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"Status" is such a terrible brain worm. All these people thinking evo psych jacked reactionaries and pick up artists are edgy for saying such-and-such is really just about "status." Call it "honor" or "vanity" and you realize your edgy insight is 2000 years old.
Look ok, people are not getting what I am trying to communicate here so I am going to be more explicit.
If you jump back 200 years and read say, something written by John Adams or James Madison or one of those famous people from the late 1700s, you realize quite quickly
If you jump back 200 years and read say, something written by John Adams or James Madison or one of those famous people from the late 1700s, you realize quite quickly
that these people understood that "status seeking" was a core human drive, and perhaps the core human drive in regards to politics. People want to be on top and have everyone esteem them.
But they used different words for this than "Status" - they talked about glory, honor, vanity, esteem, standing, renown, and regard. So why did we need to invent this ugly unnatural word "status" instead?
There is a reason
There is a reason
The reason goes like this. Sometime around 1920 important parts of the Western world decided that honor was an illusion, glory was not a good, esteem could not be earned, and so forth. I have written about one aspect of this before http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/03/on-tolkienic-hero.html
Added to the reasons I talk about in that essay are a few other things, including new egalitarian political ideals and a new strain in pol & social thought that thought of 'competition' as the enemy to all that is good and great instead of as an inevitable part of human sociality
