New Pantheon (08) — Hierarchy
Do as I say.
[Letter #026]
Good morning, son.
As we round out the end of May, we’re inching ever closer to your birthday. The baby shower was a success, and we now have far more baby-related crap than I have any idea what to do with. I’m learning that not only do babies need mountains of diapers (knew that part), but also that these diapers come in various sizes (news to me). This makes perfect sense, of course, but I’ve managed to make it through four decades of life without needing to deal with such things. I think we now own something like over a thousand “size 1” diapers, but I truly don’t know how many you’ll require. I’m still finishing up your baby room, and I really hope you’ll like bears as much as your mother and I do. It’s become quite the theme in there.
When I was a kid, my parents took me to church every Sunday. I never particularly cared for the experience, but this was just “what was done,” so I didn’t fight it. There was a common phrase that the various pastors who came through there would occasionally use before giving some sermons. They would say, “The Lord laid it on my heart,” referring to the reason for whatever the particular sermon’s subject was going to be. This supposedly meant that God had directly given it to the pastor to deliver at this specific church meeting. It was never discussed what else this suggested: namely, why the Lord didn’t lay something on the pastor’s heart every Sunday. Shouldn’t the sermon always be divinely inspired? Had I asked, they would have told me that this was, of course, the case, but that this “laid it on my heart” sermon was of some special importance for some reason known only to God.
Like I’ve told you before, God doesn’t actually work in mysterious ways. Christians just have pathetic reasons for things that happen, and they have no explanations for non-sequiturs. “God just does shit, I dunno.” Looking back on it from my vantage today, I see that what the poetic phrase of many various pastors actually meant was more along the lines of, “I couldn’t think of anything else this week, so this is what you’re getting. If you don’t understand why, then I’m just going to pretend it wasn’t intended for you.” Clearly, this isn’t an excuse that you could use every week, so thus it is explained why every Sunday wasn’t explicitly divinely guided.
Accordingly, this is a letter that I had every intention of writing as the last in the series on the New Pantheon, but I just couldn’t drum up the inspiration to do any of the other gods yet. Plus, I’ve read a few things lately that put the top-dog god on my brain, so this is what you’re getting. Laid it on my heart, you see. Maybe if I ever have the interest in writing a book out of this stuff, I’ll put them in a better order. Maybe not though. I’m not crazy about writing for an audience who isn’t as understanding as you.
Today, I want to discuss the original sin — the primordial god — the Zeus figure sitting atop the family tree. He is Hierarchy, the biggest, baddest saltine this side of the soup aisle. Without Hierarchy, none of the other gods would exist. Governance wouldn’t be possible, as the monopoly on violence is required to give governments power. Ransom couldn’t be practiced, because there would be no way to deny necessities to anyone. Money would not be able to compel behavior, as there would be no enforcement of its use.
Power itself is derived from Hierarchy. Here, we’re not talking about which statue is the most realistic or which oars drive the canoe the fastest. This god’s domain specifically refers to the relationship dynamics between animals — usually humans, but also humans dominating other animals. It’s the ability to compel people to do as they’re told, under penalty of pain or death.
In the classical Hellenic myths, before the gods of Olympus and the titans before them, there was Chaos. This was the shapeless, timeless void of everything and nothing. It was pure potential, but there was nothing concrete and lasting. Nothing structured, nothing ordered. Out of the Chaos eventually came the titans, and so their story begins.
I think there’s an entire letter to be written there about this metaphor for the beginning of “history,” particularly regarding the origins of agriculture, written language, laws and government, and all that. I’ve covered most of those points elsewhere already though, so we’ll just consider it as an interesting passing thought.
What comes to mind for me aside from that is the common misconception of Anarchism as being synonymous with chaos and disorder. Before this New Pantheon came about, there was indeed anarchy in tribal cultures. That is, there were no kings or rulers, no empires, and really no laws. There were tribal “laws,” but those were more like descriptions of how the tribe lived in general and what to do when certain circumstances came up. They weren’t a system of crime and punishment as we would think of laws today. These were more just cultural norms — “This is how we do things.”
So, before Zeus (or Hierarchy), there was Chaos (or Anarchy). Now, I know that anarchy isn’t chaotic at all and is probably the most secure and peaceful way for humans to live, but this “chaos versus order” framing is what you’d get from the faithful of Hierarchy.
Like so many of the other gods, this one is rarely invoked by name. However, his influence is ubiquitous. He effectively is civilization itself. Without him, laws don’t work, governments can’t exist, money has no power, and property simply cannot be held in private hands. While the vast majority of our species’ history (upwards of 300k years) had humans who understood this life and lived it without a second thought, modern humans of the past 10k years just can’t imagine how existence without Hierarchy is even possible. This is Hierarchical Realism, the notion that not only is hierarchical organization the best way of doing things, but that there is no other alternative. The YouTuber named Anark has developed this concept as an expansion of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.
Humans throughout civilization’s history have called him by another name: “Power.”
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
– Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation,” speech, 1857.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority[.]
– John Dalberg-Acton, Letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton, 1887.
The second quote there is, at this point, cliched to death, but it’s of particular interest to me that the right honorable Lord Acton opted to differentiate between “influence” and “authority” in the rarely-quoted subsequent sentence.
There have been a number of different voices in literature and media who have observed that power is not given but rather taken. The act of taking power is the employment of power itself to dominate the previous power holder. This simple truth is at the heart of almost every question in politics. “Why doesn’t X happen? Why do we have to do Y?” These questions boil down to “Who holds the power?” The answer is the person or group who has the capacity to inflict violence if their will is challenged. The reason we do Y and not X is because if we don’t, we’ll suffer the consequences.
We have domination dynamics even in democratic societies. Let’s pretend that our “democratic” systems somehow worked flawlessly, according to how we describe them in idealistic terms. The rule by “the people” would mean taking a vote on any given policy. The majority rules. That means that if “the people” decide that it’s only lawful to wear orange shirts, but a minority of people want to wear purple shirts, then enforcement is needed to prevent that minority from exercising their will to don the superior color. If a minority person opts to wear the best color, purple, instead of the terrible one, orange, then the law enforcement will have to threaten or inflict violence until the righteous purple shirt is put away and the terrible orange rags are worn instead.
Now that we are very clear about Papa Bear’s favorite color, we can apply the same logic to any other issue in a “democracy.” Of course, the reason that I use quotes there is because there has never been a true democracy, and the forms of “democratic” republics that are used in parts of the world today are mostly just oligarchies with several layers of obfuscating theatrics intended to keep “the people” believing that they actually matter.
I suppose it would be a good time to take a beat and mention what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that Hierarchy is equal to violence. Hierarchy requires violence in order to function, and there’s violence built into every system of law, economics, and government. But, violence can be, and has been, used by humans (and indeed most animals) throughout all of time. The use of violence does not, in itself, establish a hierarchy. It does not impose power. If a lady forcefully removes the family jewels of an assailant to prevent him from violating her, she has enacted violence on him, but she has not placed herself in a position of dominance to command him. She has used violence to defend herself against greater violence. I intend to write an entire letter on this subject some other time, but for now, the takeaway is that I’m not saying violence is inherently bad. I’m saying that it’s bad to use violence to establish a hierarchical power structure.
Hierarchy has existed so long because power preserves itself. When a person holds it, and it doesn’t really matter what the reason was originally that gave the power to that person (election, domination, succession, whatever), then that person’s primary objective will be to retain that power, even at the cost of whatever objectives they may have had upon first receiving the power. They might endeavor to increase their power, but they will never, never act to diminish it. This is the reason for such near-useless measures to restrict power like term limits or checks and balances. These practices serve to marginally obstruct some individuals, but they are impotent against systemic power dynamics. This point becomes painfully clear when the office of the US president changes to a different person, for example, and yet the policies of the previous holder remain unchanged.
The principal priority of the priests of Hierarchy is their insistence that a hierarchical organization is required for good, happy living for humanity. This is the central theme of Leviathan, after all. The book is an entire treatise on why humans are awful creatures who cannot be left to their own devices, as they would surely run amok and destroy everything. This misanthropy, this presumption of an original sin, an inherent evil within humans, runs throughout all manner of philosophy: from Machiavelli, to Freud, to St Augustine. Something that has always made me smirk is that I’m certain that, if you would have asked any of these philosophers, they would’ve told you that these observations of humanity wouldn’t apply to them. No, of course not. The lunatics who require rigid authority to guide them are those other, lesser people.
If not for laws and the enforcement of those laws, they preach, then no aspect of society would hold together and no one would ever feel secure again. Bellum omnium contra omnes. Their singular message, that almost everyone alive today has embodied to the depths of their soul, is this: “You need us to rule over you.”
It’s a remarkably successful Propaganda campaign, actually. People can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a non-hierarchical way because hierarchical systems of dominance consistently erase any evidence or idea that such living would ever be possible. Peter Gelderloos goes into detail on this phenomenon in an article he recently wrote for Substack.com.
In the years I was doing the research for my book, Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation, I could not find a single example of a statist society that collapsed, that just fell apart from some logistical inefficiency, spiraling warfare, or local ecocide perpetrated by the ruling class. I did come across multiple “mysterious” collapses that were quite clearly caused or at least helped along by lower class revolutions, and after these revolutions people’s quality of life usually improved. As for the other collapses that do remain mysterious, in every case I came across evidence — inconclusive but nonetheless strong — that popular uprisings combined with massive abandonment (back in the day when there was a frontier beyond which State power did not reach) helped tip the balance of power. Yet the vast majority of academic sources I plowed through — historians, archaeologists, paleoecologists, and anthropologists from fifty different decades, twenty different countries, and a dozen different schools of thought — refused to even mention the concept of revolution or to portray the lower classes as a group capable of agency or even thought.
– Peter Gelderloos, Ethics, Risk, Apocalypse, Substack.com
The book he refers to in the quote there should be on my shelf. You’ll enjoy it, if you haven’t read it yet. Within the book, he suggests that unless there is clear and compelling evidence to the contrary, it would be wise to presume that rebellion was a major contributing factor to any and every state collapse in history.
Too often, historians and archaeologists fabricate cheap mysteries, “Why did this great civilization suddenly collapse?,” because they refuse to accept the obvious: that states are odious structures that their populations destroy whenever they get the opportunity, and sometimes even when they face impossible odds.
– Peter Gelderloos, Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation, p129.
It’s particularly easy to obscure these uprisings within archeological evidence though. One of the primary purposes of writing (at least for the invention of writing) was to record debts, property contracts, laws, and other mechanisms of administration. These would be prime targets for rebels set on destroying the power structure. If they succeeded, the evidence of their deeds would likewise be destroyed, as that would be the entire point. Whether they succeeded or not, however, the power structure that followed the ensuing “dark age” would not be keen to make it public that the previous institution was vulnerable to being overturned. A king can wield far more clout by pretending that his lineage has been and will always be eternal — unquestionable. So, it would make a lot of sense if empires downplayed or censored historical accounts of rebellion.
But, a lot of ink (in the pixelated form) has been spilled over exactly that subject. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the ink (or, more specifically, the writing itself) that is the reason for the Hierarchical Realism that we’ve always endured. Writing is why records exist, and records are what rulers use to rule. Writing was created for administration, after all. When there’s no one in charge, there’s very little reason to make records. There is no one to enact taxation, no one to grant permits, and no one to keep track of debts. As much as I love the written word, it’s exactly the reason that we know as much as we do about rulers and almost nothing about the periods of anarchy in history.
We started calling these anarchic periods “dark ages” because there wasn’t anything illuminating the history there. No written records. The people just remembered the things they wanted to remember and they forgot about the things that didn’t matter to them. If they ever did have written records, they were promptly destroyed by the subsequent ruling classes. As a student of history, and with my utmost and sincere solemnity, I assure you that I am both appalled and also scandalized that cultures haven’t documented everything for posterity — but this is just how things do. The result, of course, is that it’s just not imaginable that humans could organize life without elites ruling over them.
In classical history, kings would pretend to be gods, because then whatever they did, said, or commanded would, by definition, be the will of the divine. In the Middle Ages in Europe, it was more common to pretend to be a regular human who was divinely chosen by God. That way, the king could feign humility to the Church while still bearing the celestial veneer over his actions and decisions. In the modern period, leaders typically just put a hand over whatever holy text they prefer and promise real hard that they’ll be well behaved.
If humans are inherently evil (a requisite supposition for this pantheon) and thus require rulers to instruct them how to live their lives peacefully, then why are all of our rulers human?
Because, you see, we’re to believe that there are different ranks of humans. A hierarchy of them, actually. The ones who are on the top of the pile are supposed to be better — that they’re super-human, naturally. Makes perfect sense, right?
It consistently astonishes me that regular people still mostly seem to buy into this garbage about better “sorts” of people running things. I’ve met a number of them, and they’re constantly on television. There’s nothing terribly special or “better” about any of them, in any sense whatsoever. They’re not particularly intelligent; they’re usually not terribly attractive; they’re not kind or compassionate (although they pretend to be); they’re often greedy and narcissistic. I mean, there’s just no measurement, whether superficial or profound, that would in any real conception make these people superior to anyone else.
Except in one regard. They’re better at understanding what the rules are for. Average folks don’t understand that rules (laws, ordinances, court orders, subpoenas, or whatever) are not created to establish or maintain a just order. They’ve never been intended for that, unless they were created by a ruler who was supremely naive (and probably short-lived). They are meant to control “the people,” the masses, the common folk, the unwashed, the ignoble. These, the underclass, are the ones for whom dominance is warranted.
This is why phrases like “do as I say, not as I do” or “rules for thee, but not for me” exist. It’s why no bankers faced any sort of accountability after they destroyed the economy (over and over and over again). It’s why the orange king, the most recent ex-occupant of the White House, is not likely to be jailed. It’s why OJ was found not guilty. It’s why the elites get away with everything, no matter what they do. Folks would still remember the Panama Papers if you brought it up, but they’ve long since forgotten that nothing became of them. Then there was Epstein and that whole mess, but we all got sidetracked over his murd — suicide and forgot about the actual stuff that was beginning to point a lot of attention toward the nobles.
There’s a fantasy among average folks these days of a billionaire being led out of his multi-million dollar estate in handcuffs to be sentenced for decades for his crimes. The idea is that there is this thing, this “force,” that is greater, mightier than anyone and anything. The force is often called “Justice,” and folks believe in it like 3-year-olds believe in Santa Claus. People far more intelligent than yours truly really believe in the whole arc of history stuff. They just know that it’s going to prevail over the forces of “evil,” and if it doesn’t, then it’s a “miscarriage of justice” or a “travesty,” or some other word that they don’t fully understand but believe gives them credibility. Yes, they take themselves very seriously on this whole “justice” thing.
But, it’s never gonna happen. There is no “justice” system. There is a “legal” system, and the laws are written by them and for them. They are not subject to them.
Sure, occasionally, they’ll throw out a sacrificial lamb. They’ll make an example of a lower-level scrub. They’ll throw the mob a bone like Martin Shkreli, Sam Bankman-Fried, or Derek Chauvin. Con artists and cops are easy enough to throw under the bus. What you won’t ever see is someone like Gates, Bezos, McConnell or the like. They’re the true nobility, and they own justice. Just like the kings of old, whatever they say is justice — it is the law. Why? Because the entire system, the Church of Hierarchy and all faiths deriving from that, are meant to protect them and their power over everyone else.
The facade that they show us — the system that we’re supposed to think exists, wherein everyone is equal under the law and must be held accountable — has never been real.
“Justice” is the carrot on the stick that elites dangle before us to goad us toward doing whatever they command. They’ll pretend to provide this sort of catharsis, so long as we permit them to continue with their exploitation and dominance without giving them too much of a headache. We’ll pretend that putting one cop behind bars somehow makes up for the thousands of people they murder every year. We’ll accept a circus of interrogation before a senate judiciary committee, a pointless exercise that will amount to nothing more than free publicity for the defendant, as though it’s some actual accountability for their misdeeds. So long as it keeps the plebs quiet, they’ll offer up whatever is cheap and easy. If the carrot doesn’t work, then they’ll just throw justice out the window and use the stick, which is just to carry out the violence that was otherwise merely suggested.
These are the humans, the Chosen of Hierarchy himself, who dominate everyone else by monopolizing the use of violence. They dictate what is and isn’t right, who should live and who should die, what land to preserve and what to pollute, which laws are acceptable and which are too “radical” to discuss, and everything else under the sun. These are the golden saints of our civilization, divinely blessed to forever stand higher than the common folk. More importantly, they’re blessed to stand above the law. They hold the power of the law, the weaponry, the money, the land — but most of all, they hold the power over our minds.
Because we let them.
We’ve bought the lie that without them, we would surely perish. We believe them when they tell us that hierarchy is “human nature,” that it’s only natural to have kings, chiefs, emperors, chairmen, presidents, and varying degrees of nobility. We’ve been told that it’s a virtue to “respect your betters,” to “obey their commands,” to “stay true to the party,” and to “be humble servants.” These are doctrines of the faith — the Church of Hierarchy.
He’s the god, him and all of his damned children, who I will stand against for the rest of my life.
Whew. I think I need a drink.
Son, I love you very much, and I hope you’re safe when you read this. If you’ll excuse me now, I have a tremendous amount of furniture that I still need to build down in the workshop in preparation for your arrival. Or, maybe a glass of good stuff and a nice chair is a better idea for today. I hope that this letter finds you well.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
