GUEST COMMENT: Status anxiety, and how to cure it

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

However, once food and shelter have been secured, the predominant impulse behind our desire to succeed in the social hierarchy may not lie 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.

In a meritocratic world, wealth is often interpreted as a sound sign of character. The rich are not only considered wealthier; they might also be plain better. High status is therefore linked to goodness; and goodness is deserving of love.

But why should a failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being, rather than of a fiasco in one particular area of the far larger, more multifaceted project of leading a good life?

Equally, why should making money make you happy?

Livelihoods and esteem depend upon at least five unpredictable elements, including: fickle talents, luck, the priorities of an employer, that employer's profitability, and the global economy.

American Indian society in the 16th century comprised small, close-knit, egalitarian, religious, playful, and martial communities. They were backward in a financial sense. They lived off fruits and wild animals, they slept in tents, they had few possessions. But there was reputed to be an impressive level of contentment amidst the simplicity.

However, within a few decades of the arrival of the first Europeans, what mattered was one's ownership of weapons, jewellery, and alcohol. Rates of suicide and alcoholism rose, communities fractured, factions squabbled among themselves over the European booty.

Curing yourself:

The hunger for status has its uses. It spurs us to do justice to our talents, it encourages excellence, it restrains us from harmful eccentricities and cements members of a community around a common value system. But, like all appetites, it excesses can also kill.

The most profitable way of addressing the condition may therefore be an attempt to understand and to speak of it. One can also attempt a cure using the following devices:

Intelligent misanthropy - The views of the majority of the population on the majority of subjects are permeated with extraordinary confusion and error. Through an unparanoid understanding of the value system around us, it's possible to settle for a stance of intelligent misanthropy, free of either defensiveness or pride.

Lower expectations - Self esteem may be determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities. In order to raise our self esteem, we may achieve more, or we may reduce the number of things we want to achieve.

Poor friends The most effective way to feel wealthy may be to distance ourselves - practically and emotionally from anyone whom we consider to be our equal but who has become richer than ourselves. Happiness comes from companions next to whom our own size will not trouble us.