An important factor in its demise is that it simply isn't working as well as it used to. Victims of rankism have gained access to powerful weapons and can exact a high price for humiliations inflicted on them. Increasingly, they're in a position to make the cost of predation exceed the value of the spoils. Weapons of mass destruction seize the imagination, but even if they're never used, non-violent "weapons" of mass disruption, employed by aggrieved groups, can paralyze modern, highly interdependent societies. This represents a fundamental shift in the balance of power in favor of the disregarded, disenfranchised, and dispossessed.

Given that predation has been a fixture throughout human history, it's not surprising that when one form of predation has ceased to work, we've devised al