Will Storr - The Status Game Review
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” --E.O. Wilson
What if I told you everything from Hitler to genocide to woke witch hunts and the accomplishments of the Victorians and the entirety of scientific progress were all driven by the same thing?
Status games.
My best condensation of what status is, according to Will Storr:
Status is a collaborative game with culturally imprinted rules, that we play anytime people who have mutual knowledge of the rules and game to be played are near each other.
It’s so deeply rooted, we play it whether we want to or not. Babies and toddlers play status games when looking at people and when interacting. Strangers in elevators, who have never seen each other before and never will again, play status games in the brief interval they share the elevator - who has the fancier luggage, who is getting off on the higher floor, and so on. Status games are profoundly fundamental to our daily behavior and what we value and pursue in life.
And we play them constantly. Aiming for a promotion at work. Dressing up for a date or a night out. Getting your kid into the “best” school. Eyeing each other in the elevator. Tut tutting at that one neighbor who’s let their lawn get unkempt and weedy. Keeping up with the Joneses.
One of my own favorites - he points out that car manufacturers in the 50’s managed to convince people that the length of your car was a status symbol, leading to an arms race where vehicles ballooned from an average length of 150 inches in the 1930’s to an average length of 180 inches in the 50’s-60’s. That’s right - the classic “land whale” only exists because of status games.
More, status games are hugely impactful to our happiness, health, and well being. British civil servants show a 4x difference in all cause mortality when comparing the top to bottom rungs. And that's not just "toffs have better habits," either - if you look at smokers, for example, higher status smokers have fewer negative health effects than lower status smokers. In baboons all fed an unhealthy diet, where researchers artificially elevate or depress their status in the group, the degree of arteriosclerosis they suffered was directly correlated to their new, altered status position. This is to say, status is directly protective of negative outcomes from bad habits.
But back to humans. There are obvious physical status games - height, beauty, mass, strength. But these are less interesting, because they're more or less fixed.
The three types of mental and cultural status games, the ones we have some level of control and volition in participating in, are Dominance, Virtue, and Success.
What are some examples?
Dominance: war of course, is the original dominance game. In our hunter gatherer past, those who were good at war got more status.
Virtue: religion - particularly being a good Christian / Catholic in the Middle Ages, where belief in hell was so prevalent that the Church was the richest organization on the planet, owning more than half of Germany, 44% of France, and where laws were passed by the state to limit the religious donations of rich people because the Church was so disproportionately powerful relative to any given monarch.
Success: the "Republic of Letters" and organizations like the Royal Society, where status was invested in you by your peers for progress in scientific and philosophical understanding and technology.
Storr takes a while to spell it out, but virtue and dominance games suck and are the source of basically everything bad and all the mountains of skulls in our past and present.
Success status games, however, are where it's at.
“Prestige is our most marvellous craving. It’s a bribe that induces us into being useful, benefitting the interests of the tribe.”
-Geoffrey Miller
The “secret to our success,” in this paradigm, is harnessing our drives for status iteratively, within a culture that lets the baseline ratchet upwards. And pace Henrich, another element of that success is likely the WEIRD societal atomization brought on along with the weakening of extended family structures. Families are inherently more forgiving and less competitive domains than society at large, and unleashing our individual drives for status in that more competitive environment is likely a big part of WEIRD success.
The way to progress as a society is to tune your culture so that most of the games people play are "success" games rather than dominance and virtue games. Culture here is the overall memetic engine that tunes our drive for status towards productive ends. We used to be rather good at this - some peak examples probably being Victorian, Napoleonic France, or Roman society, whose accomplishments and technologies and ability to achieve things are still legendary.
We are rather less good at that in the US today: our "success games" - like academia and science - are ailing and weak, and virtue / dominance games like woke / DEI are running rampant, with ~$8B a year spent on DEI training, a horrific deadweight loss that is literally just burning billions on an insatiable pyre of appeasement and "please don't cancel me."
Storr actually chalks the surge in woke, DEI, Occupy, and the "new left" to elite overproduction, incidentally, particularly amongst liberal arts degree holders, and in this sense, the entire DEI billions-pyre can be seen as a sort of placating jobs placement program for those same elites.
There are still local pockets of "success games" driving progress - Silicon Valley being the most prominent example. Does it surprise anyone that in our culture, essentially the entire media has staked out an explicitly adversarial position towards everything SV produces and represents?
What’s the difference between Victorian England, Rome, and the West today? We're post modern, post irony, post sincerity. Productivity has soared, while compensation has stagnated except for the top decile.
It is harder than ever to become “elite” under these conditions, yet more kids than ever are going to colleges and hoping to become “elite” with their degrees. But if only the top 10% (arguably, the top 3%) qualify, 90% of them aren’t going to achieve their expectations.
Harking back to elite overproduction, perhaps the bar to participate in our "success" games is too high now, and this is a recurring and very dangerous condition to be in.
Storr points out that all the real "mountains of skulls" incidents in our collective pasts originate when a large enough portion of middle and higher status people feel like the status games we are playing don't work any more for them - when the game is rigged, when “those a*holes” (whoever they may be - elites, Treaty of Versailles signatories, the bourgeoisie, Tutsis, etc) are taking all the status for themselves without sharing any with those below. And then, we get things like the Chinese civil war and Great Leap Forward, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Hutu's genociding the Tutsi's, and much more.
All this talk of "national divorce" in the US seems an ominous foreboding of a similar trend, with neither side feeling like they have a leg on the status ladder. The "new left" with their DEI and woke witch hunts, and the "new right" with their skepticism of ALL elites, higher education in toto, and mistrust of the entire mainstream media complex.
The "new left" of course, has pivoted to "virtue" and "dominance" status games, with the DEI purity spiral of cancelling and policing everyone's thoughts and words, as well as immolating billions in value to zero productive ends, and ruining the lives of various unfortunate individuals. The "new right" elected Donald Trump to the highest office. Twice. And that’s been divisive enough he’s well on track to beat Gerry Ford for “president with most assassination attempts.”
It's not a comforting picture, and Storr doesn't really have any advice beyond the personal.
What are Storr's calls to action?
His advice:
Live and demonstrate warmth, competence, and sincerity, thereby entering positive sum status games with the people around you.
Status is free to give out - when you feel tempted to dominate, consider enhancing your own and others' prestige by being respectful instead. “It’s easy to forget we have status to give, that it costs nothing and it never runs out. Creating small moments of prestige means always seeking opportunities to use it.”
Don’t take part in tyrannies / “virtue” status games, and consciously reduce your moral sphere and moral judgments - "the drug of morality poisons empathy" as well as our potential for collective success games.
Play many games, don’t invest everything in one because that can fail catastrophically at the individual and societal level (with Nazi's and Communism being the most prominent historic catastrophic failures).
One thing that Storr doesn’t consider - how a pivot to “success” status games is likely the biggest factor in driving fertility rates downwards worldwide, as countries develop. High fertility is intrinsically correlated with “virtue” status games. Who has high fertility now? The Amish. Orthodox Jews. The Mormons, although they’re just about “normie” levels now after a decade or two of steep declines. In the developing world only, some remaining patches of devout Catholics.
As we’ve stopped playing religious virtue games at the societal scale, or at least taking them existentially seriously, fertility falls everywhere, because kids carry multiple negatives in the “success” status games most of the world agrees on and plays now.
The one social status game we ALL seem to play is education and career. The better your university, the higher status, the STEM-ier or higher or more money making your degree, the higher status, and of course "what do you do" is the ultimate social and status litmus test we subject any new person we run across to.
Kids are negative status in this schema - they impair your ability to work, they make it harder to get promotions, they take a ton of TIME in general (not to mention financial costs)…the only time they even *approach* any value in the status game is when they go off to college 18 years later, and even then you can only achieve any status through them if they’re at an Ivy or getting a Physics Phd or whatever.
And of course, parents know this - the Red Queen’s Race to get into an Ivy is more competitive than it’s ever been, and ALREADY starts at "we need to get on the waiting list 6 months before birth to get precious Jayden into the right pre-school and then grind furiously and non-stop for 18 years, or their chances at getting into Harvard are *ruined!*"
But what can the solution be? I don’t think it’s to turn back to more virtue games - we’ve already got too many of those, and don’t need any more mountains of skulls. “Make having kids higher status” sounds nice, but operationally it just doesn’t work if they directly impair the only success status games we all seem to agree on - education and career1.
Despite these misgivings, the concept of “success” status games versus dominance and virtue games is a powerful and useful one itself. If you only took one idea away from the book, I think it should be this one - that everything good in life and society and technology lies in harnessing our individual drives for status into “success” games, and that everything bad in life likely stems from harnessing those drives into dominance and virtue games.
So how to live our lives? Pace Storr - we should focus on playing success games, in multiple domains. Play to win, because winning in success games lifts us all up. Play for objective measures, not for “purity” or your ingroup winning at the expense of others. And above all, use this lens to look at society, and your actions, and your fellows’ actions, so that you can guide your own and your children’s actions in net positive and net accretive ways instead of the net destructive ways of virtue and dominance games.
What incentive would work in this world? This is difficult to fix at the Ivy level, which will always have many more applicants than spots and has no reason to participate, but the various states have R1 universities in them.
The state of California, for example, has the well-regarded UC system, and could guarantee spots to selected elite parents based on pretty simple criteria. Say both of you have a prestigious degree and/or have paid >$XXX,XXX amount in taxes to California over the years. Issue those parents a guaranteed non-transferrable slot in the UC system (inclusive of the good ones like UC Berkeley and UCLA) to any of their kids as long as their kid scores above Y SAT / ACT score. Keep issuing slots for every $XXX,XXX in taxes they continue to pay.
You can extend this to ANY R1 university in any state, or more broadly to any state-controlled well-regarded university in any country, with whatever threshold makes sense. Poof! The educational arms race has had some of the pressure taken off of it, and elites (however you define them) are directly incentivized to have more kids.
The schools only have so many spots? Well legislate that you have to use some of those $XXX,XXX tax dollars to expand the universities then, this is a self-perpetuating system!