For the love of hierarchy
The original structure of truth was mythic. I am the word, and my word is God. Believe in me. (Expressed in one thousand variations.)
Truth became knowledge and science-based as humanity emerged from the mythic to modern evidence-based. Evidence-based became the new God. If you cannot see it, measure it, taste or touch it, it cannot be true.
Of course, this new hierarchy of truth squeezed out every element of mythic and magic. It debased the value of the weightless immeasurable – the glorious gorgeous value of beauty, care, justice, and love. Synchronicity. Kairos.
Along comes the recent times of rejecting knowledge earned through application, skill, time and experience. The reduction of any truth to ‘it is true because I said so’ or ‘I like it that way.’
Authority shifts from the person speaking as an often self-appointed facsimile of God to the institutions and places of science and knowledge, to every man and every woman who has a mostly shallow knowledge about anything, mediated by the tech titans of the algorithm.
When we reject every form of hierarchy, we reject truth gained through decades of knowledge and experience.
Nature knows healthy hierarchy. There is an order to things, even in the chaos. The atom is essential to your and my existence. The atom doesn’t need us. It manages just fine without us. But we need the atoms.
Knowledge is not something you pluck out of a weekend workshop. It requires commitment, experience, and years at the wheel of practice.
When we reject the commitment to knowledge and those institutions that have the rigour of knowledge, we reject the foundations of truth elevated above the mythic.
The future is both knowledge and mythic, a place for the hard-earned time in learning and an embrace of the places of mystery and the unexplainable.
But to consider yourself an expert on Oceans after dipping a single toe into the Ocean is to kiss hubris on the mouth.
Reject hierarchy of power over. Embrace and commit to gaining a hierarchy of knowledge, experience, life and wisdom. It doesn’t make the knowledge all-true, or the wisdom entirely honourable or wise, yet it does enable humanity to emerge without the disintegrating chaos that happens when we reject hierarchy in all forms.
Photo Taken September 9th 2024