The Illusion of Hierarchy

The belief that some people are “above” and others are “below” has been quietly shaping the way we value ourselves, relate to others, and interpret the world.

Hierarchy is one of the most invisible distortions in human culture. It has seeped into almost everything: Who we listen to. Who we dismiss. Who we serve. Who we silence. Who we believe deserves love, freedom, and safety. Hierarchy decides these things long before we consciously do. The concept of hierarchy is one of the most damaging inheritances I have received.

I was born into a family of four in the USA. Upper middle class, nice houses, steady income, and ample opportunities. On the surface, we looked close. We hiked together, travelled, we went on trips together, and when I left home at 18, we had a teary goodbye. I was genuinely devastated.

My parents supported me financially. They let me experiment, go to an alternative high school, travel overseas, and go to university. From the outside, everything was healthy, privileged, stable.

It wasn’t until I moved to the other side of the world, and opened my eyes to a new, value-based way of relating to people, that the truth became impossible to ignore: There were insidious, unspoken layers of trauma shaping our family. Layers I could not see until I stepped out of the system that created them.

As I opened my eyes, I came face to face with a stark and uncomfortable truth - it is entirely possible that my family members, who I have spent the largest amount of time with, were never truly aligned with my path. Not because they were “bad”, but because hierarchy had been placed above intellectual integrity, emotional truth, and relational honesty.

Society’s hierarchical code says family sits at the top… above community, above chosen relationships, above truth itself. And so the four of us lived under the same roof for years without truly sharing values, ideology, or even a common way of being. We did not organise around needs. We did not organise around emotional safety. We did not organise around freedom. We simply coexisted.

In our family culture, a subsection of American culture, keeping the family intact was valued above truth. There were things that we all sensed that we chose not to name. Subtle (and not-so-subtle) violence. Entanglement. Energetic realities that, if they had been acknowledged, could have changed the trajectory of each of our lives.

Even writing this now, I can feel how edgy it is. Not because I am unsure of what happened, but because hierarchy teaches us to protect the system at all costs, even when the system harms us. Hierarchy is so normalised that most people assume it’s natural. But it isn’t. It’s learned, conditioned, inherited.

And I am calling it out.

Life never created hierarchy. Humans did. Nature cuts through and shows us the truth.

If you look at a forest, nothing is “above” anything else. A tree is not more important than a mushroom. A river is not more valuable than the soil. A seed is not “less than” the oak it becomes.

Everything exists in relationship, not ranking. Life is one body, organised by interdependence, not superiority.

Over the past few years, I have been working closely with two women, stretching the limits of what humans usually imagine about collaboration. Guided by a philosophical framework so vast that by now it practically runs in our veins, we’ve learned to live, work, eat, share resources, and grow together inside systems that are completely non-hierarchical, completely sovereign, and deeply unattached.

This is made possible by the deep exploration of what we call our ‘areas’. Where one person thrives, another steps back. Where one person has capacity, another rests. Nothing is forced. Nothing is ranked. Everything is felt.

This way of living is a daily gift. For nearly two years, these two women cooked for me, showed up for my tears, listened to my grief, and watched as my capacity - flattened by 25 years of merely surviving in the modern world - slowly returned. There were days I didn’t get out of bed, but I felt the immense spaciousness that only comes from being around people who take radical responsibility for their own needs and never asked me to abandon myself to meet theirs.

Here I am with to two women mentioned above at a celebration at our old home, Maleny Eco Village.

The philosophy is extensive, so I won’t try to oversimplify it here, but there is one sentence that rings strongly throughout: feel and do what is needed.

When more people operate this way, the environment becomes clearer. The body becomes wiser.

I remember a profound awakening moment I had, looking at a tree and feeling a shocking, visceral belonging. I wondered: how could my body ever not know exactly what to do? I cried that day for the version of me that had lived so disconnected from my instincts, unable to properly feel hunger, unable to trust my intuition, unable to see others as they were. Disconnection had kept me from my path. Most of all, it had kept me from the integrated knowledge that I am inherently enough, and inherently safe.

These breakthroughs would never have emerged without increasing my availability by teaming up with two high-capacity people and allowing myself to learn, outsource, and receive.

Now, I haven’t cooked a meal in more than eight days. Not out of avoidance, but because we all know and accept that that is not my job right now. My role is determined by my unique positioning, and it changes constantly. It is guided by one thing: what I genuinely have energy for. The deep yes.

This requires dismantling the hierarchy of activities. We must go against the grain of society to name that, actually, going to work is not above or below having a nap. Long-term romance is not above a short-term friendship. Having sex is not above or below eating a mango. Value is not in the act. It is in the energy behind it, and the needs that are met through it.

I never expected that such harmonious co-existence was possible. Now, it feels more natural than anything else. I am wildy and gratefully disillusioned by any other organising system. I’ve integrated this way of being so deeply, that the very notion of hierarchy now seems ridiculous.

Hierarchy collapses the natural balance. It creates separation where there is none. Humans adopted hierarchy to manage fear, but the cost was enormous: we forgot our belonging.

I have felt sad to witness many people receive the invitation to join our way of living and turn away due to internalised resistance, fear, scarcity, or limitation. When we believe hierarchy is real, we internalise it.

We create inner hierarchies:

“My mind is more important than my body.”

“My productivity matters more than my wellbeing.”

“My worth depends on what others think.”

“My pain is less important than their expectations.”

This internal ranking fractures us. It disconnects us from life.

So the dismantling of hierarchy is not an idea - it is a healing.

When we let hierarchy dissolve, we begin to see clearly. We begin to feel clearly. We begin to relate without fear, performance, or pleasing.

I want to show you what this looks like in real life, through a case study of my most recent romantic relationship.

I met this man on an app, recognising his face from a community I used to be a part of. I felt that familiar “yes”… the energetic pull that tells me someone is aligned with my curiosity, my learning, or my growth. I could feel certain qualities in him immediately: willingness, openness, safety, even a kind of volatility that signalled aliveness rather than stagnation. Essentially, he had some life in him.

Over the next month, what unfolded between us was like a work of art. He was nearly twenty years older than me, yet when it came to energetic skill, emotional literacy, and the ability to stay present, it became immediately clear that my capacity was much higher.

Many people, in reading this, might think that I sound arrogant, but they would be missing the point. Pretending that my capacity is any less or more than it truly is, would be withholding valuable information from my collaborative team - the team that we are all on. The team of life.

I watched as he flushed a lot of old conditioning out of his system… the jokes rooted in objectification, casual comments that landed like micro-tears, the way he completely missed the point of most of the things I said.

I was curious: Would his willingness hold? Would his capacity to respect me deepen? Could he look beyond the deeply ingrained societal frames of dominance and ownership to see me, just a little bit more?

It was not always easy to be around him. He was, in many ways, a flag-bearer for patriarchy and my own history with non-consensual men still lived in my body like an echo. There were conversations where I would feel like anything I said could be weaponised or used against me.

But, simultaneously, I felt empowered by my own magnanimous spirit, knowing that I could see him clearly while still providing safety for myself. I knew that I truly needed nothing from him, as my needs were already met. And from that place, I could love him - not romantically, not conditionally, but in the purest way a human can love another: without attachment, without agenda, without expectation.

Without hierarchy: You stop trying to earn love. You stop waiting for permission. You stop shrinking so others feel comfortable. You stop inflating yourself to avoid being seen as “less than.” You simply are.

You meet others as equals - not in sameness, but in essence. And he hated it. He seemed to feel on some level my power to walk away at any moment, if it wasn’t working for me. I had two empowering, loving friends that would always stand by me, and if he didn’t jump on the ‘basic respect’ bandwagon, I would leave him behind.

I could see the conditioning in him crying out for a familiar dynamic. He wanted me to fight back, or to be attached, or to collapse into the fantasy of monogamous romance that he so desperately wanted me to play out. He used every trick in the book to try to get me to feed into drama . He called me ‘wounded’, asking me questions designed to corner me, rather than understand me. He blamed and criticised, and pushed for reactions. And when it was over, he did not respect my clear requests for no contact.

In the end, all I could do was withdraw my energy. Not from punishment, but because there was nothing left to engage with. The relationship did not last long, but it did not need to. It ended at the right moment, when many relationships of that nature would have dragged on.

None of those constructs and frames held weight in the ecosystem of truth. The body knows capacity. The body knows resonance. And when hierarchy is removed, what remains is the clarity of two human beings meeting exactly where they are, without pretending.

In that space, I could see him. And I could see myself – without distortion. It wasn’t about who was above or below. It was just about the value that was, or was not, present. Though at times he must have felt patronised, angry, or confused, I never once abandoned the truth that I always choose how I respond.

No one is above. No one is below. We meet as expressions of life, moving differently, holding different gifts, but none of greater value. This is equality. Not political equality, but energetic equality. When hierarchy dissolves, what remains is capacity.

Capacity is reality. It is not a value judgment, it is simply a way of accurately assessing what is available in a given moment.

Have you ever been so burnt out that you began forgetting people’s names? That is capacity. It is timely. It shifts.

When I am nourished, rested, and supported, my capacity increases. When I understand my area well, I do not push myself into territories that exist outside it. If I am not an experienced mechanic and my car breaks down, I need to outsource the fixing, learn how to fix it myself, or walk away from the car completely. These are the only true options.

In the past, I might have judged myself or felt ashamed that I did not know how to do things (especially simple things, like handwashing laundry). But experience is something we acquire. And it must be acquired properly, at the right time, in the right way, with the right support. There are still times, nearly every week, where I have to readjust my priorities and remind myself where my energy truly lies.

Capacity isn’t proof of worth. It’s the honest landscape of what you can hold, and what you cannot yet hold. It is not “higher” or “lower”. It simply is. And it can expand. In this way, hierarchy is irrelevant. Life does not distribute worth… it amplifies capacity.

In the context of personal work, capacity is the ability to integrate skills. The ability to be with truth. The ability to love, without attachment. The ability to act from essence, instead of fear. The ability to hold another human, without collapsing or dominating.

When you release hierarchy from your body, you stop living from the trauma-encoded belief that worth is something that you earn. Transaction, capitalism, and people-pleasing become a means to an end that you use only as a tool, in order to build trust with those who are still controlled by those systems. Full choice becomes a way of being.

You remember that your spirit is life. All humans are equal. There is no hierarchy in truth. Capacity is reality. Your job is not to climb, compete, or perform. Your job is to remember. Remember your belonging. Remember that you came from life, and life does not rank its own parts.

Dismantle illusions to come back to a few simple truths:

Capacity is reality.

It is safe to feel.

Meet your needs deeply.

Allow truth.