loquitur

who said anything about ubermenschen? Many of them are terrible people with huge egos, they just happen to be very talented at running huge organizations. Roachboy, you're confusing a recognition of someone's talent with a value judgment about them as people. Those are very different exercises.

You also need to consider that your own "frame" is as influenced as anyone else's. Your view of the world is colored by your experiences and education and life history, yes? You can't assume that you have detachment and others do not. So this idea that your analysis of people as, in essence, brainwashed, really doesn't fly. You're not equipped to do it because you may just be as brainwashed as they are. I have years of training in trying to be detached and I still find I miss things. Brainwashing has nothing to do with it - being human does.

For instance, no amount of advertising will persuade me to become a cannibal. No amount of advertising will persuade me to kill or maim another person voluntarily. I can't imagine I'm different from most in that regard. The reason is that I find those things morally reprehensible and logically indefensible. I'm capable of making that judgment. So why am I - or anyone else - not competent to make any of a myriad other judgments, from which soap to use to which health care plan to sign up for to which charity merits support? Why deny agency to individuals? Aren't they entitled to that basic human respect?

Oh, and about Steve Jobs....... go google John Scully and you'll see the difference between Apple under Steve Jobs and Apple under the prior management (I forget the name of the guy who came after Scully but he also flamed out). Yes, he has created a cult of personality - but you can do that only if you have a personality that is cultable (is that a word?). If you prefer someone less flamboyant, with lower visibility, have a look at what Lou Gerstner accomplished at IBM.

Again, this has nothing to do with being an ubermensch - it simply has to do with the fact that talent of various sorts is not distributed evenly in the population, and that people with different kinds of talents get rewarded differently. No one is paying me because I can roll my eyes, wiggle my ears and jiggle my adam's apple, even though I suspect my ability to do that puts me way out on the right tail of the distribution. But people do reward Johann Santana for being able to throw a small sphere in a manner that makes it difficult for other people to hit it with a stick.