The Status Game (with Will Storr)

Will Storr: Thanks for having me, Russ. It’s good to be here.

Will Storr: Yeah. So the thesis is that the conscious experience of human life is a story. That’s how we experience our life, moment to moment, where they’re kind of here at the center’s unfolding narrative. But the subconscious treats our lives in a different way. And so, when I’m talking about life being a game, that’s what it’s doing. There’s a famous neuroscientist called Chris Frith I quote in the book, who says that the brain treats your environment as a reward space, and it draws you towards the things that you need and pushes you away from the things you don’t need. And, that’s what the subconscious brain is constantly doing.

And, the story of life is: we’re telling a story and justifying and rationalizing those movements back and forth. And, the three big things that humans want is–like all living things, we want to survive, obviously, and we want to reproduce.

But, in order to do that, humans have these other two very profound urges. The first one is connection. We want to connect with people like us, which is not primarily the subject of this book, but equally important.

And, the second one is status: We need to feel that we are being of value to other humans, because we’re this sort of collective, tribal, highly cooperative ape. So, we’re highly motivated by signals that we are contributing to the great cooperative game of human life.

So, that is a subconscious obsession. We need to feel that we are valued or respected–or however you want to phrase it–that we have status. And, when we don’t feel like that, we immediately feel distress. And, when we experience low status in the chronic sense, we get mentally ill, we get physically ill.

So, the book is really arguing that status is not a want, it’s a need. And then, just extrapolating all the ramifications, the various ramifications of that.

Will Storr: Yeah, that’s so interesting about the silent retreat. Yeah, I hadn’t thought of it like that. But yeah, so the brain has this, neuroscientists call it the status detection system. We have this always-on technology that’s continually assessing people in terms of status, but also how other people are assessing us in terms of status.

So, I talk in the book: you go into an elevator in a hotel, and you’re immediately judging people on how they’re dressed, what floor they’re getting off, are they staying in a suite, or are they staying in one of the lower floors? Who is the staff? You can’t escape from the status game.

And, we’ve been playing–lots of animals do this. We’re not the only animals that are interested in status, but we are especially good and especially sensitive to it. And, it’s functional.

As I say, humans are a species of great ape. We’re not like an ape, we are an ape. But we are unlike the other apes in a really important way. And that’s that we are highly, highly cooperative. So, we are kind of part ape, part ant.

So, the way that we solve the problems of existence, unlike the other apes, is we do it collectively. We form into groups, and each member of the group knows what their role is, and they know what part they play. And, it’s the group in humans that solve the problems. So, that’s whether it’s a soccer team, or a political party, or a nation, or an army, that’s what we do. We solve the problem [?] into groups.

And, in order to make those groups functional, you need a system of incentive and punishment, rewards and punishment. And, that’s the status game. So, as I said earlier, we are deeply interested in: How useful am I being to other people? Because that’s what status is: it’s a score of our perceived value.

And, back in the days of the hunter-gatherer tribe, when our brains, when all this was evolving–when our brains, our human brains, were evolving–the more useful you were to the tribe, the more pro-social you were, the more you put the tribe’s interest before your own, the higher you would raise in status, and the more food you’d get, the better food you’d get. You’d get safer sleeping sites, you’d get better access to your choice of mates, which, of course, evolutionarily is extremely important. Your children will be treated better.

So, basically, it’s this fundamental rule of human life, is: Go for status. If you go for status, everything else gets better. And, lots of those other things are directly plugged into survival and reproduction. So, it’s of fundamental importance.

Will Storr: Yeah, I think that’s right. As I say in the book, status leaks. And so, we want to be around higher-status people than us, because their status leaks out onto us. But it also goes the other way. And, if we feel that we’re around people who are lower status, then that makes us uncomfortable, because that means that we feel that some of the status is leaking out. I mean, I’ve just come from my CrossFit class, which is why my hair is wet. And, that’s full of–

Will Storr: Not at all; don’t be, because I’ve been going for two years, and I’m still one of the worst people. And I’m one of the lowest status people in the gym, and–

Will Storr: the big guys who are in their thirties and twenties. But, it’s always the old guys that gravitate towards me. And, I think ‘Why?’ And it’s, like, ‘Because you are one of them. These are your people. Accept it.’ But, yeah, especially after writing this, I always notice it at CrossFit, because it is, like, going into a place where I am fated to be always one of the lowest status people in that particular space.

Will Storr: You wouldn’t be humble if you seen me half an hour ago, I tell you.

Will Storr: Yeah. I had a similar experience. I think one of the moments I realized I was getting old was–my favorite band is called the Afghan Whigs. And I remember going to see them in the nineties in London, and the singer Greg Dulli was young and thin and handsome, and the whole of the audience were young and thin and attractive. And, I was there; And then I went to see them again in my early forties. And, Greg was rather overweight, and everybody in the crowd was old and overweight. I was looking around like, ‘God, we used to be cool, and now we are just not.’ Even on the stage, they’re just not. Age is cruel.

Will Storr: But, I think that’s one of the liberating things, is the understanding–I think the colloquial understanding of status is that life is just one big status game. It’s just one monolithic game that you go up and down. But, that’s not how it is, is that there are effectively infinite status games. And, I can go into CrossFit and be the bottom of the rung, but then I can go into a different status game and not be there 10 minutes later or half an hour later.

So, that’s the great thing about life, and I think that’s the thing that, especially getting old–I mean, I’ve just turned 50, I’m not enjoying it–but it’s the understanding that you just can’t be playing those games of youth anymore. You can’t be playing a status game that involves beauty anymore. Just don’t, because you’re going to make a fool of yourself. But there are other games to play: when you’re in your forties and fifties, you’ve got to have experience and expertise, and there are things that a 22-year-old can’t do that you can do.

Will Storr: It’s embracing that stuff, and not falling–we live in such a youth-worshiping culture in the West, that that can be hard for people. I mean, it is hard for me. It’s hard for lots of us as we get older.

Will Storr: Are you? Oh my God, you look amazing for 71.

Will Storr: Yeah. So, Ben was a guy that I interviewed as a journalist quite a long, about 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago. And I interviewed him because he was, I think, the longest-serving prisoner in the United Kingdom. He’d been sent to prison as a teenager for losing his temper and killing someone accidentally. And, he was literally sent down to prison wearing his school uniform. I think he was 14.

And, of course, this is a nightmare. You know the phrase is, ‘at Her Majesty’s pleasure,’ which is like an open-ended sentence. And so, he was there. And initially he tried to take his own life. He tried to starve himself to death. He tried all kinds of things, and that didn’t work.

But slowly, he decided to fight against what he perceived as the petty, kind of bullying tactics of the prison officers. And so, he decided to study law–prison law and prison rules. And, he got himself to the stage where he knew the law better than the prison guards themselves and became known as the archetypal character: the prison lawyer.

So, whenever any prisoner had a problem, they would come to Ben, and Ben would help them. And cause a lot of problems, cause a lot of trouble, write a lot of letters. And, he developed a reputation as being somewhat of a difficult–well, not somewhat–a lot of a difficult prisoner. And so, in their kind of infinite capacity for revenge, the prison authorities kept denying him parole again, and again, and again, and again, and again, because he was just such a troublemaker.

And then what happened was that he fell in love–like, a visiting teacher, English teacher. He fell in love with a visiting English teacher, and she fell in love with him, and they had this kind of affair and somehow managed to have an affair in prison. And, it got to the point where she said to him, ‘Look, Ben, you are always up for parole, they’re always turning you down. All you’ve got to do is just behave. Just, like, spend a year not causing any trouble. And then, you can be released. I’ve got a lovely cottage in the Cotswolds. You can come and live with me and my cats,’–like paradise.

And, the amazing thing was that he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want to do it. And, he had to face the fact that he didn’t want to be released. That actually what had happened was he’d become very high status amongst the prisoners in the prison. When he walked down the corridor, people went, ‘Oh my God, it’s Ben Gunn.’ He had this huge beard, he looked like a pirate.

And so, when I met him, he had actually been released, and he was living in a lovely cottage in the Cotswolds, and it was lovely, and his partner was a wonderful person. But he was in the midst of what seemed to be a terrible breakdown. He completely collapsed. And, in his own words was that, ‘I knew who I was inside: I was someone. And out here I’m nothing. Just an ex-con.’

That really spoke to me quite profoundly about our need for status and how important it is; and how really preeminently important it is, is that even in that absolute hell of the prison system, he would rather be there and have his status than be outside and have freedom and the love of a good woman and have no status whatsoever. So, yeah, I thought that was just a very interesting story to begin the book.

Will Storr: Yeah, and romantic love I would put under the category of connection. That’s a separate thing. That’s different from the feeling that we are valued by the wider human community. I think that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about status.

Will Storr: That’s right. You can’t not play the status game. It’s impossible. It really is impossible. It’s in our brain–it’s part of how we experience ourselves and we experience the world. I mean, you get to people–well, there are three really examples that I talk about in the book of people who sort of fool themselves into believing that they’ve escaped the status game. And, one of them is the hikikomori of Japan, the shut-ins, the people who find–because Japan is a harsh status game. It’s very judgmental. Very difficult work conditions, very strict gender roles are enforced. And so, there are generations of people that try and check out of there. And, what happens to the hikikomoris, they end up spending their playing computer games, which is a proxy status game anyway. And then, they usually just die alone, and there’s a foul smell, and they find their bodies. It’s not good when you exempt yourself in the status game.

And, another group of people that fool themselves into believing that they’ve exempt themselves in the status game are the Buddhists, which is complete fantasy. I mean, Buddhists believe in a karmic system of–I think there are six realms of reincarnation. And, the idea is that you build this up to the–ultimately, you want to escape the game completely, but the top realm is wealth, luxury, splendor. I mean, it’s basically the Donald Trump lifestyle is what these Buddhists are actually–it’s so incredibly status-based, Buddhism, the idea that they’re somehow exempting themselves. And, this is backed up in scientific studies, too. There are these hilarious studies where they find that the better people become at Buddhism, the more highly they regard themselves as spiritual superiors to the people around them. And so, it just doesn’t work, this idea that mindfulness, and meditation, and Buddhism is this escape from the status game.

And then, the big story I tell at the end of the book, as a way of summing up the whole thing, is the experience of the Communists, who believed that there could be such a thing as a world of pure connection. I mean, that was their own phrase, ‘pure connection,’ with no status whatsoever. And of course, it ended up being an enormously hierarchical society. Sociologists in the 1950s found 12 different social groups in the Soviet Union, an insane cult of personality around Lenin, Stalin, Mao–which is all status–demands for absolute reverence and subservience to the cause.

So, between the Buddhists, and the hikikomori, and the Communists, I think we can see that these various attempts that have been to escape status, they’re catastrophic. Well, I mean, Buddhism isn’t catastrophic. I mean, I think Buddhism is more comical in its self-delusion for me. But Communism and hikikomori, they are not good ways to organize your own life or the life of a country.

So, you just can’t do it. And, also, I would argue, why would you want to? Because, status is the source of a lot of personal pain for people. And that’s what we think about a lot is, ‘Oh my God, it’s tough. It’s hard,’ and it is; but it’s also responsible for civilization itself. Without smart people being very deeply interested in winning the respect of their peers, you don’t get technological advances, you don’t get space travel, you don’t get the Internet, you don’t get cities and the amazing art that we have in the world. So, I am agnostic about–well, I mean status is as good as it is bad. In the book, I trace terrible things, including the Holocaust, to status anxiety. But, equally, the invention of the iPhone that has its founding story in Steve Jobs–insane status anxiety in his insane sense of personal competition with his rivals in Silicon Valley.

So, that’s the human animal. And, it is one of these things–I don’t think I say it in the book, but I’ve said it before and elsewhere, is that I find these conversations kind of ridiculous. Like, 20 years ago we were having conversations about is religion good or bad, or is capitalism good or bad? Is status good or bad? I mean, it’s so comical to want to feel we can reduce these incredibly complex systems of trade-offs into good or bad. I mean, they’re highly complex phenomena. Religion is good and bad. Capitalism is good and bad. Status is good and bad. So, I really try and resist these very simplistic kind of analyses of these highly complex phenomena.

Will Storr: Well, that’s very interesting. I mean, it’s reassuring and comforting. I like what you’re saying.

So, I wanted to write about this in the book, because I had an instinct that as we get older, some of these urges will lessen. And, I did research it, but the evidence was so inconsistent I decided not to write about it. And so, I was looking specifically about the effect of retirement, because I was thinking: Well, retirement is you’re removing yourself from the status games of life. And so, is retirement good or bad? And, the evidence is mixed. And, it seemed to be that if you choose your retirement, it’s good, but if you feel forced into retirement, it’s bad. It just felt a bit like, ‘Ugh.’ So I had an instinct for what you were saying was true. And, I wanted to argue it. But the only reason I didn’t, because I couldn’t find the evidence to stand it up. But, I do appreciate what you’re saying, and I instinctively–and I hope it’s true as well, because it is a lovely thought.

The other thing that I will say, which isn’t in the book because it is in my more recent book, is this sense that we don’t have the status that we deserve I think it’s fairly universal. And, in story terms, it’s part of the archetype of the underdog. So, when you are reading a story like Harry Potter, or Luke Skywalker, or whatever, Star Wars, or Hunger Games, or whatever it might be, very often you’ve got this underdog character. Underdogs are universally identifiable. Every culture has stories about underdogs. And so, underdogs tend to be low-status characters that are deserving of higher status. And I think that’s the reason why we love underdogs so much and why we identify with them, because that’s us, that’s me.

And, my guess is that’s part of our psychology because it keeps us pushing for more. ‘I deserve more, I deserve more, I deserve more.’ And, I think especially as we get into middle age and some of the optimism bleeds away, and some of the realities of life leak in, I think you’re right, that optimism and that fire turns into grievance. I feel that often. Every writer I know feels that, no matter how successful they are, without exception, ‘It’s not fair. It’s not fair.’

And, I do feel like–my instinct is it is just part of basic human cognition. We always feel like we are deserving of more status, and it keeps us pushing on and keeps us pushing on.

Will Storr: Because we identify with that feeling. I think it’s a fundamental thing. We identify with that feeling of, ‘I should have more status than I do.’ I think it is a very, very common feeling amongst humans. And, you can see why it’s functional, because it keeps us pushing on for more, and more, and more.

Will Storr: Yeah. So, I was told this, I was tipped off about this, by a Beatles fanatic when I told–there was a music journalist–when I told him I was writing a book, ‘Oh, you should write about Paul McCartney with this songwriting thing.’ And, I said, ‘What did you see?’ He said, ‘Oh, well, he went through a phase of–.’ Because, so the story is that when Lennon and McCartney started writing together, they had an agreement that all the songs were credited to Lennon McCartney. No matter who wrote what, it would just say ‘Lennon McCartney’. So, that was fine. But then, at some point with Paul McCartney, it became not fine. This is later in his career. And, he started thinking, ‘Well, why does Lennon’s name come first? It’s not fair. My name should come first.’ And, there were various meetings about this. I think some of them were after Lennon died, because Yoko Ono was involved. And, she was like, she said, ‘Absolutely not. You can’t do this.’

And then, so what he started doing is, when he would do live albums where they would cover Beatles songs, he would flip the names. So, it would say McCartney, Lennon. McCartney, Lennon. And then, there was a threat of legal action from Yoko Ono.

So, the reason I love this story is because, as you say, two things really. So, one is Paul McCartney is famously, like, a really nice guy. He’s not like a Kanye West lunatic, or Taylor Swift who is seen as savagely interested in status. He’s seen as a really nice guy. No one’s got a bad word to say about McCartney, really.

Will Storr: [inaudible 00:34:55] you can’t imagine–

Will Storr: That’s the thing. You can’t imagine really a person with more status than Paul McCartney who is alive at the moment. Really. Like, he’s beloved. He basically helped invent popular music–like, the songs that he wrote. And yet, so I just thought, I’ve got a bit more of a kind of [?] empathetic view than you. I don’t think it’s–it is petty, but I think it’s deeply human.

Will Storr: It’s deeply human. And, I think it just shows you that–and as I say in the book, the one study that sort of popped into my mind when I think about this–it might have been in the same chapter–was when they were trying to figure out the difference between power and status. Is power and status the same thing? And, the answer is it isn’t. We know power is about being able to control resources. And, actually, when you test people’s desire for power, unless you’re a particular personality type, like maybe a Trumpian or a whatever personality type, people’s desire for power very quickly wears out because with power comes responsibility, and hassle, and stress, and it’s, ‘Oh, God.’ But when they test people’s desire for status, it never runs out. It never stops. And, the interesting thing about status is it is not to say that everybody’s walking around thinking, ‘I want to be the king. I want to be the number one.’ Most people don’t: they’re quite happy to be above average. But it is about ratcheting up. You go up a little bit in status, then you want a bit more, and you want a bit more, and you want a bit more, and you want a bit more. And, that never stops. It never stops.

I mean, I agree with you. I say, in old age–older age I should say–I’m sure it wears down. And good. You don’t want to be 71 and trying to compete with a 21-year-old, for God’s sake. You want to take it easier, a bit. But yeah, it never really stops. I don’t think there ever comes a point in your life where you are quite happy to be seen as the lowest-status person in the room.

Will Storr: That’s the game. Another one of these studies which always sticks in my mind is about the orange juice, where it was back in the 1970s where they did a study where they poured lots of people glasses of orange juice, and one person got slightly less orange juice than everybody else. And, reliably, that person became distracted and obsessed and was thinking about the orange juice. Because that’s what we are like as people, as human beings. Everything is a symbol–everything can be a symbol of status. And, we are deeply interested in our relative status because, as I said at the beginning of the chat[?], it plugs directly into our ability to survive and reproduce. So, it’s extremely important to us.

Will Storr: You know. So, the human brain is always asking the question, ‘Who do I have to be in this place in order to earn connection, status, and to connect with people to rise?’ And so, with the rise–you don’t like the phrase–but when I was doing my research into this for my previous book, Selfie, I thought that lots of economists would argue that neoliberalism doesn’t exist. I was aware that there was debate. But yeah, as I say, it’s this idea that we removed things like regulation. It was the destruction of the unions. It was, in the United Kingdom, it was privatization of industry. It was selling all the council houses. It was unleashing–you know, dropping regulations on banking, which some of those regulations directly led to the global financial crisis in 2008. So, there were all these measures that Thatcher and Reagan brought into us to basically increase competition. That was the goal. And so, I’m intrigued that you said that they didn’t actually do that because that seems to me a surprising claim. But, you’re an economist, and I’m not.

Will Storr: So, I mean, really says that chapter that you’re talking about is a brief summary of a much larger argument I make in my previous book, which is called Selfie. So, I look quite deeply into that there.

And so, I think what even your viewers and listeners who aren’t economists can appreciate is, if you look at how the culture changed between the 1960s and 1970s and the 1980s, as I said in Selfie, in 20 years from 1965 to 1985, we went from, ‘Screw the Man’ in inverted commas to ‘Greed is good.’ I mean, there was an enormous change in the culture of the West into how we–into our conception of what a hero was, into our conception of what good and bad is, into the way that we played our status games. And, I feel, and that times perfectly with the rise of Thatcher and Reagan and all the things that we can describe as neoliberalism, which is the increase in competition.

So, there is this extraordinary quote from Margaret Thatcher when she was elected, where she said, ‘Economics is the project, but the object is to change the soul.’

And so, my argument in Selfie is that if you look at the psychology, that’s what happened. There was an amazing study by Jean Twenge, where she looked at babies’ names and how they suddenly changed in the early 1980s. So, up until the early 1980s, forever in the United Kingdom and the United States, people would just name their children ordinary names like George, Alfred, Barbara, or whatever it might be. And then, starting in the early 1980s, people started to give their children unusual names, because they wanted, in her phrase, to stand out and be a star.

So, all this stuff–this increasing competition to ramp up our state of individualism, ramp up our state of wanting to stand out. There was a huge study of levels of perfectionism, which found that beginning in the 1980s and rising up through into the early 2000s, perfectionism rates soared in individuals in the United Kingdom and Canada, and in the United States. So, psychologically there is a huge amount of evidence, and there’s more too, that we changed radically as a people in the 1980s. And, those changes mirror perfectly this kind of Thatcher-Reagan project of decreasing the collective self and increasing the individualistic, competitive self. So, that’s my thesis.

Will Storr: Yeah. But, I think most people would accept that–look at pop culture in the 1980s. You had Whitney Houston, ‘The Greatest Love of All is the love of the self.’ You had Madonna’s ‘Material Girl.’ Those kind of Reagan/Thatcher values became–it changed the way that we–maybe it’s just storytelling. Maybe it’s just that Reagan and Thatcher got to set the kind of narrative tone of the culture. In a similar way that Donald Trump is now, and things are kind of moving–they call it a vibe shift these days, don’t they? But, yeah, I hear what you’re saying, and I bow to your superior depth of knowledge as an economist. But, I still think it’s remarkable, that at the same time these economic changes were being made, we had an identical change in the character of the Western self. We changed alongside, along with it.

Will Storr: Even when they’re talking about the economy?

Will Storr: Well, we play the status game on two different levels. So, individual status is important to us, but also group status. So, part of our identity–there’s a huge literature in psychology, social identity theory, very popular at the moment–which explores how our identity is made up of our group memberships. And so, yeah, I think it is very well established, not only in psychology but in neuroscience, that one source of our status is in our individual achievements, but also the wins of our group matters deeply to us. And, to see that, you’ve only got to go to an English football match, and you see how unbelievably deeply people care about their team–who they don’t actually play for–winning or losing. You see grown men in tears when their team loses some important match. So, yeah, that’s why. I mean, in psychology, that’s not a controversial position, that group status.

We suffer from group narcissism. There was that hilarious study where they asked, I forget, 20, 30 different people from different countries to add up the percentage of how much their nation had contributed to world history. And, I forget the actual percentages, but people were coming up with 300% or 400%. So, there’s that concept also of group narcissism, which I think is really interesting because there’s a social kind of restriction on us claiming status for ourselves as individuals, but there isn’t one for our groups. We’re allowed to be very boastful and claim enormous amounts of status on behalf of our groups. And, that’s nationalism. That’s the Swifties.

So, yeah, that would be my position. And, I think the position of lots of people in psychology.

Will Storr: Yeah. I think justice and truth in a vertical was downstream from status in the sense that every group–like it or not, truth is local. The Zionists in Israel have one truth, and the Palestinians have another truth. And, they both equally believe their truth would be the truth. And, especially when you’re going to things like moral truths, because really there is no such thing as a moral truth. You can’t look at a moral truth under a microscope.

Will Storr: Yeah. So, all of these things we use as symbols for the status of our group. And, that’s what you see in this recent cultural thing we’ve had in cancel culture and wokeism, in inverted commas. It’s that whole business of, ‘I demand that you sign up to the truths of my group, and if you don’t sign up to the truths of my group, then I’m going to attack you.’ And, it is attack on your status. I’m going to remove you from your positions. I’m going to destroy your reputation, da-da-da-da-da. So, I think that’s how it works. And, I think group-versus-group status competitions can be absolutely savage. And, yeah, I really think that, as I said, truth and justice is downstream from status. Ultimately, it’s about the status of groups.

Will Storr: So, this was very much a reaction to–I mean, I wrote The Status Game during lockdown, during the whole–it was a very feverish time in the culture wars; and it was just that sense of, I think we’re spending too much time thinking about other people’s moral behavior. It is that sense of moral surveillance of other people. It’s all about status, that stuff. It’s all about, ‘Are you on my side, or are you not on my side? Are you a source of status for me and my group, or are you a threat to the status of me and my group?’

And, just the feeling that that brings a lot of hatred, and a lot of aggression, and a lot of stress to other people, but also to the self. It’s not nice to live in that world of never being off your phone, judging other people, getting angry at other people, stressing out about other people’s views, and just the belief that reducing your moral sphere in a sense of trying to hone it down just to think more about your own moral behavior rather than obsessing about the moral behavior of others, felt to me like probably a fundamentally good thing that most people should try and pursue.

Will Storr: Good. Well, thank you, Russ. I appreciate it. And, thanks for engaging so thoroughly with my book. I really appreciate it, and I’ve enjoyed our chat very much. Thank you.

Will Storr: Pleasure. Thank you for having me.