Highly related:
- The equality of sinners
A way to dismantle hierarchy most of the way and achieve an effectual equality is to make all people, without exception, subject to a single ruler. This seems to be what absolute monarchy does but in practice monarchic societies are highly stratified in a way that is explicitly about creating a pyramid with the king at the top.
It should be said, that this is obviously contradictory.
It comes up frequently in subordination to a single monotheistic God, for example, and can there be known as the equality of sinners. This is more universal than the human king model (see God as King), or even arguably truly universal if you exclude God as an entity in a meaningful sense. Since, however, the monotheistic Gods are always understood as superhumans, in some sense or another, it is not quite universal after all.
If the idea of ‘God’ is considered a useful fiction, it is one way to justify a practical universal equality, even if it is not conceptually pure.
Future thinking and reading:
- How have anarchists thought of themselves, especially before the Second World War? Were they as irreligious as they tend to be now?
- What about the intensely religious communities that have anarchist traits, like Jewish kibbutz?