Contents

Definitions

Part One: Causes

• I. Lovelessness
• II. Expectation
• III. Meritocracy
• IV. Snobbery
• V. Dependence

Part Two: Solutions

• I. Philosophy
• II. Art
• III. Politics
• IV. Religion
• V. Bohemia

Definitions:

• Status: One’s position (hierarchy) in society; derived from the Latin statum or standing. A higher standing is usually pleasant, rewarding them with resources, freedom, space, time, comfort, and value within a group – feeling like they are being cared for and thought valuable.
• Status Anxiety: The fear that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid out by our society. A worry we will be stripped of our dignity and respect and demoted to a lower rung. Can be provoked by recession, redundancy, promotions, retirement, conversations with colleagues, success of friends, etc. Relying on signs of respect from the world to feel tolerable to ourselves. Hard to achieve and maintain unless fixed at birth (royalty). Failure promotes humiliation and shame.
• Thesis: Status anxiety has the potential to inspire sorrow. The hunger for status can spur us to do justice to our talents, encourage excellence, and restrain us from harmful eccentricities. The best way to deal with it is to understand it first. Excess can kill.

Part One: Causes

I. Lovelessness

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).

Consequences:

• Of Neglect – You are a failure, you are unimportant, you are dim.
• Of Love – You are intelligent, you are important, you are successful.

Self-image:

• Neglect – I am a disgrace, I am a nobody, I am stupid.
• Love – I am clever, I am acceptable, I am worthy.

II. Expectation

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.

Aristotle and other Greek and Roman thinkers and leaders believed peasants and slaves to be no greater than beasts, lacking reason, and fitted to doing no more than tilling fields.

Christian society turned into a rigidly stratified monarchy, which was said to reflect the order of the celestial kingdom. To challenge this way of thinking (hierarchy) was to challenge God’s will. Inequality was assumed the natural order.

In his Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes proposed that individuals existed before societies and joined as an agreement to sacrifice freedom for security. John Locke repeated this in 1689 in Two Treatises of Government, saying that rules were the instrument of the people. Calls for equality rose up in the American Revolution in 1776. The titles esquire and his honor were banned. Thomas Jefferson explained that his life was driven by creating an aristocracy of virtue and talent rather than privilege and stupidity.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, concerning American life, that they are restless in the midst of their prosperity. When everything is more or less equal the slightest variation in equality is noticed. During times of inequality, the serf considered their misfortune a fact of life and an effect of the immutable laws of nature and were much more internally peaceful and happy. The American poor were not able to see their condition as anything other than a betrayal of their expectations.

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. 

There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires. Modern societies have done the former well, but by continuously whetting appetites, they have managed to negate a share of their success. We might do better, instead, to distance ourselves, both practically and emotionally, from those whom we consider to be our equals and yet who have grown richer than us. Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.

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.

III. Meritocracy

The impact of poverty on self-esteem will to an important extent be decided by the way that poverty is interpreted and accounted for by the community.

First Story: The Poor Are Not Responsible for Their Condition and Are the Most Useful in Society

A theory of mutual dependence held that the peasantry was no less vital and hence no less worthy of dignity than the nobility or clergy. The lives of peasants might be hard, but it was known that without them the other two classes would soon founder. There was honor in their work.

Second Story: Low Status Has No Moral Connotation

The New Testament demonstrated that neither wealth nor poverty was an accurate index of moral worth.

It was in favor of poverty, for in the Christian schema, the source of all goodness was the recognition of one’s dependence on God. Anything that encouraged the belief that a contented life might be had without God’s grace was evil, and wealth fell into that category.

They witnessed the rich failing to fit through the eyes of needles, learned that they would inherit the earth and were assured that they would be among the first through the gates of the Heavenly Kingdom.

Third Story: The Rich Are Sinful and Corrupt and Owe Their Wealth to Their Robbery of the Poor

According to this narrative, which assumed its greatest influence between approximately 1754 and 1989, the poor were reminded that the rich were thieving and corrupt and had attained their privileges through plunder and deception rather than virtue or talent. Moreover, they had rigged society in such a way that the poor could never improve their lot individually, however capable and willing they might be. Their only hope lay in mass social protest and revolution.

There was, for Marx, an inherently exploitative dynamic within the capitalist system, for employers would always try to hire workers for less than they made from selling their products, then would pocket the difference as “profit.” Such profit was invariably hailed in the capitalist press as the employers’ reward for “risk-taking” and “enterprise,” but Marx insisted that these words were mere euphemisms for theft.

Life may not have been pleasant in the slums of Manchester in the 1840s, but for a laborer, being advised that what had landed him there was the monstrosity of his employer and the endemic corruption of the economic system would have offered a sustaining sense of his moral superiority and mitigated any shame.

Three Anxiety-Inducing New Stories about Success

First Story: The Rich Are the Useful Ones, Not the Poor

Bernard Mandeville suggested that it was the rich who contributed the most to society, insofar as their spending provided employment for everyone below them and so helped the weakest to survive (early trickle down). Regardless, Mandeville admitted how vain, cruel and fickle the rich could be. Their desires knew no bounds, they craved applause and failed to understand that happiness did not have its origins in material acquisition. And yet their pursuit and attainment of wealth were of infinitely greater use to society than the patient, unremunerative work of laborers.

The villains of economic theory now found themselves recast as its heroes. It was the wealthiest who deserved praise for helping all the other social classes; it was the rich who housed the poor and fed the needy. Furthermore, they did all this even when they were personally reprehensible—in fact, the greedier they were, the better.

The story was less flattering to the poor. While the rich were hailed as creators of national prosperity, the poor were credited with only a modest, functional contribution; on occasion, they were even accused of draining resources through their excessive numbers and reliance on welfare and charity.

Second Story: Status Does Have Moral Connotations

“I smile to myself when I contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary,” commented Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (1791), “and I carry the same idea into governments. A hereditary governor is as inconsistent as a hereditary author.”

Carlyle dreamt not of a world in which everyone would be financially equal, but of one in which high and low alike would come by their inequalities honestly. “Europe requires a real aristocracy,” he wrote, “only it must be an aristocracy of talent. False aristocracies are insupportable.” What he was imagining was a system whose name had not yet been coined: a meritocracy.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century social legislation represented the triumph of the meritocratic principle. Equal opportunities were, with varying promptness and differing degrees of sincerity, promoted by the governments of all Western countries. It came to be generally accepted that a decent secondary education should be made available to every citizen, regardless of income. The United States led the way with the opening, in 1824, of the first truly publicly supported high school.

In a meritocratic world in which prestigious and well-paid jobs could be secured only through native intelligence and ability, money began to look like a sound signifier of character. The rich were not only wealthier, it seemed; they might also be plain better.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, many Christian thinkers, particularly in the United States, revised their views on money accordingly. American Protestant denominations preached that God demanded of his followers a life of achievement both temporal and spiritual; the possession of riches in this world, it was suggested, was evidence that one deserved a good place in the next.

No longer was background, gender, race or age an impassable obstacle to advancement. An element of justice had finally entered into the distribution of rewards. But there was also, inevitably, a darker side to the story for those of low status. If the successful merited their success, it necessarily followed that the failures had to merit their failure. In a meritocratic age, an element of justice appeared to enter into the distribution of poverty no less than that of wealth. Low status came to seem not merely regrettable but also deserved.

Third Story: The Poor Are Sinful and Corrupt and Owe Their Poverty to Their Own Stupidity

With the rise of the economic meritocracy, the poor moved, in some quarters, from being termed “unfortunate,” and seen as the fitting object of the charity and guilt of the rich, to being described as “failures” and regarded as fair targets for the contempt of robust, self-made individuals, who were disinclined to feel ashamed of their mansions or to shed crocodile tears for those whose company they had escaped.

Adherents of Social Darwinism proposed they were naturally better: they were more potent, their seed was stronger, their minds were cannier. They were the tigers of the human jungle, predestined by biology—a new, godlike concept before which the nineteenth century genuflected—to outpace others. It was biology that wanted the rich to be rich and the poor to be poor.

• The Social Darwinists insisted that the sufferings and untimely deaths of the poor benefitted society as a whole and should therefore under no circumstances be prevented by government interference. The weak were nature’s mistakes and must be allowed to perish before they could reproduce and thereby contaminate the rest of the population. Jeeeesus, wtf guys? It seems there are quite a few Social Darwinists still practicing, by these measures… 

To the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system now added the insult of shame.

IV. Snobbery

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.

V. Dependence

Status now rarely depends on an unchangeable identity handed down the generations; rather, it hangs on performance in a fast-moving and implacable economy. It is in the nature of this economy that the most evident trait of the struggle to achieve status should be uncertainty. We consider the future in the knowledge of competition, lack of required talent, or unforeseen marketplace issues, while any failure gets compounded by the perceived success of our peers. 

Dependence on Fickle Talent

If our status depends on our achievements, then what we may need most in order to succeed is talent and, where peace of mind is a priority, reliable control over it. In most activities, however, talent is impossible to control at will. Our achievements can seem like a gift granted to us by an external agency, a gift upon whose erratic presence and absence hang not only our ability to pay for the objects around us but the very course of our lives.

Dependence on Luck

Pointing to luck as an explanation for what happens in our lives has become unacceptable. When mankind respected the power of the gods and the unpredictable moods of nature, the idea of our having no control over events was widely accepted.

It is alarming enough to have to rely for one’s status on contingent elements. It is harder yet to live in a world so enamored with notions of rational control that it has largely dismissed “bad luck” as a credible explanation for defeat.

I don’t personally believe that “luck” should be something to consider, as luck is what people resort to when they don’t understand the cause of an event. However, given our dependence on the societal structure and how we’ve evolved to operate within communities, it is not necessary for us to know and prepare for all events. Nor should we blame those who suffer at the hands of an unforeseen event (within reason). There will always be knowledge bounds that the typical civilian is expected to fall between and a loss of social status when one repetitively commits the same mistake without learning or reaching for help. Typically, the cause of these indiscretions is not due to stupidity, but some form of unresolved trauma that has expressed itself via self-destructive coping mechanisms. 

Dependence on an Employer

Three Acres and Liberty: in order to lead a happy life, one must attempt to escape reliance on employers and instead work directly for oneself, at one’s own pace, for one’s own rewards.

In England, the transition from a nation of small agricultural producers to one of wage earners was accelerated by the loss of access to land, a resource which had enabled the rural poor to survive by growing food for themselves and letting their live-stock to roam, graze, or forage. From the eighteenth century onwards, the majority of “open” English fields were enclosed behind walls and hedges by powerful landowners.

The travails of being an employee include worry over the duration of one’s employment and also the everyday humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. The question of who will be promoted, and who left behind, typically becomes one of the most oppressive anxieties of the workplace— and one that, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Compounding the misery is the fact that because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its opposite may have an apparently haphazard relationship to performance.

Dependence on an Employer’s Profitability

The most effective and swiftest way for management to improve profitability is almost always to decimate staffing levels.

Mergers, technology replacing employees, and market changes can also lead to instability of job security.

Dependence on the Global Economy

Typically, four or five years of expansion have been followed by one or two of retraction, with occasional massive retrenchments lasting five or six years. The best efforts of governments and central banks have demonstrated that there is little to be done about such turbulence.

Every cycle follows a similar pattern:

Growth picks up and companies invest in new capacity to meet perceived future needs. Production costs tend to escalate at this stage, as do asset prices, especially for equities and property, driven up in part by speculators. Inexpensive credit encourages businesses to commit to large, capital-intensive factories and offices. At this critical point, demand and current output both begin to slow, even as consumption continues to accelerate. A lack of savings spurs an increase in personal and commercial borrowing. To satisfy domestic demand, companies start to import more and export less, a trend that soon results in a balance-of payments deficit. The economy is now officially out of kilter, freighted by overinvesting, overconsumption, overborrowing and overlending. Here begins the slide into recession.

Prices are pushed higher by the use of less efficient means of production, by the growth in the money supply and by speculation. Tighter and much more expensive credit raises the cost of outstanding debt. Asset values, inflated in the upswing, are punctured. Borrowers can no longer make their payments, and the collateral available for new loans is restricted. Incomes, investment and consumption all fall off. Companies and entrepreneurs flounder or go bankrupt; unemployment rates rise. As confidence evaporates, borrowing and spending dry up. Long-term capital investments made in better days now come on line, increasing supply and depressing prices just as demand is slackening. Companies and individuals are forced to sell off assets at a loss, deepening the crisis, but many potential buyers wait for the market to hit bottom before purchasing, further delaying recovery.

Rather than a sign of hysteria, a state of steady anxiety may be a reasonable response to the very real threats of the economic environment.

If we are anguished by the thought of failure, it may be because success seems the only dependable incentive for the world to grant us its goodwill. A family bond, a friendship or a sexual attraction may render material incentives unnecessary, but only a reckless optimist would rely on emotional currencies for the regular fulfilment of his or her needs.

In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Immanuel Kant had argued that behaving morally towards others required one to respect them “for themselves” and not use them as a “means” to one’s own enrichment or glory. With reference to Kant, Marx now accused the bourgeoisie, and its new science of economics, of practising “immorality” on a grand scale:

“[Economics] knows the worker only as a working animal—as a beast reduced to strictest bodily needs,” he charged in the Manifesto. The wages paid to workers were, he believed, just “like the oil which is applied to wheels to keep them turning … The true purpose of work is no longer man, but money.”

Raw Materials + Labour + Machinery = Product + Profit

Whatever goodwill the employer may display towards the employee, and however many years they may have devoted to a job or task, workers must live with the anxiety of knowing that their status will never be guaranteed but will be forever dependent on both their own performance and the economic well-being of their organizations.

Although the fear of being left penniless is a primary reason for our worry over the instability of our employment, it is not the only reason. We also worry because of love, for our work is the chief determinant of the amount of respect and care we will be granted. It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided. 

Meanwhile, our need for love remains unwavering, no less steady or insistent than it may have been when we were infants, an imbalance between our requirements and the uncertain conditions of the world that constitutes a stubborn fifth pillar on which our status anxieties rest.

Part Two: Solutions

I. Philosophy

Honor and Vulnerability

Entire societies have made the maintenance of status and honor a primary task of every adult male. In traditional Greek village society (time), in Muslim communities (sharaf), or as among Hindus (izzat), honor was expected to be upheld through violence. In traditional Spanish communities, to be worthy of honra, a man had to be physically brave, sexually potent, predatory towards women before he was married and loyal thereafter, able to look after his family financially and authoritative enough towards his wife to ensure that she did not have sex or even engage in flirtatious banter with other men.

Being denied status—for example, because one has failed to reach certain professional goals or is unable to provide for one’s family— may be as painful for a modern Westerner as a loss of honra, time, sharaf or izzat was for a member of a seemingly more hidebound society.

Philosophy and Invulnerability

Philosophy introduced a new, mediating element into the relationship between internal and external opinion. According to the rules of reason, a given conclusion should be deemed true if, and only if, it flows from a logical sequence of thoughts founded on sound initial premises.

Thanks to reason, one’s status could—these thinkers proposed—be fixed through the agency of an intellectual conscience, instead of being abandoned to the whims and emotions of others. If rational examination revealed that one had been unfairly treated by the community, one should be no more perturbed by the judgement than by the ranting, say, of a deluded stranger bent on proving that two and two amounted to five. No duels over status were required once the individual was able to consider their own self-worth external to the opinions of those who don’t matter. 

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.

II. Art

Life is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behavior of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humor or gravity, works of art—novels, poems, plays, paintings or films—can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

Art and Snobbery

Novels may act as conceptual counterweights to dominant hierarchical realities. They can reveal that the maid now busying herself with lunch is a creature of rare sensitivity and moral greatness, while the baron who laughs raucously and owns a silver mine has a heart both withered and acrid.

Lines that may be stretched to define a whole conception of the novel: an artistic medium to help us understand and appreciate the value of every hidden life that rests in an unvisited tomb.

“If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” knew George Eliot.

Painting is another medium that is great at telling the stories of those who would otherwise not be investigated. The lives of the seemingly mundane command attention, especially when the artist is expected to paint portraitures of royalty and landscapes, but chooses not to. This makes the viewer question the value of the commoner instead of overinflating the importance of some bulbous and insecure queen.

Tragedy

Our fear of failing at various tasks would likely be much less were it not for our awareness of how harshly failure tends to be viewed and interpreted by others. Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as “losers”—a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that they have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing.

Tragic drama followed a hero from prosperity to ruin and shame. Leaving the audience hesitant to condemn the character, humbled by the ease at which tragedy has befallen somebody of their status, and questioning whether they would fare any better in a similar situation. These stories are considered sophisticated or complex. Hopefully inspiring sympathy in the viewer, demonstrating to them that we all have the capacity for folly and the corresponding repercussions.

Comedy

Humorists and their targets have long recognized, jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense.

Freud wrote, “A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously.” Through jokes, Freud suggested, critical messages “can gain a reception with the hearer which they would never have found in a non-joking form … [which is why] jokes are especially favored in order to make criticism possible against persons in exalted positions.”

At the hands of the best comics, laughter acquires a moral purpose, jokes become attempts to cajole others into reforming their character and habits. Jokes are a way of sketching a political ideal, of creating a more equitable and saner world. Wherever there is inequity or delusion, space opens up for humor-clad criticisms. As Samuel Johnson saw it, satire is only another method, and a particularly effectual one, of “censuring wickedness or folly.” 

“The true end of satire is the amendment of vices.” – John Dryden

A great deal of what we find funny has to do with situations or feelings that, were we to experience them in our own, ordinary lives, would likely cause us either embarrassment or shame. The greatest comics shine a spotlight on vulnerabilities that the rest of us are all too eager to leave in the shadow; they pull us out of our lonely relationship with our most awkward sides. The more private the flaw and the more intense the worry about it, the greater the possibility of laughter.

Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves; those other fellow spirits wake up in the early hours feeling every bit as tormented by their financial performance as we do by our own; and that beneath the sober appearance society demands of us, most of us slowly going mad, which in itself should give us cause to hold out a hand to our comparably tortured neighbors.

Comics and artists alike use their artform as a way of critiquing life and the absurdity of our condition and the seriousness we place upon it. Easing us into accepting that we are all in this together, but simultaneously still have plenty to work on.

III. Politics

Status is rewarded to those who bring specific value to a civilization. Strength, elegance, resource allocation, virility, etc. Status values have long been, and in the future may again be, subject to alteration. 

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

IV. Religion

Death

Death reveals the fragility, and so perhaps the worthlessness, of the attentions we stand to gain through status. In good health and at the height of our powers, we are spared any need to wonder whether those who pay us compliments are doing so out of sincere affection or in some evanescent quest for advantage. We seldom have the courage or the cynicism to ask, Is it me they’re fond of, or my position in society? Illness renders the distinction quickly and all too cruelly evident.

While the thought of death may occasionally be abused (to alarm individuals or groups into doing things they might never do otherwise), it may help us to correct our tendency to live as if we could afford to defer forever, for the sake of propriety, our underlying commitments to ourselves. Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society’s expectations. In the presence of a skeleton, the repressive aspects of others’ opinions have a habit of shedding their power to intimidate.

We may also find some relief from status anxiety by dwelling on the deaths of other people, particularly those whose accomplishments in life have made us feel the most inadequate and envious. However forgotten and ignored we are, however powerful and revered others may be, we can take comfort in the thought that the lot of us will ultimately die.

Ruins bid us to surrender our strivings and our fantasies of perfection and fulfilment. They remind us that we cannot defy time and that we are merely the playthings of forces of destruction which can at best be kept at bay but never vanquished. We may enjoy local victories, perhaps claim a few years in which we are able to impose a degree of order upon the chaos, but ultimately all will end. If this prospect has the power to console us, it is perhaps because the greater part of our anxieties stems from an exaggerated sense of the importance of our own projects and concerns. We are tortured by our ideals and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing.

We may best overcome a feeling of unimportance, not by making ourselves more important, but by recognizing the relative lack of importance of everyone on earth. 

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. 

V. Bohemia

What ultimately separated bohemia from the bourgeoisie was the answer to the questions of who deserved high status and why. From the outset, real bohemians were those who, whether they owned a mansion or squatted in a garret, set themselves up as saboteurs of the economic meritocracy to which the early nineteenth century gave birth.

The martyrs of the bohemian value system were those who sacrificed the security of a regular job and the esteem of society for the opportunity to write, paint or make music, to dedicate themselves to travel or to spend time with their friends and families. They might, because of their commitments, lack the accoutrements, and perhaps even the manners, of outward decency, yet they were still, the bohemians themselves averred, deserving of the highest honor for their ethical good sense and their powers of receptivity and expression.

Human nature being what it is, they reasoned, those who succeed in society will rarely be the wisest or the best; rather, they will be the ones who are able to pander most effectively to the flawed values of their audiences. There may be no more damning marker of a person’s ethical and imaginative limitations than a capacity for commercial success.

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.