Human beings are status seeking creatures.

It is an instinct as old as it is deep. In order to survive on the plains of the Serengeti, our tree-dwelling ancestors had to come down from the trees and leave the Eden that was the food-rich jungle.

In the jungle, food was everywhere. Fruit, berries, insects, roots, leaves, and even the occasional hunk of meat made up the diet of our arboreal ancestors, and all of it was available with very little work.

The rich, dense biome of the jungle was a never-ending feast for our ancestors. But then, the climate shifted and the jungles were replaced by wide grassy plains, and they who would one day be human had leave the way of the monkey and, at least in part, adopt the way of the wolf.

We became pack hunters. And the thing about hunting in packs is that it requires a very firm and clear hierarchy. In the jungle, leadership mattered little. But on the plains, it was a matter of life or death.

And where there is hierarchy, there is the need for status. It is this desire for status that provides the energy for the dynamism of the hierarchy. Without it, nobody would seek advancement over others and hence no leaders would emerge.

And so was born the need for both the alpha and the omega of the tribe, and all the rest of the tribe in between. Some seek status strongly, and become leaders. Others seek status at a moderate level, and rise to occupy a niche in the hierarchy. And others do not seek it at all, and they form the lowest ranks.

With the coming of language and specialization, the hierarchy could grow more sophisticated. People could hone their skills at specific jobs, and hunting parties could coordinate in powerful ways.

With the rise of civilization, our hierarchic nature rapidly became formalized. From small groups which only needed a chieftain and a priest, we advanced into world requiring kings and queens and princes and dukes and mayors and all the rest.

But then something odd happened. We invented freedom. The hierarchy pyramid had grown too stiff, unfair, inefficient, and above all, intolerable to the increasingly urban people who had enough education and enlightenment to start to believe that they had value and deserved safety, security, and dignity.

Once we were gathered together in sufficient numbers in cities and hence came into far closer and more frequent contact with our government every day than a peasant on a farm has in his entire life, the status difference and the arbitrariness of its method of determination (hereditary rule) became increasingly intolerable, especially to the newly emerging middle class.

To an educated middle class person, being stuck between royalty and peasant was a terrible situation because their superiority over the uneducated peasant made them very aware of status, and gave them an appetite for more. But under a monarchy, there was a hard limit to how high they could rise.

So the monarchy had to go. Most proletariat revolutions have been led by a disaffected member of the middle class. Via rabble-rousing, a low status member of the middle class could become a high status member of the working class, and use the weapons of the middle class like education and organizational skills to topple the royal class and create a world where the middle class is in charge.

Thus, we have revolution.

Fast forward to the modern era, and we modern homo sapiens live in arguably the least hierarchical era since the days of the chieftain. All the usual pyramids have been flattened considerably and we all share the privilege of being, in the eyes of the government, citizens, all equal, and all worthy.

Has this somehow banished hierarchy? Heavens no. Of course not. Instincts aside, hierarchy is quite simply how things get done. There will always be leaders and followers on every level because there will always need to be someone how decides what to do and others who do it. The body always needs a brain.

What we have achieved, however, is an enormous growth in the middle class. This has created a situation where you have the vast majority of the population with, from a historical perspective, all the exact same status.

Hence, the seemingly petty madness of the middle class need to keep up with the Joneses, or even better, bury them in the dirt. When you have a lot of status seeking naked beach apes all accorded the same status, the tiniest of differences in status get blown up into full blown crises.

That’s why, for instance, a group of neighbors will get upset at a neighbour who neglects their lawn. They will say it is about real estate values, but that’s a lie. It is really about status. That unmowed lawn makes the neighborhood seem lower status, and hence brings down the status of those who have invested some of their self-esteem capital in a particular version of their neighborhood.

But this does not end at the neighborhood level. Households have hierarchies too, and competition within them.

Hence, sibling rivalry.

But even more so, hence a lot of the seemingly irrational behaviour of parents toward their children. Behaviour that seems at odds with their parental role.

The secret is that, unbeknownst to any of us, there is a secret deal made in every family household, and that deal is that no matter what their status is in the outside world, at home, the parents are the alphas. Period.

This is how the modern person solves the complex puzzle of status conflicts in a complex world never dreamed of by our primitive instincts. That is why they used to say “a man’s home is his castle”.

We all have high status in the tiny little hierarchy of our own homes. That is how it is before a couple has children (spouses are presumed equal) and that is how they try to keep it after they are born.

But kids have status instincts too, and thus there is conflict.

That is it for my brief history of status.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.