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"What abundance did, in the period when its potentialities were being rapidly developed, was to throw out of balance the equilibrium between two forces, both of which are essential to a healthy society—the principle of mobility, which involves the welfare of man as an independent individual, and the principle of status, which involves his welfare as a member of the community. It destroyed this balance by making a good standard of living available for any man, while perpetuating a low standard as usual for most men. The continued low standard was the penalty for lack of mobility, and, as a consequence, mobility became mandatory. At the same time, the changes in the potential living standard began to make the system of status seem evil, for the status system had always consigned the vast majority to a life of bare sufficiency in an age when this was all that the existing economy would allow; but the growth of abundance, by making insufficiency unnecessary, made this aspect of status an avoidable one, thus making status itself seem needlessly harsh and unjust. In these circumstances, society exalted mobility inordinately, at the corresponding sacrifice of status." David Potter   "Monogamous marriage changes men psychologically, even hormonally, and has downstream effects on societies. Although this form of marriage is neither 'natural' nor 'normal' for human societies—and runs directly counter to the strong inclinations of high-status or elite men—it nevertheless can give religious groups and societies an advantage in intergroup competition. By suppressing male-male competition and altering family structure, monogamous marriage shifts men's psychology in ways that tend to reduce crime, violence, and zero-sum thinking while promoting broader trust, long-term investments, and steady economic accumulation. Rather than pursuing impulsive or risky behaviors aimed at catapulting themselves up the social ladder, low-status men in monogamous societies have a chance to marry, have children, and invest in the future. High-status men can and will still compete for status, but the currency of that competition can no longer involve the accumulation of wives or concubines." Joseph Henrich   "Testosterone has far less to do with aggression than most assume. Within the normal range, individual differences in testosterone levels don't predict who will be aggressive. Moreover, the more an organism has been aggressive, the less testosterone is needed for further aggression. When testosterone does play a role, it's facilitatory—testosterone does not 'invent' aggression. It makes us more sensitive to triggers of aggression. Also, rising testosterone levels foster aggression only during challenges to status. Finally, crucially, the rise in testosterone during a status challenge does not necessarily increase aggression; it increases whatever is needed to maintain status. In a world in which status is awarded for the best of our behaviors, testosterone would be the most prosocial hormone in existence." Robert Sapolsky   "There were more ways to die in a routine takeoff of a supersonic jet fighter of the F-series than most mortals could possibly imagine. At the time, a Navy pilot flying for twenty years, an average career span, stood a 23 percent chance of dying in an accident and a 56 percent chance of having to eject at some point, which meant being shot out of the plane like a human rocket by a charge of dynamite under his seat, smashing into what was known as the 'wall' of air outside, which could tear the flesh off your face, and descending by parachute. The figures did not include death or ejection in combat, since they were not considered accidental. According to Korean War lore, a Navy fighter pilot began shouting out over the combat radio network, 'I've got a Mig at zero! A Mig at zero! I've got a Mig at zero!' A Mig at zero meant a Soviet supersonic fighter plane was squarely on his tail and could blow him out of the sky at any moment. Another voice, according to legend, broke in and said, 'Shut up and die like an aviator.' Such 'chatter,' such useless talk on the radio during combat, was forbidden. The term 'aviator' was the final, exquisite touch of status sensitivity. Navy pilots always called themselves aviators. Marine and Air Force fliers were merely pilots. The reward for reaching the top of the ziggurat was not money, not power, not even military rank. The reward was status honor, the reputation of being a warrior with ultimate skill and courage—a word, by the way, strictly taboo among the pilots themselves. The same notion of status honor motivates virtually every police and fire fighting force in the world." Tom Wolfe   "Half a century ago, Daniel Bell recognized an emerging 'knowledge class,' composed of people whose status rested on educational attainment and access to knowledge in a post-industrial society. Theoretically it represented a meritocracy, but this class has become mostly hereditary, as well-educated people, particularly from elite colleges, marry each other and aim to perpetuate their status. Between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 percent to 48 percent. As Bell observed, parents of high status in a meritocracy will use their advantages to improve their children's prospects, and in this way, 'after one generation a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.'" Joel Kotkin   "We notice Roman jewellery and precious metalwork less than their post-Roman equivalents, mainly because we are distracted by a mass of other luxury items that disappeared (or became very scarce) after the end of the empire: marbled and mosaiced private houses, in both town and country; baths with piped water and underfloor heating; a plethora of exotic foods, spices, and wines; as well as immensely expensive items of pure waste, like the animals imported for the sole purpose that they should die in the amphitheatre (ideally taking with them a few unfortunate slave 'huntsmen'). Very wealthy Romans even derived status from their costly libraries and their expensive literary education. This was a world where the display of social superiority could be very subtle—while paying out huge sums of money for the barbarian slaves and exotic beasts, whose slaughter in the amphitheatre was necessary to secure his status, a Roman aristocrat could also lay claim to a philosophical education that set him above such vulgar things." Bryan Ward-Perkins   "In dominance relationships, subordinates are influenced by the dominant out of fear; they submit, or go along in order not to provoke the dominant. By contrast, because people seek out prestigious individuals due to their perceived success and skill, they become truly persuasive such that learners often shift their underlying opinions, beliefs and practices to be more similar to those expressed by the prestigious individual. In addition, because lower status people seek to pay deference to their chosen models in exchange for getting to hang around them and learn about what they do, prestigious individuals gain influence as those with lower status seek to please them. Thus, prestigious individuals are influential both because people shift their own opinions and practices to match those of the prestigious, and because people are inclined to go along with prestigious individuals as a form of deference, even if they themselves don't agree." Joseph Henrich   "'The first casualty of these flying Balkan bullets is the status quo,' an Austrian general bitterly noted. A status quo that had benefited Vienna suddenly lay 'dead as a mouse,' Mausetot. Within Austrian military circles, the solution to the Balkan crisis seemed clear. 'Let's let this thing explode into war,' General Appel scribbled from Sarajevo. 'What do we have to fear? Russia? They won't do anything, and we need to smash the Serbs once and for all.'" Geoffrey Wawro   "Kierkegaard mistrusted journalism because he thought it would feed our love of the ephemeral, and he was no doubt right about this. Hegel remarked that in his time, newspapers were replacing morning prayer. Perhaps the earliest writer to regard our involvement with daily events as a pathology distracting us from the realities of the human condition was Pascal. As journalism in the contemporary world has extended its range, it has certainly taken in churchly events and concerned itself with the beliefs of different religions, but the very context of such news robs it of the superior status it has for believers, and diminishes religion to the same level as the vast miscellany of other human activities that are also being reported. Religions are composed of archetypes that have a status above the constant flow of ideas and news stories. We respond (or do not respond) to such archetypes in a reflective manner that determines how we view the world, but where journalism dominates our thoughts, reflectiveness is diluted by the passion for novelty. We move from an article on religion to one on fashion, sport, or public affairs. Like democracy, journalism is a manic equalizer." Kenneth Minogue   "Status and prestige matter to everyone, of course, but they matter to some more than others. Most of all, they matter to those who find themselves in precarious industries where one's reputation counts for a great deal and, just as important, to lonely, unattached people who long to feel valued and desired. Delayed marriage and child-rearing ensure that many more young people spend many more years in the mating market and, by extension, orienting their lives around fulfilling their own social and sexual appetites over the care and feeding of children. This is especially true among children of the culturally powerful upper middle class, who’ve been trained to fear downward mobility in a stratified society as much as our primitive ancestors feared being devoured by toothy predators. The result is what you might call a culture of 'competitive wokeness.'" Reihan Salam   "It was the German government, and especially its military leadership, that first risked and then caused continental war in August 1914. Why did they do it? Because they took it for granted that war is the natural way of deciding the balance of international power; because they foresaw that the longer the next war was delayed, the longer the odds against Germany's victory would be; because they were determined at least to maintain Germany's ability to back its wishes by credible military force and therefore its status as a Great Power; and because (to quote Stevenson) the memory of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War 'still nurtured through annual commemorations and the cult of Bismarck, had addicted the German leaders to sabre-rattling and to military gambles, which had paid off before and might do so again.'" Nigel Biggar   "Just as will and ethics collapse all binaries, I wish to collapse the binaries of natural life and death insofar as they are usually correlated with affirmation and negation by proposing that the death of the human species is the most life-affirming event that could liberate the natural world from oppression, and our death could be an act of affirmative ethics which would far exceed any localized acts of compassion because those acts will be bound by human contracts, social laws and the prevalent status of beings, things and their placement within knowledge." Patricia MacCormack   "The proponents of preferential policies must acknowledge the injuries done to innocent individuals. They must confront the consequences flowing daily from the system of preferences in awarding contracts, jobs, promotions, and other opportunities. Supporters of the status quo attempt to hide the reality of preferences beneath a facade of 'plus factors,' 'goals and timetables,' and other measures that are said merely to 'open up access' to opportunities. Behind all these semantic games, individual Americans are denied opportunities by government simply because they are of the wrong color or sex." Charles Canaday   "Keen observers of official Covid-messaging couldn't fail to note how many of the same public health experts reliably tacked with the political winds: from informing us that worry over Covid-19 was just barely-disguised anti-Chinese bigotry, to insisting that we cut off all human contact indefinitely, to explaining that the cause of anti-racism in fact justified taking to the streets en masse during the pandemic, and so on and so forth. Expertise in this case increasingly came down not to a proven track record of accurate predictions or wise proposals, but to the unchanging status wielded by the members of a technocratic class itself." David Polansky   "It took just seven generations for the successful descendants of illiterate village artisans of 1300 to be incorporated fully into the educated elite of 1500—that is, the frequency of their names in the Oxbridge rolls reached the level around where it is today. By 1620, according to probate records, people with names like Butcher and Baker had nearly as much wealth as people with high-status surnames like Rochester and Radcliffe." Gregory Clark   "The appeasers distrusted France, blamed her for the punitive Versailles clauses, felt Germany had been wronged, and were determined to make restitution. Lord Lothian declared that it was Britain's moral obligation to support the Germans in their struggle to 'escape from encirclement' (the encircling powers, presumably, being France, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg) 'to a position of balance.' He neglected to add that any shift in the status quo would mean the liquidation of legitimate governments. At Versailles the 1914-1918 holocaust had been blamed on the Germans. Now the fashionable scapegoat was Germany's ancient enemy. 'Lady Astor,' The Week reported, 'is obsessed with a vivid personal dislike of the French.' As late as November 7, 1936, a member of the cabinet told his ministerial colleagues that Francophobia was increasing in England because the French were an obstacle to Britain 'getting on terms with the dictator powers.'" William Manchester   "Because our status is always in flux, or potentially so, we look around and compare ourselves to our contemporaries; bourgeois society is fundamentally competitive. One has to perform one's social value anew each day. (That's what social media is for. And to maintain a high-performance personality, it helps to have the right mix of mood- or attention-enhancing pharmaceuticals.)" Matthew Crawford   "Is Joyce the one intellectual who atones for Nietzschean contempt of the masses, and raises mass man, or a representative of mass man, to the status of epic hero? To a degree, yes. One effect of Ulysses is to show that mass man matters, that he has an inner life as complex as an intellectual's, that it is worthwhile to record his personal details on a prodigious scale. And yet it is also true that Bloom himself would never and could never have read Ulysses or a book like Ulysses. The complexity of the novel, its avant-garde technique, its obscurity, rigorously exclude people like Bloom from its readership. More than almost any other twentieth-century novel, it is for intellectuals only." John Carey   "Work could be interrupted by mandatory listening to a Hitler speech on the radio or attendance at a Nazi factory cell meeting. Every tenement had a 'block leader' and a discussion forum. Recreational activity was channelled through the Strength Through Joy organization. Shopping became an assertion of identity, not just because of the campaign to avoid Jewish shops. Products were increasingly labelled and advertised as 'Germanic,' healthy for the Volk. Goebbels inveighed against the wearing of French-designed clothes for women and called for an authentically German style of couture. Life-cycle events turned into an affirmation of racial allegiance. It was necessary to prove one's Aryan status and racial health to obtain a marriage certificate. The birth of a full-limbed healthy child was joyful in itself, but it also allowed the parents to anticipate financial benefits and free schooling." David Cesarani   "We have, as it seems to me, in this most mechanical and interlocking of civilizations, attempted to lop this creature down to the status of a time-serving invention. He is not, after all, merely a member of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science. He is—and how old-fashioned the words sound!—something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity—which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves—we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims." James Baldwin