Leftist Psychology - Status

You can find the other essays in this series here: Equality, Tabula rasa, Oversocialization, Neoteny, Science

In the previous essays in this series, the working assumption has been that there is something inherently disturbed or wrong about how leftists function. Either they are wholly defined by their resentment and inner sense of inferiority, which seeps through their mindset and actions as malice or cruelty; or they have been scarred by the pressures of modern society to the point that they more resemble a kind of ideologically programmable automaton than a human being. And while this perspective is necessary in order to understand the sheer destructiveness of leftist tendencies, there is an element of leftist psychology which is in fact not abnormal. Rather, it is an expression of a drive that is fundamental to most humans – for some, it is even their primary concern. I am talking about the desire for status. In a species as gregarious and hierarchical as humans, it is only to be expected that a large part of our time and energy is devoted to jockeying for status at every level of social organization. But while this behavior is normal for humans, we will see that the all-encompassing dysfunction of modern life affects how this behavior presents itself today, and this will help us understand yet another facet of the psychology of the leftist.

What is status, and how is a person’s status determined? The concept of status is vague and not easily defined. Though we could define it as someone’s position in the social hierarchy, this makes the term seem more rigid and clear than it actually is. In reality, a person’s status is determined by a number of factors that are informal, ephemeral and subconscious. It is something which is determined and relayed between humans as a matter of instinct, and many would be hard pressed to give an account of their own or their acquaintances’ status. To understand the dynamics of status within our society, we will have to pin it down to two of its fundamental qualities – signaling and non-inherence.

Beginning with the latter, what I mean here is that status is not inherent to the things that give status. While shooting a rival gang member will earn you status within a gang culture, it will earn you complete ostracism from polite society. Status is not inherent to the act of shooting someone, but is rather assigned to it within the framework of a social context. Status arises from the power dynamics within the social context, and is assigned to the status objects as a result of this. This means that as the power dynamics change, develop or solidify within a society, so does the status flow to and from the status objects. Status jockeying can therefore be conceived of as the struggle for being at the receiving end of these status flows. Understand that by status objects, I do not mean only concrete things, but any object, belief or behavior which status attaches itself to.

Because status only exists within the framework of social reality, an aspect essential to its nature is that it must be communicated. This is what is meant by signaling. In order to reap the benefits of the status objects one has acquired, one must communicate to others that one possesses them. Sometimes this can be as simple as showing the object itself – if having the newest smartphone is high status, you will gain that status merely by people seeing that you have one. But in many cases signaling is more complicated than this. To take an example, wealth has always been deeply connected with status, but carrying around all your money in cash everywhere you go would not just be stupid, it would also make you look ridiculous. Instead, you might signal your wealth by driving an expensive luxury sports car. An important aspect of signaling is that the signal itself can become a status object in its own right. If owning a sports car is a sign of wealth, eventually the car itself will be associated with wealth to the point that owning it is enough to gain status whether you are wealthy or not. Because of this, there is the possibility of deception in signaling, where those who lack a status object may attempt to gain status by signaling that they have it. Consequently, those who possess status objects and are jealous of others threatening their station will be forced to guard against these imposters by developing more intricate ways of signaling. This leads to a complex environment where different groups not only attach status to different objects, but to different ways of signaling. Showing off fat stacks of money will earn you status in the ghetto, but among old money families you would embarrass yourself completely by doing so.

Aside from varying between groups, the perception of status also varies over time. It is an intrinsically ephemeral phenomenon on account of its non-inherence. What was popular today can be entirely passé and overdone tomorrow. This temporal aspect of status means that the status attached to an object will be unevenly distributed over time. There is more status connected to being the first owner of the new iPhone than the last, meaning that late acquisition of a status object can nullify most of its attached status. Indeed, being too late to join a new trend can mean that you must acquire that status object merely to maintain your status. If everyone else has the new iPhone, you’ll be hopelessly outdated if you don’t. This dynamic means that a viable way of gaining status can be to be ahead of the trend, adopting the next new thing before it has become popular and riding the wave once the trend starts. This act of being in the first generation of adopters can even function as a tool for gatekeeping those who are mimicking the signals associated with the new trend. Many subcultures frown on new adopters, who are thought to lack the authenticity of the old guard – an authenticity which can itself become a status object.

From the analysis made thus far we can identify three methods of gaining status. The first and most obvious is to acquire status objects. Though this seems straightforward enough, these objects may not be easy to acquire. Gaining wealth in order to become high status is a strategy that works almost universally, used by so few people only because gaining wealth is difficult enough on its own. The second method is to mimic signals of status in order to deceive others. It is far easier to earn the few thousand dollars you need for an indulgent night on the town than it is to earn the hundreds of thousands you need to support that kind of spending on the regular. This method saves you the trouble of actually having to acquire status objects, but adds the risk that you may be found out and become ostracized as a result. The third method is to manipulate the flow of status so that it attaches to objects that you already possess, or plan on possessing. This is essentially what the aim of the advertising industry is – to manipulate public perception into assigning status to their clients’ brands. This can be an incredibly powerful way of gaining status, not in the least because a reputation for being a trendsetter is itself a status object. The problem lies in that it requires that you already possess a great deal of influence and status in order to make people listen to you in the first place, and so this is a method only really employed by those who are already high status.

Our analysis of the phenomenon of status is nearly complete. What remains to be considered is the connection between status and influence. While having power and influence automatically grants a certain amount of status, the reverse is also true – being high status grants a certain amount of influence. This means that status itself can be used to gain favors and other advantages, that there is a certain exchangeability between power and status. This helps to explain why people seek status in the first place. It isn’t merely an instinctual drive intrinsic to the human animal, but there are also tangible benefits to having a high status position in one’s social environment. The flipside of this is that attacks on someone’s status is an attack on their power, and influential people themselves will want to keep the flows of status under control – either keeping them in place or manipulating and predicting their flow.

So how does all of this relate to the leftist? The analysis of status that we have just performed is intended to give us a general feeling for the social dynamics of status, such that we can identify those dynamics where they occur. But to understand how status relates to leftism, we must consider the deranged state of modern society.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the advances in industrial manufacturing, resource extraction, logistics and automation has increased the productive capacity of society to the point where neither resources nor productive capacity is the main limiting factor of the economy. Rather, the limiting factor has become demand, and large sectors of the economy are completely dedicated towards mass-manipulation of the populace in order to make demand keep up with the increasing capacity of industrial production. Today, the attention economy is the limiting factor on the industrial economy. Meanwhile, the population has exploded while the dependency on population for production has decreased. To make matters worse, the creation of the global economy has increased the scale of all of these processes to the point where they are all-encompassing, while simultaneously enforcing a paradigm where constantly increasing growth is necessary to sustain the financial markets. Lastly, because productive capacity is dependent on economies of scale, most of the production in society has been centralized under a few large global conglomerates, most owned by an even smaller number of large multinational banks.

The significance of this is that the modern world is almost entirely devoid of real opportunity. Since most people are not needed, they are relegated to pointless busywork that exists only to facilitate consumption on the premise of compliance and obedience. Modern man is reduced to a consumer slave since that is the only thing the system needs him to be. But a life of consumption is not enough for a healthy human – they require a creative outlet of some kind, to be useful to their communities, to achieve meaningful goals and to leave their mark on the world. And they expect to earn some degree of esteem from their peers for doing so. In other words, not only is the power process left unfulfilled for the common man, but so is his need for recognition and status.

Some would object that the modern world offers more opportunities as a result of being global and digitalized. A company can sell its products anywhere in the world, and it is possible to make a living playing video games or music or whatever before a global audience. The problem with this reasoning is that it fails to recognize how competitive the global economy is. You could start a company selling some product, but you are competing with multinational conglomerates that have economies the size of small countries, armies of lawyers to handle the legal red tape and the money and influence to afford expensive global ad campaigns and privileged positions in the algorithms that control the attention economy. You might be the best musician in your town, but you are competing with the best musicians in the entire world for attention – many of which are backed by the aforementioned conglomerates. In short, while the size of the possible consumer base has increased, the size of the actual sphere of recognition has decreased. Local renown is not possible in the world of the global attention economy. And while one could argue that there are plenty of opportunities for exceptional individuals, this is a pointless assertion since there are always plenty of opportunities for exceptional individuals. What is lacking are real opportunities for regular people, people who, in a different world, would have earned their status within their local communities – communities that no longer exist. Coupled with the rising cost of living and raising a family, and the massive inflation in education due to overproduction of college graduates (many with useless degrees), and one can begin to truly understand how limited the opportunities are for the common man.

But wealth, family, education, achievements, competency, reputation and influence in your community, etc. are all status objects. What we can conclude, therefore, is that achieving status in an honest way has become exceedingly difficult for a large number of people – especially the young. This is where leftist ideology comes in. Leftist ideology, being the ideology of the elite in the West, is implicitly high-status because of its proximity to power and influence. It is broadcasted from every media channel, and presented by marketers and celebrities, further inflating its status in the eyes of the masses. And since most positions of influence in our society are gatekept on the basis of ideological conformity, this gives it the false impression of exclusivity. In short, adopting leftist beliefs becomes a way to signal that you are “in on it”, and therefore high status.

Finding examples of this is trivial. Leftist beliefs are depicted as educated and urbane; right-wing beliefs are rural and vulgar. The feminist is a successful businesswoman or firebrand activist; the antifeminist is an incel loser. The progressive is hip and fun; the conservative is drab and outdated. Hillary was the choice for the sophisticated urbanite; Trump for unwashed rednecks in flyover country. Vaccine takers are responsible science-believers (thus educated); antivaxxers are ignorant conspiracy theorists (thus uneducated). In Sweden, critique against mass-immigration has long been considered extremely low-class, since it presupposes that you can’t afford to live in areas untouched by mass-immigration. Therefore, enthusiastic support for mass-immigration becomes a way of signaling that you can afford to ignore that vast areas of our cities have become unlivable slums. That large numbers of young, white men are turning right-wing is not seen as the result of decades of policies which have destroyed their futures and made them hated minorities in their own countries. No, they are uneducated losers who need to “man up”. The rhetoric is always the same – left is high status, right is low. This is the source of the left’s characteristic smugness. Having adopted the regime-approved package of beliefs, the leftist now thinks himself superior to all those who haven’t.

Since leftist ideological conformity has become a readily available source of status – and become a de-facto requirement for holding positions of influence, making a career or advancing in academia – the struggle for status has moved into the ideological realm. What I mean by this is that the dynamics of status are now intimately connected to the possession and signaling of leftist beliefs. We can use this to explain any number of bizarre leftist behaviors. Virtue signaling, for example, is indistinguishable from status signaling, from showing that you are in possession of the correct (i.e. fashionable) beliefs. The leftist drive to colonize any non-political activity and force ideological conformity on it is a form of ideological trendsetting, where being the first explicitly queer BIPOC rollercoaster-park-and-pancake-house earns you a great deal of status. Being able to get others cancelled is both a form of status flex and a source of status. Cancel culture itself, which is often directed towards other leftists, serves as a way for leftist individuals to compete for status between themselves, eliminating competition in the status game by revealing an ideologically incriminating act committed by a rival. Canceling also helps with eliminating imposters who are merely mouthing the dogmas of the left without sufficient dedication.

The high degree of ideological production from the left is at least in part driven by the desire for status. Being the academic that coins a new nonsensical phrase or concept not only keeps the endowments flowing, but it also makes you the trendsetter at various conventions and activist groups. The constantly shifting flow of leftist verbiage forces the participants in the ideological status game to be on their toes, as early adopters of new terminology gain an advantage. You certainly don’t want to be the last kid on the block without a shiny new xi/xir pronoun! The same is true for any number of other leftist affectations. Woe befalls the leftist who still reads J. K. Rowling!

Since paying lip service to a dogma is trivial, the left needs to viciously guard against imposters. This, coupled with the high competition for attention and the constantly shifting terrain of leftist practice and discourse helps to explain the insane purity spirals that the left frequently falls into. It is not enough to be vegetarian, you need to be a militant vegan; not enough to not dislike blacks, you need to denounce every white person that ever lived. You have to not only like homosexuals, but either be vocally enthusiastic about them or at least pretend to be a little gay yourself. Queer as an identity seems to me in part to have been developed to let heterosexuals in on the status of being homosexual without them having to suck any cock. All of this is monitored and gatekept by a fairly small group of self-proclaimed inquisitors and ideological commissars which help to keep imposters out and maintain the currently fashionable dogma.

As we can see, just because much of leftist activity is aimed at gaining status – and the accompanying career opportunities – does not mean that the status-concerned leftist is any less vicious. On the contrary, there are more people in the world capable stepping on others for their own benefit than there are people willing to die for what they believe in. As we have seen in the earlier essays, there is always a sinister side to the left, and in this case we find it here. Since power and influence comes to those who can successfully play the ideological game, they are furnished with all they need to crush those who threaten their station, and they have all the desire in the world to do so. This is especially true for their ideological opponents, who threaten the very power structure they benefit from. But despite this, we should not think that most leftists are purely self-interested. Only the most sociopathic people can repeat a dogma daily and never start believing in it. Most people will adopt their professed beliefs to limit their cognitive dissonance, and their fervor will be all the stronger as their aggressive self-interest mingles with the trappings of being a true believer.

We can conclude, therefore, that there is no conflict between the perspective that sees the leftist’s beliefs as genuine and that which sees it as merely a status game. In the same way, the various other processes that have been described in this series can also coexist with status hunger in the same individual. The reader is urged to consider the role that modern life plays in the growth of leftism. The very same societal machine which robs the common man of a chance at a worthy life, forcing him to fight for scraps of recognition in the ideological cesspool, lies also behind the repressive weight that causes oversocialization. The very same lack of real opportunity breeds in some great feelings of personal grievance, causing the deep resentment which drives much of the left. And though we began by asserting that a healthy human seeks to be esteemed by his peers, we see now how the system taints all human life. We see how it reduces humans to a teeming horde of rats crawling on top of one another; desperate to reach the top of the pile so they can howl what the machine wishes to hear.