The Will To Power

How raw ambition, spiritual energy, and structured obsession shape the men who bend reality to their will.

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot.”

— Jack London

---

Ambition is the more familiar, less refined expression of what Nietzsche called the will to power - a force composed in equal measure of part spiritual drive, part sovereign intent. Put simply: the greater the ambition in its intensity and directed will, the stronger the will to power - for without it, the soul lies dormant, no longer bending the world to it, but being shaped by it.

Will alone is defined as the intensity of desire and metaphysical ability to reality bend through unwavering persistence, endurance and obsession. Your will is thus the driving force of your spirit, the engine of your soul that powers all that you do. It contains your dreams, your drive, your motivation, your intensity, and your capacity to be an agent rather than an object - to change reality and be the force that energetically shifts your environment, rather than being directed by and dictated to by the energy of your environment.

If you are a conqueror, you're an agent, if you're the conquered, you're an object. If you're the master, you're an agent, if you're a slave, you're an object. If you're the victor, you're the agent, if you're the victim, you're the object - there is a battle of energies, a winner and a loser - you get what you want, or you don't - which is why cooperation requires the alignment of incentives so both sides get what they want, but that is a separate topic altogether beyond the scope of this essay.

Applied will then is the idea that if you attack something for long enough by giving enough of your energy to it, whilst intelligently adapting your tactics as you learn it with full vigour and intensity, that it will eventually fall into your lap - or perhaps stated another way - God and the universe will grant you what you want because you have proven you are worthy of it through self-sacrifice and self-demonstration.

Competence endows rewards, and rewards are the fulfilment of desires you have shown yourself deserving of. Ergo you wanted it, you pursued the tools and understanding that would get you it, developed the skills that would allow you to employ those tools and execute that understanding - and the result is ending up precisely where you want to be.

Will in itself is not plagued by doubt or rational paralysis in probabilistic evaluation, because it is too obsessed with the desired end result to allow anything that obstructs it to dissuade it. To the will, logic is a tool that must serve it, not undermine it - so if logic can be used in the pursuit of will it is accepted, but if it undermines the will, it is discarded.

To one with a strong will to power, unlike say, the prototypical atheist, logic is not God. Logic to the man animated by a strong intensity of will is simply a problem solving tool, or when used to obfuscate or deceive in pursuit of one's ends - a form of sophistry - but never the determinant of what is true and right and to be believed in, or what is wrong, false, and to be rejected.

You could say in that sense the will to power is pathological - its own form of energy - an intentionality so strong it becomes a kind of primordial intelligence, directing you, living through you, spiritually augmenting you in the pursuit of your destiny.

Those less energetically charged do not believe in such things, for they allow logic to constrain them within the reductive limitations of systems thinking where the existence of destiny must be evaluated like a hypothesis, but because destiny cannot be falsified, logic as a tool becomes impotent. And so in the absence of proof, they default to disbelief - as though absence of evidence were itself evidence of absence.

Will alone however, as important as it is in the way that I have defined it, is not competence. So whilst will is important (think of it as the impetus, the spark, the ignition, the flame, the animating force, the propellant, the driving force, the engine, etc) it is a fundamentally necessary but not sufficient condition for paradise, if we define paradise as the idealised version of yourself doing the things that provide you with the most meaning and personal satisfaction in conjunction with the personal relationships (spouse, fraternity, children) that enable this idealised form.

Competence then is the vessel for this animating energy to find structure and create something useful from it - otherwise the will to power unchanneled becomes Thanatos - which in men amounts to a fascination with danger seeking (the outward pursuit of destruction - eg: skydiving, street racing, bare-knuckle fighting - flirting with death), whilst in women it manifests as spiritual masochism (the inward pursuit of destruction, which is self-loathing and thereby vibrationally negative and self-sabotaging in that it is energetically depleting).

Both seek to destroy themselves or at least bring themselves close to self-destruction, just through different mediums - men, being the force of action and penetration, outwardly and externally, women, being the force of passivity and receptivity, inwardly and internally.

Competence in practical terms is thus orderliness in discipline guided by intelligence in planning to direct the will towards the construction of what it seeks. It tempers it enough to shape it without trying to extinguish it. If you have a strong will but insufficient cognitive ability, you will have the energy to do, but know not what to do, or if you know what to do, are not able to do it. If you have strong will but low discipline, you simply end up engaging in Thanatos. So competence then is the will tempered by discipline, directed by intelligence.

The feminine doesn’t express the will to power in the same way, because she does not seek to penetrate the world, but to enchant it. Her spiritual force, when rightly ordered, is not conquest, but magnetism - seduction in the highest form - the power to pull paradise toward her through beauty, receptivity, and truthfulness to her deepest essence. But when misaligned, that same force profoundly implodes in a most masochistic manner.

What in men becomes domination, becomes self-loathing in women - an unconscious hatred of her own need, her own depth, and her own yearning to be possessed by something greater than herself. She (in a way she cannot articulate) fears ego death, and so sees her progressive becoming as a regressive undoing, and so she punishes herself, starves herself and sabotages connection - because somewhere deep down, she believes she is not yet worthy of the ecstasy she secretly craves.

Needless to say, the will to power takes on a destructive rather than constructive form if not given structure, and not creative destruction, as in "we'll tear this down to reconstruct it better" (which is orderliness loose enough to allow for the expression of chaos whilst being robust enough to contain it) but in the sense of:

---

“I am consumed by my intensity to the point of all possessing and unrelenting madness (manic possession) and therefore want to live on the edge of existence tempting fate by repeatedly flirting with my mortality, or in the case of women: endlessly self-flagellate for all my perceived inadequacies by denying myself my truest desires, whilst pursuing self-worth through endlessly hollow but self-imposed slavery that optimises neither for potential or meaning, but allows for the most basic of dignity.”

---

This is what happens when the will to power that constitutes your ambition is in a raw and chaotic state without the appropriate structure to contain and thereby direct it. It is chaos without order, intensity without stoicism, attachment without reciprocity.

So ambition on a basic level is simply desire, but when sufficiently intense, structured and layered in a metaphysical and thereby spiritual sense, it becomes the will to power.

Now one of the greatest issues plaguing westerners in their social decline is listlessness, apathy and depression - all of which are byproducts of the same core deficiency - an insufficient will to power.

All of these things are a spiritual malady, in the sense that people in these hyper intellectualising, self-victimising and otherwise cynical states of self-limiting ideation (perpetual belief your limits are far below where they actually are) are weak souls, or stated another way - energetically depleted, and therefore in a sort of self-fulfilling way don't actually reach their potential, because they lack the requisite energy to do so and thereby get stuck in a negative feedback loop.

"I'm not successful because I'm low energy, but I'm low energy because I'm not successful" - so the key for these people in this "negative energy prison" is to focus on small wins that will give them energetic momentum that allows them to increase their frequency, or put in less esoteric terms: to become more positive, moralised, and higher energy off the back of the proof of their self-demonstrated capacity to succeed in one form or another, and therefore better able to implement their will and reach their natural God given potential.

This is why not getting depressed or demoralised irrespective of all else gives you a pronounced competitive edge, in the sense that those who lack the mania you do won't be able to last as long as you, assuming they can even motivate themselves to begin with. Motivation for you is not even required, because you are so spiritually animated you actually find it harder to stop than get going - where their hose sputters and cannot maintain a flowing stream, you are trying to find a way to direct an overflowing hose.

So to summarise: the will to power is an unwavering pathological intensity. It is a natural antidote against cynicism, faithlessness and demoralisation, constituting its own form of self-perpetuating and meaning bestowing belief system. It makes you energetically charged, and thereby ambitious and achievement seeking without being confined by the rules of logic, which it views merely as an evaluative tool, rather than as a replacement for God as the ultimate authority.

Men without ambition never go anywhere in life. But men with ambition and no skill destroy themselves in their unfulfillable desire for all this life has to offer, owing to their structural inability to fully implement their will. Those who find paradise then are those blessed enough to be able to marry the soul engine of vision, faith, drive, and animus, with competence, wisdom and self-discipline to successfully complete the trials that will enable them to not only know where they want to go, but to arrive there.

You have one life - one pulse of time in which to prove your vision was real. And that vision - if it’s true - must be proven in blood, sweat, and demonstration - not just in procrastinating abstract thought or in idealistic longing. That which is beautiful and can be imagined, must be realised. The world always kneels for those who burn, but only if they first become the sun - burning long enough and bright enough to make their fire generative.

---

This essay was originally published on Twitter, but has long since been buried by the algorithm. It has been lightly remastered, and added to the citadel for your reading pleasure, and archiving convenience.

---