In Praise of Hierarchy (Part 3. How Equality Deceives)

In Part 2 I gave a number of reasons why people might believe in something as obviously untrue as equality.

But I think perhaps the most common reason people believe in it - or rather, want to believe in it - is simply that it feels like a pleasant notion. This is superficial, of course, but people left to their own devices tend to be superficial.

It feels nice to think that everyone is of equal worth. This absolves us of having to choose, to judge, to discriminate… and to find some people wanting… and to find that some people are better than ourselves. It is like valium. It terminates thought. It assuages anxiety. It relieves both guilt about being superior and resentment about being inferior. It means a level playing field, no obstacles, and a simple green light to go ahead and explore the world. And it means that everyone else is feeling similarly calm, collected, secure and content.

Worded like that, the distance from reality is embarrassing. That people traverse the contradictions and blatant untruths in order to “believe” the above is a testament to how rudderless we are without religion, without nationhood, without identity - and how desperate we are to believe in something, anything, no matter how untrue.

And equality is greedy for believers. Like all lodestars, it demonises its rivals. It teaches that having religious faith is irrational or at best subjective, since one is choosing one faith among equally valid alternatives (and they have to be equally valid) so why choose one at all? It teaches that caring about your race is irrational, since all races are equal and therefore none should be especially valuable to you. Nothing which has siblings (peers, fellows, rivals, alternatives) should ever get special treatment, or have a special place in your heart, since that would violate equality.

Most dangerously, it teaches that all ways of life are equally acceptable and therefore that any hierarchical way of sorting them is irrational. This leaves us scattered, aimless and mapless, with only the light of equality to guide us. But it can only ever guide us farther into the darkness of itself, of nothingness.

Mostly I am liberal and inquisitive, but I recognise that hierarchy will only be respected by the masses if they are made to respect it, so despite my liberal nature I believe there is a need for an elite to pronounce upon what is good and bad, better and worse. Where hierarchy is not maintained, everything falls apart as the low, painfully aware of its lowness, attempts to deny it by attacking the high. The result is chaos and dishonesty. This seems to be a recurring pattern: people need hierarchy, yet by nature reject it on sight until compelled to accept it. But accept it they should, because the alternative is that the appetites of the lowest man will reign supreme - and reign they must, for under equality there is and can be nothing “better” than the lowest.

I would trust the public in few matters, but believe that most of them don’t really want to be consulted anyway; they just want to get on with things. The problem is that they are flexible enough to “get on” amidst the profane.

When does a spire not aspire?

And that means the rest of us have to live amidst the profane as well. Whether it is soul-crushing architecture, dreadful art, literature that is only brainless socio-political propaganda, leaders who are avaricious scum, manners that would make our grandparents blush, lifestyles that would make them run for the hills, or the total denigration and dismantling of Western civilisation… the profane is all around us.

But the one who points it out will be mocked as pretentious. How misguided must the creature be that would need to pretend to find all of this appalling…?

I dearly wish that something could be done to improve the situation. The masses are not ready to listen - and they will never be ready to hear that their judgement is consistently bad. Meantime the elites are content to play their stupid games which destroy everything that matters to any man with a soul.

But the most important thing they will destroy is us. The church ruined by renovation, the landscape raped by construction, the novel defiled by censorship, the ethnic group disfigured by mass immigration… but all of these degradations are only perceptible while there is the European IQ, and the European soul, to perceive them. This is what they ultimately want to destroy. To do that, they confound the population with riddles of “equality”, while shoveling into our lands those whose cultures, ways and genes will destroy that population forever.

And that is, I believe, why the doctrine of equality is really being pushed. It is a mirage. Nobody really believes in it - except (ironically) the people whom it is intended to destroy: Europeans.

Even with them, their commitment to it is contradicted by their actual choices in life. But nevertheless, in the abstract, it has powerful psychological appeal for them.

The European is mesmerised by equality as is prey by a cobra. I believe his vulnerability to the concept is rooted in some of his finest traits - his desire for fairness, his love of exploration and novelty, his drive towards objective truth unalloyed by prejudice, and his burning need to be good. These qualities are precious because they are unique to the European, but they will, properly misdirected, lead to his extinction. With his exit from the world and from history, there will be nobody left to care about, let alone pretend to believe in, the equality that so enraptured him.

But I don’t care about equality. I care about him.

I care also about the things he creates, which I believe only he can create. But those things, like him, are subverted by equality in the short term and will be made utterly impossible by it in the long term.

Equality does have its uses, as a concept. It can clear the ground and catalyse the creation of new perspectives. It enables random and new impulses, avenues to be explored which were precluded by the old order. This is what equality can do for us. A little of it is good, if only for some of us.

But, by contrast, hierarchy is absolutely essential in life, and in society, and in culture, and in the individual mind. It brings order out of the chaos that equality creates. And without order, there is only chaos, and when there is only chaos, there is ultimately oblivion.

The acceptance of hierarchy reflects a fundamental appreciation of the natural order (“how things are”) and enables honest evaluations of the present and sensible approaches to the future. All peoples have uses for hierarchy. But, in the case of the European, his achievements and his very existence depend upon a revitalised appreciation of it.