In Praise of Hierarchy (Part 1. How Equality Corrupts)

I think perhaps the fundamental problem in the West today - or at least the fundamental manifestation of the problem - is that hierarchy has been ruptured.

We live under the mirage of democracy but it really is a mirage. The public never get what they vote for. Meantime, there is an anti-democratic elite, and they seem to get what they want all the time no matter how egregious it is. Yet, they shy from calling themselves “the elite”, and do not take their responsibilities seriously. They do not even take seriously the task of contemplating their position.

Or if they do, then the conclusions they have reached are terrifying for the rest of us. It is clear they want us mixed into low-grade, low IQ human sludge, shorn of history, shorn of identity, incapable of opposing them, incapable of agency, incapable of autonomy, incapable of appreciating high culture, literally unrecognisable as the descendants of our ancestors. If that is not the conscious goal of today’s elite, they are doing very well at bringing it about by accident.

All of this is possible because of the undermining of the concept of hierarchy. Believing all individuals equal, the public assume that the elite have their best interests at heart. Believing all things equal, they cannot see the difference between this European culture and that African intrusion into it. Believing all things equal, they cannot understand that Shakespeare is better than Marvel. Believing all things equal, they cannot see that they degrade themselves by not aspiring towards the high.

In short, the denying of hierarchy makes all kinds of destruction possible, until we have even destroyed ourselves and there is nobody left who is intelligent enough to lament the void.

There is a dire need to assert that hierarchy is good, true and beautiful. Equality is foolish as a pursuit, because it is impossible as a goal, because it is untrue as a “fact” of life, appearing absolutely nowhere in the natural world.

Defenders of the concept argue that its absence from nature does not invalidate it as a social ideal. After all, many things are absent from nature - roads, penicillin, Tolstoy… But those things do not work directly against the principles and functioning of the natural world, whereas equality does. The issue is not so much that the natural world does not feature any equality, but that it positively abhors it. Therefore, to advocate equality as a goal is to set oneself staunchly against the natural order. And there really is a natural order. We can ignore it and work against it sometimes, but only very carefully and with the understanding that ultimately it will triumph over our artificial constructs. With that in mind, wholesale rejection of it at the day-to-day level, with a worldview that is counter-nature, is utter foolishness.

Defenders of equality also argue that its impossibility as a social ideal does not mean it should be abandoned. After all, most ideals are impossible to achieve yet still worthy to pursue. But equality has the awful effect of perverting people in real-time, even while they are merely pursuing it.

How does the pursuit of equality corrupt a man?

Going into the pursuit, he is motivated by disdain for the way the world is; this disdain prevents him from feeling humility, which would act as a corrector to both his virtuous self-image and his unrealistic social goals. During the pursuit, he continually finds his efforts fruitless, obstructed both by the “corrupt” society around him, and the human nature that it is based upon.

After the pursuit, he is full of resentment that his beautiful idea was rejected - by those who stood to gain by it (the poor, who are now “proven” to be stupid), and those who stood to lose by it (the rich, who are now “proven” to be evil), and those in-between who should have known better (his middle-class peers, who could have helped him in his crusade but didn’t, and are now “proven” to be cowardly).

Now bitter against the poor, the middle and the rich, he is apart from all of humanity and believes himself superior to it, both morally and intellectually. A failed crusade offers a chance to re-appraise, but this chance is easily rejected; the fact of his crusade’s failure only “proves” its dire necessity (because the world is corrupt) - but its dire necessity is exactly what assures its failure (because the world is corrupt). He is now locked in a spiral of resentment, delusion and grandiosity. He should have accepted that the horse simply will not drink the water. But he is prevented from accepting that by the dopamine frenzy that he experiences by denying it.

From outside and throughout, the motor of his delusion is the pleasure he feels in thinking himself kind enough to care about the weak, brave enough to oppose the strong, and intelligent enough to out-shine his peers. That combination of kindness, bravery and intelligence, like the combination of sugar and salt to the taste buds, is irresistible to the world-novice.

And a “world-novice” is what the equalitarian always remains. Being a world-novice might be innocence in a child, but it is corruption in the adult, because it can only remain if he has ignored some of the most crucial lessons of life, and has thereby set himself apart from reality, even in stalwart opposition to it.

Furthermore, to falsely persuade yourself that you understand the world is also to deny your own fallibility. The Devil’s bargain is you get to continue being blind to the realities of the world, by also becoming blind to the realities of yourself. This is not virtue, but the worst of ego.

And that is how an innocent child becomes a corrupted adult.

Every one of them insufferably convinced of his moral virtue and intellectual brilliance

Paradoxically, of course, the equalitarian, by believing himself morally and intellectually superior to others, negates the very idea of equality and also betrays the fact that he himself doesn’t want to be equal to others, and in fact revels in the possibility of being better than them. But this is the core of the utter craven hypocrisy of the Left, and is a well-worn observation.

However, it is a mistake to assume, as many do, that the equalitarian is always motivated by being inferior and so advocates “equality” as a stealthy way to sidestep hierarchy. On the contrary, I think a lot of equalitarians rank among our most capable and talented people. They have no trouble negotiating hierarchy, and are not desperate to allay their feelings of inferiority since they, sincerely, don’t have such feelings.

Why these people believe in equality will be explored, along with other matters, in Part 2.