If our position on the ladder is such a matter of concern, it is because our self-conception is so dependent on what others make of us. Rare individuals aside (Socrates, Jesus), we rely on signs of respect from the world to feel tolerable to ourselves.
More regrettably still, status is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain over a lifetime. Except in societies where it is fixed at birth and our veins flow with noble blood, a high position hangs on what we can achieve…
We would, in an ideal world, be more impermeable. We would be unshaken whether we were ignored or noticed, praised or jeered at. … And if we had carried out a fair appraisal of ourselves and decided upon our value, another person’s judgement of our irrelevance would not wound us. We would know our worth. Instead, we appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our characters. We have evidence of both cleverness and stupidity, humour and dullness, importance and superfluity. And in such wavering conditions, it typically falls to the attitude of society to settle the question of our significance.
Our mood may blacken because a colleague has greeted us absent-mindedly and our calls have been left unanswered. And we are capable of finding life worth living because someone has remembered our name and sent us a fruit basket.
Rousseau’s argument hung on a thesis about wealth: that wealth does not involve having many things. It involves having what we long for. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we seek something we seek something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually own.
There are two ways to make people richer, reasoned Rousseau, to give them more money or to restrain their desires. Modern societies have succeeded spectacularly at the first option but, by continuously inflaming appetites, they have at the same time helped to negate a share of their most impressive achievements.
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all that we might be.
The fear of failing tasks would perhaps not be so great were it not for an awareness of how often failure tends to be harshly viewed and interpreted by others.
PERCENTAGE OF NORTH AMERICANS DECLARING THE FOLLOWING ITEMS TO BE NECESSITIES
| 1970 | 2000 | |
| Second car | 20% | 59% |
| Second television | 3% | 45% |
| More than one telephone | 2% | 78% |
| Car air-conditioning | 11% | 65% |
| Home air-conditioning | 22% | 70% |
| Dishwasher | 8% | 44% |
HOW WE IMAGINE SATISFACTION AFTER AN ACQUISITION / ACHIEVEMENT
WHAT IN FACT HAPPENS AFTER AN ACQUISITION / ACHIEVEMENT
We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will guarantee us an enduring satisfaction. We are led to imagine ourselves scaling the steep sides of the cliff face of happiness to reach a wide, high plateau on which to continue our lives; we are not reminded that soon after reaching the summit we will be called down again in to fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.
… which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome anxieties or fulfil desires, but that we should perhaps build in to our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us levels of rest and resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.
Qualities and skills that would result in high status in one place have a marked tendency to grow irrelevant or be frowned upon in another …
Requirements of High Status in:
Sparta, Greek Peninsula, 400 BC
The most honoured members of ancient Spartan society were men and in particular fighting, aggressive men … little interest in family life, a distaste for business and luxury, and an enthusiasm for killing …
Western Europe, AD 476-1096
… the most revered became those who modelled themselves on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
Western Europe, AD 1096-1599
… it was the turn of knights to become the most admired people …
Western Europe, AD 1750-1890
… it was no longer judged necessary to know how to fight in order to be respectable. … The most admired people in society were ‘gentleman’. They were wealthy, they tended not to do very much apart from presiding over the management of their estates, they dabbled in industry or trade (especially with India and the West Indies), but they were keen to differentiate themselves from the inferior caste of merchants and industrialists. … It was important to take care of one’s hair and visit a barber regularly.
Brazil, 100-1960
Among the Cubeo tribe of the nort-west Amazon, individuals with the highest status were me who … were, first and foremost, skilled at killing jaguars.
London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, 2004
The category of the successful person comprises both men and women, of any race, who have been able to accumulate money, power and renown through their own activities (rather than through inheritance)… The presence of virtues – humility or godliness, for example – rarely detains attention. Like the Jaguar teeth for the Cubeo, a prosperous way of life signals worthiness.
… the greater part of our anxieties stems from an exaggerated sense of self-importance of our projects and concerns. We are tortured by our ideals, and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing.
According to one influential wing of modern secular society, there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being ‘like everyone else’; for ‘everyone else’ is a category that comprises the mediocre and conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and ‘stand out’ in whatever way their talents allow.
‘Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind’, wrote Thereau, adding, in an attempt to upset his society’s connection between owning things and being honourable, ‘Man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without.’
The beginning of a mature solution to status anxiety might be said to begin with the recognition that status is available from a variety of different audiences: from industrialists and from bohemians, from families and from philosophers – and that our choice of audience can be free and willed.
Status anxiety is the price we pay for acknowledging a public difference between a successful and unsuccessful life.
Excellent article. I enjoyed reading the historical requirements for reaching high status.
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