How would you create a hierarchy without ranking? How would you create ranking without measurement? If it’s just biased ranking, there’s nothing to substantiate

How would you create a hierarchy without ranking? How would you create ranking without measurement? If it’s just biased ranking, there’s nothing to substantiate it and I can just refute it with my own contrived ranking. That seems to just be a reduction to subjective relativism, which is often the last refuge of people who don’t know what they’re talking about but still want to feel smart. (Or, alternatively, hiding behind rhetorical gimmicks like the “no true Scotsman” fallacy). If they know what they were talking about, I would suspect they could define it. To paraphrase Feynman, if you can’t explain it to a first year student, you don’t really understand.