If I am right in my interpretation of Nietzsche that the Ni…

If I am right in my interpretation of Nietzsche that the Nietzschian man is one who embraces the fact that achieving the best things in life entails risk, then it appears that people can be Nietzschian without going through a process of nihilism and overcoming nihilism. These people have a phlegmatic temperament and they avoid getting addicted to ideas in the first place by taking a scientific approach. Thomas Sowell is one of these people. His fundamental dictum, "there are no solutions—there are only tradeoffs", which he has repeated many times in different ways, is the very thing that people wish to lie to themselves about. Sowell understands that people resist this idea out of a sense of entitlement but I think that he fails to appreciate the emotional turmoil that people may go through in accepting this idea, particularly when it touches on something especially dear to their heart. Sowell was a Marxist early in his career but the economic data coming out of the Soviet Union was enough to change his mind about it, and he does not seem to have gone through a dark night of the soul. We see a similar style in other free market economists. They have a kind of strength--an ability to avoid addictions that other people find so enticing but at the same time, an inability to deal with their opponents on anything other than an intellectual level.