Status Laundering

Unless you can jump hierarchies, status is zero-sum.

Because of an evolutionary quirk around how humans are built, peoples’ apparent self-concept and status can be quite self-propagating. You “play high” and “play low”, and other people will take cues on how to treat you from your apparent self-regard. To us in the modern environment this will seem obviously very hackable, but, imagine the poor caveman fuck who’s trying to play pickup-artist in his preliterate village.

Let’s say you live in a tribe of three hundred people, who’ve known one another their entire lives. Status is pretty long-tail: somebody’s the village chief, a handful of people are rich or have important irreplaceable skills, most people are vaguely “normal” (albeit viciously jockeying among themselves for rank), and a couple folks are widely considered to dirt.

Imagine, then, that you suddenly jump from “lukewarm” to cock-of-the-walk. You start sending signals of tacit superiority. Your stock is up! People wonder—did something change?? Women are confused and waiting for the status-market to settle, men are threatened and wary, and someone is going to resolve this soon. They have to. Because unless you can jump hierarchies, status is zero-sum; by claiming status you devalue all other status, like you’re printing money.

Actually, I should emphasize that. Unless you can jump hierarchies, status is zero-sum.

Not everyone can have “things that not everyone can have”. Having exclusive goods, or being an exclusive good, are definitionally things that separate you from others.

So, back to your quest for caveman poontang. In the evolutionary environment, demonstrating the wrong level of respect for a person is dangerous, and, demonstrating the wrong level of apparent self-regard is inviting painful correction.

So you show up flashy and taking up space amidst all these cavemen who’ve known you your whole life. They know you’re not the biggest nor the strongest nor are you a source of usefully exploitable skills. Nor have you had a history of outplaying the other monkeys and setting them against one another to end up as a perpetual consigliere, overlooked until you can take power. (Classic Putin).

Instead, everyone is briefly confused that the town clown is acting like they’re a real person who is owed attention and respect; eventually, they laugh. Now they have common knowledge that they have rejected your claim; they resolve that you are miscalibratedly overestimating your own status.

(This is what the term “cringe” means, by the way.)

And then, the men of the village beat the hell out of you because you incorrectly thought you were hot shit. The “status smackdown” has come.

In modernity, though, there is no coordinated gang of village men to kick the shit out of you. You can just claim more status, and people will look at you and guesstimate whether that’s true, and not try to fight it.

But it’s hard to act that status when you don’t feel it. Your body contains evolutionary code for ensuring that you don’t get the shit kicked out of you by a gang of cavemen.

But you can jump ladders. You can launder status from one group, inside yourself. You can hang out with people who adore you, so as to feel good about yourself, and then show up visibly feeling good about yourself, to a new peer group.

You can be the sexiest caveman.

The lowest assistant professor at Cambridge, who’s looked down upon by all the tenured faculty, might end up with small, miserable, hidden body language, and be in the habit of making self-deprecating jokes and otherwise putting themselves down so as to earn the tolerance of their cohort.

(Mental health is mostly status, by the way.)

And then, our poor neurotic Professor is introduced to a new group by their position alone. A professor! At Cambridge! and they end up with people ready to afford them quite a lot of status—

And then our Professor fumbles it by being too timid, too apologetic. They do not wear their status well; it hangs wrong on them like a too-large coat.

If you feel bad about yourself, go hang out with people who are meaningly lower status than you and who afford you higher status, to soak their adoration and feel okay again. Then you can show up feeling confident to interact with your desired cohort. The adoration of low-status people is laundered within you, to be accepted as currency on a different status ladder.

This is a positive feedback loop for feeling good and fucking a lot.