Award-winning British journalist and author Will Storr books include The Heretics about how intelligent people believe crazy things, and Selfie about how evolution and culture and economy shape who we are.
His new book is The Status Game.
The inbuilt need to achieve and maintain status gives us a thirst for rank, and a fear of its loss that deforms our thinking, Storr says, but without this hunger for status much human advancement would never have happened.
Status, he says, can also result in courage and altruism.
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We are at heart still a tribal ape, he says.
“We evolved to survive by connecting into tribes, and then competing for status within them.”
Once in our groups, we seek status within them, he says.
“We're not usually content with being in the bottom rung, liked and accepted but essentially seen as useless.
"That's not what we want, most people like to feel a value. We like to feel that were important to the group in some way.”
The withdrawal of status is profoundly humiliating and can trigger the worst in human behaviour, he says.
“The definition of humiliation is not only when all your status is taken away from you by your group, but you're so removed from the group, you're so low status, that you're basically forbidden from claiming any status, in the future.
“You're so bad, nobody wants to have anything to do with you ever again. And humiliation, it turns out is implicated in in the very, very worst of human behaviours.”
He cites the example of incel and misogynistic spree killer Elliot Rodger.
“He was one of these young guys that put a huge amount of value in being attractive to the opposite sex. But he was rejected and bullied, not only by young females, but young males that he was at school with. And he suffered repeated experiences of humiliation, and ended up tragically being this spree killer.”
Studies have found that social rejection is implicated in 87 percent of spree killings, Storr says.
Entire nations can become twisted by the withdrawal of status, he says, as was the case in Germany after World War I.
“Germany was a very grandiose nation, the most successful nation in continental Europe easily at the time, and they were humiliated in the First World War.
“And, this is essentially the story that a great deal of Germans concocted about the Jewish people, that they were the responsible for all the problems in the world.
“And it's exactly the same story that Elliot Rogers applied to women.”
When an individual or a group feels deprived of status, they'll generally be another group considered to be preventing them from earning the status that they believe they’re due, he says.
“That comes down to the fact that we're a tribal animal, we're wired to experience reality in the forms of competing groups.”
The flip side of the status coin is striving for approval which can drive finer human qualities, he says.
“Humans have evolved an automatic system for rewarding themselves and other people. When they behave in virtuous ways, when they're selfless and courageous and kind, when we behave in those ways, we feel it in our bodies, you kind of feel this little upwards jolt.
“I've done a really good thing. And when other people find out about this good thing, they applaud us, they celebrate us, they raise us as heroes.”
This impulse underpins modernity, he says.
“It drives innovation, it drives the scientific method, it drives, everything that we think of as good in the world. So, it really is that Ying and Yang the status game, it does terrible things, but also without it I don't think we'd be anywhere near the level of altruism that we experience in the world.
“And we certainly wouldn't be living these very relatively closeted, safe, and, healthy and secure lives that we do in the 21st century.”
Communism was an attempt to build a society without status, he says.
“The communists ended up building one of the most stratified, status obsessed societies that we've ever seen. I mean, they wanted to build this kind of classless utopia. But by the 1950s sociologists were finding that there were at least 12 social classes in in the Soviet Union.”
it just didn’t work, he says.
“It doesn't work because the desire for status is wired into us. And it's been wired into us since before we were even human. Before we were human, our capacity to survive and reproduce depended on our level of relative status.
“The more status we got, the more able we were to survive and reproduce, the better our food, the better our sleep safer our sleeping sites, the greater our access to our choice of mates.
“So, it's this very fundamental heuristic that the brain has, its basic rule - go for status. And if you go for status, everything else gets better. And no revolution, no government, no society can eradicate that basic rule because it's millions of years old.”
