The Joker as Failed Übermensch

When Pop-Nietzsche Meets Gotham's Clown

We've spent two posts now walking through the ruins with chaos agents—Randall Flagg building empires, the Joker holding up mirrors, both weaponizing human brokenness in different ways. In the first post, I compared their approaches to destruction. In the second, I explored how the Joker takes Catholic doctrine about original sin and strips away the resurrection, leaving only the wound.

Today I want to tackle a different philosophical framework the Joker seems to embody: Friedrich Nietzsche's vision of humanity after the death of God. Because if you squint at the Joker through a certain lens, he looks an awful lot like Nietzsche's Übermensch—the "overman" who creates new values after traditional morality collapses.

Except he's not. He's a parody. A failure. A cautionary tale about what happens when "God is dead" becomes a bumper sticker instead of a burden.

Let me explain.

The Clown Who Burned the Wrong Book

Picture the scene: a warehouse in Gotham, mountains of cash stacked to the ceiling—the mob's money, blood-stained bills representing years of corruption, extortion, murder. The Joker stands in front of it with a can of gasoline and a match. His accountant, a nervous man with a calculator, stammers about the fortune they're destroying.

The Joker lights the match.

He patiently explains that it’s not about the money, watching the flames catch. Instead, he’s sending a message to the crooks. “Everything burns.”

Meanwhile, in a philosophical universe far away, Nietzsche's Zarathustra stands on a mountaintop, weeping. Because this—this spectacular act of destruction—isn't what he meant at all.

The Joker didn’t read Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  He didn’t read Shaw’s Man and Superman either, although it’s commonly confused with Nietzsche’s work in popular culture. Although the Joker would have loved Shaw’s Devil monologue: “I’m not a criminal—I’m an amateur!”

What Nietzsche Actually Said

Before we get to how the Joker mangles Nietzsche, let's talk about what Nietzsche was actually arguing. Fair warning: This is a simplification of some pretty dense philosophy here, but stick with me as I stumble around.

In 1882, Nietzsche wrote one of philosophy's most famous passages in The Gay Science. A madman runs into a marketplace screaming, "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" The crowd laughs at him. They don't understand that he's not celebrating—he's terrified. Because if God is dead, if there's no cosmic authority backing up our moral codes, then we have to create meaning ourselves.

This is where the Übermensch comes in. Nietzsche wasn't preaching nihilism—he was trying to cure it. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he imagines a new kind of human who doesn't need God's laws carved in stone. The Übermensch creates his own values, says Yes to life in all its tragedy and beauty, and (this is the key) lives so fully that he'd be willing to relive every moment eternally.

Nietzsche also distinguished between two types of morality. "Master morality" comes from strength—the strong define what's good based on what affirms life and power. "Slave morality" comes from weakness—the oppressed invent concepts like "good" and "evil" to make virtue out of their powerlessness. Christianity, in Nietzsche's view, is the ultimate slave morality: blessed are the meek, the last shall be first, turn the other cheek.

The Übermensch is supposed to move beyond this framework entirely. Not by becoming a monster, but by creating new values that affirm life.

That's the theory. Now watch what the Joker does with it.

The Joker's Pop-Nietzsche: All Destruction, No Creation

The Joker gets the first part right. He absolutely believes God is dead—or more precisely, that the moral order everyone pretends to follow is a joke. "Their morals, their code," he tells Batman, "it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble."

He's diagnosed the same problem Nietzsche did: people's morality is performance, not conviction. Harvey Dent is Gotham's "White Knight," but one bad day and he's flipping a coin to decide who dies. The ferry passengers talk about civilization and law, but give them a detonator and see how quickly that veneer cracks.

So far, so Nietzschean.

But here's where the Joker fails the assignment: Nietzsche's Übermensch is supposed to create new values after destroying the old ones. The Joker just... stops at the destruction. He tears down slave morality but builds nothing in its place.

Watch the money-burning scene again. In Nietzschean terms, money represents slave-morality values—greed, accumulation, security. The mob hoards it. The system depends on it. By burning it, the Joker should be making a statement about transcending those petty concerns, about being beyond such base motivations.

But what does he create instead? Nothing. Just more chaos. More proof that everything is meaningless. He's not transvaluing morality (Nietzsche's term for creating new values); he's devaluing everything down to zero.

Harvey Dent's transformation is the perfect example. The Joker doesn't help Harvey become something greater. He reduces him. The District Attorney who believed in justice becomes Two-Face, a man who lets a coin flip decide life and death because, as he explains, it's the morality the world finds acceptable. That's not master morality—that's giving up on morality entirely.

The Joker claims to be an agent of chaos, improvising without a plan. "I'm a dog chasing cars," he says. "I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it." But this is a lie, or at least a half-truth. The Joker does have plans—meticulous ones. The bank heist is precisely choreographed. The ferry experiment is engineered down to the minute. The hospital explosion requires careful timing.

The contradiction is the point. The Joker is a master planner who preaches chaos. He's structured his entire existence around proving that structure doesn't matter. That's not Nietzschean affirmation—that's nihilism wearing a philosopher's mask.

Eternal Recurrence as Ritual Despair

Nietzsche had this thought experiment called eternal recurrence. Imagine, he said, that you had to live your life over and over again, exactly the same way, for all eternity. Every pain, every triumph, every boring Tuesday afternoon—infinite times. The Übermensch is someone who could say yes to that, who loves life so much that eternal repetition sounds like heaven, not hell.

The Joker has his own version of eternal recurrence, but it's not affirmation—it's ritual. Every scheme is the same proof, repeated: he creates experiment where he’s sure the masses will turn on each other.

The ferry experiment is his liturgy. He's not hoping people will surprise him. He wants to be right. He needs to be right. Because if the prisoners and civilians actually refuse to blow each other up—if grace interrupts his experiment—then his entire worldview collapses.

And that's exactly what happens. The convict throws the detonator overboard. The civilian refuses to press the button. The Joker's only response is a disappointed shrug.

Zarathustra would celebrate that moment. The Übermensch sees unexpected nobility and says, "Yes! This too!" The Joker sees it and moves on to the next experiment, the next proof, trying to make the pattern repeat until it finally confirms his thesis.

That's not amor fati—love of fate. That's despair dressed up as philosophy.

The Cultural Symptom: Nietzsche as Bumper Sticker

Here's my theory: the Joker didn't actually read Nietzsche. He doesn't need to.

Nietzsche's ideas have leaked into the cultural water supply. "God is dead" shows up in song lyrics, TV shows, late-night dorm room arguments. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is a gym-motivation poster. The Übermensch becomes shorthand for anyone who rejects traditional morality—ignoring that Nietzsche insisted the Übermensch must create something better.

The Joker inhaled these fumes. He absorbed pop-Nietzsche—the version where "God is dead" means "nothing matters" instead of "we must create meaning." Where "beyond good and evil" means "anything goes" instead of "forge your own values." Where the death of traditional morality is the end of the story, not the beginning.

Nietzsche actually warned about this. In Beyond Good and Evil, he wrote: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

The Joker stared into the abyss and blinked first. Then laughed. He's not the Übermensch. He's the Last Man—Nietzsche's term for the person who's given up on greatness, who wants only comfort and safety and never risks anything—except this Last Man is holding a grenade.

Batman: The Accidental Übermensch

Funny thing is, Batman might be closer to Nietzsche's ideal than the Joker ever gets.

Batman creates value in the void. Gotham is corrupt, the police are compromised, the justice system is broken. Traditional morality has failed. Bruce Wayne could become another corrupt billionaire or another nihilist burning it all down.

Instead, he creates the "one rule." No killing. Ever. Even when it would be easier. Even when the whole city is at stake. Even when the Joker dangles from a rope at the end of the film and Batman could just... let go.

He doesn't. He pulls the Joker up. Not because the Joker deserves it, but because Batman has decided this rule matters. He's created meaning through self-discipline, through the choice to hold himself to a standard even when no cosmic authority enforces it.

That's closer to Nietzschean master morality than anything the Joker does. Batman affirms life by protecting it, by refusing to let murder be the solution even when murder would be expedient. He's saying Yes to the struggle, to the discipline, to the cost of maintaining his code in a world that punishes it.

He's not perfect. He's no philosopher-king on a mountaintop. Superheroes rarely are. But he's wielding the hammer of value-creation, while the Joker just burns everything and calls it enlightenment.

The Punchline Nietzsche Feared

In the end, the Joker isn't beyond good and evil. He's beneath it.

He's mistaken destruction for transcendence, nihilism for philosophy, the death of God for the death of meaning. He read the diagnosis—we're living in a moral void—and mistook it for the cure.

Nietzsche spent his life trying to figure out how humans could create meaning without God. The Joker is what happens when you stop at page one of that project. When "God is dead" becomes the punchline instead of the problem.

The scariest thing about the Joker isn't that he's Nietzschean. It's that he's what millions of people think Nietzschean looks like. He's what happens when a philosophy of radical life-affirmation gets reduced to "nothing matters, so why so serious?"

So here's my question for the comments: Would Nietzsche laugh at the Joker, or weep?

I think he'd do both. Laugh at the audacity of the misunderstanding. Weep at how thoroughly his ideas got twisted.

And then he'd probably write another book nobody would read correctly.

That's it for this trilogy on chaos agents and dark philosophy. Thanks for walking through the ashes with me. If you're a writer working on your own antagonists, I hope these posts gave you some frameworks to think through. The best villains aren't just evil—they're asking questions the hero and the reader have to answer.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a manuscript to fix and a conference to attend. Stay dangerous out there.