Friday, December 4, 2015

What Is the Status System?

There is a dominant society-wide status system. Its purpose is to reward those who uphold X, and punish those who oppose X.

What is X? Specifically, what is the highest-status description of X?

1 comment:

Giovanni Dannato said...

Capitalism leaves most human affairs to the market. The market is nothing but a big popularity contest.
That is X.
If 20 million people were willing to pay 20 dollars each to see gladiators kill each other in the arena, that is X on a colossal scale.
Those gladiators are more valuable to society than a whole city worth of garbage collectors who are indispensable to keeping things running another day.

A society is legitimate insofar as its resources align with its most important business. When X becomes distorted that society loses the mandate of heaven.