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hierarchy

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All people want to belong to some sort of hierarchy. Allow me to explain. The rich want to be the richest; the poor want to be the smartest; those who are both rich and smart want to be the better persons; the better persons want to go to heaven; those who are in heaven will look down upon those who are in hell... there is always some kind of hierarchy desired by everyone; even by those who claim the opposite of this. So how do you find true divinity? Divinity is found in those who reach down low; because it is those who are above who must reach down low, while it is those who are below who must constantly reach for what is above! And this is divinity. What is divine, is what will have a curiosity in what is below. There is no fear of becoming "tainted"; because what is lesser can never really taint what is greater. it is what is greater that is able to transform what is lesser. The alchemist must first find the mud, pick it up, before she is able to transform it into diamond. She must first reach into the swamp, in order to pull out roses.

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What is the bottom line for the animal/human hierarchy? I think it is at the animate/inanimate line, and Carol Adams and others are close to it: we eat them. This is what humans want from animals and largely why and how they are most harmed. We make them dead so we can live. We make our bodies out of their bodies. Their inanimate becomes our animate. We justify it as necessary, but it is not. We do it because we want to, we enjoy it, and we can. We say they eat each other, too, which they do. But this does not exonerate us; it only makes us animal rather than human, the distinguishing methodology abandoned when its conclusions are inconvenient or unpleasant. The place to look for this bottom line is the farm, the stockyard, the slaughterhouse. I have yet to see one run by a nonhuman animal.

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Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is __uperior_ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box__rras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others.

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Ambiades, I realized, was the kind of person who liked to put people in a hierarchy, and he wanted me to understand that I was at the bottom of his. He was supposed to treat me politely in spite of my subservient position, and I was supposed to be grateful.For my part, I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one. I might bow to the superior force of the magus and Pol, but I wasn't going to bow to him. Neither of us moved.