This is the problem with Nietzsche:  He thought that a person could
by a suitable effort of will attain a state of perfection regardless of
his surroundings, and that enough people bothered to do this that
a perfect society of these perfect people would be the inevitably
perfect result.

very briefly, this first paragraph is so far from true it's surreal to see it in print. nietzsche shows little interest in the first place in perfecting society and certainly did not think "perfection" (which is very far from the language he used, both in meaning and connotation) was something many would or even could attain, regardless of environment.

The first problem with this stupid idea is that if you perfect yourself,
you will inevitably come in conflict with society.  If you arrange things
so as not to be in conflict with your imperfect society, you will be
hiding things and lying all over the place to conceal your superiority,
all activities that distract you from that perfected state.

we need to drop the "perfection" language. we're talking about nietzsche, not rousseau or whoever rog had in mind. presumably, he's referring to this overman concept. part of the overman idea is "overcoming man" by revaluation of societal values. the "ubermensch" is supposed to create his own values and is supposed to be unfettered by the silly conflicts you mention.

note to rog: i never, even implicitly, claimed to be pursuing nietzsche's idea of the "ubermensch." it would be a lunatic thing to say and i never said it nor implied it. you've made an elementary error here (and thought you were clever doing it too: note how you call nietzsche "stupid").

I mentioned Sade because he is the father of the "fuck it, evil is
more fun anyway" school of dealing with this paradox.  Nietzsche's
contention that enough perfected people will form a perfect society
(brought to glorious fictionality by Ayn Rand) simply does not
persuade.

he doesn't contend this. the ayn rand and sade references show an extremely half-baked approach. you need to get this nietzsche stuff figured out so you don't have to look so ridiculous again.

Humans have societies because in the wild, without high technology,
the survivability of a lone human without a tribe is approximately zero.
Contemplating the perfection of yourself outside of society is
another Maslow fourth-level [O(logN)] operation.  Unless you have resolved
the other needs in the heirarchy such an assertion simply comes
across as stupid.

this naturalistic understanding of the basic questions of humanity is somewhat shocking to my mind, but more importantly has absolutely no place in a discussion of nietzsche. the perspective suggested here (and elsewhere in correspondence from rog that i'm not going to post -- it's private and not directly relevant to the discussion) is as strong an obstruction to understanding nietzsche as a fundamentalist christian background.

ultimately, the superman mythos so popular amongst duty free store authors is of at best secondary importance. the most important commentary of nietzsche's, in my opinion, falls into the following areas (in order): critique of enlightenment ideals and values (especially science), the concept of ressentiment, critique of christianity, commentary on specific pieces of literature (especially faust), "european nihilism" and various aspects of what rog calls "leisure society", and the human condition (he has a million little bits on this and i don't want to try to list them).

i said i wasn't going to be a pain in the ass, but i can't resist:

Unlike Nietzsche, I notice that in a society full of people not following
the "good" life, it may actually be self-destructive to fully follow it
yourself.  This is a generalization of the tragedy of the commons.

dude.