This is just an idea that occured to me during discussing a status-grab model of politics with Spandrell and re-reading Scott Alexander’s classic That Other Kind Of Status.

Basically I see a certain correlation. The more “real”, objective, solid, tangible, effective kind of status you want, the more right-wing / conservative you tend to be. The more virtual, subjective, feelings-level status you want, the more left-wing / progressive you tend to be.

Things conservatives I know tend to like. Owning a business. Owning land, agricultural, or other. Owning antiques, gold, old artwork. Owning large houses. Being physically strong. Having some capability at self-defense or violence, such as learning martial arts or owning guns. Owning powerful, fast or heavy (offroad) cars. These are all things that can be bring one status (in certain circles at least), but they are also things that are intimately connected with reality and utility.

I don’t have that many liberal friends, but basically much of their status seeking is appearing to the smart, knowledgeable and enlightenened by saying the right kinds of things. Don’t you find that is somehow a more… fleeting kind of status than the one given by owning solid, valuable stuff? Or they take prestigious sounding jobs, but they don’t really get that well paid in cash. I think cash, savings, converted to valuables are far more real and long-lasting than the prestige generated by a job title? Or the whole SJWery, all that stuff about never offending anyone’s feelings and letting everybody feel perf. E.g. fat activists seem to be less bothered by not finding sexual partners and more bothered by people directly telling them this is because they are fat. Looks like they are more interested in keeping the illusion that they are attractive than actually getting more succesful in dating. Feelz before realz.

Imagine if the liberal is trying to gain status by buying a hybrid car and the conservative is trying to gain status by buying a Ferrari or expensive off-road Jeep. The first carries more social approval in those circles, but it is just based on the very far, distant, complicated idea of saving the planet – telescopic morality. The conservative’s gas-guzzling sports car or jeep may be less popular in those circles, but some people will still respect it, and they will respect it for their real properties, that reflect real power: price, speed, or capability to deal with rough terrain.

Imagine you are a member of an oppressed group. Not in the modern and rather ridiculous sense, but more like it was in older times. Lefties talk about how you deserve equal rights and consideration as a fellow human being and citizen. But that is a bit… virtual? I mean that is essentially just talk. Imagine that instead of that someone just gave you a bag of gold so that you can buy yourself property, nice clothes, education for your kids and all the other purchasable kinds of status. That would be somehow more solid and real?

Or even in modern groups. You could say gay marriage gave gays virtual status as it sent the message they are not “second class citizens” and “their relationships are of equal value”. But imagine someone identified typical gay professions like interior designers instead and just figured out a way to enable them to charge far more money. Wouldn’t that give them a far more real status increase? If some gay clubs are famous for having the best singers and the best drinks and full of celebrities, isn’t that more of a real status? Or the basic human territorial instinct, rich gays buy parts of a city, rename it Gaytown, let only gays live there, wouldn’t having such kinds of exclusive privilege sound more like a real status increase?

Animal brains don’t want food. They want the hunger signal to stop in the brain, and the only way they know how to is getting food.

Humans are smart, so we learned to directly tickle various feel-good centers of our brain, such as with drugs, without getting the actual goodies they were “meant” to motivate us to get.

So maybe just subjectively feeling you have status, “status wireheading” is a thing. See also. But I just wonder if it is more of a leftie thing and the rightie thing is to try to get perhaps less good feeling, but more permanent, solid and useful status-giving things.

Moralistic rants look like a perfect example of status-wireheading, so going for virtual, subjective, not real status. People who get to judge people IRL are high status – imagine a king passing judgement on accused subjects. Or pastors delivering moral exhortations. So basically just delivering such exhortations, just on a blog, even when hardly anyone is listening, may subjectively feel like having high status.

This actually could be a big element. Again imagine just some old-time chieftain type basic king, like in the Brytenwalda period. What is his job and how does he relate and interact to other people? War is a big deal. But war is against outsiders. How does he interact with the in-group? The two big ones are being a war leader, and being a judge. These seem to be to very fundamental and basic forms of high status behavior.

So going on Tumblr or Reddit and saying “we must fight back against X” or “Y is a hateful asshole” is a way to simulate the two core aspects of kingship! Is it a stretch to think it is status-wireheading, it is status-masturbation, self-stimulation? Like it is a fantasy, you being king, judging subjects and leading charges on the battlefield?

And this is a leftie thing mostly. What do righties want when they want status? I mentioned some examples above, but if you want to simplify it: money is always fairly high on the list. I am simply wired so that I would certainly feel more high-status as a “bigot” in a BMW (because the BMW is more real than the “bigot” insult) than a guy with wonderfully polcorrect opinions on the bus. Because that kind of respect is more fleeting. Are most righties wired so? Similarly I have a strange fetish for wanting to acquire land one day. Not agricultural, just a field or forest. Because that is even more solid and durable than a nice car that depreciates every year.

I must apologize that it is not fully well developed theory and I just cannot express it accurately enough. It is just a hunch, it is just seeing a certain pattern. Maybe this patter does not really exist.

Suppose Alice is more interested in having a bombastic job title, which will be lost if she loses the job, and Bob is more interested in having an academic title, like Dr., which is never lost. Wouldn’t you think Bob’s desire for something more solid and durable makes it likely he is more conservative than Alice?

I don’t really know what to make of this hunch, but maybe someone else has an idea and picks it up from here.

Also, obviously – lefties are often going for real power. But only a small fraction of them has any chance of getting it. For their majority, just feeling high status may be the thing. It could be the that powerful minority gains and retains power by feeding high-status feeling into the leftie majority.

I mean if I go to Prez Obama’s Wikiquote page, the very first one is:

“Hopefully, more and more people will begin to feel their story is somehow part of this larger story of how we’re going to reshape America in a way that is less mean-spirited and more generous. ”

Translation:

“You, my voters, should feel you are a part of a group who are capable of reshaping the most powerful thing on this planet.” Isn’t that basically saying “you my voters should feel high-status?”

Isn’t it this kind of trade – Obama gets real power, his voters get status-wireheading, they get to feel they are subjectively, virtually high status?

Of course we should really test it if the right does not do the same things. But then the problem is how do you define the right. For me someone like Reagan or Thatcher or Kohl just weren’t really right-wing – and Reagan’s Wikiquote page is full of similar moves. Who should I look at as a proper right-wing example? Churchill? Franco? Bismarck? Someone more contemporary? At a random whim, I looked up Nigel Farage’s Wikiquote page. And behold, he is not saying anything nice about his supporters – nothing at all. The closest he gets to emitting “you are cool” messages is saying the UKIP is not for sale. And that is more of a fighting message than a “you are awesome” one.

Conservative US Presidents and candidates are a different story, as they are usually just “Cathedral Right”, and this is reflected in the their message like “let’s make America great again” which basically means: “you, my supporter, are great, and can do great things”. They are not really what I would call right-wing so in this sense it does not really falsify this theory.

I don’t think I proved the theory either. I don’t even think I formulated it really. But I think I can say there is a hunch here that has some amount of probability of being correct.

EDIT: To Melting Asphalt’s great post:

According to Kemper, 1991, “Social Structure And Testosterone” increasing dominance and increasing prestige (eminence) results in boosting testosterone. You may want to work this angle in.

Don’t ignore the sexual angle: admiration, flattery plays a role in courting. Men compliment women’sbeauty, women pull a bit of hero-worship flattery on men they love.

But it is a chicken or eggs story.

If getting flattered (more prestige) increases your T, it makes you hornier and thus more likely to want to mate. Both men and women. Maybe this is why we flatter when we court / date. A tricky way to make your date horny.

But it could be the other way around. Maybe flattering and admiration evolved directly for the purpose of increasing someone’s T and thus making them hornier, and the other social aspects you described attach to that. I.e. by flattering, the admirer makes the high-prestige person hornier, and this feels good, and creates a form of bonding. Maybe. I mean basically this Ancient Greek stuff when young men admired accomplished men, who then both taught, mentored them and had sex with them. Flattering up the old warrior gives him T, makes him feel horny, and if the mentored young man also has sex with him, the old man pays for this all with mentoring. Maybe such relationships were not uncommon in the EEA.

I am not sure where this all leads, really. Flattering a brutally dominant one makes him far less dangerous, while it keeps him in the same high-T mode. It could even be a way to domesticate the brutally dominant one, or for early wives to tame their ultra-dominant husbands.

Back to my own theory: feeling one has high status, even when it is not real, is also sexually ticklish, this may be part of its appeal.