The higher measure in isolation is the residual capacity to apply the permanent criterion after every collective support has been dissolved. The residual man continues to measure himself by that criterion even though the age offers no confirming environment for it. The measure itself remains intact. Only the collective supports that once made its application public have disappeared.
Young men who still feel the pressure of a higher standard often look for residual communities or residual authorities that will keep the measure alive for them. Most of those communities have already been emptied by the horizontal forces that dominate the age. The residual path does not wait for external confirmation. It continues as the permanent application from the interior center that still recognizes its force.
This solitary measure is the residual form of the older traditional obedience to a higher law. The man who continues to apply it already performs the residual act. That act does not require collective recognition to remain real.
Apply the measure. Do not wait for the age to restore conditions in which the higher criterion is collectively enforced. The residual act is to keep the permanent measure decisive in every concrete decision. That decisiveness is the continuity of the higher type under residual conditions.