The Status Game

... how we necome the memes possessing us

Why do experts refuse to admit their obvious and epistemic uncertainty? Why do leaders and people turn violent? How it is connected to evolutionary pressure? It’s a deep-dive into the games that make up our lives.¹

These games involve players, probably all of us, certainly most of us, who struggle for status in one of the many games according to the rules of those games. We humans build and infinite variety of imaginary games. Groups of people gather together, agree what symbols they are going to use to mean ‘status’, then strive to achieve it. These symbols can be money, or power or sexy abs or gigantic yam. The dream of the mind projects values onto these symbols - so much value that we can be driven to fight and die for them.

DALL-E 3’s rendering of status games

Status is an essential nutrient found not in meat or fruit or sunlight, but in the successful playing of our lives. When we feel chronically deprived of it, or disconnected from the games we use to derive status from, our mains and bodies can turn against us. To our brains, status is a resource as real as oxygen or water. When we lose it, we break. A psychologically healthy brain excel at making its owner feel heroic. It does this by reordering our experiences, remixing our memories and rationalizing our behavior, using a battery or reality-warping weapons that make us believe we’re more virtuous and more correct in our beliefs and have more hopeful futures in store than others.

In his great book “The Status Game”, Will Storr explains that attainment of status or its loss was ’the strongest predictor of long-term positive and negative feelings’. For him, it’s natural that once we’ve been accepted into a group, we strive to achieve their approval and acclaim. This is to be understood in evolutionary terms, because status was and remains the secret of maximizing our capacity for survival and reproduction; the higher we rise, the more likely we are to live, love and procreate. Just like Bloom observed in the Lucifer Principle, Storr elucidates that being beaten down in the human rat race naturally changes what you expect from tomorrow and that expectations does seem to filter down via some psychosomatic metabolic pathway into the way your cell prepare for tomorrow.

Much of human life consists of three varieties of status-striving and three varieties of game: dominance, virtue and success. In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of specified outcomes, that require skill, talent of knowledge. Mafia and armies are dominance games, religions and royal institutions are virtue games, corporations and sporting contests are success games. We can be Idi Amin, Mother Theresa or Albert Einstein. We are involved in many of these games; the little push-back against a low-level law-enforcement officer at the airport, the glee of piling onto somebody on Twitter for saying the wrong things, the jolt of joy after archiving something genuinely difficult (for your level of competence).

Because our evolutionarily ingrained status detection system never switches off, these game never pause. And there are a few flaws in this detection system. Our rewards systems are activated most when we achieve relative rather than absolute reward; we’re designed to feel best not when we get more, but when we get more than others around us. If that reminds you of the dynamics of zero-sum games, well, probably because it is.

Copy-Flatter-Conform

Storr cites numerous studies that come to the conclusion that ‘virtually all individuals irrationally inflated their qualities’ and that moral superiority is a ‘uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion’. This might be the reason, why high-status persons quickly believe they earned their status and become complacent. Lower-status persons suck up to high-status people by living out the copy-flatter-conform-cycle.

When we identify prestigious players our subconscious copy-flatter-conform programming is triggered, and we allow them to alter our beliefs and behavior. Our brain is coded to look for four main cues: firstly, we look for the “self-similarity cue”. Our brain’s assumption seem to be we’re most likely to learn useful lessons from people like us. We have an inbuilt preference for those who match our age, race and gender. You probably guessed that this is one of the sources of much of the cliquishness and prejudice that pollutes so many status games. Unfortunately, even very young infants defer to strangers who share their mother’s dialect.

The second clues are “skill cues” Who, in our game, seems particularly able? It seems that we start mimicking people who display competence at tasks at around 14 months. We also seek out ‘success cues’ – status symbols. In older times, these were items such as an experienced hunter’s necklace of teeth; a tribal chief’s larger hut; today these are PhDs and a Franck Muller Aeternitas Mega 4 watch for $2.7 million. This tendency of ours could explain a large part of the phenomenon of ‘conspicuous consumption’ that occurs across the world. Finally, there are ‘prestige cues’: we analyze the body language, eye movements and voice patterns of our co-players to see who they’re deferring to, which implies a sort of pecking order.

These processes are potent and ancient. We have the problem, that we live in a global society that is far larger than we were evolved to cope with. We are beyond the “Dunbar”-limit, and we are not able anymore to observe people closely enough to judge their merit. Instead, we look for markers of status, that can be and are easily gamed by people: there is a reason for expensive suits… and for counterfeit suits. The colossal modern environment of global media and internet amplifies the problem. Today it’s not uncommon for millions to pay attention to one person simply because millions of others are paying attention to them and for this to become a feedback loop, sending a relatively unremarkable individual into top-league of fame. “Anyone who fancies changing the world would be well advised to study the power of these cues to influence human behavior. The subconscious copy-flatter-conform behaviors they trigger can be extraordinarily effecting."(p.58-59) Humans aren’t heroes on a destined path of progress, but players programmed for games. To succeed in these games, they seek high-status allies. When they find them, the copy-flatter-conform circuitry switches on. They - we - mimic not just their behavior but their beliefs. The better we believe, the higher we rise. And so faith, not truth, is incentivized. (p.139)

There is probably no better place to see this phenomenon than social media. It’s a technology made to cater to our addiction with the status game. Its chief wizard is Dr B. J. Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab, which is based out of Silicon Valley’s favored educational institution, Stanford University. Fogg’s started teaching a class in using his persuasive techniques to build apps on Facebook in 2007. By the end of the ten-week course, his students had amassed sixteen million users between them, earning one million dollars in advertising revenue. Fogg’s studied propaganda at school at the age of 10. ‘I learned names for the various propaganda techniques, and I could soon identify them in magazine ads and TV commercials. At Stanford, he studied how interacting with them can ‘change people’s attitudes and behaviors’. Fogg believed early that “always available” handheld devices would be ‘persuasive technology systems’. They’d be able to change users’ thoughts and behaviors with a power that’d never been known in history. (p.91) Social Media is a slot machine for status. It dishes out randomized rewards, making participation addictive. And how we yank at that One-armed Bandit!

We become the games we play

We have already heard about the hedonic treadmill on this blog. To be alive, and to be psychologically healthy, is to be vulnerable to the story of consciousness that tells us that with just that one particular victory, with that one peak finally climbed, we’ll be finally satisfied. Peace, happiness and satisfaction will be ours. This, sadly, is a delusion. We’ll never get there because we’re playing a game for status. And the problem with status is, no matter how much we win, we’re never satisfied. We always want more. This is the flaw in the human condition that keeps us playing. That’s what drives our greatest and lowest deeds. (p.97).

The strategies by which we earn connection and status shape who we are. To a significant extent, we become the puppets of the games we play.

In laboratory experiments, when people had to decide whether to contribute to the wealth of the group, take advantage for their own selfish ends or defect. Surprisingly, what made the most difference to their behavior wasn’t the level of inequality in their game, but whether or not the inequality was visible. When players’ wealth was hidden everyone, including the elites, became more egalitarian. But when wealth was displayed, players in every game became less friendly, cooperated ‘roughly half as much’ and the rich were significantly more likely to exploit the poor. Which doesn’t spell good news for our society that seems to be quite obsessed with conspicuous consumption.(p.109-110)

There are multiple games going on

The Prince Charles Paradox is that a person can be simultaneously high and low in status. Prince Charles enjoys superlative amounts of formal status, being next in line to the British throne. But he’s also relatively low in true status, with only around half of his British subjects holding a positive opinion of him. These dynamics can generate wild storms of misery for players when their leaders – be they a paranoid royal or a horrible boss – become insecure about their level of true status and demand of them ever-greater demonstrations of loyalty, subservience and adoration. We didn’t evolve to play games formally and we didn’t evolve to play games as steep as they are today. But we did evolve to feel resentment. A long time ago, this dangerous emotion helped keep our tribes functional and their hierarchies shallow. (p.110-111).

“As we grow into adults, that system – that game – gains enormous power to shape who we become. We mold ourselves to its rules and symbols. As we move through our days, our identity shifts depending on which game we happen to be playing. We can be an architect at work, a mother at home, a campaigner online, an authority on Charlotte Brontë at the book group, a restorer of rocket launchers in the shed – and in each case, we can hope to feel good at these roles: competent, better than him and her and getting better still. Our sense of self attaches to each game, an alien funnel implanting itself into an organism of many and sucking out what it needs.” (p.137-138) Our individuality merges with the game and becomes blurred, our moral behavior and perception of reality deranging itself in its service. This is what our adult identity adds up to, a collection of games and memes. We are the sum of this. So choose wisely what games you play. And with whom.

Even our most sacred beliefs, those that we call ‘moral’ are a virtue game we happen to believe in. We use our displays of morality to manufacture status. It’s good that we do this. It’s functional. Billionaires fund libraries, university scholarships and scientific endeavors for this reason.(p.147) “But these instructions – strive to appear virtuous; privilege your group over others – are few and vague and open to riotous differences in interpretation. All the rest is an act of shared imagination. It’s a dream we weave around a status game. The dream shifts as we range across the continents. For the Malagasy people in Madagascar, it’s taboo to eat a blind hen, to dream about blood and to sleep facing westwards, as you’ll kick the sunrise. Adolescent boys of the Marind of South New Guinea are introduced to a culture of ‘institutionalised sodomy’, among the people of the Moose, teenage girls are abducted and forced to have sex with a married man, an act for which, writes psychologist Professor David Buss, ‘all concerned – including the girl – judge that her parents giving her to the man was a virtuous, generous act of gratitude’. As alien as these norms might seem, they’ll feel morally correct to most who play by them. They’re part of the dream of reality in which they exist, a dream that feels no less obvious and true to them than ours does to us.” (p.148).

Goldrush

When a rich seam of status is discovered in a new game, more and more individuals are attracted to the game, with a precondition for play being acceptance of its beliefs, no matter how unlikely. Status is earned with active belief, by promoting it, by defending the group and attacking the outsiders. As the games grow, and suck in satellite games around them, their beliefs come to seem increasingly mainstream. More players playing means more status being generated, and so the game’s sucking power becomes more monstrous still, like a black hole, warping reality, until it is so massive that its gravity is felt right across the cultural universe. The most massive games of this type have probably been Christianity, Islam, communism and fascism. In such scenarios, the status on offer can become vast and almost irresistibly seductive. Individual players transmute from being ordinary people living ordinary lives to becoming mighty and noble changers of worlds. I think we have witnessed the phenomenon recently with Greta Thunberg, who is expertly playing the virtue game of “climate change alarmism”, which unfortunately stifles the “climate change solution”-game of competence, where real technological solutions could be worked out. The former game is so strong that people are openly willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of mostly African and Asian people for “the higher go(o)d” of averting climate change. There is no balancing of interests, no comparison, no contextualization. There is one scale and one scale only: who is the most virtuous player, who demands the most extreme measures, who claims to be willing to sacrifice the most? Prosperity? The economy? “How dare you to even suggest that!?”

The hallucination of reality bends itself around the game, they become its host and crusader, deranged and impossible to reason with. In short, their belief has become sacred. There are many definitions of what ‘sacred’ means, but from the perspective of this investigation, something is sacred when it becomes symbolic of our status game. As we’ve learned, the entire world as we experience it inside our brains is built out of symbols. This is the virtual interface on which we play the game of life.

Some phenomena can become symbolic not just of an amount of status, but of a status game itself. These symbols might be flags, buildings, battle sites, uniforms, gang colors, images etc. Leaders can become sacred. Perhaps the ultimate sacred symbol is the monotheistic God: the all-powerful creator and referee of his status game. Beliefs can become sacred too. They frequently do. This is why our reasoning about our sacred beliefs can become so impaired. (p.163-164)

Going to war for being attacked

This also explains, why trolling works, and why we cannot tolerate other opinions. Remember, tolerance doesn’t mean that you make a person shut up about their ideas you happen to dislike, it’s you doing the work of bearing the burden of having to talk to someone that does share all you sacred beliefs with you. Ignoring should be easy, it should be the default: it’s literally doing nothing. But in these situations we hardly ever ignore. Because it’s not actually effortless. When we encounter people whose beliefs contradict our own, we can find it acutely uncomfortable. We become preoccupied and hateful and flip into dominance state. Our beliefs can even drive us to war.(p.168)

Encountering another opinion, is equivalent to encountering a conflicting set of rules and symbols, which implies your rules and symbols – your criteria for claiming status – are invalid, and our dream of reality is false. They insult you - us - simply by being who they are. It should be no surprise, then, that encountering such a person can feel like an attack: status is a resource, and they’re taking it from us. When this happens we’re often compelled to take comfort in the presence of our like-minded kin. We tend to the wounds that have been torn into our hallucination of the world with status talk: our foes are ignorant, insane, Nazis, feminazis, white supremacists, TERFs, bros, wokes, gammons, Karens, SJWs. We try to find the tiniest crack in their dream of reality and, with each one discovered, the threat of their rival claim to status diminishes as ours is reaffirmed. Our belief in our game and our criteria for earning status is restored, and the thick evening sunlight of self-satisfaction is allowed to return. We need differences, chasm of morality between us and our rivals, and so we weave them into a moral story that says they’re not simply wrong, but evil. (p.169-170)

We are a blameless, heroic David fighting the cruel monster Goliath. Our like-minded kin play their part, cheering us on with every perceived victory, flooding us with boosted status. We think of morality as unquestionably good: how could it be otherwise? It just FEELS right. But the moral rules we abide by are a component of our status game, the dream world in which we exist. This dream can all too easily become a nightmare, tricking us into believing our acts of barbarity are holy. “As psychologists Professors Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam write: ‘People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of others.’ Anthropologists Professors Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai find that ‘when people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent’. When the victim is ‘perceived as a potential threat or contaminant to the in-group’, such acts are seen as ‘morally praiseworthy’.” Most of the time, thankfully, this war is waged without weapons. Instead we engage in battles of belief. Memes fight for mental territory in the minds of humans. Our species has an astonishing capacity for fighting wars over the insinuated content of other people’s minds. (p.172) And we really like to win in these fights. Researchers find groups tend to prefer the simple fact of winning against other groups even if it means fewer benefits for its players. Sociologist Professor Nicholas Christakis writes, this finding ‘depresses me even more than the existence of xenophobia’. Even a pyrrhic victory is a victory, I guess…(p.176)

Purity Spiral

A phenomenon which has baffled me for quite some time is the “slippery slope”, where it seems like a side is demanding ever more and ever more extreme after initial winnings. This can be partially explained by what sociologists Dr Bradley Campbell and Dr Jason Manning call a ‘purity spiral’ in which players ‘strive to outdo one another in displays of zealotry, condemning and expelling members of their own movement for smaller and smaller deviations from its core virtues’. The reason is that after aligning almost anyone, it’s hard for the “in-group” to differentiate the foe. Who are the true believers? And who are the dangerous hidden deviants betraying our dream of reality from within? So the game becomes even tighter as players ‘pressure one another in order to cover up their own private doubts’. This makes suspicions increase yet further and players have to escalate their virtue signaling. (p.200) Cults are the tightest games of all. They maintain their power by being the sole significant source of connection and status for their players. That’s why they have to make their member sever all connections to their former lives. Earning a place in a cult means actively following its belief system and adhering utterly to its game in thought and behavior. A true cult member has one active identity. Players attracted to them are often those who’ve failed at the games of conventional life. Alienated, injured and in need, their brains seek a game that seems to offer certainty, in which connection and status can be won by following an absolutely precise set of rules for the game. (p.205-206) But no cult could survive if it didn’t offer players something critical. Their members aren’t there because their brains had been washed; their brains were doing what brains naturally want to do. We seek rules and symbols by which to play a status game. (p.211).

Resentment

Being denied the status that one believes to be entitled to is dangerous.
It drives mass shooters, but can drive even mass murder, when the status has been “unjustly” stripped from a nation. “Humiliated grandiosity can trigger murder on an enormous scale because perpetrators inhabit a heroic story that says they’re categorically superior to their victims – effectively a different species of being. It’s typical for targets to be described in terms of low-status creatures: to the Communists, the middle classes were ‘leeches’; to the Nazis, the Jews were ‘lice’; to the French in Algeria, the Muslims were ‘rats’; to the Boers, the Africans were ‘baboons’. Any attempt at defense or retaliation implies their dream of grandiosity is an illusion and their criteria for claiming status is therefore false. This is disturbing to them. It often triggers a response of overwhelmingly disproportionate dominance. So morally outraged are they by insubordination from their subhuman targets, they strike back on the principle of two eyes for an eye – or two hundred eyes, or two thousand, or however many they consider morally equivalent to their precious one.” (p.235) ‘The most potent weapon of mass destruction’ is ‘the humiliated mind’.

Sociologist Professor Bradley Campbell has undertaken an extensive study of our most bestial mode of play, genocide, and finds it can happen when a high-status group, ‘experiences a decline in or threat to its status’ or a low-status group ‘rises or attempts to rise in status’.” It’s the reduction in rank between them that helps generate much of the horrible madness. A form of toxic morality is deeply implicated in these episodes: ‘genocide is highly moralistic’. Genocides are dominance-virtue games, carried out in the name of justice and fairness and the restoration of the supposedly correct order. They’re not about the mere killing or ‘cleansing’ of foes, they’re about healing the perpetrators’ wounded grandiosity with grotesque, therapeutic performances of dominance and humiliation."(p.235-236)

An unlikely way out

For Storr, we have to be thankful for the Catholic Church’s “weird preoccupation with incest”. Over a period of more than a thousand years, starting in AD 305, the Church instituted a series of rule fixes that combined to disable the old inward-looking virtue games, based on kin and extended family, and compel people to play in new, less nepotistic ways. It banned: polygamous marriage; marriage to blood relatives including up to sixth cousins; marriage to in-laws, including that of uncles to nieces and men to stepmothers and stepdaughters. It also suppressed forced marriages, encouraged newlyweds to set up their own households away from the extended family and promoted individual inheritance by will and testament, rather than the automatic handing-down of assets to the clan. It would take many centuries, but by the accident of its unholy obsession, it was to change the game forever.(p.240-241)

This lead to different rules and symbols over time. The new symbols were fit for the success-focussed player of town, university, guild and marketplace. Ultimately, whether it were priests, bishops and popes in charge, or princes, dukes and kings, these were still games of obedience and duty. But a these symbols gave rise to a new game. A game of success. If the new-style success-oriented players were to ever overwhelm the entrenched authorities, they’d need to form powerful elites of their own. They’d do so by becoming rich. This new type of more individualist player found a new home in the Protestant faiths, some of which took wealth as a sign of divine provenance.

The thinkers and tinkerers of the Enlightenment who, in the 17th and 18th centuries transformed Western Europe and then the world with their ideas about reason, liberty, tolerance, and separation of Church and State, were also inheritors of the games that formed before them. One of the most famous, Scottish economist Adam Smith, is commonly known as the ‘Father of Capitalism’. Perhaps more than anyone, the hyper-individualistic, self-interested money-obsessed world we live in today is linked to him and his theories of how free markets and competition generate prosperity.

But he, a moral philosopher by trade, didn’t believe greed for wealth was the ultimate driver of economies. He thought something else was going on, something deeper in the human psyche. ‘Humanity does not desire to be great, but to be beloved,’ he wrote in 1759. ‘The rich man glories in his riches because he feels they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world … and he is fonder of his wealth on this account than for all the other advantages it procures him.’ If that isn’t a nice description of the effect of status, I don’t know what is. This need for attention and approval was, for Smith, a fundamental part of the human condition. We strive to better our lot because we seek to be ‘observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of’. It’s the dream that says status symbols such as wealth will make us perfectly happy that inspires us to ‘cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe’. In other words, it is still a hedonic treadmill, so you don’t advance on “happiness”, but at least materially. (p.259)

Falling back

Today, increasing demands for censorship and the escalation of “virtue signalling” in on- and offline debates suggests the New Left has become a powerful goldrush movement, awarding prizes of major status and its symbols, including wealth, to those who play sufficiently well. “Untold thousands of livelihoods now depend on active belief in its tenets and countless individuals make major status for themselves in the games of journalism, publishing, politics and social media by warring for them. Its success has been boosted by its appropriation of a trick pioneered by the monotheists. The Christians conjured hell, which generated salvation anxiety, then presented their game as the only way to escape it. Similarly, New Left activists threaten hell by radically rewriting the terms by which accusations of bigotry can be made, lowering the bar such that mere whiteness or masculinity are signs of guilt. Having generated salvation anxiety, they present their movement as the sole available remedy.” The threat of this human hell can only be escaped with conspicuous, zealous and highly correct play.

Tight virtue games weave hostile dreams. Their players believe themselves to be heroes battling grotesque forces of injustice. These cartoons of reality become dangerous by casting their enemies into the role of one-dimensional baddie. (p.291) We have seen how this type of behavior can turn really horrible.

The Communist Revolution promised to get rid of all difference in status. This dream delivered us Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mengistu Haile Mariam. Although they were at the absolute pinnacle in the formal Communist game, top players like Stalin had no way of knowing where they stood in the true game that was playing in the minds of those around him. ‘The purges began here’, writes Figes, ‘in the Bolsheviks’ need to unmask potential enemies.’ And so began what remains arguably the most notorious case of status paranoia in history: the Great Terror. Good Communists had to be in a state of constant vigilance for the dangerous deviants with dangerous deviant thoughts who moved among them and were disguised as good Communists. For Storr, this could have and should have been known in advance. More than 2000 years before the Russian Revolution, the Ancient Greek who’d first dreamed the Communist dream, Plato, had been corrected by his student, Aristotle, who’d pointed out it wasn’t actually wealth or private ownership that created the human yearning to get ahead. That yearning was a part of our nature: ‘it is not possession but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized’.

The tale of the Communists reveals the impossibility of ridding human existence of the game for Storr. “The drive to get ahead will always assert itself. It’s in us. It’s who we are. The first decades of the Soviet Union find the status game in all its details: its irrepressibility; its capacity to raise violence; the grandiosity it inspires in winning players and leaders; the inevitability of elites; the flaw that makes people believe they’re always deserving of more status; the use of humiliation as the ultimate weapon; the horror of other players egging them on and their genius for tyranny; the ideological war games that rage across meme space; our vulnerability to believing almost any dream of reality if our status depends on it; the capacity for that dream to pervert our perception of reality; the danger of active belief; esoteric language; zealous leaders who cast visions of heavenly status in future promised lands and target enemies to its rising; the anger and enthusiasm they inspire; the cycle of gossip, outrage, consensus and harsh punishment; the paranoia that can afflict leaders and the terrors it brings; the grim magic of toxic morality and its conjuring trick of making evil seem virtuous; the necessity of games to generate status if they’re to endure; the world-changing power of the status goldrush.” (p.316)

This is of course in stark contrast to the story idealists sometimes tell of humanity saying we’re natural seekers of equality. This isn’t true. “Utopians talk of injustice whilst building new hierarchies and placing themselves at the top. We all do this. It’s in our nature. The urge for rank is ineradicable. It’s the secret goal of our lives, to win status for ourselves and our game – and gain as much of it as we can. It’s how we make meaning. It’s how we make identity. It’s the worst of us, it’s the best of us and it’s the inescapable truth of us: for humans, equality will always be the impossible dream.” (p.315-317) Interestingly, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way to get to more “material equality”, if we choose so and choose to measure it in relevant metrics like “access to water, food, housing, healthcare, reliable electricity, internet, transport etc.”. But if all of us strive to be able to pay for a $3M watch, just to signal your status, we will not get there. It’s just not possible for all of us to have the token of “maximum achievement”. What ever it has been previously, it will have ceased to be that symbol long before “all” or even “most” of us have gotten there.

“The games we are playing are shaping our perception of reality. They weave a dram. This dream is presented to us as reality. It’s entirely convincing, in all its color, noise and pristine focus. We see evidence everywhere that it’s true. It has the power to seduce us into the most depraved acts of hatred and barbarity. But it can also lead us into modes of play that truly make a better world.” (p.318-319) Storr gives some advice about how to reshape the games we are playing.

Beware of Tyranny!

Practice Warmth, Sincerity and Competence to become a valuable player to other people. As we’ve learned, there are three major routes to status in human games: we can grab it in acts of dominance, or we can earn prestige by proving ourselves useful to our group, with acts that signal virtue or success. When we’re warm, we imply we’re not going to use dominance; when sincere, that we’re going to play fairly; when competent, that we’re going to be valuable to the game itself, both in its own battles for status, and to individual players who might learn from us. (p.319-320) One of the greatest dangers in this game of life is tyranny. And playing virtue and dominance games, we increase the odds of it. Resisting tyranny means understanding that it is fun. It tempts us in with the lure of major status. Especially in the modern era, when wars tend to rage over psychological rather than physical territory, tyrants don’t succeed by telling people they’re wrong. Instead, they start by saying what we already believe. Their arguments make moral sense. Who could be against the end of the cruel exploitation of the Russian masses? Who could be against the restoration of the German economy and national pride, and the ridding of the Communist menace? Who could be against fighting child abuse? The Communists, Nazis and Satan-hunters each offered a game that felt virtuous and hopeful. Their leaders told their players a story that they wanted to hear – they were right, they were moral heroes, and they were on a glorious path to a promised land of elevated status.

Given the game’s ability to mold our perception of reality, how can we know if we’ve been seduced? How do you know that you are beholden to confirmation bias?

It’s possible to sense what kind of game we’re in by observing the ways in which status is typically awarded. Tyrannies are virtue-dominance games. Much of their daily play and conversation will focus on matters of obedience, belief and enemies. Is the game you’re playing coercing people, both inside and outside it, into conforming to its rules and symbols? Does it attempt to silence its ideological foes? Does it tell a simplistic story that explains the hierarchy, deifying their group whilst demonizing a common enemy? Are those around you obsessed with their sacred beliefs? Do they talk about them continually and with greedy pleasure, drawing significant status from belief and active belief? Does it seek to damage and destroy lives, often with glee? Is this aggression made to feel virtuous? That’s probably a tyranny.

We all contain the capacity for this dreadful mode of play. If we’re serious about ‘never again’ we must accept that tyranny isn’t a ‘left’ thing or a ‘right’ thing, it’s a human thing. It doesn’t arrive goose-stepping down streets in terrifying ranks, it seduces us with stories. Perhaps the best mode of protection is to play many games. People who appear brainwashed have invested too much of their identity into a single game. They rely on it wholly for their connection and status, the maintenance of which requires them to be filled up with its dream of reality, no matter how delusional. (p.322-323).

Moralism

The drug of morality poisons empathy. Because the dreamworlds we live in seem real and true, we believe the moral convictions that comprise them are also real and true, as if they’re objects that can be dug out of the ground and observed by all, just as long as we make the right arguments. But moral ‘facts’ exist only in minds. They are decision, not facts. Our insistence on their materiality blinds us to the perspectives of others: if our moral reality is reality then theirs must be a lie. So they’re liars. They are evil. This mode of thinking trips us into arguing over questions with no answer. Asking whether immigration or neoliberalism or religion are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is nonsensical. It’s pure status play. Which moral class we assign them depends on which game we happen to be playing. The truth of such complex phenomena is usually that they’re trade-offs: they have an array of positive and negative effects that impact different status games in different ways. (p.324-325) Storr’s approach seems to fall broadly into the camp of consequentialist morality.

This means viewing the world not in terms of winners and losers but of groups negotiating trade-offs. It means reaching past the self-serving fantasy of moral heroes and villains and seeing the ways different outcomes might injure our foes, whose pain is just as painful as ours. And it means empathy; sincerely attempting to understand the games played by our enemies and acknowledging their criteria for making status, even if we can never persuade ourselves of their validity. Most of the time, in even intensely bitter conflicts, each side tells a story that holds part of the truth.(p.325)

A status game is a conspiracy we join to make ourselves feel important. Once our basic survival needs have been met, and we’re connected with others, what’s left is the contest. We concoct status, as if by magic, out of those endless symbols: deference, influence, money, flattery, eye contact, clothing, jewelry, professional titles. We invest the years of our lives into projects that become of all-devouring importance As we live, we soar and fall, our victories ecstatic, our losses so grave we can be driven to suicide.

Whilst we can never separate ourselves from the game, wisdom can be gained from simply knowing that it’s there.

The trick is to find new and better games. Just because large crowds of smart people have begun believing that which seems crazy, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re right. The fact of their numbers doesn’t increase their trustworthiness and neither does their power, platform nor intellect. Elites and their games have gone wrong throughout human history; there’s no reason they should stop in our lifetime.

We’re continually offered new and shifting symbols of what it is to be a winner: thinner, larger, whiter, darker, smarter, happier, brave-and-sadder with this career triumph and that many likes. These symbols we chase are often no less ridiculous than giant yams and none of us are competing with everyone in the world, no matter how much it can feel that way. The promised land of satisfaction is a mirage. It’s a myth. In our lowest moments, we should remind ourselves of the truth of the dream: that life is not a story, but a game with no end.

“Nobody wins the status game. They’re not supposed to. The meaning of life is not to win, it’s to play.” (p. 327)

1. Sometimes you are just ready to receive the message of a book. Will Storr’s “The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It”, HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle-Version just hit a note with me. After “The Machiavellians”, “The Revolt of the Public” and “The Lucifer Principle” it seems like I was just ready to absorb the messages. “The Status Game” ties together some loose ends.