But, far from deploring this fact, he would fain have accentuated and intensified it. This inequality, to Nietzsche, is a condition to be exploited and to be made use of by the legislator. The higher men of a society in which gradations of rank are recognised as a natural and desirable condition constitute the class in which the hopes of a real elevation of humanity may be placed. The Divine Manu, Laotse, Confucius, Muhammad, Jesus Christ—all these men, who in their sublime arrogance actually converted man into a mirror in which they saw themselves and their doctrines reflected, and who in thus converting man into a mirror really made him feel happy in the function of reflecting alone:—these leaders are the types Nietzsche refers to when he speaks of higher men.
Ruling, like all other functions which require the great to justify them, has fallen into disrepute, thanks to the incompetent amateurs that have tried their hand at the game. As in the Fine Arts, so in leading and ruling; it is the dilettantes that have broken our faith in human performances. The really great ruler reaches his zenith in dominating an epoch, a party, a nation or the world, to the best advantage of each of these; but it does not follow that the motive power propelling him should necessarily be the conscious pursuit of the best advantage of those he rules,—this is merely a fortuitous circumstance curiously associated with greatness in ruling,—generally speaking, however, his only conscious motive is the gratification of his inordinate will to power.
The innocent fallacy of democracy lies in supposing that by a mere search, by a mere rummaging and fumbling among a motley populace, one man or several men can be found, who are able to take the place of the rare and ideal ruler. As if the mere fact of searching and rummaging were not in itself a confession of failure,—a confession that this man does not exist! For if he existed he would have asserted himself! he would have needed no democratic exploration party to unearth him.
"There is no sorer misfortune in all human destiny, than when the powerful of the earth are not at the same time the first men. Then everything becometh false and warped and monstrous."[2]
"For, my brethren, the best shall rule: the best will rule! And where the teaching is different, there—the best is lacking."[3]
Here we observe that Nietzsche advocated an aristocratic arrangement of society. A firm believer in tradition, law, and order, and, in spite of his opponents' accusations, an undaunted enemy of Anarchy and laisser-aller, he saw in Socialism and Democracy nothing more than two slave organisations for the raising of every individual to his highest power, individuality made as general as possible; or, in other words, Socialism and Democracy meant to Nietzsche the annihilation of all higher aims and hopes. It meant valuing all the weeds and noble plants alike, and with such a valuation, the noble plants, being in the minority, must necessarily suffer and ultimately die out. Where everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody. Socialism, i.e. organised Individualism, seemed to Nietzsche merely the reflection in politics of the Christian principle that all men are alike before God. Grant immortality to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and, in the end, every Tom, Dick, or Harry will believe in equal rights before he can even hope to reach Heaven, but to deny the privileges of rare men implies the proscription from life of all high trees with broad brandies,—those broad brandies that protect the herd from the rain, but which also keep the sun from the envious and ambitious shrub,—and thus it would mean that the world would gradually assume the appearance of those vast Scotch moors of gorse and heather, where liberalism and mediocrity are rampant, but where all loftiness is dead.
Nietzsche was a profound believer in the value of tradition, in the value of general discipline lasting over long periods. He knew that all that is great and lasting and intensely moving has been the result of the law of castes or of the laws governing the individual members of a caste throughout many generations.[4] This building up of the rare man, of the great man (of the cultivated type in a Darwinian sense) as every scientist is aware, is utterly frustrated by any thing in the way of injudicious and careless cross-breeding (see Darwin on the degeneration of the cultivated types of animals through the action of promiscuous breeding), by democratic mésalliances of all kinds, and by the laisser aller which is one of the worst evils of that kind of freedom which tends to prevail when the slaves of a community have succeeded in asserting and expressing their insignificant and miserable little individualities.
Believing all this, Nietzsche could not help but advocate the rearing of a select and aristocratic caste, and in none of his exhortations is he more sincere than when he appeals to higher men to sow the seeds of a nobility for the future.
"O my brethren, I consecrate you to be, and show unto you the way unto a now nobility. Ye shall become procreators and breeders and sowers of the future.
"Verily, ye shall not become a nobility one might buy, like shopkeepers with shopkeepers' gold. For all that hath its fixed price is of little worth.