Status Anxiety

by Alain de Botton

The economy is now officially out of kilter, freighted by overinvesting, overconsumption, overborrowing and overlending. Here begins the slide into recession. Prices are pushed higher by the use of less efficient means of production, by the growth in the money supply and by speculation. Tighter and much more expensive credit raises the cost of outstanding debt. Asset values, inflated in the upswing, are punctured. Borrowers can no longer make their payments, and the collateral available for new loans is restricted. Incomes, investment and consumption all fall off. Companies and entrepreneurs flounder or go bankrupt; unemployment rates rise. As confidence evaporates, borrowing and spending dry up. Long-term capital investments made in better days now come on line, increasing supply and depressing prices just as demand is slackening. Companies and individuals are forced to sell off assets at a loss, deepening the crisis, but many potential buyers wait for the market to hit bottom before purchasing, further delaying recovery. Rather than a sign of hysteria, a state of steady anxiety may be a reasonable response to the very real threats of the economic environment.

Other people’s heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat. SCHOPENHAUER, PARERGA AND PARALIPOMENA(1851)

Nature didn’t tell me: “Don’t be poor.” Nor indeed: “Be rich.” But she does beg me: “Be independent.” CHAMFORT, MAXIMS(1795)

Throughout his Meditations (A.D. 167), the emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, moving in the unstable world of Roman politics, continually reminded himself that any comment made about his character or achievements had to be subjected to the test of reason before he allowed it to affect his self-conception. “[One’s decency] does not depend on the testimony of someone else,” he insisted, thereby challenging his society’s faith in an honour-based assessment of people. “Does what is praised become better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn’t praised? And what of gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?” Rather than be seduced by others’ flattery or stung by their insults, Marcus aimed to take his bearings from the person he knew himself to be: “Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.”

Leaving the assessment of our worth to an intellectual conscience is not to be confused with expecting unconditional love. Unlike parents or lovers, who may value us whatever we do and however great our faults, philosophers do seek to apply criteria to their love—just not the shaky, unreasonable ones that the wider world is in danger of resorting to.

if we concede the worth of some feelings of anxiousness in helping us to find safety and develop our talents, we may be entitled to challenge the usefulness of other emotions in relation to precisely the same goals. We may feel envy, for instance, over a condition or possession that would in fact make us unhappy if we secured it.

When we begin to scrutinise the opinions of others, philosophers have long noted, we stand to make a discovery at once saddening and curiously liberating: we will discern that the views of the majority of the population on the majority of subjects are perforated with extraordinary confusion and error. Chamfort, voicing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers both before and after him, put the matter simply: “Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.”

The great defect, for Chamfort, consisted in the public’s reluctance to submit its thinking to the rigours of rational examination, and its tendency to rely instead on intuition, emotion and custom. “One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,” the Frenchman observed, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little more than common non sense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: “The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that’s the tradition. This is exactly what the Hottentots say when Europeans ask them why they eat grasshoppers and devour their body lice. That’s the tradition, they explain.”

“We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial and futile nature of their thoughts, of the narrowness of their views, of the paltriness of their sentiments, of the perversity of their opinions, and of the number of their errors … We shall then see that whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honour,” argued Arthur Schopenhauer, a leading model of philosophical misanthropy.

In Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), the philosopher proposed that nothing could more quickly correct the desire to be liked by others than a brief investigation into those others’ true characters, which were, he asserted, for the most part excessively brutish and stupid. “In every country the principal entertainment of society has become card playing,” he remarked with scorn. “It is a measure of the worth of society and the declared bankruptcy of all ideas and thoughts.”

Schopenhauer summed up the state of affairs by quoting Voltaire: “La terre est couverte de gens qui ne méritent pas qu’on leur parle” (“the earth swarms with people who are not worth talking to”). Ought we really to take the opinions of such people so seriously? asked Schopenhauer. Must we continue to let their verdicts govern what we make of ourselves? May our self-esteem sensibly be surrendered to a group of card players? And even if we manage somehow to win their respect, how much will it ever be worth? Or as Schopenhauer put the question, “Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of his audience if it were known to him that, with the exception of one or two, it consisted entirely of deaf people?”

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The disadvantage of this otherwise usefully clear-eyed view of humanity is that it may leave us with few friends. Schopenhauer’s fellow philosophical misanthrope Chamfort admitted as much when he wrote: “Once we have resolved only to see those who will treat us morally and virtuously, reasonably and truthfully, without treating conventions, vanities and ceremonials as anything other than props of polite society; when we have taken this resolve (and we have to do so or we will end up foolish, weak or villainous), the result is that we will have to live more or less on our own.”

Every great work of art, suggested Arnold, was marked (directly or not) by the “desire to remove human error, clear human confusion, and diminish human misery,” just as all great artists were imbued with the “aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they [found] it.” They might not always realise this ambition through overtly political subject matter—indeed, might not even be aware of harbouring it at all—and yet embedded within their work, there was almost always some cry of protest against a status quo, and thus an impulse to correct the viewer’s insight or teach him to perceive beauty, to help him understand pain or to reanimate his sensitivities, to nurture his capacity for empathy or rebalance his moral perspective through sadness or laughter. Arnold concluded his argument with the idea upon which this chapter is built: Art, he insisted, was “the criticism of life.”

What are we to understand by Arnold’s phrase? First, and perhaps most obvious, that life is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error.

Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art—novels, poems, plays, paintings or films—can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, mor...

Standing witness to hidden lives, novels may act as conceptual counterweights to dominant hierarchical realities. They can reveal that the maid now busying herself with lunch is a creature of rare sensitivity and moral greatness, while the baron who laughs raucously and owns a silver mine has a heart both withered and acrid.

“If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” knew George Eliot.

Like Jane Austen and George Eliot, the great artists of everyday life may help us to correct many of our snobbish preconceptions regarding what there is to esteem and honour in the world.

Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious (1905), Freud wrote, “A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously.”

Freud wrote, “A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously.”

Freud suggested, critical messages “can gain a reception with the hearer which they would never have found in a non-joking form … [which is why] jokes are especially favoured in order to make crit...

We rarely laugh, after all, at a doctor who is performing an important surgical operation. Yet we may smile at a surgeon who, after a hard day in the operating room, returns home and tries to intimidate his wife and daughters by talking to them in pompous medical jargon. We laugh at what is outsized and disproportionate. We laugh at kings whose self-image has outgrown their worth, whose goodness has not kept up with their power; we laugh at high-status individuals who have forgotten their humanity and begun abusing their privileges. We laugh at, and through our laughter criticise, evidence of injustice and excess.

Jokes are a way of sketching a political ideal, of creating a more equitable and saner world. Wherever there is inequity or delusion, space opens up for humour-clad criticisms.

Illustration from Punch, 1895

Beyond being a useful weapon with which to attack the high-status of others, humour may also help us to make sense of, and perhaps even mitigate, our own status anxieties.

Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves; that other fellow spirits wake up in the early hours feeling every bit as tormented by their financial performance as we do by our own; and that beneath the sober appearance society demands of us, most of us are daily going a little bit out of our minds, which in itself should give us cause to hold out a hand to our comparably tortured neighbours.

A successful person may be a man or a woman, of any race, who has been able to accumulate money, power and renown through his or her own accomplishments (rather than through inheritance) in one of the myriad sectors of the commercial world (including sport, art and scientific research). Because societies are in practise trusted to be “meritocratic,” financial achievements are necessarily understood to be “deserved.” The ability to accumulate wealth is prized as proof of the presence of at least four cardinal virtues: creativity, courage, intelligence and stamina.

In The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), George Bernard Shaw concluded that modern capitalist societies had settled on a particularly obtuse means of determining the economic hierarchy: a system whose basic tenet was that “if every man is left to make as much money as he can for himself in his own way, subject only to the laws restraining crude violence and direct fraud, then wealth will spontaneously distribute itself in proportion to the industry, sobriety and generally the virtue of the citizens, the good men becoming rich and the bad men poor.”

Michel de Montaigne had similarly stressed the importance of contingent factors in determining the outcome of lives. He advised us to remember the role played by “chance in bestowing glory on us according to her fickle will: I have often seen chance marching ahead of merit, and often outstripping merit by a long chalk.” A dispassionate audit of our successes and failures should leave us feeling that there are reasons to be at once less proud of and less embarrassed about ourselves, for a thought-provoking percentage of what happens to us is not of our own doing.

“A man may have a great suite of attendants, a beautiful palace, great influence and a large income. All that may surround him, but it is not in him… . Measure his height with his stilts off: let him lay aside his wealth and his decorations and show himself to us naked… . What sort of soul does he have? Is his soul a beautiful one, able, happily endowed with all her functions? Are her riches her own or are they borrowed? Has luck had nothing to do with it? … That is what we need to know; that is what the immense distances between us men should be judged by.”

said by Montaigne

Two decades later, a traveller named Robert Beverley observed, “The Europeans have introduced luxury among the Indians which has multiplied their wants and made them desire a thousand things they never even dreamt of before.”

Rousseau placed so much emphasis, unedifying though it might be, on how difficult humans find it to make up their minds about what is important, and how strongly predisposed they are to listen to others’ suggestions about where their thoughts should be directed and what they should value in order to be happy.

The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.

The most elegant and accomplished of vehicles cannot give us a fraction of the satisfaction we derive from a good relationship, just as it cannot be of any comfort whatsoever to us following a domestic argument or abandonment.

If we cannot stop envying, it seems especially poignant that we should be constrained to spend so much of our lives envying the wrong things.

Thomas Carlyle had earlier made much the same point, if less diplomatically. In Midas (1843), he asked, “This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth … which of us has it enriched? … We have sumptuous garnitures for our life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them. Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors, but in the heart of them, what increase of blessedness is there? Are they better, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call ‘happier’? Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God’s Earth; do more things and human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so … We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.”