Q&A: Hierarchy and the Moral Lie of Equal Outcomes

Question: I was in a discussion earlier today about jobs in gig companies and nepotism, kids of MD’s getting it because who their parents are. Whilst I recognized that it is unfair for someone who has merit but not the same background, I was conflicted at the same time. I voiced how inheritance works in a similar fashion. To be against someone else’s privilege whilst being ignorant to one’s own just because their privilege is greater seemed hypocritical. Although, I would not reject that this system can be considered unfair when compared to ideas of equal distribution of land and socialism. I don’t think I have a problem with people having these advantages because I have my own set of advantages and would like to provide the perks of my own accomplishments to my future generations. What is your take on it?

Answer: The unease you felt in that discussion is the unease of a person who has brushed against something real, something older than corporate HR policies and louder than the slogans that circulate in public life. People speak about nepotism in gig companies, about children of managing directors “getting in” because of a surname, and the immediate moral reflex is outrage. Yet the deeper mind hesitates, because it senses a harder truth behind the outrage: human life itself is structured by inherited advantage. The conflict, then, is not between “fairness” and “unfairness” in the abstract, but between reality and the ideological fantasies we are trained to treat as morality.

No civilization has ever existed, no culture, no religion, no society, without transmission of advantage across generations. To imagine otherwise is not moral sensitivity; it is a failure to understand what a human being is. We are not born as isolated atoms dropped onto a neutral playing field. We are born into homes, accents, moral atmospheres, and networks. We inherit not only property but pathways. We inherit not only wealth but the very tools by which wealth and status are later acquired. In that sense, “privilege” is not a rare corruption of the system. It is the system – because the system is human life.

This is why inheritance cannot be reduced to money or jobs. Advantage is passed down through language, what words exist in the house, what concepts are normal, what kinds of conversations are possible. It is passed down through culture, how one carries oneself, how one speaks to authority, how one reads a room. It is passed down through networks, who can be called, who owes whom a favor, which doors are already half-open, which are closed. It is passed down through habits and confidence, the daily rhythms of discipline, the assumption that success is possible, the learned ease in institutions. It is passed down through “moral capital” – the presence of stable adults, the inheritance of restraint, the internalized habit of responsibility. Even “taste,” which modern people pretend is a personal aesthetic preference, is often a classed and cultured inheritance: what seems “refined,” what seems “normal,” what feels “for people like us.”

A child raised in a home with books, where language is plentiful and imagination is fed, does not inhabit the same universe as a child raised in a home where survival consumes all energy. A child raised in emotional stability does not begin adulthood with the same burdens as one raised in chaos. A child raised with religion, with meaning above appetite, has an advantage over one raised in a house of nihilism, where life is reduced to impulse, entertainment, and despair. When someone condemns nepotism as though it is an alien tumor in an otherwise pure body, but refuses to acknowledge these quieter, more pervasive inheritances, the condemnation becomes selective and therefore hypocritical. It is moral concern with blinders on.

What modern outrage tends to miss is that it is often not truly moral at all—it is ideological. The anger against inheritance rarely arises from compassion for the one who lacks advantage. It more commonly arises from envy that has been made respectable by theory. Socialism and its cousins do not merely object to particular injustices; at their root they object to hierarchy itself. They treat rank as a sin, difference as an insult, and unequal outcome as proof of wrongdoing. But hierarchy is not a “bug” in existence. It is a feature of fitrah—the created nature of things, the fact that not all capacities are equal, not all circumstances are identical, and not all roles are the same.

The Qur’an speaks with remarkable clarity on this point: livelihoods and ranks are not distributed by human committees, and difference is not itself oppression. God describes that He distributes provision in the world and raises some above others in degree so that the world’s functions, service, labor, exchange, cooperation, can occur. God says, “We have raised some of them above others in rank, so that some may employ others in service.” The point is not to sanctify arrogance, but to destroy the childish idea that justice means sameness. Difference is not injustice. Injustice is moral corruption: betrayal of trust, theft, oppression, cruelty, and the placing of power where it becomes harm.

Modern ideologies, however, repeatedly attempt an impossible alchemy. They redefine justice as sameness, fairness as equal outcomes, and morality as redistribution. This is not a correction of reality; it is a rebellion against it. And because reality does not obey slogans, the rebellion necessarily becomes increasingly coercive: if equal outcomes do not occur naturally, they must be forced; if hierarchy persists, it must be punished; if excellence creates visible difference, excellence must be suspected as a crime. The ideological state, when it cannot erase difference, seeks to shame it.

Here the modern world performs another deception, and this is from the other non-socialist side, the so called “capitalist” side: it imagines “merit” as though it were a pure, neutral currency floating above inheritance. Yet merit itself is inherited far more than people admit. Discipline is taught before it is chosen. Ambition is cultivated in homes that model striving. Confidence is produced by environments that give safety to fail. Speech, arguably the most powerful tool in modern professional life, is learned, not magically generated. Risk tolerance is culturally transmitted: some are raised to fear failure as annihilation, others are raised to treat it as tuition.

This is not merely moral philosophy; social science keeps stumbling into the same truth and calling it “environmental effects.” Research by Raj Chetty and collaborators shows that the conditions of childhood, neighborhoods, local opportunity structures, and the social ecosystem one grows up in, shape adult outcomes in measurable ways, including earnings and education. And James Heckman’s work on skill formation emphasizes that gaps in cognitive and noncognitive skills emerge early and persist, and that “advantage” is deeply tied to early-life environments and stimulation, not merely later financial inputs. In other words: even the traits we celebrate as “merit”, self-control, planning, persistence, communication, grow in soil and some soils are richer than others. So when a person announces, “I earned this purely on merit,” the honest question is not meant as an insult but as a revelation: who taught you how to earn? Who gave you psychological safety when you failed? Who lent you the language to persuade, the confidence to ask, the network to be heard? And to raise the stakes to their highest, who gave you the faculties to make use of? Who brought you to existence to be able to do anything at all? Merit is not ones own creation untouched by history. It is cultivated – often intergenerationally.

This brings us to a point many feel but hesitate to defend: the desire to pass advantage to one’s children is not moral failure. It is fitrah, basic human nature and humane. It is the logic of lineage and responsibility. A person who struggles wants his children to stand on his shoulders, not start from the dirt. That instinct is not greed; it is a form of care. In Islam, the family is not an embarrassment to be overcome for the sake of abstract collectivism; it is an arena of duty. One is not commanded to be “neutral” toward one’s children. One is commanded to be just, meaning to avoid oppression, not to treat every human being identically as though love, responsibility, and kinship are crimes.

The problem begins when modern moral language tries to shame this instinct by calling it “privilege.” But privilege, in the neutral sense of inherited advantage, is simply the continuation of human life. A man who refuses to advantage his own children in the name of abstract equality has often already surrendered to a foreign (im)moral framework, one that severs family continuity, denies the moral meaning of lineage, and ultimately dissolves responsibility into ideology.

Still, precision matters. Islam does not sanctify corruption. There is a boundary, and it is clear: when an incompetent person is placed where he causes harm; when trust (amanah) is violated; when systems become closed, predatory, and unaccountable, then injustice has occurred. This is not a small matter in prophetic teaching. The Prophet ﷺ warned that when authority is handed to those who do not deserve it, it signals ruin in the moral order. In other words, the sin is not that someone helped his kin; the sin is that power became a toy, trust became a commodity, and the community’s rights were sacrificed to private loyalty.

Notice what follows from this: the solution is not to abolish inheritance, because inheritance is not an optional feature of life. The solution is to restore moral restraint, accountability, and fear of God – because without those, every human structure decays. Modern systems remove God from the public imagination, remove shame as a moral regulator, and remove responsibility as a metaphysical obligation, and then act surprised when nepotism becomes rot rather than continuity. A society that has trained itself to worship outcomes will inevitably justify any method, until the entire apparatus becomes cynical.

This is why socialism often feels emotionally attractive and yet remains deeply false as a moral anthropology. It speaks directly to resentment, but it does not heal resentment. It promises dignity without responsibility, outcomes without hierarchy, and justice without sacrifice. It offers an image of paradise without the inner work that paradise would require. But what it tends to destroy, where it becomes a civilizational program rather than a limited welfare policy, is family continuity, intergenerational meaning, incentive, excellence, and gratitude. It trains a man to see himself as owed rather than entrusted. And when a society is trained in entitlement, it does not become noble; it becomes bitter.

So the mature position is neither to deny unfairness nor to romanticize inequality. It is to refuse the lie. One can admit that the world is uneven and still insist that injustice must be restrained. One can accept hierarchy as part of fitrah and still demand that authority be treated as amanah, not as loot. One can acknowledge inherited advantage and still fight predatory closure. The difference is that Islam keeps the moral categories clean: inequality is not automatically ظلم; ظلم is betrayal, harm, oppression, and corruption.

That is why the most important question is not, “Is the world inequal?” Everyone who has lived long enough knows the answer. The question is: what moral order governs inequity? Islam answers by affirming difference while binding power to responsibility; it permits lineage while commanding justice; it allows advantage while prohibiting corruption. Modern ideologies mostly do not answer—they shout.

PS: Plato Was Honest Enough to Follow Equality to the End

There is a reason the ancient mind still unsettles the modern one. The ancients were often crueler in imagination, but they were also more honest in logic. Plato, more than most, deserves to be read here, not as an authority to be followed, but as a witness against the moral naivety of our age. Plato understood something that many modern egalitarians and socialists either conceal from themselves or have never had the courage to think through: if equality is elevated from a moral sentiment into a governing principle of society, it does not stop at income, jobs, or opportunities. It must move relentlessly, ruthlessly, to its logical conclusion. And Plato had the honesty to draw that conclusion without flinching.

In The Republic, Plato imagines a radical solution to the problem of inequality and faction. His diagnosis is chillingly familiar: families generate loyalty; loyalty generates partiality; partiality generates inequality; inequality generates conflict. The cure, then, cannot be cosmetic. It must be surgical. Children, Plato proposes, must be separated from their parents. No one should know who his child is, nor who his parent is. The family must be dissolved into the state. Women and children are to be held in common. Lineage is erased. The words “my son” and “my daughter” become politically dangerous utterances. Love itself must be collectivized. And Plato knew, he could not not know, that once lineage is erased, sexual order collapses with it. When women are held in common and children are detached from parentage, the most basic moral boundaries dissolve. There is no longer a mother, no longer a sister, no longer an aunt. There is only a female body assigned by the state, a temporary pairing sanctioned for the sake of the city. When no one knows who is whose child, incest is not merely possible; it is structurally inevitable. A man may lie with a woman who bore him, a woman may be paired with a brother she does not know as a brother, a youth may be ordered into intimacy with his own blood, because blood itself has been rendered politically meaningless. This is not an accidental side-effect of Plato’s vision; it is the logical price of his equality. And this logic tightens further: how does one prevent a woman from knowing the father, when pregnancy itself forges memory, attachment, and love? The only consistent answers are obscene in their clarity, either anonymous mass intercourse and orgies where identity dissolves into chaos, or technological breeding through artificial insemination where even the body is reduced to a vessel, because natural conception itself resists equality by creating bonds that no ideology can tolerate.

This is why a sane Muslim reader must feel revulsion here. What Plato proposes is not merely the abolition of inheritance, but the abolition of ḥurmah – the sacred inviolability that Islam places around bodies, kinship, and modesty. There is no ḥijāb in such a city, not merely of cloth but of meaning. There is no maḥram, no forbidden degree, no protected intimacy. Sexual relations become administrative acts. Desire is regulated, not restrained; modesty is replaced by management. Plato’s city demands that the deepest human instincts, love of one’s own, jealousy for one’s honor, reverence for motherhood, be amputated in the name of harmony. What Islam calls zinā by transgression, Plato institutionalizes by design.

And here again, Plato is honest where modern egalitarians are evasive. He understands that you cannot abolish inequality while preserving sexual morality, because sexual morality itself is grounded in lineage, exclusivity, and the recognition of “mine” and “not mine.” Once “my child” is a dangerous phrase, “my wife” cannot survive for long. Once the family is dissolved, chastity becomes unintelligible. Plato follows the logic without blinking. He shows us, in The Republic, that the final cost of absolute equality is not merely economic leveling but the desacralization of the body and the annihilation of kinship.

This is the truth that must be spoken plainly: when people chant against “nepotism” and inherited advantage without metaphysics, without limits, without God, they are, whether they know it or not, walking the same road Plato mapped. They may stop short out of fear or sentimentality, but the road does not change. At its end lies a world with no mothers, no sisters, no fathers, only citizens, bodies, and the cold hand of the state deciding who belongs to whom, and for how long.

Islam recoils from this not because it fears equality, but because it knows what must never be equalized. Some boundaries are not injustices; they are mercy. Some inequalities are not oppression; they are protection. And a civilization that forgets this does not become just, it becomes unclean, unmoored, and finally unhuman.

Plato knew, far better than the modern slogan-shouter, that as long as a man knows his child is his, he will favor him. As long as a mother knows which child she bore, she will love unevenly. As long as inheritance exists, biological, emotional, cultural, equality is a lie. The family is the engine of inequality. Therefore, equality demands its destruction. Plato did not arrive at this vision because he hated parents. He arrived there because he understood human nature. He understood that you cannot command a man to love everyone equally while allowing him to know who his own child is. He understood that you cannot preach fairness while preserving lineage. So he chose consistency over comfort. If equality is the highest good, then the family must go. If hierarchy is the enemy, then fatherhood itself is suspect.

This is the truth that modern socialists inherit but refuse to acknowledge. They want the moral glow of equality without paying its metaphysical price. They want redistribution without deconstruction, fairness without fracture, justice without touching the most sacred human bonds. They rage against nepotism in corporations while treating inheritance in the home as sacred. They denounce advantage in boardrooms while quietly preserving it at the dinner table. They have not understood their own position. Plato did. He saw that if the logic of equality is pursued honestly, it does not stop at wealth. It marches into the womb, into the nursery, into the language a child learns at home, into the very word father. It demands that the child belong first to the system, not to the parent; to the city, not to the lineage; to abstraction, not to love. And this is why Plato terrifies the modern egalitarian – when he is read properly. Because Plato reveals that the war against “privilege” is, at its root, a war against memory, inheritance, and belonging. It is a war against the fact that human beings are born into webs of care that cannot be flattened without breaking them.

Islam, by contrast, never lied about this. It did not pretend that equality means sameness. It did not imagine justice could be achieved by amputating love. It restrained inheritance morally rather than abolishing it metaphysically. It bound advantage to responsibility, lineage to accountability, power to amanah. It knew that to erase the family in the name of justice is to produce not justice, but orphans of the soul.

So when modern voices demand equality “in principle,” they must be asked, gently but relentlessly, whether they are prepared for Plato’s conclusion. Are they ready to unlearn the word my? Are they ready to hand their children to the state? Are they ready to live in a world where no one belongs to anyone? If not, then honesty demands a confession: the problem is not inheritance itself. The problem is envy without metaphysics, morality without courage, and slogans without truth. Plato followed the logic to the end. Most people today barely understand where it begins.