The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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. 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?_
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.