More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Osama bin Laden said, ‘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 eighty years of humiliation and disgrace.’ Researchers find a primary motivation for suicide bombers is ‘the shame and humiliation induced by foreign troops in their country’.
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’. It’s the reduction in rank between them that helps generate much of the horrible madness.
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.
There’s a message in these nightmares. They tell us something real about who we are and how we play.
But at the start of the modern era, initially in the West, we began looking outside our kin groups for connection and status.
With the help of the printing press, Luther’s writings spread far and fast: between 1517 and 1520, more than three hundred thousand copies of his books, pamphlets and broadsides were distributed. He and other thinkers, most famously John Calvin, disagreed on much, but eventually a new form of Christian game, for ‘Protestants’, came into being. It had a revised set of rules and symbols, one fit for the success-focussed player of town, university, guild and marketplace.
Playing for personal success became holy, an act of worship.
With this relatively equal society came a new kind of culture in which elite players, finding it harder to distinguish themselves, had to continually find fresh ways to signal their status.
Men and women of excellence were now able to communicate their ideas in pamphlets, periodicals, books and personal correspondence. Their expertise ranged across disciplines including medicine, science, philosophy, theology, astronomy and philology. They created an international success game in which major status was awarded for dazzling displays of competence.
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.
Human brains want to know, Who do I need to become to win rank?
The Republic’s rules were such that findings were freely shared and judged by peers; winners were reliably celebrated, moving up in rank. It was a beautifully constructed success game. Its players couldn’t know it, but the Republic of Letters was riding on ancient circuitry that had evolved to help co-operative hunter-gatherer tribes survive.
Legal innovations, such as secure property and patent rights and the principle that the law should be applied equally to all, made it safer for entrepreneurs to entrepreneur and their success games to form and flourish.
With power increasingly removed from the old virtue games of royalty and Church, Britain was a nation uniquely capable of taking the tiny knowledge-based success game of the Republic of Letters and spreading it to the masses. Not only could successful innovators win fame amongst their peers, Britain’s institutions allowed them to earn major wealth and even national celebrity, their stores of status swelling spectacularly. Increasingly, it became a game open not only to an intellectual elite but to thousands of mechanics, entrepreneurs, engineers, tinkerers and artisans. This
The thinkers of the Enlightenment who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, further transformed Western Europe and then the world with their ideas about reason, liberty, tolerance, and separation of Church and State, were also inheritors of the games that formed before them. One of the most famous, Scottish economist Adam Smith, is commonly known as the ‘Father of Capitalism’. Perhaps more than anyone, the 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
...more
We strive to better our lot because we seek to be ‘observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of’. It’s the dream that says status symbols such as wealth will make us perfectly happy that inspires us to ‘cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe’.
We are, in the twenty-first century, as we’ve always been: great apes hunting connection and status inside shared hallucinations.
As individualists we’ve always been relatively me-focussed. But the latter twentieth century saw us transform into a heightened mode of self-obsession.
This narcissistic notion became a cultural value: a Gallup poll for Newsweek in 1992 found 89 per cent of respondents believing the ‘most important’ factor in ‘motivating a person to work hard and success’ was ‘self-esteem’ (the least important, they thought, was ‘status in the eyes of others’).
Today, more than at any previous time in history, we measure our status by professional success and its symbols.
Our daily pursuits – even those in education and the arts – are increasingly directed at financial ends, their victories measured in wealth. Research suggests busyness itself has come to be considered a status symbol. In a series of studies, busy people were viewed as having ‘more status because they were perceived as more competent and ambitious, as well as to be more scarce and in demand’.
We strive to improve, to bend our personalities into a certain shape, to become a better, different person. But where does it come from, the contemporary ideal of self? We see this perfect human all around us, beaming with flawless teeth from advertising, film, television, media and the internet. Young, agreeable, visibly fit, self-starting, productive, popular, globally-minded, stylish, self-confident, extrovert, busy. Who is it, this person we feel so pressured to punch ourselves into becoming? It’s the player best equipped to win status in the game we’re in. It’s the neoliberal hero, the
...more
The neoliberal age has seen rewards being distributed with increasing unfairness. Between 1978 and 2014, inflation-adjusted CEO pay in the USA increased by nearly 1,000 per cent; in a similar period, 1975 to 2017, inflation-adjusted US GDP nearly tripled and worker productivity grew by around 60 per cent. And yet, while a subset of US workers did see some increases in pay, real hourly wages for most Americans froze or fell.
Whilst 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. Smiles began with a quote from philosopher John Stuart Mill: ‘The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.’ It was an instant bestseller.
Slavery, which has existed across the world since the first civilisations, finally began to end: Denmark banned participation in the slave trade in 1804, Britain voted to end participation in 1807, abolishing it in most colonies in 1834. In the USA, Congress passed the thirteenth amendment, abolishing slavery, on 6 December 1865.
Almost nobody believes, these days, that male and female psychology is categorically dissimilar: we’re not from Mars and Venus; furthermore, it’s now understood men and women are far more alike than different. But studies suggest the sexes do, on average, show differences in personality, interest and vocational preference that affect their distribution in the games of life.
Feminist scholars often deny the validity of these kinds of findings.
They incite the cousins by threatening a sacred story, believed by some, that says gender inequity can only ever be caused by male evil.
Class is stubborn because, as Professor Kusserow found in her study of parenting in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, 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, holidays and clothing. It’s in a person’s accent and the words they use.
‘Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should.’ Britain’s most prestigious games, in law, government, the media and the arts, are famously over-represented by such players. Around 7 per cent of Britons have been privately educated, yet they make up over 70 per cent of the nation’s barristers and 60 per cent of its Oscar winners. Less than one per cent of the population attended Oxford or Cambridge, yet their graduates have produced the majority
...more
The problem with elites is they’re an unsolvable problem; an inevitability of the game we’re programmed to play. They’ll always be there and they’ll never not make us feel small.
One side perceives it to be unfairly dominated by white people, especially white men, especially straight white men. The other side thinks it’s unfairly dominated by highly educated elites.
overrepresented by millennials and Gen Zs. This is a cohort who’ve felt their relative status pitch into a decline: they’re more qualified than the baby boomers and yet 20 per cent less wealthy than they were at the same age; the average millennial’s worth in 2016 was 41 per cent less than those of a similar age in 1989. They’re also finding it harder to buy property and are heavily burdened with student debt, graduating with an average personal deficit of $32,700 in the USA and £40,000 in England.
‘elite-overproduction’ – which, as we’ve learned, is when too many elite players are produced and have to fight over too few high-status positions. Something like this appears to be happening to many in the New Left.
This decline in relative status for young, internet socialised, highly educated players is turning into a growing rejection of the game. In just three years, between 2015 and 2018, support for capitalism among young Americans fell from 39 per cent to 30 per cent; a 2019 poll found 36 per cent of millennials saying they approve of Communism. Sociologist Professor Thomas Cushman writes, ‘anti-capitalism has become, in some ways, a central pillar of the secular religion of the intellectuals, the habitus of modern critical intellectuals as a status group’.
The clashing dreams of the New Right and New Left are neatly illustrated in a sequence of tweets by a US journalist, Rani Molla. Linking to a report on the plight of poor white workers in a rural chicken processing plant earning as little as thirteen dollars an hour, she commented: ‘oh shut the fuck up … alt title: “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.
Whilst the civilising mission of the New Left demonises white people (especially white men etc.), the New Right demonise ethnic minorities they see as being gifted unfair rank by the educated elites.
disappear and our language being lost among
The New Left says the game is wholly sexist and white supremacist. It sees the bigotry of its foes. The New Right says the educated elites have stopped caring about them entirely. It sees their contempt for the white and in pain and their veneration of minorities. These are errors of exaggeration: not all white people are bigots just as not all the educated elites are prejudiced against the white working class. But they also mislead by omission. They fail to see that, in each clashing dream, there’s both hatred and truth.
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 monsterised 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.
This bourgeois elite, the story said, were only able to fund their palaces and maintain their place at the top by private ownership of industry. They abused the power it gave them in order to exploit everyone else. It was ownership that created social classes, ownership that led to the ‘pauperization’ of the poor and ownership that ‘grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation’.
the Great Terror.
That yearning was a 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.
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;
Utopians talk of injustice whilst building new hierarchies and placing themselves at the top. Such behaviour is in our nature. The urge for rank is ineradicable. It’s a 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.
As we’ve learned, there are three major routes to status in human games: we can grab it in acts of dominance or we can earn prestige by proving ourselves useful to our group, with acts that signal virtue or success.
