Humans are not innately hierarchial. We spent most of our history in relatively egalitarian societies. Only your ancestors from the past few thousand years are likely to have experienced anything as substantially hierarchial as a modern corporation.

And those were the most dominant and powerful societies that laid waste to the egalitarian societies, conquered the most territory, became the wealthiest, and it isn't even close. They passed on their genetic characteristics and social instincts and so to some degree you can say the descendants of these winners are innately hierarchical.

But beyond whatever you actually mean by humans being innately hierarchical or not (possibly by predilection, emergent social organization, emotionally etc) the outcome of global interaction between groups of humans results in a hierarchy, whether some of them want this or not.

Some groups and some individuals are: smarter, stronger, healthier, wealthier, more powerful, more productive etc than others. A hierarchy emerges apart from whether any of us try to construct it or try to prevent it.

The reality of egalitarian systems (past and present) is much closer to the informal status hierarchies of high-school popularity contests than any sort of true equality.

That's why I used (and qualified!) the term 'egalitarian', which has a precise meaning that encompasses that point. I should also point out that high schools are a bit different since they do have some incredibly rigid formal hierarchies and they exist within an incredibly hierarchical society, so the students reproduce much of what they've learned from outside. If you want a good summary of academic thought on how egalitarian societies worked, Ken Ames' chapter The Archaeology of Rank has a decent lit review.

Can you explain the meaning of egalitarian you are using in this context? Unless you said it somewhere else I don't think you provided me with a definition.

I find that, at least in an American context, the idea that we live in an "incredibly hierarchical society" to be dubious at best. I am by no means saying that we have no formal hierarchies, but there is there is too much indivualism to describe that hierarchy as 'strict'.

Thanks for the reference.

The chapter I referenced by Ken Ames includes a whole definition section, which in turn cites the classic definition by Morton Fried:

1) Everyone has access to the necessities of life and

2) Equal access to positions of prestige, which don't confer dominance over others

That's typically contrasted with so-called "ranked societies", which are on the farther end of lacking one or both of these. Without getting too political or making value judgements, "American society" has both severely unequal access to the necessities of life (e.g. I can afford housing in the bay area as a tech worker, but others cannot) as well as positions of prestige and dominance over others that are not reciprocal (e.g. Uber CEO vs Uber SWEs vs Uber drivers).

I was expecting you to link someone like Chris Boehm that might actually be considered an expert. Jordan Peterson isn't one. All you have to do is listen to that for it to be immediately clear how little he engages with the existing literature and data on this subject.

engages enough to dismiss your claim, at least to my satisfaction.

Brain chemicals that indicate relative status to others, doesn't demand a heirarchy as a final answer. There's a multitude of ways of dealing with that, none of which are explored except for JP's catholic presuppositions.