"Status" refers to one's position in society. The higher one's status, the more one is valued in the eyes of the world. Though few care to admit it, high status is extremely desirable as "one of the finest of earthly goods" (vii).

"Status anxiety" is "[a] worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or about to fall to a lower one" (vii - viii). The main reason we long for a top position on the social ladder "is because our self-conception is so dependent upon what others make of us" (viii).

In his book Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton argues that every adult life is "defined by two great love stories": the quest for sexual love and the quest for social love - love from the world. The first quest is "well known and well charted"; the second "is a more secret and shameful tale" (5).

We all want to be "somebodies" rather than "nobodies." We long to be respected and listened to. Why do we desire these things? "Because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves" (8). Our personal awareness of our inner weaknesses and contradictions makes us susceptible to others' appraisal. "We discern evidence of both cleverness and stupidity, humour and dullness, importance and superfluity. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance... We seem beholden to the affects of others to endure ourselves" (9). When others approve our lives and consider us successful, important, and bright, we feel worthy, significant, and intelligent. On the other hand, the neglect of others' approval leaves us feeling disgraced, insignificant, and stupid.

For most of human history, status has been fixed at birth. In the eighteenth century, with the rise of political and social equality, status became more fluid. "In a stroke, [the War for Independence] transformed American society from a hereditary, aristocratic hierarchy... into a dynamic economy in which status was awarded in direct proportion to the (largely financial) achievements of each new generation" (31).

Prior to this change, a person's societal status did not bring shame. For example: "The serf considered his inferiority as an effect of the immutable order of nature. Consequently, a sort of goodwill was established between classes so differently favoured by fortune. One found inequality in society, but men's souls were not degraded thereby" (34). Because of this, people were preserved from status anxiety. Uncritical acceptance of the beliefs communicated in three ancient cultural stories formed the basis for people's tolerance of their lowly status.

• First Story: The poor are not responsible for their condition and are the most useful in society. Status is not due to merit but birth or divine order. Without the poor the world would collapse for they fulfilled the most important functions in society. (47-49)



• Second Story: Low status has no moral connotation. "The New Testament demonstrated that neither wealth nor poverty was an accurate index of moral worth. After all, Jesus was the highest man, the most blessed, and yet on earth he had been poor, ruling out any simple equation between righteousness and riches" (50). Furthermore, the New Testament "witnessed the rich failing to fit through the eyes of needles" and encouraged the poor "that they would inherit the earth and were assured that they would be among the first through the gates of the Heavenly Kingdom" (51).



• Third Story: The rich are sinful and corrupt and owe their wealth to their robbery of the poor. It was assumed that the rich gained their wealth primarily through oppression and exploitation.

In the middle of the eighteenth century these three cultural stories were replaced by three new stories. This radically changed beliefs and expectations concerning status and introduced "status anxiety" to the new world.

• First Story: The rich are the useful ones, not the poor. "[C]ontrary to centuries of economic thinking, it was the rich who in fact contributed the most to society, insofar as their spending provided employment for everyone below them and so helped the weakest to survive" (56). Pursuing and attaining great wealth was of greater utility to society to hard and patient labor. "The villains of economic theory since the early days of Christianity... now found themselves recast as its heroes" (58). The wealthy now fulfilled the most important functions in society.



• Second Story: Status does have moral connotations. Formerly, "a person's place in the social hierarchy was not reflective of his or her actual qualities" (59). Now, in light of so-called "equal opportunities" for all people, status was a reward of merit, primarily financial achievement. With everyone guaranteed an equal and fair chance of success, people would be rewarded according to their worth - or so it was assumed. The successful merited their success; conversely, the failures merited their failure. "Low status came to seem not merely regrettable but also deserved" (67).



• Third Story: The poor are sinful and corrupt and owe their poverty to their own stupidity. "With the rise of the economic meritocracy, the poor moved, in some quarters, from being termed 'unfortunate,' and seen as the fitting object of the charity and guilt of the rich, to being described as 'failures' and regarded as fair targets for the contempt of robust, self-made individuals" (67). In a land of equal opportunity, the rich were not simply lucky, they were better.

Because of this radical change in cultural beliefs, status is now assigned differently than any previous period in human history: "A successful person may be a man or a woman, of any race, who has been able to accumulate money, power and renown through his or her own accomplishments (rather than through inheritance) in one of the myriad sectors of the commercial world (including sport, art and scientific research)" (181). This way of reckoning status may seem natural to us, but it is "only the work of humans, a recent development dating from the middle of the eighteenth century" (182).

Status is no longer considered to be the natural product of one's family of birth or good fortune. Now status is the result of one's own efforts, achievements, and acquirements. Therefore, status is not as secure as it formerly was in the ancient world.

In traditional societies, high status may have been inordinately hard to acquire, but it was also comfortingly hard to lose. It was as difficult to stop being a lord as, more darkly, it was to cease being a peasant. What matters was one's identity at birth, rather than anything one might achieve in one's lifetime through the exercise of one's faculties. What mattered was who one was, seldom what one did.

The great aspiration of modern societies has been to reverse this equation, to strip away both inherited privilege and inherited under-privilege in order to make rank dependent on individual achievement - which has come primarily to mean financial achievement. (87)

This great cultural reversal has fueled the desire to succeed and remain successful at any cost. More than ever before, people are pressured to hide their failures, exaggerate their successes, manage their images, maintain high profit margins, and create ever new and better products.

This feverish attempt to achieve and maintain status is fueled and sustained by status anxiety. After all, what will people think of us if we fail?

Our fear of failing at various tasks would likely be much less were it not for our awareness of how harshly failure tends to be viewed and interpreted by others. Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as "losers" - a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that they have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing. (147)

Many of de Botton's remedies to counter and contain status anxiety are helpful correctives. Most of them are compatible with the Christian faith and message. Throughout the entire book, Jesus (along with Socrates) is offered as one of the rare individuals who effectively renounced status anxiety (viii). Also, Christianity is presented as a religion that possesses the necessary tools to oppose status anxiety (247-251).

Though we should not dismiss people's perspectives altogether, we should not be overly controlled by others' perceptions of us. We must implicitly refute the suggestion "that what others think of us must determine what we may think of ourselves, and that every insult, whether accurate or not, must shame us" (112).

We must be more concerned about who we really are rather than who we seem to be to others. "[P]hilosophers have recommended that we follow the internal markers of our conscience rather than any external signs of approval or condemnation. What matters is not what we seem to be to a random group, but what we ourselves know we are." (120).

How limiting it is to morally judge people on the basis of salary, wealth, and possessions. We should not judge others or ourselves by this standard. True wealth is not ultimately found in possessing things but in possessing "a noble soul." "A man may have a great suite of attendants, a beautiful palace, great influence and a large income. All that may surround him, but it is not in him" (188).

In order to counter status anxiety, we must adjust our expectations. Every failure does not have to shame us. "We are not always humiliated by failing at things... we are humiliated only if we invest our pride and sense of worth in a given aspiration or achievement and then are disappointed in our pursuit of it. Our goals dictate what we will interpret as a triumph and what must count as a catastrophe" (35).

Adjusting our expectations can go a long way to increasing the amount of personal happiness we experience in life: "What we understand to be normal is critical in determining our chances of happiness" (36); "We may be happy enough with little if little is what we have come to expect, and we may be miserable with much when we have been taught to desire everything" (43-44).

Our obsession with the lives of the rich and famous may impact our contentment with our own lives. Alain believes that the "atmosphere of the press" goes a long way towards increasing status anxiety. He invites us to consider "how greatly the levels of status anxiety of the population might diminish if only our own newspapers were to exchange a fraction of their interest in Lady Agnes Duff and her successors for a focus on the significance of ordinary life" (79-80).

Alain points out how a belief in eternal life puts this life in perspective and thus effectively strikes a blow against status anxiety:

But when a belief in an afterlife is dismissed as a childish and scientifically impossible opiate, the pressure to succeed and find fulfillment will inevitably be intensified by the awareness that one has only a single and frighteningly fleeting opportunity to do so. In such a context, earthly achievements can no longer be seen as an overture to what one may realize in another world; rather, they are the sum total of all that one will ever amount to. (37)

There is much of value in de Botton's book. He clearly demonstrates how contemporary evaluations of status are primarily social inventions. Without this clear perspective church leaders and church people can easily fall prey to status anxiety in relationship to everything from personal lifestyles to matters of church size. Could it be that the "success" and "relevance" we so desperately crave might simply be a capitulation to passing societal evaluations rather than related to God's purpose? The answer to this question is not easy, but perhaps asking the question in the first place is a good first step in the right direction. How tragic it would be to look back on life and recognize that everything we have ever done has been motivated by the desire to appear important in the eyes of others, rather than by the desire to please God and love others.

© Richard J. Vincent, 2004