So, if people want more social status, then their behavior in your narrative feels obviously wrong to me. Choosing that behavior feels like it would encourage others to slap their own efforts down. In practice, maybe few people share my decision procedure and I ‘should’ slap other status-seekers in order to make room for myself (though the latter doesn’t strictly follow.) But even if that’s true, I don’t think it informs my instinctive reaction. (I do pity physics cranks who don’t inconvenience me personally or harm anything I care about. That loss meme always slightly horrified me, though I admit I don’t know the guy’s comic well.)
Are you arguing that most people don’t seek increased status, or that they don’t think this way?
I get that we tend to overestimate our suffering/work relative to that of others, but that doesn’t automatically make us hate everyone who wants another dollar in their bank account. Does it?
Another puzzling feature of your diagnosis: if most people treat status as a resource like money, then why wouldn’t they try to award it for service to their tribe? That feels like a natural compromise between status-seekers and those who want to stay big fish in some small pond. The alternative described in the OP seems, well, obviously cultish. It suggests a pond in which big fish claim divine right to rule (as opposed to eg claiming their rule benefits all fish) and everyone goes along with this for some reason.
What people resent is efforts to steal status, get it undeservedly. Being rewarded with status in return for service is part of the operating system, OTOH.
So, if people want more social status, then their behavior in your narrative feels obviously wrong to me. Choosing that behavior feels like it would encourage others to slap their own efforts down. In practice, maybe few people share my decision procedure and I ‘should’ slap other status-seekers in order to make room for myself (though the latter doesn’t strictly follow.) But even if that’s true, I don’t think it informs my instinctive reaction. (I do pity physics cranks who don’t inconvenience me personally or harm anything I care about. That loss meme always slightly horrified me, though I admit I don’t know the guy’s comic well.)
Are you arguing that most people don’t seek increased status, or that they don’t think this way?
I get that we tend to overestimate our suffering/work relative to that of others, but that doesn’t automatically make us hate everyone who wants another dollar in their bank account. Does it?
Another puzzling feature of your diagnosis: if most people treat status as a resource like money, then why wouldn’t they try to award it for service to their tribe? That feels like a natural compromise between status-seekers and those who want to stay big fish in some small pond. The alternative described in the OP seems, well, obviously cultish. It suggests a pond in which big fish claim divine right to rule (as opposed to eg claiming their rule benefits all fish) and everyone goes along with this for some reason.
What people resent is efforts to steal status, get it undeservedly. Being rewarded with status in return for service is part of the operating system, OTOH.