Nietzsche’s siren song was really just one blaring note, and hard to misapprehend: The mass of men was a sorry lot whose most useful quality was the ability to conform to rules others wrote for them. But, the celebrated nineteenth-century German scholar posited, there was a small squadron of elites, of demigods, of Übermenschen (in English, roughly “supermen”) capable of molding the world and all its human glories because they refused to be bound by convention or morality or man-made law.
