Don’t use the word “better”, use specific criteria along which you want to measure people. I think that widespread conflation of betterness according to some criteria and some kind of absolute scale betterness (how do you even define it? Is it simply a social status by another name or something different?) is precisely the sort of thing that allows some people to strategically equivocate between the two concepts (or claim that other people are strategically equivocating).
Don’t use the word “better”, use specific criteria along which you want to measure people. I think that widespread conflation of betterness according to some criteria and some kind of absolute scale betterness (how do you even define it? Is it simply a social status by another name or something different?) is precisely the sort of thing that allows some people to strategically equivocate between the two concepts (or claim that other people are strategically equivocating).