I saw this comment by “Aging Lurker” on Tyler Cowen’s version of the “whose up and whose down” list.
Stop analyzing the world in terms of rising and falling “status”. This is the intellectual version of horse race journalism and it suffers the same deficits. It is a completely meta exercise that is not based on anything substantive and provides almost no useful information. It corrupts and warps your own thinking because it pushes to consider perceived status rather than conducting any kind of substantive analysis. It corrupts your morals because it pushes you to look at the world as a nihilistic, never-ending zero sum competition in which relative status and prestige matters instead of truth, justice, and beauty. Maybe it is true, as a descriptive matter, that some people view the world this way. But those people are terrible and they mostly do so because this point-of-view lets them off the hook for being terrible. In a nutshell, this approach and habit of mind is the inverse of practicing virtue—it is the practice of vice that makes you a baser and dumber person.
Maybe we can break people of their addiction to analyzing status by pointing out that caring so much about social status is, in fact, extremely low status.
I saw this comment by “Aging Lurker” on Tyler Cowen’s version of the “whose up and whose down” list.
Maybe we can break people of their addiction to analyzing status by pointing out that caring so much about social status is, in fact, extremely low status.