Hierarchy
The power of command and precedence — established in pyramid fashion at the heart of every society — involving men as well as functions.
The notion of hierarchy highlights the most insupportable contradictions of the dominant egalitarian ideology. Theoretically, hierarchy is rejected, but in practice it’s accepted, since no society can do without it and since it’s inscribed in the genetic memory. All societies, human and animal, are hierarchical, especially the latter: human societies know extremely complex forms of hierarchy.
Egalitarian ideology, like the Western society that produced it, lives a veritable form of schizophrenia: it ceaselessly attacks hierarchy but can’t prevent hierarchies from arising, for every society engenders them. Pathological expressions of anti-hierarchy, for example, are evident in: the attack on ‘selection’ in the public schools; the dogma that all individuals, cultures, and peoples are equal; the doctrine that conceives of information and communication in terms of ‘horizontal networks’; and other such illusions . . .
Anti-hierarchy quite obviously corresponds to no actual reality, since hierarchies spontaneously emerge in every domain. It’s nevertheless at the centre of the egalitarian utopia. In Western societies, this rejection of hierarchy has led to the formation of savage, chaotic hierarchies without real legitimacy, and to forms of domination that are all the more overbearing and unjust in being hedged and camouflaged in false ‘horizontal’ relations. In this way, the practice of exclusion and ostracism replaces those of sanction. It’s the reign of hypocritical hierarchy. This gives rise to the blocked society in which there’s no longer a circulation of elites, where privileged castes are established, and where the reign of lawlessness rules. Its mechanisms are perverse; in business, the military, the school, and government one refuses clear and explicit forms of authority for the sake of ‘negotiation’ and ‘dialogue’. In reality, the process leads to networks of influence and corruption — or to secret hierarchies. Since no one is any longer obliged to obey, they need to be bought (corrupted).
From the European perspective, a hierarchical society is not an oppressive society in the Oriental or Islamic sense. Hierarchy is the disciplined organisation of free men for the sake of their common welfare — this is hierarchy in the sense that rights imply duties and that authority must constantly prove its competence.
Hierarchy is insupportable if it doesn’t rest on a transcendental authority; it’s insupportable if it rests merely on the forces of money (one no longer orders or commands, but rather buys accomplices) — or else, it rests on nepotism. Hierarchy can only be legitimatised on the basis of a recognised superiority, founded on meritocracy and talent, on character and sound judgment.
A society that refuses a clear meritocratic hierarchy, established on the basis of just legal sanctions, inevitably falls into the hands of anarchic, tyrannical hierarchies: like mafias, ethnic gangs, pressure groups, financial powers, etc. It’s no less necessary to oppose the latest illusion, very fashionable among sociologists (our contemporary counterparts to Nineteenth-century socialist utopians): that a ‘new society’ is being organised as ‘networks’ and ‘tribes’, which will, supposedly, bring about an era of communication and non-hierarchical cooperation — networks and tribes, moreover, founded solely on the individual will of those comprising them. In separating roles, hierarchical society foregoes, in contrast, the very possibility that the sovereign function will fall into the hands of others — just as it evolves in ways that are as positive as they are inescapable.
From a spiritual perspective, the abolition of the sovereign function can only culminate in the brutal domination of the market, not in the installation of horizontal networks; network societies innervated by this miraculous extravaganza called ‘communications’ reproduce the most savage and unregulated hierarchies, against which the individual remains utterly defenceless. The one certain thing: the rejection of natural hierarchies gives rise to a chaotic society with the most brutal and rigid forms of hierarchy — i.e., authoritarianism.
The question, thus, is not for or against hierarchy (for or against selection), since it’s an unavoidable sociobiological given; the question is to know what type of hierarchy to choose.
Hierarchy can only be envisaged in terms of a holistic ensemble (i.e., as a harmonious, organic totality), in which the rules of the game are clear, rights and duties are progressive and unequal, and the superior echelons possess competence, authority, and an indisputable honesty.
(see aristocracy; egalitarianism; elite; meritocracy; selection)
