Elite status games are responsible for the dire straits we find ourselves in today. By Lorenzo from Oz.
Here’s a very good analysis of how western society has come to be in such trouble. Our ruling class spends all its time and energy on crazy status games, where their supposed moral authority trumps reality and truth. The game is only possible because modern technology (especially social media) and their wealth (much of it plundered from common folk by taxation) increasingly insulates them from reality.
Universities across Anglo-America, and across the West more broadly, have become increasingly dominated by a Critical Theory magisterium: a teaching authority that claims ultimate or trumping moral authority. This magisterium is based on Critical Theory and its derivatives …
The elite status game explained:
It offers a powerful shared status game — affirm beliefs X, Y, Z and that makes you A Good Person. This status game spreads a supporting censorious intolerance, for if affirming beliefs X, Y, Z and makes you A Good Person, then denying X, Y, or Z makes you A Bad Person.
This justifies shaming and shunning anyone who denies X, Y, Z, because they are Bad People and its shows your commitment to what makes someone A Good Person. It shows commitment to the shared status game.
Participation on the winning side of the status game bring social and financial rewards:
This status game generates moralised cognitive assets, and you protect the value of those assets by participating in — or at least going along with — the shaming and the shunning.
The status game generates moral projects that the central administrations of universities can use to expand their authority, range of action, and so resources. An opportunity they have enthusiastically embraced. An opportunity that corporate, non-profit and government bureaucracies have also enthusiastically embraced.
Women are pre-wired for status games:
[The status game threatens] emotions (and safety through norm conformity), which are much stronger among women than men. Women are thus systematically more hostile to freedom of speech than men.
It is an exaggeration to claim that “wokery” is just the consequence of feminisation of institutions and occupations. It is, however, true that what works for … increasingly feminised institutions and occupations has been selected for.
The three underlying (false) beliefs you need to buy into to play the status game:
- A blank slate view of human nature.
- A view of social dynamics as dominated by conflict.
- An activist relationship with information: that the trumping purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it [i.e. choose power over truth].
Blank slatism is a declaration of social power over reality. The more extreme expression recently is trans, the elite belief that you can change your sex.
The blank slate view of human nature — not merely that we are born without inborn ideas, but that everything that forms us is social — means that any level of social transformation that can be conceived is attainable. Provided enough social power can be assembled — to move human action, speech and thought in the correct direction — the socially-transformative society free of oppression and alienation can be created. …
Belief in conflict excuses any behavior as moral justified:
If conflict dominates social dynamics, then the prosecution of such conflict so as to achieve human liberation becomes the ultimate moral good. Coordinating the fighters for human liberation becomes a moral urgency. To prosecute that struggle becomes the most important thing one can do. …
Since such motivated and coordinated commitments are aimed at human liberation, all institutions must either be bent to that purpose, or destroyed, so that said human liberation can be achieved. This combination of motivation, coordination and all-trumping purpose that de-legitimises all dissent is thus structured towards taking over institutions. …
Your role, should you choose to accept it:
A supporting status game [has evolved] that people can adhere to without having any idea of where the underlying ideas come from or what their purpose is. People who have never heard of, or read, Marcuse can nevertheless prosecute his repressive tolerance strategy because they are committed to a status game of believing X makes you a Good Person, so believing not-X makes you a Bad One.
This status strategy thereby turns affirmed beliefs and modes of speech into moralised cognitive assets that folk in elite networks — or aspiring to join or create elite networks — can (and do) add to their other assets. There then develops an entire media/education/IT/advocacy non-profit/corporate/government bureaucracy infrastructure that prosecutes this strategy. They do this both on their own behalf as individuals — albeit in networks — and as a service they are selling: these are the narratives that affirming make you a good person, let us help you curate your information flows to build, maintain and protect your moralised cognitive assets.
For example, academics and journalists live in la la land because the deplorables live in reality:
Immigration:
One of the more contemptible patterns of our time is elite folk — who live by their networks, their connections, their social capital — sneering at working-class folk who arc up at having having their locality-based social capital swamped by newcomers flooding into their communities. …
Feminized society:
The surface doctrines of left-progressivism … can, and do, evolve over time. What is selected for is what works better to coordinate and motivate in various cultural and institutional circumstances. Hence the current selection is for what works best in feminised institutions and occupations. … The evolutionary mechanism that this most builds on is human status-seeking. More particularly, status-through-moral-propriety.
Humans have always been willing to shame-and-shun fellow humans who violate accepted norms. … The women’s movement became semi-notorious for it. Left-progressivism has evolved on the basis of basic, foundational claims that allow the very effective mobilisation of the shame-and-shun mechanisms. …
The two big claims of the status-game players are highly narcissistic:
- All unwanted constraint is oppression.
- What is in my head is better than decades, centuries, millennia of human experience and achievement.
The first claim is obviously highly motivating: who does not have unwanted constraints they wish to get rid of? It is also endlessly motivating, as there are always unwanted constraints, so there is always oppression, so-defined. It allows any blue-haired graduate of an elite university to claim to be oppressed.
The notion that any part of her life experience is somehow in the same continuum as, say, a zek in a Soviet gulag; or a slave being worked to death in a Caribbean or Brazilian plantation; or a Neolithic farmer woman forced to live and breed with the rapist who killed all her male relatives; is utterly, utterly offensive. But playing to people’s narcissism — indeed, enabling them to moralise their narcissism — is a social selection advantage. (This is so, provided that no reality-tests or character tests get in the way.)
The second claim … is a rampantly narcissistic claim [that flows] quite directly from making human liberation the all-encompassing social goal that trumps all other human achievement.
Blank slatism ignores genetic history, especially bottlenecks:
Humans are not blank slates. We are evolved beings with genetic variations between individuals and variations in the distribution of genetically-transmitted traits in different human populations. The longer a human population has been separate from other populations, the more differences in the distribution of such traits there will be.
The more intense the genetic-selection bottlenecks, the more differences in the distribution of such traits there will be. The male expression of human genes is systematically much better at forming and maintaining effective teams than the female expression of human genes. This is in part because of different evolutionary roles across human history but those differences became much more intense due to the y-chromosome Neolithic bottleneck that arose once farming and animal herding had developed enough to create increasingly intense social conflict over farm and grass lands.
Only about 1-in-17 male lineages made it through the bottleneck. Female lineages were unaffected. Effective male teams killed less effective male teams, took their women as the spoils of victory and bred with them.
Generations of women bred with their rapists who had killed all their male relatives. It is horrible to contemplate. (That romantic novel trope of the male brute tamed by a love of a good woman, well …)
The continuing consequence has been that boys and men are much better at teams than girls and women. Hence teenage boy sporting teams regularly crush adult female national teams. Hence — given that institutions and organisation are formalised teams — there are issues with the feminisation of institutions, organisations, occupations.
Human social dynamics are dominated by conflict? No, the opposite is true:
Every human society is dominated by cooperative mechanisms. The more complex and larger the society, the more that is true.
We are the biosphere champions at non-kin cooperation because we are so able to develop cooperative mechanisms. Western states came to dominate the planet because Medieval Christendom — riffing off how Rome did it — put non-kin cooperation on social steroids.
If you see human societies as dominated by conflict, not only are you basing your program on false claims; you will systematically undervalue, and under-consider, such cooperative mechanisms. You will therefore degrade or break such mechanisms.
We can see this process in progressive-governed cities in the US, where the mad program of redistributing status breaks giving prestige to pro-social actions and stigmatising anti-social actions. …
Decolonization has it backwards:
What is “de-colonisation” but seeking to replicate in high-functioning societies that passed the stress-tests of history with flying colours the patterns of lower-functioning societies that failed them? …
Everything in the elite status game turns to s***, like it always does for the comrades:
Activism corrupts and degrades every realm of human action whenever it imposes on that realm pre-set requirements from outside. We can very much observe this in the degrading of area after area of popular entertainment by the imposing of the “Diversity Message” on behalf of the (almost entirely mythical) “Modern Audience”. …
The Trans madness is an excellent example of this. Claiming that a person with a penis is a woman … requires monumental levels of not-noticing and rationalisations to support a bunch of evil lies that destroy lives. Something that hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated their ability and willingness to do. But their earlier confreres did the same with Castro, Mao, Stalin …
The current cohort display by their not-noticings and rationalisations their commitment to the [status games] of the universities especially strongly with Trans. Such status claims have been spread via gay and lesbian non-profits — who shifted to Trans to keep the donation flows going — and by mainstream media whose business model has become selling the narratives the affirming of which made one A Good Person. …
Left-progressive governance is regularly a disaster for human flourishing. Mass murder, terror-famines, tyranny, poverty, economic stagnation, intensely exploitive Party-elites: these are the wages of left-progressive governance when it achieves the social dominance it seeks.
Even when it just achieves local control, we see failure. Left-progressive urban government in the US is a litany of failure, from street non-cleaning through entrenched homelessness to crime surges. The current “woke” version of left-progressivism — which seeks to redistribute status — breaks a basic social mechanism, as it separates prestige and propriety from pro-social behaviour and strips stigmatisation from anti-social behaviour. Elevated crime, economic stagnation, fiscal stress, problems with providing basic services: this is what we can observe in such cities.
How can the elite sustain such harmful status games?
So, the question arises, how can something based on such false claims, and which has a litany of failures of governance, get so far, and does so in democratic societies? This is due to two factors:
- The expansion of the unaccountable classes.
- The accelerating effect of the coordinating unreality of social media.
The unaccountable classes are all those who are paid to turn up, so their incomes do not directly rely on their performance generating ongoing consent for their income. They include a large proportion of paid employees. They include most people in any bureaucracy, corporate, non-profit or government. They include academics, teachers, public broadcasting journalists
The social benefits of believing in the Emperor’s New Clothes have long been around in the ruling class
If one is not subject to the reality-test of performance, then status games that do not require reality-tests become very, very attractive. … Consider the package it generates: that its adherents own morality; that those who disagree are morally illegitimate and epistemically incompetent; that the past is irretrievably sinful, the present oppressive; that the imagined future — from which we have no information — provides a reliable, indeed superior, benchmark of judgement; that nothing is ever their fault….
The networking unreality of social media has, demonstrably, generated an accelerating effect. That on social media we interact with narrow avatars of humans that lack the full-feedback effects of a living person means that the self-deceiving mechanisms of relational aggression — where you hide your aggression from yourself, and others, behind moral or social concern — can get full flight. Linguistic taboos become king, while online mobbing is so much quicker and easier than the real thing.
These are social displays of performative “goodness” and of casting out “devils”. But a performance of goodness structured to impose costs — including cruel costs — on others is just the ticket for the socially-impoverished feedback-narrowness of social media.
Social media provides a remarkably low personal cost, but potentially very large effect on others, vehicles for moralised social cruelty.
Vile people playing vile status games:
As both Rousseau and Marx were pretty vile human beings, we should be deeply sceptical of any notion of human good emanating from such people, because it will be a conception compatible with being a vile human being. Which is exactly what we find: a whole series of monsters, both great and small, have been attracted to, and empowered by, such politics precisely because it not only hides, it actively mobilises, psychopathy behind grand purposes.
The politics of appropriation of the property of others, and the elimination of entire classes of people, is a politics of violent aggression. It attracts violent aggressors.
Commenters:
Reality needs to bite. When I was teaching one of my female colleagues was a classic liberal leftist. One parent and teacher evening she encountered the father of one of her Muslim students, very middle-class, wearing a suit, well-spoken. When she stood to shake his hand he refused, saying that he would not shake hands with a woman. This stunned her, brittle illusions fell away in an instant. Next day she was still furious. She’d been struck by a reality she never suspected.
Now that you know about elite status games, it is hard not to see how they are the underlying organizing principle of modern politics. For instance, it explains why the ruling class always have the same crazy opinions, and sticks to them so dogmatically in the face of evidence — you must conform precisely, or lose the benefits of playing the game.
