The Art of Manliness - How the Desire for Status Explains (Pretty Much) Everything

00:00:00.000 I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.180 Being famous, knowing someone famous, getting a laugh after telling a joke, getting a good

00:00:15.820 grade, getting likes on a social media post, winning a video game, cooking a tasty meal,

00:00:20.640 being good looking, having inside knowledge, sharing a good recommendation.

00:00:24.760 Now we often think of status exclusively in terms of wealth, but it's actually a play

00:00:28.360 everywhere, in every situation where we get the feeling of being of value, where we feel

00:00:32.200 ever so slightly elevated in our relative social position.

00:00:35.220 The universal desire for status greatly influences our culture, as well as our own behavior and

00:00:39.300 the ups and downs of our mood.

00:00:40.600 We would all do well then to understand status better, and my guest today can help you do

00:00:44.380 just that.

00:00:45.080 His name is Will Storr, and he's the author of The Status Game, on social position and how

00:00:48.940 we use it.

00:00:49.520 Today on the show, Will walks us through why status and its infinite forms is so important

00:00:53.040 to people, the ways it can be gained through dominance, virtue, and success, and how status

00:00:57.000 games take place both within groups and between them.

00:00:59.500 We talk about the good of status, how it can give us a psychological high and motivate the

00:01:03.340 pursuit of skill, competence, and achievement, as well as its dark sides, including the way

00:01:07.500 that a loss in status and the resulting feeling of humiliation leads to depression and sometimes

00:01:11.880 violence.

00:01:12.720 Will explains how status can be gained by enforcing the rules of a group and punishing those

00:01:16.440 who seem to be lowering the overall status of the tribe, and how this punitive dynamic

00:01:19.880 plays out online.

00:01:21.020 We also discuss how when you try to eliminate certain status games by making things equal, people

00:01:25.260 just find other status games to play, and that when one hierarchy is destroyed, another

00:01:29.400 simply rises to take its place.

00:01:31.300 We end up in a conversation with what we can do if status games are inescapable, to play

00:01:34.960 it in a healthy way.

00:01:36.040 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash status.

00:01:55.260 Will Storr, welcome to the show.

00:01:58.500 Thanks for having me.

00:01:59.600 So you got a new book out called The Status Game on social position and how we use it.

00:02:04.520 And in this book, you take this very broad, also a deep dive into the anthropology, the

00:02:10.940 history, the psychology, the sociology, the philosophy of social status.

00:02:16.420 And I'm curious, what led you to take such a deep dive into social status?

00:02:20.260 Something that we don't like to talk about particularly.

00:02:22.060 Yeah, so for the last few books, I've been really writing books around the idea that

00:02:28.140 the brain is this storyteller and that the conscious experience of our life is that we're

00:02:32.080 this hero in the unfolding plot of our lives.

00:02:36.360 And the books that I've been writing have been focused around that idea.

00:02:42.280 But then I started to think, okay, so if the conscious experience of life is this heroic

00:02:46.160 story and that heroic story is kind of delusional and leads us into all these traps, what's

00:02:52.040 going on in the subconscious?

00:02:53.500 Because the subconscious is, I imagine, more powerful than the conscious.

00:02:56.840 So what's actually going on down there?

00:02:59.860 And so the status game is my attempt at answering that question.

00:03:04.240 Okay, so let's start with definitions.

00:03:05.900 How do you define status, social status?

00:03:10.040 It's simply the feeling of being of value.

00:03:13.380 And to understand that, you've got to understand where it comes from for humans.

00:03:18.180 Most living things compete for status.

00:03:20.960 And the more status they get, the better their lives get, the longer they survive, the more

00:03:25.120 and more safely they can reproduce.

00:03:26.620 So it's a really important, critical goal that lots and lots of living things have.

00:03:32.040 But humans, we're this kind of tribal ape.

00:03:35.040 And so tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago, when our brains were evolving and

00:03:40.080 becoming the recognisably human brains that we have today, we were living in these hunter-gatherer

00:03:44.220 groups. And we started competing for status with prestige.

00:03:48.300 And the way that we gain that kind of, these prestigious forms of status were by being

00:03:53.040 valuable to our group.

00:03:54.520 And so, and there were two ways of being valuable to your group.

00:03:56.880 You can be virtuous.

00:03:58.280 So you can be like generous and courageous and good follower of rules, or you can be

00:04:02.480 successful.

00:04:03.120 You can be valuable, but useful, but being a great honey finder or a great storyteller

00:04:06.440 or a great hunter.

00:04:07.620 So that's kind of the root of a lot of human status driving.

00:04:11.200 It's that feeling of being of value.

00:04:13.460 And when we feel that we're of value to other people, that's when we get that great status

00:04:16.720 bump.

00:04:17.440 And I think an important point to make is status isn't just about being rich.

00:04:22.040 I think a lot of times when we think about status, we think of class, right?

00:04:24.820 Who has a lower class, middle class, upper class, but status is everywhere.

00:04:29.140 It's, you get status for being young.

00:04:31.400 You might get status for being attractive.

00:04:33.580 You get status when, you know, someone compliments you on something you did.

00:04:37.760 So like on your clothes, you're, you know, if you had a good thought, if your kids are

00:04:41.340 well-behaved, you get status for winning like a board game or a pickup game of basketball

00:04:48.180 or you're getting likes on, it's, it's not just about money.

00:04:51.320 It is just about your relative social position with other people in your group.

00:04:56.500 Yeah, absolutely.

00:04:57.260 So the brain has this thing that scientists call the status detection system, and it's

00:05:01.160 unbelievably sensitive.

00:05:02.220 It's constantly monitoring evidence for our relative status versus other people and for

00:05:07.460 other, and, you know, monitoring other people's status as well.

00:05:09.880 And in the book, you know, write about some of these crazy things they found, the relative

00:05:13.460 amount of orange juice you get poured in your glass versus somebody else.

00:05:16.720 If you get more of that, you know, the brain reads that as good.

00:05:19.140 And if you get less, you get offended.

00:05:20.700 Oh, that's, I've been treated as if I'm lower status.

00:05:22.740 So we're unbelievably obsessed with status.

00:05:25.020 I mean, we're constantly measuring it, mostly subconsciously.

00:05:28.480 It's all about symbol.

00:05:29.600 Those measures of orange juice in the glass, that's a symbolic status kind of ranking.

00:05:34.340 But so is money.

00:05:35.200 And so is, as you say, you know, kids' soccer games and the soccer games that we play.

00:05:40.100 And so we're constantly measuring our status in this kind of wild variety of ways.

00:05:45.660 And there's a lot of things going on when we experience status, like physiologically,

00:05:48.940 like there's hormones that boost stuff from, you know, testosterone increases, I think both

00:05:52.580 in men and women, but more in men, you feel this surge of testosterone.

00:05:56.620 Like even if you're watching like your favorite football team or soccer team play and they

00:06:01.620 win, the people watching on TV, the men watching on TV will have this surge in testosterone.

00:06:05.700 So there's a lot of, there's like neurochemicals that go on.

00:06:08.240 And then when the same thing, when you have like a status defeat, when your team loses,

00:06:11.020 or if you experience some sort of slight, you know, testosterone levels go down, you don't

00:06:15.860 get the dopamine or the serotonin.

00:06:17.540 And so we are definitely wired for this.

00:06:20.460 Well, we've been wired for it since before we were human, you know, before we were human,

00:06:23.640 it was mostly dominance battles.

00:06:26.020 So, you know, with physical fighting, you know, lots of animals still use dominance.

00:06:29.860 Most animals use dominance as their primary way of competing for status.

00:06:33.220 So yeah, you can't, you can't get rid of it.

00:06:34.940 It's in the brain.

00:06:35.920 It's been in the brain for millions of years and we all do it.

00:06:39.280 And then, but there's people out there that say, well, I just, I don't care about status.

00:06:42.520 That's, I'm above that.

00:06:45.180 Is it really possible not to care about status?

00:06:47.860 It's completely impossible.

00:06:49.140 Yeah.

00:06:49.380 It's completely, and that always makes me laugh because you say, you know, so why are you

00:06:52.640 telling me that?

00:06:53.600 Usually when people tell you, oh, I don't care what other people think of me, they're kind

00:06:57.100 of showing off.

00:06:57.900 They're kind of saying I'm better than you because I don't care what other people think

00:07:00.720 of me.

00:07:01.240 And it's like, well, it's just completely self-defeating argument.

00:07:04.140 It always makes me chuckle because, because you can just tell by the tone of voice, people

00:07:07.120 are kind of, they're using that as a claim to status.

00:07:10.140 And so, no, you know, you can't, I mean, you know, I've got, you know, I don't know people

00:07:14.700 who are sort of big into their kind of mindfulness and wellness and they're kind of anti-materialistic.

00:07:19.820 Maybe they're driving a beaten up car and they're kind of thinking that that means they're kind

00:07:24.440 of immune to being interested in the status, but the way they're dressing and eating and

00:07:28.520 living their life are just ways that they're enabling themselves to look down their nose

00:07:32.220 at other people who aren't sort of behaving as they are.

00:07:34.840 One of the studies that I write about in the book, some academics in the University of

00:07:39.080 Amsterdam, they did a survey of 3,700 people who were into mindfulness meditation.

00:07:45.260 And they were specifically looking at people who were doing meditation to get rid of their

00:07:48.840 kind of ego needs and their needs for success in their lives.

00:07:51.820 And they found that these people scored very high in measures of what they called spiritual

00:07:55.440 superiority.

00:07:56.960 So, you know, they were saying things like, you know, if other people had the amazing

00:08:00.720 insights that I have, the world would be a much better place and all this stuff.

00:08:04.220 I'm sure it's possible to reduce, you know, with lots of meditation to reduce your need

00:08:08.360 for status, but you cannot get rid of it.

00:08:11.060 And I mean, the only people that really try and get rid of it that I'm aware of in the

00:08:14.140 modern age completely are the hikikomori in Japan who essentially shut themselves away. 0.99

00:08:19.180 And you have to do that because you can't have a social encounter without playing a status

00:08:23.060 game.

00:08:23.640 You know, in all this, in tone of voice, in body language, you know, we're always getting

00:08:29.680 information about what other people think of us.

00:08:31.520 Do they think we're a good person or a bad person?

00:08:34.200 You know, a handsome person or an ugly person or a polite person or a rude person?

00:08:37.840 You know, it's endless.

00:08:39.420 So the only way you can really do it is to shut yourself away like the hikikomori do. 1.00

00:08:43.260 But even then, most of them are playing computer games and that's a status game.

00:08:46.320 So...

00:08:46.800 Right.

00:08:46.980 There's status going on there.

00:08:48.360 So even when people say, like, I don't care about status, you might not care about the

00:08:52.940 status game that the wider culture is playing.

00:08:56.640 You're going to play a different status game.

00:08:59.940 Yeah.

00:09:00.240 So the way to understand it is, I mean, that's how I talk about games, is that there's not

00:09:04.300 one game for status that everyone's playing with each other.

00:09:06.760 There are infinite games.

00:09:08.440 And that's because we're tribal.

00:09:09.540 We're a groupish species.

00:09:10.840 So we have these very powerful subconscious urges to do two things.

00:09:15.420 And one is to connect with other people, to connect into coalitions of like-minded people.

00:09:20.040 And then once we're in those coalitions, we, you know, we compete for status within those

00:09:23.520 groups.

00:09:23.800 So, you know, we want to raise in status and be thought of as a kind of above average

00:09:27.400 member of that group.

00:09:28.820 But then also those groups compete with other groups for status.

00:09:31.900 So if we're playing in a soccer match, for example, we want to get a reputation as one

00:09:35.540 of the better players on the pitch amongst our team players.

00:09:38.480 But we're also trying to beat the other team.

00:09:40.700 You know, so we're connecting into games and then competing for status within them and with

00:09:45.140 other kind of games.

00:09:46.700 You know, if you think about that, that's sports, that's politics, that's religion, that's

00:09:51.200 hobby groups, that's groups on social media.

00:09:54.360 So they're kind of infinite games that we play.

00:09:56.700 And as I said before, we can use anything to symbolize status.

00:09:59.460 And as you say, lots of people just assume you mean money.

00:10:02.400 But money is only one way that we play the status game.

00:10:04.640 There are lots of other ways that we can, you know, play the game.

00:10:07.280 It's just about, you know, anything that makes us feel that we are kind of of value in

00:10:12.280 the eyes of other people.

00:10:13.180 All right, so just to be honest, we're hardwired for status.

00:10:16.180 The reason is because it serves a benefit to us.

00:10:18.520 The higher status you get, the more access to resources, reproduction you get to mate.

00:10:23.420 And then as a group, group status, like that also, the whole group gets those benefits as

00:10:27.540 well, right?

00:10:28.540 But let's talk about these, digging deep into how we can gain status.

00:10:32.380 And you mentioned some of them earlier on.

00:10:34.320 Sort of the primal way of, well, there's a couple of ways.

00:10:37.580 There's one type of status called embodied status, where it's just basically you gain status

00:10:41.740 because of some feature you have physically.

00:10:43.900 So whether you're young or old, young people typically get more status in our culture these

00:10:49.240 days.

00:10:49.740 If you're attractive, you have more status and things like that.

00:10:53.620 But then there's things that people can do to gain status.

00:10:56.940 And like the most primal way to gain status is dominance.

00:11:00.380 Let's talk about dominance status.

00:11:01.640 What does that look like?

00:11:03.020 Is it just a matter of beating people up physically?

00:11:06.040 Or are there other ways to display dominance without physical altercation?

00:11:10.300 So dominance isn't just about violence and the threat of violence.

00:11:13.340 It's also, it's any kind of threat.

00:11:15.500 So anytime when someone's kind of forcing or coercing you to kind of attempt to them in

00:11:19.680 status and sort of give them kind of respect that you don't really want to give them,

00:11:23.420 that's dominance.

00:11:24.940 You know, obviously, when you think of dominance, you think of the more masculine qualities.

00:11:28.600 It just, you know, it tends to be one-on-one, face-to-face physical aggression.

00:11:32.180 Again, we've been doing that for millions of years before we were recognizably human.

00:11:36.800 We were much bigger, had much heavier skeletons, were much more physically powerful.

00:11:41.720 We're basically built for dominance disputes.

00:11:43.620 Even today, millions of years later, men still are bigger and still, you know, you can still

00:11:48.280 see the traces of that kind of extremely violent life that we used to live millions

00:11:52.220 of years ago in the human skeleton and in human psychology and male psychology.

00:11:56.620 But that isn't the only way to use the sort of dominance to compete for status.

00:11:59.780 Things like ostracization, bullying, reputation destruction, they're also forms of dominance.

00:12:06.280 And what you tend to find is, especially in children and in young adults, that plays out

00:12:11.420 quite clearly in that young males are much more likely to use physical aggression one-on-one

00:12:16.860 to sort of compete in dominance disputes.

00:12:19.720 And young females are more likely to use that kind of bullying, you know, the group ganging 1.00

00:12:24.980 up on somebody else, the gossiping, the reputation destruction.

00:12:27.640 So that's more kind of female typical. 0.98

00:12:30.540 But then when the men grow up, because, you know, usually when men get beyond, I don't

00:12:34.340 know, mid-twenties, late-twenties, they're much less likely to use violence or the threat

00:12:38.080 of it.

00:12:38.620 And that kind of levels out and everybody just starts using these kind of more reputation

00:12:42.820 based forms of dominance.

00:12:45.380 Okay.

00:12:45.460 So men are more prone to use physical violence, threats of intimidation.

00:12:49.240 Yeah.

00:12:49.460 Young women, sort of that reputational stuff, like that mean girl stuff that, you know, 1.00

00:12:52.860 the mean girl. 0.98

00:12:53.420 Yeah, exactly.

00:12:54.040 Yeah.

00:12:54.680 When are we more likely to use dominance?

00:12:58.560 Because we all use this at some point.

00:13:00.260 Like as a parent, you might be like, well, you're going to get your iPad taken away from.

00:13:05.280 But like on a, when do like adults use that with each other?

00:13:08.260 When do they use that strategy for status?

00:13:10.580 There are lots of ways that we kind of have to use dominance.

00:13:12.840 You know, in moments of, in war, we use dominance.

00:13:15.680 When Apple computers sues a rival for patent infringement, that's a dominance thing.

00:13:20.760 That's a kind of forced thing, but we're more, we're most likely to kind of tip into those

00:13:25.640 kind of modes of behavior.

00:13:27.200 And you're right.

00:13:27.680 You know, we, we all do it every day, even, you know, when we're kind of growling at somebody

00:13:31.840 in the supermarket checkout queue, who's, you know, who's upset us, we're using, that's

00:13:35.500 a kind of form of dominance.

00:13:37.360 It's most likely to happen when the kind of relative status of the people in the, in

00:13:42.160 the dispute are unclear.

00:13:44.080 So in the book, I talk about this woman who had an encounter with two police officers and

00:13:48.540 the police officers had pulled her kid over and I think it was the car wasn't insured

00:13:52.580 or something like this, but she kind of marched up to them and started berating them and insulting 1.00

00:13:56.780 them.

00:13:57.320 And it turns out that she was sort of high up in the police hierarchy.

00:14:00.920 And she, of course, thought this made her the kind of senior ranking person in the dispute

00:14:05.300 and that they should defer to her.

00:14:07.260 But as far as they were concerned, she was just there to pick up the kids and it was irrelevant

00:14:10.540 what her job was.

00:14:11.480 And so, so there was this dispute about who had, who actually had the right to behave as

00:14:17.260 if they were higher status.

00:14:18.660 The dispute ended up badly for the woman. 1.00

00:14:20.780 She ended up having to, I think she, she ended up having to resign her job because they filmed

00:14:24.980 the dispute and it ended up on the internet and she didn't look, it didn't reflect very

00:14:29.460 well on her. 0.53

00:14:30.480 But, but yeah, so it's in disputes where the kind of relative kind of ranking of the people

00:14:35.040 involved are kind of a bit murky, a bit ambiguous.

00:14:37.960 Like the most obvious example is if you can imagine going into a new company as the boss,

00:14:43.040 but you're, you know, you're 29 and you're going in to manage people who have been there

00:14:46.880 for years and they're in their forties and fifties.

00:14:49.220 It's ambiguous there because they're going to look at you as this, as this kid, who are

00:14:52.400 you to boss me around?

00:14:54.100 But the kid is the boss.

00:14:55.200 So the kid is there to boss them around.

00:14:57.800 So it's that situation that really is kind of very dangerous in human relations.

00:15:02.680 Well, that happens in animals too with wolves.

00:15:04.900 Like for a long time, we thought that the alpha wolf was the wolf that just beats up

00:15:09.060 on the other wolves.

00:15:10.880 But that observation was made by looking at wolves in captivity.

00:15:15.260 So they would just, but they, what they did is they got a bunch of wolves, random wolves

00:15:18.420 from not the same pack, put them in captivity and they saw, well, this wolf beat up all

00:15:22.880 the other wolves.

00:15:23.740 And so he's the alpha wolf.

00:15:25.120 But then, so yeah, that's the, okay.

00:15:26.660 So alpha wolf is the guy that beats up everybody.

00:15:28.740 But then they actually started observing wolf packs in the wild.

00:15:31.180 And what they found that doesn't happen.

00:15:32.600 Like the alpha wolf and are just like the parent wolves and their, their cubs are there

00:15:37.840 in their pack.

00:15:38.660 So in, in the natural setting, the status hierarchy is established, right?

00:15:43.260 The parents are the top dogs.

00:15:44.940 So in that sense, wolves don't rely on dominance.

00:15:47.740 They just, that's mom. 0.55

00:15:49.580 You follow mom and dad, you do what they do.

00:15:51.100 But in captivity, when you put wolves from different packs together, that's when all the,

00:15:54.580 the fighting happens.

00:15:56.360 Wow.

00:15:56.440 That's fascinating.

00:15:57.520 Yeah.

00:15:57.720 That's fascinating.

00:15:59.160 Okay.

00:15:59.600 So dominant status that we, we go to that with threats whenever we're not sure about

00:16:03.840 the status in a situation.

00:16:05.800 You mentioned there's prestige status and there's two ways you can get prestige status.

00:16:09.400 There's virtue and success status.

00:16:11.660 What does virtue status look like?

00:16:14.000 Where this comes from is, is when we started to be these kind of weird apes who are highly,

00:16:18.380 highly cooperative.

00:16:19.000 And, you know, humans back then are like humans are today, really, you know, we can 0.78

00:16:24.620 be really nice, but we can also be very selfish, self-interested, hypocritical, delusional about

00:16:28.660 our kind of moral capacity. 0.91

00:16:31.200 So how does evolution get these kind of slightly selfish, self-interested, delusional apes to 0.99

00:16:36.060 work together and cooperate and be, and think about other people?

00:16:39.500 So this is the way you have to sort of develop this reward system for rewarding tribal members

00:16:44.840 for behavior that puts the interests of the tribe ahead of their own selfish interests.

00:16:50.080 So, so that's why selfless behaviors and universally seem to be morally good behaviors

00:16:55.420 and selfish behaviors and universally seem to be morally bad behaviors because it's all

00:16:59.200 about, you know, incentivizing us to be good members of the tribe.

00:17:03.400 So, so anything that is kind of pro-tribe, selfless is, is kind of virtuous.

00:17:09.120 And so that can be, as I said, generosity, sharing your meat and resources, you being courageous

00:17:14.000 in battle, but, but also things about conformity.

00:17:17.360 So knowing the rules, following the rules, taking part in all the rituals and taking part

00:17:21.640 in them really well, you know, that's going to gain you status in the tribe because that's

00:17:25.320 that, you know, you're a virtuous, you know, tribe first minded person.

00:17:29.260 You're not selfish or selfless and also, you know, enforcing the rules.

00:17:33.340 So somebody that enforces the rules and punishes rule breakers, that's also seen as a virtuous

00:17:38.460 act.

00:17:38.960 So that's when it gets into slight sort of, you know, dodgy territory.

00:17:42.020 And the other one is competence is success.

00:17:44.720 So, you know, it's obvious other way of being useful to the tribe.

00:17:48.400 So that's just by being just skilled, but being a great honey finder, a great storyteller,

00:17:52.760 a great, a great hunter.

00:17:54.420 And so those are the three essential ways in human social life that we can, that we earn

00:17:59.020 status as dominance, but there's also virtue and success.

00:18:02.720 Maybe we see the benefits, right?

00:18:03.900 If we have the status drive, it compels us to be a good person.

00:18:06.540 It compels us to, it can compel us to, you know, be competent and become skilled at something.

00:18:11.020 But this can also take us down dark paths.

00:18:13.580 And the first way this can happen is when someone feels humiliated.

00:18:18.740 So what happens when, so the humiliation is the opposite of status.

00:18:22.360 It's the complete opposite.

00:18:23.780 What happens to us?

00:18:25.620 This was a really interesting thing when I was sort of trying to work out whether it

00:18:30.420 was right, what I was reading about status, whether it is really important.

00:18:33.280 And I kind of attest that I set myself was, okay, if you're going to argue that status is

00:18:36.580 so important, it must be really bad when it's taken away from us.

00:18:40.760 And so I started looking into that and I came across all the research literature on humiliation

00:18:45.880 and how they define humiliation is, is it's not just the removal of all your status from

00:18:50.100 the group.

00:18:50.540 It's also the removal of your kind of ability to claim status in the future.

00:18:54.580 So you're so, you've fallen so far down the game that you're out.

00:18:58.280 You're basically expelled.

00:18:59.280 Nobody wants to have anything to do with you forever.

00:19:01.460 So it's really bad to be, I mean, and we all, again, it's a universal thing, which also

00:19:05.660 shows how important status is.

00:19:07.460 Nobody wants to be humiliated.

00:19:08.820 We all fear humiliation.

00:19:10.760 Humiliation is the basis of the absolute worst of human behavior.

00:19:15.400 You know, most obviously human violence.

00:19:17.880 There's a violence researcher that I quote in the book that said when he got into studying

00:19:22.300 violence, he just assumed, like most people do, that the major causes of street crime are

00:19:26.140 greed and need. 0.66

00:19:27.400 People are starving or they're greedy and they rob people.

00:19:30.520 But when he actually met these people and spoke to these people for years, the most common

00:19:33.660 reason is status disputes.

00:19:34.920 People feel disrespected.

00:19:36.820 So they fight back with dominance.

00:19:38.980 And in doing so, humiliation flips into pride.

00:19:42.340 You know, a real driver of the cycle of violence that you see on the streets, because everybody's

00:19:46.900 trying to flip that sense of humiliation into pride.

00:19:49.700 And it goes on and on and on.

00:19:51.180 But then when you look at the kind of wider story, humiliation is implicated in the absolute

00:19:55.440 worst of the worst of the worst of human behavior.

00:19:58.100 And in the book, I talk about, you know, incel spree killers, terrorists, serial killers,

00:20:04.160 spies, honor killings, all of which often have, very often have a series of components

00:20:10.840 of humiliation that kind of motivates them.

00:20:13.540 Yeah, you highlight Elliot Rogers, the kid who did the mass shooting.

00:20:17.780 And, you know, you did a deep dive into him, did these manifestos.

00:20:21.200 And it just sounds like he was just, he just felt humiliated.

00:20:23.720 Well, first off, it sounds like he was, he probably had some sort of narcissistic personality

00:20:26.860 disorder, which made him more vulnerable to humiliation.

00:20:30.420 But if you look through, like he just had all these grievances.

00:20:32.260 And that's why he felt justified in what he did.

00:20:36.280 Yeah, he's a really fascinating case.

00:20:38.120 And so I kind of build this argument in that chapter that it isn't just humiliation that

00:20:41.640 makes people dangerous.

00:20:42.880 But the most dangerous people are A, male, for reasons we've already discussed, because 1.00

00:20:47.380 men tend to be violent, B, humiliated, but C, also narcissistic. 0.62

00:20:52.560 Because if you're kind of grandiose and narcissistic, you're kind of dysfunctional in your, in the 0.74

00:20:57.520 way that you imagine the status game.

00:20:59.280 You feel that you, you are just naturally and automatically deserving of lots of status.

00:21:03.540 And this is not, this is sort of disconnected from your behavior.

00:21:05.940 It's not about earning it.

00:21:07.200 You just earn it because you're amazing.

00:21:09.020 And so it's very unhealthy way of living your life.

00:21:12.240 But, and if you take a narcissist, especially in a male, if you take a male narcissist and

00:21:16.660 you humiliate them again and again and again, and again, you're going to end up with a very

00:21:20.540 probably with an extremely dangerous person.

00:21:22.580 And Elliot Rodgers is, it was definitely one of these people, but what was interesting

00:21:26.240 about Elliot was that he, he left this 108,000 word, it's actually an autobiography, like

00:21:30.600 this very detailed memoir.

00:21:32.640 He's full of, you know, moments of sort of extreme narcissism.

00:21:36.260 You know, he describes himself as a gorgeous, fabulous gentleman, things like this.

00:21:40.880 But he's also brutally honest about his failures and brutally honest about his sense of

00:21:46.480 humiliation, the hands of his peers, the bullying he encountered.

00:21:50.320 And the only way that he, the only kind of, his only kind of source of status in his life

00:21:54.940 was World of Warcraft.

00:21:56.460 And such was his need for status that he became obsessed with World of Warcraft and ended up

00:22:00.500 sort of reaching its kind of top level, became a really skilled player.

00:22:04.360 And, you know, he says in the memoir that it was only when he was playing World of Warcraft

00:22:07.640 that all his troubles with his social troubles receded.

00:22:10.500 And he forgot all about that and he was happy.

00:22:12.480 And then one day he had this kind of small circle of friends that he would play World of

00:22:16.320 Warcraft with at this internet cafe.

00:22:17.820 And one day he discovered somehow they were all meeting up in secret behind his back because

00:22:23.340 they didn't want to, didn't really want to play with him.

00:22:25.660 And of course, this was devastating to him.

00:22:27.620 And he talks about, he talks about playing with tears running down his face.

00:22:31.440 And that was the last day he played seriously.

00:22:34.380 In his memoir, that's the day where he just, he just, he just has his, his thoughts become

00:22:39.040 just extraordinarily disordered.

00:22:40.620 And he, and he starts sort of imagining this kind of dark future world in which sex is 0.51

00:22:46.260 abolished and women are, all the women are wiped out and, and, and so on. 0.99

00:22:50.320 You know, in the book, I argue that, you know, after his spree killing, lots of commentators

00:22:53.580 on the left and the right blamed World of Warcraft and said, well, it must be World of Warcraft

00:22:57.260 that made him violent.

00:22:58.340 But I actually think that World of Warcraft was the last thing keeping him sane because

00:23:02.000 it was his last source of status that he had and it was taken from him.

00:23:06.520 And that's when he really cracked up.

00:23:08.760 All right.

00:23:08.840 So humiliation is the most extreme form of status defeat.

00:23:12.040 And it can, in certain situations, it can lead people to do terrible things, but we all

00:23:16.120 experience maybe not humiliation, but just status defeat on a daily basis.

00:23:20.400 And I imagine if you look back on your behavior, like when you, you felt you weren't proud of

00:23:25.140 the way you behaved, it was probably because it was a reaction to a status defeat of some

00:23:30.780 sort, whether you got snippy with somebody or you lashed out online at somebody.

00:23:35.580 There might've been, you might've just been having a bad day because, you know, the boss

00:23:39.620 yelled at you or something like that.

00:23:42.180 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:23:43.220 We respond in dominance all the time when, when things like that happen, you know, it

00:23:47.380 affects our mental health too.

00:23:48.640 I mean, lots and lots of cases of depression and even suicide are implicated in the sense

00:23:55.600 that you are, you've either declined in status or the people around you have accelerated in

00:24:01.580 status and you stayed behind.

00:24:02.900 And, you know, in suicidality is particularly, we become particularly vulnerable to that kind 0.99

00:24:06.900 of suicidal thoughts when we have a very sudden drop in status.

00:24:10.780 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:24:14.300 And now back to the show.

00:24:16.180 All right.

00:24:16.300 So throughout the conversation so far, we have mentioned social media in passing and its role

00:24:21.460 that it plays in status games.

00:24:22.860 But I want to dig deeper into it because I think anyone who has a social media account

00:24:28.020 has experienced firsthand how social media can ratchet up status anxiety.

00:24:33.700 I mean, like you, you post a picture on Instagram and then you're just the rest of the day, you're

00:24:37.160 checking like how many likes did it get?

00:24:38.600 What are people saying?

00:24:39.800 Or you tweet something and then you're checking how many retweets did it get?

00:24:43.060 So walk us through that.

00:24:44.140 How does, how does social media intensify the status games that we play?

00:24:48.920 Yeah, totally.

00:24:50.200 I mean, I mean, all of social media, it's a status game.

00:24:53.460 And I think what's happened to the social media giants and designers have by kind of

00:24:57.580 instincts and trial and error formed their platforms around our need for status.

00:25:02.680 If you think about those three games that we played, dominance, virtue and success, that

00:25:06.140 is social media, you know, dominance with the kind of cancel culture and the mobby kind

00:25:10.440 of behavior, success or the pictures of the lovely holidays and I've won this award and

00:25:15.000 I've got this new job and virtue.

00:25:17.160 Of course, I've done this amazing thing, you know, enforcing the rules, showing off about

00:25:21.560 the marathon you've just run for, you know, breast cancer.

00:25:24.400 And the interesting thing about it is, you know, lots of people kind of are aware of some

00:25:28.600 of the kind of sort of dark technology that runs social media and this idea that it's a

00:25:32.600 bit like a slot machine because the rewards are unpredictable.

00:25:36.160 So if you make a contribution to social media, you don't know how it's going to go down.

00:25:40.640 Sometimes you're going to get lots of likes, sometimes you're going to get none or you might

00:25:44.500 even get attacked. So the rewards are inconsistent and that's what, just like a fruit machine,

00:25:48.900 it keeps you coming back, gives this kind of addictive quality.

00:25:52.040 But as I say in the book, you know, I think that's quite well known amongst technologists

00:25:55.360 that that kind of slot machine effect.

00:25:57.800 But what they don't really talk about is what you're actually gambling with.

00:26:00.480 And it seems clear to me that you're gambling with status.

00:26:03.000 That's what you're doing when you make any contribution to social media, whether it's a picture of your

00:26:06.780 holiday or it's a kind of witty comment or it's an attack on a political opponent.

00:26:11.140 And you're gambling with your status. And sometimes you get loads of status.

00:26:14.440 Sometimes you get retweets and people love it and you go, yeah, that's brilliant.

00:26:17.040 You're amazing. And sometimes it's a disaster.

00:26:19.300 You either get ignored, which is depressing, or you get attacked and you feel humiliated.

00:26:23.900 One of the sort of really interesting things about seeing it is this kind of huge global

00:26:27.740 status game that we can play is that, you know, most people have just pretty ordinary lives

00:26:33.000 and, you know, they're going to work every day and they're a teacher or whatever.

00:26:36.260 But if they're very active on social media, they might well find that they have more status

00:26:41.320 packed into their, you know, phones that they're carrying around in their pocket than they do in

00:26:45.180 their actual everyday lives. So, you know, so when they're in their everyday life, they're just,

00:26:49.560 they're a police officer or they're, you know, whatever. But when they turn on their phone,

00:26:53.180 they're this, you know, amazing person with all these followers who love them because they're funny

00:26:56.580 or they're brave or they're, you know, whatever.

00:26:59.180 And so, so I think that's why, that's why social media can become such a powerful thing in people's

00:27:05.600 lives because it becomes their kind of central nutrient for the mind status. Like just like

00:27:09.780 the vitamins are essential nutrients for the body.

00:27:12.500 And that can go down bad places because, you know, people feel terrible when they post something

00:27:17.500 on social media and it doesn't do well or their follower count isn't going up. And so to remedy that,

00:27:23.040 they start posting increasingly dumb or cringy things, or they start saying inflammatory stuff 0.79

00:27:29.200 that makes our, our politics more polarized, or they might start going after people because they 0.76

00:27:34.580 need attention and they'll do anything to get another status boost related to the related to

00:27:40.340 this idea, at least to the piling on that you can see happen on social media sometimes. And this is

00:27:46.080 something that happens offline too. It's the enforcement of the rules of the status games we play.

00:27:51.220 And you say this can be explained by two archetypes of people who enforce these rules. You call them

00:27:56.900 the cousins and the warriors. So who are these guys? Who are the cousins and warriors?

00:28:01.320 Again, you know, to, to work out how this stuff works, you've got to go back and look at how life

00:28:06.440 was in the tribes that we evolved in, because that's, that's where our brains evolved and where

00:28:10.220 these instincts and kind of patterns of behavior kind of first emerged. And one of the, one of the

00:28:15.960 things I thought that really surprised me when I, when you look at a hunter gatherer life was that

00:28:20.660 there wasn't some sort of big man figure in charge who was a big leader. It was generally

00:28:26.160 much more collaborative that leadership and hunter gatherer tribes. And that's surprising

00:28:29.660 because if you look at the world today, there are leaders everywhere. There are political leaders

00:28:33.100 and, you know, the cult of the CEO and the cult of the founder. We go to work and have bosses,

00:28:38.520 you know, you know, that one kind of leader feels like a natural, natural and kind of universal

00:28:44.220 facet of human life. But it wasn't like that back in the day, the status games that we played

00:28:49.360 in those tribes were much, they were there, but they were much reduced. And what would happen is

00:28:53.760 that they were, they were kind of like a small group of elders that researchers, they call them

00:28:57.420 the cousins and they're not literally cousins, but, but, but that's what they call them.

00:29:01.720 And there were these kind of elders. And so what would happen is if, if somebody, you know,

00:29:06.380 dropped in status because they were behaving badly for, for whatever reason, the cousins would go

00:29:11.260 away and sort of discuss it. And, you know, gossip would, would kind of spread out amongst the tribe

00:29:15.980 and the cousins would then kind of collaboratively kind of, kind of make this, make a decision to,

00:29:21.200 to enforce the rules of the group. And so, you know, researchers talk about this idea that we

00:29:26.980 weren't living under the tyranny of leaders. We were living under the tyranny of the cousins.

00:29:30.600 It was a fearsome, fearsome, could often be a fearsome, fearsome environment to, to live in.

00:29:36.960 You know, one of the quotes from one of these researchers was that we lived in this,

00:29:39.980 they called it a social cage of tradition where it is all about the rules. So execution,

00:29:46.660 capital punishment was, is thought to have once been a human universal. So if you really

00:29:50.920 transgress badly, you'd just be killed. And when you look at some of these groups, it isn't just,

00:29:55.200 you can imagine, okay, somebody can be executed if by, for, you know, murdering, if they murder somebody

00:29:59.880 else, or if they, you know, for some really egregious, other really egregious, aggressive

00:30:04.340 series of crimes. But you could be murdered for all kinds of reasons. You know, one of them was

00:30:08.880 treading on the men's path. For a woman, you tread on the men's path, you could be executed. 1.00

00:30:13.460 And in the book, I talk about this, that there's a story I got from the ethnographic literature

00:30:17.160 from a group in Papua New Guinea. And what happened was somebody died of sickness in the,

00:30:23.880 in the tribe, but the cousins decided that the person had died due to an act of sorcery.

00:30:28.800 So that, so they did some sort of magic ritual with like smoking leaves to, to work out who,

00:30:34.880 who the killer was. And, and they decided it was this one poor bloke who was accused and sort of

00:30:39.920 panicked. The cousins began talking and gossiping and the gossip spreads throughout the tribe.

00:30:43.880 And everyone starts talking about all the bad things that this person did and why they're so

00:30:47.300 awful. And, and, you know, the, the, a sense of moral outrage and disgust is kind of focused more

00:30:53.140 and more on this individual. And eventually he's just killed and eaten. And that's what happened to

00:30:57.260 him. I, in the book, as you'll know, I can, I compare that to the kinds of things that we see

00:31:01.900 on social media. Of course, no one's been killed and eaten on social media, but, but it's the,

00:31:06.040 but it's the same dynamics, you know, and it's the same dynamics because we have these,

00:31:10.000 we still have these tribal brains that the cousins are there on social media. And if they target

00:31:15.380 somebody that they feel has transgressed the rules of their, their tribe, then the gossip starts,

00:31:21.460 the gossip spreads down from, from their kind of lofty heights to all their followers.

00:31:25.060 And it builds and it builds and it builds and it builds. And then, but the attack is,

00:31:29.100 it's about that reputation destruction, that other form of dominance we also use. And of course,

00:31:33.980 that's sometimes we call that cancel culture, but, but, but it's certainly, you know, we see that a

00:31:39.020 lot on social media because it's, it's human behavior.

00:31:42.440 Well, yeah, I think that's a good point you make throughout the book. I think

00:31:44.940 about this idea of, of in small groups or in tribes, I think there's this romantic idea that

00:31:50.680 like, oh, they were egalitarian. We should be more like hunter gatherer tribes and like, look,

00:31:54.260 you know, the potlatch, right? Look at this, this big man, he's giving away all of his stuff

00:31:58.480 because he's so generous and noble. And, but if you, if you actually look at the ethnographic

00:32:03.280 research, a lot of times the, the researchers find out, no, they were just giving away, not because

00:32:07.920 they were like good, it's like, they were afraid if they don't, that whole, the cousins would gang up

00:32:13.060 on them and just kill them because there could, there could be no one higher in the, in the group.

00:32:18.460 Yeah, that's right. And also it's the deal for status, you know, the potlatch is a lot of that 1.00

00:32:22.780 was about status. And in the book, I talk about, you know, a similar idea with, with these big yams

00:32:27.220 and whoever brought the biggest yam to the feast was declared number one and was, you know,

00:32:31.120 rose in status. So that's absolutely right. And also this idea of, you know, the egalitarian tribe,

00:32:36.280 the first thing to say about that is that, is that that's relatively speaking, that they weren't

00:32:39.920 actually egalitarian, these tribes, not everybody was equal. There were status hierarchies in there,

00:32:45.280 but they're just much shallower than we see today. And the second thing that sort of just as

00:32:49.800 importantly is they're not egalitarian because they're all sort of communists and they'll, they'll,

00:32:54.180 nobody wanted to, you know, be the boss because they're all so humble and nice. They're egalitarian

00:32:58.600 because they're all obsessed with their own level of status and everyone is checking everyone else

00:33:03.120 constantly to make sure that nobody claims too much. So when everybody's batting heads, you know,

00:33:07.580 socially constantly to make sure nobody rises too much, that that's kind of what you end up with.

00:33:11.740 If you live in an environment where you don't have property or in a private property or, you know,

00:33:15.180 land ownership, these kinds of things that can kind of become sources of status. So yeah,

00:33:20.940 there is this myth that we lived in this proto-communist utopia back in the day and it just

00:33:25.980 isn't true. You mentioned, so there's the cousins, these kind of, they're in the group to sort of

00:33:29.960 enforce the rules. What are the warriors? Yeah, I talk about the warriors because, I mean, again,

00:33:35.000 looking at, looking at kind of social media, the cousins are the ones that I guess decide on,

00:33:39.760 on who gets punished. The warriors, I talk about these people that sort of go out

00:33:44.060 and attack other members of the tribe. And again, what we see in these, the tribes in which we

00:33:48.220 evolved, they were pretty violent. I mean, the tribes that weren't particularly violent,

00:33:52.660 the ones that are isolated and not near, not that near to other tribes, but it's fairly common for

00:33:57.880 those kind of hunter-gatherer tribes to be extremely territorial, extremely aggressive, and to launch

00:34:03.660 raiding attacks on rival tribes and in turn to have to defend themselves from raiding attacks on their

00:34:09.040 own tribes. And again, you see this in life today, you see it on social media, again, these kind of

00:34:13.360 warrior behaviour, which is not so much about enforcing the rules within the group, but going

00:34:18.720 out and attacking members of other groups for perceived attacks on their kind of status.

00:34:25.380 And I think to sort of explain, I need to sort of need to explain that, you know, one way that we

00:34:29.280 measure status is with beliefs. So beliefs can be status symbols. So we can believe a million things

00:34:34.240 that have nothing to do with status, like the length of the Mississippi River and the boiling

00:34:37.600 point of water. And nobody argues about this stuff because nobody's status is attached to it.

00:34:42.140 But there's a small kind of subset of beliefs that we attach our status to, that when somebody

00:34:47.880 doesn't believe that thing, we look down our nose at them. And then we look up at people and we admire

00:34:51.880 people who do believe those things. And of course, these are things like political beliefs,

00:34:56.100 moral beliefs. And so every kind of status game has its kind of sacred beliefs. And I think what you

00:35:02.760 see in social media is, is warriors going out to attack people who they feel have insulted the

00:35:08.320 sacred beliefs of their tribe.

00:35:10.460 Throughout the book, you mentioned that status games, there's all different types of status

00:35:13.780 games going on. There could be a status game within a tribe, within your family, at work,

00:35:18.420 wherever, or on a societal level, even. But you talk about that sometimes status games can start

00:35:23.720 to become tight. And that's when they get more intense. Like what do you, why does it happen?

00:35:28.600 And what does a tight status game look like? So this is based on some really fascinating work,

00:35:33.880 principally by a psychologist called Michelle Gelfand. She studies the differences in cultures

00:35:39.360 rather than groups. And what she finds, and psychologists who study the same thing, what

00:35:45.220 they find is that there are different kinds of culture. Some cultures are tight, relatively tight,

00:35:49.800 and some cultures are relatively loose. Tight cultures tend to be much more conformist,

00:35:53.900 much more suspicious of outsiders, much more kind of religious, much more prone to kind of,

00:35:58.060 in a supernatural belief. They're kind of rule makers, rule followers. So if you look at things

00:36:03.400 like the time on clocks in public spaces, in tight cultures, much more likely to be correct than in

00:36:08.900 loose cultures. The trains run on time more in tight cultures than loose cultures. So Germany is a 0.98

00:36:13.840 relatively tight culture. The UK is relatively loose. And what makes them this way, Gelfand and others

00:36:19.920 believe, is that it is kind of a history of struggle, difficulty, whether it be climactic difficulty,

00:36:25.840 or plagues, or wars. If that culture has a history of very severe kind of shock and stress and pressure,

00:36:33.620 that they tighten up and they kind of remain that way. And I just sort of extended that idea to groups

00:36:40.100 in general, because I think it works for groups in general. If you think about the group as the

00:36:44.300 status game, what's the tightest status game you can possibly play? But that's a cult. What defines

00:36:50.120 a cult is the cult of saying, we are your only source of status. That's it. You are not allowed

00:36:55.000 any other source of connection or status anywhere in your life. And that's why cults want you to cut

00:36:59.500 off contact with your family and friends and, you know, even outside jobs sometimes. You're not allowed

00:37:05.300 to have if you're a member of a cult. And they offer you a very, very specific set of rules by which to

00:37:10.560 earn status. You must do this, you must do this, you must do this, and you must do it exactly. You

00:37:14.740 know, very often cults even try to kind of litigate over the content of your own head. You know, they

00:37:19.500 tell you what you're allowed to think and what you're not allowed to think. So there is an extremely

00:37:23.960 tight status game. And they often offer like ridiculously, you know, crazy status rewards.

00:37:30.380 The cult that I look at in detail in the book is the Heaven's Gate cult. And the idea there was that

00:37:34.840 if you follow our rules, you can be literally taken away by UFOs, and you're going to be taken to the

00:37:39.940 level above human. So you're going to have such high status, you're going to be literally superhuman,

00:37:44.760 which, you know, not coincidentally is also what the Nazis and the communists promised,

00:37:49.340 followers of Nazis and communism, that they were going to become kind of superhuman

00:37:52.360 people. That's a really tight group. You can extend that down. You can see, you know,

00:37:56.420 so if the tightest group possible is a cult, then you can see something like, you know,

00:37:59.800 fundamentalist Islamism as not a cult, but not far off a cult. That's a tight group with really,

00:38:06.060 you know, high, like crazy promises of high status, very conformist, kind of wild supernatural

00:38:12.320 beliefs. Lots of political groups are very tight. Since the global financial crisis, I think the

00:38:16.840 cultures of the West have tightened up. Politics now in the UK, in the US and in Canada, it's just

00:38:22.920 a much, they're much tighter games than they were, we say, 15 years ago. People have wilder beliefs,

00:38:28.880 they're much more conformist, they're much more angry. So yeah, I think the tightness looseness thing

00:38:34.420 is useful because it takes it away from, oh, it's all the lefties, it's all the right-wingers,

00:38:39.400 it's all the left-wingers. It's actually everybody. The problem isn't being left-wing

00:38:42.780 or right-wing. The problem is by being unhealthily tight.

00:38:45.600 All right. So status is everywhere and it can take us down some dark places, cause a lot of

00:38:49.380 problems. So if some people think, well, why don't we just get rid of status, you know,

00:38:53.340 make everyone the same, everyone equal, and we won't have these problems anymore. But as we talked

00:38:58.040 about earlier, the fact that hunter-gatherer tribes, you know, they were very egalitarian in a sense,

00:39:02.800 that didn't stop other kinds of status games from going on. And then you also talk about a modern

00:39:08.420 day case study about what happened in Russia during Soviet rule when they tried that, when they tried

00:39:13.940 to make everyone the same. And it didn't work out the way they thought it would. So what happened

00:39:19.000 in Russia when they tried to make everyone equal?

00:39:22.360 Yeah, it was bad. It was really bad. And this was really illuminating for me because, you know,

00:39:27.340 we've all heard, you know, we know what happens in the Soviet Union. It was pretty bad. 0.98

00:39:31.440 But actually, when you look at it from a status perspective, it all starts to make sense. And so

00:39:36.780 the idea, and this was an idea that was sort of bubbling around in the years after the Industrial

00:39:41.420 Revolution, because in the Industrial Revolution, you start to see this kind of much more inequality

00:39:45.360 and these kind of captains of industry hoarding status and these very badly treated workers being

00:39:51.700 very badly treated. And so this idea, we need to get rid of this. What they imagined was that wealth

00:39:56.860 and property ownership was the cause of our status anxiety. They didn't understand it was in our

00:40:02.320 brains anyway. So they said, if we get rid of property ownership and ownership of anything,

00:40:06.520 we'll get rid of status anxiety and it'll be a paradise. It'll be amazing. But of course,

00:40:10.500 that's not what happened at all. You know, they got rid of property ownership and just started playing

00:40:15.220 a different kind of status game. What amazed me and what I didn't know before I did this research

00:40:19.620 was that under Stalin, the Soviet Union did an enormous sort of U-turn and started actually

00:40:25.220 embracing the status game again. You know, in the times of Lenin, all kind of, they tried to abolish

00:40:31.300 all outward signs of status. So even like ranks in the army, medals, awards, you know, all that stuff

00:40:37.880 was gone and Stalin brought it all back because he realized it just wasn't working. You know, he even 0.87

00:40:43.780 insulted people by calling them equality mongerers. You're an equality mongerer. He said, you know,

00:40:48.480 people want to own a cow. There's nothing wrong with owning a cow. It's perfectly normal to own

00:40:51.720 a cow. They brought back all the awards and all the, you know, all the medals. What you end up

00:40:56.840 with in the Soviet Union is an even more hierarchical world than you had in the West. I mean, one group of

00:41:02.680 sociologists went, you know, visited the Soviet Union, I think it was in the 50s. And they said there

00:41:06.600 were like 12 distinct social classes in the Soviet Union. And the top class really did live like the

00:41:13.920 aristocrats of the czars of the previous era. They even had servants. They were swept away on

00:41:20.580 holidays on these luxury trains that were full of extraordinary, you know, full of butter and veal

00:41:25.980 and, you know, incredible, you know, cigars. So it was entirely hypocritical. All they did was just 0.92

00:41:33.020 build a new hierarchy, put themselves at the top, which I think is what, that's what always happens

00:41:37.820 when, you know, when people promise utopia, they just build a new hierarchy and put themselves at the

00:41:41.780 top and the old people at the bottom. As I said, the reason it didn't work is because they just 1.00

00:41:45.880 made that fundamental mistake. They thought that wealth and property and ownership caused our status

00:41:51.680 anxiety, but the status anxiety is there anyway. You cannot get rid of it. So no matter what society

00:41:56.940 you try and build, our need for status will always assert itself. Yeah. I mean, George Orwell talked

00:42:01.980 about that in Animal Farm, right? All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

00:42:06.480 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, yeah. And it was brutal. I mean, I, I, I, I deliberately didn't

00:42:13.120 sort of pull any punches in that chapter. And, you know, at the same time, the, the, you know,

00:42:17.880 the people at the top were, they call them the nomenclature, that the nomenclature had their

00:42:23.000 servants being taken by luxury trains and feasting and, you know, for their kind of free holidays and

00:42:29.060 their, to their holiday homes. People were literally eating each other alive in, in gulags and on

00:42:34.440 kind of prison islands. So it really is, you know, uh, it was horrific what happened in the Soviet 0.97

00:42:40.280 union. And it is a story that we were, we were a bit obsessed with what was going on in Germany in

00:42:46.120 the middle of the 20th century in, in, in the West. And, uh, I think the stories, I think the

00:42:50.980 stories from the Soviet union are just as useful for us to know and no less horrific. 0.96

00:42:57.440 Yeah. So I think the lesson there, I mean, I think there's a book I read that ties into this idea

00:43:01.620 that even as you try to eliminate, uh, inequality, like the status game is still there. There's a

00:43:07.320 book called envy, a theory of social behavior by this guy named Helmut Showick. And he makes

00:43:12.300 that case is you can try to make things equal, but what ends up happening is people just find

00:43:16.400 another status game to play. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I mean, yeah, that, that, that, I mean, that's,

00:43:22.880 I think that was one of the takeaways of my book, which I thought was probably quite, quite

00:43:26.420 controversial, but you know, inarguable when you're on the side of stuff. And that is this idea of

00:43:29.640 equality is a complete myth. We're never going to have equality because people are always going

00:43:34.280 to want to be, you know, getting statuses about winning, get being above and, and, and, and you're

00:43:39.080 never going to eradicate that from the human animal. Yeah. I mean, you can just see this with

00:43:42.220 kids, right? Like you can give your kids the same amount of food, but it looks like the same,

00:43:47.960 but like, they're going to find a way. No, he's got a little bit more. And we do that even as adults.

00:43:53.800 Yeah. Yeah. And, and the fact that it's kids, you know, it demonstrates me in the book,

00:43:58.260 I talk about, you know, some of this stuff, you know, as soon as kids are able to play

00:44:02.620 with toys that they're arguing about who gets, who gets the toy and it isn't about the toys

00:44:06.680 about, you know, cause the toys is, is, is just symbolic. It symbolizes status. So it's

00:44:11.040 there. We're, you know, we're born with it and it, and it happens automatically.

00:44:15.400 All right. So if we can't escape the status game, unless you're one of these, those, a 0.99

00:44:19.040 hermit or one of those Japanese hermit dudes who just live in their, their apartment room, 0.98

00:44:23.600 how can we play the status game, but in a healthy flourishing way? Do you, have you figured

00:44:27.600 that out?

00:44:28.020 I try to answer this question in, in, in a few ways. I think a basic one that I found useful

00:44:33.980 personally is, is this idea that we, we all too easily slip into dominance, you know, and

00:44:38.340 you know, these little acts of dominance that mark our days, you know, when we kind of roll

00:44:41.940 our eyes, send rude emails when we feel we've been slighted and it, and it's a much better

00:44:46.760 strategy, I think, to, to, to try and use these small moments of prestige, trying to make

00:44:51.700 people feel good as much as possible, even though, you know, in the short term, we might

00:44:55.840 not, we might not get our way because I, you know, people love status. If you get a reputation

00:45:00.840 of somebody that sort of is, is generous with your status and makes people feel good about

00:45:03.980 themselves, people are going to want to be with you and you're going to, you know, you're

00:45:06.880 going to get lots of status coming, coming, getting sort of coming back your way. So, so

00:45:10.800 I think these, you know, it's very easy and it's in our kind of animal nature, our pre-human

00:45:14.580 nature to push back with dominance all the time. But, but, but, but I think sort of mindfully

00:45:18.940 go to prestige is a really useful thing. And I think on a, on a broader level, it's this

00:45:24.720 idea of making sure that we're playing multiple games at once. You know, I think a really healthy

00:45:28.800 life is one in which there are several different sources of status. Like I think you should

00:45:32.820 have a hierarchy of games. The one at the top that's your main game and you put lots

00:45:36.440 of attention and care into because it's not easy to earn status and get a reputation of

00:45:41.760 being somebody of value. And you're going to have to sort of put some focus into that.

00:45:45.680 But I also think you need to hedge because nobody wants to be in a cult where they've

00:45:48.520 got one source of status and that's it. And just, just, just generally speaking, if the

00:45:51.880 only thing you've got in your life is your job, for example, then what happens as is

00:45:55.960 inevitable, especially as you get older, you become less respected. Other people

00:46:00.380 overtake you, you know, things start going wrong. That's a sort of annihilation of the

00:46:05.040 self. That's, that's a catastrophe. If that's your only source of status, you're going to

00:46:08.880 end up in a very dark place sort of very quickly. So I think playing this kind of

00:46:12.360 variety of games is, is, is a, is a really useful takeaway as well.

00:46:16.140 Maybe avoid social media too. What's your take on that?

00:46:18.960 I think avoid that kind of virtue dominance behavior on social media. So a, don't allow

00:46:26.240 yourself to be triggered by feelings of being slighted on social media. Always have that

00:46:30.400 in the back of your head. It's just, it's just my brain with me. Like it doesn't matter

00:46:34.960 what this person has said that I don't agree with. But, but also it's about avoiding, you

00:46:39.740 know, the, the kind of virtue play that's kind of mixed with dominance. So we were aggressively

00:46:43.820 going after people for transgressing our kind of sacred rules. I think, I think that's the

00:46:49.000 thing to avoid on social media. And I'm sure that you can use, use social media to your

00:46:53.820 benefit, but if you use it kind of modestly and carefully, but, but I think, I think you're

00:46:58.940 in danger when it becomes your, your major source of status.

00:47:03.720 Okay. So first one, give, I think one of the, I like that gives, give status freely because

00:47:08.960 it's free and it's unlimited. It doesn't cost you anything to say, Hey, good job on that.

00:47:12.860 And people, people like that play multiple status games. So don't just make your job,

00:47:17.600 your only source of status. And then I think also, I think the big takeaway too, is just

00:47:20.780 like be aware of status, like being aware that there's a status game going on. And then

00:47:25.220 maybe I do this all the time. My wife and I, whenever we feel down, I was like, maybe there's

00:47:31.160 like some kind of status thing going on, or maybe I feel like I'm not getting a win. And that helps

00:47:35.120 because a lot of times you feel bad and you're like, why am I feeling bad? And bringing that status

00:47:39.380 paradigm can, I don't know, it helps for some weird reason.

00:47:44.280 Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. And it's just that realization. And, and, you know,

00:47:48.520 since, since writing the book, it's so often that I found myself in exactly the situation that you

00:47:53.200 describe with your wife where I'm down and I'm depressed. It's like, what's wrong with me?

00:47:56.400 And then you think, Oh yeah, I, this, I feel bad that this happened today and I haven't had a

00:48:02.060 win for ages. And that's, and that's, what's getting me down. And then as soon as you, as soon

00:48:05.220 as you get a win, since something good happens, you're just on top of the world again. And it's

00:48:08.280 actually, once you start noticing it, it's amazing how much of the kind of ups and downs of your sort of

00:48:14.020 daily mood I find are attached to what's going on in the, in the, in the status games of your life.

00:48:18.860 Yeah. Like I'm sure for an author, like you'd probably check in your Amazon

00:48:22.020 ranking like, Oh, did I go up today? Ah, yes.

00:48:25.240 No, I can't. I learned not to do that after the first book because it's, it's just, it's agonizing.

00:48:30.440 It's a, it's a disaster. So I don't, I never look at my Amazon. I don't look at the reviews. I don't

00:48:34.880 look at the play ranking because it, because you just get obsessed with it. It just takes over.

00:48:39.660 Yeah. You can't let that happen. Well, Will, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go

00:48:42.860 to learn more about the book and your work?

00:48:44.860 So I'm on Twitter. So it's at W store W S T O double R. Yeah. And, and my website is, 0.95

00:48:50.720 is, is just will store.com. You can find out a bit more about the various books on there.

00:48:55.220 Fantastic. Will store. Thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:48:57.160 Thanks Brett. It's been a great conversation. Thank you.

00:48:59.860 My guest, it was Will store. He's the author of the status game. It's available on amazon.com.

00:49:03.920 You can find more information about his work at his website, will store.com. That's store with two

00:49:08.020 R's. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash status. We can find links to resources. We

00:49:12.520 delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure

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00:49:54.200 Remind you to only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - November 15, 2021

How the Desire for Status Explains (Pretty Much) Everything

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