The Chicken, the Egg, or the Omelette?

Something I read the other day about hierarchical thinking made me think of a fish in a barrel.

Don’t ask me why.

Sometimes my mind does that. One thing bumps into another and, before I know it, I’m halfway down a road I had no intention of travelling.

So I went looking.

I wanted to know what hierarchical thinking and a fish in a barrel could possibly have in common.

At first, the answer was fairly academic. Hierarchical thinking is about how we organize things into levels and categories. This belongs above that. This is more important than that. This one fits here. That one belongs there.

Fine.

But I wasn’t really thinking about fish.

I was thinking about people.

And once people entered the barrel, things got messy.

Because hierarchy does not only organize.

It ranks.

Someone ends up on top.

Someone ends up underneath.

Someone decides what belongs where.

And somebody else discovers that the category they have been placed in comes with consequences.

That made me think about the other fish in the barrel.

Not fish as a category.

Fish as something trapped.

Contained.

Easy to reach.

Easy to control.

Easy to shoot.

And that is where my mind wandered into colonialism.

Colonialism required hierarchy. You cannot declare yourself civilized without deciding that somebody else is uncivilized. You cannot appoint yourself superior without manufacturing an inferior. You cannot take somebody else’s land, labour, resources and freedom indefinitely without eventually producing a story explaining why you have the right to do it.

But then I got stuck.

Which came first?

Did the belief in superiority make domination possible?

Or did people dominate first and then create beliefs about superiority to make what they were doing easier to live with?

The chicken or the egg?

And while I was sitting with that question, another memory came wandering in.

The fair.

The carnival.

Those childhood games where we lined up with our coins and tried to knock something over.

Shoot it.

Smash it.

Ring the bell.

Get there first.

Hit the target.

Beat the others.

Take the prize.

The lessons looked tiny enough to be harmless.

And they were fun.

You knocked something down and somebody congratulated you. You were faster, stronger, luckier or more accurate than the person beside you, and somebody handed you a stuffed animal.

Victory.

Nobody needed to stand beside the booth giving children a lecture on hierarchy.

The game was already teaching it.

There was a target.

There was competition.

There was something to acquire.

Someone would win.

Someone would lose.

And coming first was rewarded.

Perhaps that is why I keep coming back to the chicken and the egg.

Because maybe hierarchical thinking does not simply live inside people’s heads and then create systems.

Maybe systems teach us how to think.

Maybe we build little games around competition, winning and acquisition so early that eventually the rules stop looking like rules.

They begin to look natural.

Get there first.

Hit the target.

Beat the others.

Take the prize.

Except adulthood changes the prizes.

And race changes the game.

Because when you are Black, coming first, hitting the target, beating the others or reaching for what you were told you could have does not necessarily end with applause and a stuffed animal.

The prize can be suspicion.

Handcuffs.

Incarceration.

Death.

And suddenly the fair is not fair anymore.

The same society that teaches ambition can become suspicious when certain people display it.

The same culture that praises confidence can rename it aggression.

The same world that tells children to compete can become uncomfortable when the child who wins was not the child it expected to win.

So now my chicken-and-egg problem has become something else.

Perhaps hierarchical thinking created the barrel.

Perhaps the barrel teaches hierarchical thinking.

Perhaps domination creates the ideas needed to justify domination, and those ideas then build the next system capable of doing it all over again.

Round and round we go.

Which may explain why removing one particular barrel never seems to solve the problem.

Formal colonialism can end while colonial ways of organizing power survive.

A law can change while the hierarchy that produced it remains recognizable.

Institutions can adopt new language while continuing to decide who belongs at the top, who waits at the bottom and whose discomfort is simply the price of keeping the structure standing.

The barrel changes.

The hierarchy survives.

And that is where the omelette walked into my kitchen.

Because perhaps it was never only about the chicken or the egg.

Perhaps we spend too much time arguing over what came first while somebody else is standing at the stove making dinner.

And then comes that old saying:

You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette.

We say it when we mean that some damage is necessary.

Somebody will have to lose.

Something will have to be broken.

There will be a cost.

But look what we get in return.

Funny how often the omelette is used to explain why somebody had to be broken.

And even funnier how rarely we ask whose eggs keep getting cracked.

Who decided what was worth breaking?

Who gets to call the result progress?

Who gets fed?

Who clears the table?

Who washes the dishes?

And who is expected to be grateful because at least they were allowed into the kitchen?

Maybe that is the part we miss when we argue about chickens and eggs.

We are so busy trying to decide what came first that we forget to look at what keeps being made.

Hierarchy becomes policy.

Policy becomes practice.

Practice becomes culture.

Culture becomes common sense.

And common sense becomes the thing nobody thinks to question because, well, that is just the way things are.

Until somebody asks why.

Why is winning always described as getting ahead of somebody else?

Why does success so often require somebody underneath it?

Why do we keep building systems that need losers in order to prove that winners deserve what they have?

Why are some people praised for climbing while others are punished for not knowing their place?

And why, generation after generation, do the same people seem to keep ending up cracked?

Perhaps the chicken came first.

Perhaps the egg did.

Perhaps it does not matter anymore.

Because the omelette is already on the plate.

The more useful question might be:

Who made it?

Who paid for it?

And who keeps being told that breaking a few eggs is simply the price of dinner?