But once inside any group, we’re rarely content to flop about on its lower rungs. We’re driven to rise within it. When we succeed, and receive approval and acclaim from our community, we experience happiness. We feel as if our lives have meaning and purpose and that we’re thriving. These emotions, too, are no accident. In the millions of years in which our brains were being designed by evolution, the greater our status relative to the people around us, the better able we’d be to maximize our potential for survival and reproduction.
So we’re driven to seek connection and ranks: to be accepted into groups and win status within them. This is the game of human life.
It’s why, even as we raise ourselves so high above the other animals we appear to them as gods, we still behave like them — and worse. Always on alert for slights and praise, we can be petty, hateful, aggressive, grandiose and delusional. We play for status, if only subtly, with every social interaction, every contribution we make to work, love or family life and every internet post. We play with how we dress, how we speak and what we believe. We play with our lives — with the story we tell of our past and our dreams and plans for the future. Our waking existence is accompanied by its racing commentary of emotions: we can feel horrors when we slip, even by a fraction, and taste ecstasy when we soar.
Humans strive: to be the best hunter, the best builder, the best cook, the best technologist, the best leader, the best creator of wealth. The game compels us to scheme and to innovate; to push ourselves to new limits in order to win. When we succeed, dozens, hundreds or even millions of others might benefit from our play. Humans strive, too, to be virtuous: to win urgent moral battles, to rescue the imperilled, to lift strangers in distant continents out of poverty, to create vaccines that’ll defend the lives of people who’ll be born long after we’re gone. All such endeavors are accompanied by the game’s racing commentary of emotions: the shame and the pride, the plummet and the high.
Of course, life isn’t only driven by status. We’re also motivated by other grand drives. We want power. We want sex. We want wealth. We want to change society for the better. But all these wants are best satisfied by playing the status game.
We naturally pursue status with ferocity: we all relentlessly, if unconsciously, try to raise our own standing by impressing peers, and naturally if unconsciously, evaluate others in terms of their standing.
Our brains continually, and in countless ways, measure where we sit versus other people. They automatically layer them and the groups they belong to into hierarchies. Most of these processes are subconscious, and hidden from us. But, crucially, while we play life as a game, our conscious experience of it takes the form of a story. The brain feeds us distorted, simplistic and self-serving tales about why they are above us and they are beneath. In this way, complex truth become reduced to cartoonish moral struggles between good and evil. We’re all vulnerable to believing such narratives. They form our experience of reality. They make us feel better about ourselves; they motivate us to strive to improve our rank. But they’re delusional. They’re responsible for much of the hubris, hatred and hypocrisy that stalk our species.
To admit being motivated by improving our rank is to risk making others think less of us, which loses us rank. Even admitting it to ourselves can make us feel reduced. We readily recognize it in rivals and even use it as a method of insult — which, ironically, is status play: an attempt to downgrade others and thereby raise ourselves up.
Status isn’t about being liked or accepted: these are separate needs, associated with connection. When people defer to us, offer respect, admiration or praise, or allow us to influence them in some way, that’s status. It feels good. Feeling good about it is part of our human nature.
Whenever we’re in the presence of humans, consciously or unconsciously, we’re being judged, measured. And their judgments matter.
We’ve been living in settled communities for around 500 generations. But we existed in mobile hunter-gatherer bands for far longer than this — at least 100K generations. Our brains remain programmed for this style of life. We are today as we’ve always been: tribal. We have instincts that compel us to seek connection with coalition of others. Once we’ve been accepted into a group, we strive to achieve their approval and acclaim.
Wherever we connect with like-minded others, the game will be on: at work, online, on the sports field, at the volunteer center, in the club, park or activist collective — even at home. The minimum requirement for play is connection. Before we can be rewarded with status, we must first be accepted into group as a player.
Disconnection is a fearsome state for a social animal to find itself in. It’s a warning that its life is failing and its world has become hostile: where there’s no connection, there’s no protection. Isolation damages us so profoundly it can change who we are.
Humans are driven to get along and get a head. To be accepted into status games and to play well.
The basic idea is that, when we’re not doing well in the game of life, our bodies prepare for crisis by switching our settings so we’re readied for attack. It increases inflammation, which helps the healing of any physical wounds we might be about to suffer. It also saves resources by reducing our antiviral response. But when our inflammation is raised for too long, it can damage us in myriad ways.
Frequent defeat in the status game has us scuttling off to the grey safety of the back of the cave. In the sanctuary of those shadows, our inner monologue can turn on us, becoming hypercritical in a process known as self-subordination. We talk ourselves down in an onslaught of insult, convincing ourselves the fight is useless, that we belong at the bottom, that we can only ever fail.
Suicide concentrates among those who experience an increase in their social inferiority and occurs mostly when people fall below others. The greater and faster the downward mobility, the more likely it is to trigger suicide.
This game that we play is deadly serious. It’s only by surveying the damage that failure can do that we begin to grasp that status isn’t merely a nice sensation. We need it. Status is an essential nutrient found not in meat or fruit or sunlight but in the successful playing of our lives. When we feel chronically deprived of it, or disconnected from the game, our minds and bodies can turn against us. To our brains, status is a resource as real as oxygen or water.
We don’t feel like players of games. We feel like heroes in stories. This is the illusion the brain spins for us. If makes us feel as if we are the hero at the center of the universe, orbited by a cast of supporting characters.
Much of what seems inarguably real and true, in the space around us, is not. The actual world is monochrome and silent. Sounds, colors, tastes and smells exist only in the projection in our heads. What’s actually out there are vibrating particles, floating chemical compounds, molecules and colorless light waves of varying lengths. And our senses can only detect the tiniest fraction of what’s out there.
So the brain creates our experience of the world. Next it conjures us, the self at its center. It is a hero-maker, manufacturing both the illusion of self and its gripping narrative, framing our life as a journey towards a hopeful destination.
A psychologically healthy brain excels at making its owner feel heroic. It does this by reordering our experiences, remixing our memories and rationalizing our behavior, using a battery of reality-warping weapons that make us believe we’re more virtuous, more correct in our beliefs and have more hopeful futures in store than others. The evidence is “clear and consistent: we are inclined to adopt self-serving beliefs about ourselves, and comforting beliefs about the world.” The most powerful of these weapons is thought to be moral bias. No matter what we do, and how dishonestly we play, the brain nudges us to conclude we’re ultimately a better person than most.
To reveal the hidden structure of human life, we must burrow beneath the illusionary story of consciousness and into the subconscious, an incomparably more powerful place. It’s in these mysterious deeps that the vast majority of the computation of life actually takes place. Despite how it feels, consciousness is not at the center of the action in the brain, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity. The subconscious circuits that generate this hallucinatory story-world were “carved by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history.
These status symbols tell us, and our co-players, how we’re performing. We pay obsessive attention to them. We need to: unlike a computer game, there’s no definitive scoreboard in human life. We can never see precisely where players sit versus us in the rankings. We can only sense it from symbols to which we’re attached particular values.
In the luxury attire game, the general rule is the larger the logo, the lower the status and therefore price.
The status detection system continually reads symbolic information from the voice and body language of our co-players. It registers facial markers for dominance or submission in 43ms and calculates the quality and quantity of eye contact we’re receiving and it does so constantly, unconsciously and “with numerical precision.” High-status people tend to speak more often and more loudly; are perceived to be more facially expressive; achieve more successful interruptions in conversation; stand closer to us; touch themselves less; use more relaxed, open postures; use more “filled pauses” such as “um” and “ah” and have a steadier vocal tone.
People were “exceedingly accurate” in their estimates of who had higher status. Merely by glancing at a still image of them talking, they could tell who was on top.
Possession is a means to establish where you are in the nursery pecking order. The moment a toy is claimed by one child, other preschoolers want it. Owning stuff is all to do with status amongst competitors. These early disputes are a taster for later life in the real world. Just like the adults they’ll become, these young status-strivers are hypocritical. Children are sensitive to inequality, but it seems to upset them only when they themselves are the ones getting less. Even in children, the inequality associated with relative advantage is so appealing that it overrides both a desire for fairness and a desire for absolute gain.
We’re used to thinking of money and power as principal motivating forces of life. But they’re symbols we use to measure status.
Status is the original form of currency, and the one that matters most. A majority of employees would accept a higher-status job title over a pay rise.
An increase in neighbors’ earnings and a similarly sized decrease in own income each have roughly about the same negative effect on well-being.
Some argue this is also true on the national level. As a country’s average earnings go up, they say, average happiness doesn’t. By the logic of the game, this makes sense: if everyone’s getting richer at once, your extra pennies haven’t bought you superior status.
Money is a status symbol, power is a status symbol, so is the size of a logo on a handbag and the amount of orange juice poured in a glass. They’re Pac-man cookies in the game of human life. Humans are extraordinarily imaginative creatures who can turn almost anything into status symbols.
The rules by which we play at life are impossible to count. Most of the time, we’re not even consciously aware we’re following them: we just behave in ways we’ve learned are correct and judge ourselves and others — measuring, removing and awarding status — by how well they’re followed. These rules were invented by our ancestors, both recent and ancient.
The first set was laid by our ancestors who spent millions of years living in mobile, tribal bands. This was the era in which our brains did much of their evolution. Everyone alive today is still coded to play hunter-gatherer games.
A game was created in which prosocial behavior that benefitted the group was incentivized. Roughly speaking, the more you put the tribe’s interests before your own, the more you’d earn status and the better your conditions of life would become. These rules were essential because humans can often be greedy, dishonest and aggressive. 7 common rules of play that are thought to be universal: help your family; help your group; return favors; be brave; defer to superiors; divide resources fairly; respect others’ property.
The second set of rules comes from people who’ve been around more recently. They’re encoded in culture. Every culture has a distinct set of rules by which it wants its members to live. Like the ancient DNA rules, they become so embedded into our perception that we barely know they’re there, unless someone violates them.
East Asian games tend to be more collective. Status pursuit is more commonly seen as the responsibility of the group. They’re more likely to feel raised up when they serve the collective, winning status by appearing humble, conformist and self-sacrificial. In the East, it’s often the status of the group above all.
3 ways it’s possible to lose face: when one fails to meet others’ expectations associated with his / her social status; when one is not treated by others as respectfully as his / her face deserves; and when one’s in-group members (e.g. family members, relatives, immediate subordinates) fail to meet their social roles. The Asian group-centered game can be radically different to that played in the West. There, if an employee is singled out for praise, their team can experience a loss of face. The praised employee feels not elated but shamed and motivated to reduce their performance, deliberately doing a worse job so harmony and the group’s face can be restored.
Much of the rest of human life is comprised of 3 varieties of status-striving and 3 varieties of game: dominance, virtue and success. In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success game, status is awarded to the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge. Mafias and armies are dominance games. Religions and royal institutions are virtue games. Corporations and sporting contests are success game. There are no completely pure games, only blends of dominance, virtue and success.
We could earn prestige-based status by being virtuous: by demonstrating beliefs or behaviors that served the group’s interests. This kind of status is awarded to those who show concern for the public good, display commitment to the group or enforce its rules. They’ll also rise up the rankings if they’re thought of as being courageous or generous towards their co-players.
We could also gain status from gossiping. Who we gossip with can itself be a status symbol: swapping tattle with high-ranked others implies we’re of high rank too. Furthermore, by gossiping we demonstrate our knowledge of the rules, and our loyalty to them, and this can also earn status.
Physical aggression between humans happens at a frequency of less than 1% compared to chimpanzees and bonobos.
But no species has taken it anywhere near as far as us. Prestige is our most marvelous craving. It’s a bribe that induces us into being useful, benefitting the interests of the tribe. It’s enabled us to master the art of co-operative living.
Whenever a person shows they’re valuable to their game, by being conspicuously virtuous or successful, it’s registered by their co-players. Subconsciously, they’ll see this person’s winning behavior as a chance to win themselves. They’ll desire to learn from them, so they too can rise up in the rankings. This means being near to them as much as possible. As a reward for all their valuable time and knowledge, they offer them symbolic status: they lavish them with eye contact and defer to them in conversation; they might maintain a hunched, subservient posture; bare their teeth in submissive displays known as “fear grimaces” in apes and “smiles” in humans; fetch them food, drink or other gifts; walk behind them; hold doors open; seat them in a special location or use honorific titles to address them.
It works the opposite way too. If people we consider significantly beneath us begin copying us, we’re likely to drop the behaviors that earned us status in the first place.
Whenever you track trails of influence — of people deferring, altering their beliefs or behavior to match those of the people above them — you’ll find status games being played and won. We frequently measure our own level of status by our capacity to influence. Our status detection systems monitor the extent to which others defer to us in the subtlest negotiations of behavior, body language and tone.
This is one reason we can take it so personally when our ideas, tastes or opinions are rejected. If human life was strictly rational, we’d be likely to feel blank when disagreed with, or perhaps worried a suboptimal decision was being made.
The human expectation that social status can be seized through brute force and intimidation, that the strongest and the biggest and boldest will lord it over the rank and file, is very old, awesomely intuitive and deeply ingrained. Its younger rival — prestige — was never able to dislodge dominance from the human mind.
The best is still in us. It is our second self.
In studies, men and women have picked silhouettes of tall, bulky people with thin eyes and lips and a strong jawline as ideal leaders in times of war; in peacetime those with narrower frames were more popular.
In the majority of cases, killers are unemployed, unmarried, poorly educated and under 30. Their sense of status is fragile. In most places, the leading reasons for killing are status-driven, the result of altercations over trivial disputes.
Time and time men give the same answer as to why they assault or kill: “because he disrespected me / my wife / sister, etc.” In fact, they used that phrase so often that they abbreviated it into the slang phrase: “He dis’ed me.”
I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I pointed a gun at some dude’s face.
Boys’ aggression revolves around the threat of violence: “I will physically hurt you” … but girls’ aggression has always been relational: “I will destroy your reputation or your relationships.” Female aggression tends to be indirect. Rather than assault an antagonist’s physical body, face-to-face, they’ll attack their avatar. They’ll attempt to secure their enemy’s ostracization, severing their connections to games, and use mockery, gossip and insult to strip them of status.
Women derogate other women’s promiscuity and physical attractiveness on social media more than men do, while men derogate men on their abilities more than women do.
The more ambiguous the relation is with respect to who should be expected to outrank whom, the more likely violence is.
The question was reasonable. Their refusal to answer was petty. But this is often the way with such disputes, including those that become so aggressive they end in murder. When people have an outburst over something trivial — an unanswered question, a tiny debt, a perceived lack of gratitude, a minor discourtesy on the road — they often justify themselves by saying it’s about the “principle” of the matter. Those who talk of principle mean “the other party has arrogated to himself or herself a dominant role that has not previously characterized the relation.” In life, even the subtlest interpersonal events can be symbolic. They’re all too easily read by the status detection system as “fuck you.”
Elliot couldn’t speak or move. He felt humiliated. He barely talked for the rest of the day. “I couldn’t believe what had happened.” The experience made him feel like an “insignificant, unworthy little mouse. I felt so small and vulnerable. I couldn’t believe this girl was so horrible to me, and I thought it was because she viewed me as a loser.”
If life is a status game, what happens when all our status is taken from us? What happens when we’re made to feel like nothing, again and again and again? Humiliation can be seen as the opposite of status, the hell to its heaven. Like status, humiliation comes from other people. Like status, it involves their judgment of our place in the social rankings. Like status, the higher they sit in the rankings, and the more of them are, the more powerful their judgment. And, like status, it matters. Humiliation has been described as “the nuclear bomb of the emotions” and has been shown to cause major depressions, suicidal states, psychosis, extreme rage and severe anxiety, including ones characteristic of PTSD. Humiliation is an “annihilation of self.”
One after another of the most violent men I have worked with over the years have described to me how they had been humiliated repeatedly throughout their childhoods.
In severe states of humiliation, we tumble so spectacularly down the rankings that we’re no longer considered a useful co-player. So we’re gone, exiled, cancelled. Connection to our kin is severed. When humiliation annuls the status of individuals to claim status, they are in essence denied eligibility to recover the status they have lost. If humans are players, programmed to seek connection and status, humiliation insults both our deepest needs.
An African proverb says, “the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” If the game rejects you, you can return in domination as a vengeful God, using deadly violence to force the game to attend to you in humility. The fundamental cause of most human violence is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride.
His brain took his feelings of debasement and resentment and magicked them into a story in which he was the hero. He went to war against smart people and the world they’d made, writing that the technological age and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race and have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering.
All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure while I’ve had to rot in loneliness all these years. They all looked down upon me every time I tried to join them. They’ve all treated me like a mouse. If humanity will not give me a worthy place among them, then I will destroy them all. I am better than all of them. I am a god. Exacting my retribution is my way of proving my true worth to the world.
Even the slightest disagreement or slur form a person of similar or higher-status rank might be enough to humiliate the narcissist.
Feeling entitled to a place at the top of the game, they were driven to depravity by life at the bottom. This pattern — male, grandiose, humiliated — is also evident in those who commit nonviolent acts of destruction against their game.
Up until this point, Rodger had presented as confused, miserable and bitter. He was also hateful: his fear of women had curdled into a powerful misogyny, his loathing extending to the “cool” men they chose to date. But angry misogynists, sadly, aren’t rare. Only when his source of connection and status was lost did absolute pandemonium let loose in his thoughts. “I began to have fantasies of becoming very powerful and stopping everyone from having sex.”
It said his suffering was the fault of women, who represent everything that is unfair with this world and who control which men get sex and which men don’t. By always choosing “the stupid, degenerate, obnoxious men,” they were going to hinder the advancement of the human race.
I am the true victim in all this. I am the good guy.
WoW had been the only place he’d felt of value. It was a status game and one he’d excelled at. Far from being the cause of his madness, it was more likely the last thing keeping him sane.
They’re also formally ranked. The position of each player or team is precisely scored and announced for everyone to see. The games we play in daily life are not usually like this. Typically, they’re open-ended: they last as long as our relationships with our co-players continue. And our position, as it shifts from minute to minute, day to day, is neither fixed in a precisely defined rank nor declared publicly. Instead, it’s sensed. The status detection system reads it from clues in the world of symbols we’re immersed in. This means it’s possible to attend a work meeting as a relatively low-ranked team member, contribute a fantastically useful idea, receive symbolic rewards of attention, praise and influence, and leave feeling on top of the world. We might not be number one, but we feel like we are. Even though we have a job title and a pay grade, these don’t represent a precise and inarguable judgment, like the position on a sports area’s scoreboard.
These positive feelings from the group are keys: in team tugs of war, when individual performance is hidden, people pull about half as hard as when working alone, but ramp up their efforts when a crowd cheers them on. The same is true of runners and cyclists who also perform better with an appreciative audience.
Researchers find happiness isn’t closely linked to our socioeconomic status, which captures our rank compared with others across the whole of society, including class. It’s actually our smaller games that mater: “studies show that respect and admiration within one’s local group, but not socioeconomic status, predicts subjective well-being.”
Fighting, when you and a small group of humans are trying to out-shoot and out-maneuver another group of humans, and they you, is the ultimate team sport. Studies of soldiers usually find their central motivation comes not from king, queen or country, but from their close comrades.
Rivalry emerges over time between parties who’ve jostled repeatedly and have a history of tight skirmishes, near misses and close calls. When players compete with someone they consider a rival, they feel their status is at stake.
I felt empowered. I marveled at how words, images, and songs could get people to donate blood, buy new cars, or join the Army. This was my first formal introduction to persuasion. After that, everywhere I looked I started seeing what I called “propaganda,” used for good purposes and bad.
Even though at the time there was nothing useful you could do with LinkedIn, that simple icon had a powerful effect in tapping into people’s desire not to look like losers.
He described a way of issuing rewards such that they’d encourage compulsive behaviors. If a programmer wanted to create a certain action, in a user, they should offer a symbol of reinforcement after they’d performed the desired “target behavior.” But here was the trick: the positive reinforcement would be inconsistent. You wouldn’t always know what you were going to get. This type of unpredictable reward schedule makes the target behavior very compelling, even addictive.
Social media is a slot machine for status. This is what makes it so obsessively compelling. Every time we post a photo, video or comment, we’re judged. We await replies, likes or upvotes and we don’t know what reward we’l receive for our contribution.
There’s no happy ending. That’s the bad news. But this is not how life feels. To be alive, and to be psychologically healthy, is to be vulnerable to the story of consciousness that tells us that with one particular victory, with that peak finally climbed, we’ll be satisfied. Peace, happiness, and delicious stillness will be ours. This, sadly, is a delusion. We’ll never get there because we’re playing for status. And the problem with status is, no matter how much we win, we’re never satisfied. We always want more.
And yet, even in the midst of it all, he found himself bothered by the fact that, the songs he’d co-written were credited to “Lennon-McCarthey.”
Lennon came first.
One reason the desire for status is never really satisfied is because it can never really be possessed by the individual once and for all. Since it is esteem given by others, it can always, at least theoretically, be taken away. So we keep wanting more. And more and more and more.
They were asked to rate their happiness on a 10-point scale, then say how much cash they’d need to be perfectly happy. “All the way up the income-wealth spectrum. Basically everyone says 2 or 3 times as much.”
Status drunkenness is extraordinary and ordinary and testament to how the game can intoxicate human cognition. Newspapers abound with tales of reported diva demands.
Those who attempt to deliver it are often punished with a reputation for being difficult, overly negative or not “team players.”
When his team go into companies and report back negative staff opinion, leaders are frequently shocked. While some take it seriously, many bitterly contest the findings. They argue that no one has ever brought such issues to their attention before and that the data must therefore be flawed.
But they then mostly go on to assume that they themselves are immune to its effects. In reality, they almost never are. Tellingly, the most successful leaders are usually those with “least compliant” followers.
Out of nowhere, you’re worth something. You’re important.
Then comes the brain-story that says they’ve earned it. “My life is different in that people kiss my ass and that’s not always a good thing because then you start believing that your ass is worthy of being kissed. You have to constantly stay on guard for that. And I think it’s very hard.”
I’ve been addicted to almost every substance known to man and the most addicting of them all is fame.
No matter who we are or how high on the scoreboard we climb, life is a game that never ends.
There’s a universal prejudice, a bias that unites humanity: we don’t like those who swagger about above us in the higher ranks. This is a resentment that transcends politics, class, gender and culture. People feel perfectly comfortable being perfectly cruel about celebrities, CEOs, politicians and royalty, as if their elevated rank makes them immune to pain.
We too prefer tattle about high-status people, preferably of our own gender — rivals in our games.
The higher their status, the greater the enjoyment of their de-grading. The most venomous levels of envy were reported when the poppy’s success was in a “domain that was important to the participant, such as academic achievement among students” — when they were rivals in the game.
And yet, as we’ve learned, we’re also drawn to high-status people: we crave contact with the famous, the successful and the brilliant. So our relationship with elite players is thunderously ambivalent. On one hand, we gather close to them, offering them status in order to learn from them and, in the process, become statusful ourselves. On the other, we experience grinding resentments towards them.
There was also division of land. For the first time, major wealth began to accumulate in private hands. Most of it floated upwards, to the clan at the top.
The status these elites experienced would’ve felt deserved to them, even god-given, as their brains wove their predictable, self-serving dreams. Then the flaw kicked in: they acclimatized to their levels of status and wanted more.
Humans are today as we’ve always been: ambitious and delusional animals. We’re also jealous and resentful. Conspicuous symbols of others’ thriving can alter how we play the game of life. They can change us, making us meaner, harder and less cooperative.
Surprisingly, what made the most difference to their behavior wasn’t the level of inequality in their game, but whether or not the inequality was visible. When players’ wealth was hidden everyone, including the elites, became more egalitarian. But when wealth was displayed, players in every game became less friendly, cooperated “roughly half as much” and the rich were significantly more likely to exploit the poor.
We didn’t evolve to play games formally and we didn’t evolve to play games so steep. But we did evolve to feel resentment. A long time ago, this dangerous emotion helped keep our tribes functional and their hierarchies shallow.
Wearing it in public for the first time made me absurdly proud. I was narcissistic on behalf of my glam metal kin: we were better than those idiots who liked boybands or rave. I knew this to be the truth and I knew it totally.
Within the games we play, we police each other. It’s in everyone’s interest the game remains fair and stable and that big shots are managed. But no such policing happens in status competitions between games. On the contrary, our co-players award us even more status when we behave in ways that boost our game’s rank and diminish that of our rivals: when we sneer, for example, that the Francophone elite are only in it for the money. When pricked by status anxiety, we often look at our rival games — the corporations, the religions, the football clubs, the music tribes, the school cliques, the nations — and convince ourselves ours is somehow superior. Even if they’re above us in the hierarchy of games, we’ll tell stories that say we’d rather be where we are. Our game is the one: our football team, our company, our clique, our tribe, our religion. This grandiosity we feel for our games is highly conspicuous in sports. Even if a football team is low in the league, its supporters can spend much of their social time persuading each other that they’re actually somehow superior. They seek out canny arguments to devalue rivals, reframing losses as injustices or near-wins and reliving glories from the past.
This is a role the great religions have played. The hidden truth of religions is that they’re status games: Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians agree a set of rules and symbols by which to play, then form a hierarchy along which they rise and fall. The dream that’s woven over this truth often tells of major status rewards not in this life but the next.
A study of over 400 societies found moralizing gods “consistently” appeared after a population had reached 1M. Belief in moralizing gods created a standard set of rules and symbols by which players of different languages, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds could play. And they believed them. They lived the dream of reality they’d been sold.
Pious untouchables accept they’ve earned their degrading by committing sins in a past life; only by following the rules in the present will they win higher status in the next. This is how many major religions have compelled people to conspire in their own subjugation. You win by knowing your place and staying in it, in the expectation of rewards after death. Everything was God-created, wen the logic, so people were precisely where God wanted them to be.
About a third accepting they’d earned untouchability by committing sins in past lives, with others blaming unfairness or believing a more self-serving version of the Hindu dream, claiming “they never took a true plunge in status, that they were really Brahmans in disguise.” Tellingly, some untouchable seek to restore their sense of relative status by looking down at those even more untouchable than they.
This is even more true in virtue-based societies and eras. Back in the age of kingdom and empire, we might’ve been ruled by some distant leader in theory, but we’d mostly be concerned with obligations to our tight-knit clan and adhering to its local rules and symbols. Life was small, confined to a small territory and a small group.
A robust society is one in which the general populace is protected from outside threat and status trickles down in ways that are expected. Even if elite groups — the religious, legal, military, bureaucratic, aristocratic games — get nearly all the rewards, and bottom castes virtually none at all, stability won’t usually be threatened. What creates revolutionary conditions isn’t the steepness of the inequality but the perception the game has stopped paying out as it should.
This is why poverty alone doesn’t tend to lead to revolutions. Revolutions — defined as mass movements to replace a ruling order in the name of social justice — have been found to occur in middle-income countries more than the poorest. What matters is that people feel they are losing their proper place in society for reasons that are not inevitable and not their fault. The anxiety caused by their games’ lost of status reflects that which is found in the depression and suicide research. What goes for ourselves goes for our groups: when we and our people sense our collective status is in decline, we become dangerously distressed.
When a game’s status begin to slip, its players can be merciless. But for a revolution to succeed, the games at the bottom of the hierarchy require the help of the elites. Indeed, in most revolutions it is the elites who mobilize the population to help them overthrow the regime.
A predictable precursor to societal collapse is “elite-overproduction” — when too many elite players are produced and have to fight over too few high-status positions. A moderate level of overproduction is beneficial, as it creates healthy competition and increases the quality of the elites that do end up occupying its most prestigious positions, in government, media, the legal world, and so on. But too much overproduction leads to resentful cadres or failed elites forming their own status games in opposition to the successful. They begin warring for status, attacking the establishment, which contributes to its destabilization. We find chaos and history being made in the aftermath of the game’s expected rewards failing to pay out.
Even when societies don’t fall to revolution or elite overproduction, those who rule them can become tamed and toppled by status play. This is true for civilizations that have endured for centuries. When a status-hungry imperial force conquers a people, they establish themselves as elites. As the generation pass, indigenous people, seeking status, increasingly play the empire’s games, adopting its rules and symbols: speaking its language, worshipping its gods, working for its institutions. Eventually, desiring full and unprejudiced membership of the elites, they demand equal status and often do so with aggression in the form of civil disobedience, legal challenge or violence. Thus begins the fall of the empire’s founders. Conquered culture are “digested” by imperial games that continue to flourish and develop even after its founders are long ejected.
Most humans alive today are playing by the rules and symbols of their long-vanquished overlords.
In modern Western society, we live inside a story that says, if we want it badly enough, we can do anything. Open the door, step outside, go for it. This cultural myth tells us to shoot for the moon. But the reality of shooting for the moon is that it requires years of training, millions of dollars, the support of a major space agency and a rocket.
3 major forces conspire to push us in certain directions: genes, upbringing and peer group.
Most billionaires become billionaires, in part, because they’re monstrously competitive. They may be extroverts who tend to be ambitious and are prepared to work very hard in pursuit of fame or money. Even more successful are those with a stellar capacity for self-control. This is associated with a trait known as conscientiousness, which is the “most reliable personality predictor of occupational success across the board.”
Poor and blue-collar children were taught the game was tough and success required resilience. Qualities not tolerated in youngsters included: spoiled, fresh, whiny, weak-minded, prissy, soft, mushy, and pushover.
Queenston parents saw themselves as holding their own in a jungle of violence and corrupt youth.
In Kelley, resilience took a more optimistic form. There, it was required to break through into better status games. They wanted their young to have the mettle to: try things out, stand out, get a lot more out of this world, break away, go for your dreams. “I want my kids to definitely strive for everything they can possibly get — not take it, but work for it.”
But in wealthy Parkside a radically different type of player is being built. There, children were seen not as tough warriors of the game but as fragile buds that needed to be “opened out into the world, into a successful career.” Parents emphasized the delicacy of the child’s self, the extreme care, resources, wide canvas and gentle touch needed in helping this unique self to “flower” and opened up to its full potential. Rather than respecting a parent-child status hierarchy, Parkside youngsters were encouraged to see themselves as equals.
Unlike younger people, teenagers are likely to take the evaluations of their peers to be a true indication of their self-worth — or lack of it.
In this and a thousand of the ways they’ll begin absorbing the lawyer’s game. It is very difficult for a young lawyer immersed in this culture day after day to maintain the values she had as a law student. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, young lawyers change. They begin to admire things they did not admire before, be ashamed of things they were not ashamed of before, find it impossible to live without things they lived without before. Somewhere, somehow, a lawyer changes from a person who gets intense pleasure from being able to buy her first car stereo to a person enraged over a $400K bonus.
But usually, we believe what our groups believe, obediently copying the perceptions of our elites and accepting the world as they define it. This is how status games are played and how human culture has to work. We can’t be expected to test for ourselves every fact on which we have to rely, so instead we look upwards for guidance. We have faith. We believe. And sometimes we end up believing crazy things.
He indoctrination was rapid. She played that slot machine for status and kept on winning. “You’re socially rewarded for going with the group. It’s Facebook likes, it’s comments like ‘yeah way to go Mom, you’re strong, you’re so mart, you’re doing the best thing.’” She found the experience captivating. There was also the thing of — this is happening and we need to do something about it. So we were rallying the forces. It felt political.
I asked Maranda if part of the point was to go back to the group and report in, for status rewards. “I went to the doctor and boy did I show them.” “I went to my cousin’s today and I was spitting fire.” The louder you were, the more unmovable you were, the higher you moved up socially.
The status on offer was bountiful. When she turned her back and rebelled, she wasn’t permitted to simply vanish. They took the time to let her know: all that status she’d been awarded had been revoked. She was nobody. Worse than nobody. It would be better if she were dead.
More often than not, citizens do not choose which party to support based on policy opinion; they alter their policy opinion according to which party they support. Usually they do not notice that this is happening, and most, in fact, feel outraged when the possibility is mentioned.
And intelligence is no inoculation. On the contrary. When brilliant people are motivated to find evidence to support their group’s false beliefs, they’re brilliant at finding it. Their superior intelligence simply makes them better at reaffirming their bent story of reality.
Needless to say, we’re not entirely gullible. When the facts of a matter are strong and we devote sincere conscious effort to understanding them, we can be perfectly capable of rationality. Personal experience can throw us out of our bubble. There are also categories of beliefs we can accept without a struggle, many of them objectively measurable and devoid of status value, such as the length of the Mississippi River. If we don’t endlessly debate these kinds of facts, it’s because we don’t have any of our status invested in them. But when we do, our thinking can rapidly become deranged.
In the places where status is won and lost, we can be vulnerable to believing almost anything. Billions play games in the fantastic dreamworlds conjured by the great religions: Christians believe evil was introduced to the world as a punishment from God after a woman ate an apple. Jews believe they’re a chosen people selected by God to be a “light unto nations.” Buddhists believe there are 31 planes of existence.
84% of the world’s population identifies as religious shows the game’s capacity to flood our minds with strange notions: our compulsion to seek schemes that make connection and status and weave wild dreams around them.
If moral truth exists anywhere, it’s in our DNA: that ancient game-playing coding that evolved to nudge us into behaving cooperatively in hunter-gatherer groups. But these instructions — strive to appear virtuous; privilege your group over others — are few and vague and open to riotous differences in interpretation. All the rest is an act of shared imagination. It’s a dream we weave around a status game.
As alien as these norms might seem, they’ll feel morally correct to most who play by them. They’re part of the dream of reality in which they exist, a dream that feels no less obvious and true to them as ours does to us.
Meanwhile, Gandhi once explained his agitation against the British thusly: “Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the black African whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and pass his life in indolence and nakedness.
To say that one had “seen the light” is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows (regardless of what faith he has been converted to). The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern, like stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by one magic stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past — a past already remote, when one lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don’t know. Nothing henceforth can disturb the convert’s inner peace and serenity — except the occasional fear of losing faith again, losing thereby what alone makes life worth living, and falling back into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Securing connection was as easy as believing. But to earn status, a player had to do more than merely agree. They had to become possessed by the belief, defending it, evangelizing it, acting it out in their life. The more they allowed the belief to take them over, the higher they climbed.
Virtue games often do weave a story around their striving that says they are motivated by the solving of some critical problem — frequently in the form of some evil, high-status enemy — but the truth is betrayed by their mode of play.
The Satan-hunters were simply doing what nature had programmed them to do. Their brains detected a game that offered fantastic rewards: connection with like-minded others and status in the form of influence, acclaim, cash, fame, proximity to the prestigious games of law, media and government and the reputation of an avenging angel, defending the lives of America’s children. And so they played. They believed the dream and they believed it sincerely. Of course they did. They were only human.
More players playing means more status being generated, and so the game’s sucking power becomes more monstrous still, and so on and so on in a runaway process, the whole thing becoming self-sustaining, self-expanding, with it eventually becoming sufficiently massive to be felt right across the culture.
They might be flags, buildings, battle sites, uniforms, gang colors, ceremonies, books, songs, phrases, or the images, remains of birthplaces of elite players, living or dead. Leaders can become sacred. Perhaps the ultimate sacred symbol is the monotheistic God: the all-powerful creator and referee of his status game.
When a group of people make something sacred, they lose the ability to think clearly about it.
Sacred symbols can be seen as physical carriers of our status: when someone attacks them, they attack our game and our co-playing kin; they degrade all that we’ve earned and all that we value. They scorn our dream of reality, our lived experience, and the ways we think and act in it in order to feel superior. This is why beliefs can make us irrational and violent. It’s why they can send us to war.
If they’re living by a conflicting set of rules and symbols, they’re implying our rules and symbols — our criteria for claiming status — are invalid, and our dream of reality is false. They insult us simply by being who they are. It should be no surprise, then, that encountering someone with conflicting beliefs can feel like an attack: status is a resource, and they’re taking it from us.
We jab our fingernails into every crack we find in their dream of reality and, with each one discovered, the threat of their rival claim to status diminishes as ours is reaffirmed. And so our bloodied understanding of life and how it operates is healed; our belief in our game and our criteria for earning status is restored, and the thick evening sunlight of self-satisfaction is allowed to return.
But the dream is now becoming dangerous. It takes the differences between us and our rivals and weaves over them a moral story that says they’re not simply wrong, they’re evil. This permits further vilification.
We can always find new reasons to justify our hatreds when our diseased dream of reality keeps imagining them into being.
Our hatreds are further justified by the belief that our status game is not an act of shared imagination that’s local to our kind, but real. And if our criteria for claiming status are real, that means everyone should abide by them. We have a spiteful and snobbish habit of judging all people by our rules, whether they’re playing with us or not. If they’re not playing by the imagined rules we’ve decided are important and true, we give them a plummeting.
People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right.
Most of the time, we don’t fight with violence. Instead we engage in battles of belief. For humans, ideology is territory. Our species has an astonishing capacity for fighting wars over the content of other people’s minds.
People everywhere crusade on behalf of their sacred beliefs. When we go on the attack, like this, we’re reaching into the minds of others and attempting to rearrange them such that they start playing our games, dreaming our dreams instead of theirs. Every convert’s theft is transmogrified into a gift: they go from stealing status from us to offering it. And it feels good.
Humans love to become superior: to win. Groups tend to prefer the simple fact of winning against other groups even if it means fewer benefits for its players.
Having status means being above. We continually seek to rearrange the world such that our game is on top, all the while telling self-serving stories about the immaculate virtue of our behavior. The lesson many will find impossible to accept is this: never believe groups who claim they just want “equality” with rivals. No matter what they say, no matter what they believe, they don’t. They weave a marvelous dream of fairness for all, but the dream is a lie.
Individuals who experience combat with one another maintained stronger personal connections even 40 years later. Their bonds were intensified yet further if their units had suffered deaths, suggesting the more intense the social threat, the greater the social bonding.
And it would be that group, not the individual, that held final authority.
If a player attempts to dominate a game through terror, that player is taken out. Execution is the ultimate humiliation; a rejection by the game that’s physical as well as psychological, not to mention final. But unfortunately for the history of the human race, it’s not quite straightforward as this. The problem is, there aren’t 2 separate and easily identifiable forms of player — tyrants and non-tyrants. We all contain the capacity for tyranny. Who’s the tyrant and who’s the victim can often be difficult to tell. The cousins themselves could be brutal.
I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
When a game goes to war, it tightens up. It strengthens its dominion over individual players, whose selves increasingly merge in its service. Its dreams turn wilder and darker. Its heroes seem more heroic, its villains more villainous, its moral lessons become purer. Players who tell tales that reaffirm its self-serving narrative are rewarded with status.
Their attacks are frequently enabled by resentful, ambitious low-status players who conspire in the gossiping and mobbing.
They’ll sense its gathering madness. But, nervous of the power of the cousins, they’ll pretend to believe. These false believers still act as if they’re loyal players, adhering to the game’s rules, symbols and beliefs. But in the secret psychological territory in their skulls, they’ve lost faith in the dreamed-up story.
She finds nations that have suffered events such as disease, famine, natural disaster or conflict have tighter cultures with stronger social norms and less tolerance for deviance than looser nations.
People raised in tight cultures are also greater respecters of hierarchy and authority. Tight players are more likely to earn status from precisely correct moral behavior, to a sometimes comical extent.
A true cult member has one active identity. Players attracted to them are often those who’ve failed at the games of conventional life.
Successful groups are status generating machines. They thrive when they make status, both for their player and for the game itself. People need status: they look to their games to get it.
Leaders rent their thrones from these subordinates. If their formal position at the heights is to be assured, and they’re to remain comfortable behind their giant desk, they must earn true status in the minds of their players. This means succeeding in the grind of making status for the group, and distributing it down through the hierarchy in ways that generally adhere to its rules. It might come in the form of titles or money or medals or secret knowledge or a ladder to heaven, or just simply appreciation. Even dictators have players to please, not least their military elites who ought to be rewarded if their reign of dominance is to continue. No game — not even a cult — can survive when every player but one feels hopeless and useless.
Successful organizations help keep their most talented employees from leaving by providing those individuals with high status. When rewarded with status, workers identify more with their group, are more committed to it and come to view it more positively. We reward players who help our games win. We raise them in rank. If they prove themselves sufficiently useful, we might even allow them to lead us for a while.
Since the end of WW2, many have puzzled at how the forces of irrationality and evil could have risen with such ferocity in a nation as advanced as Germany. Once again, it conflicts with our fundamental ideas about human nature. How could such a cultured and brilliant people have voted a violent anti-Semite to be their leader? And then cheered him hysterically, in squares crammed with thousands, as if he were a god?
The sense of outrage and disbelief that swept through the German upper and middle classes like a shock wave was almost universal. Germany had been brutally expelled from the ranks of the Great Powers and covered in what they considered to be undeserved shame. Germany was superior, and Germans knew it. They looked at the ruined hierarchy and wove around it a self-serving story that said their defeat was engineered by powerful and sinister forces.
He wove a fantastic dream that millions of intended voters found irresistible: they were members of an elite Aryan master race, “the Prometheus of mankind, out of whose bright forehead springs the divine spark of genius at all times.”
The party finesses their message to suit the values of every game that mattered: there was a Hitler for rural workers, a Hitler for thinkers, a Hitler for war veteran, a Hitler for businessmen, a Hitler for women. The Nazis offered something for everyone.
Once individuals start to play and begin to enjoy a game’s rewards, it becomes part of their identity. They come to rely on it, to defend it, to evangelize it. And so the game becomes self-supporting, self-reinforcing, as each individual player now requires it to be real and true in order for their status to be real and true. The tyrannical cousins roar forth in their behavior.
There’s a critical warning in all this: tyrants often start by telling you what you already believe. When they arrive, they weave their irresistible self-serving dream, promising that you deserve more status, just as you’d always suspected, and pointing accusingly at those you’d already figured to be your enemies — child abusers, conversos, big business, Communists, Jews. They make accusation and gossip; you become angry, enthusiastic and morally outraged. You begin to play. Once they’ve got you, they tighten up. Their beliefs become more extreme, more specific and are policed more severely; second-self tactics of dominance are widely deployed. The most tyrannical games — cults and fundamentalist political and religious movements — insist on complete conformity in thought and deed; their dream of reality colonizing your neutral territory entirely. They seek to become a player’s sole source of status; no rival games are easily tolerated.
When a game becomes tight, so does the story it tells of the world. It looks at the hierarchy — at where it sits versus its rivals — and conjures a simplistic, self-serving, moralistic tale that explains how that hierarchy came to be. This story is always the same: we’re the virtuous players, deserving of more, and those who block our path are evil. The story is seductive: it’s what players want to believe.
And so our journey into the status game arrives at hell. At an earlier stop, we encountered the disordered interior worlds of individual killers and there discovered powerful currents of grandiosity and humiliation.
We made them clean out the toilets, smeared them with black paint and organized “control monster teams” to see that it was done properly. It took nearly a week of constant struggle to make a teacher admit he had said “Mao was wrong” in conversation.
This revolution he’d joined was a status goldrush: its rewards were immense. Of course it was fun. For willing players on the right side of the gun, tyranny always is.
What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years of humiliation and disgrace.
- What if a rich relative were to give you a lot of money to the cause in return for you cancelling or just postponing a martyrdom action?
- Is that a joke? I would throw the money in his face.
- Why?
- Because only in fighting and dying for a cause is there nobility in life.
Terrorists believe in their moral virtue, and so do racist colonialists. The imperialists of the British Empire told a self-serving story that said they were leading lower forms of life on a journey toward the promised land of civilization.
It’s typical for targets to be described in terms of low-status creatures: to the Communists, the middle classes were “leeches”; to the Nazis, the Jews were “lice”; to the French in Algeria, the Muslims were “rats”; to the Boers, the Africans were “baboons.”
The most potent weapon of mass destruction is the humiliated mind.
Genocides can happen when a high-status group experiences a decline in or threat to its status, or a low-status group rises or attempts to rise in status. Toxic morality is deeply implicated in these episodes: genocide is highly moralistic. Genocides are dominance-virtue games, carried out in the name of justice and fairness and the restoration of the correct order. They’re not about the mere killing or cleansing of foes, they’re about healing the perpetrators’ wounded grandiosity with grotesque, therapeutic performances of dominance and humiliation.
“You Tutsi women think you are too good for us”; “You Tutsi girls are too proud”; “Remember the past months when you were proud of yourselves and didn’t look at us because you felt we were lower than you? Now that will never happen again.”
For survivor Marian Turski, the worst thing about Auschwitz wasn’t the cold, the hunger or the beatings but the humiliation.
Getting along and getting ahead meant conforming to these rules and symbols, policing them when others erred, deferring to superiors, meeting obligations, building a reputation for loyalty and duty and for offering value to the game’s overall success.
But virtue and dominance aren’t the only way humans evolved to make status. We can also use strategies of success. In the tribes in which we evolved, it was possible to earn rank by being useful to others with displays of competence: the best hunter, the best sorcerer, the best finder of honey. The modern world is heavily flavored by the success games of scientists, technologists, researchers, corporations and creatives. Their status is won not by showing and enforcing moral correctness, but by becoming smarter, wealthier and more innovative and efficient.
Elsewhere, researchers hunting the roots of Western individualism look to Ancient Greece. They, too, note its geography: it was a pointillist civilization formed of around 1K city states, dotted about many coasts and craggy islands in which large-scale farming was mostly impossible. This compelled people to get by, not as obedient members of agrarian communities, but as entrepreneurs: fishermen, makers of pottery, tanners of hides.
Across the world, wealth and the great religions constituted major threats to the dominant powers of King, Queen and Emperor.
And it works: research on the effects of religious conversion finds the psychological and emotional condition of most converts improves after joining.
The dream the monotheists wove atop the game of life called for absolute faith. God couldn’t be worshipped by sacrifice, like pagan gods, but by “proper belief.” Anyone who didn’t believe the right things would be considered a transgressor before God. Punishments for incorrect belief were as severe as an imagination could allow: an endless degrading in the torments of hell.
To insult a priest was a crime against God. The Church became rich, the largest landowner in Europe, owning 44% of France and half of Germany. Inevitably, its professional class became status drunk, surrounding themselves with treasures, wearing large hats, insisting on absolute deference in their presence — knees bent, hats doffed — and to be addressed by titles such as Your Holiness, Your Excellency and Your Grace.
What is a man by himself, without grace? A being more evil than the demon. Life was a game for status that was mostly won in the eternity; where you ended up was a matter of how well you played. The tricky thing was knowing whether one had done enough to count as an unqualified “yes” to God’s invitation. For many terrified people, this question became an obsession.
Guilds were success game. They sprang up around all manner of trades, including blacksmiths, brewers, weavers, glass-makers, dyers, shoemakers, locksmiths, bakers and skinners. Each had their own set of rules as symbols by which they awarded success-based status, with members granted the title “master craftsman.”
He and other thinkers, most famously John Calvin, disagreed on much, but eventually a new form of Christian game, for “Protestants,” came into being.
For Protestants, life was no longer a grueling test for heaven or hell. God already knew where you were ending up. Believers were to look for clues of “assurance” to see if they were saved or damned: signs of “elect status” could be found in their own personal behavior such as virtuous and sober living, but also in the accrual of wealth and rank on earth. Believers were said to have a personal “calling.” God had endowed them with special talents that they should seek to maximize by choosing the right occupation or vocation, then working hard in it. Playing for personal success became holy, an act of worship.
A sacred virtue was made of education: reading wasn’t merely encouraged, it was a foundational rule of the game, necessary for developing individual moral behavior and building a personal relationship with God.
Merely mastering the knowledge of the past was of little value in this game. Earning status was about the new: progress, innovation, insight and originality. The financial rewards could be significant: the best players earned patronage by dukes, princes and kings, who’d boast of having the finest minds in their employ, and make profitable use of their expertise in their state-building.
The first live wire was our capacity for culture. Humans had been able to conquer the planet partly because we exist in a web of stored information. Every individual born didn’t have to learn everything for themselves afresh: knowledge was communicated by elders and passed down through the generations. But in the old kin-based virtue games, this knowledge often just bounced around the group. The ideas of other collectives were typically of little interest. Innovation never sat well in these virtue games, where worship of ancestry and the wisdom of the past dominated a player’s thoughts. As problems were encountered and solved, innovation naturally took place, but not often for its own sake. In the era of virtue games, aside from relatively rare bursts here and there, progress was usually slow.
In Italy the old elites eventually re-established their dominion over the new. In Venice, entrepreneurial merchants and bankers were shut out of The Great Council, its center of political power. The Council was colonized by a hereditary aristocracy who then ate away at the traders’ ability to create wealth, leading to the city’s decline.
Waste lands enclosed, roads improved, bridges erected, canals cut, tunnels excavated, marshes drained and cultivated, docks formed, ports enlarged: these and a thousand kindred operations which present themselves spontaneously to the mind’s eye, prove that we have not yet attained our zenith, and open an exquisite prospect of future stability and greatness.
Perhaps more than anyone, they hyper-individualistic, self-interested money-obsessed world we live in today is linked to him and his theories of how free markets and competition generate prosperity. But Smith didn’t believe greed for wealth was the ultimate driver of economies. He thought something else was going on, something deeper in the human psyche. “Humanity does not desire to be great, but to be beloved. The rich man glories in his riches because he feels they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world and he is fonder of his wealth on this account than for all the other advantages it procures him.” We strive to better our lot because we seek to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of.
For all of history prior to the Industrial Revolution, global life expectancy bounded around the age of 30.
In 1800, nearly 95% of humans lived in extreme poverty.
We are, in the 21st century, as we’ve always been: great apes hunting connection and status inside shared hallucinations. The contemporary Western self is a strange, anxious, hungry thing. It emerges out of a market economy that’s heavily focussed on success. While we’ll never stop playing games of dominance and virtue, our society emphasize individual competence and achievement. We win points for personal success throughout our lives, in the highly formalized and often precisely graded games of school, college and work.
Following the depression and world wars, the economies of the USA and Britain became more rule-bound, virtuous and group-focused: it was an era of increasing regulation over banking and business, high taxation, broad unionization and “big government” innovations such as the New Deal, the Social Security Act, the minimum wage and the welfare state. American and British players became concomitantly collective: the monkey-suited “Corporation Man” of the 1950s suburbs gave birth to the even more collectively minded hippies, with their anti-materialistic values.
In just 20 years we’d gone from fuck The Man to greed is good. The deeper we moved into the neoliberal age, the more we were consumed by its dream.
Psychologists have a name for people with a heightened sensitivity to signals of failure: perfectionist.
It’s all too easy, in these modern-colossal hierarchies, to feel as if we’re failing, even as we provide food, shelter and security for our families that’s ample. To live in the neoliberal dreamworld is to suffer some form of status anxiety.
When we force hardworking people to accept handouts, we commit on them an injustice: we steal from them something they’ve earned.
Political battles between the left and right are often concerned with how success games create and share the wealth they produce. Is it better to allow creators maximal freedom to make as much cash as possible, and feed the economy? Or do we tighten control, increasing their virtue element via tax and regulation, forcing more fairness throughout the game? These are essential debates. While it’s clear capitalism has an almost magical capacity to raise living standards and life expectancy, it’s no less clear that leaders of success games can be relentless and sociopathic in their desire to win.
In Britain, 1859 saw the publication of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, the first book of its kind. Filled with inspiring case studies, it argued even players at the bottom of the game could move up with hard work and perseverance.
Today these views are more than outrageous, they’re taboo. Even extremists who cling to them understand that publicly voicing these beliefs in the West is to contravene sacred rules and so to risk prosecution, expulsion from employment, public shaming and perhaps physical attack. But only recently, deeply prejudicial concepts like these were mainstream and accepted by many of the world’s smartest thinkers.
Billions of people still play these games, drawing significant amounts of status from the color of their skin, their country of birth or whether they have XX or XY chromosomes. This is virtue play. It’s inward-looking and concerned with defense of our kin: honor, duty and moral arguments usually take precedence over skill, talent or knowledge.
Children raised in these games have elite rules and symbols written into their brains from birth. Social class isn’t simply about wealth and ancestry, it’s about taste in the arts, food, sports, holiday and clothing. It’s in a person’s accent and the words they use.
Britain’s most prestigious games, in law, government, the media and the arts, are famously over-represented by such players. Around 7% of Britons have been privately educated, yet they make up over 70% of the nation’s barristers and 60% of its Oscar winners. Less than 1% of the population attended Oxbridge, yet their graduates have produced the majority of the nation’s PMs.
The powerful connection felt by those educated at Elton and similar elite schools can unjustly prevent ambitious, deserving players from breaking in. Otherwise exceptional people can feel disoriented and excluded, as their own subconscious language and status fails to connect.
Privilege is an explosive notion. As we’ve learned, humans are designed to be maddened by others they experience as prancing about above them, their status unfair and on display. Resentment pricks us into desiring to pull them down, whether by social distancing, mockery, humiliation, ostracization or execution.
There are any number of ways to have privilege in the game of life. You can be: smart, attractive, mentally healthy, talented, able-bodied, male in a male-dominated game, female in a female-dominated game, under the age of 30, privately schooled, university educated, not born into poverty, professionally connected, live in the right part of the county, have successful or connected parents, and so on. The truth about privilege is that it’s a combination of all these factors and more: it’s complex, dynamic and unique to who we are and what games we’re trying to play.
A major form of privilege is genetic.
The problem with elites is they’re an unsolvable problem; an inevitability of the game we’ve programmed to play. They’ll always be there and they’ll never not make us feel small.
She describes the perception they’re working as hard as their parents, yet are being rewarded with a poorer quality of life. “They feel like they’re doing what they were told they needed to do to get ahead. And somehow it’s not enough.”
Linking to a report on the plight of poor white workers in a rural chicken processing plant earning as little as $13 an hour, she commented: “Oh shut the fuck up. How does it feel to have every advantage and still be a whiny asshole?”
The Christians conjured hell, which generated salvation anxiety, then presented their game as the only way to escape it. Similarly, New Left activists threaten hell by radically rewriting the terms by which accusations of bigotry can be made, lowering the bar such that mere whiteness or masculinity are signs of guilt. Having generated salvation anxiety, they present their movement as the sole available remedy. Hell’s threat can only be escaped with conspicuous, zealous and highly correct play.
Tight virtue games weave hostile dreams. They live inside imagined territories that are blasted by the winds of toxic morality. Their players believe themselves to be heroes battling grotesque forces of injustice. These cartoons of reality become dangerous by casting their enemies into the role of 1-dimensional baddie.
An 18-year-old man said that Asians “walk around like they’re higher than us, when we were the ones who welcomed them into our country. Everyone is really annoyed with it. I feel like I’m on the outside looking inside to the immigrants.”
The projects of neoliberalism and globalization have de-ranked their games and covered their physical and neural territories with symbols of defeat. It doesn’t matter to them that immigration is a win for the British economy; neither do they have a visceral experience of the automation and outsourcing that’s also been responsible for their decline. All they see is their decline.
What if it was possible to live without status? To create a society in which the requirement for getting ahead was eradicated, and getting along was all that mattered? The misery and injustice the status game creates, the envy and the fury and the sheer bloody exhaustion of it — all gone. No more private ownership. Everything must be shared. We’ll live and work communally. If we all strive on behalf of one another, instead of ourselves, we’ll create an incredible bounty that can be given out according to need rather than greed. We’ll call it “Communism.”
But now a new class — industrialists, capitalists, the “bourgeoisie” — were becoming conspicuously wealthy, often on the back of herds of mistreated and humiliated workers. Anger began to swell, not only in pockets of the working class but among intellectuals who resented the rise in status of these nouveaux riches.
In a Communist world, wrote Marx, “society regulate the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner… without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
The dream woven by the Communists told of a rebirth of the human animal. Capitalist systems had forced people away from their natural state of cooperation and into one of competition, a harsh world where love and sharing had been monsterized into one of cost, benefit and trade in which a human being was of value only to the extent they could help another get ahead.
Following Sasha’s arrest and execution, the proud family were tossed back to the “margins of society.” Dignitaries who’d once been guests stopped visiting; old friends never called; strangers stared at them in the streets.
As one leading revolutionary put it: “for centuries our fathers and grandfathers have been cleaning up the dirt and filth of the ruling classes, but now we will make them clean up our dirt.”
As players play, they come to believe. Millions plugged their own personal status into the game of the Communists, absorbed the dream and became loyal and true.
Instead, he had to think “dialectically” and interpreted the world through the eyes of the party. “Gradually I learned to distrust my mechanistic preoccupation with facts and to regard the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on the proper color and fell into their proper place.” Like the cult members, he found himself willingly lost int he dream of his game. “We craved to become single and simple-minded.”
This was an extremely tight game that had, by now, been being played for nearly 2 decades: conformity was the defining mode of life. The party didn’t accept the concept of the private life. “Everything people did in private was political and thus was subject to the censure of the collective.
But if everyone was saying they believed the Communist dream, how could we find out who the deviants were? How could Stalin know which of his elite were truly loyal and which were playing a different game in the secret worlds inside their heads? Although he was at the absolute pinnacle in the formal Communist game, Stalin had no way of knowing where he stood in the true game that was playing in the minds of those around him. The purges began here, in the Bolsheviks’ need to unmask potential enemies.
“The shameful example of my fall shows that the slightest rift with the Party, the slightest insincerity towards the Party, the slightest hesitation with regard to the leadership, with regard to the Central Committee, is enough to land you in the camp of counterrevolution.”
Just as we’ve seen in periods of extreme tightness under the Nazis and the Spanish Inquisition, a wave of denunciations began. There were millions of informants: friends, colleagues and family members, some motivated by fear, others grudge and resentment and personal ambition and others by true belief.
Stalin was creating status games for people, generating aspiration and ambition and meaning. These new upwardly mobile classes were encouraged further by Stalin’s stunning turning away from the founding dream of perfect equality. Rather than there being no social classes, he declared there were actually 3: workers, peasants and intelligentsia. Old symbols of hierarchy, including degrees and honorary titles, were brought out of abolishment just as new titles such as “The Hero of the Soviet Union” and “The Distinguished Master of Sport” were introduced.
More than 2K years before the revolution, the Ancient Greek who’d first dreamed the Communist dream had been corrected by his student, Aristotle, who’d pointed out it wasn’t actually wealth or private ownership that created the human yearning to get ahead. That yearning was part of our nature: it is not possession but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized.
The parable of the Communists reveals the impossibility of ridding human existence of the game. The drive to get ahead will always assert itself. It’s in us. It’s who we are. The first decades of the Soviet Union find the status game in all its details: its irresponsibility; its capacity to raise violence; the grandiosity it inspires in winning players and leaders; the inevitability of elites; the flaw that makes people believe they’re always deserving of more status; the use of humiliation as the ultimate weapon; the horror of the cousins and their genius for tyranny; the ideological war games that rage across neural territories; our vulnerability to believing almost any dream of reality if our status depends on it; the capacity for that dream to pervert our perception of reality; the danger of active belief; esoteric language; zealous leaders who cast visions of heavenly status in future promised lands and target enemies to its rising; the anger and enthusiasm they inspire; the cycle of gossip, outrage, consensus and harsh punishment; the paranoia that can afflict leaders and the terrors it brings; the grim magic of toxic morality and its conjuring trick of making evil seem virtuous; the necessity of games to generate status if they’re to endure; the world-changing power of the status goldrush.
The story idealists sometimes tell of humanity says we’re natural seekers of equality. This isn’t true. Utopians talk of injustice while building new hierarchies and placing themselves at the top. We all do this. It’s in our nature. The urge for rank is ineradicable. It’s the secret goal of our lives, to win status for ourselves and our game — and gain as much of it over you and you and you as we can. It’s how we make meaning. It’s how we make identity. It’s the worst of us, it’s the best of us and it’s the inescapable truth of us: for humans, equality will always be the impossible dream.
Follow the rules, and follow them well, and you can expect to feel great.
When encountering others, people ask of them 2 fundamental questions: “What are their intentions?” and “What’s their capacity to pursue them?” If we want to supply the right answers, and so to be received positively, we should behave in ways that imply warmth and competence.
When we’re warm, we imply we’re not going to use dominance; when sincere, that we’re going to play fairly; when competence, that we’re going to be valuable to the game itself, both in its own battles for status, and to individual players who might learn from us.
For leaders, this warmth, sincerity, competence rule is slightly different. While warmth can certainly be advisable, especially when dealing with pampered elites, it’s perhaps more critical to show zeal on behalf of the game. Throughout history, leaders have succeeded by telling a story that says their group is deserving of more status, which, under their direction, they’ll win. But it remains important this evangelical passion doesn’t morph into arrogance. No one likes a big shot.
It’s easy to forget we have status to give, that it costs nothing and it never runs out. Creating small moments of prestige means always seeking opportunities to use it. Allowing others to feel statusful makes it more likely they’ll accept our influence. Whether we’re asking for a favor or issuing a task to a subordinate, it’s advisable to resist even subtle markers of dominance, allowing them to reach the “correct” decision without putting them under pressure. If they sense they’ve had no choice in the matter, they’re robbed of the gift of feeling good about their action.
Given the game’s ability to mould our perception of reality, how can we know if we’ve been seduced? It’s possible to sense what kind of game we’re in by observing the ways in which status is typically awarded. Tyrannies are virtue-dominance games. Much of their daily play and conversation will focus on matters of obedience, belief and enemies.
Perhaps the best mode of protection is to play many games. People who appear brainwashed have invested too much of their identity into a single game. They rely on it wholly for their connection and status, the maintenance of which requires them to be filled up with its dream of reality, no matter how delusional. Not only does this put them at risk of committing harm to others, they risk catastrophic collapse themselves. If the game fails, or they become expelled, their identity — their very self — can disintegrate. Those with “complex,” multiple self-identities tend to be happier, healthier and have more stable emotional lives.
Some forms of status are easier to win than others. For those of us who aren’t pretty, virtue is probably the easiest to find of all. It’s as simple as judging people: because status is relative, their degrading raises us up, if only in our minds.
Many of us could benefit from consciously reducing our moral sphere. How much time do you devote to the judging of other people? How much cheap and tainted status do you grab for yourself by doing so? Reducing our moral sphere means casting our eyes inwards, concerning ourselves mostly with our own behavior instead of that of others. It means ceasing the casual condemnation of distant players living different dreams which we refuse to understand and are all too easy to belittle and hate.
We concoct it, as if by magic, out of those endless symbols: deference, influence, money, flattery, eye contact, clothing, jewellery, professional titles, measures of orange juice, left or right on the plane. We invest the years of our lives into projects that become of all-devouring importance.
While we can never separate ourselves from the game, wisdom can be gained from simply knowing that it’s there.
I believe we can all take consolation in the knowledge that nobody ever gets there, not the superstars, the presidents, the geniuses or the artists we gaze up at in envy and awe. That promised land is a mirage. It’s a myth. In our lowest moments, we should remind ourselves of the truth of the dream: that life is not a story, but a game with no end. This means it isn’t a final victory we should seek but simple, humble progress: the never-ending pleasure of moving in the right direction. Nobody wins the status game. They’re not supposed to. The meaning of life is not to win, it’s to play.