The last rank is the interior hierarchy a man still holds when every outer hierarchy has been leveled or made theatrical. Outer ranks still exist as titles, wages, and crowds. They no longer correspond to a spiritual order. The differentiated man does not confuse those remnants with rank. He keeps an inner order of higher and lower in himself and measures every relation by it.
Young men either chase official ranks that confer nothing, or they reject rank as such and call the rejection freedom. Both moves belong to the same leveling. Tradition does not apologize for hierarchy. It states that without higher and lower, man becomes a quantity. The last place that hierarchy can still live is inside a man who refuses to become a quantity.
This interior rank is the residual form of the older traditional knowledge of caste as a spiritual fact. Caste was never only birth. It was a quality of being. The man who orders his own forces under a higher command already performs the residual act.
Keep the last rank. Do not sell it for position and do not throw it away as a pose of equality. The residual act is to remain internally hierarchical in a leveled field. That interior order is the last caste.