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The Status Game
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By Will Storr
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Amazon: Link
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#Pg.TC Highlight
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X11LIFE IS A game. There’s no way to understand the human world without first understanding this. Everyone alive is playing a game whose hidden rules are built into us and that silently directs our thoughts, beliefs and actions. This game is inside us. It is us. We can’t help but play.
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21Back in the Stone Age, increased status meant greater influence, access to a wider choice of mates and more security and resources for ourselves and our children. It still does today. So we’re programmed to seek connection and rank: to be accepted into groups and win status within them. It’s part of our nature. It’s the game of human life.
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32Our need for status gives us a thirst for rank and a fear of its loss that deforms our thinking and denies us the possibility of reliable happiness. It’s why, even as we raise ourselves so high above the other animals we appear to them as gods, we still behave like them – and worse. Always on alert for slights and praise, we can be petty, hateful, aggressive, grandiose and delusional. We play for status, if only subtly, with every social interaction, every contribution we make to work, love or family life and every internet post. We play with how we dress, how we speak and what we believe. We play with our lives – with the story we tell of our past and our dreams of the future. Our waking existence is accompanied by its racing commentary of emotions: we can feel horrors when we slip, even by a fraction, and taste ecstasy when we soar. Up and down and up and down and up and down we go, moment by moment, day by day, from childhood to the grave. Life is not a journey towards a perfect destination. It’s a game that never ends. And it’s the very worst of us. But it’s also the best.
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X45We are, it should go without saying, driven by a multitude of desires. We want power. We want sex. We want wealth. We want to change society for the better. But it’s also true that the status game is deeply implicated in these great human hungers. If you want to rule the world, save the world, buy the world or fuck the world, the first thing to pursue is status. It’s the golden key that unlocks our dreams. And your subconscious mind knows this. This is why, as psychologist Professor Brian Boyd writes, we ‘naturally pursue status with ferocity: we all relentlessly, if unconsciously, try to raise our own standing by impressing peers, and naturally, if unconsciously, evaluate others in terms of their standing’.
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56If you’ve arrived from my preceding book, The Science of Storytelling, you’d be forgiven for wondering if you’re about to tumble into a gigantic contradiction. I went to some lengths to persuade you that your brain is a storyteller and now, here I am, insisting it’s a game player. But as I hope will become clear, this is actually a parallel argument investigated at a deeper level. If the conscious experience is organised as a story, this book concerns the subconscious truth that lies underneath.
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69But every time an opportunity for parole came up, he managed to supply the prison service with a new reason to deny it. The MP Michael Gove, who’d been campaigning for his release, told The Times newspaper he thought there was, ‘perhaps a self-destructive element in his make-up, because the prison authorities always have a misdemeanour to report, some serious (never violent), some trite, to prevent parole being granted’. To encourage him out, Alex would paint him pictures of the things they’d be able to enjoy together on the outside: the cottage in the country, the fire in the winter, the cat. She couldn’t understand it: he could have her and everything else he wanted. All he had to do was behave. Why was he refusing? Then one day Ben told her straight: ‘I want to stay.’
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X712Whenever we’re in the presence of humans, consciously or unconsciously, we’re being judged, measured. And their judgements matter. Wherever psychologists look, they find a remarkably powerful link between status and wellbeing. One study of more than sixty thousand people across 123 countries found people’s wellbeing ‘consistently depended on the degree to which people felt respected by others’. Attainment of status or its loss was ‘the strongest predictor of long-term positive and negative feelings’.
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X812Ben’s story is a profound lesson in how to live. It shows us that it’s possible to survive everything being taken from us. We can become despised by society, classed a child murderer, and have a brutal force such as the prison service ranged against us. We can hit such depths of torment that we refuse to eat for forty-three days, starving until we feel our eyeballs drying out. And yet out of these circumstances of grotesque debasement, we can flourish. Ben built a life of meaning and purpose and he did it by plugging himself into a set of like-minded brains and playing a game in which the goal was to earn status. His rank as a lifer and jailhouse lawyer gave him deference and respect. He became useful to his co-players in their conflicts against the prison staff. He grew to be admired and valuable. He invested all the efforts of his days, months and years into the playing of this game. He created a world of meaning for himself. Then, after prison, he collapsed. When freedom means expulsion from the meaning you’ve spent your life making, then freedom is hell.
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X914Psychologists find that simply connecting with others and feeling accepted by them can be profoundly good for us. But equally revealing is how our minds and bodies react when we fail to connect. A wide range of research finds people with depression tend to belong to ‘far fewer’ groups than the rest of the population. Studies across time suggest the more a depressed person identifies with their group – the more of their own sense of self they invest in it – the more their symptoms lift. Failure to connect can even make us physically ill. Numerous studies find it’s possible to predict mortality by observing the extent to which someone has meaningful contact with others.
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1015One survey of nearly seven thousand residents of Alameda County in California found ‘the people most likely to survive to old age were those with solid face-to-face relationships’, writes psychologist Susan Pinker. Their social relationships, or lack of them, ‘predicted mortality, independently of how healthy, well-to-do, or physically fit’ they were.
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X1115Disconnection is a fearsome state for a social animal to find itself in. It’s a warning that its life is failing and its world has become hostile: where there’s no connection, there’s no protection. Isolation damages us so profoundly it can change who we are. It can force us into a ‘defensive crouch’, writes psychologist Professor John Cacioppo, in which we seek to fend off the threat of further rejection. Our perceptions of other people become warped. They start to appear ‘more critical, competitive, denigrating, or otherwise unwelcoming’. These faulty interpretations ‘quickly become expectations’. We can become scrappy, bitter and negative, a mindset that ‘leads to greater marital strife, more run-ins with neighbours, and more social problems overall’.
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X1216Workers ‘at the bottom of the office hierarchy have, at ages forty to sixty-four, four times the risk of death of the administrators at the top of the hierarchy’. This remained true with every step you took up or down the game. The lower you dropped, the worse your health and the earlier your death. ‘The group second from the top has higher mortality than those above them in the ranking.’ These remarkable and telling findings have been confirmed in men and in women. They’ve even been found in baboons. In the lab, monkeys were fed diets high in cholesterol and fat until they developed dangerous levels of atherosclerotic plaque. The higher the monkey was in their troop’s status hierarchy, the less likely they were to fall ill as a result of their nasty diets. When researchers conspired to alter the hierarchy, each monkey’s risk of illness changed in lockstep with their change in status. ‘It was the new position, not the one they started with, that determined the degree of atherosclerosis they developed,’ writes Marmot. And ‘the differences were dramatic’.
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1317The basic idea is that, when we’re not doing well in the game of life, our bodies prepare for crisis by switching our settings so we’re readied for attack. It increases inflammation, which helps the healing of any physical wounds we might be about to suffer. It also saves resources by reducing our antiviral response. But when our inflammation is raised for too long, it can damage us in myriad ways. It increases susceptibility to neurodegenerative disease, promotes the spread of plaque in the arteries and the growth of cancer cells. According to a world leader in this field, Professor Steve Cole, ‘several studies have related objective indicators of low social status to increased expression of pro-inflammatory genes and/or decreased expression of antiviral genes. Being beaten down in the rat race naturally changes what you expect from tomorrow, and that does seem to filter down into the way your cells prepare for tomorrow.’
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1418It’s probably not a surprise to discover that feeling deprived of status is a major source of anxiety and depression. When life is a game we’re losing, we hurt. One review of the scientific literature found that ‘perceiving oneself as having low rank compared to others is consistently linked to higher depressive symptoms’. Some psychologists argue that when we become depressed we ‘mentally withdraw from the competition for higher status’. This keeps us off ‘high-status individuals’ radars’ and conserves energy, helping us cope with the ‘reduced opportunities imposed by low status’. Frequent defeat in the status game has us scuttling off to the grey safety of the back of the cave. In the sanctuary of those shadows, our inner monologue can turn on us, becoming hypercritical in a process known as self-subordination. We talk ourselves down in an onslaught of insult, convincing ourselves the fight is useless, that we belong at the bottom, that we can only ever fail.
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1519To our brains, status is a resource as real as oxygen or water. When we lose it, we break.
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X1622A psychologically healthy brain excels at making its owner feel heroic. It does this by reordering our experiences, remixing our memories and rationalising our behaviour, using a battery of reality-warping weapons that make us believe we’re more virtuous, more correct in our beliefs and have more hopeful futures in store than others. For psychologist Professor Thomas Gilovich, the evidence is ‘clear and consistent: we are inclined to adopt self-serving beliefs about ourselves, and comforting beliefs about the world’. The most powerful of these weapons is thought to be the moral bias.
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1722Culture conspires in this dream of human life. Cultures are built out of billions of brains: billions of neural storytellers working in concert. They fill their religions, novels, newspapers, screens, speeches, gossip and ideologies with simplistic stories of moral heroes and evil villains; actors battling odds and fighting evil on their journeys towards promised lands. We all live the dream of the mind.
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Z1823A Cartier watch is worth this much status; a Casio watch is worth that. These ‘status symbols’ tell us, and our co-players, how we’re performing. We pay obsessive attention to them. We need to: unlike in a computer game, there’s no definitive scoreboard in human life. We can never see precisely where players sit versus us in the rankings. We can only sense it from symbols to which we’ve attached particular values. In order to manage this process, the subconscious has a ‘status detection system’ that includes mechanisms that read ‘relevant cues in the environment to assess status’. This system is astonishingly sensitive. It doesn’t only use inanimate objects as status symbols, it can project value onto virtually anything, including people’s appearance and behaviours.
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X1924These apparently trite symbols matter. In one test, when participants were shown photos of people wearing ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ clothes, they automatically assumed those in wealthier looking outfits were significantly more competent and of higher status. This effect remained when they were warned upfront of the potential bias, when they were informed the clothing was definitely irrelevant and when they were told all the people worked in sales at a ‘mid-size firm in the Midwest’ and earned around US$80,000. It even remained when the participants were paid money to make an accurate guess. And all it took for their status detection systems to make these extraordinarily stubborn judgements was a single flash of each photo, lasting 129 milliseconds. The status detection system continually reads symbolic information from the voice and body language of our co-players. It registers facial markers for dominance or submission in forty-three milliseconds and calculates the quality and quantity of eye contact we’re receiving (more is better) and it does so constantly, unconsciously and ‘with numerical precision’.
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X2025High-status people tend to speak more often and more loudly; are perceived to be more facially expressive; achieve more successful interruptions in conversation; stand closer to us; touch themselves less; use more relaxed, open postures; use more ‘filled pauses’ such as ‘um’ and ‘ah’ and have a steadier vocal tone (although some of these symbols may vary culturally). When researchers took candid photos of ninety-six pairs of co-workers interacting, cut them out and stuck them against a white background to remove contextual information, people were ‘exceedingly accurate’ in their estimates of who had higher status. Merely by glancing at a still image of them talking, they could tell who was on top.
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X2125When speaking, we emit a low-frequency hum at around 500 hertz. When people meet and talk, their hums shift. The highest-status person in the group sets its level and the rest adjust to match. This hum is thought to be an ‘unconscious social instrument’ that helps sort us into status hierarchies. Analyses of interviews on The Larry King Show found the host deferentially changed his hum to match Elizabeth Taylor whilst Dan Quayle adjusted to him.
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2226Likewise, the desire for wealth is not fundamental. Status is the original form of currency, and the one that matters more. Studies show a majority of employees would accept a higher-status job title over a pay rise: one survey of 1,500 UK office workers had around 70 per cent choosing status over money, with creative assistants preferring ‘chief imagination officer’ and file clerks opting for ‘data storage specialists’. Those data storage specialists were onto something. Assuming we have enough money to live, it seems relative status makes us happier than raw cash.
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2326This has been found many times, with one study using data from twelve thousand British adults concluding ‘the ranked position of an individual’s income predicts general life satisfaction, whereas absolute income and reference income have no effect’. Elsewhere, economists find people’s happiness goes down if others living nearby earn more than they do. And it drops most of all for those who spend time socialising in their neighbourhood. The effect is strong: ‘An increase in neighbours’ earnings and a similarly sized decrease in own income each have roughly about the same negative effect on well-being.’ This meets our understanding of how the brain works. It has to judge our status relative to everyone else’s, because that’s how it perceives. For neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott, ‘perception has no ground zero. There’s not an absolute truth about the world that we compare everything else to, so it’s all relative.’ The status detection system, therefore, works in contest mode. Researchers find our reward systems are activated most when we achieve relative rather than absolute rewards; we’re designed to feel best not when we get more, but when we get more than those around us.
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2430The anthropologist Professor Robert Paul writes that our pursuit of symbolic status ‘has to do with the fact that human social life inherently depends on there being a public arena in which symbols can be made available to perception and shared by many people’. People who have connected ‘share in the perception of these symbols, and incorporate them into their own thinking, feeling, and identity’, which ‘means that they experience their consociates as “kin”’. It’s in this way that we exist as a tribe, a culture, a people. We come into being as a collective when we connect with like-minded others whose brains process reality in similar ways; who dream the same dream of life. We recognise the same symbols; play the same game. As we do, we become the source of each other’s status, the people of the yam.
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2532Hunter-gatherer rules were designed for a specific purpose: to help keep our tribes functional and their members working together peacefully and well. A game was created in which prosocial behaviour that benefitted the group was incentivised. Roughly speaking, the more you put the tribe’s interests before your own, the more you’d earn status and the better your conditions of life would become. These rules were essential because humans can often be greedy, dishonest and aggressive. One survey of sixty premodern societies uncovered seven common rules of play that are thought to be universal: help your family; help your group; return favours; be brave; defer to superiors; divide resources fairly; respect others’ property. These elemental rules dictate the ways humans keep their tribes working well. They tell us basically how to play: deferring to superiors means ‘being deferential, respectful, loyal or obedient to those above you in a hierarchy, using appropriate forms of address and etiquette’; returning favours includes ‘repaying a debt, forgiving people when they apologise’; dividing resources includes ‘being willing to negotiate, compromise’.
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2634Around the world, there are gigantic shifts in the ways status games are played. These shifts can create some radical differences in self as brains form around local rules. Among the most studied are the differences between East and West. Westerners tend to see status-pursuit as primarily the job of the individual. This moulds their strategies for playing the game. Psychologists find that Westerners generally like to stand out and feel unique, tending towards conceited self-views and rating themselves better than average at all kinds of traits including healthy habits, immunity to bias and driving skills. In one study, 86 per cent of Australians rated their job performance as ‘above average’; in another, 96 per cent of Americans described themselves as ‘special’. East Asian games tend to be more collective. In countries such as Japan and China, status-pursuit is more commonly seen as the responsibility of the group. They’re more likely to feel raised up when they serve the collective, winning status by appearing humble, conformist and self-sacrificial. In the East, it’s often the status of the group above all. This is a game plan that might sound worthy and wonderful until you consider its ramifications for individual human rights.
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2738The only feasible way to opt out of the game is to seek an empty room and stay in it. In Japan, more than half a million adults suffer ‘social withdrawal syndrome’, refusing to leave their bedrooms unless absolutely compelled to. These ‘hikikomori’ are ‘incapable of following the rules of society’, the sociologist Professor Teppei Sekimizi has said. They find connection and status too difficult to reliably achieve, strongly agreeing with statements such as: ‘I cannot blend into groups’ and ‘I am anxious about what others might think of me.’ Many stay locked up for years. Some die alone. And this, ultimately, is the choice facing each one of us: hikikomori or play.
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X2839A major review of the psychological literature found attractive people are judged and treated more positively than the unattractive, ‘even by those who know them’.
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2939Much of the rest of human life is comprised 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 conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge. Mafias and armies are dominance games. Religions and royal institutions are virtue games. Corporations and sporting contests are success games.
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3040The games played by boxers and chefs in Michelin-starred kitchens are fascinating for their being relatively equally weighted combinations of dominance, virtue and success: they’re often brutally fierce, bound by tradition and strict codes of behaviour, and winners are celebrated for achieving acts of extreme competence. The same is true for us as players. The three varieties of game tend towards three general varieties of human: we can be Idi Amin, Mother Theresa or Albert Einstein. But everyone contains elements of all three archetypes. Humans have the capacity to source status from acts of dominance, virtue and competence and, crazed as we are, we’re going to use any strategy we can: a scientist, a princess and a cartel boss will all use shifting modes of dominance, virtue and success as they play their games of life. We’re all a sometimes uncomfortable, often contradictory mixture of these three routes to the great prize.
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3143Additionally, we needed to be able to talk. We might’ve stored the reputations of others in our brains, but those reputations lived and died in the stories we told of them. The current dominant theory says this is why we evolved speech – to gossip. If others in the tribe spoke well of us, we’d be rewarded with a prestigious reputation and its glittering dividends; if bad, we’d sink in the rankings and risk punishment. We could also gain status from gossiping. Who we gossip with can itself be a status symbol: swapping tattle with high-ranked others implies we’re of high rank too. Furthermore, one of gossip’s critical purposes was to demonstrate the rules of the tribe and what happened if you broke them. By gossiping we demonstrate our knowledge of the rules, and our loyalty to them, and this can also earn status. Gossip has been described as ‘an activity that is attention seeking, promoting self-interest and self-image through social comparison, and the discrediting of others’. It’s universal and essential to our gameplay: children start to gossip almost as soon as they can speak
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3245Chimpanzee troops have been found to be ‘several hundred to a thousand times’ more aggressive than even the most violent human societies. We don’t need to tear each other’s limbs and genitals off and drink their blood for status, as chimpanzees do, when we can earn it by raising our prestige and displaying our ranking with ivory lions and glittering shells.
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X3346In each status game we play, we have a reputation. In its details, that reputation will be different within the mind of every player. We exist in varying degrees of depth and varying degrees of fairness in all these minds. Whenever others think of us, they’ll overwrite us with their own status information. Are we moral or immoral? Expert or useless? How do we look? How do we talk? What job do we do? Do we make them feel loved or hated? Fancied or repulsed? Pitied or admired? It’s this distorted and partial avatar we play at life with, not our whole self. Nobody ever truly knows us. They never will.
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X3447Whenever a person shows they’re valuable to their game, by being conspicuously virtuous or successful, it’s registered by their co-players. Subconsciously, they’ll see this person’s winning behaviour as a chance to win themselves. They’ll desire to learn from them, so they too can rise up in the rankings. This means being near to them as much as possible. As a reward for all their valuable time and knowledge, they offer them symbolic status: they lavish them with eye contact and defer to them in conversation; they might maintain a hunched, subservient posture; bare their teeth in submissive displays known as ‘fear grimaces’ in apes and ‘smiles’ in humans; fetch them food, drink or other gifts; walk behind them; hold doors open; seat them in a special location or use honorific titles to address them. The prestigious player will luxuriate in these signals of status. These people clearly think they’re marvellous. But as lovely as it feels, it’s often a trick, a strategy, a game plan. These game-playing instincts are a component of our universal human nature
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3548monkeys also copy high-status associates. But our evolutionary cousins don’t take the copying instinct anywhere near as far as we do. Studies comparing infant humans to chimpanzees show both species copy a prestigious individual’s actions, such as when they skilfully retrieve a treat with a stick – but only humans copy all the actions. Chimpanzees judiciously identify and edit out any pointless parts of the procedure, copying only what’s necessary to get the treat. Humans copy everything.
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3653More recently, the eating of shark fin soup has declined significantly in China, due in large part to a successful programme of prestige-signalling. The largely tasteless and nutrition-free dish was known as an elite delicacy in Imperial China, and was eagerly copied in the new economy, where the monied elite used it as a status signaller at weddings and banquets. Around seventy-three million sharks were killed for soup every year. A public information campaign was launched, headed by prestigious celebrities including basketball star Yao Ming. Importantly, China’s president removed the dish from all their official banquets. Between 2011 and 2018 consumption in China fell by 80 per cent.
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X3754The outsized influence that high-status players exert can also be measured in how much they talk. One study of premodern societies found top-ranking members spoke fifteen times more frequently than those at the bottom, and almost five times more than those one rank beneath them.
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3858The officers requested she ask the driver, who was standing perhaps three metres away and in possession of all the answers. Beneath the surface (not far beneath the surface; less than a half a millimetre beneath the surface) this was a status battle, a dispute over who had superior rank. Caren Turner played a dominance game. She lost. Whenever our sense of status is challenged, like this, we can easily slip into a different state of being. We employ primeval neural coding that was written millions of years ago, in the prehuman era of dominance. Whilst the prestige games of virtue and success have made us gentler and wiser animals, these superior modes of playing haven’t completely overwritten our bestial capacities. As psychologist Professor Dan McAdams writes, ‘the human expectation that social status can be seized through brute force and intimidation, that the strongest and the biggest and boldest will lord it over the rank and file, is very old, awesomely intuitive and deeply ingrained. Its younger rival – prestige – was never able to dislodge dominance from the human mind.’ The beast is still in us. It is our second self. Many of us shade between these states multiple times a day, often without realising we’re morphing from one self into another. And they really are different modes of being. Prestige and dominance behaviours are ‘underpinned by distinct psychological processes, behaviours and neurochemistry which were selected for distinct evolutionary pressures’. We tend to hold ourselves differently when inhabited by each version of us: when in a dominant, second-self mode we take up more space, hold our arms away from our bodies, smile less often and maintain a downwards head tilt; when in a prestigious state we embody our status in subtler ways, expanding our chest, pushing our torso out, tilting our head upwards. Studies show even children younger than 2 can differentiate between players using strategies of dominance and prestige.
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X3960Tellingly, we’re especially prone to raising up dominant leaders when the status of our game is under threat. In studies, men and women have picked silhouettes of tall, bulky people with thin eyes and lips and a strong jawline as ideal leaders in times of war; in peacetime those with narrower frames were more popular.
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4061For psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘girls and boys are equally aggressive but their aggression is different. Boys’ aggression revolves around the threat of violence: “I will physically hurt you” … but girls’ aggression has always been relational: “I will destroy your reputation or your relationships”.’ Researchers argue female aggression tends to be ‘indirect’. Rather than assault an antagonist’s physical body, face-to-face, they’ll attack their avatar.
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4166For psychologists Professor Raymond Bergner and Dr Walter Torres humiliation is an absolute purging of status and the ability to claim it. They propose four preconditions for an episode to count as humiliating. Firstly, we should believe, as most of us do, that we’re deserving of status. Secondly, humiliating incidents are public. Thirdly, the person doing the degrading must themselves have some modicum of status. And finally, the stinger: the ‘rejection of the status to claim status’. Or, from our perspective, rejection from the status game entirely.
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4267If humans are players, programmed to seek connection and status, humiliation insults both our deepest needs. And there’s nothing we can do about it. ‘They have effectively lost the voice to make claims within the relevant community and especially to make counterclaims on their own behalf to remove their humiliation.’ The only way to recover is to find a new game even if that means rebuilding an entire life and self. ‘Many humiliated individuals find it necessary to move to another community to recover their status, or more broadly, to reconstruct their lives.’
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4367An African proverb says, ‘the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth’. If the game rejects you, you can return in dominance as a vengeful God, using deadly violence to force the game to attend to you in humility. The life’s work of Professor Gilligan led him to conclude the fundamental cause of most human violence is the ‘wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride’.
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4469And Elliot Rodger? This is what he had to say in the novel-length autobiography he distributed prior to his spree: ‘All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure while I’ve had to rot in loneliness all these years. They all looked down upon me every time I tried to join them. They’ve all treated me like a mouse … If humanity will not give me a worthy place among them, then I will destroy them all. I am better than all of them. I am a god. Exacting my retribution is my way of proving my true worth to the world.’ Acute or chronic social rejection has been found to be a major contributory factor in 87 per cent of all school shootings between 1995 and 2003.
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X4579Status games don’t function best by generating maximal competition between players. Research on this matter is mixed, but moderate levels are thought to increase diligence and productivity. Too much internal competition, however, can be counterproductive. If a hard atmosphere of all-against-all descends, players can be incentivised to stop rewarding each other with status and there’ll be a paucity of supply. Life, under such conditions, can reek of stress and misery. It can also contribute to a game becoming corrupted.
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4683Fogg’s legend grew in 2007 when he started teaching a class in using his persuasive techniques to build apps on Facebook. 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 fascination with controlling behaviour began when, aged 10, he studied propaganda at school. ‘I learned names for the various propaganda techniques, and I could soon identify them in magazine ads and TV commercials,’ he writes. ‘I felt empowered … I marvelled at how words, images, and songs could get people to donate blood, buy new cars, or join the Army. This was my first formal introduction to persuasion. After that, everywhere I looked I started seeing what I called “propaganda,” used for good purposes and bad.’ Growing up with a tech-obsessed father, Fogg wondered about harnessing the power of computers to persuade. At Stanford, he studied how interacting with them can ‘change people’s attitudes and behaviours’. In 2003 he published Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Years before the invention of the smartphone, it outlined his vision of our connected tomorrow: ‘Someday in the future, a first-year student named Pamela sits in a college library and removes an electronic device from her purse. It’s just smaller than a deck of cards, easily carried around, and serves as Pamela’s mobile phone, information portal, entertainment platform, and personal organiser. She takes this device almost everywhere and feels a bit lost without it.’ Such devices, Fogg believed, would be ‘persuasive technology systems’. They’d be able to change users’ thoughts and behaviours with a power that’d never been known in history. ‘
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4789Sociologist Professor Cecilia Ridgeway describes experiments that tried to locate the point at which our need for status, once acquired, stabilises. ‘There was no point at which preference for higher status levelled off,’ she writes. The researchers thought one reason the desire for status is ‘never really satiated’ is because ‘it can never really be possessed by the individual once and for all. Since it is esteem given by others, it can always, at least theoretically, be taken away.’ So we keep wanting more. And more and more and more.
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4894Tellingly Tourish has found the most successful leaders are usually those with the ‘least compliant’ followers.
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X49101Humanity’s great stretching also led to another quirk of life that’s common and dreadfully consequential. As we’ve learned, we evolved to play status games informally: whilst our rank, in hunter-gatherer tribes, was sometimes indicated externally in success cues – the hunter’s necklace of bones; the chief’s safer sleeping site – mostly it would’ve been sensed. We’d detect it in body language, voice tones and levels of deference. But when we formed settled societies, chiefs, kings, priests, prime ministers and CEOs had their high status confirmed in titles and rituals, acts of enforced deference and splendour. And so two parallel games began to be played: the formal game, announced in the grand hierarchies of culture, economy and society, and the informal true game, that continued to occur in the minds of the players. This leads to a phenomenon that might be called the Prince Charles Paradox, in which one 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.
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50108This is the truth of human nature: we’re helpless players of games and are programmed to play unfairly. The brain judges our status in contest mode, by comparing what we have to others. The more our group possesses, and the higher it climbs versus rival groups, the more of the great prize we personally win. Perhaps even more damaging than our tendency towards avarice and shadiness is the fact our brains hide these behaviours from us. They tell a self-serving story in which we’re not calculating players of games but moral heroes. It’s not us or our co-players who are deluded, greedy and corrupt, it’s everyone else. It’s the blue T-shirts that are truly superior, it’s the Islamists, it’s the French, it’s the British Empire, it’s that prat in the precinct who spent four quid in Woolworths and now thinks he’s King of Tunbridge Wells.
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51109The hidden truth of religions is that they’re status games: Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians agree a set of rules and symbols by which to play, then form a hierarchy along which they rise and fall. The dream that’s woven over this truth often tells of major status rewards not in this life but the next. Religions, it hardly needs pointing out, are virtue games. This means that to succeed – to earn connection and respect in this life and then heaven or a superior life via reincarnation – a player must be moralistic, faithful, obedient and dutiful. They must do as their gods, priests and sacred texts instruct. The ultimate purpose of all status games is control. They were designed by evolution to generate cooperation between humans; to force (in the case of dominance) or bribe (in the case of the prestige games of success and virtue) us to conform. It’s thought the major religions came about as a way of controlling the unprecedented numbers of people that began living side-by-side in the first ‘megasocieties’. Gossip alone couldn’t manage hundreds of thousands of disparate people, as it had in the hunter-gatherer era, so we invented moralising gods that tempted and punished us into behaving. At the time of writing, there’s a fierce debate amongst academics about whether moralising gods preceded large, complex societies or co-evolved alongside them. Most researchers agree, however, about the fundamental role of ‘big religion’. It created a standard set of rules and symbols by which players of different languages, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds could play. And they believed them. They lived the dream of reality they’d been sold.
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52111Today there are over 160 million untouchables in India. According to the National Geographic, they’re still ‘relegated to the lowest jobs and live in constant fear of being publicly humiliated, paraded naked, beaten, and raped with impunity by upper-caste Hindus seeking to keep them in their place. Merely walking through an upper-caste neighbourhood is a life-threatening offence.’ How does such a system remain stable? If we’re all such relentlessly ambitious players, why have the untouchables cooperated, for thousands of years, with this monstrously degraded dream of life? Many do so because they believe it. Pious untouchables accept they’ve earned their de-grading by committing sins in a past life; only by following the rules in the present will they win higher status in the next. This is how many major religions have compelled people to conspire in their own subjugation. You win by knowing your place and staying in it, in the expectation of rewards after death. Everything was God-created, went the logic, so people were precisely where God wanted them to be. As the Christian hymn sings it: ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly, and ordered their estate.’
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53113Even if elite groups – the religious, legal, military, bureaucratic, aristocratic games – get nearly all the rewards, and bottom castes virtually none at all, stability won’t usually be threatened. What creates revolutionary conditions isn’t the steepness of the inequality but the perception the game has stopped paying out as it should.
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X54113This is why poverty alone doesn’t tend to lead to revolutions. Revolutions – defined as mass movements to replace a ruling order in the name of social justice – have been found to occur in middle-income countries more than the poorest. Sociologist Professor Jack Goldstone writes, ‘what matters is that people feel they are losing their proper place in society for reasons that are not inevitable and not their fault’. The anxiety caused by their games’ loss of status reflects that which is found in the depression and suicide research. What goes for ourselves goes for our groups: when we and our people sense our collective status is in decline, we become dangerously distressed.
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x55115Elsewhere, Goldstone finds a predictable precursor to societal collapse to be ‘elite-overproduction’ – when too many elite players are produced and have to fight over too few high-status positions. A moderate level of overproduction is beneficial, as it creates healthy competition and increases the quality of the elites that do end up occupying its most prestigious positions, in government, media, the legal world, and so on. But too much overproduction leads to resentful cadres of failed elites forming their own status games in opposition to the successful. They begin warring for status, attacking the establishment, which contributes to its destabilisation.
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56118We’ve already learned how, especially in childhood, the brain draws information from the culture that surrounds it and shapes us to its contours. But the process of honing begins before even this. The brain’s roughly 86 billion neurons are made in the womb, as are major components of our hormonal and neurochemical systems. This is the biological equipment through which we’ll process reality – and its design is unique to us. How it’s wired up is directed partly by random biological events and partly by instructions encoded in genes we inherit from our parents. This genome strongly influences the ways we perceive and respond to the games of life. For instance, how anxious we are is thought to depend partly on a brain region called the amygdala and a hormone called serotonin. Just as nobody has exactly the same fingerprints, nobody has exactly the same amygdalae or serotonin system. Some people happen to be wired with an increased sensitivity to threat: their alarm is triggered more easily. They’re likely to be more neurotic, more cautious and more sensitive to criticism. They may also struggle socially. This personality difference can have a significant effect on the games they’ll end up playing. Someone high in anxiety may be attracted to different games than a natural taker of risks.
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57124This brain-directed emergence into adult games usually happens around the time we start secondary school. Adolescent students learn a harsh lesson of human life: not only are there hierarchies of status within games, the games themselves form a hierarchy, with some nearer the top, and others lower down. Elite cliques are formed by players who are naturally better at making friends. ‘Social mammals are status seeking, that is, interested in befriending powerful, appealing, or popular individuals,’ writes Professor Nicholas Christakis, an expert in social networks. ‘Those desirable partners tend to be connected to other desirable partners because they get to choose who they are friends with. Partly as a result, less popular individuals wind up being friends with less popular individuals.’ It’s this type of sorting that results in our ‘status-based society’.
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X58126As we discovered in the darkly competitive world of Enron, the games we join have the power to corrupt us. This process has been captured in an extraordinary paper by Patrick J. Schiltz – former big-firm attorney, Associate Professor of Law at Indiana’s prestigious Notre Dame Law School and present-day judge. Addressing a cadre of incoming law students, he wrote: ‘If you go to work for a big firm, you will probably begin to practice law unethically in at least some respects within your first year or two in practice. This happens to most young lawyers in big firms. It happened to me.’ Those who yearn to become big-firm lawyers are, he writes, a ‘remarkably insecure and competitive group of people’. They’ve spent their entire lives competing through the education system to get where they are. ‘Now that they’re in a big law firm, what’s going to happen? Are they going to stop competing? Of course not. They’re going to keep competing – competing to bill more hours, to attract more clients, to win more cases, to do more deals. They’re playing a game. And money is how the score is kept in that game.’ Their fever for lucre is exacerbated by regular trade press articles on how much this or that big shot is making. Lists of lawyers’ incomes are published biannually and ‘pored over by lawyers with the intensity that small children bring to poring over the statistics of their favourite baseball players’. This is how youthful idealism stales and grows mould. They arrive at their big firm to discover a new set of rules and symbols, a new game to play: they must compete using wealth as a symbol of status.
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X59128We are the sum of the games we play.
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x60161We think of morality as unquestionably good: how could it be otherwise? 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.’
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61164At a ‘very primal level’ players are motivated ‘to view the world through a competitive lens, with importance placed on their own group’s superiority’. Humans love to become superior: to win. Researchers find groups tend to prefer the simple fact of winning against other groups even if it means fewer benefits for its players.
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62165This is an inevitable, terrible consequence of the game of life we play. We’re wired to love being above. We continually seek to rearrange the world such that our game is on top, all the while telling self-serving stories about the immaculate virtue of our behaviour. The lesson many will find impossible to accept is this: never believe groups who claim they just want ‘equality’ with rivals. No matter what they say, no matter what they believe, they don’t. They weave a marvellous dream of fairness for all, but the dream is a lie.
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X63166A game’s command over its players strengthens when it flips into a mode of war. Connections between players tighten. These effects have been shown in numerous studies. An analysis of social ties between World War II veterans found individuals who experienced combat with one another maintained stronger personal connections even forty years later. Their bonds were intensified yet further if their units had suffered deaths, suggesting, ‘the more intense the social threat, the greater the social bonding’.
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64169If a player attempts to dominate a game through terror, that player is taken out. Execution is the ultimate humiliation; a rejection by the game that’s physical as well as psychological, not to mention final. But unfortunately for the history of the human race, it’s not quite as straightforward as this. The problem is, there aren’t two separate and easily identifiable forms of player – tyrants and non-tyrants. We all contain the capacity for tyranny. Who’s the tyrant and who’s the victim can often be difficult to tell. The cousins themselves could be brutal. Indeed, the same hunter-gatherer groups that came together to bloodily cancel tyrants also used deadly force against those who broke many other of their game’s rules. Players could be executed for theft and hoarding of meat, for malicious sorcery, for unauthorised viewing of the magic trumpets and for ‘treading on the men’s secret path’. The games we evolved to play could be oppressive and terrifying. Anthropologist Professor Richard Wrangham describes us as having lived in a ‘social cage of tradition’ in which players ‘lived or died by their willingness to conform’. The power of these cousins was ‘absolute. If you did not conform to their dictates, you were in danger.’
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65181In 2013, at the University of Wyoming, an anonymous Facebook page on which students would post about their ‘crushes’ received an entry directed at a prominent feminist and award-winning blogger: ‘I want to hatefuck Meg Lanker Simons so hard. That chick that runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it. I think its hot and it makes me angry. One night with me and shes gonna be a good Republican bitch.’ Lanker-Simons replied, writing it was ‘disgusting, misogynistic, and apparently something the admins of this page think is a perfectly acceptable sentiment’. There followed a student demonstration against ‘rape culture’ at which Lanker-Simons spoke. Following an investigation, police concluded the post had been written by Meg Lanker-Simons.
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X66201The strategist of legend Niccolò Machiavelli knew this well. A successful prince, he counselled, should, ‘show his esteem for talent, actively encouraging the able men and honouring those who excel in their profession’. Naturally this munificence should extend to any player who belonged to his elite. A prince ‘must be considerate towards him, must pay him honour, enrich him, put him in his debt, share with him both honours and responsibilities. Thus [he] will see how dependent he is on the prince.’ More sneakily, Machiavelli advised leaders to encourage the belief that such prizes can only be assured under their charge: ‘a wise prince must devise ways by which his citizens are always and in all circumstances dependent on him and on his authority; and then they will always be faithful to him’.
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67201One analysis concluded successful organisations ‘help keep their most talented employees from leaving by providing those individuals with high status’. When rewarded with status, workers identify more with their group, are more committed to it and come to view it more positively. Sociologist Professor Cecilia Ridgeway writes that there’s ‘overwhelming evidence’ status hierarchies operate in this way, by awarding esteem and influence ‘in exchange for a recipient’s perceived value for the group effort’. We reward players who help our games win. We raise them in rank. If they prove themselves sufficiently useful, we might even allow them to lead us for a while.
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68203Already, our strange travels have brought us into the company of three mass-killers: Elliot Rodger, Ed Kemper and Ted Kaczynski. All were grandiose, secure in their entitlement to being treated as high-status individuals, but who nevertheless suffered chronic and serious experiences of humiliation. Humiliation, as we’ve learned, is the ultimate psychological de-grading: the ‘nuclear bomb of the emotions’ that can cause the ‘annihilation of the self’ and lead to major depressions, suicidal states, psychosis, extreme rage and severe anxiety. It’s also thought to be a propulsive force for honour killers who similarly seek to restore their lost status with violence. And this is just what we find in pre-war Germany: the humiliation of the grand, but on the level of the nation.
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X69208In his first address to the media after taking office, propaganda chief Goebbels told journalists: ‘There are two ways to make a revolution. You can blast your enemy with machine guns until he acknowledges the superiority of those holding the machine guns. That is one way. Or you can transform the nation through a revolution of the spirit, and instead of destroying your enemy, win him over.’ And so the Nazis played both strategies.
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X70210Once individuals start to play and begin to enjoy a game’s rewards, it becomes part of their identity. They come to rely on it, to defend it, to evangelise it. And so the game becomes self-supporting, self-reinforcing, as each individual player now requires it to be real and true in order for their status to be real and true. The tyrannical cousins roar forth in their behaviour. As the goldrush grows, the game attracts new players, drawn to its increasingly splendid rewards; as it becomes more powerful, more and greater status is made available; it becomes larger and more powerful still.
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71210There’s a critical warning in all this: tyrants often start by telling you what you already believe. When they arrive, they weave their irresistible self-serving dream, promising that you deserve more status, just as you’d always suspected, and pointing accusingly at those you’d already figured to be your enemies – child abusers, conversos, big business, Communists, Jews. They make accusation and gossip; you become angry, enthusiastic and morally outraged. You begin to play. Once they’ve got you, they tighten up. Their beliefs become more extreme, more specific and are policed more severely; second-self tactics of dominance are widely deployed. The most tyrannical games – cults and fundamentalist political and religious movements – insist on complete conformity in thought and deed; their dream of reality colonising your neural territory entirely. They seek to become a player’s sole source of status; no rival games are easily tolerated.
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72214Partly through effective propaganda, Hitler himself became highly symbolic of the resurgent Germany: by the logic of the status game, he became sacred, the literal equivalent of a god, a figure that symbolised all that his players valued and who, in effect, was their status. One contemporary observer, Otto Dietrich, wrote: ‘We see in … him the symbol of the indestructible life-force of the German nation, which has taken living shape in Adolf Hitler.’ Another, Bavarian minister Hans Schemm: ‘In the personality of Hitler, a million-fold longing of the German people has become a reality.’ As the propaganda slogan said, ‘Germany is Hitler, and Hitler is Germany
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73219In his first public statement following 9/11 Osama bin Laden said, ‘What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than eighty years of humiliation and disgrace.’ Researchers find a primary motivation for suicide bombers is ‘the shame and humiliation induced by foreign troops in their country’.
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74224But virtue and dominance aren’t the only way humans evolved to make status. We can also use strategies of success. In the tribes in which we evolved, it was possible to earn rank by being useful to others with displays of competence: the best hunter, the best sorcerer, the best finder of honey. The modern world is heavily flavoured by the success games of scientists, technologists, researchers, corporations and creatives. Their status is won not by showing and enforcing moral correctness, but by becoming smarter, wealthier and more innovative and efficient. Modernity was made in the West.
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75225Across the world, wealth and the great religions constituted major threats to the dominant powers of King, Queen and Emperor. The rise of holy leaders and rich traders saw new elites emerge, leading rival games. But it was in the West that success games first managed to overpower the old virtue games, and come to flower over a culture. This happened not as a result of strategy or guile, but of chance and unintended consequence. It’s a process that demonstrates how powerful the games we play for status can be in defining self, culture and history. Individuals want to know: who do I have to be to get along and get ahead? Those born in an environment of dominance, virtue and obedience to caste and kin will become those people and play those games. They’ll live the dream they’ve been woven. But at the start of the modern era, initially in the West, we began looking outside our kin groups for connection and status. We became interested in novel, useful ideas from foreign clans and continents. We began generating major status by studying, innovating and making correct predictions about reality; rewarding each other for discovering truth and making use of it. These success games became a goldrush that spread across Western Europe, the USA and then the rest of the world. They changed everything. They were our road out of hell. And they might never have come about if it wasn’t 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 changes that combined to disable the old inward-looking virtue games, based on kin and extended family, and compel people to play in new 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. These rule alterations and their historical effects were discovered by Joseph Henrich, a Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology. He and his colleagues have produced an impressive constellation of evidence in support of them. Henrich argues these changes ‘systematically broke down the clans and kindreds of Europe into monogamous nuclear families’. People were forced to seek status outside their kin networks and play with strangers. Learning to ‘navigate a world with few inherited ties’ meant developing a novel psychology, and so the coding of their game-playing machines was rewritten. They made games for themselves in which ‘success and respect’ depended on ‘honing one’s own special attributes; attracting friends, mates, and business partners with these attributes and then sustaining relationships with them’. Crucially, Henrich’s research shows the Catholics’ new rules were causative in changing who we were: the longer a population lived by them, the looser their kinship groups and the more they became outward-looking, nonconformist, trusting of outsiders, self-focussed and individualistic. This mass psychological recoding was only possible in the first place because the major religions had insinuated their dream of the game into the minds of millions. The spread of the two most successful faiths, first Christianity and then Islam, is partly thanks to a tweak in their theology: unlike pagan and animist traditions, with their teeming pantheons of gods, they were monotheistic. Their god wasn’t a god, he was God. The One and Only. His moral rules were universal, applicable to all. Accepting the truth of other gods and breaking His rules was now a heresy, a significant rejection of the monotheist’s criteria for claiming status. This incentivised believers to convert those around them and conquer their neural territory. Studies suggest religious belief doesn’t fall upon populations as charismatic holy men ride into towns on pony-back and convert them en masse. Rather, it spreads through personal connections, as friends and family members convince those close to them to join. And it works: research on the effects of religious conversion finds the ‘psychological and emotional condition of most converts improves’ after joining.
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76228The reward for playing was connection and status in this life, and infinite paradise in the next. ‘Religion had never promoted such an idea before,’ writes Ehrman. ‘Christians created a need for salvation that no one knew they had. They then argued that they alone could meet the need. And they succeeded massively.’
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77228By the medieval era, the Catholic Church had become the most powerful institution on earth; its leader the most powerful human alive. The pope and his bishops and priests, at the top of the game, were divinely appointed, part of an ‘apostolic succession’ leading back directly to the apostles of Christ. To insult a priest was a crime against God. The Church became rich, the largest landowner in Europe, owning 44 per cent of France and half of Germany. Inevitably, its professional class became status drunk, surrounding themselves with treasures, wearing large hats, insisting on absolute deference in their presence – knees bent, hats doffed – and to be addressed by titles such as Your Holiness, Your Excellency and Your Grace. Much of its wealth came from a crafty alteration to one of the game’s rules. It might’ve been true that Jesus once said it was ‘easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’, but a cheat was added: the wealthy could enjoy their riches in life then donate it to the Church just prior to death – after all, if you’d been relieved of your wealth even one second before your heart stopped, strictly speaking, when you reached heaven’s gates you were poor.
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78238Named by the Venetian statesman and thinker Francesco Barbaro as the Respublica Literaria, or Republic of Letters, this game was made possible by the postal system that had been established across much of Western Europe. Men and women of excellence were now able to communicate their ideas in pamphlets, periodicals, books and personal correspondence. Their expertise ranged across disciplines including medicine, science, philosophy, theology, astronomy and philology. They created an international success game in which major status was awarded for dazzling displays of competence. Merely mastering the knowledge of the past was of little value in this game. Earning status was about the new: progress, innovation, insight and originality. The financial rewards could be significant: the best players earned patronage by dukes, princes and kings, who’d boast of having the finest minds in their employ, and make profitable use of their expertise in their state-building; merchants similarly recruited mathematicians and engineers to help give them an edge. But money wasn’t the driving force of the Republic of Letters. As Mokyr writes, ‘reputation based on peer evaluation was what counted … to be recognised by one’s peers as a master is enormously desirable and this was the driving motive behind most scholarly effort in early modern Europe’. Players could win major status by becoming international superstars, their fame spanning the continent, and have their discoveries – laws, methods, processes, astral bodies, parts of the brain and body – named after them.
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X79244But Smith 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.’ 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’.
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X80246We are, in the twenty-first century, as we’ve always been: great apes hunting connection and status inside shared hallucinations. The contemporary Western self is a strange, anxious, hungry thing. It emerges out of a market economy that’s heavily focussed on success. Whilst we’ll never stop playing games of dominance and virtue, our societies emphasise individual competence and achievement. We win points for personal success throughout our lives, in the highly formalised and often precisely graded games of school, college and work. In the street, in the office and on social media we signal our accomplishments with appearance, possessions and lifestyles. We’re self-obsessed, because this is the game we’re raised to play. As individualists we’ve always been relatively me-focussed. But the latter twentieth century saw us transform into a heightened mode of self-obsession.
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81248When discussing his play Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller described its tragic hero Willy Loman’s worldview thusly: ‘The law of success is that if you fail you’re dead. And you’re weighed on that scale the way God used to weigh people in the old days.’ The neoliberal age saw us all becoming little Lomans. Today, more than at any previous time in history, we measure our status by professional success and its symbols. Our daily pursuits – even those in education and the arts – are increasingly directed at financial ends, their victories measured in wealth. Research suggests busyness itself has come to be considered a status symbol. In a series of studies, busy people were viewed as having ‘more status because they were perceived as more competent and ambitious, as well as to be more scarce and in demand’. The neoliberal dreamworld glisters with such symbols. Success cues might’ve started in ropes of teeth around a hunter’s neck, but in twenty-first-century Westernised cultures, they’re everywhere. Maddened by them, we sweat and spend and hurry to keep up. We strive to improve, to bend our personalities into a certain shape, to become a better, different person. But where does it come from, the contemporary ideal of self? We see this perfect human all around us, beaming with flawless teeth from advertising, film, television, media and the internet. Young, agreeable, visibly fit, self-starting, productive, popular, globally-minded, stylish, self-confident, extrovert, busy.
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X82249Psychologists have a name for people with a heightened sensitivity to signals of failure: perfectionist. There are various forms of perfectionism: ‘self-oriented perfectionists’ have excessively high standards and often push themselves harder and harder in order to win; ‘narcissistic perfectionists’ already believe they’re number one and experience anxiety when the world treats them as less; ‘neurotic perfectionists’ suffer low self-esteem and often believe with the next victory they’ll finally feel good enough. But there’s one species of perfectionism that’s especially sensitive to the neoliberal game: ‘social perfectionists’ feel the pressure to win comes from the people with whom they play. They’ll tend to agree with statements such as, ‘People expect nothing less than perfection from me’ and ‘Success means that I must work harder to please others.’ Social perfectionists are highly attuned to reputation and identity. They’ll easily think they’ve let their peers down by being a bad employee, a bad activist, a bad woman. An especially hazardous quality of social perfectionism is that it’s based on what we believe other people believe. It’s in that black gap between imagination and reality that the demons come. Living the neoliberal dream, with its zero-sum, formal games and its galaxy of signals of failure, seems to be making us more perfectionistic. Further powerful evidence that altering the rules of our status games changes who we are can be found in a study of more than forty thousand students across the USA, Britain and Canada. Led by psychologist Dr Thomas Curran, the researchers discovered all the forms of perfectionism they looked at had risen between 1989 and 2016. Social perfectionism had grown the most.
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X83251Today, sixty-nine of the hundred largest economies on earth are not nations but corporations. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, technology company Apple made more money than the annual GDP of 135 countries; its market valuation was higher than the GDP of Italy, Brazil, Canada, South Korea and Russia. It’s all too easy, in these modern-colossal hierarchies, to feel as if we’re failing, even as we provide food, shelter and security for our families that’s ample. To live in the neoliberal dreamworld is to suffer some form of status anxiety. It’s standard. It’s who we are and how we play.
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84253Following the pressure of 2008’s global financial crisis, psychologists surveying college students found evidence of a tightening. As the perception spread that the neoliberal game was broken, and its expected rewards were no longer paying out, markers for individualism and narcissism among the students declined. The same period saw the emergence of what looks like a Social Media Self. Cadres of people who’d been partly socialised online, using the rules and symbols of websites such as Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit, brought these platforms’ harsh, virtue-bound and identity-fluid modes of play into the offline world. Rebellious and furious, their games have now become something of a status goldrush for young and privileged players. The coming years might see them undergo a significant expansion. Many of the battles they fight centre on the failures of neoliberalism, and the fact that we still struggle to offer equal opportunities to play across categories of race and gender.
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X85254This is how the success games that underpin modernity want to be played: acclaim is earned by what you do, not who you are. As the Industrial Revolution spread, and these games won increasing influence over culture, the worth and wellbeing of the individual player took on a more central importance. In Britain, 1859 saw the publication of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, the first book of its kind. Filled with inspiring case studies, it argued even players at the bottom of the game could move up with hard work and perseverance. Smiles began with a quote from philosopher John Stuart Mill: ‘The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.’ It was an instant bestseller.
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86255Towards the end of the eighteenth century, discussion of ‘human rights’ became more common in the West, with published use of the word ‘rights’ quadrupling between the 1780s and 1790s. The same period saw a series of legal reforms that speak to a rising belief in the value of the individual. Torture increasingly fell out of fashion, with European nations including Prussia, Sweden, Bohemia and France abolishing it between 1754 and 1788, the American physician Benjamin Rush arguing in 1787 that even criminals, ‘possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends’. Public executions in the UK had once drawn huge and raucous crowds, with contemporary reports at London hangings telling of the ‘most amazing scenes of drunkenness and debauchery’ and a ‘remorseless multitude … shouting, laughing, throwing snowballs at each other’. In 1868 Parliament abolished them. It wasn’t even eighty years earlier that they’d banned burning women at the stake.
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87266Many of the elite are simply gifted, the gift they receive from the gods that of sliding from the right womb. If the promised land comes and the old barriers of class, gender and race are removed, we’d find ourselves ruled principally by a genetic elite, privileged winners of the lottery of birth. These enviable few would live and work and play together, becoming a source of one another’s status. They’d come to speak in a certain manner, dress in a certain manner, enjoy certain pastimes, adopting their own distinctive rules and symbols. They’d fix their games in conscious and unconscious ways, creating even more privilege for themselves and their children. And we’d admire them and mimic them and resent them, just as we do today. The problem with elites is they’re an unsolvable problem; an inevitability of the game we’re programmed to play. They’ll always be there and they’ll never not make us feel small.
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88280The dream woven by the Communists told of a rebirth of the human animal. Capitalist systems had forced people away from their natural state of cooperation and into one of competition, a harsh world where love and sharing had been monsterised into one of cost, benefit and trade in which a human being was of value only to the extent they could help another get ahead. This pursuit of status, that had been conjured by the greedy, capitalist ‘bourgeoisie’, had poisoned our very perceptions. ‘A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling,’ wrote Marx. ‘But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut.’ Even if that little house grows and grows, ‘if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls’.
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89301Practise Warmth, Sincerity and Competence
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90301Professor Susan Fiske argues that, when encountering others, people ask of them two fundamental questions: ‘What are their intentions?’ and ‘What’s their capacity to pursue them?’ If we want to supply the right answers, and so be received positively, Fiske finds we should behave in ways that imply warmth and competence. More recently it’s been argued a third component should be added. For Professor Jennifer Ray, morality is ‘not only a critical and separable dimension … it may even be the primary dimension’. Elsewhere, ‘perceived sincerity’ has been found to be essential to successful ‘impression management’.
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X91302When 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.
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X92305Psychologists find those with ‘complex,’ multiple self-identities tend to be happier, healthier and have more stable emotional lives.
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X93308Psychologists argue that it’s possible to earn success-based status by engaging in ‘minor acts of nonconformity that do not violate the group’s basic standards for behaviour but attract attention’. Doing your own thing takes imagination and courage, but as long as you’re being useful, and not breaking sacred rules, you have the potential to rise. Originality also makes it more difficult for rivals to catch you. This should be a relief to those of us who obsess, damagingly, over our failure to be perfect. Often, a better strategy lies in trying to be different.