Making Sense with Sam Harris - #294 — Status Games

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Will Storr about the role that status plays in human life and culture. They talk about 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 as an evolved mechanism, gossip, status and health, the consequences of humiliation, the role of social media, status and politics, conspiracy thinking, moral panics, status and philanthropy, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed 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 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 in 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 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. 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 like 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. The next book was The Heretics, which was published in the US as The Unpersuadables. 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, I don't know if you're familiar with him.

Yeah, but please summarize. Yeah, I mean, he was once 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 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 and you know he's doggedly pursued this line uh this belief and it has literally destroyed him it's destroyed his 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, you know, renounce his views on the Holocaust. And he refused and went to prison, I think in his, he might have been in his 70s. You know, he was famously sued by an author. there was a film made about that court case so you know this is a guy who is you can say whatever you like about david irving but he's smart guy he's intelligent and yet you know he has come upon this insane belief that is you know

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 the ruins of the crematoria and saying that none of this is as advertised well temporarily he did he went through a temporary phase of kind of holocaust denial um when he read a paper like i think somebody somebody went to auschwitz or somewhere and chipped some um material off the wall of a gas chamber and had it analyzed for its concentration of deadly gases. That's it, right. And they said, this is a weaker level that 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. Actually, cockroaches are much more hardy than the human beings so so so but you know to be fair to david irving he did then kind of walk back that belief but you know 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 kind of you know a revisionist right wing revisionist historian and we went to um a former concentration camp in poland and you know he's walking past the guards towers and he was saying things like you know 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 uh young girls i think they were from russia

um is my memory and he started 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 tonight, he'll sue you. But there's certainly lots of extreme revisionism going on with him and his followers. like? And 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, whether from a law enforcement point of view or 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. 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, okay, 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 you know i don't want to demonize you guys i want to understand 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, there's no way I would have got anywhere near him. And I didn't lie.

In the email to him, I said said i'm writing a book on people who have the courage to stand up to the orthodoxy right and you know you're you're one of them so yes there was some flattery going on but but but and i and actually almost went wrong because on the first day of the sort of a seven or eight day trip i interviewed him and and and was obviously too forthright in my views and And he kind of 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. I mean, the experience that you asked, it was kind of surprising because, you know,

aside from being unbelievable anti-Semites, these were ordinary men, you know, when they found out that David Irving wasn't cooperating with me anymore, with my project, every day after our kind of road trip, we'd sit down and have a, you know, 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 my project writing about heretics so you know they behave very kindly towards me so you know it's it again it's that that whole thing that they're not monsters that they are people who've made a they've made a mistake yeah so what do you...

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 especially why smart people and even well-informed people, even too well-informed people in some perverse way, believe crazy things. What did you conclude about that process? 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 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 and 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 and inverted commas we come across which challenges that heroic story of who we are, we uncritically accept it usually. And any fact, any inverted commas we come across which challenges that heroic story of who we are, we're 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 find 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 that they wouldn't they wouldn't allow themselves to believe the story that the culture tells us that the nazi nazis are synonym for evil and the holocaust really happened and they felt they were on this great cognitive kind of mission a lot of them to prove that their mums and dads probably that you know 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 pitched up with these people. Yeah. Yeah, well, that leads us rather nicely to the topic at hand, which is status.

But before we go there, I was wondering, did you ever deal with the case of David Icke? I've met David Icke. Yeah, he threw me out of his house. 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 kind of absolute lunatic you know i mean and and you know i i if you read his um memoirs i'm sure he had a an episode of psychosis but extraordinarily he's kind of reborn now as this conspiracy theorist who manages to sell out you know hundreds to um seat theaters he sells huge amounts of books. He seemed to really rise after 9-11. He's a mad genius 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 shapeshifting lizards.

He believes the moon is a space station, a hollowed out space station. But he's got huge amounts of followers now. So he's kind of reborn as this kind of, it's kind of like the British Alex Jones, but much even crazier than that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's, that's what, how, 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 he, yeah, as I say, yeah. As I say, he threw me out of his, his house when, when he felt I was insufficiently, um, well-read on his endless, you know, multi-thousand page books.

sufficiently well-read on his endless multi-thousand page books. 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 but but all status really is the feeling of being of value so when psychologists you know look at our kind of 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 a kind of 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. 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 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 its hallmarks. I mean, certainly when you're

talking in terms of wealth and fame, even virtue signaling now is part of this picture where any self-consciousness with respect to how one is being perceived by others is viewed as venal or in some other way something you should be able to rise above. How do you think about the 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, 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 an effort by the group to pull that person down and to get them to act in humility. In the 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. admitting even to ourselves that we're interested in status is connected to all of that stuff. Yeah, although one of the master hacks of that system is you can rise in status by not taking yourself too seriously. You only become 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 so i 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 you can't you know money is a symbol of status that you might use to measure your status or you might not depending on who 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 Beyonce, equally might feel very low status if they were treated with disrespect by somebody that they admire. So we're constantly measuring our status. In the book I write about, neuroscientists talk about how we have this thing in the brain called 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 with who all own status detection systems we know full well that what you're 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 that that's connected to and maybe it's really of a piece with a broader principle here which is that people's sense of their own well-being is so often anchored to comparison with a lot of others right and so it's not based on some absolute measure of well-being. And that's why 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 wasn't aware that Marx hit on this. And he was not a dummy for all the chaos born of his economic theories. And yeah, he said, 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 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' 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. 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, you know, it was happening in Trumpistan, you know, among Trump's most avid defenders. And what was interesting, you know, psychologically, in my experience, is how little I cared about the, you 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. at this point, really has low status.

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 wasn't all in on my auto-da-fay, but 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, that's, perhaps you have some yeah something to say about that yeah yeah that's absolutely right so so what what what they find is that we're not

playing a status game with everybody in the world we play multiple status games you know we have these you know we're kind of tribal in in the sense that we're members of lots of tribes all at once. And we care about what our kind of 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 no way it's not going to sting anywhere near as much as somebody in your game with you who you know a and b especially if they're in your game with you and they're and you perceive them as to be above you in that status game and those are the ones that really burn yeah and it really it's impressively multi-dimensional and and it's it shifts because you 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, you know, who, you know, 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, you know, they're opining on their topic. And, you know, 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, about money or fame and it goes round and round depending on what the the matter at hand actually is yeah and it's how you're measuring status you know we we're so amazing at playing these status games we can use anything as to measure status it's certainly not all about money you know my

wife and i have been to you know places like saint-Tropez in France, places where we're in the bottom 1% of wealth in Saint-Tropez. But we managed to look down our noses at a lot of them because, oh, they're so gauche. Oh, 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, they were looking at us and seeing these scruffy hermits 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're 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 thing of standing for status. 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 i mean perhaps a healthy sense of personhood in light of that landscape well i mean it's huge i mean i i i think you know to a great extent we become the games that we play you know when i say i'm a writer that i'm not talking about what i do for a job that's a massive part of my identity because that's 95 percent of the source of the status in my life which is an unhealthy you know um amount really so you know we join groups the groups have rules of behavior um we follow the rules and the better we follow the rules the higher we climb in status you know 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 you know identity is fluid and multiple we can be one one person when we're engaged in one status pursuit maybe at work and then at the weekend when with our you know 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 you know as i you know i really do believe that that to a great as i say we we become those games that we play you know we become conformist in that group context and in terms of you know 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 we have, the more we hedge, the better place we are. You know, I'm in a vulnerable position because my life is devoted to my writing. And if that was to go wrong, I mean, you know, 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. There's no reason, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, I guess if you're dragged before Congress, you put on 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 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. fact that i've been wearing hoodies with disconcerting regularity but um there is something about just being when you're of sufficient status in a certain context you don't have to try you know you don't have to put on airs you don't there's no pretense that you need to have because you're the genuine article well except i'd say there is a there there are airs and there is

there is pretense it's just that i think dress, well, all of the kind of status cues that we adorn ourselves with is always an arms race. You know, we're, we're always looking at what other people are doing and wanting to one better. And I think, I think when you get to the, to the very top, that's, that's the way that you can do it. And my, my wife, um, and 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 of, weirdly, of Hitler. Because Hitler was the same, wasn't he? He didn't wear all his military stuff. He just wore medals and all that stuff like Herman Goering 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. So 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 when you think of the concept of the status game you know when i talk about status games it's just a proxy for tribe you know 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, you know, 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, you know, 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's it it feels like it's something nice about humans that we love belongingness and we love being loved and and that's true but once we've connected into any group we're rarely content to be to kind of flop about on the bottom rungs considered likable but useless you know we want

to feel like okay they like me but do they value me you know do they do that do i impress them is that are there things that they look at they think well well he or she is good at that so so you know and when you think about that you know the concept of the status game of the groups and and the contest for status that 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. That 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. 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? It's not a matter of getting out of the status game. It's in finding a healthy, life-affirming, connection-inducing, creative version of it. Well, it's about playing the right game. So I think there are basically three different genres of status game that humans generally play. There are three 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. Domin 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. You know, 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 kind of 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? That's the virtue game. You can see people like the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Michelle Obama. These are 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 a 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 kind of incel misogynist culture and spree killers yeah 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, 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 being paid for it, obviously, is the material version of that. But 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. transcendence within an explicitly 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 some 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. ourselves and other people when they prove that they are of value.

You know, when we even do it to ourselves, sometimes the researchers write about what they call the imaginary audience that we have in our heads. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support,

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