865.
The state of mind which calls itself "idealism," and which will neither allow mediocrity to be mediocre nor woman to be woman! Do not make everything uniform! We should have a clear idea of how dearly we have to pay for the establishment of a virtue; and that virtue is nothing generally desirable, but a noble piece of madness, a beautiful exception, which gives us the privilege of feeling elated....
866.
It is necessary to show that a counter-movement is inevitably associated with any increasingly economical consumption of men and mankind, and with an ever more closely involved "machinery" of interests and services. I call this counter-movement the separation of the luxurious surplus of mankind: by means of it a stronger kind, a higher type, must come to light, which has other conditions for its origin and for its maintenance than the average man. My concept, my metaphor for this type is, as you know, the word "Superman." Along the first road, which can now be completely surveyed, arose adaptation, stultification, higher Chinese culture, modesty in the Instincts, and satisfaction at the sight of the belittlement of man—a kind of stationary level of mankind. If ever we get that inevitable and imminent, general control of the economy of the earth, then mankind can be used as machinery and find its best purpose in the service of this economy—as an enormous piece of clock-work consisting of ever smaller and ever more subtly adapted wheels; then all the dominating and commanding elements will become ever more superfluous; and the whole gains enormous energy, while the individual factors which compose it represent but small modicums of strength and of value. To oppose this dwarfing and adaptation of man to a specialised kind of utility, a reverse movement is needed -the procreation of the synthetic man who embodies everything and justifies it; that man for whom the turning of mankind into a machine is a first condition of existence, for whom the rest of mankind is but soil on which he can devise his higher mode of existence.
He is in need of the opposition of the masses, of those who are "levelled down"; he requires that feeling of distance from them; he stands upon them, he lives on them. This higher form of aristocracy is the form of the future. From the moral point of view, the collective machinery above described, that solidarity of all wheels, represents the most extreme example in the exploitation of mankind: but it presupposes the existence of those for whom such an exploitation would have some meaning.[2] Otherwise it would signify, as a matter of fact, merely the general depreciation of the type man,—a retrograde phenomenon on a grand scale.
Readers are beginning to see what I am combating—namely, economic optimism: as if the genera] welfare of everybody must necessarily increase with the growing self-sacrifice of everybody. The very reverse seems to me to be the case, the self-sacrifice of everybody amounts to a collective loss; man becomes inferior—so that nobody knows what end this monstrous purpose has served. A wherefore? a new wherefore?—this is what mankind requires.
[2] This sentence for ever distinguishes Nietzsche's aristocracy from our present plutocratic and industrial one, for which, at the present moment at any rate, it would be difficult to discover some meaning.—Tr.
867.
The recognition of the increase of collective power: we should calculate to what extent the ruin of individuals, of castes, of ages, and of peoples, is included in this general increase.
The transposition of the ballast of a culture. The cost of every vast growth: who bears it? Why must it be enormous at the present time?