According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Western culture, Western religions, and Judeo-Christian morality have all served to pacify human beings into weak, herd-like beings, masking their potential as strong, creative, and subjective individuals with their own values and with authorship over their own life stories. So for Nietzsche, “know thyself” means something more like recognizing and embracing your individuality, your own unique perspectives, to purposefully go against the grain and against the flow of the herd—philosophically, morally, culturally, aesthetically, politically, and otherwise. The Nietzschean notion of authenticity is not merely a matter of looking inward and seeing your own essence, as if that essence were something fixed and necessary; it is a matter of embracing your own creative power to author a life story for yourself that is uniquely suited to you, actively and because of the perspectives and metaphors that you choose to create with which you actively and creatively define yourself.