Status-Seeking – Part 2

When status-seeking meets groupthink.

Continuing this essay series on status-seeking using Will Storr’s book The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It, this essay will examine what happens when status-seeking meets tribal groupthink.

Storr writes that people mostly view status through a local lens, looking to those in their immediate social circle rather than society at large, although social media is now greatly enlarging our “local lens”:

Researchers find happiness isn’t closely linked to our socioeconomic status, which captures our rank compared with others across the whole of society, including class. It’s actually our smaller games that matter: ‘studies show that respect and admiration within one’s local group, but not socioeconomic status, predicts subjective well-being’ … To a significant extent, we become the puppets of the games we play. In recent years, something like this has been happening to the world’s 3.6 billion users of social media. Social media is a status game. It can’t not be: it’s human life, unfolding online. It’s all there, the success games of the selfie-takers and humble-braggers; the virtue games of the wellness gurus and political campaigners; the dominance games of the mobbers and the cancellers. But the everyday striving that would’ve happened naturally, online, has been intensified by technologists who’ve tweaked their rules and symbols. They’ve made these games both highly competitive and madly compulsive. A 2019 survey of nearly two thousand US smartphone users found they check their phones an average of ninety-six times a day, about once every ten minutes … Social media is a slot machine for status. This is what makes it so obsessively compelling. Every time we post a photo, video or a comment, we’re judged. We await replies, likes or upvotes and, just as a gambler never knows how the slot machine will pay out, we don’t know what reward we’ll receive for our contribution. Will we go up? Will we go down? The great prize changes every time. This variation creates compulsion. We just want to keep playing, again and again, to see what we’ll get.

Related to the point I made at the beginning of this series regarding status-seeking-as-Ponzi-scheme, Storr writes:

[T]he problem with status is, no matter how much we win, we’re never satisfied. We always want more. This is the flaw in the human condition that keeps us playing … [Cecelia] Ridgeway describes experiments that tried to locate the point at which our need for status, once acquired, stabilises. ‘There was no point at which preference for higher status levelled off,’ she writes. The researchers thought one reason the desire for status is ‘never really satiated’ is because ‘it can never really be possessed by the individual once and for all. Since it is esteem given by others, it can always, at least theoretically, be taken away.’ So we keep wanting more. And more and more and more … A team led by psychologist Professor Michael Norton contacted over two thousand people whose net worth started at one million dollars and rose to an awful lot more. They were asked to rate their happiness on a ten-point scale, then say how much cash they’d need to be perfectly happy. ‘All the way up the income-wealth spectrum,’ Norton reported, ‘basically everyone says two or three times as much.’ Perfectly happy. They’re not going to be perfectly happy … [E]lites at the top of their games … become acclimatised to the myriad ways they measure status: money; power; influence; flattery; clothing and jewellery; mode of transport and allocation of seat therein; holiday and residential locations; numbers of staff; size and luxury of house and workspace; laughter at jokes; eye contact; body language; measures of orange juice poured in a glass. They’ve earned it! Then they want more. They get more. Then that becomes normalised. It’s in this way that our bosses, politicians and celebrities can become drunk on status, their behaviour growing ever more crazed … [S]tatus never makes us perfectly happy. In a small but fascinating study, psychologists persuaded fifteen highly identifiable American celebrities, including a top-tier Hollywood actor, a basketball hero and an R&B superstar, to submit to an analysis of what actually happens at the Paul McCartney heights. They described the initial surge of major status as something fantastical. One recalled, ‘the swell of people, the requests, the letters, the emails, the greetings on the street, the people in cars, the honking of the horns, the screaming of your name … it starts to build and build like a small tornado, and it’s coming at you, and coming at you.’ Out of nowhere, ‘you’re worth something. You’re important.’ Then comes the brain-story that says they’ve earned it. ‘My life is different in that people kiss my ass and that’s not always a good thing because then you start believing that your ass is worthy of being kissed,’ said another. ‘You have to constantly stay on guard for that. And I think it’s very hard. There are times when I exploit that. I take advantage of people sucking up to me, or the power that I wield.’ As overwhelming as it is, it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Said another, ‘I’ve been addicted to almost every substance known to man and the most addicting of them all is fame.’ Then, paranoia. ‘I don’t think you trust anybody the same way when you become well-known … are they laughing at my jokes because they think I’m funny or because it’s me saying them?’ They start to lose people they love. ‘I’ve lost friends … they feel inferior … You’re special and they aren’t. The next thing you know, they’d really rather not have anything to do with you.’ Some superstars expressed disillusionment with the game. But it wasn’t the status itself that was the problem. Rather they weren’t getting the right kind of status: they had plenty of the success variety, now they wanted status for their virtue. ‘You find out there are millions of people who like you for what you do. They couldn’t care less who you are.’ The elites, so far above us, will never find what they’re looking for. No matter who we are or how high on the scoreboard we climb, life is a game that never ends.

As Storr writes, humans have evolved not only to seek status for themselves, but also to seek status for their tribal group:

In one study, 5-year-olds were given a coloured T-shirt to wear and were then shown pictures of various children, some in matching shirts, others not. They knew their colour was random and meaningless and yet they still thought more positively of kids wearing the same colour, believing them to be more generous and kind. They also rewarded them unfairly, allocating them more toy coins in a game. They even remained more statusful in their memories: they were better able to recall the positive actions of their shirt-wearing brethren than the equally positive actions of those in different colours … Our tendency to believe the stories spun by brains and cultures is a source of much of the injustice that’s stained human history. Determined as we are to award ourselves and our playmates all the prizes, we excel at perceiving only the self-serving sliver of the truth. Our stories often benefit us, convincing us of the righteousness of our fight, motivating us to play harder for ever-greater rank. But they can sometimes work against us. They can even persuade us to conspire in our own subjugation.

Storr describes the influence our genes have on our tendency to seek status (and avoid loneliness):

[H]ow anxious we are is thought to depend partly on a brain region called the amygdala and a hormone called serotonin. Just as nobody has exactly the same fingerprints, nobody has exactly the same amygdalae or serotonin system. Some people happen to be wired with an increased sensitivity to threat: their alarm is triggered more easily. They’re likely to be more neurotic, more cautious and more sensitive to criticism. They may also struggle socially. Our genes also influence how successful we’ll be. People wired to experience greater feelings of thrill and reward when they win are more likely to become wealthy. Most billionaires become billionaires, in part, because they’re monstrously competitive. They may be extroverts who, writes [Daniel] Nettle, ‘tend to be ambitious’ and ‘are prepared to work very hard in pursuit of fame or money’. Even more successful are those with a stellar capacity for self- control. This is associated with a trait known as conscientiousness, which is the ‘most reliable personality predictor of occupational success across the board’.

Early life experiences are important, too:

So we’re born with inherited tendencies, a set of predilections, a groove that guides our development. But genes don’t spell destiny or doom. During our formative years, our brains continue being wired up by the rules and symbols of our time and place. Early life experiences steer us, one way or another, into becoming specific types of people with specific suites of beliefs, interests and attitudes about the world. These help define our modes of play … Anthropologist Professor Adrie Kusserow has made a fascinating investigation into how social class impacts parenting. She spent time with white parents in three New York City area communities: impoverished Queenston where she ‘could never wear sandals because of all the broken crack vials littering the streets’; patriotic, blue-collar Kelley, its residents of mainly Irish, German and Italian heritage, a ‘safe and neat community’ with a ‘great deal of pride’; and finally, Parkside, a wealthy district in Manhattan. Poor and blue-collar children were taught the game was tough and success required resilience. Qualities not tolerated in youngsters included: ‘spoiled’, ‘fresh’, ‘whiny’, ‘weak-minded’, ‘prissy’, ‘soft’, ‘mushy’ and ‘pushover’. One Queenston mother told Kusserow, ‘you shouldn’t pay too much attention to any emotion and you shouldn’t baby them too much, give them too much praise. You don’t want them to be too soft.’ During one interview, a 4-year-old spilled her grape juice, causing her mother to yell, ‘That’s great, Laura, just great. Clean it up before I smack you one.’ Kids in Queenston and Kelley were also taught respect for the fundamental parent–child status hierarchy. ‘Examples of the child’s lower status were manifested in the child not having access to all parts of the house or pieces of furniture (for example, the parent’s bedroom, the dining room for guests, a father’s chair) and the child having to use a respectful tone of voice in talking with parents.’ In both these groups, status was awarded for being maximally resilient. But the parents differed profoundly in their reasons for making this such an important rule. In Queenston, resilience was required to give children the strength of character to protect themselves from absolute destruction at the game’s bottom. Queenston parents ‘saw themselves as holding their own in a jungle of violence and corrupt youth’. In Kelley, resilience took a more optimistic form. There, it was required to break through into better status games. They wanted their young to have the mettle to: ‘try things out’, ‘stand out’, ‘get a lot more out of this world’, ‘break away’, ‘go for your dreams’. One parent told Kusserow, ‘I want my kids to definitely strive for everything they can possibly get – not take it, but work for it.’ But in wealthy Parkside Kusserow found a radically different type of player being built. There, children were seen not as tough warriors of the game but as fragile buds that needed to be ‘opened out into the world, into a successful career’. Parents emphasised ‘the delicacy of the child’s self, the extreme care, resources, wide canvas and gentle touch needed in helping this unique self to “flower” and open up to its full potential’. One mother, on reading a story in which a 12-year-old was admonished for not saying ‘thank you’ for her birthday party, shuddered at the notion. Her own daughter ‘would be so struck with a deep sense of guilt that I wouldn’t do that to her. We have such power over our children especially at these ages when they are so vulnerable.’ Rather than respecting a parent–child status hierarchy, Parkside youngsters were encouraged to see themselves as equals. One mother said treating her daughter as an adult ‘gives her a certain status in the family, makes her feel like she’s on an equal footing, her feelings are as important as anyone else’s’. Kusserow noted various techniques that encouraged this thinking, including: children calling teachers by their first names; consulting the child on the solving of family problems; allowing them to ‘teach the parent’ and adults asking, ‘How can I help you get what you want?’ One father said of his daughter, ‘My basic feeling is that I have no right to discipline her … I’m conscious of the power differential and I don’t feel just because I’m bigger and stronger and know more that I have the right to push her around because we disagree on something.’ His daughter was 3 … Ironically, however, Kusserow found the children who were treated as the delicate, precious equals of their elders could show less stability. ‘What seems lacking for some Parkside children is the sense of security, protection, respect and humility that can arise from knowing that one is not at the top of the hierarchy,’ she wrote. These children were told they were delicate and so they felt delicate, but at the same time automatically deserving of an elite position. Kusserow’s research was published in 2004. The striking mix of fragility and entitlement she found seems characteristic of the status-striving of some of our most privileged young adults today.

Storr writes that status-seeking can easily corrupt our sense of morality over time:

[T]he games we join have the power to corrupt us. This process has been captured in an extraordinary paper by Patrick J. Schiltz – former big-firm attorney, Associate Professor of Law at Indiana’s prestigious Notre Dame Law School and present-day judge. Addressing a cadre of incoming law students, he wrote: ‘If you go to work for a big firm, you will probably begin to practice law unethically in at least some respects within your first year or two in practice. This happens to most young lawyers in big firms. It happened to me.’ Those who yearn to become big- firm lawyers are, he writes, a ‘remarkably insecure and competitive group of people’. They’ve spent their entire lives competing through the education system to get where they are. ‘Now that they’re in a big law firm, what’s going to happen? Are they going to stop competing? Of course not. They’re going to keep competing – competing to bill more hours, to attract more clients, to win more cases, to do more deals. They’re playing a game. And money is how the score is kept in that game.’ Their fever for lucre is exacerbated by regular trade press articles on how much this or that big shot is making. Lists of lawyers’ incomes are published biannually and ‘pored over by lawyers with the intensity that small children bring to poring over the statistics of their favourite baseball players’. This is how youthful idealism stales and grows mould. They arrive at their big firm to discover a new set of rules and symbols, a new game to play: they must compete using wealth as a symbol of status. Their indoctrination will be delicate but emphatic: ‘the culture will pressure you in many subtle ways to replace your values with the system’s’. During a lawyer’s first month, a senior partner will invite them to a barbecue. They’ll travel up a long drive, park by ranks of luxury cars and walk up a long verdant drive towards an enormous house. Someone in a black bow tie will answer the door. In a perfect, huge garden, they’ll be served pâté, shrimp, miniature quiches and cocktails. A caterer will grill swordfish. And in the corner they’ll glimpse ‘the senior partner, sipping a glass of white wine, holding court with a worshipful group of junior partners and senior associates. The senior partner will be wearing designer sunglasses and designer clothes; the logo on his shirt will signal its exorbitant cost; his shorts will be pressed. He will have a tan – albeit a slightly orange, tanning salon enhanced tan – and the nicest haircut you’ve ever seen.’ In this and ‘a thousand other ways’ they’ll begin absorbing the lawyer’s game. ‘It is very difficult for a young lawyer immersed in this culture day after day to maintain the values she had as a law student. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, young lawyers change. They begin to admire things they did not admire before, be ashamed of things they were not ashamed of before, find it impossible to live without things they lived without before. Somewhere, somehow, a lawyer changes from a person who gets intense pleasure from being able to buy her first car stereo to a person enraged over a $ 400,000 bonus.’ … But there’s a problem: if these young lawyers are already working as hard as it’s possible to work – and they are – how can they get the edge? In order to win, they’ll begin to cheat in ways that seem, at first, excusable. They’ll bill a client for ninety minutes for a job that took an hour, but promise to repay them that half an hour another time – it’s not stealing, it’s borrowing. And they’ll do it, they’ll repay. But then they’ll stop repaying. They’ll tell themselves they did such good work that their client should ‘pay a bit more for it’. They’ll start lying to get an edge too: an excuse over a missed deadline here, a document that’s unhelpful to their client getting ‘lost’ there. A couple of years in and they won’t notice they’re continually lying, cheating and stealing. ‘You will still be making dozens of quick, instinctive decisions every day, but those decisions, instead of reflecting the notions of right and wrong by which you conduct your personal life, will instead reflect the set of values by which you will conduct your professional life – a set of values that embodies not what is right or wrong, but what is profitable, and what you can get away with. The system will have succeeded in replacing your values with the system’s values, and the system will be profiting as a result.’

Status-seeking can also warp our logic:

The persistence of irrationality is a puzzle. But the status game suggests an explanation. Humans aren’t heroes on wondrous journeys of progress, we’re players programmed for games. To succeed in these games, we seek high-status allies. When we find them, our copy-flatter-conform circuitry switches on. We mimic not just their behaviour but their beliefs. The better we believe, the higher we rise. And so faith, not truth, is incentivised. It’s by this process that we come upon many of our most deeply held convictions. It can feel like we choose our beliefs as a cook chooses a recipe, carefully considering an array of options before making a selection. But usually, we believe what our groups believe, obediently copying the perceptions of our elites and accepting the world as they define it. We can’t be expected to test for ourselves every fact on which we have to rely, so instead we look upwards for guidance. We have faith. We believe. And sometimes we end up believing crazy things.

Storr tells the story of Miranda, who sought a midwife to have her child delivered at home. The midwife launched into a discussion of vaccines that led Miranda down a status-driven rabbit hole:

Maranda sat and listened as a wild new dream of reality emerged in front of her, right there in her living room. The midwife said after she’d vaccinated her first child it was like night and day – bam! – he got vaccinated and he was autistic. The light just left his eyes. And did Maranda know vaccines could give kids diabetes? And they can make it appear that you’ve beaten them up? That’s one of the side effects. Child abuse, it looks like. So child services might take your baby away. ‘Anyway,’ she finished. ‘You should make up your own mind. It’s totally up to you. There’s some great information on Google.’ After the midwife left, Maranda investigated. She used Google because that’s what she’d been told. She typed: ‘Why not vaccinate?’ And there it all was: breakdowns, from A-Z, on the ingredients in vaccines and why they’re dangerous; blogs detailing how children developed epilepsy and died following vaccinations; videos about ‘big pHARMa’ and the cash premiums doctors are paid for poisoning babies … Then Maranda looked on Facebook. ‘Facebook was the big one,’ she said. ‘You find a Facebook group, join it and it sucks you in.’ One of the groups was Great Mothers Questioning Vaccines. She made her first comment, announcing herself as ‘vaccine hesitant’. It didn’t take long. The group massed around her like a slug on an earthworm. ‘I was bombarded: “I was a nurse and I saw vaccines do harm”; “I have five kids, I vaccinated the first one and they’re like this”; “I’ve been doing research for thirty-five years.”’ Maranda felt fascinated and horrified by their stories. But she also felt good. As an 18-year-old whose friends were all at college, she had no mothers to talk to, besides her own. ‘It felt warm and cosy.’ Her indoctrination was rapid. She played that slot machine for status and kept on winning. ‘You’re socially rewarded for going with the group,’ she said. ‘It’s Facebook likes, it’s comments like “yeah way to go Mom, you’re so strong, you’re so smart, you’re doing the best thing”– going to a young Mom from women who are sometimes older than my Mom.’ She found the experience ‘captivating. There was also the thing of – this is happening and we need to do something about it. So we were rallying the forces. It felt political.’ … She’d believed her anti-vax stance was based on evidence. But she learned some of the mothers thought the only reason people were gay was because of vaccines. Then someone said AIDS didn’t exist. Then someone warned they were all going to be put in FEMA death camps. ‘Every time I saw these comments I thought, what the hell is that?’ she said. ‘It took me a long time. But eventually I thought, Why am I taking one of these things and saying “this is totally true” and the others I’m going “that’s kind of crazy?” Especially when it came from someone who’d given me information I’d used.’ … Maranda Googled again. This time, she purposefully looked for information that countered her biases. She also considered the role mainstream medicine played in her life. ‘I have asthma, my father’s disabled, there are medical issues rampant in my family. I would’ve died from asthma if not for medicine. I was suddenly putting the pieces together.’ … Maranda’s experience isn’t unusual. She wasn’t being stupid, she was being human, playing the game of life exactly as she’s designed to. During the Stone Age, it didn’t matter if the stories we told about the world weren’t true. Faith in the myths and prejudices of our tribe served to bond us together, co-ordinate our behaviour and motivate us to fight harder against enemies. But in the twenty-first century environment, in which we exist side by side in multiple intertwined and overlapping groups, the human tendency to credulously accept the wild dreams of our game leads all too frequently to error, mistrust, division, aggression, hubris and catastrophe. And the tendency is strong.

And political tribes are a source of anti-logic as well:

Psychologists have amassed a sizeable literature that demonstrates how even our closest convictions are often absorbed from our games. This is true of our political beliefs. In one study, researchers who altered the apparent policies of the Republicans and Democrats found voters changed their support for harsh or lavish welfare programmes accordingly. Not only did they not realise they were being manipulated, they found good reasons to support their altered beliefs and could readily explain how they’d come to them. Psychologist Dr Lilliana Mason writes, ‘more often than not, citizens do not choose which party to support based on policy opinion; they alter their policy opinion according to which party they support. Usually they do not notice that this is happening, and most, in fact, feel outraged when the possibility is mentioned.’ … For anthropologist Professor John Tooby, ‘Coalition mindedness makes everyone, including scientists, far stupider in coalitional collectivities than as individuals.’ … The world around our bodies is chaotic and confusing. But the brain must make sense of it. It has to turn that blizzard of noise into a precise, colourful and detailed world it can predict and successfully interact with, such that it gets what it wants. When the brain discovers a game that seems to make sense of its felt reality and offer a pathway to rewards, it can embrace its rules and symbols with an ecstatic fervour. The noise is silenced! The chaos is tamed! We’ve found our story and the heroic role we’re going to play in it! We’ve learned the truth and the way – the meaning of life! It’s yams, it’s God, it’s money, it’s saving the world from evil big pHARMa. It’s not like a religious experience, it is a religious experience. It’s how the writer Arthur Koestler felt as a young man in 1931, joining the Communist Party: ‘To say that one had “seen the light” is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows (regardless of what faith he has been converted to). The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern, like stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by one magic stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past – a past already remote, when one lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colourless world of those who don’t know. Nothing henceforth can disturb the convert’s inner peace and serenity – except the occasional fear of losing faith again, losing thereby what alone makes life worth living, and falling back into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.’

This dynamic has spread across social media from its earliest days:

It all began over lunch by the beach in La Jolla, California. That afternoon, in the autumn of 1984, a counterculture businessman named Larry Brilliant tried to hustle a publisher, Stewart Brand, into using his online conferencing technology. Brand was famous for publishing The Whole Earth Catalog, a magazine and product guide for people who lived communally. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called the catalogue ‘one of the bibles of my generation’, describing it as ‘like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along’. That day, Brilliant tried to convince Brand to have a presence online. Readers of the original catalogues and their successor, the Whole Earth Review, could connect via their computers, over modems and phone lines, and chat. How about that? They could create a kind of virtual hippy commune. Who knows what would happen? Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out? Brand agreed. He named this experimental community ‘The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link’–‘The Well’ for short. It was launched to the public in 1985, on April Fools’ Day … What happened was people gathering around these ‘random associations’ and forming status games. Players were mostly of a certain type. Hafner describes them as ‘baby boomers in their late thirties and early forties, smart and left-leaning without being self-consciously PC, mostly male, many with postgraduate degrees’. These like minds ‘found something of a club’ in their online forums: they’d discuss their lives and expertise, showing off what they knew. But then, about a year after its launch, when user numbers approached five hundred, someone different arrived. His log-in was Grandma, his name Mark Ethan Smith. Unlike his relatively privileged co-players, Smith had been homeless for around twenty years and was living in near-poverty in Berkeley. And he was angry. He hated men. He came to despise the ‘white male clan’ he believed characterised The Well. Smith would start brutal ‘flamewars’, making outrageous assertions or attacks on people on the forums, in direct messages and multi-hundred-line emails – even on the phone (‘Smith had a knack for finding people’s home telephone numbers,’ writes Hafner) … Mark Ethan Smith was the world’s first internet troll. He was also biologically female. He wasn’t trans, he was gender non-conforming –‘I never became a man, nor do I wish to be known as a man, or, for that matter as a woman,’ he wrote. ‘In the 5,000 year history of patriarchy, I may be the first individual to exist as a person, without regard to sex.’ He objected to having a female name and pronouns he considered ‘diminutive’, insisting on the ‘right to equal terms’ with men. His demands to be referred to as ‘he’– unusual at that time – were respected by many women of The Well and a few of the men. But more found it preposterous. One wrote: ‘According to Mark, you have to call me by a name or pronoun of my choice. In the future please refer to me as: “THE GRAND PUBA, MASTER OF ALL HE SEES OR THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE WHICHEVER IS BIGGER”.’ It didn’t take long for the organism to begin moving against Smith. But then McClure left. In October 1986, Smith was told by a new manager his account was suspended indefinitely. According to Smith, hundreds of thousands of his words then vanished. To anyone who’s spent time online, all of this probably sounds familiar. It was all there, back in the 1980s, during the first eighteen months of social media: the status-striving, the groupishness, the trolling and the banning. They were even arguing about pronouns … In an undated essay reflecting on his experience, Smith seems most upset at the loss of his contributions. ‘If The Well establishment disagreed with my opinions, they could have done so without censoring me.’ Why did all this happen? When Smith presented ideas they didn’t believe in, why didn’t they simply ignore him? And when he abused them, why couldn’t they ignore it? Then, when he was banned, why did they feel the need to erase his work? Why not ignore it? Just forget about it. Why not? Ignoring should be easy, it should be the default: it’s literally doing nothing. But in these situations we hardly ever ignore. Because it’s not actually effortless. When we encounter people whose beliefs contradict our own, we can find it acutely uncomfortable. We become preoccupied and hateful and flip into dominance state. Such behaviour can be difficult to understand. What’s the point in getting so emotional about a stranger being wrong? It doesn’t make sense. Especially since, as is so often the case, we become furious over issues that have no real-world effect on the lives of us or anyone we know. Of all the things we could be doing with our energies, being angry at the internet seems a worse than pointless choice. So why do we have this reflex? It only makes sense if we adjust our conception of the human condition. Life is a game played with symbols, and beliefs can be no less symbolic than an invader’s battle flag. Our status games are embedded into our perception. We experience reality through them. So when we encounter someone playing a rival game, it can be disturbing. If they’re living by a conflicting set of rules and symbols, they’re implying our rules and symbols – our criteria for claiming status – are invalid, and our dream of reality is false. They’re a sentient repudiation of the value we’ve spent our lives earning. They insult us simply by being who they are. It should be no surprise, then, that encountering someone with conflicting beliefs can feel like an attack: status is a resource, and they’re taking it from us. When this happens we’re often compelled to take comfort in the presence of our like-minded kin. We jab our fingernails into every crack we find in their dream of reality and, with each one discovered, the threat of their rival claim to status diminishes as ours is reaffirmed. And so our bloodied understanding of life and how it operates is healed; our belief in our game and our criteria for earning status is restored, and the thick evening sunlight of self-satisfaction is allowed to return. But the dream is now becoming dangerous. It takes the differences between us and our rivals and weaves over them a moral story that says they’re not simply wrong, they’re evil. This permits further vilification. Our hatreds are further justified by the belief that our status game is not an act of shared imagination that’s local to our kin, but real. And if our criteria for claiming status are real, that means everyone should abide by them. We have a spiteful and snobbish habit of judging all people by our rules, whether they’re playing with us or not … We take our foe’s adherence to their own game as proof of their disgrace. When they defend themselves, our brains fight off their rival dream of reality by warping ours further, such that it becomes impossible for them to win. If they present counter arguments, we often demand unreasonably high evidence for their claims just as we accept unreasonably low evidence for ours. We like to find any excuse to dismiss their strongest arguments and simply forget those that disturb us most. We adopt harsh double standards, extending them none of the patience, understanding and empathy we lavish on our own. As accusation and outrage builds, our co-players supply us with ever more reasons why we’re right, helping us calm any dissonance generated by our wanting to feel virtuous whilst wanting to cause them pain. We begin to see the individual players who make up their game as an indistinguishable stain, judging them all as identical and identically contemptible. Look at them: they deserve it, they’re asking for it. We attack as a blameless, heroic David fighting the cruel monster Goliath. Our kin play their part, cheering us on with every perceived victory, flooding us with boosted status until we’re giddy. We don’t just seek to win arguments with our ideological foes, we seek domination, as the citizens of The Well showed in their treatment of Mark Ethan Smith. They couldn’t ignore him because he was stealing status from them; for the same reason, Smith couldn’t ignore them. They couldn’t even bring themselves to use his preferred pronoun – an act that, symbolically, meant deference to his rules and symbols, thus defeat. So he responded with threats and de-grading abuse; they responded with insult, ostracization and censorship. They couldn’t simply live with one another’s claims to status. One party had to win. This is an inevitable, terrible consequence of the game of life we play.

Adult online mobs today are the product of their childhood as well as evolutionary tendencies to reject people perceived as threats to their social group:

A study into the reasons schoolchildren, aged between 5 and 7, reject playmates found a tendency to do so when their behaviour became a threat to the status of themselves or their clique. Psychologist Professor Francisco Juan García Bacete has said, ‘what actually leads to rejection are the rejecters’ interpretations of the child’s behaviour, and whether they think it will have a negative impact on themselves or their social group’. Elsewhere, brain scans show the mere anticipation of a transgressor being punished for rule- breaks is experienced as pleasurable. We don’t like to think of ourselves this way. The story we prefer removes oppression and hatred from our essential game- playing human nature and blames it on corrupted leaders and their evil schemes. We can see this mode of naivety in the pioneers of internet and social media who predicted that connecting millions of humans together online would create a kind of utopia. In 1996, a former member of The Well, John Perry Barlow, published a ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ in which he announced a new ‘civilisation of the Mind’ was being created in which the old hierarchies of power were not welcome. ‘I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us … We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.’ But that’s not how it turned out. Today, even seemingly innocuous comments on social media can lead to a group coalescing in screeching outrage. Online mobs play virtue- dominance games: status is awarded to players who enforce their rules to those both inside and outside their groups. They’re also tight: the players involved are highly conformist … [A]ctivists use the dread machine of social media to gain a level of status – and the influence and power that goes with it – that massively outsizes their numbers. We can know this through public surveys. The year after Templer’s mobbing, one of the largest ever studies of Britain’s social psychology was published, containing data from over ten thousand respondents. It found seven distinct opinion groups, describing ‘progressive activists’ as being the one ‘motivated by the pursuit of social justice’. They make for a ‘powerful and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity’. The progressive activists believe the game is essentially fixed, that a player’s life outcomes are ‘determined more by the social structures in which they grow up than by their individual efforts’. Of all the groups, they’re the most highly educated and also the wealthiest, with more earning a household income above £50,000 than any other. They’re also ‘the dominant voice’ on social media, a realm in which they play a ‘commanding role’. They’re six times more likely to post about politics on Twitter and other platforms than any other group. They make more total social media contributions than the rest of the nation combined. And yet, as of 2020, they comprised just 13 per cent of the population. In the USA, a similar study found they numbered 8 per cent … [P]rogressive activists don’t only gain outsized status via their mobs. With their peerless levels of wealth and education, they’re also able to insert their elites into many of society’s most powerful games. It’s important to note, too, that concluding all progressive activists approve of mob behaviour would be extremely unfair. But this is the point. Those who play in their mobs are a minority of a minority. And yet too often their commanding voice on social media becomes a commanding voice in our democracies. Like ISIS, they achieve this outsized status partly by the spreading of dread. This is how mobs win.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll examine the upsides of status-seeking in free markets, and its downsides in communism.