Hierarchy Quotes

“Isn't this the very glue that holds the human world together? Isn't this why we need other people, to give us the pleasure of knowing we are better than they are? Amazingly, even those who seem to be the worst-off take, in their humiliation, a perverse satisfaction in the fact that no one has it worse than they do. Thus they have still, in some sense, won.

Where does this all come from? Asher wonders. Can man not be repaired? If he were a machine, as some now argue, it would suffice to adjust one little lever slightly, or to tighten some small screw, and people would start to take pleasure in treating one another as equals. ”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

“From the evolutionary perspective, revenge is retaliation that is intended either to destroy an enemy or to foster deterrence against him, as well as against third parties. This, of course, applies to non-physical and non-violent, as well as to physical and violent, action.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“We know that over time society sometimes improves in quality, and sometimes decays. What we cannot know is which direction our descendants will take.”
― Richard W. Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

“...where coercive alliances regulate societal rules, conflicts between the interests of men and women consistently end in men's favor. Patriarchy in this sense is currently a human universal.”
― Richard W. Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

“Every society has to find its own protection. To avert episodes of violence we should constantly remind ourselves of how easily a complex social organization can decay, and how hard it is to construct.”
― Richard W. Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

“The important human quest should not be to promote cooperation. That goal is relatively simple and firmly founded on our self-domestication and moral senses. The harder challenge is reducing our capacity for organized violence.”
― Richard W. Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

“Any individual who truly has a lot of social status has enough power that he or she doesn't need to use force.”
― Patricia B. McConnell, The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs

“Knowledge. New, shiny things. Better thinkers than we have observed that, when you reach this level of post-scarcity civilization, it’s either wallow in your own excesses forever or seek out newness. Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Indeed, want and hunger were not the only reasons for fighting. Plenty and scarcity are relative not only to the number of mouths to be fed but also to the potentially ever-expanding and insatiable range of humans needs and desires. It is as if, paradoxically, human competition increases with abundance, as well as with deficiency, taking more complex forms and expressions, widening social gaps and enhancing stratification.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Humans have far longer memories than do animals and, thus revenge -the social settling of accounts with those who offended them- assumes a wholly new level with them.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Don’t kid yourself, Professor. The powerful don’t think things over. They just react. It’s all they know.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, A Pause in the Perpetual Rotation

“Language created our chimeric personality in which high killing power lies alongside reduced emotional reactivity. A unique communicative ability gave us a uniquely contradictory psychology of aggression.”
― Romain Gagnon, SO MAN CREATED GOD IN HIS OWN IMAGE: The Science of Happiness

“Paradoxically, man is just as good at making life miserable through pollution or war.”
― Romain Gagnon, SO MAN CREATED GOD IN HIS OWN IMAGE: The Science of Happiness

“Homo sapiens are the most impressive creatures alive (at least on Earth), but also the one to whom life is the most cruel since this animal species is both mortal and conscious of being mortal. Moreover, death is blind; it strikes the just and the unjust without discrimination.”
― Romain Gagnon, SO MAN CREATED GOD IN HIS OWN IMAGE: The Science of Happiness

“I have been blacklisted. Servants are routinely blacklisted when their services come to an end, even when they have done nothing to deserve it, except working their fingers to the breaking point each day, coming in early, leaving late, cleaning up other people's messes,”
― Stacey Lee, The Downstairs Girl

“Even those who believe that humans are more egalitarian than chimpanzees will have to admit that our societies could not possibly function without an acknowledged order.”
― Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

“The colonel mustn't really mind the Army being a topsy-turvy place because the Church was often a topsy-turvy place as well, with curates and chaplains often holier than canons and bishops, but of course that wasn't quite the same, because the Lord was there to guide the Church, and although she didn't want to be rude, she didn't think that He had always guided the army in quite the same way.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“In Ireland the older and truer conception was never lost sight of. It persisted into Christian times when a Kieran or an Enda or a Colmcille gathered his little group of foster-children (the old word was still used) around him; they were collectively his family, his household, his clann — many sweet and endearing words were used to mark the intimacy of that relationship. It seems to me that there has been nothing nobler in the history of education than this development of the old Irish plan of fosterage under a Christian rule, when to the pagan ideals of strength and truth there were added the Christian ideals of love and humility. And this, remember, was not the education system of an aristocracy, but the education system of a people. It was more democratic than any education system in the world today. Our very divisions into primary, secondary, and university crystallise a snobbishness partly intellectual and partly social. At Clonard, Kieran, the son of a carpenter, sat in the same class as Colmcille, the son of a king. To Clonard or to Aran or to Clonmacnois went every man, rich or poor, prince or peasant, who wanted to sit at Finnian’s or at Enda’s or at Kieran’s feet and to learn of his wisdom.

Always it was the personality of the teacher that drew them there. And so it was all through Irish history. A great poet or a great scholar had his foster-children who lived at his house or fared with him through the country. Even long after Kinsale the Munster poets had their little groups of pupils; and the hedge schoolmasters of the nineteenth century were the last repositories of a high tradition.”
― Pádraic Pearse, The Murder Machine and Other Essays

“Gradually, human societies started extricating themselves from the worst forms of oppression. Human sacrifice and deified rulers went out of fashion. Slavery was outlawed, and privileges were taken away from nobles. Human societies regained much of the lost ground. We are still not as egalitarian as hunter-gatherers --there are the poor and the billionaires-- but we are much better off than we were during the days of god-kings.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“I recognized that the racialized liberalism in which I was educated--where we strive for a bigger part of some mythological pie that our fractured identities are in competition for--leaves us without a language with which to talk about inequality. It leaves black and white in perpetual opposition, a state that feeds the plantation mentality.”
― Tessa McWatt, Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging

“God has never been about hierarchy. He is about yielded hearts and people who are willing to step out in faith because they discover who they are in Christ.”
― Robby Dawkins, Identity Thief: Exposing Satan's Plan to Steal Your Purpose, Passion and Power

“(Not), in my view, is all hierarchy or
inequality inherently negative. Inequalities or differences in ability and
experience, provided they are not reified or assigned on the basis of biological
category, can usefully complement one another in relationships, and
can also foster mutual learning.”
― Ruth Vanita, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West

“Shame lurks most often in the thoughts that silently condemn, while entitlement patriotically camouflages itself behind our “God-given rights.” Yet whether you flip the coin to the side of shame or to entitlement, both play the game by endorsing a broken view of humanity and worth. Shame and entitlement both owe their survival to a hierarchical view of the world.”
― Chuck Ammons

“I suppose Epsilons don't really mind being Epsilons,' she said aloud.

'Of course they don't. How can they? They don't know what it's like being anything else. We'd mind, of course. But then we've been differently conditioned.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“...deadly aggression is a major, evolution-shaped, innate potential that, given the right conditions, has always been easily triggered. However, its ocurrence and prevalence are subject to wide fluctuations, depending on the prominence of these conditions.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“...the evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers in their evolutionary natural environment and evolutionary natural way of life, shaped in humankind's evolutionary history over millions of years, widely engaged in fighting among themselves. In this sense, rather than being a late cultural 'invention', fighting would seem to be, if not 'natural', then certainly not 'unnatural' to humans.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“As Thomas Malthus pointed out, a new equilibrium between resource volume and population numbers would eventually be reached, recreating the same tenuous ratio of subsistence that has been the fate of most pre-industrial societies throughout human history.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“To those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“If you are low status ten (...) Money will make you liable to the dangerous temptations of drugs and alcohol, which are much more rewarding if you have been deprived of pleasure for a long period.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“In communities in which spiritual life was permeated -as it invariably was- with supernatural beliefs, sacred cults and rituals, and the practice of magic, this was a potent force. All known hunter-gatherer societies -as with any other human society- exhibit the universal human quest for ordering and manipulating the cosmos.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization