Which status do you want?
Which status do you want?
Recently a video circulated on the internet interviewing several high school students about to take the college entrance exam, saying that if you could choose between 100 million yuan and being accepted into Tsinghua University, which would you choose? The result was that every student chose Tsinghua University. The teenagers regarded the 100 million yuan as nothing, and some middle-aged people couldn’t stand to watch, saying that the high school students were too young to understand what 100 million yuan meant: you put that money in the bank, and every year the most basic interest income of two to three million dollars, which is more than most of the graduates of Tsinghua University already ……
This kind of hypothetical question out of thin air doesn’t really make much sense, but I understand those teenagers very well. Tsinghua University admits just over 3,000 undergraduates each year, and there are only 130,000 Chinese households with assets of more than 100 million yuan [1], both of which are very difficult. If you have to choose, you can’t say it’s wrong to choose Tsinghua, because what people want most is not money.
- Rather, it is social status. *
In this talk we don’t say what should be pursued in life - I think modern people can have all sorts of pursuits - we examine what people actually pursue, with a scientific, spectator’s eye.
Some people say that the pursuit of life is nothing more than the word fame and fortune, some say that most people only pursue pleasure, and some say that power is the most important …… These statements are plain views played out in the minds of ordinary people. We talk about the latest understanding of social science [2]. If you pull the threads out of the cocoon and dig deeper into everyone’s beginnings, you will find that the thing that people generally tirelessly pursue, the most primitive motivation that can make people strive for, is called “Social Status (Social Status)”.
We’ll analyze the two types of Social Status and how they differ from other things worth pursuing - money, power, and friendships. After you’ve figured all this out, you can then decide for yourself what to choose.
✵
Moneycan quickly improve your ‘absolute happiness’, such as improving your life, and the progress is tangible compared to what you used to have; however, people are more concerned with ‘relative happiness’[3], that is, where they rank in society relative to others. If the economy develops again, there are only ……10% of people whose status can be ranked in the top 10% of the whole society. This is called ‘ranking scarcity’.
Social status is not strictly in accordance with which indicators ranked out, there is no uniform definition, but people’s hearts are generally clear. Who is respected more among this group of people? Who has priority access to resources? Whose words carry more weight? Everyone has a consensus.
Money can improve status to a certain extent, but its role is very limited. The income of government officials is far lower than that of private enterprise owners, but it is recognized that officials have a higher status; aspiring professors would rather take a very low salary to stay in a famous school to teach, Messi is not willing to go to Saudi Arabia to retire, and there are too many things in the world that money can’t buy.
Status is something older and more fundamental than money. In the animal world, like wolves and monkeys, there is a clear hierarchy of status. High status means not only better living conditions, but also better mates, more children, and a higher probability of passing on one’s genes. Evolution dictates that the pursuit of status is more in line with human instincts.
The human brain spends more than 50% of its time in the ‘default mode network’, the state of ‘daydreaming’, thinking. If you look at the areas of the brain that are active in this state, you will find that they are either thinking about what they think of other people or what other people think of them. …… In other words, they are thinking about social status.
But social status is a bad game to play because it’s a zero-sum game.
✵
According to a new 2013 theory [4], there are two ways to improve social status, or rather,There are two types of social status: one is ‘dominance’ and the other is ‘prestige’.
Dominance is the oldest route to rise, meaning you get to the top by knocking someone else down. Your means are violence and fear, the effect you want is submission, you dominate them. When we look at wolves and monkeys, the kingship comes from fighting themselves. All the way up to the present day in human society, there have always been people who instinctively seek domination as well, like schoolyard bullies, gangsters, dictators, all of them are dominators.
Prestige, on the other hand, is a social status that is relatively rare in the animal world and particularly important in human society. Prestige comes from your personal abilities and what you do for others using those abilities, and it has the effect of admiration and affection.
You might say that dominance is bad and should be abolished, and that only prestige status is worth pursuing. It depends on what the situation is. In the animal world, it is precisely the hierarchy brought about by dominance that provides order to society.
When we talked about Sapolsky’s book Behavior, we said [5] that the alpha in an animal society like a baboon is purely beaten out of the group; it is the predator rather than the servant of the group. The higher the status the better the health of the baboon, the lower the status the higher the daily stress and the worse the health of the baboon, which manifests itself in higher levels of both glucocortisol.
So what if I were to remove the leaders from the animal society, would that work? Someone actually did a study on this [6] and took the leader of a group of monkeys away for a while, and the monkeys were immediately thrown into chaos. They would fight a new leader, and the new leader would reestablish order. Then if you take away this new leader as well, it’s chaos again. That’s why sociologist Nicholas A. Christakis, in his book Blueprint, 2019, repeatedly says that there is no order without hierarchy [7].
This simply means that order maintained by violence is also good order. This is perfectly in line with Hobbes’ Leviathan’s notion that without hierarchical order, society descends into a war of all against all.
But Hobbes only saw one side of the story.
The other side is that the dominant type of position in human society has been weakening for a long time.
✵
Since humans entered gatherer-hunter societies 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, the importance of dominance has declined, and we have come to value prestige status more and more. Why is this?
Harvard biologist Richard Langham has a recent book called The Human Paradox[8] that solves the mystery: how is it that human societies have become increasingly ethical and nonviolent while at the same time being able to be particularly violent from time to time, engaging in inhumane mass killings? The key, he says, is that there are actually two kinds of violence.
One is**”hot violence “**, that is, when someone offends you, you immediately take action, and if you do not accept it, you will do it, and you can fight to the death over a small matter, which is reactive. Hot violence is the means by which you gain a dominant position, it is your own direct action, reflecting the value of your force.
The other kind is**”cold violence “**, which is a proactive attack after careful planning. Someone offends you, you pretend to bow down and put up with it. Then in a couple of days you get two friends together and suddenly launch an attack to finish him off when he’s not looking, which is cold violence.
Langham’s insight was that *after entering gatherer-hunter societies, human society entered a more advanced stage where hot violence was decreasing and cold violence was increasing. * Simply put, the kind of violence that involves cutting people down at the drop of a hat is becoming less and less common, but organized, premeditated, large-scale warfare is not. In the words of the Qin State, as described in the Records of the Grand Historian, “the people are brave enough to fight in public, but timid enough to fight in private”.
This was not the result of Shang Yang’s change of law, but a general trend of evolution. First of all, people in the gathering and hunting era had weapons, and the weapons leveled out the fighting power. If you were physically strong and I had a spear in my hand, you couldn’t beat me. Furthermore humans had language, the ability to work in teams, and the ability to monitor those in power by spreading gossip, which made it increasingly impossible to gain status solely by personal violence.
To put it bluntly, if there’s a bully in the tribe who bullies people all day long, a few of us can join forces and do away with him.
So the gathering and hunting society is a very egalitarian society. Status ranks come mainly from prestige, which comes from ability and generosity. If you are the best hunter in the tribe, and every time you go out with a group of people you can catch a big game animal and come back, and you always like to treat all the villagers to dinner, then we will definitely embrace you, and you are the embodiment of leadership. Because violence within the tribe is greatly reduced, men have a self-domestication mechanism [9], and are cooperative, gentle, and friendly to women, and don’t need to steal their wives, and are basically monogamous.
Gathering and hunting societies were truly a wonderful era for mankind, where people not only had more balanced nutrition, better health, and longer life spans, but also worked shorter hours and were mentally happy, and more importantly, there was no man-on-man oppression …… The only drawbacks were the limited resources, small populations, and the high frequency of foreign wars.
But the more primitive desire to bully still exists in the hearts of people.
✵
About 10,000 years ago, humans entered an agricultural society. Resources could now be accumulated, wealth could be balanced, the population increased rapidly, and the gap between social classes grew wider and wider. A new thing emerged:POWER.
Power is the force that allocates resources. There are just a few good pieces of land, just a few places, and the company has just so much money, so you can give it to whomever you say, and that’s power at its most fundamental level.
I understand that scholars nowadays believe that power is not social status. This is shown in the fact that some little people can also get power, and some leaders like to give power to little people, probably for good control. People fear their power, but actually look down on them, and they don’t think much of themselves. They know very well that they are nothing without the power given to them by others.
Furthermore, status, whether earned by fighting for yourself or by prestige, is recognized by all and reflects the relationship between people. Power, on the other hand, can be abstract. It may be that yesterday no one recognized this man, and today he is suddenly a great leader.
So why do we listen to him? The fundamental reason is violence. Our social mechanisms allow power to mobilize, directly or indirectly, cold violence. It is not the person himself we fear, but the power he has.
You can imagine that some people would enjoy the pursuit of power. But because power came so late in human evolutionary history, we don’t pursue it as much as status. Power may not be as attractive as money, which directly represents wealth.
✵
Social status is a pursuit more in line with human nature than money or power. This is not only reflected in the evolutionary history of human society, nor is it just an analogy with animal communities, but it can also be demonstrated experimentally with modern humans.
For example, you examine infants and toddlers. Several people, a teacher and a student, show up in a room together, and the toddler automatically knows that it should imitate the teacher’s actions, not the student’s. Experimenting with young newborn babies, researchers have found that they innately believe that people of high status should be given more resources.
*Money can’t buy you recognition from the crowd, power always expires, and only status can truly satisfy you. Dominant status traded for violence is increasingly dangerous in modern society, but sometimes it works; prestige status is the best pursuit for most people. *
You want to prove your ability to society; you want others to count on you, rely on you, and embrace you. That’s why the Tsinghua University acceptance letter is so valuable, and why people are willing to pay so much money for it. But you can be just as good a doctor, a good athlete, a good teacher, if you can prove it.
Ultimately, though, the pursuit of status is just a historical relic of human evolution. There’s no law of physics that says you should just pursue status, and there’s nothing that should absolutely be pursued for modern man.
In fact there are now many people who have voluntarily withdrawn from the status-seeking game and are more interested in friendship, in living in harmony with others, and in maintaining good relationships [10]. While men may still value competitive status, women are now increasingly emphasizing friendship and cooperation. People increasingly want others to like them rather than look up to them. This is not wrong, and it has been a good social trend since the time of gathering and hunting.
All in all, we are now in an era of unprecedented pluralism, where you can have more than one choice of status, likeability, money, power, or literature, art, or physics. This talk is just to illustrate what ‘status’ is all about.
Note
[1] This data is from the Hurun Wealth Report 2022. https://finance.sina.com.cn/china/gncj/2022-04-14/doc-imcwiwst1860859.shtml
[2] ROB HENDERSON, What is Social Status? JUN 4, 2023. https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/what-is-social-status
[3] Relative and Absolute Happiness
[4] Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., Foulsham, T., Kingstone, A., & Henrich, J. (2013). Two ways to the top: Evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(1), 103-125.
[5] Behavior 11: The law of the jungle and human society
[6] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/monkey-police-provide-soc/
[7] Why society has to be the way it is
[8] [US] Richard Langham, The Humanity Paradox: Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (CITIC Publishing Group, 2022). The English version is called The Goodness Paradox.
[9] A Tale of Domestication.
[10] https://knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2023/secrets-of-cooperation
Getting to the point
- The thing that people generally pursue tirelessly, the original motivation that makes people strive for, is called “social status”.
- Money can’t buy you recognition, power will always expire, and only status can really satisfy you. The dominant status exchanged with violence is getting more and more dangerous in modern society, but sometimes it is also effective; for most people, the prestigious status is the best pursuit.
- Nowadays, there are many people who have voluntarily withdrawn from the game of pursuing status, and they are more interested in friendship, in living in harmony with others, and in maintaining good relationships.