Everyone supports hierarchy until they remember someone has to kneel
When people argue for sweeping social orders, their arguments often sound moral, historical, or inevitable.
Planned economies are framed as rational coordination. Hierarchies are framed as a natural order. Restoration projects promise dignity, stability, and tradition. But beneath the vocabulary, there is often a softer assumption drifting along, rarely examined. I will be one of those making the decisions. I will be exempt from the mess.
The mechanics of this are almost mundane.
Humans reason from experience, and experience is stubbornly personal. It is easier to imagine competence than submission, authority than obedience. When systems are discussed in the abstract, incentives blur. Power becomes an idea instead of a force that presses down unevenly. So the mind fills in the missing piece with something flattering.
I would be trusted. I would be competent. I would not be the one waiting in line.
This is where the contradiction lives. Most systems that concentrate control do not ask who believes they deserve it. They ask who already has leverage, proximity, luck, or brute force. The planners are selected. The lords emerge. History is not short on people who supported rigid structures and were then surprised to discover they had volunteered for the bottom half of the diagram.
People are not lying when they imagine themselves as exceptions. They believe it. They are just thinking from the only camera angle they know.
The trick, if there is one, is to shift the lens slightly. To ask not what the system promises at its peak, but what it does on an ordinary day, to an ordinary person, who assumed they would be noticed and learned they were not.
That question tends to change the picture without needing to argue about ideology at all.