On Hierarchy, Belonging, and the Strange Relief of Being Understood
There are moments in a therapy session when something is said so plainly, so without drama, that you feel almost cheated. You expected the revelation to arrive with more ceremony — a swelling of strings, perhaps, or at least a lengthier preamble. Instead it comes the way the most important things usually do: quietly, in a small room, between two people drinking tea.
My therapist was not attempting to change my life. She was trying to explain a pattern she had noticed. I had been describing, again, the particular texture of my confusion about a certain social world I inhabited — not a hostility, nothing so legible as that, but a strange conditionality I couldn’t quite map. There was real warmth in this world, and I had been grateful for it. I was adequate at being in a room. I could make people laugh; I could be present and engaged and interested in everyone around me. That version of me was received easily, enthusiastically even. It was only when I brought something else — work I had made carefully, work I wanted to be taken seriously — that the temperature dropped. Not dramatically. Quietly. A certain quality of attention withdrawn. I kept wondering what I was doing wrong. Whether I was too much, or too earnest, or had somehow committed some social error I wasn’t aware of. I had described this confusion before, she said. Several times. And then she said the thing that stopped me.
Some people, she told me, live inside vertical hierarchies. And some people — like you — live inside horizontal ones. And when these two types meet, they genuinely cannot understand each other.
I sat with that for a moment. It was not, I realised, the novelty of the idea that arrested me. It was the recognition. Not the slow, earned recognition of therapy — the kind that takes months of circling — but the faster, more violent kind, the kind that arrives like a key turning in a lock you had forgotten was locked.
To understand what she meant, it helps to think about how human beings organise themselves when they gather. Every group, from a family to a civilisation, must answer the same fundamental question: who matters, and how much? The answer, across all of human history, has almost always been: it depends on where you stand.
The primatologist Robert Sapolsky has spent decades studying hierarchy in baboons, and what he finds, again and again, is that rank is not incidental to social life — it is constitutive of it. It shapes who eats first, who grooms whom, who defers and who does not. But Sapolsky is careful to note something that tends to get lost in popular retellings of his work: hierarchy is not one thing. There are dominance hierarchies built on fear and coercion. And there are prestige hierarchies built on skill, generosity, and earned admiration. The first is enforced from the outside. The second is granted from the inside. They feel entirely different to live inside.
What my therapist was pointing to is something related but distinct: not just the difference between types of hierarchy, but the difference between people for whom hierarchy is the primary organising principle of any social group, and people for whom it is secondary — or irrelevant altogether. The former cannot walk into a room without, almost instinctively, mapping the terrain: who has power here, who defers to whom, where do I fit in relation to everyone else? The latter walk into the same room and ask an entirely different question: who is interesting? What can we make together?
Neither of these orientations is more evolved than the other. They are, in the most literal sense, different social grammars. And like all grammars, they are largely invisible to the people who use them — until, that is, you find yourself in a room where everyone is speaking a different one.
I grew up between two countries. The early years were in Denmark; then school in the United Kingdom, then years in London that became, without my quite deciding it, the place I knew best how to be myself. I did not understand, for a long time, why this was. I assumed it was temperamental — that I was simply better suited to the pace and pitch of English social life, that something in me resonated with the irony and understatement and the particular way the English have of expressing great warmth while appearing not to.
But it was more specific than that. It was not England in general. It was a particular set of people, and a particular way they had learned — or perhaps been made — to be with each other.
Many of my closest friends in London had been sent to boarding school as young children. Seven, some of them. Eight. At an age when most children are still largely defined by the family they belong to, these children had been placed in institutions where the family was suddenly absent, and they had to construct, from scratch, an entire social world made only of peers. No parents. No inherited status. No older sibling whose reputation preceded you. Just a collection of children of roughly the same age, thrown together, having to work out how to live.
The sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about what he called total institutions — places like prisons, mental hospitals, and boarding schools — where individuals are stripped of the social identities they arrived with and forced to construct new ones within the institution’s own logic. What tends to emerge, in the boarding school version, is a culture of intense horizontal loyalty. You survive not by establishing dominance but by being the kind of person others want in their corner. You learn, very young, that the child who mocks others to feel superior is a liability; that the currency of real social standing is generosity, wit, and the willingness to show up for people. The hierarchy that forms is not absent — there are popular children and unpopular ones, as there are everywhere — but it is built on something fundamentally different from rank. It is built on character.
These friends of mine — now artists, gallerists, writers, musicians, even bankers and lawyers — carried that grammar into their adult lives. I experienced it as a room in which no one was performing for a superior. Everyone was, simply, present. There was competition, in the way that any gathering of ambitious people contains competition, but it was not the anxious, zero-sum kind. Someone else’s success did not diminish your own. Praise was given freely, not because it was strategically advantageous to give it, but because it was true, and because these were people who had learned, young, that generosity costs you nothing and returns everything.
I did not know, sitting in that West London flat or that East End gallery or dancing at that West End party, that I was experiencing a specific social structure. I only knew that I was entirely comfortable, and that I had not always been.
Here is what I now understand about the other kind of room.
There is a word in Danish — jantelov — that every Scandinavian knows and most will tell you, with some pride, is no longer relevant. The Law of Jante comes from a 1933 novel by the Norwegian-Danish writer Aksel Sandemose, in which he describes the unspoken rules of a small, fictional town called Jante. The rules are ten in number, but they are all variations of the same instruction: Do not think you are anything special. Do not think you are better than us.
The law is usually presented as a critique — Sandemose was writing satire — but it has always had an uncomfortable double life. On one hand, it describes a genuine egalitarian impulse: the insistence that no one is above the collective, that inherited privilege is not a virtue, that the community matters more than the individual. On the other hand, it describes something darker: the way that communities can use the language of equality to enforce conformity, to punish anyone who rises, creates, or refuses to make themselves small.
The historian Uffe Østergaard has written extensively about the origins of Danish national identity in the agrarian transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Denmark was, for most of its history, a peasant society. The great redistribution of land in the 1780s created a class of independent smallholders whose entire social identity was built around the village — its collective rhythms, its mutual dependencies, its shared measurement of who was doing well and who was not. Social cohesion required a kind of constant calibration: you needed to know where you stood, and you needed everyone else to know too. Hierarchy was not only tolerated in this world; it was load-bearing. The question of who was above and who below was not a distraction from social life. It was social life.
That peasant village is, of course, long gone. But the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would recognise what replaced it. Bourdieu’s great insight was that hierarchy does not disappear when old structures of class and rank are officially dismantled. It migrates. It finds new containers. In societies that pride themselves on equality, hierarchy tends to relocate into cultural capital — into taste, refinement, access, and the subtle performance of knowing what is worthy of admiration and what is not. The old aristocracy had titles. The new aristocracy has opinions about which opinions are acceptable.
What Bourdieu called a field — the art world, the literary world, the intellectual world — is a structured space in which people compete for a very specific kind of status. And what distinguishes a field from, say, a dinner party among friends is precisely that it has its own internal hierarchy, its own system of consecration: mechanisms by which some people and works are declared significant and others are not. These mechanisms are often invisible to those inside them, which is precisely what makes them effective. The people within a cultural field often genuinely believe that their judgements are aesthetic rather than political, that they praise what is good and overlook what is not, that their hierarchy is a hierarchy of quality. This belief is, Bourdieu argues, the field’s central myth — and its primary means of reproducing itself.
I have sat inside such fields. I have watched the way that praise moves through them — not freely, not responsively, not according to actual merit, but in strictly regulated patterns, like water following channels already cut. I have noticed who must nod before others will speak. I have noticed the curious phenomenon of work that everyone knows to be ordinary being called extraordinary, and work that is genuinely extraordinary being passed over in silence — not because it is unrecognised, but because recognising it would disrupt the hierarchy.
What I have noticed more particularly, and more uncomfortably, is the role such a field will sometimes assign to someone who doesn’t quite fit its grammar. The hierarchical social world is not, in fact, hostile to such a person — not initially, not as long as they remain useful in a specific way. There is always room, in a court, for someone who is lively and engaged and generous and good company — who ornaments the gathering, who makes things more fun, who seems to prove by their very presence that the group is expansive and not narrow. That person is welcomed warmly. What is not welcomed — what tends to be met with a silence so complete it can take you a long time to even register it as a response — is the moment the same person produces something that asks to be evaluated on its own terms. Not because it is bad. But because evaluating it seriously would require a kind of attention that doesn’t pass through the usual channels.
It is a more disorienting trap than simple exclusion, because the acceptance is real — the warmth, the laughter, the easy companionship — and the withdrawal, when it comes, feels like a personal failing rather than a structural one. You search yourself for the error. You wonder what changed. You become, gradually, a person who second-guesses their own seriousness.
I have spent years trying to locate my discomfort in myself, wondering what I was doing wrong, why I could not seem to get the grammar right.
The grammar, it turns out, was not mine.
Geert Hofstede, the Dutch social psychologist whose work on cultural dimensions has become foundational in cross-cultural studies, developed a measure he called the Power Distance Index — a scale that captures how much a society accepts and expects unequal distribution of power. Denmark ranks among the lowest in the world on this index, which is to say: Danes officially believe in flat structures, in the right to question authority, in the idea that no one is fundamentally above anyone else. This self-image is sincere and, in many institutional contexts, accurate.
But Hofstede’s index measures stated values. What it cannot fully measure is what happens inside the unofficial hierarchies that form precisely because the official ones have been dissolved. When a society insists loudly on equality, the hierarchies it generates tend to become covert, deniable, and therefore harder to name or resist. They operate not through the honest declaration of rank — I am above you, you should defer to me — but through more sophisticated instruments: the withheld acknowledgement, the faint praise that functions as criticism, the warmth that is available only after the queen has extended it first.
These are not the same as the easy, generous cruelties of openly hierarchical societies, where at least the rules are visible. They are something harder to navigate: a social world that insists it has no hierarchy while running entirely on one.
My therapist’s observation did not resolve anything, exactly. The social world I had been describing did not suddenly become less bewildering. The years I had spent extending generosity that was not returned did not unhappen. But something shifted in how I held it all.
Before, I had located the problem in myself. I was too much, or not enough, or somehow misaligned in a way I could never quite diagnose. After, I understood that I had been trying to play a game whose rules I couldn’t read because they were written in a grammar I didn’t speak — not because I was deficient, but because I had been formed, across two countries and two very different social worlds, into someone who organises social life differently. I look for reciprocity. I offer what I have without calculating what it might return. I find it natural to praise work I find genuinely good, regardless of whose permission I have been given. These are not virtues exactly — they are just the grammar I was taught, the one that was reinforced every time I walked into a room in London and felt, without effort, entirely at home.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote about what he called stages on life’s way — the idea that we do not come to understand ourselves all at once, but in moments of revelation that reframe what came before. My therapist’s small observation was one of those moments. It did not make me, suddenly, more legible to the world I had been struggling inside. But it made that world more legible to me.
There is a particular kind of freedom that comes not from changing your circumstances but from understanding them clearly. I have spent years feeling like someone who could not get the social mathematics to work — who kept arriving at the wrong answer without being able to find the error. Now I understand that I was not making an error. I was working in a different system of arithmetic.
That is not nothing. In fact, it turns out to be quite a lot.
What my therapist gave me was not a solution but a map — and not of the territory I had been lost in, but of the territory I had always, in some other part of my life, been able to find my way around easily. The horizontal world. The world where everyone is, in the room that matters, equal. The world where what you have made is more interesting than who has sanctioned your making it. The world I grew up learning, and then, returning to a different country, spent years trying fruitlessly to find.
It exists. I have lived in it. I will find it again.
The Law of Jante has ten rules, but Aksel Sandemose knew they were really one. Don’t think you’re anything. Don’t think you have anything to offer that we haven’t already decided you have. It is a law about the terror of the individual — specifically, the individual who does not need the hierarchy in order to know who they are. That person is not just inconvenient to a vertical world. They are, to it, incomprehensible.
I think I can live with that.
My World of Interiors 