Once upon a time the costumes of head of state, judges, generals and priests required all kinds of peacock level signalling.
The illiterate masses needed the signals. Especially where authority figures were concerned.
Today we are at a point were a CEO can walk into a meeting in shorts and people have the capacity to understand who has more decision making power.
Are General's and Judges going to stop wearing their costumes? In large parts of the west much of it has disappeared. Not yet fully because when your job is to get people to do stuff that has nothing to do with their own needs distractions work.
As more and more people get in touch with their own needs the power of distraction and manipulative signals will reduce. We are seeing this push back happening all over the place.
In the past both the education system and professional hierarchies at work did a fantastic job of disconnecting people from their own needs to produce obedience.
Today thanks to hyper-connection of the internet, the hierarchies are bypassed, and people are getting slapped in the face, a hundred ways, reminding them to think about their own needs.
This is a new thing. It goes wrong a lot and produces bad outcomes but people are learning. And the learning is very different from the past. Because it comes through a network not from a hierarchy.