Examined Worlds: MLK Day 2026: Hierarchical Chaos or Equitable Community?

Monday, January 19, 2026

MLK Day 2026: Hierarchical Chaos or Equitable Community?

MLK Day Parade and March, Chattanooga, TN (Jan. 19, 2026)

Since last year’s MLK Day post was called “Where Do We Go From Here?” I thought I’d continue alluding to King’s 1967 book by calling this one “Chaos or Community?”

Lately I’ve been trying to understand the type of hierarchical, authoritarian thinking that’s animating a lot of our politics these days. Ironically, while hierarchical authoritarians prattle on about law and order, as we’ve seen in my first home state of Minnesota recently, such authoritarianism breeds chaos.

Lasting order cannot be imposed from without. Since this is a science fiction blog, it’s appropriate to think of a fruitful line from Star Wars: Andor: “tyranny requires constant effort.” It requires, say, sending thousands of masked paramilitary (storm)troopers to occupy the city where I was born and harass, harm, or even kill anyone they deem unworthy. The drive to control breeds chaos, as we’ve seen in my grandma’s old neighborhood in South Minneapolis where both George Floyd and Renée Good were killed.

A stable social order can only truly come from what King called the Beloved Community—a community animated by equitable justice, dignity for all, freedom to live and thrive, and freedom from the “triple evils” of poverty, militarism, and racism.

I say “equitable justice” here, partly to annoy anti-DEI people, but also to acknowledge that bland equality is not enough. As King argued in Why We Can’t Wait and elsewhere, a just society must offer special help to those it has previously offered special harm. That is, justice demands equity, not mere equality.

I’m frequently flummoxed by the whole “anti-DEI” thing: who thinks diversity, equity, and inclusion are bad things? While I honestly believe that many people are swayed by bad rhetoric and would embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion if they really understood them, I’ve also come to believe in the last decade that some people really don’t want diversity, equity, or inclusion.

Here’s where hierarchical thinking comes in, the idea that some types of people are better than others. This is a hierarchy of value. Last year I suggested that a lot of support for Trump and the MAGA movement comes from “hierarchy anxiety.” It’s not just white supremacy and patriarchy, although those are probably the most powerful forms of hierarchical thinking in America. It’s also sentiments like “citizens are better than non-citizens” or “people who came here a long time ago are better than recent immigrants” or “people from my part of the country are better than people from other parts” or “people of my religion/sexuality/class/income level/opinions/interests are better than others.”

I certainly don’t think hierarchical thinking is limited to Trumpists or MAGA people. I see plenty of hierarchical thinking on the left, not to mention in academia with its strict power hierarchies of job titles and classifications (this is a bit ironic, since academia is a filled with so many self-professed egalitarians).

The deeper problem of hierarchical thinking comes when it’s combined with authoritarianism. While I have a general, anarchic allergy to hierarchical thinking, some degree of hierarchy is perhaps natural, humans being social primates and whatnot.

But the rigid hierarchies of modern societies are unnatural. I really think living in a world as unequal as ours makes most of us a little mentally unstable, whether we acknowledge it or not. Who could be well-adjusted in such a maladjusted society?

One way to deal with this anxiety is to double-down on it, to look toward a “strong” authority to tell you your place. This is why the people who proudly wave the Gadsden flag and have Punisher decals on their trucks are so happy to be told what to do by those higher in the authoritarian hierarchy and to gleefully tread on others lower in the hierarchy, even in a place that regularly gets below zero degrees Fahrenheit in January.

Another, much better, way to deal with the anxiety of living in an unequal society is to work against the inequality itself. Not to make everyone the same. We are, of course, all different and unique: we need not be qualitatively identical to be ascribed the same basic human value, which equitable justice can recognize.

And this is what King’s message was all about. The Beloved Community is not a homogenized society of blissful automatons, but a place where all of us can thrive in our individuality together in dignity and mutual appreciation and love for humanity.

It’s a future worth working toward. It’s a future on the other side of authoritarian hierarchical thinking. And King provided a lot of the ideas we need to undo harmful hierarchical thinking and move toward the thinking we need to create the Beloved Community.

I’m thinking a lot about this right now because last week I started teaching a course called “Gandhi, MLK, and Nonviolence.” But I hope you, dear reader, will also think about what we can all learn from King on this MLK Day. Happy MLK Day!