2. The higher the average level becomes, the less needy it is in relation to the above average, and the more suspicious of any attempt to attain it. The elevation of the average does precisely obstruct the above average.
3. The apparently clear conclusion from the elevation of the average to the greater height of the above average is itself a treacherous sign of the calculative character of an attitude which is thereby already excluded from the possibility of grasping the essence and origin of the setting of ranks and thus of preparing them in the correct way. Progress even here | is always only a mask covering a decline, in the sense of the increasing abandonment by being.
85
Does there not now spread like a contagion through all that is human the habit of organizing everything according to an established calculability and producibility, of seeing therein the prescriptive mode of all dealings, and of denying effective power to any other sort of development?
Should creative ones, in case there are still such, as grounding and beginning ones, yield to the pressure of the age toward calculability, utility, and breeding, and transfer what is essential to themselves into these domains and forms, in order to abolish definitively what cannot be produced and cannot be bred? No. But a quite different decisiveness and persistence of the cognitive attitude is required in order to be the steward of the gift and self-refusal of truth, the steward of the unforeseen and the strange.
86
You must be able to renounce being measured with the measures, even the highest ones, of that which is destined to be overcome.
87
The new politics is an intrinsic essential consequence of “technology” and is so not only with respect to the ways and means of proceeding which are set in motion by it. On the contrary, in itself this politics is the machinational organization of the people to the highest possible “performance,” whereby even people are grasped with regard to the basic biological determination in an essentially “technological”-machinational way, i.e., in terms of breeding. A result of this essential nexus