Pt2: The Building Blocks of Status

the basic mechanics

1. Have what other people want

My favorite way to conceive of status is having what other people want. The more you have what other people want, the higher status you are.

In a scarce desert land, caveman Grugg has the bright idea to follow a stream, and then finds a hidden oasis overflowing with fruit trees. He eats his fill, stuffs pomegranates into his loincloth, and waddles back to the tribe. Grugg hands out fruit to his friends and to an especially curvy cavewoman. Everyone begs Grugg to tell him where he found the fruit, but he wisely does not answer, only shrugging cryptically. He is now the source of the fruit, and people vie for his attention, try to be his friend, and offer up their rears for mounting.

A few things are now going on.

1. Grugg has fruit. This is good on direct, practical level for Grugg himself - he isn’t going hungry, he now has more energy to fight enemies or build huts or whatever.

2. Other people want Grugg’s fruit. This is good on a social level for Grugg, as now he is the gateway to fruit access, and the cavepeople will try to trade stuff (friendship, loyalty, big butts) to get his fruit.

3. Grugg has demonstrated that - via bright ideas - he is the kind of caveman who can find fruit.

By finding the fruit, Grugg has become very advantageous to be friends with. If you’re allied with someone who has what you want, you are more likely to get what you want from that friend. This extends to any useful trait - you have fruit and can share it. You’ve got good eyesight, can shoot the arrow into your prey. You’re funny, people feel good laughing at your jokes. You are smart, can outwit your enemies and thus save the lives of your allies. You’re pretty, people feel sparkly when they look at you.

You might notice that some traits are innate to Grugg, like being clever, but some are more parts of his environment. In one sense, the difference doesn’t matter - Grugg has fruit, it’s good to be Grugg’s friend to get fruit, doesn’t matter how Grugg got fruit. But different cultures (and psychological profiles) weight internal vs external status differently, which takes us down the narrative and identity path which I hope to get to in future posts in this series.

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2. Make sure other people know that you have what they want

Different rules about status pull us in different ways. But one pull is that you want people to know that you have what they want. After all, Grugg loses all his power if none of the other cavepeople know he has fruit. Why would they try to be his friend or mate with him? Status is exchange; you’re granted it by other people who are trying to get a piece of your pie. Or fruit, I guess.

Looking at the materialist angle here:

I like imagining desire as an energetic force that imbues things with power. If a crowd of people are staring at a beautiful diamond, it glows with desire energy. If you clone the diamond, the desire energy gets split across the two. Make diamonds cheap and easy to acquire, and the energy gets diffused across it until there’s barely a glimmer left.

You can gain status by possessing things that glow with the force of others’ desire. You require other people’s desire to give your possession power.

Possessing such a powerful talisman indicates that you must be powerful too, somehow. Maybe you serve as a gatekeeper to family wealth, maybe you were clever enough to make money to buy it, or strong enough to beat someone up and take it.

To state the obvious: much of our material culture is demonstrating our ability to touch, possess, be near, provide access for, the glowing talismans. The shifting winds of fashion blow desire for clothing this way and that; many people are employed in the business of manufacturing and manipulating scarcity; owning a large house means now you are the access for your friends’ party venue.

We take photos next to things that glow with desire, to show we have done well enough in life to beat out other people and get next to it. If every person in the world were forced to journey to the Eiffel Tower upon hitting puberty, they’d be much less inclined to take and post photos of themselves posing next to it.

photo credit Lauren

There’s more that goes into status than simply display of possession of your talismans, but display is required for them to have power.

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3. Trade on the status marketplace

Several years ago, when I was much less well known, some higher status people spent a lot of time doing calls and meetings with me where they gave me advice about my trajectory and offered me connections. At the time I was pretty confused by this. I was happy to take it, but why were these people, who clearly had better things to do, being so generous when there was no way I could help them back?

But I realize now that they were making calculated investments. They thought there was a chance I would rise in power, and by being gracious and helpful now, I would feel an implicit debt, and likely repay it many times over in favors or access or whatever later on. I’m sure you can sympathize with this - imagine someone you went to school with would grow up to be a famous celebrity. If you could go back in time, would you spend more time befriending them beforehand? Even if you think of yourself as someone who wouldn’t (likely an identity-preserving move), you can at least understand the temptation.

People’s statuses are like stocks, and the market fluctuates. It’s better to purchase stocks when low (nursing a sick friend back to health), and good to cash out on when high (e.g., getting invited to elite parties, or a celebrity’s ex-friend writing an expose).

You might think of all this as cold, but it’s built into your behavior so deeply that you likely don’t even see it. You pick the best mate you can get, and secretly hope they don’t ‘let themselves go’ right after marriage (that their stock doesn’t decline after you invested). You’ll notice that most people seem to be equally matched in their romantic partners, and divorces happen when one of them makes it big (their stock values diverge).

We try to purchase the best deals we can with what we have to offer. We gravitate to people who are happy, clever, introspective, pretty. We find that we don’t really enjoy the company of people who are rude, or annoying, or stupid. We don’t enjoy hanging out with people we don’t find pleasant (which is a resource), much as cooler people don’t hang out with us. So we end up stratified; celebrities date celebrities, the local grocery store clerk dates the local mechanic. We really don’t like when this equilibrium gets rustled, and much of politics, social anxiety, and various crises of identity come out of disturbances to the strata. (more on this later)

Probably, your friends are similar financial tiers to yourself. Probably, they’re similar levels of physical attractiveness, and body weights, and occupational prestige. That didn’t happen by accident. If you’re lower status along one axis compared to those around you, then you’re probably higher status among another.

(You might object: but no, you can point to how some of your good friends are actually much less powerful than you are! And you asked this one super high status person to leave your party because they were being a dick! Doesn’t this mean you value things besides status? And sure - there are good things in life besides status. But I don’t think our narratives about how we’re immune to status are actually very good. This is another thing I’ll get to later!)

When thinking about how status works, it makes sense - however distastefully - to model people as things. You collect friends like attempts to get the nicest arrangement of pretty rocks to display - after all, why try hard to get the microcelebrity you don’t know well personally to your party, if they are not a pretty rock that you managed to get onto your mantle?

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4. Prove your proximity to high-status people

Imagine Kayleigh is a 17-year-old who works at a call center in rural Ohio. After months of saving, she travels to attend a Taylor Swift concert. Through sheer accident, she ends up out back of the venue at just the right time to run into Taylor and her bodyguards taking a weed break. She meets Taylor, talks to her a bit, and Taylor gives her a hug and lets Kayleigh take a selfie together before moving on.

You could bet every pretty rock on your mantle that Kayleigh will go back to her small town and tell all of her friends about it, in excruciating detail, many times. She’ll post the photo to all of her social media with captions like ‘I MET TAYLOR SWIFT!!!’ Her friends will be awed, and ask a bunch of questions. Kayleigh would likely experience a status boost; she might temporarily be a tiny celebrity in her own right (“omg becky did you see that kayleigh is like, best friends with taylor swift now?!?”)

But unlike fruit or toilet paper, Taylor Swift did not impart much practical value. There’s near-zero chance that Kayleigh will ever see Taylor again. Taylor did not give Kayleigh any money, she did not make any clever jokes in their brief interaction, she did not sing for Kayleigh. If status is about having what other people want, how did Kayleigh get status from this interaction?

Well remember, people are objects, and lots of people want Taylor. Originally they wanted her because she had some direct, practical skill (singing, entertainment). This scales; one performance can benefit as many people as you can shove into a room. This makes Taylor slightly higher status in the eyes of a large amount of people. This means more people want to be her friend. But she can only have so many friends, and now you’re competing against more people to get a friend spot. If you do win out and get a friend spot, this is proof that you have some power that other people don’t have. You have something Taylor wants, and since Taylor is high status, she can afford to pick the person who can offer her the most. And if you have a lot to offer, you must be high status too. Congrats on getting into Harvard!

Proximity to Taylor is also status in its own right, independently of it being evidence of your own status. While Grugg would have been cooler if he found the fruit through the internal status of possessing superhuman cleverness (this implies he will be more likely to find useful things in the future), he still becomes high status by having fruit on accident. Taylor Swift’s friend can still get you into a party with her, even if that friend is kinda lame and only there because they were friends with her in high school.

Kayleigh has demonstrated ability to attain proximity. The photo is still proof that, for a moment, she won an extremely intense competition of access.

This is an extremely tenuous access, though. Kayleigh’s exposure was accidental, and she has no realistic expectation of actually seeing Taylor again. But it’s still a tiny increase in odds - Taylor might recognize her in the audience next time. Taylor’s like 0.1% more likely to respond to one of her comments on Instagram.

But miniscule increases in access become worth a lot if the gap in power is very large, and people recognize this intuitively. Would you rather have 50% chance of grabbing coffee with a slightly higher-ranking employee than you, or 1% chance of 60 seconds with Taylor Swift?

Taylor’s immense status becomes extremely potent; even contact with scattered micrograms of it can infuse those contacted with her power. Taylor’s brush with Kayleigh cost her very little, but gained Kayleigh immensely, who absorbed some of Taylor’s status, went home, and passed a little more down to those who touched Kayleigh. Status transfers down the ranks by association! In a sense, when people pay to go to a Taylor Swift concert, they are paying to absorb some of Taylor’s status for themselves.

People are stocks, they are talismans. We get photos with celebrities in nearly exactly the same way we get photos with famous landmarks. They are not people, they are objects of desire that we can use to prove that we are cool via proximity.

Thanks to Lauren for volunteering her photos despite not knowing what for

You yourself are likewise imbued with some glow of desire, and much of your social brain is dedicated to monitoring how much.