Are you seriously telling me that in civilian life there is no "differentiation" in at least some of the above list (e.g. pay/office size/perks/etc) between the very top and the very bottom in most companies?
No, of course not.
I'm just a little confused as to why there needs to be anything
more than that. Even without that, without the differences in pay and conditions, in any well-run organisation everyone's fully aware of what the pecking order is in some detail, even without access to the financial records of everyone else.
What the military seems to do is to draw a line down the middle of the workforce and decide that part of it is such a vastly superior human being to the other half that it would be demeaning to even socialise together. This comes off as institutionalised snobbery. I appreciate that this was normal at the time the RAF was founded, but I'm not sure what the purpose of it is - especially as maintaining two (or three) sets of everything is clearly expensive. My father reports that large manufacturing concerns in the 1970s would often have separate silver-service dining accomodation for the high-level management, but this does not happen, at least not very much, anymore.
I am aware of the need for a certain remove between management and those they manage. This is often a problem in my field, film and television, because the atmosphere of a film set is generally informal but yet there is still a very well-defined pecking order to which those present must be sensitive. I get the impression the same is sometimes the case in the military (particularly the RAF which can sometimes seem extremely informal until it needs not to be).
But at the end of the day we don't pretend the rest of the crew are our social inferiors and wear a system of merit badges just to rub it in their face, if you see what I mean.
P