One of the central concepts in Nie­tzsche’s philosophy was the “eternal return of the same,” that is, the need to affirm the value of one’s life in every single detail as something to be repeated endlessly through time. Given the sheer torture of his physical existence, such an affirmation was testimony to Nietzsche’s own gigantic will — a will that transformed into madness when he collapsed on a Turin sidewalk in January 1889 with delusions that he had become a world-creating God.

But after his disastrous courtship of Lou Salomé, whose affections were stolen by Nietzsche’s close friend Paul Rée, he came to regard feminism as one of the most disastrous byproducts of modernity, and women as needing (in the words of a character in “Zarathustra”) “the whip.”

Ayatollah Khamenei is indeed a much better model of Nietzsche’s future leader than the power­less Dalai Lama.