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January 2 - February 6, 2023
Our position in the hierarchy governs our daily experiences as individuals. If we have high status, things go well, people are nice to us, and we’re relatively happier. If we lack status, we grow bitter and depressed. Sociological research demonstrates that our social position affects long-term well-being, motivates our behavior, and becomes a goal in its own right—and thus can be considered a fundamental human desire.
We seek status because it provides esteem and favors from others. But it’s never easy to obtain. High status is a position within a hierarchy, so the more who seek to move up, the more difficult it becomes to reach the top. This inherent uncertainty puts many on a never-ending quest for higher position. Researchers recently concluded that the achievement of high status only makes people want more.
Theory of everything!
The author Tom Wolfe concluded in the 1970s that status was the “fundamental taboo, more so than sexuality and everything of that sort. It’s much easier for people to talk about their sex lives in this day and age than it is to talk about their status.”
This also explains why we dislike social climbers: they remind us there is a ladder to climb. In fact, the modern word “villain” derives from the status-related sin of lowly villein feudal tenants daring to seek a higher social position.
Just as microeconomics posits that markets form as self-interested individuals maximize utility for their money, a similar “invisible-hand” mechanism exists between status and culture: in seeking to maximize and stabilize status, individuals end up clustering into patterns of behavior (customs, traditions, fashion, fads, taste) that we understand as culture.
Many bourgeois class-marking cultural standards promote rational behaviors with obvious health benefits—such as eating organic vegetables rather than prepackaged foods, and doing daily exercise rather than watching endless hours of television. The radical art used in elite distinction is emotionally rewarding and spiritually invigorating. Culture makes possible human self-understanding, complex thinking, and creative expression.
wealthy people buy expensive things to reveal they can buy expensive things. But the interactions go much deeper: Status shapes our aspirations and desires, sets standards for beauty and goodness, frames our identities, creates collective behaviors and morals, encourages the invention of new aesthetic sensibilities, and acts as an automated motor for permanent cultural change. Culture is embodied in the products, behaviors, styles, meanings, values, and sensibilities that make up the human experience—and it is status that guides their creation, production, and diffusion.
These analytic tools are particularly helpful for addressing a pressing concern of the moment: Why does internet culture often feel less valuable than what we experienced in the analog world? Why does everything seem less cool than before? The reasons are much clearer when viewed through the lens of how the internet has changed status signaling. Where we once pleaded for status in person (or through media reporting of real-life appearances at social events), there is now a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week pageant of flexing on social media apps. Elites could once protect their status symbols
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Subcultures once provided society with a constant stream of cultural innovations, but the most notable outsider group of the twenty-first century has been the internet trolls rebelling against diversity, equity, and inclusion through revanchist slogans and memes.
The biggest counter-culture?
Gen Z appears to have abandoned previous generations’ determination toward radical artistic innovation for laid-back amateurism.
We’ll eventually see how status seeking shapes our deepest personal desires, why profligate spending is logical, how status has been important in encouraging radical artistic invention, how fashion exists without a fashion industry, how elites influence what we remember, how postmodern politics have made us ashamed of taste, and how the moral duty to be “original” may be simply the democratization of aristocratic custom.
We come here to deconstruct status, not to praise it. The human propensity toward hierarchical order—especially in the form of racism, sexism, and other bigotries—has long acted as a pernicious barrier to realizing a truly democratic society. But if we seek to promote equality over hierarchy and encourage cultural creativity and experimentation, we must learn the full implications of how culture and status work together.
The second lesson from Lassie is that every status position comes with specific rights and duties, with the most desirable benefits accruing to those at the top. The vast majority of any population has normal status, for which they receive common courtesies and basic privileges—but no special treatment.
“The moment a digging stick is set in the earth, a colt broken in, a pack of wolves defended against or a human enemy set by his heels, we have the germs of a social structure.”
Research subjects, for example, felt better “in a hierarchical group in which they alone would be afforded a high level of respect and deference, than in an egalitarian group in which all members would be afforded a high (and equal) level of respect and deference.”
That is sad.
status affects our brain chemistry and bodily functions. A higher status position results in the production of more serotonin, while being in the presence of a status superior raises our blood pressure.
Normal status provides social approval, common courtesies and pleasantries, and relaxed communication with others. This is a major improvement from lower status, with its constant reminders of inherent inferiority, reprimands for the tiniest errors, marginalization, and potential social exile.
While we may be embarrassed by outright status seeking, most of us are comfortable with receiving recognition for significant achievements.
High status also means more attention and rewards for doing the same work as lower-status individuals. “The man of rank and distinction,” notes the economist Adam Smith, “is observed by all the world. . . . Scarce a word, scarce a gesture, can fall from him that is altogether neglected.”
Higher status positions often come with an increase in bothersome responsibilities—having to make difficult decisions for the group and behave as a role model. Rewards may not always exceed the duties.
There may be decreasing marginal utility for money and power, but achieving status makes us want more.
The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde notes that in primitive times, the criteria were “physical vigour and skill, physical bravery” but changed centuries later to “skill in war and eloquence in council” and, still later, to “aesthetic imagination, industrial ingenuity, scientific genius.”
The legitimacy of any hierarchy hinges on status integrity—a collective belief that the ranking of individuals is fair, and that they receive greater benefits for legitimate reasons. Esteem should never be granted for free. Status-seeking individuals violate the principle of status integrity when they demand better treatment than they “deserve.”
“The only people for me are the mad ones,” writes Jack Kerouac in On the Road. “The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
Alternative status groups believe in criteria outside of traditional capital.
As much as we may identify most closely with a single status group, we are all members of many: family, school, workplace, clubs. And since the status criteria and beliefs may differ among them, we behave differently based on the context. Kerouac’s status improved among his family when he married his live-in girlfriend, but he impressed his Beat friends and fans only by leaving home and going on the road.
For every winner in status group battles, there must also be losers. The pioneering sociologist Max Weber found that dominant groups that tumble down the hierarchy develop particularly strong resentments: “The more they feel threatened, the greater is their bitterness.” Status envy is a common source of conflict in multiethnic states. When the majority Buddhist Sinhalese lost their monopoly on political power in Sri Lanka and the government started to provide job opportunities for Tamils, the Sinhalese rioted. Recent political turmoil in the United States also appears to resemble status envy.
Status is an ordinal ranking, and so even if the economic pie expands and material benefits increase for much of society, this doesn’t equalize status in society. In fact, an overall increase in wealth only raises the bar for the capital required to gain status. Alternative status groups enable the status-disadvantaged to find new sources of status, but members may still worry about their global ranking.
Status maximization: We desire high status and fear low status. Status achievement: We can modify our status through talents, contributions, possessions, and virtues. Status integrity: We should not claim more status than we deserve. Status mobility: We can choose to move ourselves to new social contexts that better value our talents, contributions, possessions, and virtues.
“Human beings have a very strong desire to have reasons for what they do and find indeterminacy hard to accept.” Our brains provide us with post facto rationalizations for our arbitrary acts. We often assume there must be evolutionary instincts that best explain our customary behavior.
And from whence do conventions draw their power? Status. We ultimately follow conventions to gain social approval and avoid social disapproval, and in doing so, they change our behaviors and organize the data we gather from our senses.
During the reversion of Okinawa from American control to Japanese rule, the island chain needed to coordinate a switch from American-style right-side driving to Japanese-style left-side driving. The government chose July 30, 1978, as the first day of left-hand driving and ran a multimillion-dollar “7-30” advertising campaign to raise awareness of the change in policy. The plan worked: other than a few bus accidents,
The Onion TV segment “Thousands of Girls Match Description of Missing Sorority Sister” joked that Ohio police struggled to find a missing woman with “dyed blonde hair, Ugg boots, purple nail polish, and oversized sunglasses” because this description fit nearly every sorority member in the state. Many sorority sisters may unconsciously gravitate toward the same styles—but only after making a status-based decision to join the group in the first place.
The idea that major chords sound “happy” and minor chords are “sad”? That’s a convention.
How do we know that this isn't a genetically inherited convention?
This tight relationship between conventions, social approval, and status supports the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s description of culture as “best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns—customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters” but instead as “a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions—for the governing of behavior.”
Is culture a way of life, fine art, pop culture, or organizational norms? While we may be no closer here to settling on a singular definition, we at least know what culture is “made of”: conventions are the individual units of culture. Everything we point to as “culture”—customs, traditions, fashions, and fads—exists as conventions.
The average American yearly income at the time was $450; the cheapest cars started at $600, and their cost could reach ten times higher.
Is thete anything like this today?
Perhaps an upper-middle-class New Yorker finds a Barcalounger more comfortable than an Eames chair, but only the Eames chair adheres to her high-status community’s conventions of interior design. This changes the calculus of the purchase: Is the immediate comfort of a Barcalounger worth the long-term discomforts of status loss?
In the 1950s, writer Vance Packard interviewed the head of a consulting company who concluded that “more important than belonging to the right club is ability to behave in the knowing manner once inside.”
“more important than belonging to the right club is ability to behave in the knowing manner once inside.”
In 1956 President Sukarno of Indonesia blasted Hollywood executives, complaining that the middle class in his country suffered a new dissatisfaction with their lives after they watched American films in which average households owned luxuries such as automobiles and electric appliances.
“Imitative behavior often occurs when someone who doesn’t know exactly what to do identifies other persons who seem to know and are doing it.”
“Each class envies and emulates the class next above it in the social scale.”
The philosopher Charles Taylor summarizes, “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s.”
High status in modern society thus requires satisfying an additional status criterion: to be distinct. Mindless imitation becomes a low-status act.
In theory, accomplishing this should be even easier than imitation. We can just follow our hearts and do whatever we want, no matter what others think. Or even better, we can do outrageous things, like wear Ziploc bags as shoes and a brown-paper grocery bag on our head that says, in purple Magic Marker, “Juxtaposed Pickle Exasperation.” There are an infinite number of potential idiosyncrasies. But alas, unconventional acts are tolerated only for those who already have high status.
But alas, unconventional acts are tolerated only for those who already have high status.
The pressures of status give every individual a set of conflicting demands: imitate the group norms, counterimitate rivals, emulate superiors but not too obviously, and be unique but not too unique.
“You want to be perceived as original, but not so original that you are outside of the marketplace of popular opinion.”
Humans have an innate predisposition to imitate, but in modern times we must reconcile this with a moral duty to be distinct.
