The Status Game
Seven Rules of The Status Game:
- Practice warmth, sincerity, and competence.
- Choose prestige over dominance
- Play a multitude of status games, but focus energy on games you consider important.
- Reduce your moral sphere. Worry about your own shit. Turn the gaze inwards.
- Have a trade-off mindset. Good or bad is bullshit. It’s all created.
- Be different, but don’t break the rules and be useful to the group.
- Never forget you are dreaming – the aim is to play, not win.
Life is a game of status. We want to fit in AND stand out. We create hierarchies and narratives about why some people are above us and why others are below us, but they are delusional stories.
Three types of status games:
Dominance
Virtue
Success
The need for status is fundamental. Status stories motivate us to improve our rank or make us feel better about ourselves. But the stories themselves are delusional.
Our goal is to earn status. When people defer to us and offer respect, admiration, or praise, that’s status. We are driven to get along and get ahead.
Status is an essential nutrient. Low social status is linked to increased expression of pro-inflammatory genes and or decreased expression of antiviral genes. Loss of status is a marker for suicide.
We seek face-to-face, social connections. To be a player in a group, we require acceptance. Disconnection can be a negative signal.
Our brain is a hero maker, creating both the illusion of self and its gripping narrative, framing our life as a journey toward a hopeful destination. We are the centre of that world. The job of the brain is to provide the storyline and narrative of our lives.
The brain creates our experiences of the world. We adopt self-serving beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. Moral superiority is a uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion.
The desire for relative advantage over absolute advantage is compelling. Status symbols tell us how we and those who surround us are performing. We read relevant cues in the environment to assess status.
Our posture, tone, and cadence give away our status. We are extremely efficient at assessing status. When we speak, we emit a low-frequency hum. The highest status person sets the level of the hum, and the rest adjust.
People gather together to decide what symbols they are going to use to derive status and then go about achieving them. There are rules to the game of status.
Seven common rules of play: Help your family; Help your group; Return favours; Be brave; Defer to superiors; Divide resources fairly; Respect others’ property.
There are also cultural rules. We can pursue status individually, a typically Western approach. Or, as a group, a typically Eastern approach.
Reputation is a symbolic version of us that exists in the minds of others. We evolved from being brutal and competing (dominance) to becoming useful to the group. By being virtuous, courageous, and generous, we develop the group’s opinion of us.
Competitive altruism; we compete to be seen as great contributors to the group. Prestige-based status.
Gossip is an activity that is attention seeking, promoting self-interest and self-image through comparison and the discrediting of others. Universal and essential to our gameplay.
Status play is dishonest, spiteful, and one of life’s great pleasures.
Dominance is a primitive mode of play. The two prestige games are virtue and success. We think of people of high prestige status as examples worth copying.
Influential people talk more than lower ranks.
We seek out success cues and skill cues. We look for competency. Paying attention to the eye movements and voice patterns of co-players to see who we defer to.
Copy-Flatter-Conform changes our values and beliefs.
Dominant leaders are overbearing. Take public credit, tease and humiliate subordinates, and are manipulative. Prestigious leaders self-deprecate, tell jokes, and publicly attribute success to the team.
We shift between dominance and prestige. Dominance is hard-wired. Prestige is a much younger status game.
We may think we have prestige on our side, but we often retaliate with dominance. “The principle of the matter” is a tell. Dominance appears where it was not previously present.
Humiliation is the purging of status; the nuclear bomb of emotions. Repeated humiliation during childhood is a marker for violent criminals. Shame is the private experience of humiliation.
Humiliated individuals rebuild their lives by playing a new game or returning vengeful and exerting dominance.
The status game we play is based on the symbols we are immersed in. Respect and admiration within one local group predict subjective well-being not our socioeconomic status.
To ramp up a status game, internal group struggle is less effective than a focus on rivalry. Between games, it pays to be competitive and deriding other groups. We need to convince ourselves of our superiority over other groups.
Rivalry helps motivate the group so that they are less motivated to improve the status of the group.
Where we are suits us; self-serving.
The strategies by which we earn connection and status shape who we are.
The purpose of all status games is control, conformity, and subjugation.
Religions created a standard set of rules and symbols so that people of different languages, cultures, and ethnicities could play along. Our brains weave us a dream. We become virtuous actors in a God-created reality.
We consider our groups to be of high esteem. Within games, the interest is stability. Status quo.
It is in the interest of the group to keep you where you are. Protecting their and the collective’s personal reputations. Religion convinced us that we win by knowing our place and staying there, with the future expectations of rewards after death.
For our games to be superior, we must consider our people to be superior. We are moral heroes telling a self-serving story. We are not greedy, corrupt and deluded; they are.
The steepness of inequality matters less than the perception that the game is paying out as expected. Relative deprivation.
The dangers of elite overproduction. Too few resources for too many. A decline in perceived status is distressing.
Overproduction is destabilising. Moderate overproduction and competition are preferred. Elites will create their own status games and compete with other revolutions.
Imperial cycles; Invasion; Subjugation; Revolution; Oppression; Civilisation
Imperial forces conquer people and establish themselves as the elite. As generations pass, indigenous people increasingly play the empire’s games, eventually desiring full and unprejudiced membership. Civil disobedience, violence, and legal challenge follow. The fall of the empire’s founders begins, and the cycle continues.
The brain draws information from the culture that surrounds it and shapes us to its contours.
Conscientiousness as a trait is the major predictor of success.
When the brain discovers a game that appears to make sense and that offers a pathway to rewards, it can embrace its rules and symbols with ecstatic fervour.
Securing a connection is as easy as believing, but to earn greater status, becoming possessed with a belief is the game-changer.
Virtue games are based on the promotion of the game itself; it feeds the game, a form of positive feedback. Conformity is currency.
Moral entrepreneurs defend, evangelise, and act it out.
Beliefs can send us to war. When someone attacks our core beliefs, they attack our game. Beliefs become status symbols and, in turn, become sacred.
People do great wrong not because they are unaware of what they are doing, but because they consider it to be right. Ideology is territory. Self-serving stories of the immaculate virtue of our behaviour.
Warriors participate in warfare for the reward. Increased status. Honorific names. Special insignia. The conviction that their game is special and entitled to be treated that way is a narcissistic dream.
Equality between groups is a lie; we may weave an idea about fairness, but it’s a lie.
Identification with the game drives group members to take action to maintain positive group status. Earning status for self and the group. Virtue-dominance play.
Wholly obsessed with games, sacred beliefs, and their enforcement is a warning sign. Think and talk about nothing else. Attack-Defend-Win.
Status game elites are highly visible players. Enabled by resentful, ambitious low-status players who conspire in the gossiping and mobbing. In an attempt to outdo each other, low-status game players create a purity spiral. Posturing for group approval.
Narcissistic perfectionists believe they are number one and experience anxiety when the world treats them as less.
Self-oriented perfectionists: high standards and push themselves harder and harder to win.
Neurotic perfectionists suffer low self-esteem and believe that the next victory will finally feel good.
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