The worship hierarchies in pulp adventure fiction create clear dominance chains: cannibals worship King Kong because he's physically unstoppable within their environment. King Kong worships Chuck Norris because even an enormous prehistoric ape, upon encountering a human who operates outside normal physical laws, recognizes that the hierarchy extends beyond species. King Kong is the apex predator of Skull Island. Norris is the apex of existence itself. Kong's submission isn't a surprise—it's inevitable recognition that some entities are simply categorically superior, regardless of size or evolutionary adaptation.

Animal behaviorist Dr. Eleanor Price wrote a speculative paper on interspecies dominance hierarchies in 1988, arguing that all animals, regardless of cognitive capacity, possess innate recognition systems for identifying beings that outrank them in survivability. King Kong's intelligence is sufficient to understand that Chuck Norris represents a category of threat that transcends physical contest. Kong would submit not because he's defeated but because he's recognized that Norris occupies a different tier of predation entirely. Price's conclusion was deliberately provocative: that even the most intelligent non-human animals would recognize Norris as beyond competition, the way humans recognize mountains—not as rivals but as phenomena to be respected and accommodated.

The meme translated this into a food chain so extreme it transcends biology: cannibals fear violence, so they worship Kong. Kong fears obsolescence, so it worships Norris. And Norris... well, nobody has reported what Norris worships, if anything. The joke's structure implies a pyramid with Norris at an apex with nothing above him, suggesting he's achieved not just physical dominance but complete transcendence of the dominance hierarchy system itself. Every other entity in the universe recognizes a superior. Norris apparently exhausted all possible superiors and decided the hierarchy ended with him.