Interaction Entwined

Hunter Gatherer Notes

• Turn the sound down on your conversations, and watch the actions. Act like an animal behaviorist, especially when interpreting interactions between you and your romantic partner. Much can be learned about the actual emotions in play when you stop listening to words and start watching behavior.
• Be an animal behaviorist on your own emotional state as well. And recognize that if you have contempt or disgust or persistent anger for someone with whom you are in a relationship, these feelings are incompatible with love.
• Avoid dating apps, if you can. The risks are many, including that seeing so many possible partners may make you less interested in going deep with any individual. In such a sea of opportunity, it is also possible to become a perfectionist—to get the sense that the “perfect one” must be out there, if you just keep swiping long enough. Best to have real-life interactions early and often in any relationship that you think might be worth developing.
• Encourage alloparenting of your children—by grandparents, older siblings, friends. If you have only adult women, or only adult men, in your household, an alloparent of the opposite sex stands to be particularly beneficial for your children.

Status Anxiety Notes

Once we achieve food and shelter our main objective tends to be love, which we gain as a result of our social status. Money, fame, and influence are seen as mere tokens to gaining it rather than ends in themselves. Discomfort can be suffered for a long period of time as long as it isn’t accompanied with humiliation or lovelessness.

Most people’s stories can be defined by the quest for sexual love (in music and literature it’s socially accepted) and the quest for the love of the world (more shameful). To cover up the latter it is usually expressed in a more acceptable drive for economic stability.

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

Provided that it is not accompanied by humiliation, discomfort can be endured for long periods without complaint.

“No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned around when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met “cut us dead”, and acted as if we were non-existent things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily torture would be a relief” – William James, The Principles of Psychology (Boston, 1980).

The increase in wealth, food supply, scientific knowledge, consumer goods, physical security, life expectancy, and economic opportunity has provided the Western civilization with great luxury. However, it has also increased social anxiety and a perceived sense of deprivation and fear of it. We compare our wealth and esteem to reference groups that we consider to be our equals (the Joneses).

We cannot be impressed by what we have over our forebearers, we are only influenced by our friends and peers in the current time. We only envy those who we identify with and are in our social circles. The more people we purport to be our equals the more people we have to envy.

William James:

“With no attempt there can be no failure and with no failure no humiliation. So, our self-esteem depends on what we back ourselves to be and do.”

Self-esteem = Success/Pretensions.

“To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified. There is a strange lightness in the heart when one’s nothingness in a particular area is accepted in good faith. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender? ‘Thank God!’ we say, ‘those illusions are gone.’ Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.”

The dangers of disappointed expectation must further be increased by any erosion of a faith in a next world. Those who can believe that what happens on earth is prelude to an eternal existence will offset any tendency to envy with the thought that the success of others is momentary. But when a belief in an afterlife is dismissed as a childish and scientifically impossible, the pressure to succeed and find fulfilment will inevitably be intensified by the awareness that one has only a fleeting opportunity to do so.

Expectations have raised dramatically with the biographies and stories of self-made men and women rising from the ashes of misfortune. Unintentionally generating anxiety for the public who feel cheated by life and ashamed by their lack of comparative value. What followed this was the media advertising products and increased standards of living that were unattainable by most, and excessive. 

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

Snobbery is usually committed by those who are in fear of being reduced on the social ladder or are suffering from status anxiety. They must find faults with others to appear comparably better off. They practice overt social or cultural bias and profess importance to one thing over another, depending greatly on the system.

We may be endowed with the wisdom of Solomon and have the resourcefulness and intelligence of Odysseus, but if we are unable to wield socially recognized badges of our qualities, our existence will remain a matter of raw indifference to them.

Our earliest experience of love is that of unconditional love from our parents. As adults we must perform to achieve the same level of acceptance.

A youthful resentment of snobbery isn’t enough to save us from gradually turning into snobs ourselves, because being insolently neglected almost naturally fosters a hunger to gain the attention of our neglectors (disliking people rarely being a sufficient reason for not wanting them to like us).

Snobs combine a weak capacity for independent judgement with an appetite for the views of influential people. So, their views are greatly influenced by the media. It is a collective disease that breeds more snobs by unseen emotional scarring.

Intelligent Misanthropy

When we begin to scrutinize the opinions of others, philosophers have long noted, we stand to make a discovery at once saddening and curiously liberating: we will discern that the views of the majority of the population on the majority of subjects are perforated with extraordinary confusion and error.

Painful though it may be to acknowledge the poverty of public opinion, the very act of doing so may somewhat ease our anxieties about status, mitigate our exhausting desire to ensure that others think well of us, and calm our panicked longing for signs of love.

The approval of others may be said to matter to us in two very different ways: materially, because the neglect of the community can bring with it physical discomfort and danger; and psychologically, because it can prove impossible to retain confidence in ourselves once others have ceased to accord us signs of respect.

As Schopenhauer put the question, “Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of his audience if it were known to him that, with the exception of one or two, it consisted entirely of deaf people?”

The problem with thinking of the public this way is you are left with very few friends. If you believe the public to be imbeciles there is a high chance you will slide into the behaviors of the rich.

A Political Perspective on Modern Status Anxiety

London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney (2004): The ability to accumulate wealth is prized as proof of the presence of: creativity, courage, intelligence and stamina. The presence or absence of other virtues— humility and godliness, for example—rarely detains attention. That success is no longer attributed to “luck,” “providence” or “God” is a reflection of the collective secular faith we now place on individual will power. Financial failures are judged to be similarly merited, with unemployment’s bearing some of the shame that physical cowardice earned in warrior eras.

The possession of material wealth becomes desirable not principally because such goods provide any subjective pleasure (though they may do this, too) but because they confer honor.

Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another—which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should become more aware that individual goals will most likely fail to deliver salvation from anxiety.

Political Change

However frustrated we are with our social hierarchy, we are likely to go along with it on the assumption that it is too entrenched and must be too well founded to be questioned. We are led to believe, in other words, that communities and the principles underpinning them are, practically speaking, immutable— even, somehow, natural.

Within a given society, political consciousness may be said to emerge through the realization that certain opinions paraded as a priori truths by influential figures may in fact be relative and open to investigation. If they have been declaimed with sufficient confidence, however, these truisms may seem to belong to the fabric of existence no less than the trees and the sky, though they have been—a political perspective insists—wholly invented by individuals with specific practical and psychological interests to defend.

“The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.” – Karl Marx

Community

Whether we are cruel or impatient, dim or dull, we must recognize that we are all of us detained and bound together by shared vulnerabilities. Beneath our flaws, there are always two driving forces: fear and the desire for love.

The more humiliating, shallow, debased or ugly we take ordinariness to be, the stronger will be our desire to set ourselves apart. The more corrupt the community, the stronger the lure of individual achievement.

During a Mass (Christianity I assume), the public nature of the performance helps us to realize that if others around us are responding as we are to the music, then they cannot be the indecipherable enigmas we imagined them to be. Their emotions run along the same tracks as ours, they are stirred by the very same things and so, whatever the differences in our appearance and manner, we possess a common core, out of which a connection can be forged and extended far beyond this one occasion. A group of strangers who initially seemed so foreign may thus in time, through the power of choral music, acquire some of the genuine intimacy of friends, slipping out from behind their stony facades to share, if only briefly, in a beguiling vision of humankind.

People sacrificed their self-identity to be a part of a community. In this circumstance a religious group where they are able to commit to something beyond themselves and suspend disbelief. 

However unpleasant anxieties over status may be, it is difficult to imagine a good life entirely free of them, for the fear of failing and disgracing oneself in the eyes of others is an inevitable consequence of harboring ambitions, of favoring one set of outcomes over another and of having regard for individuals besides oneself. Status anxiety is the price we pay for acknowledging that there is a public distinction between a successful and an unsuccessful life.

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attempted, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognized by, and critical of, those of the majority. While maintaining a firm grip on the differences between success and failure, good and bad, shameful and honorable, these five entities have endeavored to remold our sense of what may rightfully be said to belong under those weighty and dichotomous headings.