How the Desire for Status Explains (Pretty Much) Everything
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, Will Storr walks us through why status and its infinite forms is so important to people, the ways it can be gained through dominance, virtue, and success, and how status games take place both within groups and between them.
Transcript
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I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Being famous, knowing someone famous, getting a laugh after telling a joke, getting a good
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grade, getting likes on a social media post, winning a video game, cooking a tasty meal,
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being good looking, having inside knowledge, sharing a good recommendation.
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Now we often think of status exclusively in terms of wealth, but it's actually a play
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everywhere, in every situation where we get the feeling of being of value, where we feel
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ever so slightly elevated in our relative social position.
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The universal desire for status greatly influences our culture, as well as our own behavior and
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We would all do well then to understand status better, and my guest today can help you do
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His name is Will Storr, and he's the author of The Status Game, on social position and how
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Today on the show, Will walks us through why status and its infinite forms is so important
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to people, the ways it can be gained through dominance, virtue, and success, and how status
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games take place both within groups and between them.
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We talk about the good of status, how it can give us a psychological high and motivate the
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pursuit of skill, competence, and achievement, as well as its dark sides, including the way
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that a loss in status and the resulting feeling of humiliation leads to depression and sometimes
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Will explains how status can be gained by enforcing the rules of a group and punishing those
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who seem to be lowering the overall status of the tribe, and how this punitive dynamic
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We also discuss how when you try to eliminate certain status games by making things equal, people
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just find other status games to play, and that when one hierarchy is destroyed, another
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We end up in a conversation with what we can do if status games are inescapable, to play
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash status.
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So you got a new book out called The Status Game on social position and how we use it.
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And in this book, you take this very broad, also a deep dive into the anthropology, the
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history, the psychology, the sociology, the philosophy of social status.
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And I'm curious, what led you to take such a deep dive into social status?
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Something that we don't like to talk about particularly.
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Yeah, so for the last few books, I've been really writing books around the idea that
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the brain is this storyteller and that the conscious experience of our life is that we're
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And the books that I've been writing have been focused around that idea.
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But then I started to think, okay, so if the conscious experience of life is this heroic
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story and that heroic story is kind of delusional and leads us into all these traps, what's
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Because the subconscious is, I imagine, more powerful than the conscious.
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And so the status game is my attempt at answering that question.
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And to understand that, you've got to understand where it comes from for humans.
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And the more status they get, the better their lives get, the longer they survive, the more
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So it's a really important, critical goal that lots and lots of living things have.
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And so tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago, when our brains were evolving and
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becoming the recognisably human brains that we have today, we were living in these hunter-gatherer
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groups. And we started competing for status with prestige.
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And the way that we gain that kind of, these prestigious forms of status were by being
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And so, and there were two ways of being valuable to your group.
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So you can be like generous and courageous and good follower of rules, or you can be
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You can be valuable, but useful, but being a great honey finder or a great storyteller
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So that's kind of the root of a lot of human status driving.
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And when we feel that we're of value to other people, that's when we get that great status
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And I think an important point to make is status isn't just about being rich.
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I think a lot of times when we think about status, we think of class, right?
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Who has a lower class, middle class, upper class, but status is everywhere.
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You get status when, you know, someone compliments you on something you did.
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So like on your clothes, you're, you know, if you had a good thought, if your kids are
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well-behaved, you get status for winning like a board game or a pickup game of basketball
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or you're getting likes on, it's, it's not just about money.
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It is just about your relative social position with other people in your group.
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So the brain has this thing that scientists call the status detection system, and it's
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It's constantly monitoring evidence for our relative status versus other people and for
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other, and, you know, monitoring other people's status as well.
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And in the book, you know, write about some of these crazy things they found, the relative
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amount of orange juice you get poured in your glass versus somebody else.
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If you get more of that, you know, the brain reads that as good.
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Oh, that's, I've been treated as if I'm lower status.
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I mean, we're constantly measuring it, mostly subconsciously.
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Those measures of orange juice in the glass, that's a symbolic status kind of ranking.
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And so is, as you say, you know, kids' soccer games and the soccer games that we play.
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And so we're constantly measuring our status in this kind of wild variety of ways.
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And there's a lot of things going on when we experience status, like physiologically,
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like there's hormones that boost stuff from, you know, testosterone increases, I think both
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in men and women, but more in men, you feel this surge of testosterone.
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Like even if you're watching like your favorite football team or soccer team play and they
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win, the people watching on TV, the men watching on TV will have this surge in testosterone.
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So there's a lot of, there's like neurochemicals that go on.
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And then when the same thing, when you have like a status defeat, when your team loses,
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or if you experience some sort of slight, you know, testosterone levels go down, you don't
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Well, we've been wired for it since before we were human, you know, before we were human,
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So, you know, with physical fighting, you know, lots of animals still use dominance.
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Most animals use dominance as their primary way of competing for status.
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It's been in the brain for millions of years and we all do it.
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And then, but there's people out there that say, well, I just, I don't care about status.
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Is it really possible not to care about status?
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It's completely, and that always makes me laugh because you say, you know, so why are you
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Usually when people tell you, oh, I don't care what other people think of me, they're kind
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They're kind of saying I'm better than you because I don't care what other people think
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And it's like, well, it's just completely self-defeating argument.
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It always makes me chuckle because, because you can just tell by the tone of voice, people
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are kind of, they're using that as a claim to status.
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And so, no, you know, you can't, I mean, you know, I've got, you know, I don't know people
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who are sort of big into their kind of mindfulness and wellness and they're kind of anti-materialistic.
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Maybe they're driving a beaten up car and they're kind of thinking that that means they're kind
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of immune to being interested in the status, but the way they're dressing and eating and
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living their life are just ways that they're enabling themselves to look down their nose
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at other people who aren't sort of behaving as they are.
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One of the studies that I write about in the book, some academics in the University of
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Amsterdam, they did a survey of 3,700 people who were into mindfulness meditation.
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And they were specifically looking at people who were doing meditation to get rid of their
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kind of ego needs and their needs for success in their lives.
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And they found that these people scored very high in measures of what they called spiritual
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So, you know, they were saying things like, you know, if other people had the amazing
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insights that I have, the world would be a much better place and all this stuff.
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I'm sure it's possible to reduce, you know, with lots of meditation to reduce your need
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And I mean, the only people that really try and get rid of it that I'm aware of in the
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modern age completely are the hikikomori in Japan who essentially shut themselves away.
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And you have to do that because you can't have a social encounter without playing a status
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You know, in all this, in tone of voice, in body language, you know, we're always getting
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information about what other people think of us.
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Do they think we're a good person or a bad person?
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You know, a handsome person or an ugly person or a polite person or a rude person?
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So the only way you can really do it is to shut yourself away like the hikikomori do.
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But even then, most of them are playing computer games and that's a status game.
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So even when people say, like, I don't care about status, you might not care about the
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So the way to understand it is, I mean, that's how I talk about games, is that there's not
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one game for status that everyone's playing with each other.
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So we have these very powerful subconscious urges to do two things.
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And one is to connect with other people, to connect into coalitions of like-minded people.
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And then once we're in those coalitions, we, you know, we compete for status within those
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So, you know, we want to raise in status and be thought of as a kind of above average
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But then also those groups compete with other groups for status.
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So if we're playing in a soccer match, for example, we want to get a reputation as one
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of the better players on the pitch amongst our team players.
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You know, so we're connecting into games and then competing for status within them and with
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You know, if you think about that, that's sports, that's politics, that's religion, that's
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So they're kind of infinite games that we play.
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And as I said before, we can use anything to symbolize status.
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And as you say, lots of people just assume you mean money.
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But money is only one way that we play the status game.
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There are lots of other ways that we can, you know, play the game.
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It's just about, you know, anything that makes us feel that we are kind of of value in
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All right, so just to be honest, we're hardwired for status.
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The reason is because it serves a benefit to us.
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The higher status you get, the more access to resources, reproduction you get to mate.
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And then as a group, group status, like that also, the whole group gets those benefits as
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But let's talk about these, digging deep into how we can gain status.
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Sort of the primal way of, well, there's a couple of ways.
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There's one type of status called embodied status, where it's just basically you gain status
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So whether you're young or old, young people typically get more status in our culture these
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If you're attractive, you have more status and things like that.
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But then there's things that people can do to gain status.
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And like the most primal way to gain status is dominance.
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Is it just a matter of beating people up physically?
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Or are there other ways to display dominance without physical altercation?
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So dominance isn't just about violence and the threat of violence.
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So anytime when someone's kind of forcing or coercing you to kind of attempt to them in
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status and sort of give them kind of respect that you don't really want to give them,
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You know, obviously, when you think of dominance, you think of the more masculine qualities.
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It just, you know, it tends to be one-on-one, face-to-face physical aggression.
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Again, we've been doing that for millions of years before we were recognizably human.
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We were much bigger, had much heavier skeletons, were much more physically powerful.
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Even today, millions of years later, men still are bigger and still, you know, you can still
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see the traces of that kind of extremely violent life that we used to live millions
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of years ago in the human skeleton and in human psychology and male psychology.
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But that isn't the only way to use the sort of dominance to compete for status.
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Things like ostracization, bullying, reputation destruction, they're also forms of dominance.
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And what you tend to find is, especially in children and in young adults, that plays out
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quite clearly in that young males are much more likely to use physical aggression one-on-one
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And young females are more likely to use that kind of bullying, you know, the group ganging
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up on somebody else, the gossiping, the reputation destruction.
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But then when the men grow up, because, you know, usually when men get beyond, I don't
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know, mid-twenties, late-twenties, they're much less likely to use violence or the threat
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And that kind of levels out and everybody just starts using these kind of more reputation
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So men are more prone to use physical violence, threats of intimidation.
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Young women, sort of that reputational stuff, like that mean girl stuff that, you know,
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Like as a parent, you might be like, well, you're going to get your iPad taken away from.
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But like on a, when do like adults use that with each other?
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There are lots of ways that we kind of have to use dominance.
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You know, in moments of, in war, we use dominance.
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When Apple computers sues a rival for patent infringement, that's a dominance thing.
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That's a kind of forced thing, but we're more, we're most likely to kind of tip into those
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You know, we, we all do it every day, even, you know, when we're kind of growling at somebody
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in the supermarket checkout queue, who's, you know, who's upset us, we're using, that's
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It's most likely to happen when the kind of relative status of the people in the, in
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So in the book, I talk about this woman who had an encounter with two police officers and
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the police officers had pulled her kid over and I think it was the car wasn't insured
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or something like this, but she kind of marched up to them and started berating them and insulting
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And it turns out that she was sort of high up in the police hierarchy.
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And she, of course, thought this made her the kind of senior ranking person in the dispute
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But as far as they were concerned, she was just there to pick up the kids and it was irrelevant
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And so, so there was this dispute about who had, who actually had the right to behave as
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She ended up having to, I think she, she ended up having to resign her job because they filmed
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the dispute and it ended up on the internet and she didn't look, it didn't reflect very
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But, but yeah, so it's in disputes where the kind of relative kind of ranking of the people
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involved are kind of a bit murky, a bit ambiguous.
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Like the most obvious example is if you can imagine going into a new company as the boss,
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but you're, you know, you're 29 and you're going in to manage people who have been there
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for years and they're in their forties and fifties.
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It's ambiguous there because they're going to look at you as this, as this kid, who are
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So it's that situation that really is kind of very dangerous in human relations.
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Like for a long time, we thought that the alpha wolf was the wolf that just beats up
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But that observation was made by looking at wolves in captivity.
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So they would just, but they, what they did is they got a bunch of wolves, random wolves
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from not the same pack, put them in captivity and they saw, well, this wolf beat up all
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So alpha wolf is the guy that beats up everybody.
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But then they actually started observing wolf packs in the wild.
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Like the alpha wolf and are just like the parent wolves and their, their cubs are there
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So in, in the natural setting, the status hierarchy is established, right?
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So in that sense, wolves don't rely on dominance.
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But in captivity, when you put wolves from different packs together, that's when all the,
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So dominant status that we, we go to that with threats whenever we're not sure about
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You mentioned there's prestige status and there's two ways you can get prestige status.
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Where this comes from is, is when we started to be these kind of weird apes who are highly,
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And, you know, humans back then are like humans are today, really, you know, we can
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be really nice, but we can also be very selfish, self-interested, hypocritical, delusional about
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So how does evolution get these kind of slightly selfish, self-interested, delusional apes to
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work together and cooperate and be, and think about other people?
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So this is the way you have to sort of develop this reward system for rewarding tribal members
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for behavior that puts the interests of the tribe ahead of their own selfish interests.
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So, so that's why selfless behaviors and universally seem to be morally good behaviors
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and selfish behaviors and universally seem to be morally bad behaviors because it's all
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about, you know, incentivizing us to be good members of the tribe.
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So, so anything that is kind of pro-tribe, selfless is, is kind of virtuous.
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And so that can be, as I said, generosity, sharing your meat and resources, you being courageous
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in battle, but, but also things about conformity.
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So knowing the rules, following the rules, taking part in all the rituals and taking part
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in them really well, you know, that's going to gain you status in the tribe because that's
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that, you know, you're a virtuous, you know, tribe first minded person.
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You're not selfish or selfless and also, you know, enforcing the rules.
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So somebody that enforces the rules and punishes rule breakers, that's also seen as a virtuous
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So that's when it gets into slight sort of, you know, dodgy territory.
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So, you know, it's obvious other way of being useful to the tribe.
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So that's just by being just skilled, but being a great honey finder, a great storyteller,
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And so those are the three essential ways in human social life that we can, that we earn
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status as dominance, but there's also virtue and success.
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If we have the status drive, it compels us to be a good person.
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It compels us to, it can compel us to, you know, be competent and become skilled at something.
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And the first way this can happen is when someone feels humiliated.
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So what happens when, so the humiliation is the opposite of status.
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This was a really interesting thing when I was sort of trying to work out whether it
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was right, what I was reading about status, whether it is really important.
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And I kind of attest that I set myself was, okay, if you're going to argue that status is
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so important, it must be really bad when it's taken away from us.
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And so I started looking into that and I came across all the research literature on humiliation
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and how they define humiliation is, is it's not just the removal of all your status from
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It's also the removal of your kind of ability to claim status in the future.
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So you're so, you've fallen so far down the game that you're out.
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Nobody wants to have anything to do with you forever.
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So it's really bad to be, I mean, and we all, again, it's a universal thing, which also
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Humiliation is the basis of the absolute worst of human behavior.
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There's a violence researcher that I quote in the book that said when he got into studying
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violence, he just assumed, like most people do, that the major causes of street crime are
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People are starving or they're greedy and they rob people.
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But when he actually met these people and spoke to these people for years, the most common
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You know, a real driver of the cycle of violence that you see on the streets, because everybody's
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trying to flip that sense of humiliation into pride.
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But then when you look at the kind of wider story, humiliation is implicated in the absolute
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worst of the worst of the worst of human behavior.
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And in the book, I talk about, you know, incel spree killers, terrorists, serial killers,
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spies, honor killings, all of which often have, very often have a series of components
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Yeah, you highlight Elliot Rogers, the kid who did the mass shooting.
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And, you know, you did a deep dive into him, did these manifestos.
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And it just sounds like he was just, he just felt humiliated.
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Well, first off, it sounds like he was, he probably had some sort of narcissistic personality
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disorder, which made him more vulnerable to humiliation.
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But if you look through, like he just had all these grievances.
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And that's why he felt justified in what he did.
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And so I kind of build this argument in that chapter that it isn't just humiliation that
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But the most dangerous people are A, male, for reasons we've already discussed, because
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men tend to be violent, B, humiliated, but C, also narcissistic.
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Because if you're kind of grandiose and narcissistic, you're kind of dysfunctional in your, in the
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You feel that you, you are just naturally and automatically deserving of lots of status.
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And this is not, this is sort of disconnected from your behavior.
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And so it's very unhealthy way of living your life.
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But, and if you take a narcissist, especially in a male, if you take a male narcissist and
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you humiliate them again and again and again, and again, you're going to end up with a very
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And Elliot Rodgers is, it was definitely one of these people, but what was interesting
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about Elliot was that he, he left this 108,000 word, it's actually an autobiography, like
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He's full of, you know, moments of sort of extreme narcissism.
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You know, he describes himself as a gorgeous, fabulous gentleman, things like this.
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But he's also brutally honest about his failures and brutally honest about his sense of
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humiliation, the hands of his peers, the bullying he encountered.
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And the only way that he, the only kind of, his only kind of source of status in his life
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And such was his need for status that he became obsessed with World of Warcraft and ended up
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sort of reaching its kind of top level, became a really skilled player.
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And, you know, he says in the memoir that it was only when he was playing World of Warcraft
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that all his troubles with his social troubles receded.
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And then one day he had this kind of small circle of friends that he would play World of
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And one day he discovered somehow they were all meeting up in secret behind his back because
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they didn't want to, didn't really want to play with him.
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And he talks about, he talks about playing with tears running down his face.
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In his memoir, that's the day where he just, he just, he just has his, his thoughts become
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And he, and he starts sort of imagining this kind of dark future world in which sex is
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abolished and women are, all the women are wiped out and, and, and so on.
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You know, in the book, I argue that, you know, after his spree killing, lots of commentators
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on the left and the right blamed World of Warcraft and said, well, it must be World of Warcraft
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.
00:23:08.840
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
00:23:43.220
We respond in dominance all the time when, when things like that happen, you know, it
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
00:24:02.900
And, you know, in suicidality is particularly, we become particularly vulnerable to that kind
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.
00:24:16.300
So throughout the conversation so far, we have mentioned social media in passing and its role
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
00:24:39.800
Or you tweet something and then you're checking how many retweets did it get?
00:24:44.140
How does, how does social media intensify the status games that we play?
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
00:25:17.160
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
00:25:57.800
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.
00:26:19.300
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
00:27:29.200
that makes our, our politics more polarized, or they might start going after people because they
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.
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
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
00:35:10.460
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
00:44:19.040
hermit or one of those Japanese hermit dudes who just live in their, their apartment room,
00:44:23.600
how can we play the status game, but in a healthy flourishing way? Do you, have you figured
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
00:48:25.240
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
00:48:44.860
So I'm on Twitter. So it's at W store W S T O double R. Yeah. And, and my website is,
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
00:49:23.580
to check out our website at art of manless.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as
00:49:27.020
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00:49:54.200
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