Status

A guide.

I wrote a piece about how there is a huge and mostly unidentified group of thinkers who were secretly influenced by Jordan Peterson (me). They don’t tend to identify themselves because associating yourself with Jordan Peterson has become low status.

The response to the piece was almost as illuminating to me as was writing it. For one, it had the most views of anything I’ve written, but about half the likes, proving my thesis in revealed behavior: people were interested to click on his name, but more reluctant to share a public “like” and broadcast themselves as associated with him.

The more interesting response, though, was people scolding me for even bringing up the concept of status. Some said it was crass and brought down the seriousness of the entire piece. Others said that it was pathetic of me to concern myself with status and I shouldn’t worry about what people think.

The first complaint I can at least understand: it is indeed crass to bring up status, especially an estimation of your own. Status isn’t something you give yourself, it’s woven into the tension of the collective mind of all the people who know and remember you. You cannot force people to see you how you wish to be seen, you can only influence it indirectly by nearly everything you do and are: how you dress, your posture, your speech, who you associate with, even unconscious mannerisms and facial qualities that reveal inner beliefs and habits and rituals to the intuitions of those that perceive you, more accurately in the first five seconds than in the next five years.

The actual reason it’s taboo to talk about, I would imagine, is because all that is overwhelming and terrifying to bring to consciousness. The next reason is because making it too explicit only works to make you self-conscious, which is both painful and, as it happens, low-status.

The general failure of the genre of self-help is that it tends to bring more and more awareness to what people think of you, which is the easiest way to have people think less of you. It can easily spiral into something like obsessive bodybuilding, money-making, or anorexia: obsession with a particular measure of how others size us up as a way of soothing for the fact that we have no control over millions of other subtler and more meaningful measures. The cure proves incurable as increased focus on self-improvement commensurately increases self-consciousness, birthing those many strange creatures you see out in the world whom your intuition clocks as, on the whole, stilted and awkward, but in one measure at least have become super-human. Nietzsche thought that most of the people who we think of as “genius” are inwardly little gnomes with one giant ear.

Of course, part of the profound taboo of status (and our inborn ability to gauge it quite well) is that what I’m even saying now is quite uncomfortable or maybe outright taboo. We are generally not allowed to say we notice what we notice about other people, to avoid being cruel or stereotyping, but really for fear of being so harshly seen by strangers ourselves.

So, to the second complaint that I should worry less about what people think of me, I say… yes and no. No, because everyone cares about what people think of them. It is not an optional emotional response, but our direct connection to the minds of other human beings. Concerns about status are the very fibers of intersubjectivity. Without them, you are not just lonely, you have no functioning sanity. The people who have ventured the farthest from caring what others think are not swashbuckling rugged individualists (who are actually quite successful at the status game), but the men on the street who talk to themselves for lack of anyone else to remind them who they are. Sanity is something you must just leave in the unguarded banks of other people’s minds.

The sort of person who tells you not to worry about what people think of you is themselves hoping that they will be perceived as the sort of person who is above caring about what people think of them. Just one layer deep it is a self-contradictory bid for a certain type of status in the minds of a certain type of people. Otherwise, why would they communicate? We speak to be understood, and to be understood and paid attention to is a measure of status. No escaping it.

Similarly, the advice “just be yourself” comes from people for whom being themselves unreflectively gets them praise and admiration. They’re like the people with money saying they don’t care about money. You can only not care about money if you have it. When you don’t have it, you will forever struggle with the devastating double-bind that it would be much easier to get it if you had it. Hence, also, the rabid temptation to be engulfed by envy to those who do. There is a sort of universal law of accumulation: it is always easier to get more of what you already have. It is also a law that everyone eventually loses everything, though, so let’s not get carried away with our bitterness. Jocks get old and billionaires die.

Yes, though, because an even subtler takeaway, almost to the point of seeming like a trick of the light, is how this brutal law reveals why the rich get richer: Their current stores of wealth make them sufficiently unconcerned to trust their own intuition for further gain. It is not only that they have money to invest. It is that they possess the freedom from self-consciousness required to move decisively toward opportunity without being paralyzed by the fear of loss.

The same is true of status. People who are naturally confident tend to accumulate more confidence, prestige, and social ease precisely because they are less self-conscious of the possibility of losing them. They move through the world unburdened by the constant self-monitoring that afflicts just about everyone else. This is a delicate power because any person may be cast into a spiral of self-doubt with a single reminder of their fallibility. One deep-enough social wound can suddenly make someone awkwardly conscious of themselves for the rest of their lives. Every attempt to free ourselves from that self-consciousness originates from the self itself, and therefore cannot escape it. The self cannot will itself into un-self-consciousness.

So we fantasize about catastrophes in movies and TV. Our concern with our position inside the minds of others would, in those imaginary times, abate and our intuition would swell as our self-consciousness recedes. The cramped theater of self-monitoring reveals itself and through that revelation, the means to reenter the world directly.

Being the sort of person who is able to always be “awake” like this has been one of the central concerns of religion and philosophy. Kierkegaard’s solution was not rational mastery or dreaming of the crash, but a constant leap. Faith. You can’t reason yourself into freedom. The leaps only appear coherent in retrospect. Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward.

This becomes increasingly difficult still because liberal society is built on concealed status-seeking. We pretend to lower ourselves in order to elevate ourselves. We call this sophistication, emotional intelligence, branding, diplomacy. Explicitly calling it status games is deeply taboo. When an actor wins an Oscar, he says “I’m humbled.” What he means is: I have been elevated above you. He knows that overt displays of superiority would themselves lower his standing. Since it is almost impossible to tell this from the real thing, it makes the rest of us incurably cynical of the genuine fact that humbly accepting what is in front of you will paradoxically raise you up.

We all also tend to carry these private archetypes of a very specific sort of fear of failure: being forty and not famous, being on the poorer side of the rich neighborhood, too short for hot women. Whatever. Entire lives are organized around avoiding these apparitions. We keep these hand-crafted ghosts a profound secret from others not because they are too painfully true to be known, but because they aren’t. What is actually true is that our excessive self-concern is ruining the potential of a real life.

If you are at all wise, the people you instinctively recognize as truly admirable are not the people obsessed with status. In fact, at a certain level the word “status” no longer even feels appropriate for these people. It becomes Reputation. Presence. The crassness of the term itself dissolves in its own actualization.

What these people share is a willingness to endure temporary humiliation, obscurity, toil, and service without collapsing inward. They are capable of high adventure because they are not constantly calculating themselves, nor are they pretending to not care about their standing. They have just learned to invest more trust in something like a perfect measurer somewhere in the sky.