Status Anxiety (NON-FICTION)

All great artists are, said Arnold, imbued with ‘the aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they find it’.

Our ‘ego’ or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated and vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect. There is something sobering and absurd in the extent to which we are cheered by attention and damaged by disregard.

In 1800, 20 per cent of the American workforce was employed by another person; by 1900, the figure was 50 per cent; by 2000, 90 per cent. Employers were also taking on more people. In 1800, less than 1 per cent of the American workforce was employed in an organization with 500 or more employees; by 2000, the figure was 55 per cent.

They oriented the less fortunate towards three sustaining ideas: that they were the true wealth creators in society and were therefore worthy of respect; that earthly status had no moral value in the eyes of God; and that the rich were in any case not worth honouring, for they were both unscrupulous and destined to meet a bad end in a set of immine

The great ambition of modern societies has been to institute a comprehensive reversal of the equation, to strip away both inherited privilege and inherited under-privilege in order to make rank dependent on individual achievement – which has primarily come to mean financial achievement. Status now rarely depends on an unchangeable identity handed d

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

The approval of others could be said to matter to us for two reasons: materially, because the neglect of the community can bring with it physical discomfort and danger; and psychologically, because it can prove impossible to retain confidence in ourselves once others have ceased to accord us respect.

In England, the transition from a nation of small agricultural producers to one of wage earners was accelerated by a scarcity of commonly owned land, which had in the past enabled a portion of the population to survive by growing food for themselves and letting their animals, a cow or a goose, roam free. From the eighteenth century onwards, the maj

The rigid hierarchical system that had held in place in almost every Western society until the eighteenth century, and had denied all hope of social movement except in rare cases, the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: