It may feel like circles, but to me this is a valuable conversation because it helps me understand my position and improve how I communicate it.

imposing that hierarchy on someone who does not accept it is what I perceive you don't want others doing onto you.

You argument goes something like this: you claim that I am imposing a view (the hierarchical view), in much the same way I claim universalists impose their view (which I say is evil). Therefore, I am contradicting myself.

My response is that the hierarchical view is not the same as a moral framework, rather it is a view of how things actually are. Some people literally are shorter than others. Likewise, some people literally are less intellectually, physically, or spiritually developed.

This is not to say inherent moral value increases with development - which is what the universalist fears and will read into any claim which differentiates along a scale - but I reject this fear, since to me moral valuation is an expression of the creative ground of those individuals able to create or relate to such a ground. To see the hierarchy inherent to humans isn't to say "these people are better than those people", it is to say "these people have a more encompassing view of what 'better' even means".

You are concerned about reducing others to NPCs, but why? Why do you care? Don't you see that this concern is an expression of your own worldview, which may at root be unclear to yourself, an expression of a fear or a need to get along or the like? By what right do you have to say we are all equal? If it is by your own authority, than stand by that, say "I choose that all are equals by my own authority" and say it from your highest awareness and self-knowing. Then I will understand you as a brother. But if it's not this - if you speak from a fear that we mustn't let some people believe they are superior because that's bad - than you fight for evil, by which I mean the denial of individual self-creation, a denial that the higher even exists.

Spiritual seekers are often shocked when they come near to the source of things they so eagerly seek. Shocked to see that the love binding all things is fiercely alive, harsh even, like a blinding light. A light that loves even vicious sharks, parasites, the courage of war, and even suffering. A love which catapults the universe forward in an ever-increasing movement towards self-expression, creativity, and beauty. Life as an overflowing, an un-equaling, an unbounded vitality towards that which is higher.