The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It

by Will Storr

Not only did Rodger, Kemper and Kaczynski experience severe humiliation, they also had an immense psychological height from which to fall. All were intelligent – Kemper had an IQ of 145, near genius level – and all were markedly grandiose, with Kaczynski hoping to spearhead a global revolution and Rodger’s autobiography greasy with entitlement and narcissism, including descriptions of himself as a ‘beautiful, magnificent gentleman’.

Writes mental health expert Professor Marit Svindseth, ‘even the slightest disagreement or slur from a person of similar or higher-status rank might be enough to humiliate the narcissist’.

One of the most successful status games I’ve come across is that of the internationally popular health regimen CrossFit. Founded in the U.S. in 2000, it brilliantly uses the desire for connection and status to drive its members sometimes to near-addiction.

At CrossFit, status is not jealously guarded by individuals fighting over a zero-sum place on a single leader board, but lavished at any player who strives.

Relative smallness is another property of healthy status games.

In the Stone Age, the tribal subgroups in which we spent most of our time numbered perhaps twenty-five to thirty people, many of them extended family members.

Rivalry is distinguished from competition by its focus.

When we earn connection and status, we thrive; when we lose it we can become sick, sad, suicidal and murderous.

Social media is a status game.

In 2003 he published Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.

When you pack a mobile persuasive technology with you, you pack a source of influence. At any time (ideally, at the appropriate time), the device can suggest, encourage, and reward; it can track your performance or lead you through a process.’ It could do this with ‘microsuasion’ elements – notifications, badges or symbols of status: all the nudges with which we’re now familiar on social media.

The model said a person is compelled to act when three forces collide in a moment: motivation (we must want the thing); trigger (something must happen to trigger a desire to get more of it) and ability (it must be easy).

He described a way of issuing rewards such that they’d encourage compulsive behaviours. 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 behaviour’.

It’s not clear the technologists are fully aware what their users are actually gambling with. Social media is a slot machine for status. This is what makes it so obsessively compelling.

Facebook’s former vice president of user growth, Chamath Palihapitiya, once said the site aimed ‘to psychologically figure out how to manipulate you as fast as possible

Status drunkenness is practically the defining condition of royalty, with its palaces and crowns and compulsory rituals of deference.

Today’s titans of capitalism often ache with the flaw, their shining headquarters being flophouses of status drunkenness. The condition of terrible, gibbering conceit that’s befallen some of our leaders of industry and finance was exposed following the global financial crisis. When the CEOs of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors travelled to Washington on a begging mission for public money, they did so in private jets. Over in the UK a household name was made of Fred Goodwin, the CEO who walked the Royal Bank of Scotland into debts of over £24 billion and a taxpayer bailout of £45 billion.

the most successful leaders are usually those with the ‘least compliant’ followers

‘I’ve been addicted to almost every substance known to man and the most addicting of them all is fame.’

The elites, so far above us, will never find what they’re looking for. 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. Its gangrene drips through all of human life. People feel perfectly comfortable being perfectly cruel about celebrities, CEOs, politicians and royalty, as if their elevated rank makes them immune to pain.

The exceptions we make tend to be for ambassadors for our groups: artists, thinkers, athletes and leaders with whom we strongly identify. They seem to symbolise us, somehow. They carry with them a piece of our own identity, a pound of our flesh – so their success becomes our success and we cheer it wildly.

Our settling down and claiming the earth triggered a monstrous expansion of the status game from which we’ve never recovered.

Surprisingly, what made the most difference to their behaviour 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.

The writing game that authors play is full of such zero-sum battles: limited spots in newspaper review pages; ‘new release’ displays in book shops; positions in numbered sales ranks and the status of ‘lead title’ at publishing houses. From our first day at school right up to retirement, most of us find ourselves warring over status-freighted prizes. Life in the tribe would have featured far fewer such contests. Though I can’t prove it, I suspect our massively increased exposure to formal zero-sum play is responsible for much of the misery, anxiety and exhaustion we experience as twenty-first-century players.

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.

Religions, it hardly needs pointing out, are virtue games. This means that to succeed – to earn connection and respect in this life and then heaven or a superior life via reincarnation – a player must be moralistic, faithful, obedient and dutiful.

The ultimate purpose of all status games is control. They were designed by evolution to generate cooperation between humans; to force (in the case of dominance) or bribe (in the case of the prestige games of success and virtue) us to conform.

Most researchers agree, however, about the fundamental role of ‘big religion’. It 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.

How does such a system remain stable? If we’re all such relentlessly ambitious players, why have the untouchables cooperated, for thousands of years, with this monstrously degraded dream of life? Many do so because they believe it. Pious untouchables accept they’ve earned their de-grading 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.

A robust society is one in which the general populace is protected from outside threat and status trickles down in ways that are expected.

What creates revolutionary conditions isn’t the steepness of the inequality but the perception the game has stopped paying out as it should.

‘what matters is that people feel they are losing their proper place in society for reasons that are not inevitable and not their fault’.

But for a revolution to succeed, the games at the bottom of the hierarchy require the help of the elites: ‘indeed,’ writes Goldstone, ‘in most revolutions it is the elites who mobilise the population to help them overthrow the regime.’

Elsewhere, Goldstone finds a predictable precursor to societal collapse to be ‘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 of failed elites forming their own status games in opposition to the successful.

Most humans alive today are playing by the rules and symbols of their long-vanquished overlords.

IN MODERN WESTERN societies, 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.

It takes a certain kind of person, with a certain kind of background, to successfully shoot for the moon. And you’re probably not it.

Nobody gets to choose exactly what kind of mind they have – whether they’re confident, shy, a genius, extroverted, or love boxing or literature or smoking weed or the politics of left or right. These things mostly happen to us depending on how our brains develop and what kinds of experiences we have.

People wired to experience greater feelings of thrill and reward when they win are more likely to become wealthy. Most billionaires become billionaires, in part, because they’re monstrously competitive. They may be extroverts who, writes Nettle, ‘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’.

The striking mix of fragility and entitlement she found seems characteristic of the status-striving of some of our most privileged young adults today.

they begin to feel the presence of an ‘imaginary audience’ of others, constantly watching and judging them, a feeling that ‘remains quite high even in adulthood’. 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. As their self-esteem shifts from being based on how they feel in the moment to how they imagine their peers are evaluating them, they begin to crave their approval. Their chase for status can become all consuming.

Addressing a cadre of incoming law students, he wrote: ‘If you go to work for a big firm, you will probably begin to practice law unethically in at least some respects within your first year or two in practice. This happens to most young lawyers in big firms.

‘the culture will pressure you in many subtle ways to replace your values with the system’s’.

‘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.

The system will have succeeded in replacing your values with the system’s values, and the system will be profiting as a result.’

This is what our adult identity adds up to. We are the sum of the games we play.

Our brain has various tricks that nudge us into accepting our game’s story of the world and believing what it’s supposed to: it tells us the members of our group are more intelligent than others; it finds it harder to reason logically over arguments that contradict our group’s beliefs; it processes opinions we already agree with as if they’re facts; it often automatically assumes those who hold different beliefs are stupider, more biased, less moral and less trustworthy than we are, making it all too easy to dismiss them.

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. When psychologists study how people’s religious, political and social identities affect their beliefs, they find that the more educated, numerate and intelligent they are, the more likely they are to endorse the fringe ideas of their groups. This goes for deniers of climate change, vaccination and evolution – the smarter a player is, the greater the likelihood they’ll reject scientific consensus. We’re all vulnerable to believing what our coalition wants us to believe. For anthropologist Professor John Tooby, ‘Coalition mindedness makes everyone, including scientists, far stupider in coalitional collectivities than as individuals.’