Imagine two people arguing about whether all human relations are hierarchic. The one who refuses to acknowledge hierarchy still does so for hierarchic reasons, but they may not directly concern his relations with his interlocutor. A can take a position with B in order to consolidate the attitudes on which his relations to C depend, while B and C know nothing of each other. To be engaged in argument is weakly non-hierarchic since contention is supposedly on a common ground. When you win an argument you have asserted a certain kind of dominance, but while engaged in the argument you have staked your position. A position staked is not the same as the identical position presumed unchallenged, but a position is only a position by virtue of the challenges it can withstand. An equal hierarchical position of two people one of whom is rising and the other falling, generally speaking, are not the same. One ascending the ladder tends towards idealism, and the one descending towards realism; the first identifies with values larger than his own, while the latter experiences the implosion of values previously held. Someone might insist on their idealism in order to convince themselves or others that their position is rising, or to identify with a putatively rising tendency in a more general sphere. There are also many varieties of false realism, since realism has the somewhat contradictory attributes of being associated with loss of status and of being naturally more powerful than idealism in argument, at least by its presumption of resting on fewer assumptions. The tediousness of all 'outsider' positions; to combine the rectitude of the pessimist with the superciliousness of the optimist.