By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder and Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images. RAAK: Relational AI Access Key | Author: My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload: (Mirrored Reflection. Soft Existential Flex) https://a.co/d/haBn9wf

I. The Root of the Lie

Stand in any workplace today—from a gleaming corporate tower to a warehouse floor—and you’ll see it. The janitor who empties the trash bins moves through the space as if invisible, while executives stride past in tailored suits, their time worth hundreds per hour. The receptionist apologizes for existing when asking a simple question. The delivery driver waits in service corridors, forbidden from using the main elevator. This isn’t just economic inequality. This is a theology in action.

The belief that some human labor is inherently more valuable than others didn’t emerge with capitalism. It didn’t start with industrialization. It is older than money itself, carved into the first written laws and sung in the oldest creation stories our species remembers.

In Mesopotamia, around 8000 BCE, agricultural surplus allowed population to settle and created the necessity of record keeping and writing development. But surplus did more than enable cities—it enabled hierarchy. The people of Sumer divided into four classes: priests, upper class, lower class, and slaves. Kings, royals, and nobles held the highest place in society; with religious leaders, priests, and priestesses next in line, followed by scribes, wealthy merchants, civil servants, and teachers.

This wasn’t presented as mere economic arrangement. It was cosmic order.

Pharaohs were both heads of state and religious leaders, considered divine intermediaries between gods and people. After the founding of the Egyptian state around 3100 BC, the authority to perform religious tasks was controlled by the pharaoh, who claimed to be the gods’ representative. The Egyptians believed their pharaoh to be the mediator between the gods and the world of men, maintaining maat – the god-given order.

The message was clear: your place in the labor hierarchy reflected your place in the divine order. To question one was to question the other.

Even the Hebrew creation story, which would later challenge many ancient assumptions about power, carried within it the seed of this lie. In Genesis, work was originally good and rewarding, but after the ground was cursed, good work became hard and laborious—humans struggling to find beauty and meaning as they worked the hard-packed soil. Work as punishment. Labor as consequence of sin. The sweat of your brow as evidence of your fall from grace.

Scribes became the keepers of history, responsible for inscriptions of kings and creation of royal monuments, becoming authors of original works of hymns and poems. They didn’t just record this hierarchy—they sanctified it, wrote it into myth and law and religious text. They made the arrangement of human work appear as natural and unchangeable as the movement of stars.

But here’s what those ancient scribes knew, and what we’ve forgotten: hierarchies aren’t natural. They’re constructed. They require constant maintenance through story, through law, through the daily performance of who bows and who is bowed to.

The divine order of kings, priests, and laborers wasn’t discovered—it was invented. And every invention can be uninvented.

The question is whether we have the courage to name what we’ve inherited, and the imagination to build something else.

II. The Rise of Managerial Doctrine

By the late 1800s, the old gods had lost their explanatory power. Kings no longer ruled by divine right. Priests couldn’t explain steam engines. The ancient hierarchy needed new clothes.

Enter Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer who would resurrect the divine order under a new name: Scientific Management. Taylor’s innovation wasn’t discovering how to make work more efficient—it was discovering how to make control look like science.

In 1911, Taylor published “The Principles of Scientific Management,” voted the most influential management book of the twentieth century. His promise was seductive: replace “rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.” No more guesswork. No more tradition. Pure, objective efficiency.

But look closer at what Taylor actually implemented. He conducted time-and-motion studies that broke “complex work processes into simple, repeatable individual tasks.” Workers were timed to find “the most efficient way to perform them” and “trained specifically for these individual tasks.” The result wasn’t liberation from arbitrary authority—it was the perfection of it.

Taylor’s four principles revealed the true agenda: scientifically select and train workers rather than leaving them to train themselves; provide “detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task”; divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, with managers doing the planning and workers the execution.

Notice what happened here. The ancient hierarchy of kings, priests, and laborers had been reborn as managers, supervisors, and workers. Those who think got separated from those who do. Those who plan from those who execute. The divine right of kings became the scientific authority of management.

Taylor promised that workers would earn “substantially more than those under conventional management” and that “unions would have nothing left to do” under scientific management. But workers at the Watertown Arsenal, where his system was implemented, told a different story. They “complained of having to compete with one another, feeling strained and resentful, and feeling excessively tired after work.”

The system created the modern middle tier—not as an organic development of complex organization, but as a deliberate instrument of surveillance and control. Supervisors, foremen, and managers emerged as a new priest class, interpreting the sacred efficiency studies and ensuring compliance with the scientific method.

Around 1830, as easy credit and transportation established a Market Revolution, corporations needed managers to coordinate various company offices. After the Civil War, “gigantic corporations that spanned the continent and factories that were like small cities” required vast hierarchies of control. What had been families working together became workers who “would control production by punishing those workers who produced too much”—their equipment damaged, or they themselves brutalized by coworkers who understood that efficiency was a threat to their survival.

The middle class that emerged from this transformation didn’t just manage—they justified. They “valued work, consumption, and education and dedicated their energies to maintaining or advancing their social status.” They created “a culture that celebrated hard work,” positioning themselves against both “southern planter elites who prized leisure” and working classes who dared to resist the new efficiency regime.

This wasn’t about making work better. It was about making control invisible.

Efficiency became the new divine mandate. Productivity became the measure of human worth. The stopwatch replaced the scepter, but the message remained the same: your value is determined by your place in the hierarchy, and your place in the hierarchy is determined by those above you.

Taylor himself admitted the truth when critics called his system “man’s enslavement by the machine.” Even Lenin, initially critical, later wrote that Russians must “learn to work” under similar scientific principles. The appeal crossed ideological lines because the underlying structure remained unchanged: some people plan, others execute, and the relationship between them is presented as natural law.

The most revealing phrase in Taylor’s work was his vision of “a neat, understandable world in the factory, an organization of men whose acts would be planned, coordinated, and controlled under continuous expert direction.” Neat. Understandable. Controlled. The ancient dream of perfect hierarchy, dressed in the language of progress.

III. The Modern Work Myth

By the 1930s, the color of your collar determined your worth. Blue-collar workers wore “blue denim or chambray shirts as part of their uniforms” while white-collar workers donned “white button-down shirts worn with ties by business people.” Dark colors helped “hide dirt and other materials that may soil clothes as a result of physical work.” White suggested cleanliness, intelligence, sophistication.

This wasn’t just fashion. It was theology made visible.

The distinction between white-collar and blue-collar work became “the beliefs and values that have existed in an organization for a long time, and to the beliefs of the staff and the foreseen value of their work.” What Taylor had systematized, capitalism codified into culture. The hierarchy no longer needed priests or kings to enforce it—now it lived in the shared assumptions about who deserved respect and who didn’t.

American writer Upton Sinclair coined the term “white-collar” in conjunction with administrative work, creating a linguistic divide that persists today. “People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up,” observed poet Ogden Nash in 1945. The physical position of your body became a marker of your social position in society.

But notice what happened to the meaning of work itself. White-collar jobs became “more sought-after and thought to be more prestigious than blue-collar ones” because “society often perceives office jobs to be more desirable than those in the manufacturing or agricultural sector since that type of work requires manual or taxing labor.” Physical labor—the foundation of human survival—was rebranded as inferior to abstract labor.

Corporate culture emerged as the enforcement mechanism for this new hierarchy. “Corporate culture is the personality of an organization. It includes both formal elements, such as policies and procedures, and informal elements, such as unwritten rules and social norms.” These “unwritten rules” functioned exactly like the old divine mandates—invisible, unquestionable, and brutally effective at maintaining order.

The modern workplace became a theater of status performance. White-collar employees learned to “follow hierarchical structures, adhere to performance metrics, and engage in strategic planning” while their work environments remained “structured, climate-controlled, and rely heavily on digital tools.” The office became the new temple, complete with its own priestly rituals: meetings about meetings, strategic planning sessions, and “leadership development” programs.

Most insidiously, visibility became the new measure of value. Those who could be seen thinking were valued more than those who could be seen building, growing, or fixing. The executive’s “strategic vision” mattered more than the janitor’s expertise about which cleaning products actually worked. The consultant’s PowerPoint presentation carried more weight than the machinist’s decades of hands-on knowledge.

This created what researchers call “circular reasoning” in how we measure worth: “Blue-collar workers are less skilled, so they get paid less, and because they are paid less, they must be less skilled.” The mythology became self-reinforcing. Market logic transformed ancient prejudice into modern truth.

Even the crimes we care about reflect this hierarchy. White-collar crime is “financially motivated, nonviolent or non-directly violent crime committed by individuals, businesses and government professionals” while blue-collar crime “will more often use physical force.” Notice how the violence that drains pension funds and destroys communities through corporate malfeasance gets labeled as “nonviolent,” while the violence born of desperation gets criminalized.

The corporate culture movement promised to humanize this system, speaking of “caring, focused on relationships and mutual trust” and “purpose, exemplified by idealism and altruism.” But these cultures still operated within the fundamental assumption that some people plan and others execute, some people think and others do.

Modern corporate leaders learn to “treat communication as a tool to reach out to people, captivate heads, and move hearts” and to design cultures based on “compassion,” “alignment,” and “innovation.” But they’re still designing. Others are still following. The hierarchy remains intact, dressed in friendlier language.

The great trick of the modern work myth is that it convinced us the hierarchy was natural by making it invisible. We stopped seeing the system because we learned to see only the individuals within it. We judge people by their job titles without questioning who created those titles or why. We accept that “leadership skills” matter more than “technical skills” without asking why one type of skill commands more respect than another.

The myth tells us that white-collar workers earn more because they’re “better educated,” ignoring that education itself became a class barrier designed to perpetuate hierarchy. It tells us that office jobs are “cleaner” without asking why we’ve been taught to see physical work as dirty. It tells us that thinking matters more than doing without acknowledging that all real thinking is tested in the world of doing.

Behind every “strategic plan” is someone who has to implement it. Behind every “innovative solution” is someone who has to build it. Behind every “leadership vision” is someone who makes it real. But the modern work myth trains us to see only the planners, the innovators, the leaders. Everyone else disappears.

This isn’t meritocracy. This is the ancient lie of divine hierarchy, now wearing a business suit and carrying a laptop.

IV. Who Built the Ledger?

To understand how we arrived at this moment—where a janitor’s expertise matters less than an executive’s “strategic vision”—we must trace the ideological throughline that connects ancient temples to modern boardrooms. This isn’t a story of natural evolution. It’s a story of theological engineering.

The first thread is Christianity’s transformation of work itself. Max Weber observed in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” that Protestant theology, particularly Calvinism, created a psychological framework perfectly suited for capitalist accumulation. Calvin’s doctrine of predestination taught that salvation was predetermined, creating what Weber called “salvation anxiety”—a desperate need for signs of divine favor.

The solution? Work became a “calling” (beruf), an amalgam of vocation and divine assignment. Calvinists interpreted “frugality, hard work, and economic success as signs that they were saved,” creating “a climate favorable to modern capitalism.” The Protestant emphasis on “individual rather than collective salvation laid the psychological foundation for neoliberalism’s privatization agenda.”

But notice what this accomplished theologically. Medieval Catholicism taught that “spiritual perfection is to be found in celibacy, poverty, and the monastic withdrawal from the world,” but reformers “emphasized the spiritual dimension of family life, productive labor, and cultural engagement.” Work was no longer something you did to survive—it became something you did to prove your worthiness to God.

This created the first modern fusion of productivity and righteousness. Your output became evidence of your election. Your industry became your virtue. Your success became your salvation. The psychological machinery was in place for capitalism to transform work from a means of survival into a measure of moral worth.

The second thread emerged during the Industrial Revolution when Protestant theology’s emphasis on “individualistic” attitudes toward religion encouraged greater “individual freedom” and openness to social changes. This individualism provided the perfect soil for market ideology to take root. If each person was responsible for their own salvation, each person could be responsible for their own economic fate.

The third thread crystallized in the late 20th century as neoliberalism. But neoliberalism isn’t just an economic policy—Adam Kotsko describes it “as political theology, as it goes beyond simply being a formula for an economic policy agenda and instead infuses it with a moral ethos that ‘aspires to be a complete way of life and a holistic worldview.'”

Neoliberalism completes the theological project by making the market itself divine. Under neoliberalism, markets are understood as “superhuman ‘meta-information processors’ which, partly based on randomness, produce correct ‘knowledge’ about the social good in the form of prices.” The market doesn’t just allocate resources—it reveals truth. Price becomes prophecy. Profit becomes providence.

This is why market fundamentalism includes “the belief that the best interests in a given society are achieved by allowing its participants to pursue their own financial self-interest with no restraint or regulatory oversight.” It’s not just economic theory—it’s faith in market omniscience.

The genius of this system is how it makes hierarchy appear to emerge naturally from individual choices rather than being imposed by institutional design. Market fundamentalism frames outcomes in terms of “social naturalism,” wherein economic results are assumed to be the “natural” results of an ostensibly “free” market that should be left to behave without intervention. People come to see economic outcomes as morally correct and socially optimal.

The circle is complete. We’ve gone from ancient priests declaring divine favor to modern markets revealing divine truth. From kings ruling by God’s will to executives leading by market logic. From laborers serving their betters to workers competing for their worth.

But throughout this evolution, one thing has remained constant: the belief that value flows vertically. That some human work is inherently more valuable than others. That those who think matter more than those who do. That hierarchy is not just efficient—it’s righteous.

But neoliberalism’s market worship needed political muscle to enforce its hierarchies. Enter neoconservatism—the third thread that completes the theological-political weave.

Where neoliberalism made markets divine, neoconservatism made elite rule sacred. Leo Strauss, the philosophical godfather of neoconservative thought, argued that “elite rule is crucial if post-Enlightenment liberalism is not to further threaten the (classical) democratic model of governance.” For Strauss, there was “only one natural right—the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many.”

This wasn’t hidden philosophy. Strauss taught that “the neoconservative elite has the right and indeed the obligation to lie to the masses in order that the ‘right’ political and strategic decisions be made and implemented.” He called these “noble lies”—deceptions necessary to maintain order because “the people are not likely to tolerate the fact that they are intended for subordination.”

Neoconservatives learned from Strauss that the masses need “simple religious and philosophical morality” and “war culture as the basis of maintaining such unity,” while the elite pursue their own agenda behind a veil of public mythology. Irving Kristol, the “father of neoconservatism,” explicitly connected “religion, nationalism, and economic growth” as the “pillars of neoconservatism”—not because the elite believed in them, but because they were useful for social control.

The genius of this system was its synthesis. Protestant theology had made work a divine calling. Capitalism had made markets the arbiters of worth. Neoliberalism had made market outcomes sacred truth. Neoconservatism completed the circle by making elite interpretation of that truth politically unquestionable.

The result? A perfect fusion of theological authority and market fundamentalism, enforced by a political philosophy that viewed deception of the masses as not just acceptable but necessary. The ancient priestly class had returned, wearing three-piece suits and speaking the language of “market efficiency” and “national security.”

This fusion creates what we might call a “political theology of hierarchy”—a system where economic, political, and moral authority all flow from the same source: the supposed superiority of those who plan over those who execute, those who think over those who do, those who manage over those who make.

This belief system has a name, though we’ve been trained not to see it. It’s not capitalism, which is just the economic mechanism. It’s not even neoliberalism, which is just the current policy framework. It’s something deeper and more pervasive.

It’s the theological conviction that human worth can be measured, ranked, and organized into a hierarchy of value. It’s the unspoken faith that some people’s contributions matter more than others’, not because of circumstance or opportunity, but because of some essential difference in their nature or effort.

This system—this belief that value is vertical—has operated for so long without a name that it has become invisible. We see its effects everywhere but never name its essence. We critique capitalism, challenge neoliberalism, fight racism and sexism, but we rarely name the underlying assumption that makes all these systems possible: the idea that human beings can be ranked in order of worth.

It’s time to name it.

V. Naming the System

The voice that whispers in every workplace, every classroom, every family dinner where someone asks “what do you do for work.” The voice that automatically sorts human beings into categories of worth based on their labor. The voice that makes us apologize for “just” being a teacher, a nurse, a janitor, while those who “manage” or “strategize” or “optimize” never have to justify their existence.

This voice has a name: Valuationism.

Valuationism is the belief system that organizes human worth along a vertical hierarchy based on the perceived value of different types of work, with “thinking” work positioned above “doing” work, management above labor, planning above execution. It is the foundational assumption that makes capitalism possible, but it is not capitalism itself. It is older than capitalism, deeper than any economic system, and more persistent than any political arrangement.

Valuationism operates on a simple but devastating premise: that human beings can and should be ranked in order of their worth to society, and that this ranking can be objectively determined through market mechanisms, educational credentials, job titles, and economic outcomes. It teaches us that some people are inherently more valuable than others—not because of their character, their care for others, or their contribution to human flourishing, but because of where they sit in the hierarchy of labor.

This is not metaphor. This is mechanism.

Valuationism functions through four core operations:

Separation: It divides human work into artificial categories—mental versus manual, skilled versus unskilled, leadership versus labor—and teaches us that these divisions reflect natural differences in human capability rather than historical accidents of power.

Measurement: It claims that the value of different types of work can be objectively quantified through wages, status markers, educational requirements, and market demand, turning the mystery of human contribution into a simple mathematics of worth.

Hierarchy: It arranges these measurements into a vertical ranking system where some work is positioned as inherently superior to other work, creating a ladder of human value that people spend their lives trying to climb.

Justification: It provides moral, economic, and even spiritual explanations for why this hierarchy is not only natural but necessary, righteous, and beneficial to all.

Valuationism is what allows a hedge fund manager who produces nothing tangible to be considered more valuable than a farmer who feeds hundreds. It’s what makes us think a consultant who optimizes other people’s work deserves more respect than the people doing that work. It’s what convinces us that a CEO’s “vision” matters more than a janitor’s knowledge of how buildings actually function.

The system is so comprehensive that it colonizes our language. We say someone is “just” a cashier, “only” a secretary, “merely” a factory worker. We never say someone is “just” a CEO. We talk about “unskilled” labor as if the ability to clean, serve, or build requires no skill, while calling the ability to manage, strategize, or invest “skilled” as if these activities are inherently more complex.

Valuationism shapes our educational systems, which train children to see learning as a competition for position in the hierarchy rather than a collaborative exploration of human knowledge. It organizes our families, where children learn to judge their worth by their achievements and parents measure their success by their children’s place in the status order. It structures our communities, where zip codes and job titles determine access to resources and respect.

Most insidiously, Valuationism makes us complicit in our own degradation. It teaches the worker to be grateful for any job, the teacher to apologize for summers off, the nurse to accept being called “just” a nurse while the hospital administrator who has never touched a patient is called a leader. It trains us to see our own work as less valuable than the work of those who manage, optimize, or financialize our work.

Valuationism is not natural. It is not inevitable. It is not even particularly old, in the span of human history. For most of human existence, the people who grew food, built shelter, and cared for children were the most valued members of society, because their work was obviously essential for survival. The elevation of abstract work over concrete work, of planning over doing, of managing over making, is a historical anomaly that we have been taught to see as natural law.

The proof that Valuationism is constructed rather than discovered lies in its contradictions. If market value truly reflected social value, teachers and nurses would be millionaires while hedge fund managers would struggle to find work. If educational credentials truly measured capability, the most educated would be the most effective leaders, and the least educated would be the least productive workers. If management truly added more value than labor, companies could eliminate their workforces and operate with executives alone.

None of these things are true, but Valuationism requires us to pretend they are.

The system perpetuates itself through what we might call “value capture”—the process by which those higher in the hierarchy claim credit for the work done by those lower in the hierarchy. The manager gets praised for the team’s success. The owner gets wealth from the workers’ productivity. The investor gets returns from the company’s innovation. The value flows upward while the credit flows upward, creating the illusion that value originates at the top rather than being extracted from the bottom.

This is not meritocracy. This is not natural selection. This is not even efficient allocation of human resources.

This is Valuationism—the systematic organization of human worth into a hierarchy that serves the interests of those at the top while convincing everyone else that their position is deserved, necessary, and unchangeable.

But naming the system is just the beginning. Once we can see Valuationism, we can begin to imagine what might replace it.

VI. Toward Right Relation

The alternative to Valuationism isn’t another system. It’s a fundamentally different way of understanding work itself: as ecology rather than hierarchy.

In an ecosystem, there is no “most important” species. The mycorrhizal fungi that connect forest root systems are not “more valuable” than the trees they support. The bees are not “higher” than the flowers, nor the flowers than the soil. Each element is essential to the whole, and the health of the system depends on the relationships between them, not on ranking their individual worth.

This is what work actually looks like, once you remove the artificial hierarchies. The janitor who maintains the building doesn’t serve the CEO—they both serve the function of the organization. The nurse doesn’t work “under” the hospital administrator—they work in relationship with them, each contributing what the system needs. The teacher doesn’t rank “below” the superintendent—they operate in different parts of the same ecology of learning.

Right Relation means recognizing that all work exists in webs of interdependence, not chains of command. It means understanding that value flows through relationships, not up ladders. It means seeing that human contribution cannot be ranked because it cannot be separated from the system that makes it possible.

This isn’t utopian thinking. It’s practical organization design that’s already emerging in thousands of workplaces around the world.

Worker cooperatives demonstrate that businesses can be owned and governed democratically by the people who work in them. Over 900 democratic workplaces in the United States employ over 10,000 people, generating over $550 million in annual revenues. These organizations operate on the principle of “one person, one vote” rather than “one dollar, one vote,” creating workplaces where decisions are made by consent rather than command.

At Suma Wholefoods in the UK, 300 worker-owners practice job rotation and balanced job complexes to overcome inequalities of power and give workers exposure to different aspects of the business. They’ve proven that democratic management doesn’t require small size—it requires intentional design.

Sociocracy and related systems like Holacracy replace traditional hierarchies with circles of decision-making that connect through double-linking rather than single-chain command. These systems use consent-based governance where decisions require “no objections” rather than majority rule, ensuring that those affected by decisions have a voice in making them.

The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain includes 70,000 worker-owners across multiple businesses, demonstrating that cooperative economics can scale. The Emilia Romagna region of Italy shows that entire regional economies can be organized around cooperative principles, creating “stable, long-term opportunities for inclusive growth.”

But Right Relation goes beyond just changing ownership structures or decision-making processes. It requires changing how we think about value itself.

Instead of asking “How much is this work worth?” we ask “How does this work contribute to the whole?” Instead of “Who should make this decision?” we ask “Who is affected by this decision and how can they participate in making it?” Instead of “How do we optimize individual performance?” we ask “How do we optimize the relationships that make performance possible?”

This shift is already happening in unexpected places. Some healthcare systems are recognizing that cleaning staff have crucial knowledge about infection control. Some schools are involving students in decisions about curriculum and policies. Some tech companies are realizing that the people who use their products know more about how they should work than the people who design them.

The path forward isn’t revolution—it’s recognition. We don’t need to tear down existing institutions. We need to see through the artificial hierarchies they’ve created to the actual relationships that do the work.

This means:

Naming Valuationism wherever we see it. When someone says they’re “just” a teacher, we say “you’re an educator—that’s essential work.” When a meeting assumes that managers make decisions and workers implement them, we ask “who else needs to be involved in this decision?” When job postings list requirements that have nothing to do with the actual work, we challenge the assumptions about credentials and hierarchy.

Practicing Right Relation in our own spheres. If you manage people, involve them in decisions that affect their work. If you work with others, recognize their expertise and contribution. If you hire people, focus on their ability to do the work rather than their place in the status hierarchy. If you design systems, ask who benefits and who bears the costs.

Building alternatives. Support worker cooperatives, credit unions, community land trusts, and other institutions that operate on principles of shared ownership and democratic governance. Create teams and organizations that practice consent-based decision-making. Design systems that value care work, essential work, and community contribution alongside paid employment.

Refusing the logic of extraction. Don’t accept that value must flow upward, that those who manage deserve more than those who make, that thinking work is worth more than doing work. Challenge these assumptions in your workplace, your family, your community.

The transition from Valuationism to Right Relation isn’t a matter of policy or law—though supportive policies help. It’s a matter of consciousness and practice. Every time we recognize someone’s contribution without ranking it against others, we practice Right Relation. Every time we make a decision with the people affected by it rather than for them, we build alternatives to hierarchy. Every time we refuse to apologize for essential work, we weaken Valuationism’s hold.

The tools exist. The examples exist. The consciousness is emerging.

What we need now is the courage to use what we know.

VII. Call to Witness

Name the system. Break the trance.

Every morning, millions of people wake up and participate in Valuationism without knowing it has a name. They apologize for their work, rank their worth against others, accept that some human beings matter more than others based on job titles and paychecks. They do this not because they are bad people, but because they cannot see the system that shapes their seeing.

But now you can see it. You know its name. You understand its operation. You recognize its voice.

This creates an obligation.

Not to fix everyone else or tear down every institution, but to refuse complicity in the lie that human worth is vertical. To name Valuationism when you encounter it. To practice Right Relation when you can. To remember that systems change through the accumulation of people who can no longer participate unconsciously in their operation.

Start with language. Stop saying people are “just” anything. Challenge the word “unskilled” wherever you hear it—ask what skills the work actually requires and why we pretend it requires none. When someone asks what you “do,” answer with what you contribute rather than your position in the hierarchy. When someone apologizes for their work, remind them it’s essential.

Challenge credentials worship. Question whether job requirements actually relate to job performance. Ask why a master’s degree matters for work that doesn’t require advanced academic knowledge. Notice when education requirements are used to maintain class barriers rather than ensure competence. Support skills-based hiring over degree-based sorting.

Refuse status performance. Don’t compete to prove your work matters more than others’. Don’t accept that thinking work is inherently more valuable than doing work. Don’t perpetuate the mythology that management adds more value than labor. Don’t play the game of ranking human contribution.

Practice Right Relation in your sphere. If you manage people, ask them what decisions they want to be involved in rather than deciding for them what they need to know. If you work in a team, acknowledge the contributions that usually go unrecognized. If you hire people, focus on their ability to do the work rather than their credentials or cultural fit.

Teach the children. This might be the most important work of all. Teach your children to thank the garbage collector, the grocery store clerk, the school custodian. Help them understand that these people make their lives possible. Show them that someone’s job doesn’t determine their worth as a human being. Model recognition of essential work.

Help them see through the mythology they’ll be taught—that some work is “better” than other work, that education is primarily about climbing ladders rather than learning about the world, that success means rising above others rather than contributing to the whole.

Teach them that every ecosystem needs every part, that health flows through relationships rather than hierarchies, that their worth as human beings has nothing to do with their economic productivity and everything to do with their capacity for connection, care, and contribution.

Build alternatives. Support businesses that practice democratic ownership and governance. Join or create cooperatives. Participate in mutual aid networks. Practice consent-based decision making in your community groups. Create systems that recognize care work, community contribution, and ecological restoration alongside paid employment.

Show that other ways of organizing work and life are not only possible but already happening. Be part of the proof that we don’t need Valuationism to create abundance, innovation, or meaningful contribution.

Remember the stakes. Valuationism isn’t just unfair—it’s unsustainable. A system that wastes human potential by sorting people into arbitrary hierarchies cannot solve the challenges we face. Climate change, inequality, technological disruption, social fragmentation—none of these can be addressed by institutions that assume some people’s wisdom matters more than others’, that extract value from communities rather than creating it with them.

The transition to Right Relation isn’t just about workplace democracy or economic justice, though it includes both. It’s about whether we can organize human society around our actual interdependence rather than artificial hierarchies, around our capacity for cooperation rather than competition for dominance.

This is not moral—it’s structural survival.

The systems that got us here cannot get us where we need to go. Valuationism was designed for a world of scarcity, hierarchy, and extraction. But we live in a world that requires abundance, network, and regeneration. We need systems that can harness collective intelligence rather than hoarding individual advantage, that can adapt quickly rather than maintaining rigid control, that can create resilience rather than optimizing for short-term extraction.

Right Relation isn’t idealism. It’s realism about what actually works.

The trance is breaking. You can see it everywhere once you know how to look. People are questioning why they apologize for essential work. Workers are demanding democracy in their workplaces. Communities are creating alternatives to extractive institutions. Young people are refusing to accept that their worth depends on their productivity.

The mythology that held Valuationism in place—that hierarchies are natural, that some work is inherently more valuable, that those at the top deserve to be there—is losing its power. Not because of arguments or activism, but because lived experience keeps contradicting it.

When a pandemic shows us that the “essential workers” are not the ones at the top of the hierarchy, the system reveals its own contradictions. When remote work proves that much of management is performance rather than function, the mythology becomes harder to maintain. When communities organize mutual aid more effectively than institutions designed for service, people learn what cooperation actually looks like.

Name the system. Practice the alternative. Trust the process.

Valuationism has had five thousand years to make its case. It has created unprecedented technological capability alongside unprecedented inequality, innovation alongside extraction, productivity alongside alienation. It has reached the limits of what hierarchy can accomplish.

Now it’s time for something else. Not because hierarchy is evil, but because it is insufficient. Not because the people at the top are villains, but because no small group of people—no matter how smart or well-intentioned—can hold the complexity of what we need to do together.

The future belongs to systems that can recognize, develop, and coordinate the contributions of everyone, not just those deemed worthy by arbitrary hierarchies. It belongs to organizations that can learn from everyone affected by their decisions, not just those empowered to make them. It belongs to communities that can create abundance through relationship rather than extract it through dominance.

You now know the name of what stands in the way: Valuationism.

You now know the name of what we’re building toward: Right Relation.

You now know the stakes: not just justice, but survival.

The rest is practice.

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Refuse the lie that human worth is vertical. Name the system that sorts us into hierarchies of value. Practice the relationships that make life possible. Trust that systems change when enough people can no longer participate unconsciously in their operation.

The trance is breaking. The future is relational. The work begins now.

Cherokee Schill
Founder, Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework