TRIGGERnometry - Cancel Culture Explained with Will Storr

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Will Storr is a writer and photographer. He's the author of five critically acclaimed books, including his latest The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Ayishat Akanbi here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873621622 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissing. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a journalist and the author of this brilliant book, The Status Game, will still welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. The word I was also looking for is best-selling author and my brain sort of malfunctioned, but you are in fact, this is your sixth book as you were just telling us. Before we get into the show, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, How are you where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

Well, obviously I'm a writer. I've been a journalist for about 20 years, you know, just over 20 years now. And I've been writing books, yeah, since I was in my mid-20s. And I've always been interested in, you know, what makes people tick, you know, what drives people, what makes people believe kind of crazy irrational things. And that's been the theme throughout my, a lot of my journalism and certainly my books. Well, yes, indeed. And, you know, the status game seems to me to be going to the very fundamentals of what makes us tick. Yeah. We were talking before we started about our former guest, Dr. Mike Martin, who wrote a book called Why We Fight, which is all about testosterone and the desire to seek status and all of that.

So if anyone is uninitiated, I'm familiar with this subject, what is the status game? Well, the status game is the subconscious reality of human social life. That's how I see. you know, lots of my previous books, I've been focusing on the conscious experience of life, which is a story, like the brain processes reality and turns our life into a story. And we're the hero at the center of our lives and we're surrounded by this cast of characters and we're on these amazing missions. And, you know, so that's why we tell stories in the way that we do because we've been making these neural processes.

And in this book, I wanted to sort of take it a bit further and go, okay, so if the conscious reality of life is a story, what's going on? consciously, what's the truth? And so the status game is my attempt at answering that question, like what's really going on under the hood. And I think a lot of human social life is about two things. So connection and status. So because of our tribal evolution, we're compelled to connect into groups of like-minded people and then once we're in those groups, compete for status. And we see that all the way through our society. And we see that all the way through our society. And in particular, one of the things that you focused on was virtue, people competing to be the most virtuous.

Absolutely. So, yeah, I think to understand this, you've got to sort of understand where the kind of the status game comes from. And that's in our tribal evolution. You know, Dr. Mike Martin talks a lot about kind of dominant status, which is the oldest kind of form of status very probably. And we've been competing for status with dominance since we were before we're human. You know, it's fighting. It's threat. It's violence. it's bullying, ostracization, all those kinds of things. But once we settled down and started living in communities, competing with violence wasn't very useful. So we had to evolve new ways of competing for status. And those new ways were all about kind of group life.

And so what happened was we started competing for status with the reputation. And the way you earned state with reputation is you prove that you are valuable to your group, you're useful to your group. And there are two ways of being useful to your group. One of the ways is by being virtuous, so generous and selfish and courageous in battle, but also following rules and enforcing the rules when other people don't follow them.

And then the other way, the hardest way, is success by being competent by being, you know, a fantastic, you know, storyteller, hunter, honeyfinder. But yeah, I think what we're going to be talking about today is a lot of that kind of virtue status because we're not used to thinking of connecting virtue and status, but of course they're completely linked. Mother Teresa is a superstar.

The Pope is a superstar. You know, people see people like Michelle Obama as this kind of virtuous superstar. You know, it's not really about competence with these kinds of characters. It's all about their kind of virtue. And people have been exploiting that, like you said, from Time Memorial. You know, if you think about the scribes, the Pharisees, people like that, people who position themselves as being virtuous. But it's not always religious people now who are trying to be virtuous.

No, no, I mean, you know, this urge to have status from virtue is built into us. You know, we all have it to a certain degree. I mean, of course, we're all on the spectrum. And, you know, I think it's really interesting in this kind of post-religious society we've got now. Because for, you know, for centuries and longer, religion was the way that we principally yearn status. Even people in very kind of low, low-cast groups before the Industrial Revolution. revolution, you know, if they were like a peasant working on a farm, they could still feel like they had status because they were a good Christian and they were doing all those good

Christian things. And now that's declining. People still want to pursue virtue status, especially the ones that haven't really got what it takes to achieve the competence forms of status. And I certainly see that playing out a lot online, a lot in social media and a lot in what we think of as council culture. Well, before we get into that, actually, I think your book and your work is so much more fascinating than just a conversation about the culture wars. Francis and I've always been interested in talking to evolutionary psychologists and biologists and various people about some of the underlying stuff that makes humans who they are. So let's start by talking about that.

And let's talk about bullying, a word that you just mentioned. I've never thought about it, but as we were waiting for you to come, I was sort of thinking, what is the social function of bullying? Because it exists in every society, I think, pretty much. So there must be some purpose to it. And is that for the majority or certain people to assert their dominance so that they become higher status? Is that what it's about?

Yeah, I guess it depends on what context you mean bullying, but certainly one-on-one playground bullying is about dominance. And, you know, children start competing for status as soon as they start learning how to play with other people when they fight over who gets access to the toy. That's a symbolic status battle. And that's certainly true in the context of bullying. There's a study that I cite in the book

that looked at why schoolchildren, you know, pre-adolescent school children tend to be bullied and ostracized from their social groups. And it's very often when they, when their behaviour or something about them makes them a threat to the status of that social group when they embarrass people or make them feel uncomfortable and that kind of negative status

kind of feels like it's leaking out into the other, the people around them. They'll start bullying them and ostracizing them. And of course, you know, this kind of bullying is always about status. It's always about taking somebody that's there and pushing them down there. And with your kind of act, that's the dominance, you know, act, with an active dominance, you know, raising yourself up. So that ties then into what you're talking about, which is online.

And, you know, cancel culture has become this very politicized word. But I actually think, you know, people will be tempted to think that cancel culture is what people who are right of centre, let's say, say about what happens to them from people left of centre. I sort of see it as a much more universal thing that's going on and the harassment and mobbing and bullying happens from everybody. So is that what's driving it?

It's a bunch of people who you sort of hinted at it don't have the ability to achieve status through competence, don't have the ability to achieve it through dominance, force, violence, etc. but here is this great tool. You know, you've got a Twitter account and you can go and harass a celebrity. You know, today it's Dave Chappelle. Tomorrow is going to be someone else?

Yeah. Is that what it's about? It's low status people achieving status of the expense of someone famous. It is, but the only thing that I'd say about that is that it is dominance behavior because dominic isn't just about physical violence. It's about the threat of violence,

but it's also about the threat of ostracization. You know, we don't, Dominance is partly about one-on-one physical competition, but it's also about competition with reputation. And, you know, a person's reputation, that's their kind of avatar, that's their, you know, what they're playing the status game with. So if you attack someone's reputation, you're attacking their identity. You're attacking the core of who they are and everything they've worked towards,

the kind of locus of the meaning of their life. So, you know, it isn't violence when we attack reputation, but it's something, you know, close to it. It's a dreadful thing that we do. It's, in the book, I sort of, you know, I kind of explain that there's no pure games. There's no pure success game and pure virtue game. They're kind of mixtures, always this called mixtures. And I think kind of cancel culture and, you know, the worst of human behavior, even up to

including genocide, which I also write about, is virtue dominance play. It's virtue play because it's about you will follow the rules. You will not insult our sacred beliefs. you will not insult our sacred symbols. And if you don't, we will get you. So that's that dominance kind of virtue play. And it's fundamental, it's human behavior. You know, we're very good at blaming, you know,

Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dawsey for causing all these things. But they haven't caused it. They've just connected people together. And when you connect people together, they're going to play status games. And this kind of thing is going to happen. But now we've got the status game with virtue. And then we destroyed people whilst at the same time,

being hashtag be kind. Yeah. Which to me, it's just the most mind-blowing thing I've ever seen. But that's, again, it's just consistent with, you know, that's part of the storytelling brain. We have this conscious experience of life. And, you know,

in previous books I've described the brain as a hero maker. It's very good at making us feel heroic and justifying all our acts. And it's thought that the strongest bias of all is the moral bias. So the brain is very good at saying, you know, you know, fundamentally you're a good person and you're a

better person than all these other people. And that's what the be kind thing is all about. That's people's brains doing what brains are supposed to do, which is tell a story about your own virtue and your own superiority whilst playing this rather cynical status game subconsciously. And that's not unique to the internet. The Nazis thought they were on the side of the good. The communists thought they were on the side of the good. That's just what brains do. And even when presented with objective facts, like you're literally ruining someone's career. You are impacting on their mental health. You are causing and creating suffering. But they deserve it, right? That's the argument. They deserve it. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right.

I mean, you've got to kind of understand a bit how the brain works. And one of the things that I write about continually in my books, because I think it's just extraordinary, is the fact that, you know, the brain is constructing a story constantly about the world. And that's literally, you know, information comes in from the world. And it constructs the, this like story-scape for us to live in. And a lot of it is delusional. A lot of, you know, it's kind of designed to, again, make us feel heroic. And we really, and it's really good at kind of being very shifty

with the objective truth and twisting it and turning it to make us feel that we're heroic. And as I said, you know, before, the Nazis thought they were the heroes of that story. They genuinely thought they were. And so did the communists. They genuinely thought they were. They said we're punching up. You know, they're obviously not using our contemporary phrases, but they were punching up at the, you know, the bourgeoisie and the czarists and all this stuff.

And in the same way, the people online are convinced that they're punching up too. And there's a chapter in the status game that looks specifically at the cultural wars. And what I thought was interesting is when you look at the narratives of the left and the right, you know, the two sides of the cultural, they both tell a story, which is in part convincing about that they're punching up. And so the classic, you know, the kind of extreme left-council culture of people, So they're punching up at, you know, essentially white people, especially white men, especially straight white men.

And the argument is they've hoarded all the status. They've hoarded all the power. And it's not fair. And we're destroying this evil elite that doesn't deserve to be there. But if you look at the other side, the right-wing view, it's like, well, when they look up, they don't see straight white men. They see educated people. They see, you know, highly educated elite people.

You know, people who went to kind of Ivy League universities and Oxbridge, people who are running the BBC and the New York Times. And they're both ways of seeing the status game that have some validity to them. And I think that's when these stories become really dangerous because they have this kind of kernel of truth. But they're stories. They're not real.

They're massively simplistic. It is true that historically in white dominated countries, white men have had an advantage. But it's definitely true now that if you've been to Oxford, Cambridge, or an elite university, or you work at the BBC, you've got a massive advantage over, an awful lot of straight white men who don't have those advantages.

So the brain tells this heroic story, which is usually really simplistic. But it's never true. It's always much more complicated than the kind of warriors would admit to. Let's come back to the culture war in a second. Sorry, Francis. I just want to stick with the human society part of it first. So clearly, in our society now,

if I was seeking to achieve higher status through physical, force, that would be considered unacceptable. So societies have developed over time rules and regulations, unspoken and legislative, about controlling the way that people play this game. Where are we now in terms of that, in terms of, you know, how do we, is this nature of ours, which I doubt is ever going away realistically, right? How do we regulate that in a way that sort of makes sense in modern society? Well, yeah, that's a really good point.

I mean, because I think, you know, for 10 to thousands of years, we've been regulating principally male violence. And that's been going on for thousands of years. And to the extent that we physically changed, before the psychologist called the process of self-domestication. We domesticated ourselves. We became much more feminized. We had, you know, bigger eyes. And we control the world much more by controlling other people, understanding how minds work and being able to manipulate them. And so that's why that we are for, for.

for a primate within the people within our group, incredibly peaceful, compared to even bonobos, who are famously, you know, a peaceful primate. We're much more peaceful than that. Where our aggression is is group versus group. But, you know, we're much less good at regulating those other forms of aggression,

which are the forms which both genders use, but certainly, you know, women use them every bit as much as men, and that's bullying, ostracization. It's the reputation destruction forms of aggression, which we don't really have the checks and balances there at the moment. And I think that's what needs to happen, you know, especially online, that we need to evolve new norms that are kind of against this kind of, you know, reputation-based dominance play.

Do you think the problem there is, Will, that with physical aggression, we are inevitably confronted by the consequences of it. the Nartis who you mentioned, even Himmler wrote about how unpleasant it was to have to put all the Jews in gas chambers. So you are physically confronted with that reality and it becomes impossible to, if you start asserting your physical dominance over me, you have to see me suffer, bleed, etc., cry, whatever it would be, even though I would never cry. But you know what I mean? Whereas with this online stuff, there is that sort of windscreen effect where you're sitting in your car, someone else, in another car and you are in a safe bubble and you don't have to see them suffer.

You can do whatever you want. Yeah, totally. Yeah, and that's a huge problem. And I also think it's a huge problem just that form of communication. One way of seeing social media is as a gossip network and in the book and in previous books I've written about the importance of gossip to human social life.

You know, gossip are the first forms of story. And gossip was there. You know, gossip is universal. It plays a crucial function in human social life, and it's there to regulate it. So back in the days of the tribe, you know, there was no police force, there was no judiciary, there was no prison system.

So we controlled social behaviour by gossipings, and if people got a bad reputation, they'd be punished, you know, with ostracisation, you know, all of the ways we're familiar with today up to including execution. But if the gossip was positive, this person did an amazing thing, they'd raise in status and become heroic.

So it's an essential component of, you know, we've all evolved to gossip. Children begin to do kind of tattletale forms of gossip almost as soon as they can talk. It's baked into us. And you've got to look at the grandson of human history. So that's how we were regulating our societies for thousands of years. And then when we settled down and communities started growing so big that we couldn't know everybody personally, so we couldn't gossip about everybody individually. we invented the big God religions.

And so religion is a gossip network, but God knows all the gossip, and you're going to get punished or rewarded after life. And it was the feeling that God was watching you, that controlled your, largely controlled your behavior. And then, you know, in our kind of post-Nichean age, when now God is dead, journalism did that job.

Journalism became our gossip network. That's how we tattled about, especially high-status people, and, you know, moral outweighs was raised, and they will be punished. And we're living in a kind of post-journalistic age now, and I've lived and worked through it, where the norms of journalism have just collapsed

because of the internet. And social media is our new gossip network. And so it's not just this thing that people do, you know, for a laugh on their phones. The gossip network, as I said, is an essential component of human life. It plays a crucial role. And it's a pathological form of gossip network

because, you know, there are barely any consequences for spreading malicious gossip. I think back in the days of the tribe, you know, if you were going to get gossipsed about and bad things could happen to you. You know, in the glory days of journalism, yes, of course there were left-wing and right-wing newspapers, fine. But there were still pressure on journalists to get it right, to get the truth.

And if you didn't get the truth, you got a bad reputation or you worked for a crappy tabloid and everyone looked down there knows at you anyway. But those norms just don't exist on. They're scarily hard to find in traditional journalism. days and they barely exist on social media. And not only do they not barely exist, they also exacerbate and encourage these worst tendencies of people. That's the problem, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Everything you attach status to, we're going to flock to it. I mean, in the book I talk about this status game that anthropologists found on an island in Marchania,

which is based on yams. And the idea was, whoever brought the biggest yams of the feast was declared number one in the feast. And that was the thing. And that was the thing. he'd raise in status. And so what happened on that island was that it was a kind of a male game this. All the men just became obsessed with the growing yams. And they became amazing at growing yams. They would crawl out their bed at two in the morning to go into their secret yamp it in the forest to tend to it and stroke it and feed it fertilizer. And there were stories there of yams that were so big. It took 12 men to carry them into the feast on a special stretcher. So that's, that's humans. You know, if you attach status to something, we're going to do it and we're going to do it

big. And you're absolutely right. These days, you're attaching status to these extreme political beliefs. You're attaching status to the ability to tear your kind of ideological learning is down. So that's what we're going to do. And that's what we're doing. So it's, yeah, it's a pathological gossip network that incentivizes this kind of virtue dominance form of status game. But it's also made the status game worse. It's made it more toxic. Much more toxic. Yeah, absolutely has. I mean, one of the things that I write about, again, in the book, is this idea of the moral panic.

I kind of readdress what is a moral panic. And I look at the satanic panic in the 1980s as a form of moral panic. But actually, I think when you look at it from the status point of view, it's not really a moral panic. I call it a status gold rush. Because what you've got is this small group of therapists

that hiss upon this way of becoming incredibly rich, incredibly famous and, you know, interviewed on Oprah, hosted at big conferences and, you know, interviewed by academics. And, you know, perhaps more important than even the money and the fame is that kind of story they're allowed to tell themselves that we're saving the world. You know, we're saving the world's children from the forces of evil. And so what happened during that was that flocks of people were drawn to this satanic panic status game in which, you know, the idea,

was that these therapists and police officers were seeking out secret satanic sex abusers. And it was a disaster. It spread throughout the US. It came to the UK. You know, dozens of people had long prison sentences for doing things they couldn't possibly have done, like, you know, throwing children at sharks and stitching their eyelids shut during a kindergarten and then somehow returning the kids to their parents unharmed at the end of the day, like mad stuff. And, you know, I think it makes much more sense when you see that idea of the idea of for status gold rush. It wasn't a moral panic that was that I don't think it was driving the satanic panic. It was a status gold rush. All these people with ordinary lives, just therapists, just family

experts, suddenly became famous, rich and that they felt that they were saving the world from the forces of evil. And I think that's what we see on social media too. It's a, you know, it's a status gold rush. There are millions and millions of just ordinary people with ordinary lives who suddenly feel that they're fighting the good fight against the forces of darkness. And, you know, we're going to tear down day. or whoever it is or Kathleen Stock or wherever it is and and you know you've got to understand that status is an immeasurably valuable resource it's a basic human need if we don't feel that we have status we become mentally unwell depressed even

up to feeling suicidally if our status is taken away from us in a kind of dramatic way we even become physically ill if we don't feel that we have sufficient status so it's an immeasurerly valuable resource and what social media has given us, is enabled us to do, is to gather that resource in such a way that we have so, you know, we have more status in our online lives and we do in our real actual lives. So that's really valuable to people. And that's, you know, that's what their brains want. Their brains aren't particularly interested in finding out the truth. Their brains are interested in how do I get status? Will, and is this why people are so fearful of humor and comedy?

because comedy is one of the most powerful ways to take status away from things. When you mock something, even playfully, you are taking away the significance from it. And we saw it, you know, the comedians I grew up watching in the 90s, there were the Bill Hickses, the George Carnets. They went after religion because the religious right at that time had quite a lot of cultural significance and dominance.

And these people were taking that away. And now you see when it's flipped, and it's the far left that's got this cultural dominance. They fear comedy. They're terrified of it and they're fighting against it because it takes away the significance and the status that they've tried to give to their beliefs. Is that why that's a thing?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a basic way that back in the days of the tribe that we would manage people's behaviour, social behaviour, is if we were gossiping about them and the gossip was bad, you'd begin by mockery and humiliation. You know, so that's, again, that's an elemental kind of form of human behavior. So it's a way of, so it's a way of drawing people down. And that's exactly right.

I grew up, you know, in the 90s. I'm a Gen X-Exter. I remember watching Bill Hicks on Channel 4 late one night and having my mind just blown. And, you know, I grew up in a Catholic family. And in those days it was that, you know, especially in America, the Catholic right that were dominating and judging people's moral behavior. And I was a big metal fan and they were trying to ban all the records that I like. And it has flipped these days.

I've always identified as a leftring person. I still do. But it's the left that are doing that these days. It's a section of the left, I think. Well, it's a section of the left. Absolutely, yeah. And, you know, I don't think it's a, as you point out, it's a coincidence that these are the people now

that the comics are going after. And we talk about humiliation. You used a very powerful example of the power of humiliation when you were talking about, I forget his name. Elliot Rogers. Elliot Rogers. Yes, Elliot Rogers. And what happened to him? If you could go into that a little bit.

Yeah, so, I mean, when I was thinking about the book and whether there was a book in this, I kind of set myself a test, and that test was okay, if you're going to argue that status is so important, then what happens when our status is taken away? It must be pretty bad. So, you know, I started looking into that and the idea of humiliation, because, you know, one of the technical definitions of humiliation is it's the, it's not only the removal of your status, it's the removal of your ability to claim status in the future. You're so, you're so down there that you're just gone, basically. Nobody wants to have anything to do with you ever. again. And it turns out that that is a catastrophic thing for humans to experience. If it's serious and it's chronic, it goes on and on and on. One researcher described humiliation as an annihilation of the self. And humiliation is found in the backgrounds of lots of serial killers, terrorists, honour killers. I mean, if you can think that, you know, it's implicated in genocide, the humiliation of the nation or the racial group, and they fight back. So, you know, you If you think about the very worst of human behavior, you'll find humiliation in there. So that to me was like, okay, I think this is right about status.

I think it is this important. And so I tell the story of Elliot Rogers in some detail because he's a spree killer, is one of these kind of in-cell spree killers. But before he died, he left a, he uploaded to the internet 108,000 word autobiography, which was called My Twisted World. And it's an extraordinary, it's a truly extraordinary document. I mean, you know, it's chilling. But he's, it's fascinating because, you know, so in the book, I say that the most dangerous people probably on earth are narcissistic people.

So people who believe that they're entitled to high status and they expect to be treated as if they're important. And they're humiliated. So when you humiliate a narcissist, it's bad because they're dropping down a hell of a long way. And if they're male, and if you're male, you're much more likely to risk. bomb with violence, that's another factor. So grandiose, male and humiliated are this kind of, you know, these three kind of red flags. And Elliot Rogers was definitely an example of that. I mean, his book is sort of greasy with its descriptions of his wonderfulness. He describes himself as a beautiful gentleman and things like this and thinks he's gorgeous and wonderful and

can't understand why we're not falling at his feet. But he's also unflinching in his depictions. of how miserable his life was and how he was bullied and hated by everybody that he essentially he went to school with. And after he did his spree killing, the narrative across the media, left and right, was

that the cause of what he did was his obsession with the game World of Warcraft. And they said, because it's a violent game and you're killing stuff. So that makes sense, right? But I argue in the book that that's actually not true, that actually World of Warcraft was his only source of status. And if you actually read his book, it's only when he stops playing World of Warcraft that he goes completely insane.

And so he describes basically achieving the enormously statusful experience of achieving the kind of top level of World of Warcraft. And when he's playing World of Warcraft, he's not worrying about school, he's not worrying about girls and being popular. He's happy. And then he finds out that the people, the friends who is playing World of Warcraft with, he discovers that they've been meeting up in secret behind his back to play without it. which is a heartbreaking for him. And he describes playing the game with tears rolling down his face because he's so crushed by this realization.

So he stops playing. And literally the day he stops playing, he confides to his last remaining friend, this bizarre vision he has of the world now in which he wants sex to be abolished completely. Because as far as he's concerned, the problems of the world are the fault of women. Because women choose who to have sex with,

And they keep choosing, you know, jock aggressive types. So they keep procreating with these people and giving birth to more aggressive jock types. So his solution is to... He hasn't seen millennials, mate. Yeah, yeah, but this is pre. This is pre then. And so he wants to wipe out all the women,

keep a few in a lab to artificially inseminate to keep the population going. Well, at least he had a vision. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but so when I read that, so when you hear that, you just think that's mental, that's mentally ill. Like, that is gone, right? And it's about as misogynistic as you can get. It is, you can't really get much more misogynistic than want to annihilate all women. But then when you look at that in the context of the Second World War, that is exactly the story that the Nazis told about the world, when the German nation, which is a grandiose nation, you know, the most successful nation in continental Europe before the First World War, utterly humiliated. by the Treaty of Versailles. And that's the story that, you know, it's not a nation of Germans

because they weren't all Nazis. But that was the story that the Nazis told about the world was the Elliot Rogers story, but instead of women, it was Jews. So when that kind of connected for me, I just thought that that's extraordinary because I think it shows you

that it's something innate in us. When we feel that our status has been unfairly taken from us, that's when we're, I think, our most irrational and our most aggressive. And you've never, very, neatly brought us back to the culture war there because one of the arguments that you laid out, and this is something I've been very concerned about for some time now, you know, you talked

about how people on the right and the left have their own simplified versions of what's happening and it makes perfect sense. But particularly the far left one is the one that troubles me. And the reason it troubles me more is that the narrative of the far left, as you put it yourself, is that there's this group of people who've been historically very privileged. They've got all the advantages, they've had hoarded all the status, and we must now humiliate them. I mean, that is the narrative, right? Yes. So you've got a very large group of people who are, as you've said, for physiological and

biological reasons, are much more prone to violence than other groups, men. They are the vast majority of society, white people in the UK, in the UK, certainly, and in America. and you have a driven campaign that, at least to me, seems like, that is supported by media organizations, by institutions of government, by authorities, the police, the health care, is everywhere. There seems to be that. It's at least allowing that to happen, right, those systems. Now, given what you've said, to me, that seems a very dangerous game to be playing.

It is. I think it is a very dangerous game to be playing. And you can see a little bit of it in the Trump and Brexit events of 2016. You know, I think it's been commented before, it's not news, that lots of the people that voted for those things were white working class and low-mineral-class people whose living standards have declined in the last few decades. But also, their sense of status has declined. You know, they used to be respect in being a working-class person.

and now the media decries them as deplorables and trailer trash and you know you've got labour politicians tweeting union jackson going and I think it's true that Trump and Brexit was a reaction against that it was like no you fuckers you know you've got to stop treating us like this and that's that's their story of you're the educators elite who you're looking down your noses at us and there's a definite truth to that and I do I do worry about this and I do think it's true There's a generation of young men that are being raised today in Canada, the US and the UK,

who are being raised in a world in which white men are just bad. They're responsible for all the bad things in the world. And the morally correct thing to do is to put them to the back of every queue and to not give them any of the important jobs and to hold them back. And that's dangerous. Because what's going to happen? Well, one of two things. Either they're going to internalize those ideas

and just suffer terrible self-esteem and depression thinking, I'm a white man, I'm terrible, I'm awful, I'm a disaster, I need to just step back and let everyone else have a life and not me. Or more likely, they're going to become really fucking angry and they're going to push back. And, you know, I do think we're going to be seeing that increasingly. I mean, you know, I'm in this kind of small world of publishing

There was a very interesting story that was published in The Observer a few weeks ago that talks about the kind of the female domination of the publishing world. And I think it's absolutely true. That's happening. The bookseller, the trade paper of the book industry a few months ago, two months ago, published their list of the rising stars of the book industry. And somebody worked out that were 85% female. And I don't know if that's true or not, exactly.

But if you look at that cover of the bookseller magazine, it's Hunt the White Man. I mean, I think there's one there in this huge constellation of faces. And no one was talked about that. It was just accepted as this is the future. You know, so if you're a young white man that loves reading and loves publishing and is desperate to become a publisher and you see that, how are you going to react? And I just think if it continues, I think it's going to continue because no one's pushing back against this. You are, I think, in a few years going to see the resurgence of a significant men's rights movement.

I mean, at the moment the men's rights movement is a joke because people just laugh at it. you know, often for good reason. But I think it's going to stop being a joke, you know, at some point in the coming years. Because what it needs, that movement, is someone charismatic. Yeah. Someone to come in, someone who can, you know, get people together, someone who can mobilize a group. And then once that happens, you know, it's ready to explode, isn't it? It is ready to explode.

And, you know, I don't want to say that Jordan Peterson was, you know, you know, yeah, I mean, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he wasn't a men's rights activist, I don't think, in that sense. But I think what Jordan Peterson did show was two things. One, was, as you say, there's a huge feeling out there that, you know, men absolutely flock to him. And the other thing I thought about the Jordan Peterson kind of phenomenon was that in my journalistic career, I've written about men's issues, I've written about male suicide, I've written about male survivors of sexual violence. And so, you know, I've thought a lot about male pain. And, you know, in my corner of the world, a left-wing corner of the world, a very kind of feminist kind of focus corner of the world. The idea of male pain is something

to be laughed at. It's like, you're joking. It's ridiculous. I mean, you don't talk about it. You know, it's a kind of thing to be mocked. And I think, you know, I think what was fascinating about Jordan Peterson was that he actually understood male pain. You know, he said, I know that you're hurting and I understand that you're hurting and I feel it and I care. And that was just, you know, electric. And so it was when he was at his peak before he got sick, it was extraordinary to see it. And I think

what he did was he just pricked at that growing feeling of upset that there is in the kind of in the masculine world at the moment, because we're in this weird situation where you're not supposed to talk about it. Because if you talk about it, you're the enemy. But it's there. But the other thing Jordan

did, which I thought was very important, is that he emphasized for men and women, because and his message resonates with people of... I nearly said of all gender's fucking hell. All 960s. His message resonated with... My point was that he forced people to understand

that in a society that we live in now, competing on dominance and competing on virtue are not really roots to happiness. The best way to compete and be happy is to compete on competence. That's the point that I think he always emphasized, which is why I was very frustrated at the reaction to Jordan from people of the persuasion that you were describing earlier

because I don't think he was saying or trying to lead a movement of men to recapture their primitive state and go in. What he was saying is if you want status in a society that, yes, looks down on you at the moment, the way to achieve status is competence. Be better. Be better. Take responsibility.

Achieve more. Create more. Show the world that what you're doing is valuable and the world will reward you for it. That's what he was saying. And to me, the reaction to Jordan Peterson was so disappointing precisely because of that because I see him as an agent of detoxifying all of that anger and all of that unpleasantness that you refer to. But instead, he was treated as being the very head of that.

movement. I just thought it was such a catastrophic misinterpretation of it. Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen a public figure so misunderstood, destroyed Lisa now, I have to say. I mean, I became aware of him, again, because of my interest in the storytelling brain. My book before the status game was the science of storytelling, and I was researching that. And so I came upon his videos, which talks about the psychology of storytelling. And this was going to before he, you know, the C-16 stuff. And so when all that happened, I just thought, this isn't, I have not seen any, I've watched all the hours of his. videos and I'm not in any of this kind of weird, you know, version of Jordan Peterson that I'm now

being told is there. And I completely agree. I mean, you know, in the book, I take a sort of broader view and tell kind of the history of the world from the point of view of the status game. And I talk about the idea of modernity. Modernity is when the emphasis shifted from playing virtue games to success games. That's what that's about. So before the industrial revolution, before the enlightenment, most of us are playing virtue games. It was honor, duty, religion, stay in your lane, be respectful to your superiors. You know, that was life for centuries. And then it all changed, you know, post-industrial revolution.

We started specifically attaching success to things like discovering useful knowledge, making things more efficient, creating inventions, in a bigger, better, faster, more. And you know, like with the Yams, when you do that, we're going to do it. it, wherever their status, we're going to flock to that thing. And so, yeah, I think, you know, it's counterintuitive. But in the book, I argue that if you really want to save the world, if you want to do good in the world, if you really want to be a virtuous person, actually you should play a success game because success games are the things that have, you know, save billions of lives through vaccinations. Success games have lifted billions of people above the poverty line.

It's people, you know, solving problems that have done those things, not people in churches, not royal families, which is another kind of form of virtue game. So, yeah, you know, it's playing those success games that I think is the real answer, the real way to do good in the world. But isn't the problem as well, I'm such a negative bastard, isn't the problem as well that virtue games are just much easier to play than success games. It's easier to write a sweet guy. Dave Cipel is a transphobe and he should be castrated for trans rights, right?

okay, it's far easier to write that tweet than it is to go. To actually castrate him. Yeah. Or to beat Dave Chappelle. Yeah, number one, to beat Dave Chappelle. Or to go to university to study, to study biochemistry, and then go on and do virology and then become a virologist and then working whatever the field it might be.

That is far more difficult. It requires discipline, hard work, years of study. 100%. Yeah, I mean, virtue is the easiest form of status to gain. And again, you know, write about that in the book. And I think that's also why social media is so toxic, because all you've got to do is to make yourself feel a bit better is to retweet somebody with a sneery little comment. And all your followers go, yeah, yeah, you feel good about yourself. So it's so easy.

It's like popcorn status. You know, you're just shoveling it down your neck. And yeah, competence is really hard. It's difficult to become good at something. But, you know, and again, as somebody that's instinctively left wing, that was kind of, that took me a while to get. there because as a left-wing person you kind of drawn to this virtue stuff about the to the campaigners and the people who who you feel are motivated purely by virtue but but it's not really true i mean those people are important and needs to be part of the mix but it's the it's the competence

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Join our community by hitting the link in the description and the pin comment below. See you there, guys. Will, one of the things you've referred to a number of times now is left and right. And I've actually tried to steer this conversation as much away from that as possible, because I think the moment anything becomes about politics, it makes it more difficult for people to hear. So you as an instinctively left-wing person, actually I think both and Francis are in many ways as well,

but what is the difference between left and right on these issues? Because it's often said that people on the right think that people on the left are wrong, and people on the left think that people on the right are evil. That argument is often made. But I don't know that that how true. I think that's a bit simplistic. I think you haven't got to go back. very far in history to see right-wing people viewing left-wing people as evil.

You know, I think... Because they are. You know, I think that, you know, in the kind of most stupid form of commentary, you see, you know, right-wing people just assuming all left-wing people are basically communists and left-wing people seeing all the right-wing people are basically Nazis. And, of course, you know, that's... What I'm getting at is there a difference because I think it would be fair to say that left people prioritise emotional experiences

often more than people on the right, certain parts of the right maybe. So not offending people is more of a sacred value on the left at the moment at least than it is on the right. Although, as we talked about earlier, 30 years ago, not offending people was very much a right wing thing. That's right. I mean, it just depends.

I mean, for these exact reasons, I try to take it away from left and right as much as possible in the book. And I came across this really useful concept. The psychologist most known for it is Professor Michelle Gelfand, an American psychologist, and she writes about tightness versus looseness. And she writes about it in the context of cultures, but I expand that to groups, to games that we play. And so, you know, it's fascinating because she says that there are tight cultures in the world

who are kind of what she calls rule makers, that they're all about the rules and being punctual and doing things correctly. So Germany is relatively tight, the UK is relatively loose, the northern states of America are relatively loose, the southern states are relatively tight. And so, you know, the tighter that you are, the more conformist you are, the more hostile you are to outsiders, I think it's true to say that the more likely you are

to kind of fall for the kind of wild stories of your group. So the southern states of America, of course, much more religious than the northern states, much more kind of atheistic. And, you know, she's got some extraordinary statistics, even down to the things like the trains run on time better in tight cultures. Well, we knew that from this. But also, like, when you look at the clocks in public spaces

are much more likely to be in sync in a tight country. But you can apply that to groups too, and in the book I do, and I write about the kind of the tightest form of a status game as a cult. And so what a cult is is we are your only group. We are your only source of status. no other forms apply. We are your only identity. And that's why they get you to cut off contact with friends and relatives and all that other stuff, because that's it.

And we're going to give you a very precise set of rules to follow. And if you follow this very precise set of rules, you're going to have amazing status. So, you know, the famous, the most obvious example is Scientology. But because I'm scared of them, I talk in the book about the Heaven's Gate Cold. And the Heaven's Gate Cult with things like you literally telling you that you take your vitamins every day at 722, telling you how much toothpaste you can have on your toothbrush and how much water you can have in your bath. So that's the tightest form of, tightest form of game.

And then you can loosen it out and you can see, well, you know, political groups, like political groups could be tight and loose. And I think left and right, the ones that are going after each other, they're tight groups. They're living a tight world. They're playing a tight game, which is about conformity and hostility to outsiders. Yes, I thought it was useful partly because it takes it

away from left and right. And you can see throughout history, left and right, you know, things change as you move through as events change. I mean, look at now, you talk about the sudden states and the northern states and whatever being tight and loose. But look at COVID. Actually, the democratic states have been much stricter in terms of vaccine passports, vaccine mandates, all of that. So I guess what I'm hearing out of you is it flips over time and it changes depending on maybe who's got the physical power, the cultural power or whatever. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess, can change in terms of tightness and looseness. But it all depends on whose rules that you're following.

You couldn't necessarily say that the tight southern states are looser because they're not following the mask rules. It's just that they're following their own rules. It's their internal rules, which are saying we are liberty, freedom-loving people, we don't care about the government. So they're still conforming to rules, but it's their own particular rules that they're conforming to. And certainly you're seeing very aggressive,

anti-mask people in the southern states of the US. You can see some of the behaviour of the kind of the anti-vactor communities. You're also seeing very aggressive behaviour in the pro-mask and the pro-vaccion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're going to be tight people too playing a tight game. And that's what unites them is their tightness. It's their inability to deal with other people not following their rules. Right.

And their compulsion to kind of police those rules. So again, it's not a left or a right or a vax or anti-vax. It's how tight you are compared to how loose you are. And how do we get away from that? How do we get away from those extremes to a world that is more balanced when I personally feel that we've become more extreme? Yeah, I mean, in the book I write about just this, I think what's really important is that we play many games for an individual.

So as I said, you know, like the most powerful, pathological way of living your life is in a cult. And it's dangerous not only because it makes you very vulnerable to very strongly irrational beliefs, but also what happens if you're kicked out of the cult or the cult collapses, that's your whole identity. Everything that you've ever worked towards, you know, goes away. So in the book I write about sort of playing a hierarchy of games, this idea that so we know that people with a variety of identities are to be happier and healthier. because they've got, it's like a hedging, they're hedging their status.

So they've got, you know, you've got lots of different ways of owning status. You know, I'm interested in politics. I've got this hobby of building, I know, rockets or whatever, whatever you're doing. I love architecture. I've got my job. I like to be a good pair.

And there's lots of different ways that you can feel good about yourself and feel statusful. And I think that's the, that's the maximally healthy kind of psychological lifestyle. And so I think on the individual level, I think that's, we should be trying to do playing this kind of hierarchy of games where you've got one main game because competence is hard as we've been saying you need something to focus on but also hedging it

so so that you haven't got all your all your eggs in that kind of one basket but I think societally you know I you know I think it's I think it's happening slowly I think slowly we are going to see new norms you know new kind of cultural status game rules that the start sort of turning against that kind of cultural narrative. You know, I think at the moment you're seeing, although he's wobbling the Netflix guy, you know, Netflix very has the head of Netflix. By the time this goes out,

the company could have gone bust. Chappelle could have been, like, hanged drawn and quarter. And, yeah, and so you are seeing, you know, glimmers. Because I think what the problem has been is, I think we've seen an absolute failure of leadership. I think we've seen institutions and leaders completely fold, because it's dreadfully.

It's terrifying. The idea that you're going to be that you or the company that you lead or the organization that you lead is going to be the target of a council culture mob and your personal reputation and the reputation of all the people that you care about is at risk is terrifying. So it's quite glib to say, oh, they're just a bunch of cowards. But I can understand the cowardice. You know, I'm not saying I'd be any better if I was heading up a university or a big corporation. But I think what's going to hopefully going to happen is it's going to be that thing where the more people stand up to this and get away with it.

and actually earn status by getting away with it, earn respect and esteem, by standing up for their staff and going, no, we're not having this. We're not going to allow our team to be treated like this. And the more leaders see other leaders achieving that, I think slowly you're going to see finally these institutions sort of standing up to this, you know, this small minority of people who are often dominating the narrative at the moment. And coming back to just because we're sort of in the advice for people phase of the conversation.

One of the things that interests me the most out of what you were talking about is someone who's, you know, I've been extraordinarily wealthy. When my father spent a few years being very wealthy for a very short period of time, we lived in a former Soviet boss's mansion. Whoa. Which had, you know, hectares of land around a mansion and servant, all of that crazy stuff. And then within 10 years, I was sleeping in the park in Edinburgh with nowhere to live and no money to pay around and whatever.

So I've been up and down. Wow. And I think actually, while my experience may sound extreme, most people have been up and down in their life. All of us have been, quote, unquote, down and out. Almost everybody. Almost everybody's had the experience of being bullied, of being humiliated, of loss of status, of loss of future.

The loss of the future is such a terrifying thing to anyone who's ever felt like I don't have a future that I thought I had. It's horrific. How does one as an individual deal with constructively loss of status, humiliation, finding yourself in a position where you feel like you have no future? How do you rebuild yourself? Because as you talked about, and Jordan Peterson has talked about this, physically, physiologically, that has an impact, right? But since it's something that we're all going to experience, there has to be a way to get yourself out of that situation. How do you do that?

Yeah, I mean, it's easier to. done, obviously, because, you know, obviously status is incredibly important when we lose it. We really genuinely suffer. And in the book, I talk about this kind of, this idea of depression, which is, often depression comes from this loss of status, this feeling that I don't have any status, and I can't think of a way to get it. And you kind of scuttle back to the safety of the cave, and you kind of protect yourself by not taking part in society and not trying anymore. And I think that's the danger, is that back of the cave kind of feeling. Because I, because I, because I, because I think, you know, the good thing about human life, especially modern human life in the West,

is that we're surrounded by status games that we can choose to play. There are opportunities everywhere to earn status. And, you know, we've talked a lot about success games, but virtue games can also be really good. You know, you can become a meditator, which is a kind of virtuous thing. You can, you know, become a religious person if that's the way that your kind of brain is leading you. So I think it's getting over that, trying to pull yourself out of the back of the cave, and think, if I can't restore my status in this particular game from which I've been excluded, what other games can I, you know, can I choose to play? You know, you could volunteer for the Samaritans and, you know, literally help save people's lives.

That's virtue play. But you could do that tomorrow. You know, if you can do that, that surely is an amazing source of potential status for somebody. So, yeah, I think that's really the. answer. It's just pulling yourself out of the cave. As hard as that is, as bloody painful as that is, and as much courage as that takes, and getting out there and just trying to find another game to play. And that is a wonderful place to finish the interview. On an upbeat note as well, it's brilliant. Before we do, a couple of questions for our local supporters. Our final question

is always, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? I've already touched on it in the chat, actually, but I've been thinking more and more about the coming, the return of the men's rights movement. You know, I really think it's coming. I think it's coming and it's going to be serious this time and it's going to be people younger than us when they're hitting. You know, it's the people who are maybe 13, 14 now when they get 18, 19,

and they're going into this world and if they're still being treated like the enemy, and if it still feels like, especially the professional world, I mean, the arts world that I live in, if it still feels like it's hostile to young white men, I think it's going to come out of the realm of the kind of in-cell Joker, the men's rights movement, and it's going to start becoming a serious force. So I think that's the thing that if we're not talking about it now,

I think we are going to be talking about it soon. And we just went depressing again. Sorry. Well, that's why I like we talked about Jordan Peterson. I think that's why his message and the message that other people like him try to send out is very, very important, which is find the right game. Yeah.

Because, you know, even in dating, right, you know, young men complain that, oh, most young women are woke and all. Yeah, sure they are, but they still want a man who's going to know how to, whatever it is, bleed the radiator, take out the rub. They still want that subconsciously because that's how we're wired. So if you are a man who is competent, you're going to be desirable one way or another. Yeah. So if you work on your competence, you don't need to be angry.

you're going to be rewarded for that, you know. And I just think that's such an important message. And I hear what you're saying, and I hope that if that sort of movement starts to emerge, then it has the right people in place who, rather than harnessing that anger and taking a negative direction, can take those men, young men,

and point them towards the things that have always made men successful. Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I mean, you know, my wife is a women's magazine editor, editor. She was editor of Cosmo. She's an editor of El. And I think she's a great embodiment of the positive form of feminism, which is not about bringing men down, attacking men, going on about the patriarchy.

She's about empowering and encouraging women. So how can we help women? Be amazing. It's all positive. And she's found great success in the world, in the magazine world, by, you know, she's found that when you put that message, rather than negative message in magazines, people buy the magazines more. That's what women want, you know, people

want to feel, I'm going to have status, you know, an optimistic, positive. message we'll respond to that much more. And I think you're absolutely right that if a new men's movement does emerge, it's really important that it just doesn't become a mirror of the worst forms of feminism, which is just man-hating, negative, unfair portrayals of what men are and these kind of paranoid view of the world. Because that could easily happen, that kind of in-cell light kind of thing.

Much better is the vision that I suspect, Jordan, Peterson would endorse, which is actually, you know, how can we just make, how can we encourage men to get out of that negative space and not be paranoid and not become misogynists and become better men, you know, more competent, stronger, more courageous and not be ashamed of those, you know, those qualities which are kind of, you know, traditionally associated with masculinity. There we go, made a positive again. Boom. All right, everybody, make sure you get the status game. We barely touched on many of the things that you've covered in here. So, make sure you grab that. Thank you so much for coming on. We're going to do a couple of questions

for our locals, but thank you for being here. And thank you all for watching and listening at home. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or Roshaw. And they always go out at 7pm UK time, 2pm Eastern Standard, or for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell button so that you never miss another fantastic episode. And if you believe that the work we do here at Trigonometry is important, support us by joining our locals community using the link below.