The residual demand of rank is the capacity to remain under the permanent requirement of hierarchy after every collective demand of higher order has been leveled. The residual man continues to answer that demand even though the age offers no confirming hierarchy. The demand itself remains intact. Only the collective hierarchies that once made its force public have disappeared.
Young men who still feel the pressure of rank often look for residual hierarchies or residual orders that will keep the demand alive around them. Most of those orders have already been emptied by the horizontal forces that dominate the age. The residual path does not wait for external hierarchy. It continues as the permanent demand from the interior center that still holds the vertical measure.
This solitary demand is the residual form of the older traditional knowledge of hierarchical obligation. The man who continues to answer it already performs the residual act. That act does not require collective hierarchies to remain real.
Answer the demand of rank. Do not wait for the age to restore conditions in which higher hierarchy is collectively enforced. The residual act is to keep the permanent measure decisive in every concrete relation. That decisiveness is the continuity of the higher type under residual conditions.