Think about how broad that word is: status. You can have a status effect in a video game, where you get burned, or poisoned, or put to sleep. You can give a status update on Twitter, indicating what you’re currently up to. You can check the status of a medical patient by running tests over their body.
Even if we constrain ourselves to social status, the word sounds like it should cover something rather general, rather qualitative. “What’s your social status?” “Oh, I’m in good standing with my friends, my relationship with my parents is a bit rocky, I’m planning to go on a date with my new girlfriend in a few hours...”
All of that info pertains to your status as in the state you inhabit in the social graph, but it’s not a direct answer to what people are really wondering about, when they wonder about social status. Your social status isn’t a qualitative account of every facet of your social life. It’s a scalar quantity. You have more of it, or you have less of it. And you generally want to have more of it.
But what is “it”? Why do we use such a vague, almost euphemistic term, when it’s clear that we really mean something quite specific? It’s like how we use terms like “bathroom” or “restroom”, when often times they don’t have baths at all, and aren’t primarily intended for rest. They’re primarily for excreting bodily waste, which is something so gross and uncomfortable to think about that we’d rather not have a particularly descriptive name for the room where we do it.
My view is that having a more precise name for status would make us uncomfortable in a rather similar way, which is why we don’t have one. But, for the sake of understanding ourselves a bit better, let’s stare straight into the heart of darkness. What is the definition of status? Status is the extent to which others feel motivated to get on your good side, to confer benefits upon themselves.
It’s about having resources, whether monetary, material, social, or attentional, that make others want to suck up to you. Rich people are high-status, primarily because they have lots of money and power to cause the outcomes they want. And maybe, you think, if you just flatter them enough, if you walk on eggshells in their presence, they’ll start to want good outcomes for you. They might use that power to bend your fate in the directions you want.
Status is also about having connections to others, who are themselves powerful. Befriending someone with powerful friends, even if that someone lacks direct power and influence, is still a good power move for you, personally. It gets you a foot in the door. It brings you to the attention of the powerful. It gives you a better angle from which to vie for their favor.
“Power” doesn’t have to mean power on a civilizational scale, by the way, although that generally helps. Someone can be high-status, in your eyes, simply because they have power in domains that you, personally care about. They might be a figurehead in your local community, that most of the outside world finds distasteful. They might even your boss, who has the power to determine the future of your career. They might just be romantic partner, whose favor you want simply because you enjoy their presence in your life. (Their attention is itself a kind of resource they control your access to).
In all of these cases, the basic dynamic of “aim to get and stay on their good side, possibly by deceptive and dishonest means” applies robustly. People will lie to their partners, flatter them, keep certain pieces of information conveniently hidden, in the same way they might to their boss. In the same way they might in front of a community figurehead. You’ll always try to be on your “best behavior”, lest you lose the favor of someone with the power to make or break your life.
People don’t want to acknowledge that this is the heart of status. After all, they like playing status games! They don’t want to confess that there are incentives for strategic deception, flattery, and sycophancy everywhere. They don’t want to remind others, or even themselves, that they probably let perverse incentives of status games guide their social behavior. But they do! Everybody vies for good standing among the powerful, often with unvirtuous strategies. And it’s worth staring into that anti-meme, to describe the phenomenon with honest eyes.
Interestingly, looking at status through this lens actually makes the world look less bleak in some ways. It’s commonly assumed that status is purely relative, such that your absolute social value doesn’t matter, only what percentage of the population has more or less of it than you do. In my frame, that claim translates to: “It doesn’t matter how valuable it is to be in good standing with you. It only matters relative to how valuable it is to be in good standing with everybody else.”
But that’s just false! Imagine a community of five people stranded on a desert island, each worth with unique and important skills, each worth having as a friend. In this community, it makes sense for everyone to be careful to remain in good standing with everybody else. In other words, everybody has some amount of status.
Contrast this with the mental image of five back-stabbing jerks, who know each other to be back-stabbing jerks, stranded on a desert island. All of them believe (rightly, let’s suppose) that it would be a waste of effort to try to get into good standing with anyone else on the island. All you can hope to do is backstab them before they backstab you. There, everybody treats everyone else as low status. None of them are interested in sucking up to each other in the slightest.
That’s not to say that relative status plays no important role. Say you have two high-status people who hate each other, with one being somewhat but not dramatically higher-status than the other. Both are interested in hanging out with you on a given day. Ultimately, you want to get on the good sides of both of these individuals. But you can only choose one. And all else being equal, you’ll pick the one with higher status. You want to court the favor of someone with more power, influence, connections, and resources.
But that’s a special case. There are many cases where multiple people gain status at once, without depriving it from anyone else. The desert island scenario is one example. Another would be if you had two friends who both had work, but different days off. Hanging out with one wouldn’t take anything away from the other, because you couldn’t hang out with both at the same time anyway. So it’s not just that you want to stay on their good sides. It’s that there’s nothing keeping you from doing so.
So, I think defining status clearly helps strip away some misconceptions about how it operates. More important than any analysis this frame enables, though, I want you to remember the framework itself. Like I said, it’s anti-memetic. It’s an uncomfortable truth, and easy to let yourself forget. But read it out loud if you can:
“Status is the extent to which others are motivated to get on your good side, to confer benefits upon themselves.” Their methods for doing this can be honest or dishonest, virtuous or vice-ridden. But vying for the favor of those who can give you what you want — that is the conceptual core. It’s the heart of the anti-meme. And if you want to perform a clear-eyed analysis of the world around you, it’s important to not let yourself forget it.
The definition of status is an anti-meme
Think about how broad that word is: status. You can have a status effect in a video game, where you get burned, or poisoned, or put to sleep. You can give a status update on Twitter, indicating what you’re currently up to. You can check the status of a medical patient by running tests over their body.
Even if we constrain ourselves to social status, the word sounds like it should cover something rather general, rather qualitative. “What’s your social status?” “Oh, I’m in good standing with my friends, my relationship with my parents is a bit rocky, I’m planning to go on a date with my new girlfriend in a few hours...”
All of that info pertains to your status as in the state you inhabit in the social graph, but it’s not a direct answer to what people are really wondering about, when they wonder about social status. Your social status isn’t a qualitative account of every facet of your social life. It’s a scalar quantity. You have more of it, or you have less of it. And you generally want to have more of it.
But what is “it”? Why do we use such a vague, almost euphemistic term, when it’s clear that we really mean something quite specific? It’s like how we use terms like “bathroom” or “restroom”, when often times they don’t have baths at all, and aren’t primarily intended for rest. They’re primarily for excreting bodily waste, which is something so gross and uncomfortable to think about that we’d rather not have a particularly descriptive name for the room where we do it.
My view is that having a more precise name for status would make us uncomfortable in a rather similar way, which is why we don’t have one. But, for the sake of understanding ourselves a bit better, let’s stare straight into the heart of darkness. What is the definition of status? Status is the extent to which others feel motivated to get on your good side, to confer benefits upon themselves.
It’s about having resources, whether monetary, material, social, or attentional, that make others want to suck up to you. Rich people are high-status, primarily because they have lots of money and power to cause the outcomes they want. And maybe, you think, if you just flatter them enough, if you walk on eggshells in their presence, they’ll start to want good outcomes for you. They might use that power to bend your fate in the directions you want.
Status is also about having connections to others, who are themselves powerful. Befriending someone with powerful friends, even if that someone lacks direct power and influence, is still a good power move for you, personally. It gets you a foot in the door. It brings you to the attention of the powerful. It gives you a better angle from which to vie for their favor.
“Power” doesn’t have to mean power on a civilizational scale, by the way, although that generally helps. Someone can be high-status, in your eyes, simply because they have power in domains that you, personally care about. They might be a figurehead in your local community, that most of the outside world finds distasteful. They might even your boss, who has the power to determine the future of your career. They might just be romantic partner, whose favor you want simply because you enjoy their presence in your life. (Their attention is itself a kind of resource they control your access to).
In all of these cases, the basic dynamic of “aim to get and stay on their good side, possibly by deceptive and dishonest means” applies robustly. People will lie to their partners, flatter them, keep certain pieces of information conveniently hidden, in the same way they might to their boss. In the same way they might in front of a community figurehead. You’ll always try to be on your “best behavior”, lest you lose the favor of someone with the power to make or break your life.
People don’t want to acknowledge that this is the heart of status. After all, they like playing status games! They don’t want to confess that there are incentives for strategic deception, flattery, and sycophancy everywhere. They don’t want to remind others, or even themselves, that they probably let perverse incentives of status games guide their social behavior. But they do! Everybody vies for good standing among the powerful, often with unvirtuous strategies. And it’s worth staring into that anti-meme, to describe the phenomenon with honest eyes.
Interestingly, looking at status through this lens actually makes the world look less bleak in some ways. It’s commonly assumed that status is purely relative, such that your absolute social value doesn’t matter, only what percentage of the population has more or less of it than you do. In my frame, that claim translates to: “It doesn’t matter how valuable it is to be in good standing with you. It only matters relative to how valuable it is to be in good standing with everybody else.”
But that’s just false! Imagine a community of five people stranded on a desert island, each worth with unique and important skills, each worth having as a friend. In this community, it makes sense for everyone to be careful to remain in good standing with everybody else. In other words, everybody has some amount of status.
Contrast this with the mental image of five back-stabbing jerks, who know each other to be back-stabbing jerks, stranded on a desert island. All of them believe (rightly, let’s suppose) that it would be a waste of effort to try to get into good standing with anyone else on the island. All you can hope to do is backstab them before they backstab you. There, everybody treats everyone else as low status. None of them are interested in sucking up to each other in the slightest.
That’s not to say that relative status plays no important role. Say you have two high-status people who hate each other, with one being somewhat but not dramatically higher-status than the other. Both are interested in hanging out with you on a given day. Ultimately, you want to get on the good sides of both of these individuals. But you can only choose one. And all else being equal, you’ll pick the one with higher status. You want to court the favor of someone with more power, influence, connections, and resources.
But that’s a special case. There are many cases where multiple people gain status at once, without depriving it from anyone else. The desert island scenario is one example. Another would be if you had two friends who both had work, but different days off. Hanging out with one wouldn’t take anything away from the other, because you couldn’t hang out with both at the same time anyway. So it’s not just that you want to stay on their good sides. It’s that there’s nothing keeping you from doing so.
So, I think defining status clearly helps strip away some misconceptions about how it operates. More important than any analysis this frame enables, though, I want you to remember the framework itself. Like I said, it’s anti-memetic. It’s an uncomfortable truth, and easy to let yourself forget. But read it out loud if you can:
“Status is the extent to which others are motivated to get on your good side, to confer benefits upon themselves.” Their methods for doing this can be honest or dishonest, virtuous or vice-ridden. But vying for the favor of those who can give you what you want — that is the conceptual core. It’s the heart of the anti-meme. And if you want to perform a clear-eyed analysis of the world around you, it’s important to not let yourself forget it.