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

by Will Storr

Christians believe evil was introduced to the world as a punishment from God after a woman ate an apple; Muslims believe angels were created on a Wednesday and walk the earth noting down believers’ good and bad acts; Jews believe they’re a chosen people selected by God to be a ‘light unto nations’; Hindus believe eternal souls travel through cycles of birth and rebirth that only cease when a state of perfection is achieved; Jehovah’s Witnesses believe it’s better to die than receive blood transfusions, which are against God’s will; Buddhists believe there are thirty-one planes of existence, including the ‘realm of hungry ghosts’, through which the reincarnated ascend, depending on how well they play their game; Sikh men wear special pants to control their lust and believe hair is God’s creation so must never be cut.

The moral reality we live in is a virtue game. We use our displays of morality to manufacture status.

Moral ‘truths’ are acts of imagination. They’re ideas we play games with.

When the brain discovers a game that seems to make sense of its felt reality and offer a pathway to rewards, it can embrace its rules and symbols with an ecstatic fervour. The noise is silenced! The chaos is tamed! We’ve found our story and the heroic role we’re going to play in it! We’ve learned the truth and the way – the meaning of life! It’s yams, it’s God, it’s money, it’s saving the world from evil big pHARMa. It’s not like a religious experience, it is a religious experience.

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. Virtue games tend to be focussed mostly on the promotion of the game itself, with maintenance of conformity, correct beliefs and behaviours being of heightened importance. The hunters’ core beliefs were often challenged by children in interviews and their virtue play is evident in their magicking of these denials into further evidence that their diseased perception of reality was correct. They were willing to ‘believe the children’, but only when the children confirmed their beliefs. The consequence? Status beyond their wildest dreams.

The standard account of human life struggles to make sense of this. Either these warriors were brave heroes striving to make the world a better place or they were lying, scheming villains gladly sacrificing the innocent. Neither option is credible. 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.

When a group of people make something sacred,’ writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, they ‘lose the ability to think clearly about it.’ Beliefs are like my Mötley Crüe T-shirt, only infinitely more dangerous.

Mark Ethan Smith was the world’s first internet troll.

Because it’s not actually effortless. When we encounter people whose beliefs contradict our own, we can find it acutely uncomfortable.

If they present counter arguments, we often demand unreasonably high evidence for their claims just as we accept unreasonably low evidence for ours.

We think of morality as unquestionably good: how could it be otherwise? But the moral rules we abide by are a component of our status game, the dream world in which we exist. This dream can all too easily become a nightmare, tricking us into believing our acts of barbarity are holy.

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 are compelled to think of their groups as better than others. Without that, they themselves feel inferior.’ At a ‘very primal level’ players are motivated ‘to view the world through a competitive lens, with importance placed on their own group’s superiority’. Humans love to become superior: to win.

They couldn’t even bring themselves to use his preferred pronoun – an act that, symbolically, meant deference to his rules and symbols, thus defeat.

We’re wired to love 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 behaviour.

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 marvellous dream of fairness for all, but the dream is a lie.

no one person is truly in charge of them.

describes us as having lived in a ‘social cage of tradition’ in which players ‘lived or died by their willingness to conform’. The power of these cousins was ‘absolute. If you did not conform to their dictates, you were in danger.’

But the cousins are also inside us. We all contain the capacity for tyranny. 8-month-olds prefer to play with a puppet they’ve seen punishing a transgressor in a puppet show. Children start enforcing rules spontaneously at around age 3. A study into the reasons schoolchildren, aged between 5 and 7, reject playmates found a tendency to do so when their behaviour became a threat to the status of themselves or their clique.

Online mobs play virtue-dominance games: status is awarded to players who enforce their rules to those both inside and outside their groups. They’re also tight: the players involved are highly conformist. These mobs throb with the horrible power of the cousins.

By conforming to the tyrannical cousins, and the frenzy spreading across the gossip networks of social media, she avoided being ‘cancelled’ – which is what we call it when internet mobs, unsatisfied by mockery, denunciation and humiliation meted out online, attempt at having their target de-graded as much as possible in the physical world.

These mobs don’t seek to win over their victims and turn them into allies. They seek the maximal removal of their status and any of its symbols; ideally, reputational death.

In a world dominated by games of prestige, this is how we do killing. The ultimate target of cancellation is not the human, but their belief. Mobs are performative. They say to their many onlookers, ‘if you express this opinion, you too can expect a call from the cousins’. No single person is in charge of these mobs just as no single person can stop them. They just happen, usually when someone expresses a view that contradicts a game’s sacred symbolic beliefs.

Online mobs are like ISIS. They use social media in the same way as the terrorist group. Western cultures have a sacred rule forbidding bigotry. Leaders of corporations and the institutions of government, media and education know that to be suspected of misogyny, racism, homophobia or transphobia is to face reputational death. This is what these mobs threaten.

It found seven distinct opinion groups, describing ‘progressive activists’ as being the one ‘motivated by the pursuit of social justice’. They make for a ‘powerful and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity’. The progressive activists believe the game is essentially fixed, that a player’s life outcomes are ‘determined more by the social structures in which they grow up than by their individual efforts’. Of all the groups, they’re the most highly educated and also the wealthiest, with more earning a household income above £50,000 than any other.

The politically correct policing of speech is largely unwelcome in both nations.

It’s important to note, too, that concluding all progressive activists approve of mob behaviour would be extremely unfair. But this is the point. Those who play in their mobs are a minority of a minority.

And yet too often their commanding voice on social media becomes a commanding voice in our democracies. Like ISIS, they achieve this outsized status partly by the spreading of dread. Their gossip, accusation and merciless fury is designed to weave the illusion of consensus, wake our ancient dread of the cousins and bully us into their social cage.

This mode of performative story-making isn’t only carried out by players on the left.

These hoaxers reaffirmed the simplistic moral stories their games told of the world, reassuring them their criteria for claiming status were true.

These warriors are usually thirstier for rank than other players. An analysis of warriorship in premodern societies discovered a positive relationship between conflict intensity and the status on offer for fighters. ‘Warriors are motivated to participate in warfare because of the possibility of rewards,’ it found. These included ‘increased status, honorific names or titles, or special insignia’. They’re also more likely to be collective narcissists: they believe their game is obviously superior and automatically deserving of deference.

Their strategies are revealed in analyses of tweets that find those most likely to be retweeted contain more moral words, more emotion, and more moral outrage.

A warning that someone’s slipped into this state of tightness is their seeming wholly obsessed with their game’s sacred beliefs and their enforcement. They can seem able to think and talk of little else. They find this pleasurable because they’re playing a symbolic game of status with them: with every thought, utterance and expression of active belief, they earn prizes.

Warriors such as Jamil and Fox earn significant status in spite of their errors, reversals and shamings.

Researchers Dr Justin Tosi and Dr Brandon Warmke describe the process of ‘ramping up’ by which status-strivers, trying to outdo one another, push their game’s moral positions into ever tighter places: ‘Once we hear what others’ views are (or at least what they say they are), we have two options. We can either accept that we are morally ordinary and keep our views as they are, or we can ever so slightly shift our views (or at least our presentation of them) to retain our status as the moral exemplar within the group. For many, the latter option is preferable.’ When warriors ramp up, in this way, they’re ‘not trying to arrive at the correct moral claim … What drives them is the desire to be the most morally impressive.’

The game can then enter what sociologists Dr Bradley Campbell and Dr Jason Manning call a ‘purity spiral’ in which players ‘strive to outdo one another in displays of zealotry, condemning and expelling members of their own movement for smaller and smaller deviations from its core virtues

In tight cultures – that include Pakistan, Germany, Malaysia, Switzerland, India, Singapore, Norway, Turkey, Japan and China – players dress more similarly, buy more similar things and possess superior self-control: they tend to have lower rates of crime, alcohol abuse and obesity.

Cults are the tightest games of all. They maintain their power by being the sole significant source of connection and status for their players. Earning a place in a cult means actively following its belief system and adhering utterly to its game in thought and behaviour, allowing it to colonise your neural territory entirely. A true cult member has one active identity.

This metamorphosis would be ‘the most difficult task that there is … you have to lose everything. You will sever every attachment with that world that you have.’

We seek rules and symbols by which to play a status game. When we find one that’s suitable, and that feels right, we’re vulnerable to absorbing its story, no matter how berserk.

Brains want to know, who do I have to be to earn connection and status?

One analysis concluded successful organisations ‘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. Sociologist Professor Cecilia Ridgeway writes that there’s ‘overwhelming evidence’ status hierarchies operate in this way, by awarding esteem and influence ‘in exchange for a recipient’s perceived value for the group effort’. We reward players who help our games win.

Researchers find rivalrous anger, when combined with optimistic enthusiasm for the win, can be especially potent in motivating players: in studies, when people read a political message that makes them feel highly angry or enthusiastic, ‘they want to jump into the ring’, writes political psychologist Dr Lilliana Mason. ‘They want to get involved.’ Threats from rival games help motivate by increasing the poisonous narrative of prejudice.

All were grandiose, secure in their entitlement to being treated as high-status individuals, but who nevertheless suffered chronic and serious experiences of humiliation. Humiliation, as we’ve learned, is the ultimate psychological de-grading: the ‘nuclear bomb of the emotions’ that can cause the ‘annihilation of the self’ and lead to major depressions, suicidal states, psychosis, extreme rage and severe anxiety.

Once individuals start to play and begin to enjoy a game’s rewards, it becomes part of their identity.

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.

Hitler hired Ferdinand Porsche to help create an affordable ‘People’s Car’ (now known as the VW Beetle)

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.

Nations the world over become dangerous when humiliated. One study of ninety-four wars since 1648 found 67 per cent were motivated by matters of national standing or revenge, with the next greatest factor – security – coming in at a distant 18 per cent.

Of course it was fun. For willing players on the right side of the gun, tyranny always is.