Hierarchically

My father was the ultimate authority of that family in which power was hierarchically passed down to the eldest brothers.

Maybe, it's a crazy idea that there is God or are gods and there are aliens. I surmise that God is or the gods are not like persons. And hierarchically, there are aliens below. Aliens have a more immediate controlling influence over my life. God could be everything or everything and beyond it, respectively pantheism and panentheism. God could be more like space, light, or wind. Meanwhile, aliens could be sentient beings, more like people.

Unlike, say, botany or zoology, or even in a thesaural structure of a knowledge database, where the syntactical and semantic relationships between concepts is often highly ordered (e.g. hierarchically, cohyponymically), the central concepts and meanings in the field of management are more consensually negotiated.