DaewooOfDeath wrote:
Have you ever met a 6 year old with modest desires?
I think this modesty is, at least a little bit, an admission of defeat and a learned strategy for coping with that defeat.
I've never met a 6y.o. that genuinely understands what they desire. They are immature. It is flawed to think that our adult personalities and desires are the same as those of a 6yo.
It is not admitting defeat, it is recognizing the complexity of life. You can't have everything. Desires compete with each other, and you have to decide which ones you value more highly. Perhaps a better way of saying it is not that modest people do not desire power, wealth, and fame, but that they desire other things more - freedom, free time, lack of stress.
DaewooOfDeath wrote:
I'm not sure I agree - I'd argue that leadership is the art of sacrificing others for your goals and then hoping those goals are worthy enough to justify the sacrifice - but even if I do, I'm not sure master and leader are the same thing. Nor am I sure follower and slave are the same thing.
A playboy who does whatever he wants and has no responsibility would seem to disrupt the parallels, for example. As would an artist who is okay enough with the starving part of the starving artist trope to quit whenever he disagrees with his clients.
Leadership is the art of directing resources at hand to best achieve the desired goal. The best leaders see that goal as the care of the group or organization they represent and those that make it up. There are leaders who see care of themselves as the goal, and there are leaders who see avoiding consequences as their goal. They are generally not recognized as good leaders.
My argument is not that "Master" is the same thing as "Leader", but that the "Master" morality you describe is a perversion of Leadership morality that seeks the benefits that come from taking on that position, but without the associated responsibility.
The playboy and starving artist you describe are both people who eschew responsibility.
To put it another way: Can you think of common examples of people who are able to fully elevate themselves through the sort of master morality you describe? Not someone who inherits wealth. Not someone who achieves it through pure, dumb luck. Not someone who games the system and ends up broke, or in jail again, or who cashes out and runs just before that happens. The people who start with low or modest wealth and are able to build something sustainable up from that, or who inherit something and can successfully shepherd a complex institution.
If you are arguing that Master and Slave morality are unhealthy and damaging to both society and the individuals that prescribe to them, what sort of healthy morality would you suggest those people shift to? I am saying that if you take those things and add in responsibility, you get Leadership and Following.
Yeah, I'm not saying master morality is the key to happiness or anything. Neither is Nietzsche. It's morality in the state of nature. It's the morality you have if you never have to struggle or sacrifice. Slave morality, also not a good thing, is the morality you have when you've been completely broken, when all you have left is resentment and self-pity.
My alternative is - involved. 
Short version I that I think you should mostly be a relativist - basically shrugging and saying "when in Rome" a lot - but that absolute relativism doesn't work and that all morality is only valid so long as it points to continued existence and the imposition of meaning on that existence.
In other words, good is that which allows us to survive and impose meaning on nature. Bad is that which causes us to die and that which fosters meaninglessness. The rest is either a matter of pragmatics or somewhere between aesthetic preference and pure whim.
DaewooOfDeath wrote:
It's morality in the state of nature. It's the morality you have if you never have to struggle or sacrifice.
...
In other words, good is that which allows us to survive and impose meaning on nature. Bad is that which causes us to die and that which fosters meaninglessness. The rest is either a matter of pragmatics or somewhere between aesthetic preference and pure whim.
I guess my biggest critique is that the morality you have in the state of nature is the morality you have if you have to struggle and sacrifice. Struggle, sacrifice, and consequences are natural. A morality that evolves freed of those (e.g. Master and Slave morality) is unnatural.
Morality freed of struggle, sacrifice, and consequence leads to meaninglessness. Without the potential for failure, there is no potential for success.
