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

by Will Storr

WHEN A GAME endures a period of major threat, its resulting state of tightness can leave traces for centuries. Psychologist Professor Michele Gelfand studies these effects globally. She finds nations that have suffered events such as disease, famine, natural disaster or conflict have tighter cultures with stronger social norms and less tolerance for deviance than looser nations. ‘Groups that deal with many ecological and historical threats need to do everything they can to create order in the face of chaos,’ she writes. ‘The greater the threat, the tighter the community.’

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. Their citizens are more punctual, and so is their public transport:

months after taking office, they authorised the construction of a brand new, ultra-modern form of road, the motorway, with Hitler personally signing off the design of bridges and service stations; by 1935, 125,000 men were working on them and by summer 1938, they’d built 3,500 kilometres; by the end of that year five billion marks had been spent on job-creation schemes; they gave out subsidies for house purchases, conversions and maintenance; spent substantial amounts in deprived areas; offered young engaged couples interest-free loans to help get them started (nearly a quarter of a million loans were issued in the first year alone); through their leisure organisation Strength Through Joy they bought and subsidised thousands of theatre tickets (accounting for more than half of all Berlin ticket sales in 1938); put on music concerts in factories; built theatres; organised exhibitions, operas and plays (in 1938, nearly seven and a half million went to its plays and six and a half million to its opera and operetta evenings); offered heavily discounted package holidays to locations such as Libya, Finland, Bulgaria and Istanbul, offering 75 per cent off rail tickets and 50 per cent off hotels (in 1937 alone, 1.7 million Germans went on a Strength Through Joy holiday whilst nearly seven million went on one of their weekend mini-breaks – accounting for as many as 11 per cent of overnight stays in all German hotels); they put on cruises (140,000 passengers in one year alone); thei...

when the party came to power a third of the population, 6.1 million people, were unemployed – by 1935 it had dropped to 2.2 million, by 1937 it was under a million, by 1939 full employment was claimed;

Even when he took Germany into war, against the popular will, he achieved a series of rapid and stunning successes, including the taking of its hated France, their capitulation, writes Kershaw, ‘symbolically wiping out the humiliation of the German capitulation in the same spot in 1918’.

Terrorists believe in their moral virtue, and so do racist colonialists. The imperialists of the British Empire told a self-serving story that said they were leading lower forms of life on a journey towards the promised land of civilisation. Poet Rudyard Kipling captured this sentiment in ‘The White Man’s Burden’: ‘Take up the White Man’s burden / And reap his old reward / The blame of those ye better / The hate of those ye guard / The cry of hosts ye humour / (Ah, slowly!) toward the light.’

Sociologist Professor Bradley Campbell has undertaken an extensive study of our most bestial mode of play. He finds 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.

The spread of the two most successful faiths, first Christianity and then Islam, is partly thanks to a tweak in their theology: unlike pagan and animist traditions, with their teeming pantheons of gods, they were monotheistic. Their god wasn’t a god, he was God. The One and Only. His moral rules were universal, applicable to all. Accepting the truth of other gods and breaking His rules was now a heresy, a significant rejection of the monotheist’s criteria for claiming status. This incentivised believers to convert those around them and conquer their neural territory.

Unbelief could also mean dropping in status in the here and now, with sometimes all-too-real consequences: if the faithless didn’t suffer outright persecution, they were often denied legal and social privileges and, in some Muslim communities, paid higher taxes. The reward for playing was connection and status in this life, and infinite paradise in the next. ‘Religion had never promoted such an idea before,’ writes Ehrman. ‘Christians created a need for salvation that no one knew they had. They then argued that they alone could meet the need. And they succeeded massively.’

The Church became rich, the largest landowner in Europe, owning 44 per cent of France and half of Germany.

A market for indulgences grew, in which forgiveness for sins including cousin marriage could be bought. They even sold forgiveness for future sins. One spectacular section of Rouen Cathedral is known as ‘The Butter Tower’, its construction financed by indulgences permitting the eating of butter during Lent.

Slowly, and in fits and starts, our focus had been juddering from duty to the clan towards individual competence and success. This changed our psychology, rewriting the cultural coding of our game-playing brains, turning us into new sorts of humans. We were more independent, more self-focussed, more outward-looking, more interested in personal excellence, less conformist and less in awe of tradition, ancestry, duty and authority. In short, we were no longer the kind of people prepared to be bullied, threatened, bribed and insulted by a corrupt and status-drunk Church. By the sixteenth century the Catholic Church, and the psychological nature of its players, had grown apart. Something would have to give.

Winners of success games began enjoying the same status symbols as the winners of virtue games. This outraged the old elites. Special rules, called sumptuary laws, were instituted that sought to control how members of each social rank could express themselves with status goods and behaviour. They dictated what they could wear, eat, how they could organise their funerals and weddings, what carriages they could own and how they could be upholstered. In England, in 1363, legislation was introduced to curb ‘the Outragious and Excessive Apparel of divers People, against their Estate and Degree, to the great Destruction and Impoverishment of all the Land’. It defined what those of different ranks, from carters, oxherds and ploughmen all the way up to knights, could spend on clothing.

This openness to novel ideas became a status-making pursuit. At first in Italy in the 1500s, and then across Western Europe, there spread a fashion for possessing ‘useful knowledge’. In the beginning, this manifested as ‘an upper class fascination with learning and the arts, combining the features of the scholar and gentleman into a serious if perhaps somewhat amateurish intellectual’, writes economic historian Professor Joel Mokyr. These gentleman thinkers, known as ‘virtuosi’, wrote books on subjects as disparate as forestry, mathematics and sumptuary laws. Their success-play was founded on a love of knowledge for its own sake. The virtuosi, ‘turned curiosity, once regarded as a vice, into a virtue’. Showing knowledge had become a status symbol: ‘the courtier had become a scholar, and culture for social ornament passed into learning for fame and admiration’.

But Smith didn’t believe greed for wealth was the ultimate driver of economies. He thought something else was going on, something deeper in the human psyche. ‘Humanity does not desire to be great, but to be beloved,’ he wrote in 1759. ‘The rich man glories in his riches because he feels they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world … and he is fonder of his wealth on this account than for all the other advantages it procures him.’

great apes hunting connection and status inside shared hallucinations. The contemporary Western self is a strange, anxious, hungry thing. It emerges out of a market economy that’s heavily focussed on success. Whilst we’ll never stop playing games of dominance and virtue, our societies emphasise individual competence and achievement. We win points for personal success throughout our lives, in the highly formalised and often precisely graded games of school, college and work. In the street, in the office and on social media we signal our accomplishments with appearance, possessions and lifestyles. We’re self-obsessed, because this is the game we’re raised to play.

There are various forms of perfectionism: ‘self-oriented perfectionists’ have excessively high standards and often push themselves harder and harder in order to win; ‘narcissistic perfectionists’ already believe they’re number one and experience anxiety when the world treats them as less; ‘neurotic perfectionists’ suffer low self-esteem and often believe with the next victory they’ll finally feel good enough. But there’s one species of perfectionism that’s especially sensitive to the neoliberal game: ‘social perfectionists’ feel the pressure to win comes from the people with whom they play. They’ll tend to agree with statements such as, ‘People expect nothing less than perfection from me’ and ‘Success means that I must work harder to please others.’ Social perfectionists are highly attuned to reputation and identity. They’ll easily think they’ve let their peers down by being a bad employee,

study of more than forty thousand students across the USA, Britain and Canada. Led by psychologist Dr Thomas Curran, the researchers discovered all the forms of perfectionism they looked at had risen between 1989 and 2016. Social perfectionism had grown the most. The extent to which people felt they had to ‘display perfection to secure approval’ had soared by 32 per cent.

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.

It’s easy to forget we have status to give, that it costs nothing and it never runs out. Creating small moments of prestige means always seeking opportunities to use it. Allowing others to feel statusful makes it more likely they’ll accept our influence. Whether we’re asking a favour or issuing a task to a subordinate, it’s advisable to resist even subtle markers of dominance, allowing them to reach the ‘correct’ decision without putting them under pressure. If they sense they’ve had no choice in the matter, they’re robbed of the gift of feeling good about their action.