Status-Seeking – Part 3

The upsides in free markets, the downsides in communism.

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 the upsides of status-seeking in free markets, and its downsides in communism.

Storr describes the upside of status-seeking, which comes when people try to gain status by improving the lives of others:

In the tribes in which we evolved, it was possible to earn rank by being useful to others with displays of competence: the best hunter, the best sorcerer, the best finder of honey. The modern world is heavily flavoured by the success games of scientists, technologists, researchers, corporations and creatives. Their status is won not by showing and enforcing moral correctness, but by becoming smarter, wealthier and more innovative and efficient … This ‘Industrial Revolution’ was a status goldrush. It came to define the country’s mood and culture. Britons ‘became innovators because they adopted an improving mentality’, writes historian Dr Anton Howes. This mentality spread like a ‘disease’ that could infect ‘anyone … rich and poor, city-dwellers and rustics, Anglicans and dissenters, Whigs and Tories, skilled engineers and complete amateurs’. A growing number ‘published about innovation, lectured on it, exhibited it, and funded it’. They formed themselves into communities based around their interests and established societies devoted to spreading the mindset further. These organisations were generators not only of new and useful knowledge, but major status for successful innovators … [James] Dowey finds the Royal Society spent more in its first two decades on medals for inventors than it did on cash premiums. Its awards, he argues, had a major societal impact via their effect on ambitious onlookers: as a ‘nationally visible institution patronised by London’s social, intellectual and commercial elites’ its most important contribution to innovation ‘was to promote and bestow prestige upon inventing in general’. These dynamics made status games such as the Royal Society foundries of innovation. As players strived for acclaim and respect, they themselves became generators of new and useful knowledge. Dowey’s analyses reveal that more societies in a particular region led to more patents being awarded there; the same pattern was found in his analysis of exhibitors at London’s 1851 Great Exhibition: more societies in any region predicted higher representation at the event, and more prizes. For every 746 society members, in any given region, its number of exhibits grew by 42 per cent, its prizes by 48 per cent. The relationship between learned societies and innovation during the Industrial Revolution, Dowey concludes, ‘should be interpreted as causal’ … The Industrial Revolution soon spread to other parts of the world. When the fever for improvement caught the United States, it first rivalled and today easily surpasses Western Europe in its genius for innovation … Scottish economist Adam Smith, is commonly known as the ‘Father of Capitalism’. Perhaps more than anyone, the hyper-individualistic, self-interested money-obsessed world we live in today is linked to him and his theories of how free markets and competition generate prosperity. But Smith didn’t believe greed for wealth was the ultimate driver of economies. He thought something else was going on, something deeper in the human psyche. ‘Humanity does not desire to be great, but to be beloved,’ he wrote in 1759. ‘The rich man glories in his riches because he feels they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world … and he is fonder of his wealth on this account than for all the other advantages it procures him.’ This need for attention and approval was, for Smith, a fundamental part of the human condition. We strive to better our lot because we seek to be ‘observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of’. It’s the dream that says status symbols such as wealth will make us perfectly happy that inspires us to ‘cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe’ … We’re immeasurably better off for our modern strivings towards excellence. By the end of the nineteenth century, life expectancy and living standards were rising, extreme poverty and infant mortality were falling and the threat of famine and starvation that had forever haunted the masses was beginning to recede. Our relentless accumulations of useful knowledge brought astonishing innovations in technology, medicine and science. The road out of hell is mapped across the data of human health and thriving. For all of history prior to the Industrial Revolution, global life expectancy bounced around the age of 30. It’s since soared to over 70 – and, in developed nations, over 80. Scientific advances have saved the lives of billions: water chlorination has saved 177 million; smallpox eradication 131 million; the measles vaccine 120 million; infectious disease controls have saved over a hundred million children since 1990; in 2021 multiple coronavirus vaccines began saving the entire world. We’re also better fed than ever. In 1947, around half the planet’s population was undernourished; that number now stands at 13 per cent in the developing nations and, in the developed, less than 5 per cent. We’re also wealthier. In 1800, nearly 95 per cent of humans lived in extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2018 alone that number fell from nearly 1.9 billion to about 650 million … If we truly want to help others and make the world a better place, we must play games of success … As the Industrial Revolution spread, and these games won increasing influence over culture, the worth and wellbeing of the individual player took on a more central importance. In Britain, 1859 saw the publication of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, the first book of its kind. Filled with inspiring case studies, it argued even players at the bottom of the game could move up with hard work and perseverance. Smiles began with a quote from philosopher John Stuart Mill: ‘The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.’ It was an instant bestseller. Where once we belonged to our tribe, we began to belong to ourselves. Every human was precious; individuals had rights.

While status-seeking has an upside in free market economies, there are those who insist it should be eliminated in utopian egalitarian societies. But these imagined societies will always be utopian, and doomed to fail. Storr recounts the horrible history of communism’s tragically failed attempt at squelching status-seeking on behalf of egalitarianism:

What if it was possible to live without status? To create a society in which the requirement for getting ahead was eradicated, and getting along was all that mattered? The misery and injustice the status game creates, the envy and the fury and the sheer bloody exhaustion of it – all gone. Imagine! It would be a utopia, the coming of a true paradise on earth, the final, beautiful chapter in the story of human progress. But how would you go about it? Where would you start? Well, what creates these divisions between us in the first place? What makes inequality? Wealth. Private ownership – of property, of goods, of land, of businesses and industries, of everything. So that’s where we’ll start. No more private ownership. Everything must be shared. We’ll live and work communally. If we all strive on behalf of one another, instead of ourselves, we’ll create an incredible bounty that can be given out according to need rather than greed. We’ll call it ‘Communism’ … [Under Stalin’s Soviet Union] [t]he surest way of rising in this new Communist game, the people realised, was to join the party or work for it. By 1920, 5.4 million were directly employed by the government. ‘There were twice as many officials as there were workers in Soviet Russia and these officials were the main social base of the new regime,’ writes Figes. ‘This was not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat but a Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy.’ As players play, they come to believe. Millions plugged their own personal status into the game of the Communists, absorbed the dream and became loyal and true … A fascinating insight into the mindset of the convert can be found in an essay by author Arthur Koestler, who joined the Communist Party in Germany in 1931. After the economic crash decimated the middle classes, Koestler witnessed them fleeing to the far left and far right. In the Communist Manifesto he read Marx’s prediction that ‘entire sections of the ruling classes’ would supply the movement with ‘fresh elements of enlightenment and progress’. He liked the sound of that: ‘That “fresh element of enlightenment,” I discovered to my delight, was I.’ Once he’d joined, the rules and symbols began being written into Koestler’s game-playing equipment. Just as we’ve encountered in the worlds of the Eton schoolboys and Heaven’s Gate, membership was symbolised in esoteric language. After being handed his party card, he was told he should, from then on, say ‘thou’ instead of ‘you’. He discovered that ‘spontaneous’ wasn’t used, due to its association with Leon Trotsky, who’d by then become a class enemy. Likewise, there was no such thing as a ‘lesser evil’, which was a ‘philosophical, strategical and tactical fallacy; a Trotskyite, diversionist, liquidatorial and counter-revolutionary conception’. Words and phrases in favour included ‘the toiling masses’, ‘sectarian’, ‘herostratic’ and ‘concrete’ (as in, ‘You must put your question into a more concrete form, Comrade’). During the Nazi clampdown, one woman known to Koestler betrayed her membership of the party by her use of the word ‘concrete’. ‘The Gestapo Commissar had listened to her with boredom, half-convinced that his underlings had blundered in arresting her – until she used the fatal word for the second time.’ As the game increasingly colonised Koestler’s neural territory, and his copy, flatter, conform circuitry switched on, he found his artistic and musical tastes became that of his elites: Lenin had read Balzac, so now Balzac was ‘the greatest of all times’; any painting without a smoking factory chimney or a tractor in it was dismissed as ‘escapist’. Truth itself became swallowed by the dream. Any questioning of the party line was seen as sabotage; during meetings they’d acclaim one another for taking turns to repeat correct beliefs. The value of free speech was seen as deviant. ‘One of the slogans of the German Party said: “The front-line is no place for discussions.” Another said: “Wherever a Communist happens to be, he is always in the front-line.”’ Just as in the Heaven’s Gate cult, where people were instructed to hold a ‘blank card’ up to incorrect thoughts, Koestler learned to think correctly. In his early days, when he questioned the party’s analysis as being contrary to the obvious truth, it was explained that he was still suffering from a ‘mechanistic outlook’. Instead, he had to think ‘dialectically’ and interpret the world through the eyes of the party. ‘Gradually I learned to distrust my mechanistic preoccupation with facts and to regard the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique you were no longer disturbed by facts; they automatically took on the proper colour and fell into their proper place.’ Like the cult members, Koestler found himself willingly lost in the dream of his game. ‘We craved to become single and simple-minded.’ As the game gripped in, and he strove for status within it, this highly intelligent man’s grip on reality loosened more and more: ‘Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.’ … But if everybody was saying they believed the Communist dream, how could we find out who the deviants were? How could Stalin know which of his elite were truly loyal and which were playing a different game in the secret worlds inside their heads? Although he was at the absolute pinnacle in the formal Communist game, Stalin had no way of knowing where he stood in the true game that was playing in the minds of those around him. ‘The purges began here’, writes Figes, ‘in the Bolsheviks’ need to unmask potential enemies.’ And so began what remains arguably the most notorious case of status paranoia in history: the Great Terror. Good Communists had to be in a state of constant vigilance for the dangerous deviants with dangerous deviant thoughts who moved among them and were disguised as good Communists. It was announced that ‘open and secret violators’ of the party who ‘cast doubt on and discredit its decisions and plans’ would be expelled: over half a million party members were. For many, being accused and ejected from the game to which they’d devoted their lives was agonisingly alienating. One complained he was now ‘isolated from everybody, an enemy of the people, in an inhuman position, completely isolated from everything that constitutes the essence of life’. Another asked, ‘Can everything be collapsing this way? Is it possible that I could have become the enemy of the party which has formed me? No, it is a mistake.’ The elites and former elites came under heavy suspicion: members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia were smeared as ‘bourgeois specialists’. Also attacked were priests, kulaks and the so-called ‘Nepmen’– the entrepreneurs who’d run those small businesses during Lenin’s NEP. Many who were suspected of incorrect thought were interrogated about their beliefs at purge meetings. ‘“Going through the Purge” meant confessing your sins endlessly, especially membership of oppositions and bad social origin,’ writes Fitzpatrick, ‘but there was no provision in the ritual for being relieved of the burden. You “recognized your errors”, you apologized and, if lucky, you were sent away with a warning. But the errors were still there the next time.’ Show trials were held, their always-guilty victims sacked, shot or exiled to the gulags. One victim raged, ‘the shameful example of my fall shows that the slightest rift with the Party, the slightest insincerity towards the Party, the slightest hesitation with regard to the leadership, with regard to the Central Committee, is enough to land you in the camp of counterrevolution’. Just as we’ve seen in periods of extreme tightness under the Nazis and the Spanish Inquisition, a wave of denunciations began. There were millions of informants: friends, colleagues and family members, some motivated by fear, others grudge and resentment and personal ambition and others by true belief. People denounced celebrities they read about in newspapers; workers denounced their managers; the wife of a biologist denounced her husband’s academic rival as ‘a vulgarian who pulls the wool over people’s eyes, a pitiful scientific pigmy, a plagiarist and compiler’; historians have uncovered ‘many letters from leading actors, actresses, and opera singers denouncing the theater directors who had insulted them and failed to give them appropriate roles’. One poet was denounced for not signing a group request for the execution of two elder revolutionaries; a writer was denounced for being the drinking companion of someone else who’d been denounced. University students were denounced for having kulak fathers or being ‘brought up by a merchant’. When a photographer complained that photographic paper was better before the revolution, he was denounced by his apprentice and executed. Some ambitious warriors became ‘super-denouncers’, writes Fitzpatrick, ‘virtually professional public denouncers’. One later described how he and a partner would go to meetings with ‘readymade lists of persons whom we intended to accuse of being enemies … when we appeared it not only caused embarrassment at the meeting, but frightened party members would quietly run out of the building’. When true-believing Communists were arrested, still lost in the dream of the party’s total infallibility, they were baffled. One wrote: ‘the fact that I am here must mean that I have committed some wrong – what I do not know.’

As Storr writes, communism quickly devolved into status-seeking of the rawest kind, creating starkly different classes amidst a purported “egalitarian” society:

By the fact of its massive and lethal focus on successful players, the Great Terror created new vacancies, which meant new opportunities for millions. There began an intense programme of ‘proletarianizing’ the intelligentsia: those who entered this new game ‘achieved extraordinarily rapid promotion during the Great Purges’. They became a new elite populating the games of industry, arts and politics. The Soviet bureaucracy became filled with inexperienced former low-status players, many of whom were semi-literate. ‘All over the Soviet Union, at every level, people were changing their social status,’ writes Fitzpatrick, ‘peasants moving to town and becoming industrial workers, workers moving into technical jobs or becoming party officials, former school teachers becoming university professors.’ Stalin was creating status games for people, generating aspiration and ambition and meaning. These new upwardly mobile classes were encouraged further by Stalin’s stunning turning away from the founding dream of perfect equality. Rather than there being no social classes, he declared there were actually three: workers, peasants and intelligentsia. Old symbols of hierarchy, including degrees and honorary titles, were brought out of abolishment just as new titles such as ‘The Hero of the Soviet Union’ and ‘The Distinguished Master of Sport’ were introduced. In the military, titles, ranks and status signifiers such as epaulettes had been abolished: now they were back. The ‘egalitarianism’ that said workers should be paid the same no matter their level of competence was an ‘ultra-left’ idea. He derided it as ‘equality mongering’. He defended the notion of citizens owning their own cattle: ‘a person is a person’, he said. ‘He wants to own something for himself.’ There was ‘nothing wrong in this’ … There’d once been a ‘Party Maximum’ wage cap, even for those at the top. Not anymore. Stalin ‘vigorously demanded that individual skills and efforts be rewarded with higher wages and other material rewards’, writes sociologist Professor Jukka Gronow. ‘In his opinion, it had now become necessary to encourage workers to get personally interested in the results of their own work.’ Hundreds of thousands of players became more prosperous. But what use was money when there were so few status symbolising goods to spend it on? ‘The authorities clearly understood, new and higher quality material goods, along with the shops to sell them, were crucial.’ In 1936, following a personal intervention by Stalin, the Soviet champagne industry was born. A director of champagne production was paid two thousand roubles per month, more than ten times that of an industrial worker … Restaurants were opened, one strata of which were permitted to raise prices by 30 per cent to improve quality and service. Some, proud of their success, began promoting themselves as superior. This led to a potentially deadly dissonance: these ambitious players of success games were denounced as a ‘group of fascist bandits’ and accused, writes Gronow, of ‘vigorously promoting a policy geared toward the establishment of quality restaurants’. Throughout the 1930s, there came into being a complex hierarchy of status. Stalin might have admitted there were now three classes, but sociologists found at least ten: the ruling elite; superior intelligentsia; general intelligentsia; working-class aristocracy; white collar; well-to-do peasants; average workers; average peasants; disadvantaged workers; forced labour. His regime ‘introduced systematic discrimination on the basis of class in all sorts of contexts important for everyday life: education, justice, housing, rations, and so on’, writes Fitzpatrick. ‘Even the right to vote was reserved for those who came from the “toiling” classes. A young worker had privileged access to higher education, Communist Party membership, and a host of other benefits, while the son of a noble or a priest suffered corresponding disadvantages and restrictions.’ A person’s social class was even listed on their passport … Party membership was made on a discriminatory basis: the admissions procedure included letters of reference and investigations of social background; those from working families were privileged. College admissions were similarly policed. In the arts, prestigious awards were often reserved for those of minority backgrounds: ‘They give medals to Armenians, Georgians, Ukrainians – everyone except Russians,’ complained one artist. Engineers and the new, approved, politically correct intelligentsia also received special privileges. Industrial workers comprised about 40 per cent of the workforce but received around 75 per cent of the food. Even work canteens were stratified this way: ‘the most important workers of the most important factories ate the best food at lower prices’, writes Gronow. Workplace canteens were often themselves divided into at least three sections based on status. ‘This principle of hierarchy – rewards in relation to the imagined input based on the position or the type of work in question – permeated all fields of society.’ Stalin bought ‘the loyalty of the new middle class with “trinkets” but also with real privileges … thereby allowing for widening status differences’. The new elites gained access to special apartments and had the best goods automatically reserved for them. Their children were sent to exclusive summer camps. They received holidays, chauffeur-driven cars and money. It became ‘normal’ for them to have live-in servants. Many of these servants were provided with no bed and forced to sleep in the kitchen, under a table or on chairs. ‘They are even worse than the “ladies” of earlier times, these wives of engineers, doctors and “responsible” cadres,’ said one brave complainant. They managed to calm the dissonance of their elevated lifestyles partly via the dodge that, under Communism, they didn’t actually own any of these amenities. They belonged to the state. Privilege, for them, was about access instead of ownership – and abolishing ownership was the whole point of this, right? As for the state itself, it argued their privilege was temporary: soon all of the USSR would live like this. They were not a privileged elite, went the thinking, they were a vanguard. The elite in the Communist Party, including administrators and higher army and government officials, became known as the nomenklatura. In 1933, at the height of the famine during which kulaks were eating grass, tree bark and each other, luxury trains were taking its members on holidays to health spas in the south. One official document notes a single month’s tally in just one of their restaurant cars: 200 kg butter; 150 kg Swiss Cheese; 500 kg sausages; 500 kg chicken; 550 kg of different kinds of meat; 300 kg fish (plus 350 kg canned fish and 100 kg herring); 100 kg caviar; 300 kg sugar; 160 kg chocolate and sweets; 100 boxes of fruit; 60,000 cigarettes. One member wrote: ‘The nomenklatura is on another planet. It’s Mars. It’s not simply a matter of good cars or apartments. It’s the continuous satisfaction of your own whims, the way an army of boot-lickers allows you to work painlessly for hours. All the little apparatchiks are ready to do everything for you. Your every wish is fulfilled. You can go to the theater on a whim, you can fly to Japan from your hunting lodge. It’s a life in which everything flows easily … You are like a king: just point your finger and it is done.’ By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the nomenklatura and their families numbered around three million, about 1.5 per cent of the population. This, observes historian Professor Richard Pipes, is ‘approximately the same proportion of nobles under tsarism in the eighteenth century. And the favors it enjoyed resembled those of the magnates of that age.’ What had gone wrong? Communism was supposed to bring about a ‘kingdom of equality’.

As Storr writes:

The parable of the Communists reveals the impossibility of ridding human existence of the game. The drive to get ahead will always assert itself. It’s in us. It’s who we are. The first decades of the Soviet Union find the status game in all its details: its irrepressibility; its capacity to raise violence; the grandiosity it inspires in winning players and leaders; the inevitability of elites; the flaw that makes people believe they’re always deserving of more status; the use of humiliation as the ultimate weapon; the horror of the cousins and their genius for tyranny; the ideological war games that rage across neural territories; our vulnerability to believing almost any dream of reality if our status depends on it; the capacity for that dream to pervert our perception of reality; the danger of active belief; esoteric language; zealous leaders who cast visions of heavenly status in future promised lands and target enemies to its rising; the anger and enthusiasm they inspire; the cycle of gossip, outrage, consensus and harsh punishment; the paranoia that can afflict leaders and the terrors it brings; the grim magic of toxic morality and its conjuring trick of making evil seem virtuous; the necessity of games to generate status if they’re to endure; the world-changing power of the status goldrush.

Storr writes that “Utopians talk of injustice whilst building new hierarchies and placing themselves at the top.” And he recounts in that regard the modern creation of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” regimes dedicated to perpetuating their own forms of tribal preference and status-seeking:

The New Left have also been brilliantly successful in institutionalising their game and its dream of reality through the rapidly expanding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry. Many universities contain large DEI bureaucracies, often with extensive teams of evangelising staff who oversee multimillion-dollar budgets. The University of Michigan’s DEI mission has an annual employee bill of over $11 million, and has nearly one hundred full-time staffers, twenty-five of whom earn over $100,000 a year. Yale has more than one hundred and fifty staff and student representatives serving DEI aims. One study of 669 US universities found nearly a third put its faculty through mandated DEI training. And it’s not just the universities. In 2019, the New York Times reported the DEI industry to be ‘booming, creating new career paths and roles’. One US job agency reported ads for such postings had risen 18 per cent between 2017 and 2018; between 2018 and 2019 it jumped a further 25 per cent. A survey of 234 companies in the S&P 500 found 63 per cent had appointed or promoted DEI professionals in the past three years. Universities, including Yale, Cornell and Georgetown, have begun offering relevant certificate programmes. DEI conferences are charging up to $2,400 just for registration; Google spent $114 million on DEI programmes in 2014 and a further $150 million in 2015. It’s estimated that US companies spend eight billion dollars every year on DEI training. Where does all that money go? According to leaked documents, between 2006 and 2020, one consultant alone billed US federal agencies, including the Justice Department and the Office of the Attorney General, over five million dollars for diversity trainings; in 2011 he charged NASA half a million dollars for his ‘power and privilege sexual-orientation workshops’ … All this suggests the New Left has become a powerful goldrush movement, awarding prizes of major status and its symbols, including wealth, to those who play sufficiently well. Untold thousands of livelihoods now depend on active belief in its tenets and countless individuals make major status for themselves in the games of journalism, publishing, politics and social media by warring for them.

That concludes this essay series on status-seeking.