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What was the point in voting, we asked, when all you got were slightly different versions of ‘neoliberal’ capitalism? We don’t ask this anymore.
the left lurched leftwards towards identity politics and its new lexicon of insult: gammon, cis, bro, Karen, TERF, mansplainer, manspreader, white, privileged, pale-male-stale.
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.
The arguments in this book are predicated on the simple idea, now well-supported by researchers, that status is a fundamental human need.
Status is what researchers call an ‘ultimate’ rather than a ‘proximate’ drive: it’s a kind of mother-motivation, a deep evolutionary cause of many other downstream beliefs and behaviours that’s been favoured by selection and is written into the design of our brains.
‘As a lifer you have a particular place in the prison hierarchy and as a jailhouse lawyer, you do too,’ he said. ‘All these things give you status and I knew, as soon as I walked out, they’d be irrelevant.’
When asked why we do the things we do, we rarely say, ‘It’s because of status. I really love it.’ It can be distasteful to think of it as any kind of motivating force, let alone a vital one. It contradicts the heroic story we like to tell of ourselves. When we pursue the great goals of our lives, we tend to focus on our happy ending. We want the qualification, the promotion, the milestone, the crown.
To admit to being motivated by improving our rank risks making others think less of us, which loses us rank.
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.
When freedom means expulsion from the meaning you’ve spent your life making, then freedom is hell.
The story we’re often told is that, with sufficient application of self-belief and effort, we can do anything we want; be whoever we want. But it’s not so easy. The world isn’t as it seems. On the other side of that door you won’t find a simple pathway to happiness that you can march up heroically for seven or eight decades. Everyone out there is playing a game.
A wide range of research finds people with depression tend to belong to ‘far fewer’ groups than the rest of the population. Studies across time suggest the more a depressed person identifies with their group – the more of their own sense of self they invest in it – the more their symptoms lift.
One survey of nearly seven thousand residents of Alameda County in California found ‘the people most likely to survive to old age were those with solid face-to-face relationships’, writes psychologist Susan Pinker.
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. It can force us into a ‘defensive crouch’, writes psychologist Professor John Cacioppo, in which we seek to fend off the threat of further rejection. Our perceptions of other people become warped. They start to appear ‘more critical, competitive, denigrating, or otherwise unwelcoming’. These faulty interpretations ‘quickly become
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When we’re chronically deprived of status, the mind may even turn against itself and cause its own destruction. Although the causes of suicide are many and complex, lack of status is a known common driver. Tellingly, it’s sudden movements down the game that can be most dangerous.
A psychologically healthy brain excels at making its owner feel heroic. It does this by reordering our experiences, remixing our memories and rationalising our behaviour, 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.
Moral superiority, they concluded, is a ‘uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion’.
As we’ve learned, humans value connection and status. In order to earn the resources essential for our survival and reproduction, we seek to bond with our co-players; in order to secure more of those resources we seek rank. But how do we gauge this rank? How do we tell how we’re doing in this game of life? We do it, in part, by assigning values to objects. A Cartier watch is worth this much status; a Casio watch is worth that. These ‘status symbols’ tell us, and our co-players, how we’re performing.
When speaking, we emit a low-frequency hum at around 500 hertz. When people meet and talk, their hums shift.
We’re used to thinking of money and power as principal motivating forces of life. But studies suggest that, unlike status, the desire for power over others is not fundamental in humans. Unlike status, it doesn’t strongly predict wellbeing. Moreover, unlike status, the desire for power is quenchable. ‘After acquiring a moderate amount of power, most people become less interested in gaining even more,’ writes sociologist Professor Cecilia Ridgeway. ‘But not so status.’
Status is the original form of currency,
Researchers find our reward systems are activated most when we achieve relative rather than absolute rewards; we’re designed to feel best not when we get more, but when we get more than those around us.
Humans are extraordinarily imaginative creatures who can turn almost anything into status symbols.
We come into being as a collective when we connect with like-minded others whose brains process reality in similar ways; who dream the same dream of life.
Groups of people gather together, agree what symbols they’re going to use to mean ‘status’, then strive to achieve it. These symbols might take the form of money or power or a plastic dumper truck in a kindergarten toy box.
But the truth of human life is that it’s a set of hallucinatory games organised around symbols.
Hunter-gatherer rules were designed for a specific purpose: to help keep our tribes functional and their members working together peacefully and well. A game was created in which prosocial behaviour that benefitted the group was incentivised. 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.
One survey of sixty premodern societies uncovered seven common rules of play that are thought to be universal: help your family; help your group; return favours; 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.
Kate Fox
Among the most studied are the differences between East and West. Westerners tend to see status-pursuit as primarily the job of the individual.
Psychologists find that Westerners generally like to stand out and feel unique, tending towards conceited self-views and rating themselves better than average at all kinds of traits including healthy habits, immunity to bias and driving skills. In one study, 86 per cent of Australians rated their job performance as ‘above average’; in another, 96 per cent of Americans described themselves as ‘special’. East Asian games tend to be more collective. In countries such as Japan and China, status-pursuit is more commonly seen as the responsibility of the group. They’re more likely to feel raised up
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The brain begins learning these rules in infancy. As 2-year-olds, we have around one hundred trillion connections between our brain cells, double that of an adult. This is because, when we’re born, we don’t know where we’re going to pop out.
Baby brains are specialised for many environments, many games. At this age, we’re better than adults at recognising faces of other races and can hear tones in foreign languages that grown-ups are deaf to. But then our brain begins to carve itself to its local environment. Connections start being culled at a rate of up to one hundred thousand per second. We
Much of the rest of human life is comprised of three varieties of status-striving and three 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 games, status is awarded for 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 games.
We shifted away from fist and fang when we began playing games with symbols in the communal imagination. Accounts of how and why this happened can only be speculative and are debated hotly. Some believe that, after we came down from the trees, the threat from predators huddled us into protective groups. As living became denser, males found themselves with more rivals to fight off, so began shifting their mating strategy towards one of pair-bonding, in which they’d offer meat and protection to females in return for preferred sexual access.
For biologist Professor Edward O. Wilson our use of campsites, beginning perhaps a million years ago, was another critical event. He describes them as human ‘nests’ and observes that all animals ‘without exception’ that have achieved the intense mode of survival-through-cooperation of which we’re capable have lived this way.
The current dominant theory says this is why we evolved speech – to gossip
Prestige is our most marvellous 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. We pursue goals, and tackle problems, as members of collaborative groups because we’re programmed to care deeply about what our co-players think of us: we revel in the reward of status they supply.
It can somehow just feel right to copy beliefs and behaviours of high-status people even if they don’t make rational sense. It’s in this way that children in countries such as India overcome the pain of eating spicy foods. Mimicking the actions of high-status people is so desirable, it’s argued, their brains reinterpret the pain signals as pleasurable.
We have an inbuilt preference for those who match our age, race and gender. We attend to them, and thus offer them status, preferentially.
Next we look for ‘skill cues’. Who, in our game, seems particularly able? Research suggests we start mimicking people who display competence at tasks at around 14 months. We also seek out ‘success cues’ – status symbols such as an experienced hunter’s necklace of teeth; a tribal chief’s larger hut; a PhD; a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s Lurums. Our desire to signal success in this way is the cause of the ‘conspicuous consumption’ that occurs across the world.
When we identify prestigious players our subconscious copy-flatter-conform programming is triggered and we allow them to alter our beliefs and behaviour. Status games run on powerlines of influence and deference that crackle up and down their hierarchy. This is why, of all the countless status symbols that exist in human life, influence is probably the most reliable.
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. We might even feel pleased about it, taking the disagreement as a signal of the group’s rigour. But when our attempts at influence fail – especially in public, especially in the witness of higher-status players – we can become preoccupied, livid, bitter and vengeful.
As psychologist Professor Dan McAdams writes, ‘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.’
Humiliation has been described by researchers 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 post-traumatic stress disorder’. Criminal violence expert Professor James Gilligan describes the experience of humiliation as an ‘annihilation of the self’. His decades of research in prisons and prison hospitals, seeking the causes of violence, led him to ‘a psychological truth exemplified by the fact that one after another of the most violent men I have worked with over
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‘the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth’.
The life’s work of Professor Gilligan led him to conclude 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’.
Acute or chronic social rejection has been found to be a major contributory factor in 87 per cent of all school shootings between 1995 and 2003.
