Knowledge is Hierarchical Authority

Help! Help! I’m being epistemologically repressed! — not Monty Python and the Holy Grail

This delusion treats organizational hierarchy as a knowledge system. It assumes that knowledge can be handcrafted in a boardroom and handed down to teams like Halloween candy. If knowledge isn’t a possession, it can't be something owned by "leadership" or dispensed by institutions.

In the United States this myth is practically an origin story. The founders believed that landed gentry were inherently more rational, better informed, more fit to decide. Corporations inherited this monarchical structure, and our education system was built to produce expectation-meeting industrial labor for a small leadership class.

We still confuse social position with knowledge. Academic prestige, job title, wealth, brand visibility, follower counts, and election are forms of authority, not (necessarily) knowledge skills. We might apply knowledge from a powerful position but power is not epistemology.

When a group has the authority to decide who gets to speak, who get believed, and who is ignored, they reinforce epistemic gated communities. Defining who counts as knowledgeable. Gender essentialism is a good example, The myth that men are objective and women are emotional was produced by a culture in which women had no authority to define objectivity. Or, biology.

Knowledge is a social process. It arises through reciprocity -- exchanging information, perspective, and experiences across a system of relationships. People working together to interpret, synthesize, and act.

Relational reciprocity doesn't mean "everyone's opinion is equally valid". Opinion is not knowledge. The goal isn't agreement. The goal is coherence, soundness and ... making sense.

Knowledge flows when the CTO's systemic pattern recognition meets the Head of Product's understanding of user behavior meets the junior engineer's intimate knowledge of the code. It emerges in relationships, not boardrooms.

Key concept: Knowledge emerges through reciprocity (not rank) when people, teams, and tools exchange perspective, context, and care.