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by danharaj
3985 days ago
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> It's things like this that make it really obvious that we're primates, hardwired for status. Or maybe it's an indicator that our incredibly hierarchical society inflicts psychological violence on people because it holds them to conform to impossible shapes in order to fit into the system. I have a lot of contempt for any abductive reasoning that explains Western Capitalist society with unobservable primordial determinism. Anthropologists and primatologists both observe numerous counterexamples to the idea that we are hardwired to vie for status. What is true is that we would like to be valued as worthy by the people we invest a lot of importance in. Shame and humiliation is not the absence of status, it is a response to a positive situation of being socially attacked in some way. In a society where status is governed by intricate, interlocking, alienating systems of rules and violence, no one but the very few priviliged (and even then) can escape feeling shamed by their social surroundings. |
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Two, I agree that our current society is a mess, and share your desire that it be made better.
That said, I have never seen a primatologist suggest that we aren't wired for status. Certainly our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are. (See, e.g., de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics.)
I think it's important to acknowledge that tendency if we want to make the world less of a mess. For example, consider how we deal with a different inbuilt tendency: violence. We know that all humans can be violent, which is why children are taught early and often that violence is wrong. It's why we have a whole system of customs and laws that constrain violent behavior. We, as a culture, are working to eliminate it, but we can't do that by pretending it isn't part of our nature.
I think we should do the same for status. Rather than constructing a system that, as you say, helps the privileged maintain their sense of status, we to acknowledge that an irrational drive for status is part of our roots, and to build a society that helps us overcome that.