Status Games: A Conversation with Will Storr (Episode #294)

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed.

Hi, Sam.

To add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Will Storr. Will is an award-winning writer, And his work has appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He's the author of many books, most recently The Status Game, on social position and how we use it. And that is largely the topic of today's conversation. We talk about the role that status plays in human life and culture. We discuss the taboo around caring about status. Egalitarianism, the perpetual insecurity of status, how we play multiple status games simultaneously. Identity, social connection, dominance, virtue, success, status urge as an evolved mechanism. Gossip, status and health, the consequence of humiliation, the role of social media. Status and politics, conspiracy thinking, moral panics, status and philanthropy, and other topics. Status is one of those things that once you begin thinking about it, you see it everywhere and realize that it was doing its mad work all the while without you thinking much about it. Anyway, it's It's a fascinating and all too consequential subject. And now I bring you Will Storr. I am here with Will Storr. Will, thanks for joining me.

Oh, thanks for having me, Sam.

So I loved your book. The book is The Status Game on social position and how we use it. And I want us to just dive deep into that topic. But before we do, perhaps you can summarize your background as a writer, journalist, however you think of yourself. What have you focused on and how do you describe your place in the world at the moment?

Yeah, well, I was a journalist for 20 years and now I sort of focus on books really. And I guess most of my nonfiction focuses on, you know, looks at kind of how science can explain the human condition really, who we are.

And what other topics did you hit before status?

Oh, so my first book was written in my 20s. It was about the supernatural. It was kind of a slightly lighthearted adventure with ghost hunters and people like this. It was really about why people believe in crazy things.

You didn't find any ghosts?

No. Some odd things happened, I have to say, but no. I didn't find any ghosts. And the next book was The Heretics, which was published in the US as The Unpersuadables. And that book looked at the question of how is it that otherwise intelligent people could end up believing crazy things? So not stupid people, but really smart people. So I did things in that book like I went on this really weird holiday with the historian David Irving, who is, if you're familiar with him, I'm sure you are. He's notorious.

Yeah, but please summarize. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, he was once a highly respected historian of the Second World War. We know most of what we do about the firebombing of Dresden because of David Irving's scholarship. And then at some point in his career, he decided that Hitler was, in his words, a friend of the Jews and had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Uh-huh.

And he's doggedly pursued this line, this belief, and it has literally destroyed him. It's destroyed his reputation, it's destroyed him financially. He went to prison. He was actually in prison. He was given the opportunity in an Austrian court to renounce his views on the Holocaust, and he refused and went to prison. I think he might have been in his 70s. He was famously sued by an author. There was a film made about that court case. So this is a guy who is— you can say whatever you like about David Irving, but he's a smart guy. He's intelligent. And yet he has come upon this insane, belief that is literally, to most people, unbelievable.

I forgot how far his denial went. Did he go so far as to say the gas chambers weren't gas chambers, and examining the ruins of the crematoria and saying, none of this is as advertised?

Well, temporarily he did. He went through a temporary phase of Holocaust denial when he read a paper. I think somebody went to Auschwitz or somewhere and chipped some material off the wall of a gas chamber and had it analyzed for its concentration of deadly gases.

It was like blondie mix.

That's it, right. And they said, this is a weaker level than you need to kill cockroaches, so it's impossible to think that millions of people were killed this way. But it didn't occur to this person that actually cockroaches are much more hardy than human beings.

Correct.

But to be fair to David Irving, he did then kind of walk back that belief. But also, to be fair to the truth, one of the things that I did when I was with him, I was undercover pretending that I was also a revisionist, right-wing revisionist historian. And we went to a former concentration camp in Poland, and he was walking past the guard's towers and he was saying things like, there's the box office. And when we got into the actual gas chamber, it was extremely upsetting to watch. There was a school group of young girls. I think they were from Russia, is my memory. And the group started barracking them about how ridiculous they were believing this stuff. And he was saying that the doors on the gas chamber were fake. He said, these are just standard air raid blast doors. I think somebody was saying that the locks were on the wrong side and things. So if you call him a Holocaust denier, he'll sue you. But there's certainly lots of extreme revisionism going on with him and his followers.

That's interesting. I wasn't expecting to talk about this, but I'm wondering what you think about the ethics of going undercover. What was that experience like? And I mean, it's just my generic take on this is that there are many stories that couldn't be told or couldn't be told adequately unless some people were willing to deceive others about who they are. I mean, to go properly undercover, you know, whether from a law enforcement point of view or, you know, an espionage point of view or a journalistic one. But what was that experience like, and what do you personally think about the ethics of it?

The ethics for me are straightforward. You know, I'm interested in the truth. I'm not interested in just dismissing these people as, oh, they're evil. That's the story. I actually want to know what, you know, okay, you know, rather than calling them names, how can we explain these people believing what they do? So that's my take on the ethics. It's pretty, you know, straightforward.

Do you think there was no way to embed with the heretics or the conspiracy theorists in a truly above-board, honest way, just saying, listen, you know, I don't want to demonize you guys, I want to understand you, I don't actually share your beliefs, but I'm really here to have an honest conversation.

Sure. I mean, most of the book was above board. I think this was the only chapter I went undercover in, and that's because David Irving is— there's no way I would've got anywhere near him if I'd have— and I didn't lie. In the email to him, I said, I'm writing a book on people who have the courage to stand up to the orthodoxy, and you're one of them. So yes, there was some flattery going on, And actually, it almost went wrong because on the first day of that 7 or 8-day trip, I interviewed him and was obviously too forthright in my views, and he stopped the interview. And it was very difficult then to get him to agree to sit down, which he did eventually. So yeah, I did almost give the game away.

Hmm.

I mean, the experience that you asked, it was kind of surprising. Because aside from being unbelievable antisemites, these were ordinary men. When they found out that David Irving wasn't cooperating with me anymore with my project— every day after our road trip, we'd sit down and there'd be a lecture from David and a question and answer session. And I found out towards the end that the guys had sort of conspired between them to ask lots of questions I thought would be helpful for me and my project writing about heretics. So they behaved very kindly towards me. So again, it's that whole thing that they're not monsters, that they are people who've made a mistake.

Yeah. So what do you— and again, I wasn't planning to hit this topic. Obviously, I haven't read that book of yours, But I'm just fascinated by why people believe crazy things, and, you know what, especially why smart people and even well-informed people, even, you know, too well-informed people in some perverse way, believe crazy things. What did you conclude about that process? I mean, how do you explain it to yourself? Obviously, this is a problem that has only grown in scope and consequence in recent years, given the way conspiracy theories are amplified on social media, and given the reaction to the ham-fisted efforts to contain the spread of misinformation, you know, the blacklisting on social media or the shadow banning or whatever else Twitter and Facebook currently do, that freaks everyone out when they have unorthodox information they think really must spread, whether it's about vaccines or Anything else, politics. So what's your sense of the cognitive, emotional, social, cultural conditions that we're trying to put right here?

Well, I mean, the answer that I got to in The Heretics was my introduction to the idea that the brain is a storyteller. And, you know, in the book, I describe the brain as a hero maker. It wants to make us a hero in the story of our lives. And what tends to happen is that any kind of fact in inverted commas that we come across that flatters that heroic story, that heroic sense of who we are, we uncritically accept it usually. And any fact in inverted commas we come across which challenges that heroic story of who we are, we are very good at rejecting. And so the brain isn't particularly interested in the truth. The brain's much more interested in motivating us, getting out of bed, telling a heroic story about who we are and what's in store for us in the future. In the specific case of the Holocaust deniers, the people who were on the trip with David Irving, what was extraordinary was the number of men whose parents had served on the side of the Nazis in the Second World War. In fact, on the final night, there was this gala showing of the film Downfall, the kind of hyper-realistic German film about the final days in the Hitler bunker. And one of these guys, an Australian guy, he didn't want to watch the film because his dad was in the bunker with Hitler, and he would've found it too distressing to watch the film. So, I mean, to me, it felt like these were men who'd grown up with Nazi parents, and they wouldn't allow themselves to believe the story that the culture tells us, that the Nazis are synonymous for evil and the Holocaust really happened. And it felt like they were on this great cognitive kind of mission, a lot of them, to prove that their mums and dads, probably who they loved, weren't evil and all this stuff wasn't really true. So that was an insight I wasn't expecting to have when I kind of pitched up with these people.

Yeah. Well, that leads us rather nicely to the topic at hand, which is status. But before we go there, I was just wondering, did you ever deal with the case of I've met David Icke.

Yeah, he threw me out of his house.

Really?

Yes.

What is going on there? Who is David Icke? For people, I think he's probably more famous across the pond than he is here. What's his story?

David Icke's an extraordinary individual. So he was a footballer, and then he was a famous BBC TV sports presenter. And then his father died, and he had what I believe is a very profound nervous breakdown and an episode of psychosis. But his brain dealt with this chaos by telling a story in which he was kind of the second coming, that he was basically God, Jesus. And I remember seeing it. I actually saw it in the '80s. He was on this big chat show, Wogan, which is a bit like The Letterman Show. And Wogan was interviewing him about all this stuff, and the audience was acutely uncomfortable to watch because the audience were laughing at him openly and the things he was saying. So David Icke has always been seen as this absolute lunatic. And if you read his memoirs, I'm sure he had an episode of psychosis. But extraordinarily, he's reborn now as this conspiracy theorist who manages to sell out 100-seat theaters, he sells huge amounts of books, and he seemed to really rise after 9/11. And his kind of mad genius is to take all the individual conspiracy theories, like Illuminati and so on, and connect them all into one grand conspiracy theory. And it involves basically high-status people like the Queen and JFK being secret shape-shifting lizards. He believes the moon is a space station, a hollowed-out space station. Oh, my God. But he's got huge amounts of followers now, so he's kind of reborn as this kind of— he's kind of like the British Alex Jones, but even crazier than that.

Yeah, that's how I have him pegged. He's like Alex Jones, except the pedophiles are actually lizard people.

Lizard people. Shapeshifting lizard people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as I say, he threw me out of his house when he felt I was insufficiently well-read on his endless multi-thousand-page books.

Wow. Wow. Okay. Well, so status. What is status? I think people have a gut feeling for the concept, but I bet many people would be hard-pressed to give it anything like a coherent definition. How do you think about status?

Well, it's simply the feeling of being valued. Sometimes when you talk about status, people think, oh, he's saying that everybody wants to be rich. He's saying that everybody wants to be famous and a celebrity. And of course, wealth and fame are part of status, but all status really is, is the feeling of being of value. So when psychologists look at our deep needs, our deep cravings, they find we have a craving for belongingness and connection. That's one thing. We want to be loved and we want to join groups. We're tribal, obviously. But once we're in those groups, there's an urge to move up, to feel not just loved, but valued. And that's what status is.

I can hear there's going to be a subliminal tug of war between my saying status and your saying status, but I think we should both stick to our respective countries here.

I think so.

So yeah, it's— and yet desire for status is taboo. It isn't taboo to say that you would want to be valued by the people in your life or by your community, and that you want to have a positive— you want to be seen to be making positive contributions to society, etc. But there's something tawdry, or perceived to be tawdry, about people's concern about status and You know, its hallmarks. I mean, certainly when you're talking in terms of wealth and fame, you know, even virtue signaling now is part of this picture where, you know, any self-consciousness with respect to how one is being perceived by others is viewed as, you know, venal or in some other way something you should be able to rise above. How do you think about the—

Yeah.

taboo aspect of seeking status?

I think it's because we're all so chippy about our own status that we just don't like it at all if anybody was to admit that they were interested in it, and we don't like it. And I think there's a taboo against, as you say, against ourselves admitting it. I think it's connected to the fact that people don't like self-aggrandizing people. They don't like people who present as if they deserve high status. When anthropologists look at pre-modern groups, hunter-gatherer groups, they're often described as egalitarian. But as people like the psychology professor Paul Bloom has pointed out, they're only egalitarian because the people in those groups care so very much about status. They're constantly jostling and there are constant checks and balances. So if somebody goes in there and claims to be a great hunter and comes in all proud of their catch, then there will be a an effort by the group to pull that person down and to get them to act in humility. In a book I write about a pre-modern group in the north of Canada who have a tradition of circling a person who's too hubristic and singing a song of derision in their faces. So I think the taboo against admitting even to ourselves that we're interested in status is connected to all of that stuff.

Yeah. Although the One of the master hacks of that system is you can rise in status by not taking yourself too seriously. You only become an object of— a successful object of derision if you can't laugh at yourself. And there are different careers that are more amenable to this than others, but how do you view the insecurity Of status. I mean, really, this is a point you make in your book at some point. Status is perpetually insecure, really, no matter who you are. I mean, you're always liable to slip on the ice and fall in front of a crowd. And it's kind of funnier the higher status you were. You know, if you're an aristocrat in a top hat and an overcoat and you fall on the ice, that's just hilarious. And so how do you view the perpetual insecurity of status and people's efforts to shore it up.

Well, yeah. So I think that's why people get so chippy about status. One of the reasons is because what is it? You can't own status. It's not a material object. Money is a symbol of status that you might use to measure your status, or you might not, depending on what you like. But it isn't money. You never own your status. You can't take it to bed and lock it in a box. So it's always up for grabs. It's always in question. Elon Musk can be reduced in status in conversation with somebody that he admires and respects if they treat him disparagingly. Michelle Obama, somebody as high status as her, or Beyoncé equally might feel very low status if they were treated with disrespect by somebody that they admire. So we are constantly measuring our status. In the book, I write about Neuroscientists talk about how we have this thing in the brain called— they call the status detection system, which is constantly measuring everything as a way of gauging our status. So it measures things like the amount of eye contact we're getting with numerical precision. In one study, they looked at people being served measures of orange juice, and they found that if you serve lots of measures of orange juice to people, but one person gets slightly less orange juice than everybody else, they're going to get preoccupied with it and get upset about it. And of course we completely understand that because as human beings who all own status detection systems, we know full well that what you are upset about isn't the fact that you've got half a mouthful less of orange juice than the next person. It's that your status detection system has read that as an insult, as, okay, so I'm not as valuable as all these other people because you're giving me less juice.

Yeah. I mean, that's connected to, and maybe it's really of a piece with broader principle here, which is that people's sense of their own well-being is so often anchored to comparison with the lot of others, right? And so it's not based on some absolute measure of well-being. And that's why, you know, all boats rising with the same tide doesn't really solve most people's problems, because even if things get better and better for them, they see things getting better and better for their neighbor who already had much more than them. And actually, this is a point explicitly made in your book by Karl Marx, if I recall, which I never—

Yes.

I wasn't aware that Marx hit on this, and, you know, he was not a dummy, for all the chaos born of his economic theories. And yeah, he said, you know, basically, if you have a tiny little house, that's going to be fine as long as everyone else has a tiny little house, but if there's a palace next door, your tiny little house is now going to be perceived as a A hut or a hovel, and you'll be unhappy. Well, we'll get to any ways in which you draw lessons from this later on, but one point you just made, which at least implicitly was that we only tend to care about others' view of us and therefore mark our status this way insofar as we respect the other people, which is to say, based on how we perceive their status. I mean, the status they hold for us is the cash value of their opinion of us, and is the thing that can raise or lower our status, or at least to some degree.

Yeah.

And I just had a recent experience of this. Perhaps you noticed it online. I had what purported to be a real conflagration and witch burning on Twitter where I was the witch, but it took place in exclusively right-wing circles explicitly. It was happening in Trumpistan among Trump's most avid defenders. And what was interesting psychologically in my experience is how little I cared about the human sacrifice that I had become because of how I view the people who were dancing on my grave. Because in my world, anyone who is defending Trump to that degree at this point really has low status.

Yeah.

I basically— I know I don't agree with almost anything that is underwriting their opinion of me there. And so it really didn't matter, except I saw one writer whose work I admire sort of— I mean, he didn't— he wasn't all in on my auto-da-fé, but he was— he caught some of the pleasures of being had at my expense. And like that one person, you know, that stung because I actually like that person, right, and admire his writing. So it was interesting just to see that bifurcation in my mind. And it was— yeah, anyway, perhaps you have something to say about that.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. So what they find is that we're not playing a status game with everybody in the world. We play multiple status games. We're kind of tribal in the sense that we're members of lots of tribes, all at once. And we care about what our co-players in these tribes think of us. But people outside our tribes, I mean, sure, if anybody insults you, you're going to feel something probably. But as you say, if you have contempt for these people, if we actually actively consider them low status, it's not going to sting anywhere near as much as somebody in your game with you who A, and B, especially if they're in your game with you and you perceive them as to be above you in that status game, then those are the ones that really burn.

Yeah, and it really is impressively multidimensional, and it shifts because you can be— it can be for the purpose of any specific encounter or conversation who has high status and who doesn't. So you can be an academic who almost by definition doesn't have a lot of money or doesn't have a lot of fame, but in a certain dinner party conversation, that person can be very high status when they're opining on their topic. And the billionaire at the table will feel lower status intellectually when dealing on that topic. But then things flip when you're talking about money or fame, and it goes round and round depending on what the matter at hand actually is.

Yeah, and it's how you're measuring status. We're so amazing at playing these status games, we can use anything to measure status. It's certainly not all about money. My wife and I have been to places like Saint-Tropez in France, places where we could— we're surrounded, we're in the bottom 1% of wealthy people in Saint-Tropez. But even we managed to look down our noses at a lot of them because, oh, they're such— oh, they're so gauche. Look at that. It's not about money. We've got our own ways of measuring status. They've got their own ways of measuring status. No doubt they were looking at us and seeing these scruffy Herberts with bad shoes who shouldn't be there. And we were looking at them as these ridiculously over-the-top, orange-skinned, idiots. So yeah, it all depends on how you are measuring status, how you're assessing status. Every game has its different, almost like tokens, like on the Monopoly board, you've got plastic houses and hotels. Every game's got its different way of, different thing of standing for status.

And all of this connects to the concept of identity. How do you think about identity in light of The sort of never-ending possibility of finding new status games and having one supersede the next. Just how do you think of personhood, perhaps a healthy sense of personhood, in light of that landscape?

Well, I mean, it's huge. I mean, I think to a great extent, we become the games that we play. When I say I'm a writer, I'm not talking about what I do for a job. That's a massive part of my identity because that's 95% of the source of the status in my life, which is an unhealthy amount, really. So we join groups, the groups have rules of behavior, we follow the rules, and the better we follow the rules, the higher we climb in status. We begin to dress like those kinds of people, talk like those kinds of people, read the kind of books and consume art in the way that those kinds of people read books and consume art. Identity is fluid and multiple. We can be one person when we're engaged in one status pursuit, maybe at work, and then at the weekend when we're with our cycling friends, we can be another kind of version of us playing another status game. So you can't separate the status game from identity. I really do believe that to a great extent, as I say, we become those games that we play. we become conformist in that group context. And in terms of how should we pursue these games, and this is where I become a bit hypocritical because I'm not very good at doing this myself, but the research is that we're kind of happier and more stable emotionally the more groups we belong to. So I think the more status games we play, the more sources of status that we have, the more we hedge the better place we are. I'm in a vulnerable position because my life is devoted to my writing, and if that was to go wrong, I mean, my career will peak and decline like anybody's does. It's going to be more than just a disappointment for my career. It's going to be an assault on my identity and an assault on my sense of who I am.

Yes. It's also interesting how some of the markers of status can flip. So I was thinking, As you were speaking about what's happened just with dress as a social signal, in certain contexts, dressing in fancy, expensive clothing is a marker of high status, but in other contexts, it's actually a marker of low status, or certainly lower status when compared to the billionaire who just shows up in a hoodie because he can. You know, like there's no reason— if you're Mark Zuckerberg, you know, I guess if you're dragged before Congress, you put on a suit.

A suit.

But when you're in every other situation, the fact that you just roll in in a hoodie is a sign that, well, you don't have to play the game of wearing nice clothes, right? I mean, like, you know, I don't think this is necessarily conscious on his part or anyone else's part, And I now, as I complete this sentence, I'm forced to reflect on the fact that I've been wearing hoodies with disconcerting regularity. But there is something about just being— when you're of sufficient status in a certain context, you don't have to try. You don't have to put on airs. There's no pretense that you need to have because you're the genuine article.

Well, except I'd say there are airs and there is pretense. It's just that I think dress is an— well, all of the status cues that we adorn ourselves with is always an arms race. We're always looking at what other people are doing and wanting to one better. And I think when you get to the very top, that's the way that you can do it. My wife, up until recently, was the editor of Elle magazine, the fashion magazine in the UK. And she would always tell me that the people in the fashion industry don't wear all that very expensive stuff. They tend to dress in black and have their hair pulled back. And that always made me think, weirdly, of Hitler, because Hitler was the same, wasn't he? He didn't wear all his military stuff with medals and all that stuff like Hermann Göring did. He just wore a plain uniform. Because what do you do when you're above the people at the very top of the status game who are all adorned in their finery? Well, you just go the other way. You signal that the pose is, I don't even need that. But of course, it's still a pose. You're still marking yourself out as separate from the other elite people around you.

But in your book, you describe some other principles here which can balance this out. I mean, like for instance, connection. What's the relationship between social connection and status?

Well, I mean, it's linked when you think of the concept of the status game. When I talk about status games, it's just a proxy for tribe. We're a tribal animal, and that's why we crave connection and status. We time and time and time again collect into groups. Those groups have rules, and then the better we play by those rules and the better we play in the context of that group, the higher we rise in status and the better the conditions of our life get within that group. So Connection is an indivisible part of the status game. But as I say in the book, it's not enough. We like to think about connection a lot because it feels like it says something nice about humans, that we love belongingness and we love being loved. And that's true. But once we've connected into any group, we're rarely content to flop about on the bottom rungs, considered likable but useless. We want to feel like, okay, they like me, but do they value me? Do I impress them? Are there things that they look at and they think, well, he or she is good at that? And when you think about that, the concept of the status game, of the groups and the contest for status, that is all of human social life outside the family. That's religions, that's corporations, that's cults, that's football teams, you name it, that's what we're doing. We're gathering into groups, playing by rules, and rising and falling in status depending on how well we serve those rules. Connection and status is kind of what we do as human beings.

For you now, as you've thought about this at this sort of depth, what I'm hearing is that you're not envisioning an alternative to caring about status. I mean, there's obviously the embarrassing and petty and tawdry end of this, but there's also the idealistic, ennobling, virtuous end as well. Am I hearing you correctly that it's not a matter of getting out of the status game, it's in finding a healthy, life-affirming connection Well, it's about playing the right games.

So I think there are basically 3 different genres of status game that humans generally play. There are 3 kinds of status game. The first kind of status game is the dominance game. And we've been playing dominance games for millions of years since before we were human. Dominance is aggression or the threat of it. So when hens peck each other to establish a pecking order, that's a dominance game. We still do that. Obviously we still do that. And it's not just physical violence, it's also any kind of coercion, bullying, ostracization, any kind of threat. Anytime somebody is forcing you to attend to them in humility as if they're a high-status person, that's dominance. So that's dominance. There's also the virtue game. When we became human and became tribal, one of the ways we could earn status is by being virtuous. And so virtue is all about Knowing the rules, following the rules, enforcing the rules. And it's also about belief. How well and how sincerely do you believe the stories and myths and legends and laws of the tribe? So that's the virtue game. And you can see people like the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Michelle Obama. These are kind of superstars, global superstars of the virtue game. They're famous for being good. Over here in the UK, the royal family is a kind of virtue game. It's all about deference and respect and believing in all your heart that the queen and her fucked-up family are really special and important. So that's a virtue game. But there's also the success game. The other way that you could earn status and be seen as a valuable person in the tribal context is by being good at stuff, being a good storyteller, a good tuber finder, a good warrior, a good sorcerer, and so on. And that's modernity, that's civilization. Even as I say in the book, even Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, recognized that it wasn't pursuit of money that made the world go round and that made progress happen. It was the pursuit of what he called esteem. It's that people want to feel important in the eyes of their peers. So you don't want to get rid of the status game. I really believe that we make a fundamental mistake when we condescend to the status urge. It's certainly the very worst of human nature. And in the book, I write about status and its connection to everything from serial killers to genocide to incel misogynist culture and spree killers. But it's also the best of human nature. You don't get modernity without the status game. You don't get progress. You don't get science. You don't get technology. You don't get vaccines, and so on and so on and so on.

Yeah. And it just seems like having a social process that reinforces value, right? The value people create for others, the value people get in being recognized for creating value for others, and there's just a positive feedback loop there. I mean, that is the healthy form of esteem, is the social mechanism that inspires people to do more and more that other people value, right? I mean, apart from just money being paid for it, obviously, is the material version of that, but—

Yeah.

Contributing to society and having society tell you they want more of that and to feel better as a result, that is a virtuous piece of machinery that I think we would— I mean, perhaps there's a way of psychologically uncoupling even from that and being happier still. I mean, that's certainly the notion of self-transcendence within, you know, an explicitly—

Mm-hmm.

contemplative context would argue for that. And perhaps we could have a sidebar conversation on that topic. But short of that, what it means to be a good person in a healthy society entails actually adding to the well-being of others in addition to— I mean, or finding a mode of fulfilling one's own desires that is actually positive sum. with respect to the desires and well-being of others.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's incredible and fantastic that our species has evolved this instinct to reward ourselves and other people when they prove that they are of value. You know, when we— you know, we even do it to ourselves. You know, sometimes the researchers write about what they call the imaginary audience that we have in our heads.

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