Notes on The Status Game by Will Storr.
The three games
Success (achievement-based status)
- Status is gained through skill, competence, and accomplishments.
- Common in capitalist, academic, and creative fields.
- E.g.
- An “entrepreneur” who starts a successful company.
- An athlete winning a gold medal.
- A scientist making a new discovery.
Virtue (moral and ethical status)
- Status is earned through moral superiority, social justice, or adherence to a belief system.
- Common in religious, political, and activist communities.
- E.g.
- A social justice advocate.
- A devout religious figure.
- An environmentalist promoting sustainability.
Dominance (power & fear-based status)
- Status is earned through force, intimidation, or coercion.
- Common in hierarchical and authoritarian systems, such as gangs, dictatorships, or competitive corporate environments.
- E.g.:
- A schoolyard bully.
- A CEO/boss who rules through fear and control.
- An actual autocrat.
Quotes
We build an infinite variety of imaginary games. Groups of people gather together, agree what symbols they’re going to use to mean “status,” then strive to achieve it.
In the West, 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.
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. Who is it, this person we feel so pressured to punch ourselves into becoming? It’s the player best equipped to win status in the game we’re in. It’s the neoliberal hero, the fantasy of an economy. And when we don’t measure up, we read these success symbols as signals of our failure. We’re individualists: believing it’s in our own power to win means believing that, when we don’t, it’s our fault and our fault alone. So we’re a loser, then: that’s who we are. We’ve been weighed on the new God’s scale and found wanting.
Psychologists 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. The extent to which people felt they had to ‘display perfection to secure approval had soared by 32 per cent. They concluded, ‘young people are perceiving that their social context is increasingly demanding, that others judge them more harshly, and that they are increasingly inclined to display perfection as a means of securing approval’. In speculating why, the authors pointed to neoliberalism. They noted the Western nations under study had ‘become more individualistic, materialistic, and socially antagonistic over this period, with young people now facing more competitive environments, more unrealistic expectations, and more anxious and controlling parents than generations before’. Both social perfectionism and materialistic goal-seeking have been linked to a witchbag of psychological maladies, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders and self-harm, rates of which have been climbing in recent years, especially in the young.
The parable of the Communists reveals the impossibility of ridding human existence of the game. 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 the cousins and their genius for tyranny; the ideological war games that rage across neural territories; 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. The story idealists sometimes tell of humanity says we’re natural seekers of equality. This isn’t true. Utopians talk of injustice whilst building new hierarchies and placing themselves at the top. Such behaviour is in our nature. The urge for rank is ineradicable. It’s a secret goal of our lives, to win status for ourselves and our game and gain as much of it over you and you and you 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.