Western Egalitarianism Is Bullshit
And status is like Fight Club
I am a big fan of
and his Substack. As a homage to David’s work in the domain of bullshit, I decided to write about some bullshit myself.Status is a fact of life - it exists in all areas of our social life:
Status exists in families
Parents are high status, kids are low status. Then, as parents age and kids become established adults, this status dynamic shifts. The status of siblings is driven by age, achievements, money and whether or not they’re their parent’s favorite kid. And everyone in the nuclear family is also affected by the status of extended family members: grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. All of this often produces tensions that need to be managed to keep the family intact.
Family status is an interesting and, I think, often overlooked problem that probably deserves a separate post.
Status exists in school
Jocks and prom queens are high status, nerds and incels are low status. Not much to say here, we all survived school and the status hierarchy was pretty clear for everyone.
Status exists at work
Managers are high status, interns are low status. The corporate work environment is notorious for status jockeying. Most workers prefer a bullshit “title promotion” over money, since a better title provides them with more status than money.
Status exists among friends
Friend groups are typically egalitarian - they typically self regulate by lower status people distancing themselves from higher status ones (low status people distance themselves from the group, and the group distances itself from higher status people). But the group also confers high status to the ones who contiribute and bind the group together by running the conversations, planning and hosting events and being the funniest or nicest person around. Conversely, the more boring, annoying and slacking ones are considered low status.
Status exists in public life
This is otherwise known as social status - billionaires, celebrities and political leaders are high status, homeless people and drug addicts are low status.
If you won some kind of golden ticket that would allow you to have a dinner with any person in the world, I bet you wouldn’t choose a homeless man or a drug addict, but some high status person. If you could bring back any dead person for this, you would probably choose a famous philosopher, scientist, leader or artist1.
That’s a lot of status.
Much if not most of our social lives comes down to carefully navigating various status hierarchies. Our need for status is deeply ingrained in our brains by evolution - in our evolutionary past (and still today), high status has provided security and mating opportunities, while low status has resulted in social rejection, which greatly reduced the chances of survival and reproduction.
Given above, it would be unsurprising for normal people to casually discuss status, like that:
- My neighbor is high status, he has just bought a Rolls-Royce last week.
- I love George Clooney. I wish I could marry a high status man like him!
- Philadelphia Eagles won the Superbowl! Imagine all the status they got!
- Why did you yell at me in front of my parents?! They surely thought my husband is low status.
- Becky is sleeping with all these guys, that’s something only low status girls do.
- Chad is sleeping with all these girls, that’s something only high status guys can pull off.
The thing is, normal people just don’t talk like that. 2
They use other terms like “cool”, “awesome”3, “lame” or “cringe”, which basically mean the same as high/low status. They also talk about the ways people signal status - money, cars, homes, travel, jobs, achievements - but never ever openly discuss status.
It’s as if status was a dirty word - a word used mostly by low status people, but hardly ever by normal people, especially in public.
It seems like the only people who openly talk about status are evolutionary psychologists - both real ones like David,
and and armchair ones like myself - and the online communities that draw from the evolutionary psychology body of knowledge, such as the Far Right and the Manosphere.Here, evolutionary psychology is similar to entomology. Normal people find bugs ugly and disgusting, but entomologists are somewhat excused for playing with the ugly and disgusting bugs, since their research is supposed to provide some greater good for the society. For example, maybe one day they will discover a bug that secretes a substance that cures cancer out of its ass? But still, neither entomologists nor evolutionary psychologists are high status in the science world4.
But why is “status” a dirty word? Why discussing status openly codes as low status?
Because it violates a key social norm - a foundation of our Western society.
I call this norm “Western Egalitarianism”.
Western Egalitarianism
Western Egalitarianism is an ideological cousin of Western Individualism - another foundation of our Western society, brilliantly described by Joseph Heinrich in The WEIRDest People in the World. Both are based on the cultural impact of the Western Church and the teachings of Jesus Christ.
I realized that Westerners have three different ways of approaching status that function at different levels.
In a way, it’s similar to Orwellian doublethink or Scott F. Fitzgerald’s “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.“. But here we have three opposing ideas, not two.
A better way to describe it is to use the Freudian framework of the human psyche which consists of Superego, Ego and Id.
Outer layer (Superego) - Total Egalitarianism
The Superego reflects the internalization of cultural rules.
It is the conscious layer of words, but not actions. Or simply, the bullshit layer.
In this layer, we can find the egalitarian concepts rooted in the Western Church traditions. “All men are created equal”. “We are the world“. Human rights. Gender equality. Economic redistribution. DEI. That sort of things.
All of these come down to: We are all equal - hence status doesn’t exist.
This discourse is obviously driven by women and liberals. But what about men and conservatives? Well, they are free to either conform to the narrative or discuss their silly inegalitarian ideas in their own respective groups.
One example of total egalitarianism at play is how one can insult or ostracize someone by saying that they “think too high of themselves” or “think they’re better than us”. An inegalitarian response to that would be “Well, maybe they just are better?”. But saying it would be seen as totally autistic and would rise normie eyebrows or cause more serious backlash. So no one really says things like that.
Of course, as we established before, status is real. Normally, the clash between the total egalitarianism narrative and the reality of status would produce a massive cognitive dissonance.
That cognitive dissonance is often resolved with proper intellectual and rhetorical acrobatics. One of them is compensatory self-enhancement:
Researchers have found that when people learn that an individual is superior to themselves on some valued quality, their own self-esteem is thwarted.
People then respond by engaging in downward comparisons. They denigrate the threatening individual. After doing this, people report experiencing a boost in their mood.
For example, if someone sees a strikingly attractive person, they might say, “Well, that person is probably an airhead (I’m smarter than him/her).” Or if they see a rich person, they might say, “That person is probably immoral (I’m a better person than him/her).”
Another one is trying to undermine the value or validity of things that confer status, like beauty/wealth/intelligence etc. by saying things like:
“Beauty/wealth/intelligence/ is irrelevant.”
“Beauty/wealth/intelligence/ is worthless.”
“Beauty/wealth/intelligence is subjective.”
“Beauty/wealth/intelligence is relative.”
“Beauty/wealth/intelligence is immeasurable.”
“Beauty/wealth/intelligence is not real.”
“We can’t define beauty/wealth/intelligence.”
The extreme version of above - and the actual definition of total egalitarianism - is saying things like “You can’t say that some people are better than others”.
Middle layer (Ego) - Moral Inegalitarianism
The Ego negotiates between the conscious Superego and the subconscious Id.
It is the layer of both words and actions. When we act sincerely - we do what we say - it’s driven by the Ego.
Here, we can find the middle ground between the Superego’s total egalitarianism and the Id’s subconscious, implicit understanding of the reality of status - moral inegalitarianism.
The idea of moral inegalitaranism is like total egalitarianism but with the exception of morality. This allows us to say that some people are better or worse than others - but only based on the principle of adherence to a given moral code.
A good example of this is semantics.
“I’m a good person.”
“He’s a bad man.”
When we say things like that, it doesn’t mean being good or bad at sports ball, dancing or making money, or some aggregate of sports ball/dancing/money and everything else that is valuable and confers status. The default meaning (without quantifiers, like “I’m really good at sports ball”) is being good or bad at following the moral code.
Note that morality is complex.
There are some universal moral rules that exist across cultures. But we often disagree about the details.
We all agree that thou shalt not kill, steal, or covet thy neighbor's wife.
But for a conservative, abortion is murder.
For a libertarian, taxation is theft.
And for a libertine, consensual non-monogamy is not cheating.
For other stuff, we disagree about the principles. A hiring manager actively trying to bring in more “diverse” talent to the company is a good person for a liberal and a bad person for a conservative.
Your personal moral code shapes your words. And your Ego allows you to follow up with actions.
“Bad people” are punished, expelled, tortured or killed as sinners.
”Good people” are rewarded and revered as saints.
Typically, your personal moral code is highly affected by your perception of personal moral codes of the people around you, but as a sentient intelligent being, you have a right to disagree.
Inner layer (Id) - Total Inegalitarianism
The Id is the unconscious source of all innate needs, emotional impulses and desires
It is the layer actions, but not words.
The Id provides us with the subconscious, implicit understanding of the reality of status.
We act to navigate the status hierarchies. We hate the homeless man and the drug addict and we love the billionaire and the celebrity. And - unless you autisticly delve5 into the details of this, which you are now doing together with me here - it’s all purely subconscious.
Status is like Fight Club: The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club. But even though you don’t talk about Fight Club, Fight Club is real - it’s as real as it gets.
The idea of status is practically synonymous with inegalitarianism. The existence of status means that some people are just better than others. And not just from a moral standpoint - people can be better or worse across every domain that provides value and status, and their overall status is some aggregate of all of their status domains relevant in a given social context.
Imagine two twin brothers: John and Bob. They are exactly the same in every possible dimension, except for one: running. They are both great runners but John is just slightly faster than Bob. They go to the Olympics together - John wins gold and Bob wins silver. John is now the Olympic Champion. Bob is just a runner-up.
Which one of them is better?
According to total egalitaranism, everybody is equal, so they are the same.
According to moral inegalitarianism, they are both equally moral, so they are the same as well.
But according to total inegalitarianism, people value both athletic capability and achievements such as winning the Olympics. John and Bob are the same on every possible status dimension, except for running speed and olympic achievement, which is where John is better. Hence, overall, John is a better person than Bob.
The real life implications of above might be that John will be invited to TV shows and public events and remembered forever as the Olympic Champion. Bob will be either forgotten or remembered as the loser who lost to John. He might possibly go on to live a bitter life of envy and resentment.
Status is real and egalitarianism is bullshit.
To summarize: Western Egalitarianism is a layered concept that consists of:
The outer, conscious (Superego) layer of total egalitarianism
The middle, semi-conscious (Ego) layer of moral inegalitarianism
The inner, subconscious (Id) layer of total inegalitaranism
And it’s mostly bullshit - status is real, which is only fully respected in the inner layer. Two out of three layers are bullshit.
But instead of autistically dismissing Western Egalitarism as bullshit, we should look at how it actually enables our high-functioning Western society to flourish.
Useful bullshit is good bullshit. And Western Egalitarianism is arguably the best bullshit that is.
The inner layer of total inegalitarianism enables meritocracy and the free market economy.
A high-functioning society needs a stratified system of social status. People need food, shelter, leadership, law enforcement, information, entertainment and lots and lots of other goods and services. One could argue that money and free market economy solve the problem of exchange of goods and services. But status is a key component in that machine. We want our goods and services to get better and better, and the best way to achieve it is to confer high status to both providers and users of the best goods and services.
The middle layer of moral inegalitarianism enables public order and effective law enforcement.
A high-functioning society needs its members to strictly adhere to its moral code. This needs to be ruthlessly enforced. It’s not enough to just talk about morality and not follow up with action (outer layer of the Superego). It’s also not enough to assume that people will understand the moral code subconsciously and implicitly and follow it to avoid coming off as low status (inner layer of the Id). The problem of enforcing the moral code needs to be tackled from both sides - we need words AND action.
The outer later of total egalitarism enables mental wellbeeing.
A high-functioning society needs a way to cope with the dreadful reality of status. The status hierarchy is a pyramid, where a tiny elite hoards much of overall wealth and most people are low status. And being low status sucks - “Life is shit, and then you die.”
Moreover, the American Dream - the rags to riches story - is bullshit. Social mobility is very hard and limited: you have to work hard and be very lucky, and even then you will only advance one social class during one generation at best (i.e. from poor to lower middle class).
For low status people, this would be a very hard pill to swallow. This is why they need to cope otherwise. And this is the primary function of the outer level Superego total egalitarism - cope.
What happens without Western Egalitarianism
It’s easier to fully grasp the benefits of Western Egalitarianism by looking at what happens when certain components of it are missing.
Communism
As I wrote before, communism was an attempt to remove the underlying meritocratic status hierarchies:
The only people who considered low status a social issue were Marxist communists, who wanted to build a classless society. But all attempts at communism failed at this task and resulted in replacing the former status hierarchy with a new one, with the Supreme Leader and his Communist Party on top, the normie conformists in the middle and the low status dissidents on the bottom - facing persecution, exile, prison, torture, death or the Gulag.
Communits got rid of the inner level subconscious total inegailtarianism and replaced it with what they transplanted from their version of middle level moral inegalitarianism - the communist ideology and allegiance to the communist party and the Supreme Leader.
In communist and socialist regimes, there was no implicit understanding of meritocratic status conferred to the providers and users of the best goods and services. It was clear for everyone (explicitly and implicitly) that the real status is based on how big of a communist you are.
Arguably, the main reason communism failed was that the whole system was deeply anti-meritocratic. When people are promoted to management positions and given media exposure not based on merit, but their loyalty to the communist party and ideology, it really doesn’t make sense to be creative and try your best - it won’t provide you with any more status anyway.
Eventually, all products and services available in communist and socialist economies turn into crap, and people want to either get their hands on goods and services imported or smuggled from Western countries, leave the country or get rid of the communists and their stupid regime.
The Roman Empire
On the other hand, if you get rid of all of the egalitarian facade, you get a fully inegalitarian system like the Indian caste system or any ancient civilization such as the Roman Empire.
While men from the online Trad Right often think about the Roman Empire, the idea of building anything even remotely similar today would be absurd. When we think about the Roman Empire, we mostly think about their military power, the effective and scalable public institutions, the gladiator games and the lavish lives of the Roman elite patricians. We don’t think about the blood, sweat and tears of millions of slaves and plebeian peasants that made all of this possible.
Compared to the Roman Empire, our modern Western civilization is miles ahead in terms of personal freedom and overall wellbeeing, so there is no going back.
A lighter version of ancient inegalitarianism is found in the kin-based societies described by Joseph Heinrich in The WEIRDest People in the World as the antithesis of the Western Individualism. These societies predated the Western culture and still exist in parts of Asia and Africa today.
Nihilism
A softer version of above can be seen in some of the problems we are currently seeing in the Western Society today. These result from the erosion of boundaries between the three layers of Western Egalitarianism. The implicit understanding of status from the inner layer is now bleeding through the cracks into the middle and outer layers.
This post is also a part of this phenomenon - even though it’s still forbidden to talk about status with normies, it’s now possible to read and write about status in specific online spaces like this one.
One consequence of this is the corruption of the status system, similar to the corruption of the free market economy.
The free market was set to reward people for providing valuable goods and services with money that could buy them other valuable goods and services. After some time, “rich” became synonymous with “provider of valuable goods or services”. Then, some people realized that it’s possible to get money (and the status associated with it) without producing any valuable goods and services, using scams, grifts and get-rich-quick schemes.
The status system was also set to reward people for providing valuable goods and services. But when “high status” became synonymous with “provider of valuable goods or services”, some people realized that it’s possible to get status without producing any valuable goods and services, using scams, grifts and get-status-quick schemes.
The fact that the status system is now vulnerable and people can get status without doing anything valuable is not good.
The other problem with bleeding the true understanding of status into the mainstream discourse is that it weakens the outer level total egaliarianism cope needed by the masses of low status people.
When faced with bitter truths, people have to choose their pill. Those who can handle the truth can accept it and embrace it (the red pill) and use the newfound knowledge to learn and adapt. Those who can’t handle it, may willfully reject it (the blue pill). But some people who can’t handle the truth are also unable to reject it - they become blackpilled and retreat into nihilism and despair.
We can see it by the rising levels of anxiety, depression among young people. At the extreme end, we have the literal blackpilled incels who sincerely believe that “It’s over” and the severely depress people who try to kill themselves.
On a social level, a complete collapse of Western Egalitarianism means that low status people have no cope and no hope, and also there is no effective system of enforcing the moral code. “Religion is the only thing stopping the poor from killing the rich” - this is gone. Low status people become nihilists. The angry mob hits the streets and starts riots. Sometimes this escalates into a full blown revolution where the army and the police joins the protesters and the government is overthrown. We’ve seen this happen many times already.
The Best Society Ever
Western Egalitarianism is bullshit. But it’s good bullshit that makes our great Western society go round.
Yes, our Western society is not perfect. We still have crime, poverty and other challenges. Most importantly, our Western society is currently unsustainable with TFR way below replacement rate and, in some countries, high immigration from non-Western societies.
But we are happy. We are free. We have a good moral code and we are able to enforce it somewhat effectively. And we have a status incentive structure that drives us to get better and achieve more every day. Which also provides us with high quality goods and services at affordable prices.
And it’s way better than any other alternative we’ve seen so far.
It’s better than hunter-gatherer tribes.
It’s better than ancient societies like the Roman Empire.
It’s better than medieval Europe.
It’s better than communism.
It’s better than Asian kin-based societies.
And pretty much everything else we’ve seen so far.
The modern Western society is simply the best one ever. And it is the best one because of our Western Egalitarianism - a perfect blend of egalitarianism and inegalitarianism.
Your takeaway here is that any imperfections of our Western society shouldn’t blind you from the fact that it is still the best kind of society that ever was. And any attempts at fixing these imperfections should not poke holes in its foundation - Western Egalitarianism.
One should not try to dismantle the meritocratic status incentive structure which motivates us to work hard and strive to do our best. Commies already tried that and it ended up with an epic fail.
One should not also try to dismantle the outer layer, the egalitarian facade, by autistically explaining the dreadful reality of status loud and clear for everyone, depriving the low status people of their much needed cope (and hope) which, as for now, still allows them to be happy and productive members of the society.
And one should not also try to dismantle the middle layer, which provides effective enforcement of the moral code. Otherwise, the streets will be ruled by mobsters and thugs, or the angry mob.
Unless, perhaps, you would prefer to live in an Asian kin-based society. Or the Roman Empire (with 1% chance of being an elite patrician and 99% chance of being a low status plebeian farmer or a slave). Or communism. Or something even worse than that.
I wouldn’t.
Assuming that you don’t have any loved ones who passed away recently - if you do, I guess you would choose them instead.
Also, I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you’re not low status yourself. If you were, you would probably choose a “poor man’s idea of high status” person - an instagram influencer, a pro wrestler or MMA fighter, a sports ball world champion or some gangster.
Which means that if anyone talks like that, the normies will consider them weird (funny at first, then eventually annoying).
Believe me, I know - I’ve made that mistake more than once.
This one literally means “high status”. Per Wiktionary the primary meaning of “awe” is “a feeling of fear and reverence”.
If anyone asks “What’s high status science then?”: Physics, medical science, genetics, data science and AI research.
I did not use any AI to write this, or any other post on my Substack.
Good read! I always talk about in-/out-group dynamics but in the end it’s all about status. If we add another recursion layer on top it is also about male/male female/female and female/male status games, which play out very differently. I suspect Noah Vincent took her own life because she couldn’t cope with that cognitive dissonance. You almost need a certain amount of disagreeableness (and or tism) to not care or be oblivious to status.
Excellent reading