[linuxontheweb]

I think Nietzsche was on to something with his concept of the noble classes, according to whom morality becomes fully life affirming, i.e. beyond good and evil. Everything else being based on the herd instincts of the "slave classes."

[beardyw]

The problem with class is in the newborn baby. Does it have a class? In a room full of newborns can their class be determined? I don't think many people would seriously say so. That means class must be associated with nurture. And that is an inheritance from parents. That puts class in the same bracket as money. It is not inherent in the person.

[linuxontheweb]

It is in the nature of the atomic elements in the class of noble gases to not do much mixing with other elements.

We too are made up of atomic elements. In our case, it would be the precise combinations of these elements that would tend to make us more or less noble. This concept of "precise combinations of elements" also goes under the term, "genetics."

Regardless, the nurture vs. nature debate is indeed quite a thorny one.

[jauntywundrkind]

Absolutely the most gobshit saddest part of Nietzsche, to me. I very much recognize the want & goal, to have a society that has character & soul & flavor, defined by good character, great works, and circumstance.

But my god, the idea that just having some half-layabout half-managerial luxury class that random waifs are born into? So gross. This seems like a sure way to have culture constantly destroyed, sacrificed, by unearned no goods, & manipulated into exploitation by nakedly self interested power mongers.

The article itself talks about a nearby concern, criminals, who will exercise flexibility,

> An honest person will never commit criminal acts but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts. Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And the rule is an asymmetry in choices.

I have a hard time imagining a class of blessed society defining people as being able to ever resist decaying into such flexibility, as being willing to self sacrifice to uphold a better society. Especially when they will constantly have to be negotiating with various intransigent elements.

It's interesting that the Dictatorship of Small Minorities is about, somewhat, populous minorities. There's still a bae of significantly squeaky wheels raising bloody hell.

Where-as in compare, this submission surfaced recently in the Apple/Jon Stewart discussion, where paying eternal uncritical lip service to various authoritarian global powers has become a funnel that capitalists find themselves having to walk down to insure continued market access. Those governments thus become taste-setters & content-setters for all global commerce, even though they do not represent the global desire; they are the intransigents. Rather than be for example a small minority of people who want an outright ban abortion, the small minority in this scenario are a handful of dictators & party watchdogs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37966643

Which is what it feels like aristocrats are & would become. A group mantled in their permission to be intransigent.

[linuxontheweb]

We might need to wait another generation or two before Nietzsche's stuff starts making proper sense. I've been feeling that there's going to need to be some sort of a global reckoning between communist and capitalist ways of thinking. The counter-culture movement from the 60's was just too pervasive to go away forever. That movement needed a breather to allow the tech industry to grow as much as it possibly could. If we are going to start seeing the end of growth in tech, a revolution-centric hippie scene could start re-emerging sooner rather than later. Once these issues start playing out, then I think we'll have a better understanding of how the future generations will relate to the idea of nobility. So I'm pretty confident that it won't have very much to do with the purely capitalist notion of "layabout managers."