Hierarchy, Order, and the Salvation Machines — Part 1
A series in two parts. Part 1 builds the scaffolding: why people resist admitting class exists, why evolution doesn't settle the question, why democracy is still worth its cost, how capitalism mixes hierarchy with decentralized order, and why "order therefore hierarchy" is a tautology. Part 2 turns to the machinery of justification — the lodges, the bourgeois civilizing project, the Indies relay, and finally the techno-salvation narratives of Silicon Valley.
The running thread: hierarchy is real but not self-justifying → order is not the same as hierarchy → capitalism mixes both → elites build private networks to reproduce themselves → those networks need a transcendent story → today that story is technological. The arc runs from why people deny class to why billionaires want to escape death.
Chapter 1 — Why the Public Resists Admitting Class Exists
People do not mainly deny the facts of hierarchy. They resist what the facts imply. If class is structural, then meritocracy is partly a myth — and that is psychologically expensive.
"The general public" is not monolithic. People accept some hierarchies readily: expertise, seniority, wealth-as-success. What they resist is class as a structural fact rather than a personal one.
The resistance has several engines:
- The meritocracy myth — if class is structural, "success = merit" is partly false.
- Just-world bias — believing outcomes are deserved reduces anxiety.
- Mobility beliefs — "I'll move up" makes class feel temporary rather than systemic.
- Segregation — elites and the poor live in separate worlds; inequality stays abstract.
- Attribution errors — poverty is read as personal failure, wealth as personal virtue; inheritance, networks, credit, schooling, and geography stay invisible.
- Shame — admitting class can feel like admitting family failure.
- Elite and media framing — personalities get covered, structures do not.
- Normative confusion — people hear "class exists" as "class should exist" or "your effort doesn't matter."
The reframe matters: the resistance is usually not factual denial. It is normative and psychological resistance to what the fact implies.
Chapter 2 — Does Evolution Settle It? No.
Biology shows humans are capable of dominance hierarchies — and equally capable of coalitionary checking of dominants, reciprocity, and egalitarian norms. Hierarchy is not one fixed natural form.
What evolution actually shows:
- Dominance hierarchies: yes.
- Coalitionary checking of dominants: also yes.
- Reciprocity and prestige-based, non-coercive status: also yes.
- Egalitarian norms in small-scale societies: also yes.
Two corrections follow.
First, hierarchy is not one thing. Its degree and legitimacy vary enormously by institutions and ecology. "Natural" does not specify which hierarchy, or how steep.
Second, is does not imply ought. The fact that hierarchies emerge says nothing about whether a particular class order is inevitable, just, or beyond reform. Evolution explains capacities, not moral legitimacy.
Chapter 3 — Why Keep Fighting for Democracy If Hierarchy Persists?
Democracy is not a denial that hierarchy exists. It is a technology for managing power under hierarchy — and its costs are maintenance costs, like hygiene.
What democracy actually does:
- Accountability — constrains arbitrary power even where unequal power remains.
- Peaceful turnover — no civil war at every succession.
- Voice and information — elections, press, opposition, and courts create error-correction.
- Legitimacy — people accept decisions more when they had voice, even with unequal outcomes.
- Protection against domination — imperfectly shields weaker groups from unchecked elites.
- Malleability — de facto hierarchy is real, but its steepness, rigidity, and legitimacy are institution-dependent.
On the cost: democracy is slow, compromising, and exhausting. But the alternatives are also costly. Authoritarianism concentrates risk, suppresses feedback, and makes peaceful correction nearly impossible. Democracy's effort is maintenance cost, not waste.
Chapter 4 — Capitalism Is Hierarchical. It's Also More Than That.
Capitalism reliably produces durable hierarchies — capital over labor, owners over workers. But it is a mixed order of hierarchical firms, competitive markets, state power, and social institutions. Not one single hierarchy.
Where the strong claim holds:
- The firm is usually hierarchical: shareholders → executives → managers → workers. Inside the workplace, it is command, not democracy.
- Markets are horizontal in exchange but asymmetric in power: capital, credit, land, information, and bargaining power are unequally held.
- Class relations persist: owners and controllers of productive assets versus sellers of labor.
- Global capitalism is hierarchical too: core and periphery, creditors and debtors, multinationals and suppliers.
- "Like it or not" is broadly true — you can opt out at the margins, but there is no real exit.
"You can opt out at the margins, but there is no real exit."
— the structural constraint of market dependence
Where it needs nuancing:
- Capitalism is not one hierarchy. It intersects with state bureaucracy, racism, patriarchy, caste, and citizenship. Some hierarchies predate capitalism and survive inside it.
- Markets also disrupt hierarchies — weakening old aristocratic or caste privilege, enabling mobility, coordinating activity decentrally. Capitalism is hierarchical and horizontal at once.
- "Capitalism" varies enormously: Nordic welfare, neoliberal, state capitalist, cooperative sectors, strong unions, public ownership. The steepness and legitimacy of hierarchy differ.
- Hierarchy existing does not make a particular hierarchy natural or just. Is does not imply ought.
The sharp version: capitalism is a system of generalized market dependence organized around private ownership and wage labor, and that reliably produces durable hierarchies — especially capital over labor. But it is not merely a hierarchy. It is a mixed order.
Chapter 5 — Order Is Not the Same as Hierarchy (The Tautology Trap)
"If a system involves order, it is hierarchical" is only true if you define "order" as "hierarchy" — which makes it a tautology, not an argument.
The definitions that matter:
- Order = regularity, predictability, coordination, stable patterns.
- Hierarchy = ranked, asymmetric authority: A commands B, B commands C.
Order without hierarchy exists:
- Decentralized coordination — markets coordinate millions of exchanges without a central commander, though with asymmetric power.
- Self-organization — ecosystems, languages, norms, traffic patterns, open-source projects.
- Polycentric order — many overlapping decision centers, none supreme.
- Heterarchy — elements ranked differently by context, not one fixed chain of command.
- Protocols and rules — queues, standards, contracts, constitutions.
The honest version of the claim is weaker: every ordered social system has structure, constraints, and some asymmetries. But structure is not hierarchy. A network has structure. A market has structure. A language has structure. That does not make them a command hierarchy.
"When someone says 'order therefore hierarchy,' ask: which specific ranking, who commands whom, and could the same regularity be produced by rules, networks, or polycentric institutions instead?"
— the diagnostic question
Chapter 6 — What "Order" Actually Means in Science, Society, and Economics
In all three domains, order means patterned coordination under constraints. Hierarchy is one mechanism that produces it. Markets, norms, laws, and self-organization produce it too.
In science
Order means one or more of: regularity (patterns, laws, symmetries), structure (crystal lattices, anatomy, food webs), constraint (degrees of freedom limited), compressibility (describable with less information than the raw microstate), emergence (macroscopic order from local interactions — flocking, convection, ant colonies), and dynamical stability (homeostasis, attractors).
Order is often opposed to entropy, but "order" is not automatically good or hierarchical. A crystal is ordered; a gas is disordered; a living cell is ordered through energy throughput. Biology has hierarchies — gene, cell, organ, organism, ecosystem — and networks, feedback loops, and decentralized regulation.
In the social domain
Order means the stability and predictability of social interaction — people can expect roughly how others will act.
Mechanisms include norms and roles, institutions (law, property, money, constitutions), sanctions, coordination (conventions, standards, language), power and legitimacy, and networks and trust.
Crucially, social order is not necessarily just or hierarchical. It can be coercive (force), normative (shared values), negotiated (stable but contested), spontaneous (language, norms, traffic), or designed (constitutions, bureaucracies, firms).
In economics
Order means the regular coordination of production, exchange, investment, and consumption.
It includes division of labor, property rights and contract, money and credit, price signals, profit and loss, firms and management hierarchies, state law and enforcement, supply chains, and expectations.
Two broad visions:
- Spontaneous market order — decentralized coordination through prices and dispersed knowledge. No central planner, but not egalitarian; power asymmetries remain.
- Organized or administrative order — firms, states, contracts, regulation, industrial policy. Hierarchical inside organizations.
Across all three domains: order means patterned coordination under constraints, and hierarchy is one mechanism among several — sometimes present, often not required.
The real question is never "order or no order." It is what kind of order, produced by what mechanisms, with what distribution of power, and with what accountability.
Chapter 7 — Did Old Money Join Freemasonry and Theosophy? A Selective Truth
Disproportionately, yes. Universally, no. These were private clubs for class reproduction and cross-class alliance-building — not secret governments.
Freemasonry was deeply intertwined with aristocracy in its early modern heyday. British lodges recruited nobility for prestige; Grand Masters came from either the aristocratic class or the mercantile class. Royalty joined. In some continental lodges, aristocrats were nearly half the membership. But dominance was never total, and today the noble and ultra-wealthy share of British Freemasonry has sharply declined.
The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, explicitly appealed to an elite, educated, middle- and upper-middle-class constituency — a religion for the thinking classes. It attracted scientists, artists, and wealthy patrons who funded its spread.
Why elites were drawn in:
- The old money / new money symbiosis — the core function. Aristocrats had land, titles, and status but lacked liquid capital. Merchants had wealth but lacked social legitimacy. Lodges provided a private, screened environment for advantageous alliances and boundless networking.
- A machinery for career advancement.
- Ideological affinity and exclusivity — an intellectually respectable, "enlightened" spirituality that let liberal-minded elites critique bourgeois culture without abandoning their class position.
"It was not unadvantageous to belong to this brotherhood … for there, one brother helped the other."
— contemporary observers on the networking function of the lodges
Member screening for "social connections" and "willingness to uphold traditions of secrecy" kept the network exclusive and trustworthy.
The verdict: the image of the old-money Freemason or Theosophist is a caricature of a real pattern. Elites used voluntary associations as private clubs for class reproduction when titles and inherited wealth alone were insufficient. These organizations were reliable nodes of elite social capital — which is exactly why they attracted so much speculation and myth.
Continue reading: Part 2 turns from the how of elite networking to the why — the bourgeois civilizing project, the Javanese relay that turned Theosophy into national awakening, the migration of the lodge function into Davos and Dialog, and Peter Thiel's attempt to leave the ledger entirely.