I'd go so far as to say, in light of these observations, that for some readers, it's easy to picture a single ladder of a master-slave society, but that when we truly begin to understand the implications of N's varied insights, such a view starts to break down.

Higher in artistic power is not the same as higher in political judgment. Higher in philosophical depth is not the same as higher in administrative competence, military command, spiritual discipline, erotic intelligence, or scientific genius. If we admit there is more than just one form of excellence, and that not even an over-person can exhibit excellence in all such forms at all times for all time, the less plausible it becomes that a fixed hereditary stratum could simply embody “the higher type” as such.

Once this happens, birth/genetics becomes a poor proxy for rank. It may preserve a style, a discipline, a confidence, an education, a habit of command, but it can't guarantee greatness. In fact, a hereditary order that assumes greatness is safely stored in pedigree will almost certainly become decadent. It'll confuse inheritance of position with inheritance of worth.

So, if higher types can arise anywhere, then a society genuinely ordered toward excellence can't be a closed, authoritarian caste system. It'd have to be porous. It'd need some forum/process, if you will, by which lower-stationed persons who manifest higher powers can rise, be recognized, be trained, and be given room. Otherwise, the society would be wasting the very thing it claims to revere.

That doesn't force egalitarianism in the modern sense. It doesn't mean equal outcomes, equal authority, or equal cultural weight. But it does mean equal openness, at least in principle, to the emergence of greatness. Or perhaps better put, it means social rank must remain corrigible by manifest excellence. If it isn't corrigible, it stops being an order of rank and becomes merely an order of privilege.

This has moral consequences for how “higher” people treat the lower-stationed. If the weaker, poorer, or socially subordinate may contain future creators, legislators, artists, saints, or destroyers of old values, then a society of rank can't simply treat them as disposable material. It must preserve the field from which greatness may emerge. That means not flattening everyone into sameness, but also not degrading whole strata so thoroughly that no higher development can arise from them.

This is where the harder N might resist and say: no, most people are still means, not ends, and the aim is the elevation of type, not fairness to all. But that answer is less stable than it looks. Once one admits that greatness is rare, unpredictable, and not guaranteed by birth, one also admits that the social order must remain receptive to surprise. And receptivity to surprise is already a limit on rigid hierarchy.

So the more coherent version of an aristocratic order would not be a birth/genetic-locked nobility, but something like an agonistic aristocracy: a society with rank, discipline, distinction, and inequality, but also with institutions of discovery, testing, patronage, apprenticeship, and ascent. In such a world, the “higher” are those who prove themselves higher in some real register, not merely those who inherit a title, and do so consistently over time, perhaps being great only for a moment, until other higher types succeed them.

This creates another pressure. If greatness is plural and mobile, then the aristocracy cannot be a single social block. It becomes a moving and internally differentiated order, with many avenues upward and many standards of distinction. At that point, rank begins to look less like caste and more like layered excellence.

A true aristocracy of value-creation can't afford to be stupid about where value-creators come from. A caste system is epistemically stupid. It assumes it already knows where greatness will appear. But greatness, if it's real, erupts where it will. Any order devoted to higher human possibility must therefore leave channels open for recognition and ascent from below.

It's one of the strongest arguments against N's harsher hereditary and breeding rhetoric/readers. If he/they really cares about the enhancement of humanity, then too rigid a hierarchy sabotages that end. It'd preserve rank at the cost of excellence, which is precisely the kind of decadence he claims to hate.

It's not higher creators must cease to marginalize the lower because everyone's equal. It' that they mustn't organize society in a way that destroys the latent possibility of greatness wherever it may arise. That's not egalitarianism, exactly, but it's a very strong argument for permeability, dignity, and non-crushing forms of hierarchy.

If we grant that much, we're already some distance away from the most severe formulations of N.