Status Anxiety

by Alain de Botton

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

The benefits of high status are similarly seldom limited to wealth. We should not be surprised to find many of the already affluent continuing to accumulate sums beyond anything that five generations might spend.

Few of us are determined aesthetes or sybarites, yet almost all of us hunger for dignity; and if a future society were to offer love as a reward for accumulating small plastic discs, then it would not be long before such worthless items too assumed a central place in our most zealous aspirations and anxieties.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves.

Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among. If they are amused by our jokes, we grow confident in our power to amuse. If they praise us, we develop an impression of high merit. And if they avoid our gaze when we enter a room or look impatient after we have revealed our occupation, we may fall into feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness.

We would know our worth. Instead, we each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities. We discern evidence of both cleverness and stupidity, humour and dullness, importance and superfluity. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance. Neglect highlights our latent negative self-assessments, while a smile or compliment as rapidly brings out the converse. We seem beholden to the affections of others to endure ourselves.

Our “ego” or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect.

Such feelings of deprivation may seem less peculiar if we consider the psychology behind the way we decide precisely how much is enough.

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like—we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our ostensible equals.

David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (Edinburgh, 1739): “It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him. A great disproportion cuts off the relation, and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us or diminishes the effects of the comparison.”

We are not always humiliated by failing at things, he suggested; we are humiliated only if we invest our pride and sense of worth in a given aspiration or achievement and then are disappointed in our pursuit of it.

“With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.

“To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified. There is a strange lightness in the heart when one’s nothingness in a particular area is accepted in good faith. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. ‘Thank God!’ we say,‘ those illusions are gone.’ Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.”

Rousseau’s argument hung on a radical thesis. Being truly wealthy, he suggested, does not require having many things; rather, it requires having what one longs for. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.

For the individual, trying to make more money may not be the most effective way to feel wealthy. We might do better, instead, to distance ourselves, both practically and emotionally, from those whom we consider to be our equals and yet who have grown richer than us. Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.

We may be happy enough with little if little is what we have come to expect, and we may be miserable with much when we have been taught to desire everything.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

The impact of poverty on self-esteem will to an important extent be decided by the way that poverty is interpreted and accounted for by the community.

The pattern held until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the first voices began to question the hereditary principle. Was it really wise for fathers always to hand down their businesses to their sons, without regard to their intelligence? Were the children of royalty necessarily the best suited to run their countries?

When it came to choosing a book, what mattered was whether the writing was any good, not whether the author’s parents had been famous or wealthy. A talented father did not guarantee literary success, nor an ignominious one failure. Why not, then, import this same objective method of judgement into appointments in political or economic life?

“I smile to myself when I contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary, commented Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (1791), and I carry the same idea into governments. A hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author. I know not whether Homer or Euclid had sons; but I will venture an opinion that if they had, and had left their works unfinished, those sons could not have completed them.”

Napoleon shared Paine’s indignation, and early on in his reign, became the first Western leader openly to move towards what he would term a system of carrières ouvertent aux talents,“careers open to talent.” “I made most of my generals de la boue,” he proudly recalled on Saint Helena, near the end of his life. “Whenever I found talent, I rewarded it.” There was substance to his boast: Napoleonic France witnessed the abolition of feudal privileges and the institution of the Legion of Honour, the first title to be bestowed on individuals of every social rank. The educational system was likewise reformed: lycées were opened to all, and in 1794 a polytechnic was founded, offering generous state subsidies to poorer pupils (in its early years, half the students it enrolled were the sons of peasants and artisans). Many of Napoleon’s leading appointees came from modest...

Thomas Carlyle, for his part, was outraged by the way the children of the rich squandered their money while those of the poor were denied even a rudimentary education: “What shall we say of the Idle Aristocracy, the owners of the soil of England; whose recognised function is that of handsomely consuming the rents of England and shooting the partridges of England?” He railed against those who had never done anything or benefitted anyone, who had not had to prove themselves in any field but had instead been handed their privileges on a plate. He sketched a portrait of the typical English aristocrat,

“luxuriously housed up, screened from all work, from want, danger, hardship. He sits serene, amid appliances, and has his work done by other men. And such a man calls himself a noble- man? His fathers worked for him, he says; or successfully gambled for him. It is the law of the land, and is thought to be the law of the Universe that this man shall have no task laid on him except that of eating his cooked victuals and not flinging himself out of the window!”

Like many nineteenth-century reformers, Carlyle dreamt not of a world in which everyone would be financially equal, but of one in which high and low alike would come by their inequalities honestly. “Europe requires a real aristocracy,” he wrote, “only it must be an aristocracy of talent. False aristocracies are insupportable.”...

In the United States, equality of opportunity was pursued with a special intensity. In March 1961, less than two months after assuming office, President John F. Kennedy established a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and charged it with ending employment discrimination in all its forms in government departments and private businesses. A series of specific laws followed: the Equal Pay Act (1963), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (1964), the Older Americans Act (1965), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967), the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1976) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). With such legislation in place, it was plausible to believe, however old one happened to be and whatever one’s religion, colour or sex, that one would be guaranteed a fair chance of success.

When riches were still being handed down the generations according to bloodlines and connections, it was natural to dismiss the notion that wealth was an indicator of any virtue besides that of having been born to the right parents. But in a meritocratic world in which prestigious and well-paid jobs could be secured only through native intelligence and ability, money began to look like a sound signifier of character. The rich were not only wealthier, it seemed; they might also be plain better.

Thanks to the meritocratic ideal, multitudes were granted the opportunity to fulfil themselves. Gifted and intelligent individuals of the sort who for centuries had been kept down within an immobile, castelike hierarchy were now free to express their talents on a theoretically level playing field. No longer was background, gender, race or age an impassable obstacle to advancement. An element of justice had finally entered into the distribution of rewards. But there was also, inevitably, a darker side to the story for those of low status. If the successful merited their success, it necessarily followed that the failures had to merit their failure. In a meritocratic age, an element of justice appeared to enter into the distribution of poverty no less than that of wealth. Low status came to seem not merely regrettable but also deserved.

Without doubt, attaining financial success in an economic meritocracy, without the benefit of inheritance or advantages of birth, provided a measure of personal validation that the nobleman of old, who had been given his money and his castle by his father, had never experienced. But at the same time, financial failure became associated with a sense of shame that the peasant of old, denied all chances in life, had also, and more happily, been spared. The question of why, if one was in any way good, clever or able, one was still poor became more acute and painful for the unsuccessful to have to answer (to themselves and others) in a new meritocratic age.

With the rise of the economic meritocracy, the poor moved, in some quarters, from being termed “unfortunate,” and seen as the fitting object of the charity and guilt of the rich, to being described as “failures” and regarded as fair targets for the contempt of robust, self-made individuals, who were disinclined to feel ashamed of their mansions or to shed crocodile tears for those whose company they had escaped. There could have been no more telling expression of the idea of a just distribution of wealth and poverty than the nineteenth-century philosophy of Social Darwinism. Its adherents proposed that all humans began by facing a fair struggle over scarce resources such as money, jobs and esteem. Some gained the upper hand in this contest not because they enjoyed improper advantages or were unfairly lucky but because they were intrinsically better than their rivals. The rich were not better, however, from a moral point of view; rather, they were, intimidatingly,naturally better: they were more potent, their seed was stronger, their minds were cannier. They were the tigers of the human jungle, predestined by biology—a new, godlike concept before which the nineteenth century genuflected—to outpace others. It was biology that wanted the rich to be rich and the poor to be poor.

The Scottish-American industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie, despite his philanthropy, was at heart similarly pessimistic about the ultimate benefits of welfare: “Of every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity nine hundred and fifty of them had better be thrown into the sea,” he remarked in his Autobiography (1920). “Every drunken vagabond or lazy idler supported by alms is a source of moral infection to a neighbourhood. It will not do to teach the hardworking, industrious man that there is an easier path by which his wants can be supplied. The less emotion the better. Neither the individual nor the race is improved by alms-giving. Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do.”

Michael Young, The Rise of Meritocracy (London, 1958): “Today all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance … If they have been labelled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend… . Are they not bound to recognise that they have an inferior status, not as in the past because they were denied opportunity, but because they are inferior?”

But this idyllic state is fated not to endure. By the time we have finished our education, we are forced to take our place in a world dominated by a new kind of person, as different from a mother as it is possible to be and whose behaviour lies at the heart of our status anxieties: the snob. Though certain friends and lovers will remain immune from snobbery, will promise not to disown us even if we are bankrupted and disgraced (on a good day, we may even believe them), in general, we are forced to subsist on a diet of the highly conditional attentions of snobs.

The word “snobbery” came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility), or “s.nob, ” next to the names of ordinary students on examination lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers.

In the word’s earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equation between social rank and human worth. In his Book of Snobs (1848), a pioneering essay on the subject, William Thackeray observed that over the previous twenty-five years, snobs had “spread o...

Babies cannot, by definition, repay their caretakers with worldly rewards. In so far as they are loved and looked after, it is therefore for who they are, identity understood in its barest, most stripped-down state. They are loved for, or in spite of, their uncontrolled, howling and stubborn characters. Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement: being polite, succeeding at school and later, acquiring rank and prestige. Such efforts may attract the interest of others, but the underlying emotional craving is not so much to dazzle because of our deeds as to recapture the tenor of the bountiful, indiscriminate petting we received in return for arranging wooden bricks on the kitchen floor, for having a soft plump body and wide trusting eyes.

Given their exclusive interest in reputation and achievement, snobs are prone to make some sudden tragi-comic reassessments of who their closest friends might be when the outer circumstances of their acquaintances alter.

It is perhaps only ever fear that is to blame. Belittling others is no pastime for those convinced of their own standing. There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren’t good enough for us.

Yet it is hard to renounce snobbish tactics on our own, for the disease is a collective one to begin with. A youthful resentment of snobbery isn’t enough to save us from gradually turning into snobs ourselves, because being insolently neglected almost naturally fosters a hunger to gain the attention of our neglectors (disliking people rarely being a sufficient reason for not wanting them to like us). The snobbery of a prominent group can thereby draw the population as a whole towards social ambitions that it may initially have had no taste for but now pursues as the only apparent means to love and recognition. Rather than scorn, sorrow and understanding might be more accurate responses to behaviour motivated at heart by a frightened and frustrated desire for dignity.

It may be tempting to laugh at those afflicted by urgent cravings for the symbols of status. The name-droppers, the gold-tap owners.

Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays.

Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

In traditional societies, high status may have been inordinately hard to acquire, but it was also comfortingly hard to lose. It was as difficult to stop being a lord as, more darkly, it was to cease being a peasant. What mattered was one’s identity at birth, rather than anything one might achieve in one’s lifetime through the exercise of one’s faculties. What mattered was who one was, seldom what one did.

It is in the nature of this economy that the most evident trait of the struggle to achieve status should be uncertainty. We contemplate the future in the knowledge that we may at any time be thwarted by colleagues or competitors, or discover that we lack the talents to reach our chosen goals, or steer into an inauspicious current in the swells of the marketplace—any failure being compounded by the possible success of our peers.

If our status depends on our achievements, then what we may need most in order to succeed is talent and, where peace of mind is a priority, reliable control over it. In most activities, however, talent is impossible to direct as we please. It can make an appearance for a time and then unapologetically vanish, leaving our career in pieces. We cannot call the best of ourselves to the fore at will. So far are we from owning what talent we do on occasion display, that our achievements can seem like a gift granted to us by an external agency, a gift upon whose erratic presence and absence hang not only our ability to pay for the objects around us but the very course of our lives.

Our status also depends on a range of favourable conditions that could be loosely defined by the word luck. It may be merely good luck that places us in the right occupation, with the right skills, at the right time, and little more than bad luck that denies us the selfsame advantages.

It is alarming enough to have to rely for one’s status on contingent elements. It is harder yet to live in a world so enamoured with notions of rational control that it has largely dismissed “bad luck” as a credible explanation for defeat.

It is much safer to be feared than loved. Love is sustained by a bond of gratitude which, because men are excessively self-interested, is broken whenever they see a chance to benefit themselves. But fear is sustained by a dread of punishment that is always effective. MACHIAVELLI

Since the majority of men are either not very good or not very wise, one must rely more on severity than on kindness. GUICCIARDINI