Hierarchies

The world is an endless unconscious climb up and down hierarchies. We are always sizing ourselves and everybody up, comparing how we are doing, and automatically taking our predefined place. We are always in a hierarchy of some kind.

Maslow’s pyramid is a well-known blueprint of human needs and motivations. Steps we take to meet our needs, from the most basic at the bottom to the highest at the top. Maslow himself never drew a pyramid. A management consultant drew it in 1960, and the picture stuck until it looked like a law of nature.

From the bottom it looks like a pyramid. While you climb, it works like a funnel: every step narrows the choice, until you are sitting in an office waiting for someone to walk in and arrest you as the impostor. You are only pretending to be competent enough.

The top of the pyramid exists beyond the confines of the pyramid itself. It’s the way out. To be on top means to be outside it. The Egyptian pyramids were originally white, cased in limestone, and the capstone, the pyramidion, may have been covered in gold: a symbol of passing to a higher plane. The white base represented the earthly realm and mortal struggle, the golden top — the divine.

The mountains you are carrying you’re only supposed to climb.

― Najwa Zebian

Same with Maslow’s pyramid. Self-actualization lies outside the scope of needs outlined within it. A higher plane of existence — beyond the framework.

The main goal in life isn’t navigating the stairs while merely satisfying basic requirements. The goal is breaking free from the cycle. Don’t be imprisoned for life. Close your holes, mend what’s broken, get out, and never come back. Transcend it. Self-realization is the closest we come to the divine.

The pyramids are a symbol of eternity, just like the world itself. They tower all around us; we are always in one hierarchy or another. We always measure, compare and analyze ourselves and others. Leave one pyramid and you find yourself in another. They go up forever, nested and connected. You will never be at the top of them all.

It’s turtles all the way down.

— an old story about the world resting on a turtle, retold by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time

Look closer and you’ll see that below are bottomless depths of meaning. Everything has meaning inside meaning, like following links on Wikipedia. Imagine a well. You peer in — it stretches further than the eye can see. Each layer of understanding reveals more layers beneath. Knowledge within knowledge, never ending. No bottom.

Don’t get trapped in the endless cycle of hierarchies. Don’t play along. Get out of the one you’re in.

One game for three keeps you from leaving. Drama.