Nietzsche believed aristocracies improved humanity. He offers two conventional reasons for why? Both are social innovations. The first is the establishment of a long gradation of humans into different ranks of greater and lesser worth. The second is the grouping of the weighed and valued individuals of similar worth, into distinct and separate social classes. Nietzsche was adamant human beings were not of equal worth, so the fact that aristocracy functioned on such a premise was a welcome and progressive boon. The German philosopher perceived a tiny cluster of humans of having immense value. These scant individuals formed the highest and smallest social class — the aristocracy. The immense hordes of persons contained within the lower classes were of little value. To be frank, Nietzsche was a man who was not opposed to slavery, but who was instead dangerously ambivalent, seeing slaves as valuable not in themselves, but only in how they could be effectively utilized as tools, to help the aristocracy rule, innovate and push humanity forward. The great virtue of the aristocratic ordering of society was that it identified who had value, and who didn't — and then separated them, accordingly. The class that greatly benefitted from this crass social apartheid were the aristocrats. Who experienced, for the first time in history, a great distance between themselves and the masses they governed, looked down upon, and punished into submission. Over time, Nietzsche argues, the new position of privilege of the aristocracy translated into the accelerated development of human beings, who developed different psychological structures that propelled humanity forward, enabling the aristocracy to pull away from animalistic instincts associated with humans of the lower classes and overcome supposedly fixed limitations of what it meant to be human. In other words, without aristocracies, the innovation of the human species would have suffered.
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