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

by Will Storr

Life is not a journey towards a perfect destination. It’s a game that never ends.

It’s astonishing that our species has evolved a system for rewarding ourselves and each other when we’re virtuous. The result is courage and altruism.

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. Their social relationships, or lack of them, ‘predicted mortality, independently of how healthy, well-to-do, or physically fit’ they were.

‘What we call normal perception does not really differ from hallucinations, except that the latter are not anchored by external input.’

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.

In the luxury attire game, the general rule is the larger the logo, the lower the status and therefore price. One analysis found ‘an increase in logo size of one point on a seven-point scale translates to a $122.26 price decrease for Gucci handbags and a $26.27 price decrease for Louis Vuitton handbags’. The logo on Bottega Veneta’s $2,500 Hobo bag isn’t visible. They put it on the inside.

LIFE IS NOT as it appears. As neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith writes, ‘our perception of the world is a fantasy that collides with reality’. The dream state we exist in is founded on objective truth – we’re alive on a planet, breathing air under skies. But on these foundations we build an infinite variety of imaginary games.

An African proverb says, ‘the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth’.

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.

Tourish has found the most successful leaders are usually those with the ‘least compliant’ followers.

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, went the logic, so people were precisely where God wanted them to be. As the Christian hymn sings it: ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly, and ordered their estate.’

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. They begin warring for status, attacking the establishment, which contributes to its destabilisation. Goldstone finds these dynamics in the years leading up to the English Civil War, the French Revolution and crises in China and Turkey.

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. 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. Without that, you’ll fall to earth and break your back. 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.

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.

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; 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.

We don’t have to travel back far to discover moral superstars holding moral views that would destroy them today. Feminist hero and birth control campaigner Marie Stopes, who was voted Woman of the Millennium by the readers of The Guardian and honoured on special Royal Mail stamps in 2008, was an anti-Semite and eugenicist who once wrote that ‘our race is weakened by an appallingly high percentage of unfit weaklings and diseased individuals’ and that ‘it is the urgent duty of the community to make parenthood impossible for those whose mental and physical conditions are such that there is well-nigh a certainty that their offspring must be physically and mentally tainted’. 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 raw Kaffir [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.’ Such statements seem obviously appalling. But there’s about as much sense in blaming Gandhi for not sharing our modern, Western views on race as there is in blaming the Vikings for not having Netflix. Moral ‘truths’ are acts of imagination. They’re ideas we play games with.

What’s the point in getting so emotional about a stranger being wrong? It doesn’t make sense. Especially since, as is so often the case, we become furious over issues that have no real-world effect on the lives of us or anyone we know. Of all the things we could be doing with our energies, being angry at the internet seems a worse than pointless choice.

In thirteenth-century France, when the Cathars refused to convert, the Catholics who burned them alive were so afraid that their slightly different beliefs about God and Satan would somehow reanimate, and start conquering psychological territory, they dug up their bones and burned them again.

research on the effects of religious conversion finds the ‘psychological and emotional condition of most converts improves’ after joining.

Scientific advances have saved the lives of billions: water chlorination has saved 177 million; smallpox eradication 131 million; the measles vaccine 120 million; infectious disease controls have saved over a hundred million children since 1990; in 2021 multiple coronavirus vaccines began saving the entire world.

In 1879, the pioneering and influential social psychologist Gustave Le Bon wrote, ‘there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brain … Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads.’

Capital punishment, which is thought to have once been a human universal, was increasingly outlawed. In the seventeenth century, residents of New Haven in America could be put to death for masturbating; until 1834 Britain was still gibbeting the corpses of murderers. By 2020, over half the world’s nations had formally abolished it.

In the 2010–2015 parliament, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition had both taken exactly the same degree: Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford (as had the Shadow Chancellor, the Foreign Secretary and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury).

Consider race. It’s true that there’s white privilege. But it’s also true the most successful UK ethnic groups by income aren’t white, but Chinese and Indian. The Chinese earn fully 30 per cent more than their causation counterparts. 69 per cent of Chinese-background state school pupils in the UK win passage to university, as do 50 per cent of Asian and 44 per cent of black students. At the bottom? White kids, at 30 per cent. Similarly, in the USA, the most successful demographic by income aren’t whites, but Asian Americans. None of which is to argue racism isn’t real, serious and deserving of urgent attention. It’s simply to observe the world is often more confusing than the warriors allow.

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 behaviour 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.

The meaning of life is not to win, it’s to play.