Nietzsche elevated the individual a decisive step further by famously proclaiming: "God is dead." For Nietzsche, values do not derive from any transcendent truth, whether from the God above or the God-infused self within. Rather, morality is defined by the emotions of those who hold institutional and political power.

Nietzsche believed that the pre-Socratic Greeks had no concept of "evil", but only concepts of "good versus bad". Good was defined as that which felt good to the noble, aristocratic, free Greeks who held power; bad was what was different, such as the practices of the helots, the lowest class of Greek serfs.

A shift in values occurred when the weaker, lower classes built up feelings of ressentiment towards those in power. They established a priestly power class who, driven by deep resentment of previously ruling Greek nobles, replaced the idea of bad with "evil".

If God is dead, morals do not emanate from God, but derive from whichever ruling group establishes the values that feel good to them. The new sexual values are no longer defined by God's laws and inculcated by the priestly class. Instead, sexual values are defined and legitimised by the new power groups—the psychiatric and sexuality societies—that define mental illness and health. These values are inculcated through our schools, universities, television shows, movies, newspapers, magazines, music industry and social media.

Emerson's self was bound by a notion of God that dwelt within; Nietzsche's self is unbounded, the ultimate Superman. If it feels good, doesn't appear to harm others, and is done between consenting adults who mutually accept the terms, there is no higher authority to declare it to be bad, let alone evil. As long as the power group in a given society defines a set of behaviours as "non-pathological", they become the new normal. But before celebrating this brave new world, consider the paradox of Molly, the keynote speaker who explored sadomasochism and race. Her freedom to find goodness in expressing the "integrity of her self" culminated in sexual arousal through a reenactment of slavery. The path blazed by Emerson and Nietzsche has brought us full circle from freedom back to slavery.

Molly argued that because there are rules allowing her to control the very thing (slavery) that she despises, the experience is empowering, freeing and sexually satisfying. Really? If she were truly free, would she choose to enjoy sexual pleasure as a black woman in this way? Or would she have continued to explore the self-confessed guilt and shame she experienced at the start of her journey, perhaps through (in this case) old-fashioned psychotherapy? BDSM used to be viewed as the "acting out" of sexual and psychological conflicts that needed to be internalised and analysed in order to resolve the underlying psychological conflict. No longer, according to our professional societies. In determining psychopathology, feelings have replaced reason, deviation has been normalised, and past perversions have become spiritual paths.

Ruling structures that place a premium on freedom without balancing it with a principle of restraint inevitably lead to tyranny and terror. Total freedom to express any desire that gratifies only the unbounded self will culminate in unhappiness, at best, and enslavement to one's passions, at worst. It is no accident that Molly's new, new normal expression of boundary breaking and "transgressive" freedom was not merely an act of slavery, but an act of a slave being abused. As I left the auditorium, I recalled Dostoevsky's prognostication in The Brothers Karamazov: "If there is no God, everything is permitted." Whither next?