The Two Visions Of Society: Hierarchy vs Equality
Ideological Foundations
The Influence of Power on the Interpretation of Reality
It is a feature of all human power structures to demonise and persecute beliefs that contradict their absolute authority on the interpretation of reality. We all know examples of societies that worship blatant lies, simply because they justify the rule of their respective elites. These societies, be they small tribes or gigantic empires, will inevitably suffer from the consequences of working against the very fabric of reality that governs the interactions of individuals on a day-to-day basis.
Let us explore this idea with a hypothetical example:
The gravitational forces of this world make a dropped apple fall downwards, not upwards. Denying this simple demonstration of reality might be a strong expression of faith to other true believers, but it would necessarily prove impractical once adherent zealots start looking for apples in the sky. Reality, however, marches on, and so apples would, of course, continue to fall, creating a clearly visible contradiction to the dogma of this gravitational denialism. The elites that govern this bizarre society would have to expand their lie by arguing these apples are mere exceptions, until they became so numerous that it would be easier to redefine the ground as the sky, so that up becomes down. Eventually, the continuously expanding construct of lies and linguistic perversions would become so complex, so inconsistent, it would become easier to simply restrict discussion of the issue and brand anyone who brings up gravity as extremist outliers and lunatics. The language of shame and ostracisation has always been a much more effective tool at policing the sentiment of the masses than honest debate and reason.
This society might go on like this for a while, but cracks would begin to appear in its façade. Lived experience would sow the seeds of doubt in the minds of many individuals who would simply feel the natural sensation of falling downwards and not upwards after jumping into the air. Fewer individuals would explore the issue in other areas of their life, and they might even give the benefit of doubt to outcasts who have been advocating the issue for a while. The most dedicated and driven individuals would endeavour to coherently describe and define the gravitational forces and ultimately seek to replace the dogmas of old with what they have discovered as the axiomatic truth. All while this society of gravitational denialism would increasingly experience serious problems that result from its misalignment with reality. Buildings would start to collapse because of the widespread societal blindness on the issue of gravitation. Eventually, the first human casualties would create bursts of public outrage. The misbelief originating from something as simple as a piece of fruit would eventually carry implications for the entire spectrum of society.
Propelled by the disintegrating support of the masses for a system of lies, the Overton window would begin to reframe itself, allowing a fundamental re-evaluation of all existing values. Better still, some members of the existing elite would begin to foster sympathies for the nascent movement and start to open previously closed doors. In such an environment, the dedicated few could begin their long-awaited ascent to power. The strategic capture of societal institutions would follow an exponential trajectory - slow at the start, but eventually, the old elite would be overtaken in a breakthrough moment of history. The repolarised masses, mentally primed for change, now await the final marching order. At long last - revolution!
Immediately, the new order would repeat the cycle of cementing its pre-eminence on the interpretation of reality anew. While this is the natural incentive of all human power structures, there would still remain a key difference to the old system: Both apply the highly effective tool of absolute authority to control the masses and maintain social order, but one system would use it to propagate a blatant lie, while the other would use it to defend a self-evident truth. The truthful one would consequently experience fewer problems with artificial inefficiency. It would rely on beliefs that derive directly from the reality of nature and would not have to fight against or deny its forces - its buildings would not suffer from the instabilities caused directly by false beliefs.
This allegory serves to emphasise the proliferation and maintenance of true and false beliefs as the result of power struggles between opposing elites. It is important to highlight that, because there will always be dedicated and driven individuals in and out of power, so too will the lines between interpretations of reality be drawn between what is currently supported by one group versus the other. In other words, if the truthful elite captures power, the outcast elite will naturally gravitate towards delusion, simply because it supports and justifies its existence as opposition. In an imaginary utopia governed by perfect truth, but made up of naturally status-driven humans, there would with absolute certainty exist an opposition movement that has convinced its followers of the perfect lie.
An elite that lays the foundation of society primarily on the principles of truth, however, will inevitably be more often and longer in power than the one that does the opposite. Working against the nature of reality, will leave blatantly obvious signs of deterioration that will startle those simplest of individuals that posses a modicum of common sense, while it will positively agitate the sharpest ones that will seek to correct the course of society for good. It is much harder to control a society that is founded on a construct of lies in the long run, while it becomes much simpler to govern with a kernel of truth perpetually. In either case, elites can and will apply any means necessary to maintain social cohesion to maintain their power - be it through laws, moral norms, religious justifications, corruption or violence.
Forces of Nature as the Origin Of Societies
The framework of power, which contrasts the societal dominance of true and false interpretations of reality as the perpetual conflict of status-driven individuals, highlights another fundamental force of nature: competition. The existence of gravity is an undeniable reality, consistently observed by all humans throughout time, and the same applies to the concept of competition. It is a basic functionality of a world in which resources are limited. Its only purpose is simple: Determine who gets access to these resources and by doing so determine who gets to survive.
Survival is essentially tied to resource access - without water, nourishment, and a protected space, it becomes impossible to sustain the biomass of any living being. The result would be physical deterioration due to a lack of fundamental building blocks, leading to the eventual death of the individual. Therefore, every living being competes, regardless of whether it takes the form of a plant, animal, or human. Logically, the outcome of this process must be that the most competent competitors among them get to survive, while the most incompetent perish. Fate also plays a role, as it can shift the fortunes of competitors, but because it is not a consistent force, competence will, on average, predict the outcome of competition much more accurately. This process can be consistently observed in nature: The animals most competent at competing for resources within a limited space and timeframe will continue to exist because they can sustain their own biomass.
Now, the resources of this world are not always evenly distributed, meaning that somewhere there is more, and somewhere there is less:
Think of a small and bare island in comparison to a vast, lush continent. The living beings that inhabit these spaces are physically much smaller entities than the geography that surrounds them, so it is only logical that this competition does not necessitate the immediate elimination of all losers. If there are enough resources to go around, the winning being will eventually be limited by its own physicality, because there is only so much to consume before its desires become satisfied. It is at this point, where the existence of other beings becomes possible. The winning being will have its fill of the resources first. Now the next most competent being, the second placed competitor, will have its fill and this continues until eventually a resource cut-off occurs. With each decreasingly competent being will the available resources dwindle down until they are not sufficient to sustain the biomass of the next one in line. Beyond the cut-off point, losers start to perish. If we take our bare island and an initial group of living beings, we will with time see that this natural hierarchy inevitably becomes formed through the force of competition, which in turn is governed by the limitations of the given space.
And so too - just like the natural forces of gravity and competition - hierarchy manifests as a consistent and self-evident part of reality. These primordial forces are so fundamental to this world and the humans societies that inhabit it, they have shaped its expression entirely: As gravity shapes the reality of the space in which we exist by pulling all physical objects downwards, competition and hierarchy shape the reality of how humans interact with this space by determining how its limited resources get distributed and in which priority order they are accessed. The significance of these forces on human societies should be obvious by now - if left to their own devices they will inevitably organise individuals into social hierarchies governed by competency, which in turn constitute the order of access to limited resources.
The complicating factor in all this, however, is that humans do not just have to consider limited material resources, but also limited time. No matter how much access various individuals accomplish in their lifespan, they will suffer the same fate as everyone else - one day, they will die. This dilemma is in essence mitigated by all living beings via the natural process of reproduction - the ability to create offspring originating from an existing organism.
Humans are physically shaped by two factors: primarily by their genes and secondarily by their environment. These interact with each other but have differing impacts:
Reproduction allows individuals to pass on their genes directly, which accomplishes the following: First and foremost, genes determine the phenotype of an organism, which most notably influences its physical appearance. Hence, reproduction serves to create a child that resembles the parent - a copy of sorts. Furthermore, by passing on these genes, parents ensure that a part of their organisms survives within the next generation, allowing them to "live on" even in death.
Genes do not just impact how an organism looks, they impact how it functions in a given environment, which crucially influences its ability to compete with other living beings. For example, if your genes give you a phenotype with gills and you happen to be thrown into a space on land, you will not compete well with other living beings that happen to have lungs because of their genes. Environmental limitations therefore impact genes, because they skew the outcome of the competition for limited resources towards genetically well-adapted living beings. These now benefit from improved access to limited materials, allowing them to survive longer, which in turn grants them the time to reproduce and “cheat death”.
The logical conclusion to that process is that living beings with the most well-adapted genes will manage to rise above the resource cut-off point to top the hierarchy and survive long enough to reproduce, therefore endowing their offspring with the genetic competitive advantage that served them well to succeed in the first place. Over many generations all descendants of these surviving individuals become more well-adapted to the given environment - a process commonly known as evolution. Because every new generation continues the competition for the same limited resources, hierarchies eventually become more and more enshrined, because offspring of the overall winners have the double advantage of the best genes paired with the resulting priority access to limited resources.
If we see how this has shaped the organisation of all living beings in our world, we can observe that whole species start to become ranked against each other into a natural hierarchy. The human species has of course benefited from these natural forces of competition, hierarchy and reproduction, because it is the most well-adapted to this world genetically, and therefore managed to maintain its priority access to all limited resources, perpetually endowing its descendants a competitive advantage versus all other existing species.
The Natural Vision of Society: Hierarchy
While food chains represent the hierarchies of species, a much more important dynamic for us is, of course, the emergence of societies, which represent the hierarchies of humans. Before society is firmly established, an individual man must, by logical principle, compete in some form with nature and other men to sustain himself long enough in good health to access reproduction. He may not be the overall winner of this competition, as defined by who secures priority access, but he must be competent enough to access the available resources before the cut-off point upends his opportunity to do so.
If successful, he is able to start a family connected through affinity and blood. His offspring - genetically the combination of their mother and himself - are naturally endowed with traits of competitive competency, although exact distributions are determined by fate. The father now creates a new natural hierarchy of dependency, as the survival of his offspring depends on his continued success in the competition with nature and other men. For the father, this signifies a temporary sacrifice of limited resources to protect and sustain his young family, but with time these children mature into young adults. The family's total capacity to compete, protect, and sustain itself thereby multiplies and forms a newly gained competitive advantage for the father. He now effectively heads a social hierarchy of kin, a source of support and strength for all members, governed by the most capable and experienced individual. When his abilities inevitably start to decline, his position is assumed by the most capable and strongest member of the group. The inherited reign over the familial hierarchy comes at the price of repaying the young generation’s existential debt to their progenitors by providing them continued access to limited resources and care in their old age.
This most basic of social agreements establishes a generational precedence, so that mutual and cyclical care of the weak by the strong becomes deeply ingrained in the self-conception of the family. It is precisely the family unit, shaped by the natural forces of competition, hierarchy, and reproduction, which becomes the building block of all societies across time. This process of competition for resources between individuals eventually scales families into tribes, tribes into ethnicities, and ethnicities ultimately into sovereign nation-states - all bound by the same primordial forces that have governed the reality of human civilisation since time immemorial. This state of spontaneously organised natural order constitutes the first vision of society: the original establishment of all human societies as systems of organically emerged hierarchies. This vision of society is so deeply embedded in the reality of our world precisely because it does not require any societal construction or ideology - it derives its existence from the principles of the natural world and will inevitably organise itself wherever humans exist.
The hierarchical vision of society orders every individual within social groups into a vertical structure that forms a great chain. As they reflect genuine ability and competency, societies structured in such a way benefit from high levels of efficiency. This does not imply, however, that lower-ranking individuals will suffer. Far from it in actuality, as kinship becomes a strong motivator of mutual care. As evolutionary forces are leveraged to multiply, the wealth, knowledge, and power generated by the winners, so to multiplies the ability of society at large to provide limited resources and care to its weakest.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that the vast majority of societies that have emerged organically throughout history have independently of each other developed some variant of aristocratic monarchy. Along with their precursors, the chiefdoms of prehistoric times, monarchies have proven to be the most persistent political systems throughout history. This endurance is due to their initial lack of need for artificial justification; they are products of competition-shaped hierarchies ingrained into societal structures through family reproduction. Unlike other systems of government, monarchies develop ideologies only post-establishment to justify their existence, as they result from spontaneous order rather than deliberate construction.
The Artificial Vision of Society: Equality
Why is it, then, that the kingdoms and empires of old nearly all failed or lost their relevance in our modern world? There are, of course, a million reasons that one could bring up to explain the various failures of this ancient societal system in recent times. Ultimately, most boil down to the same factor: the advent of a new vision of society - equality. This, of course, was not “new” in the truest sense of the word.
Equality itself constitutes one of the natural forces of this world. It is easy to observe in nature: the most notable expression of equality is the fact that all that live must eventually die. How living beings live their lives is fundamentally a very unequal affair, due to the forces of competition, hierarchy, and reproduction. The process of dying, being the last chapter of life, is also a vastly different experience for each living being. It is, however, inevitable that everything that lives will at some point end up being physiologically dead - a rare state of shared, observable, and true equality in this world. It stands to reason that each force of nature has a distinct purpose and place within the bedrock of the reality that we perceive to be true as human beings. Denying or misattributing them is akin to living in an alternative reality, one that by necessity must stand in conflict with the world as it really is. This is exactly how the idea of equality emerged as a vision of society.
Society, as we have established, is a naturally emerged structural hierarchy that is formed due to the very existence of inequality. Human competition defines itself as the striving for a desirable outcome - such as priority access to limited resources - by multiple parties, be they individuals or groups. In the case of individuals, it determines winners, losers, and everyone in-between, based on their inherent genetic traits, the environment in which they compete, and fate. In the case of groups, collaborative organisation becomes an additional variable that determines competitive outcomes. It is undeniable, then, that the hierarchies produced by competition must therefore be the direct result of the inequalities between all human individuals and groups in existence. If all humans were equal, if all groups were equal, we would observe a true and consistent equality of outcomes across time and space. All the resources would be distributed equally, all competitions would result in a draw, leaving no one winner or loser. In reality, this is simply not the case - and no one denies this.
The adherents of the equal vision of society argue that there is no inherent genetic difference between humans and that it is purely the limitations of their environment which determine why some individuals and groups consistently succeed in the competition of life, while others consistently fail. They argue that if only the environment were “fair”, the need for competition would disappear, hierarchies would disappear, and humans would finally become equalised. If this view accurately reflected the state of reality as it is, it would, of course, be understandable why they deny the value of hierarchies in the first place. What would their purpose and even justification for existence be if no one man were clearly superior to his neighbour - when no one man could win any competition? They would just represent another artificially constructed inefficiency that props up the existence of yet another power structure keen to maintain its preeminent position in society.
Despite its tremendous political success in recent centuries, it remains deeply misaligned with the true nature of reality. Even if a generation of individuals were to start off in an environment of equal opportunity that disadvantages no one in any terms, some would eventually dominate the others. This is simply the result of their differences in speed, strength, or intelligence - whatever provides them a natural adaptation to this specific environment. The irony of this scenario is that it is precisely the equal application of forces within the environment that disadvantages some over others. If we return to the example of gravity, we see that it is a force that applies equally to everyday humans in our world. Even with advanced training methodologies, even with the use of chemical interventions, some humans will always end up being stronger than others. If genetic traits express themselves in this radically varying potential for neuromuscular development between individuals, why should this be any different for other abilities of the human body? All human differences are the result of the genetic cards dealt to the individual at conception, which in turn determine their adaptability to compete in any given environment. And so, even in an idealised world where all environmental limitations have been equalised, the most adaptable would end up on top, organically forming a new societal hierarchy.
The Two Visions as the Foundation of Societal Conflict
It is at this point that we arrive at the consequences of both visions for society. The equal vision of society denies inequality as the basic state of humanity. It does not align with the reality of the world as it is, and seeks to artificially alter the competitive environment to eliminate hierarchies in an effort to equalise all individuals and the groups that they form. Because humans remain inherently different from each other, this vision does not eliminate hierarchy - in actuality, it simply changes the rules through which hierarchies are formed. The resulting society is one that is still ordered hierarchically, but the individuals and groups considered most competent are those most adaptable to the artificial rules governing its competitions. As this society must, by necessity of its guiding vision, deny the natural value of hierarchy, it is bound to exist in an everlasting contradiction. The elites that govern its power structure must therefore justify their own existence by ingraining a lie at the heart of their belief system: even though they are clearly in a superior position compared to other social groups, they must propagate the idea that this is not the case. Naturally, this becomes a source of inherent instability, because such blatant deceptions easily fan the flames of opposition to this social order. Furthermore, the widespread inefficiency generated by a significant misalignment with the true nature of reality inevitably decreases the productivity and power of this society, to a point where it is increasingly plagued with problems - similar to our initial example of gravitational denialism. As the naturally competent do not lead the hierarchy of the egalitarian society, its ability to competently respond to such problems becomes severely diminished.
The hierarchical vision of society, on the other hand, accepts inequality as the basic state of humanity. It aligns with the reality of the world as it is, and sees competition as a means to establish a natural order that aligns with individual competency. In the resulting power structure, the most capable multiply their traits through reproduction, inevitably forming larger groups endowed with beneficial adaptations to their environment. Within these hierarchical groups - defined as families, tribes, ethnicities, and eventually sovereign nation-states - social agreements of mutual care arise due to organic relationships of affinity and blood. This process of perpetual competitive selection proliferates not only the most adaptable genetic traits but perhaps more importantly, the most effective mode of collaborative organisation within groups. By implication, groups will in and of themselves become ordered into a natural hierarchy against each other. The adherents of this societal vision simply accept hierarchy as the natural and rightful expression of merit. The elites who govern its power structures therefore embed this concept with various justifications, for example by portraying it as a great chain. A society aligned with the natural forces of the world in such a manner benefits from increased productivity and power over time, as well as from enhanced social cohesion and stability, since widespread acceptance of hierarchy mitigates inter-societal conflicts. As it does not work against the forces of competition, hierarchy, and reproduction, it avoids artificial inefficiencies and the problems that result from them.
Ultimately, the two visions of society lie at the core of every ideology. All positions in societal conflicts can be plotted along a spectrum that runs from a belief in absolute equality to absolute hierarchy. The vision of equality signifies a quasi-religious notion that unites all historical and contemporary left-wing ideas and embraces societal construction to achieve its desired outcome - effectively a complete inversion of nature. The vision of hierarchy, on the other hand, is an observation of the true state of reality that unites all historical and contemporary right-wing ideas and embraces the natural forces responsible for the effective spontaneous organisation of society.
The elites of all major societies in the United States-led Western world have embraced the vision of equality as their dogma. Their absolute authority on the interpretation of reality is founded on the belief that all human individuals and groups are inherently equal. By now, it should be clear to every attentive reader that this is an example of power using a false belief to justify its existence, similar to the gravitational denialists. It is no surprise, then, that Western people are witnessing increasing signs of instability and outright deterioration in their homelands. As zealots of the prevailing order, the herd, of course, remains in denial. Yet, to many individuals, the problems have become so blatantly obvious, the inefficiencies so rapidly expanding, and the symptoms so extensively described by others on our side that it is unnecessary to recap them here. If you know, you know. And if you have no idea what this means, the next chapters will provide some enlightening examples.
Finally, power does not necessarily require truth to exist. Stability and peace can be maintained on a construct of lies. The issue, as you now understand, is that this is only a temporary state - one that is already coming apart at the edges, accelerated precisely by its misalignment with reality. Only time will tell if the current egalitarian order has the ability to survive over periods similar to its hierarchical predecessors. Even though 80 years of “Pax Americana” sounds impressive, it pales in comparison to other historical periods of relative peace and prosperity. The well-known “Pax Romana” of Roman Emperor Augustus lasted an impressive 207 years, illustrating that adherents of the equal vision have a long way to go before they can truly proclaim the end of history. If we go by recent historical precedent, such as the collapse of the equality-worshipping Soviet Union, it is more likely that they will only survive if they reinvent themselves more in line with the reality of our world and its natural forces. The mandate for us, the opposition, is unequivocal: the vision of hierarchy must be restored to power.
Our one true and righteous cause is Ascension.