Saturday, March 18, 2017

Misanthropy, pt. 5 - Top Monkey

Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself. - Wittgenstein

If you're a bitter person, you may be tempted to interpret all human behavior as posturing for power and status. Once you stop being bitter, or become less bitter, you'll take a more relaxed view, but honesty still dictates that most of the stuff people do involves posturing. Watch a group of friends sitting around a table and talking. When they tell stories, when they tell jokes, when they give their opinions, when they decide what bar to go to, there is always posturing involved.

There's more to it, of course. Human motivation is complex. If I give change to a homeless guy, perhaps I'm doing it to look good to the people around me or cement myself as powerful giver and the homeless guy as weak receiver. But I am also doing it because he looks hungry and I figure he could use a cheeseburger. Our actions don't always boil down to just one thing. That realization will help you stop being so paranoid and bitter if you're willing to internalize it. You have to know when to put your foot down and when to let it go. You have to accept that power dynamics are part of human interaction, and if you're going to have a friend group then you have to spend some time maintaining your status, as simian as that task is. But it becomes less loathsome when you realize that the power dynamics are only part of the deal, albeit a very large part. You will be less disgusted by people, and human interaction will seem less revolting if you realize that it's not all about being top monkey.

But there's a catch.

The catch is that, sometimes, status isn't 100% of everything, but it's still 95% of everything, and that's not much better. And these situations, especially in terms of employment, are situations that cannot be avoided. The problem is that much of what you want out of life is tied to your status, and if you don't have much patience for posturing, you're gonna be limited in what you can have. That's just how the chips fall.

This line of thinking inevitably runs into the practical issue. At that point, somebody will say this: "Look, I know you think you're too good to do the tribal ego-dance with the rest of us, but you're not. So come down off of your cloud and play top monkey. You're just afraid that you're going to lose. It's just weakness."

Up to a point, this is a legitimate response. If you're so terrified of what people do to each other that you can't leave your house, you have a problem. They're not gonna eat you. The response is legitimate, but only up to a point. It is true that you have to play the status game to function. But - and there is no nice way to say this - the status game is just ridiculous. It's silly. I win, and now I'm sitting on my monkey-throne, wearing my monkey-crown, and I have the status. I won the trophy. I got the sticker. I'm king of the monkeys. Hooray! This is the kind of thing you hear from bitter people, true, but people don't say that posturing is silly because they're bitter. It's the other way around: they're bitter because they think posturing is silly. And when a bitter person says that posturing is silly, they're right!

More than silly, it's also corrosive. Anyone with significant life experience can tell you that competition for status brings out the worst in people. A preoccupation with increasing status is the first step to becoming evil. A corporate executive who founds a nature preserve as a PR move, and then dumps toxic waste upstream of that very nature preserve because it's cheap and technically legal, is a good example of this. So is the girl blowing her boss in the bathroom to get  a promotion. So are the schoolyard bully and the absent work-a-holic father. So are cog children.

Remember what I said a few paragraphs ago, about how our actions seldom boil down to just one thing? Bitterness is sometimes the product of a distorted, skewed outlook. But very often, it is also the product of being honest with oneself. You can stop being bitter once you figure out how to accept the truth without being bitter. In this case, the way you do that is by taking the wide view. You have to see how power dynamics fit in with the rest of human behavior. You have to understand that posturing is part of the package, but not the whole thing.


4 comments:

  1. You might like Dostoevsky's novel *The Idiot*.

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    1. Just ordered it. I read the preview online for the copy I ordered - lovely!

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  2. But what do you get status FOR? If you hang out with people influenced by existentialism and humanistic psychotherapy, you get points for NOT posturing.

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  3. Although I suppose, being "authentic" can be as much of a pose as anything else.

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