Monday, July 26, 2010

why we seek social status

I think we are programmed to seek social status. Presumably, the groups our evolutionary ancestors formed had social hierarchies within them, the way troops of monkeys do. A group member who had low status ran the risk of being deprived of resources or even of being driven from the group, events that could threaten his survival. Furthermore, the low-status males of a group were unlikely to reproduce. Therefore, those ancestors who felt motivated to seek social status—those ancestors for whom gaining social status felt good and losing it felt bad— were more likely to survive and reproduce than those who were indifferent to social status. Thanks to our evolutionary past, today's humans find it pleasant to gain social status and unpleasant to lose it. This is why it is delightful when others praise us and painful when they insult us.

Consider, for example, the pain we might experience when someone publicly insults us. I have given an evolutionary explanation for this pain: We experience it because our evolutionary ancestors who cared deeply about gaining and retaining social status were more likely to survive and reproduce than our ancestors who were indifferent to social status and who, therefore, didn't experience pain on being insulted. But the world has changed dramatically since our ancestors roamed the savannas of Africa. Today it is quite possible to survive despite having low social status; even if others despise us, the law prevents them from taking our food from us or driving us from our home. Furthermore, low social status is no longer an impediment to reproduction; indeed, in many parts of the world, men and women with low social status have higher rates of reproduction than men and women with high social status.

If our goal is not merely to survive and reproduce but to enjoy a tranquil existence, the pain associated with a loss of social status isn't just useless, it is counterproductive. As we go about our daily affairs, other people, because of their evolutionary programming, will work, often unconsciously, to gain social status. As a result, they will be inclined to snub us, insult us, or, more generally, do things to put us in our place, socially speaking. Their actions can have the effect of disrupting our tranquility—if we let them. What we must do, in these cases, is use—more precisely, "misuse"—our intellect to override the evolutionary programming that makes insults painful to us. We must, in other words, use our reasoning ability to remove the emotional sting of insults and thereby make them less disruptive to our tranquility.

Along similar lines, consider our insatiability, As we have seen, our evolutionary ancestors benefited from wanting more of everything, which is why we today have this tendency. But our insatiability, if we do not take steps to bridle it, will disrupt our tranquility; instead of enjoying what we already have, we will spend our life working hard to gain things we don't have, in the sadly mistaken belief that once we have them, we will enjoy them and search no further. What we must do, again, is misuse our intellect. Instead of using it to devise clever strategies to get more of everything, we must use it to overcome our tendency toward insatiability. And one excellent way for us to do this is to use our intellect to engage in negative visualization.

Consider, finally, anxiety. We are evolutionarily programmed, as we have seen, to be worriers: Our evolutionary ancestors who, instead of worrying about where their next meal was coming from and about the source of that growling noise in the trees, sat around blissfully enjoying the sunset probably didn't live to a ripe old age. But most modern individuals—in developed countries, at any rate—live in a remarkably safe and predictable environment; there are no growling noises in the trees, and we can be reasonably certain that our next meal is forthcoming. There is simply much less for us to worry about. Nevertheless, we retain our ancestors' tendency to worry. What we must do, if we wish to gain tranquility, is "misuse" our intellect to overcome this tendency. In particular, we can, in accordance with Stoic advice, determine which are the things we cannot control. We can then use our reasoning ability to eradicate our anxieties with respect to these things. Doing this will improve our chances of gaining tranquility.


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