength! What fantasies about the inner ‘miseries’ of evil persons the preachers of morals have concocted! How they have even lied to us about the unhappiness of passionate people! Yes, ‘lied’ is here the proper term: they knew very well about the superabundant happiness of this type of person, but kept a deathly silence about it, since it constituted a refutation of their theory on which happiness arises only with the annihilation of passion and the silencing of the will! Finally, concerning these soul-doctors’ prescription and their praise for a severe, radical cure, one may ask: is our life really so painful and burdensome that it would be advantageous for us to trade it for a fossilized Stoic way of life? Things are not bad enough for us that they have to be bad for us in the Stoic style!