Status Anxiety

The Desire for Status

1
There are common assumptions about which motives drive us to seek high status; among them, a longing for money, fame and influence.

Alternatively, it might be more accurate to sum up what we are searching for with a word seldom used in political theory: love. Once food and shelter have been secured, the predominant impulse behind our desire to succeed in the social hierarchy may lie not so much with the goods we can accrue or the power we can wield, as with the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. Money, fame and influence may be valued more as tokens of - and as a means to - love rather than as ends in themselves.

How might a word, generally used only in relation to what we would want from a parent or a romantic partner, be applied to something we might want from and be offered by the world? Perhaps we could define love, at once in its familial, sexual and worldly forms, as a kind of respect, a sensitivity by one person to another's existence. 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. There may be differences between romantic and status forms of love - the latter has no sexual dimension, it cannot end in marriage, those who offer it usually bear secondary motives - and yet those beloved in the status field will, just like romantic lovers, enjoy protection under the benevolent gaze of others.

It is common to describe people who hold important positions in society as 'somebodies' and their inverse as 'nobodies' - nonsensical terms, for we are all by necessity individuals with identities and comparable claims on existence. But such words are apt in conveying the variations in the quality of treatment meted out to different groups. Those without status remain unseen, they are treated brusquely, their complexities are trampled upon and their identities ignored.

The impact of low status should not be read in material terms alone. The penalty rarely lies, above subsistence levels at least, merely in physical discomfort. It lies also, and even primarily, in the challenge that low status poses to a sense of self-respect. Discomfort can be endured without complaint for long periods when it is unaccompanied by humiliation; as shown by the example of soldiers and explorers who have willingly endured privations that far exceeded those of the poorest in their societies, and yet who were sustained through their hardships by an awareness of the esteem they were held in by others.

The benefits of high status are similarly seldom limited to wealth. We should not be surprised to find many of the already affluent continuing to accumulate sums beyond anything that five generations might spend. Their endeavours are peculiar only if we insist on a strictly financial rationale behind wealth creation. As much as money, they seek the respect that stands to be derived from the process of gathering it. Few of us are determined aesthetes or sybarites, yet almost all of us hunger for dignity; and if a future society were to offer love as a reward for accumulating small plastic discs, then it would not be long before such worthless items too assumed a central plac

Książka "Status Anxiety"
Alain de Botton