A short treatise on inequality among men

It has been said that man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains. It would be equally reasonable to say that sheep are born carnivorous, and everywhere nibble grass.

To start off this article in the absence of any need for derailments, I would like you to think about making a friend. Most people don’t know how they make a friend, and that’s why people ask so often how to ‘make friends’, but they do. The very essence of friendship is itself mysterious. It is a voluntary relationship, and the friends, before they become ‘friends’, must equally confront each other as the Other. But in the act of creating friendship, one identifies with the other, thereby dissolving the category of Other. The relation of friendship cannot exist without its mutuality, and this mutuality of friendship is the cause of its diversity — variance of preferences and situations creates similarities between those who share them, differentiating them from those who don’t. Who is one’s friend may also be another’s enemy, and this shows the real mystery of life and the essential individuality that constitutes humanity. Friendship is never officialised, but must be constantly created by those who partake in it. It is only recognized once it is visibly going on. Nature provides for us our needs, and in distributing the shares of these needs and particularities, she does it not through herself, but through our private social relations. These bonds are a creation of the combination of need and love.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.

Continuing this essential realisation about the nature of bonds between friends, hierarchy can be seen as an extension of the same principles which constitute friendship. Hierarchy can be defined, atleast here, as an (voluntary) assignment of the subordinate’s vaccum in capacity and capability to those who have some sort of definitive superiority in attaining the need they need to satisfy. They can’t abdicate their self-ownership without some sort of love informing this abdication — a recognition of the superior’s responsibility to care for their subjects — and without need, situation, which is constituent of the inherent friendship defining love, becomes non-existent.

For natural superiority is the foundation of all that is called authority or lordship, and need that of all that bears the name of dependence or service, in these relations as in the others. It is incomprehensible how Hobbes and his followers could have maintained that reciprocal fear is what impelled men to unite in society: For fear separates and divides men; love and confidence alone brings them together. In fact, one can very well unite in order to more effectively resist a third party who inspires fear, and it frequently happens. But those who unite do not fear one another. They are friends, not enemies.

These hierarchical relations may be one of care, as is expected of our parents (caretakers), or it may be of service, as are the servants of a king, the employees of a business, or soldiers obeying a general. What is common to all these hierarchical relations is a satisfaction of mutual needs, which the subject gains the most from, as Nature produces “by turns, differences in acquired means, wealth and property, (which are) all the fruit of innate talents“. Every hierarchy is examined on its own weight, and evaluated according to personal experience or such, but the principle of hierarchy itself has rarely ever been put into question in the modern day, save the likes of anarchists, who call for each and every one’s destruction, although this itself is the logical conclusion of the systematic ignorance of the principle itself that has taken foot in modern philosophists. Even modern ‘communists’ are adamant on believing that communists in fact, do not want to abolish the family, and an anarchist who believes in it out of a sense of justice, is sure to be someone who loves her parents. So you either have an absolutely equal and democratic society with every unequal social relation demolished, or you can have a stateless society built on the free association and federation of voluntary communities. You must pick one or the other, as they by nature contradict each other.

Hierarchy in modernity

The ignorance of the essential benevolence of hierarchy will lead to an essential contradiction of logic in explaining practical human affairs, and most of all, human failures (who also demonstrate that inequality is not categorical but rather developmental). But, it will be said, the essential possession and force inherent to hierarchy means it must be illegitimate. In contradiction however, we can easily use the example of someone who stays at their parents even after they grow up. Because their parents possess the place they live under, and can easily take this away from them at any time, their possession makes their authority legitimate, as does authority within monarchies. The man-child and his parents are bound to reciprocal obligations: the parent must provide for their child, and the child must obey the parent. They acknowledge that they are bound to this, and will abdicate the relationship if either violates its rules and boundaries.

If all there is to hierarchy is coercion and illegitimacy, why hasn’t the child already left the relationship? In fact, most of such examples aren’t man-children, and rather stay at their parents because they cannot get a job, and the likes. Especially in that case, why haven’t they left? If this hierarchy isn’t dependent on mutual need, then they most likely should’ve already left the relationship; they only obey because their superior possesses.

A woman gives birth to a child, but she names and takes control over the child, because she loves the child, and the child can’t take care of itself. The woman gains ownership over the child because she loves the child. It is not a voluntary or contractual relationship, but nobody is forcing the child into the relationship. This is the very relationship that allows a child to develop the capacity to comprehend what a ‘contractual relationship’ is, and the abdication of the child’s power to their superiors is truly a simple work of nature i.e. voluntary. Just as easily, and it has happened plenty of times before, children can escape their parent’s authority (and in most cases these situations, too, are misguided and they come crawling back). By the very connection of love, combined with the superiority and wisdom of the parent in terms of their development of reason. They aid in the child’s development of reason, and the child leaves the parent when it is apparent that their capacity to reason is adequately developed. Pope Boniface VIII said, “it is a law of the divinity that the lowest things reach the highest place by intermediaries”. This essential truth was never abandoned, and even within the Age of Enlightenment it took a good few decades for it to mutate into what we have now; instead, the assumption was that, untethered from God, reason could flourish; or that democracy is the great protector of human properties and privileges. Both assumptions were wrong, but I am just trying to demonstrate my point here.

The portrait of human life furnishes material for an interesting exposition of this idea. Every man is a subject from infancy; nobody is born free and equal in rights, as the Declaration of the Rights of Man would have it. For nine months before his birth, the infant already lives as a prisoner in his mother’s womb. Even as he has just barely come into the world, he is bound by various ties, and subjected to two superiors he in no way appointed, and also to various subaltern masters who, one and all, give him laws, execute them themselves, settle his disputes, and punish his wrongs, with no jury and no civil code (…)

If possession is coercive, then again, why haven’t they left the relationship? Apparently, according to leftists, they don’t have anything to gain from the relationship. The leftist ideal is universal self-sufficency realized through communism; they must have a job that would allow them to feed and take care of themselves. After all, if all are essentially equal, all must also be able to satisfy their own needs, too. Perhaps, like their mom, they have their own natural talents to make money off. If all is equal, all must be able to make money, as well. But now I’m told, they don’t have a job, and will most likely go homeless and starve to death. Perhaps if they’re lucky, they’ll try to satisfy this requirement, and leave this relationship that the most wretched kinds despise so much, by becoming dependent on the goodwill of thousands or even millions of other people, who almost all had to go out to earn and save money through selling their natural talents, or valuable resources, or through exchanging money with individuals who did do the former. To state the obvious, our earnings and your earnings do not, and can not, come about through a vaccum. Dependence, if not realized through the authorities which are appointed by the Lord (Roms 13:1), will eventually be realized through some other way. In socialism too dependence does not disappear, but rather becomes the collective work of the community.

Man, born without weapons, in general reigns over animals, because he is their superior through the power of the mind, and that wonderful instrument, the hand, which allows him to convert many forces of nature into weapons for his use. However, he doesn’t always reign over all animals, nor over every animal; his rule is limited to those he has domesticated with benefits (that is to say, a useful power that provides for their needs); those he has proven his superiority over in warfare and combat, or finally, those he has defeated by means of some other power of nature.

The pet too has its own relation of subservience to its master, who in exchange for its continued nourishment and caretaking under their household learns to obey its master. Would anyone be ridiculous and heartless enough to abolish this natural relationship between a pet and its master, in the name of some abstract egalitarian ideology, namely that nobody should have a master and that all masters are fundamentally unjust? To be sure, we have evolved beyond the older complete denial of animal sentience, and either answer to this question would reconstruct the idea that hierarchy is indeed legitimated through superiority and mutual need. The left-wing anarchists with an interest in animal ethics (such as total liberationists) especially would be forced to tackle that question.

If animals aren’t able to fight against its master’s domination of it, how come dogs, for example, still show they have a mind and will of its own anyway and will actively growl or bite at even its superiors if the master transgresses the pet’s natural boundaries? The superior of a bond between souls is an universal and invisible law that determines what is just & what is not. At the same time, this invisible law also works to govern relations between each and every soul and their bonds, and the Lord communicates to each and every soul who obeys Him what this law is; the law is enforced through personal & cosmic justice alone.

Differences in rank and ability

Blessed are you! You Swiss Fatherland: – according to your philosophers there shall be no more subjects among you, consequently no more masters and no servants, no masters and no journeymen, no servants, no fiefdoms, no inmates, perhaps no more officers and soldiers; for these also are subjects, and in a word, he who is subject to the power of a higher one, who depends on him or is in his service, he is his subject. No woman will be subject to her husband, no child will be allowed to obey her parents, no man will be able to help another, no one will be able to possess free property, for the inhabitants and cultivators of it are his subjects. Nor shall we be subject to nature any more; the frost will not force us to dress warmer, the rain not to stay under roof, nor the burning sun to put us in the shade; for they prescribe laws for us, and we have not sent a representative up to consent to these laws, or even to make them ourselves.

It is incredibly easy for a modern person to accept the essential fact of hierarchy, but deny the idea of an order of rank. However, if rank is denied, then the whole notion of inequality collapses on itself, because orders of rank are fundamentally orders of stratification “structured according to life, with as many chambers or curiae as there were free, property-owning classes in a given country”. Hence, it is “so that some countries formed only one curia because there was only one property-owning estate in the country (such as the nobility in Livonia and Estonia, and then the peasantry in Norway), while others had four (e.g., Sweden) because there was a property-owning clergy, a knighthood, a burgher class, and a peasantry.” To continue:

In England, the clergy and lords of the upper classes met in the House of Commons, as did the burgher and peasantry, because the convergence of their interests dictated it. The king did not command it.

It is so that these orders of rank are marked by a shocking degree of internal self-governance. “Since the various estates were already represented in private life by their hierarchical superiors (bishops, abbots, etc.), family heads (seniors and primogenitures), and urban authorities, the same thing happened in the curiae at the provincial diets. This was called the right of the estates, a personal, inherent, lifelong right of the individuals who were the legal superiors, defenders, and protectors of their fellow estate members and subjects. These individuals did not elect them as their representatives ad hoc, but were already so by virtue of their own right and by virtue of their existing duty. Only the free, landed peasantry elected its deputies, but usually only its village authorities. Indeed, even the unfree, landless peasantry found its natural defenders in its lords (clergy and knighthood).”

It is so that “there is in every sizable society also a natural tendency toward social stratification, i.e., the emergence of a ruling ‘upper’ class of people enjoying greater liberties and comforts and a corresponding ‘lower’ class of people with lesser liberties and greater dependencies. Naturally, with all social relations being mutual beneficial, there exists upward and downward mobility, but the stratification in upper and lower social classes itself is to be taken as a natural constant. On one end of the extreme, there are people who are the heads of households and at the same time major landowners, owners of farms, factories and firms, of mansions and rental properties; people who employ hundreds or even thousands of employees, of advisors, teachers, lawyers, doctors, managers, security guards, cooks, maids and servants, etc. On the other end of the extreme, there are day laborers, vagabonds, beggars or the recipients of alms. And in between these extremes, then, there exist countless gradations, and ceaseless fluctuations regarding the social status of different people and the corresponding extent of liberties or dependencies enjoyed or willingly sought and accepted by them”. This fact of social stratification has not disappeared under modern neo-liberalism. As wives and children obey (or used to obey) fathers who protect them from harm, so do the lords aim to look after and protect their vassals. Social stratification is not a mystical work of the State, as is often thought in modern times, but rather a mere fact generated by dependencies of one man to another. In all traditional societies, their nobilities, or patricians, or aristocracy (government by ‘the best’) were propieters and fighters. They held a stake in the state because the state would collapse without the stake they already had in it. Defense of the country is the work of ‘natural elites’, and aristocracies are, thus, merely an ‘association of free men’. It is their stake in the nobility that makes them free. Accordingly, it’s strange to complain that the nobility are a parasitic class “whom infirmities, incapacity, incurable laziness, or the weight of bad habits render strangers to the labors of society”. Will people who wish the aristocrats to “become honest hard-working men” like everyone else (democracy) tell the capitalists too to “become honest hard-working men” (communism)? Not only do aristocrats generate immense wealth and beauty for the countries they inherit, but economies also exist for the satisification of human needs; work is not an end in itself. Your profession is your productive stake in generating the wealth of your community (and through trade, many other communities as well). Through defense, so do aristocrats practice their profession, which does not necessarily need to defined by industrial labour, which would burden the development of their natural talents. Now, to elaborate further, the Church in guaranteeing the salvation of souls naturally occupies the highest rank in a Christian traditional society. And while kings are “permitted honorably to rule over human kind”, “yet in things divine” they must “bow (their) head humbly before the leaders of the clergy and await from their hands the means of (their) salvation”. For that reason too are princes and peasants alike bound to the laws of the Lord.

The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no “modern idea,” can exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and feeling of perfection. It is not Manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity — the last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select. The superior caste — I call it the fewest — has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness.”

In all this, I repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing “made up”; whatever is to the contrary is made up — by it nature is brought to shame… The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types — the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all. A right is a privilege. Everyone enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence.

Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of ‘equal’ rights.

To elaborate on my last comment; Catholic Christianity, in fact, offers the ‘flattest’ order of rank the world had ever seen before that point. Instead of a world that reflects a ‘hierarchy of souls’ in which some men inevitably become slaves, some become so called ‘divine’ tyrants, or some inevitably become ‘untouchables’, Christianity proposes instead a ‘hierarchy of the cosmos’ in which all souls, regardless of race, gender, or birth, receive equal dignity. Each man is assigned a role in the grand scheme of life in which they contribute to and possess a stake in the welfare of their community. Each man’s life and liberty is preserved through decentralization, along with allowing it to develop as far as each individual’s nature takes them. Instead of each role being intermediaries to an overworld or underworld (shamans), by which their power can be easily expanded in the name of false gods and false titles. Christianity offers that every role be a ‘thing-in-itself’, they are given divine legitimacy but simultaneously stripped of all inherent sacral power besides its substance insofar as they serve God and the maintenance of His order.

Besides a vertical hierarchy, there also exists a horizontal hierarchy as well, found in the division of labour. It makes to make sense then that in traditional societies guilds were often formed to cement this division of professions, or ‘differences in skill & talent’, and formalise these essential vocations in the form of (ranked) cooperative brotherhoods.

To conclude with those being said, the fact of aristocracies, and the resulting fact of orders of rank, is a fact that confines firmly to the axiom of quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est.

One response to “A short treatise on inequality among men”

1. Fuki says:

   October 26, 2026 at 1:14 am

   (A lot of this article is copied from notes I took while reading Haller a few months ago… I see no problem with that. In fact, I find that it’d be a good idea to do it far more. Someday I’ll write far more on Haller, but I wish to read more on him before I can do that.)

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