Re: your point #2, there is another potential spiral where abstract concepts of “greatness” are increasingly defined in a hostile and negative way by partisans of slave morality. This might make it harder to have that “aspirational dialogue about what counts as greatness”, as it gets increasingly difficult for ordinary people to even conceptualize a good version of greatness worth aspiring to. (“Why would I want to become an entrepeneur and found a company? Wouldn’t that make me an evil big-corporation CEO, which has a whiff of the same flavor as stories about the violent, insatiable conquistador villans of the 1500s?”)
Of course, there are also downsides when culture paints a too-rosy picture of greatness—once upon a time, conquistators were in fact considered admirable!
Re: your point #2, there is another potential spiral where abstract concepts of “greatness” are increasingly defined in a hostile and negative way by partisans of slave morality. This might make it harder to have that “aspirational dialogue about what counts as greatness”, as it gets increasingly difficult for ordinary people to even conceptualize a good version of greatness worth aspiring to. (“Why would I want to become an entrepeneur and found a company? Wouldn’t that make me an evil big-corporation CEO, which has a whiff of the same flavor as stories about the violent, insatiable conquistador villans of the 1500s?”)
Of course, there are also downsides when culture paints a too-rosy picture of greatness—once upon a time, conquistators were in fact considered admirable!