It’s not controversial to point out that social status is a core feature of how our world functions. It revolves around status, is drunk on status, has been so back into the distant past and will be so to some extent for the foreseeable future. Judging a person’s specialness or importance based on appearance, role and position, and deferring or dominating accordingly, is still how many people approach most interactions, and seemingly more so than ever.
Alan Watts commented in the 1960s that the great symbols of the time were the rocket and the bulldozer. In the first part of the 21st century it has been the smartphone and the social media platform. Social media being the most naked appearance of the status game—a flagrant tool of comparison where status is publicly performed not only qualitatively but quantitatively, while simultaneously trying to convince you that not playing is simply not an option; a display as far removed from substance as possible while still retaining just enough semblance of it to convince. Our world today is more drunk on status than in Watts’ time and this may well be reaching a crescendo.
It’s often bandied about that ‘we seek status’ or ‘humans seek status’ as a kind of justification for status-seeking behaviours or business projects that attempt to capitalise from them. I don’t disagree with the observation, but I do disagree that this means we have little choice but to follow along. Whenever someone says things like this, my mind responds ‘thank you for telling me how you think and how you are approaching our interaction.’
Likewise that vacuous pronouncement that ‘humans are social creatures.’ I’ve never quite got whatever supposed deeper meaning this is getting at; that humans are social therefore… be social? What’s more is the suggestion that humans are basically just creatures, and that this is the core determinant of how we ought to behave. If we are just creatures, then it matters little what else we are. On the other hand, if what makes us human is our capacity to transcend our creaturely-ness, then whatever our default settings are they are not much of an argument for being embraced unthinkingly and without credence to other human-created factors. Not only that, but that our default settings may not be fixed at all, and furthermore may in fact be established through conscious choice.
In the same family of claims is that humans ‘evolved’ to be this way or another, and so we ought to do it that way too. But there are all kinds of harmful and untenable behaviours that humans apparently evolved to do that we have made efforts to temper and integrate in our modern world, some fairly successfully. Those who use such claims as a justification for their behaviour invariably ignore them wherever it doesn’t suit them. They at best explain a mechanism of what has unfolded to this point, but pay no credence to the principles of what is guiding us forward. Just because something happens a certain way in nature doesn’t mean we have to do it that way as civilised humans.
As with all misguided falsities, there is nonetheless some kind of truth behind them. That is precisely what allows them to stick—and for people to mistake their illusions for the realness they represent.
The real issue is that status is at best a proxy; not that it’s entirely wrong or false, but that our ideas around status are mere semblances of something that is real and true. In this case some essential reality to stages of development and ‘betterness’ of certain kinds. But the thing with proxies is that they are only somewhat useful insofar as you don’t actually know the thing in itself—and that where little effort has been made to integrate the thing in itself, proxies can pass for worthwhile substitutes. You only have to look for signals where you don’t understand the substance.
Therefore, when taken to extremes, or ultimately confused for substance, the pursuit of status for its own sake leads to all kinds of other problems: misdirections, costly choices, the misallocation of resources and energy, and life itself remaining unlived. Ideas that were once useful to an extent eventually become so deprived of the thing they purport to represent, that their pursuit not only fails to serve the thing in itself but becomes positively counter to it. Not only that, but that its features become adornments for those who wish to use them for purposes of misdirection.
A great portion of the human-created world operates this way today and capitalises off the inability—or mass unwillingness—of the market to simply see it. Much of who and what we encounter fills these roles of cartoonish and caricatural one-sided extremes, occupying a space not by virtue of what they are but only by what they forcibly ignore and throw out; dissonant self-referential phantasms insisting on their own existence to the detriment of their very own conditions for existing.
The pursuit of status for its own sake is simply put a zero-sum game. Status in pretty much every dictionary is defined as relative standing—my pursuit of status is necessarily an attempt to lower yours. The irony here of course is that the very need to be seen as important or special in the eyes of others undermines the very self-assuredness on which any image of wholeness depends. Said another way, if you truly had it together, you wouldn’t need to bolster yourself with externalised proof or attain it exogenously by feeding off the recognition of others; others whom you ostensibly regard as lower status. Not to mention that it’s a tacit admission of where empathy is lacking—an unconscious advertisement of precisely where you don’t actually care about others’ welfare at all and yet somehow expect them to admire you anyway.
This was the contradiction at the heart of the master-slave dialectic described by the great German idealist Georg Hegel. He recognised that any such dynamic is unstable precisely because the person of supposedly higher standing depends on the very thing they regard as beneath them. While those who occupy the supposedly ‘lower’ rung of this dynamic are actually involved in the real work of making something—ultimately of making themselves. At its heart this is not merely about producing some economic output but about engaging in the tension of dialectical movement itself and shepherding in what you and spirit already are implicitly. Those who insist on operating at the highest perceived status levels in any interaction cannot do that. It is precisely their avoidance of themselves that drives this desire for status, and their unwillingness to do the hard work of realising intrinsic selfhood that shows up in their need to extract it from others. What appears is often a compensation for what is really there. The master-slave dialectic is eventually resolved through mutual self-recognition, which is only possible when people stop seeking status.
The status game is really another form of the master-slave dynamic, and a world built around it is one where everyone loses. Where some might claim that status games are about advantaging oneself at the expense of others, I would question whether in the end it even advantages oneself, or just does so at best temporarily or even illusorily. To claim that it advantages some at others’ expense can itself betray an involvement in the status game. But just as the master-slave dynamic is at some point an unavoidable and necessary step, the pursuit of status might be a necessary intermediate step. But certainly not the kind of place you want to hang out in permanently and call it society or your life.
‘Status’ has become a very poor proxy for wholeness, hierarchy or even ‘betterness.’ For one thing, ‘betterness’ is situational and siloed. You can be of higher ‘status’ when you are the one presenting, and then immediately hand that position over to someone else when it’s their turn to speak. Or you can be of greater ‘betterness’ in a certain role based on ability. Although we need not look very far to see how ideas around status fall short as a measure of true ability or worth. This is the point—that the two things have moved so far apart that perceived status often has no real value at all and is not merely irrelevant but misleading.
Just as there is some underlying truth to what the self-referential phantasms of status are pointing to, the resolution to the problem of status is not to claim that there’s no truth to such things as betterness or hierarchy, nor value in comparisons of any kind. Hierarchy and ‘betterness’ represent truths that have to be worked with. Relativist positions like believing everyone is equal are perhaps truly equal only insofar as how problematic they are and how immediately they too contradict themselves.
So while status as we know it is a problem, throwing out what it purports to represent will not help us much either. The way forward as always is through a synthesis of what is true to both. To recognise the reality of better or worse to guide and understand forward movement, while also not falling for it as a fixed state or confusing mere signals of it for the truth it represents.
The real test is not whether you can ‘win’ at pre-defined games of ‘status,’ but whether you can think for yourself at all and not have to rely on outward substitutes for understanding.
