Status Anxiety

by Botton, Alain De

  7.

  If poverty is the customary material penalty for low status, then neglect and faraway looks are the emotional penalties that a snobbish world appears unable to stop imposing on those bereft of the symbols of importance.

  Carved cabinet of pollard oak, Jackson & Graham, London, 1852

  V

  DEPENDENCE

  Factors of Dependence

  1.

  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 mattered 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. Status now rarely depends on an unchangeable identity handed down the generations; rather, it hangs on performance in a fast-moving and implacable economy.

  It is in the nature of this economy that the most evident trait of the struggle to achieve status should be uncertainty. We contemplate the future in the knowledge that we may at any time be thwarted by colleagues or competitors, or discover that we lack the talents to reach our chosen goals, or steer into an inauspicious current in the swells of the marketplace—any failure being compounded by the possible success of our peers.

  Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition, for our livelihoods and esteem rest on at least five unpredictable elements, offering us five good reasons never to count on either attaining or holding on to our desired position within the hierarchy.

  1. Dependence on Fickle Talent

  If our status depends on our achievements, then what we may need most in order to succeed is talent and, where peace of mind is a priority, reliable control over it. In most activities, however, talent is impossible to direct as we please. It can make an appearance for a time and then unapologetically vanish, leaving our career in pieces. We cannot call the best of ourselves to the fore at will. So far are we from owning what talent we do on occasion display, that our achievements can seem like a gift granted to us by an external agency, a gift upon whose erratic presence and absence hang not only our ability to pay for the objects around us but the very course of our lives.

  It was the ancient Greeks who came up with the most acute image to evoke our distressingly volatile relationship with talent, when they named the Muses. According to Greek mythology, each of these nine demideities held sway over, and fitfully bestowed on chosen souls, a particular ability: in epic poetry, history, love poetry, music, tragedy, the writing of hymns, dancing, comedy or astronomy. Those who experienced success in any of these fields were reminded that their gifts were never truly their own and might be spirited away again at a stroke if the thin-skinned givers changed their minds.

  The areas in which the Greek Muses were said to operate hardly reflect contemporary concerns. And yet the mythological idiom continues to capture something meaningful about the weak hold we have upon our own powers to achieve, and about the subservient, anxious position we are thereby compelled to adopt in relation to our future.

  2. Dependence on Luck

  Our status also depends on a range of favourable conditions that could be loosely defined by the word luck. It may be merely good luck that places us in the right occupation, with the right skills, at the right time, and little more than bad luck that denies us the selfsame advantages.

  But pointing to luck as an explanation for what happens in our lives has, regrettably, become effectively unacceptable. In less technologically sophisticated eras, when mankind respected the power of the gods and the unpredictable moods of nature, the idea of our having no control over events had wide currency. Gratitude and blame were routinely laid on the doorstep of external agencies, with reference made to the intervention of demons, goblins, spirits and gods. Throughout the story of Beowulf (circa A.D. 1100), for example, we are told that the success of man depends on the will of the Christian God; describing his defeat of Grendel’s mother, Beowulf himself asserts that “the fight would have ended straightaway if God had not guarded me.”

  As our power to control and anticipate the behaviour of our environment has increased, however, so has the concept of luck or of guardian deities lost its potency. While few would deny outright that luck retains a theoretical role in mapping the course of careers, the evaluation of individuals proceeds, in practical terms, on the assumption that they may fairly be held responsible for their own biographies. It would sound to our ears unduly (and even suspiciously) modest for someone to ascribe a personal or professional triumph to “good luck,” and more significantly in this context, pitiable to blame defeat on the opposite. Winners make their own luck, so goes the modern mantra—an aphorism that would have puzzled the ancient Roman worshippers of the goddess of fortune or the faithful heroes of Beowulf.

  It is alarming enough to have to rely for one’s status on contingent elements. It is harder yet to live in a world so enamoured with notions of rational control that it has largely dismissed “bad luck” as a credible explanation for defeat.

  3. Dependence on an Employer

  The unpredictability of our condition is further aggravated by the likelihood that our status will be bound up with the priorities of an employer.

  In the United States in 1907, a book entitled Three Acres and Liberty seized the imagination of the reading public. The author, Bolton Hall, began by taking for granted the awkwardness of having to work for someone else, and so advised his readers that they could win their freedom by leaving their offices and factories and buying three acres apiece of inexpensive farmland in middle America. This acreage would soon enable them to grow enough food for a family of four and to build a simple but comfortable home, and best of all, relieve them of any need ever again to flatter or negotiate with colleagues and superiors. The balance of the book was given over to detailed descriptions of how to plant vegetables, construct a greenhouse, lay out an orchard and buy farm animals (one cow was sufficient for milk and cheese, explained Hall, and ducks made for more nutritious eating than chickens). The message delivered by Three Acres and Liberty had been heard with growing frequency over the previous fifty years in both Europe and America: in order to lead a happy life, one must attempt to escape reliance on employers and instead work directly for oneself, at one’s own pace, for one’s own rewards.

  Such calls had come in response to an opposing trend: during the nineteenth century, for the first time in history, a majority of people ceased working on their own farms or in small family businesses and began bartering their intelligence or their strength for a wage paid them by someone else. In 1800, just 20 percent of American workers had an employer other than themselves; by 1900, the figure was up to 50 percent, and by 2000, 90 percent. Employers were also getting larger: whereas in 1800, less than 1 percent of the American workforce was employed in an organisation having five hundred or more employees, by 2000, the figure stood at 55 percent.

  In England, the transition from a nation of small agricultural producers to one of wage earners was accelerated by the loss of much commonly owned land, a resource which had enabled the rural poor to survive by growing food for themselves and letting their live-stock—a cow or a goose—roam free to graze or forage. From the eighteenth century onwards, the majority of “open” English fields were enclosed behind walls and hedges by powerful landowners. Between 1724 and 1815, more than a million and a half acres of land were privatised. According to traditional Marxist analysis (strongly challenged by historians but revealing nonetheless), the enclosure movement heralded the birth of a modern industrial proletariat, defined as a group of people unable to be self-sufficient and hence left with no option but to sell themselves to an employer at a
rate and under conditions heavily weighted in the employer’s favour.

  Now as then, the travails of being an employee include not only worry over the duration of one’s employment but also the everyday humiliation of many working practises and dynamics. Because most businesses are shaped like pyramids, with a wide base of employees giving way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be promoted, and who left behind, typically becomes one of the most oppressive anxieties of the workplace—and one that, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Compounding the misery is the fact that because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its opposite may have an apparently haphazard relationship to performance. The successful alpinists of organisational pyramids may not be the employees who are best at their tasks, but those who have best mastered a range of political skills in which ordinary life does not generally offer instruction.

  Despite the surface differences between modern businesses and royal courts, perhaps the most penetrating advice on the requirements for survival in the former was provided by a succession of clear-eyed noblemen who lived in the latter in France and Italy between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. In retirement, these men collected their thoughts in a series of cynical works written in a tart, aphoristic style—works that continue even today to test the limits of what we would like to believe about our fellow human beings. The observations of Machiavelli (1469–1527), Guicciardini (1483–1540), La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) and La Bruyère (1645–1696) give a prescient indication of the manoeuvres that workers may, outside their regularly advertised roles, have to execute if they wish to flourish.

  On the need to beware of colleagues:

  Men are so false, so insidious, so deceitful and cunning in their wiles, so avid in their own interest, and so oblivious to others’ interests, that you cannot go wrong if you believe little and trust less.

  GUICCIARDINI

  We must live with our enemies as if they might one day become our friends, and live with our friends as if they might sometime or other become our enemies.

  LA BRUYÈRE

  On the need to lie and exaggerate:

  The world more often rewards outward signs of merit than merit itself.

  LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

  If you are involved in important affairs …, you must always hide your failures and exaggerate your successes. It is a form of

  swindling, but since your fate more often depends upon the opinion of others rather than on facts, it is a good idea to create the impression that things are going well.

  GUICCIARDINI

  Youu are an honest man, and do not make it your business either to please or to displease the favourites. You are merely attached to your master and to your duty. You are finished.

  LA BRUYÈRE

  On the need to threaten:

  It is much safer to be feared than loved. Love is sustained by a bond of gratitude which, because men are excessively self-interested, is broken whenever they see a chance to benefit themselves. But fear is sustained by a dread of punishment that is always effective.

  MACHIAVELLI

  Since the majority of men are either not very good or not very wise, one must rely more on severity than on kindness.

  GUICCIARDINI

  It may, of course, be possible to acquire the velvet glove and iron fist of a courtier, and possible, too, to learn to navigate around colleagues as we might around a reef-ringed coastline—but having the need to do so is scarcely calming. From the perspective of an office or a factory floor, it is easy to fathom the lure of three acres, half a dozen ducks and liberty.

  4. Dependence on an Employer’s Profitability

  For a worker in an organisation, job security depends not only on internal politics but also, and more ominously, on the company’s ability to remain profitable in a marketplace in which few producers can defend their competitive position or pricing power for long. If the ferocity of the competition inflicts on many workforces an anxiety not dissimilar to that one might feel when standing on a melting ice floe, it is perhaps because the most effective and swiftest way for management to improve profitability is almost always to decimate staffing levels.

  Companies under financial pressure may find it hard to resist dispensing with workers in countries where wages are high in order to hire cheaper replacements in faraway lands. They may equally be tempted to enhance profitability by merging with competitors, in the process eliminating great swathes of duplicate workforces. Or again, they may turn to mechanisation, computers or robots. Consider, for example, the automatic teller machine, or ATM, which was developed in 1968 and first unveiled the following year, when a single unit was fitted into a hole in the wall at a branch of Manhattan’s Chemical Bank. Within a decade, 50,000 ATMs were in operation worldwide; by 2000, the number had risen to 1,000,000. But however technologically impressive they were, ATMs offered flesh-and-blood bank tellers few grounds for celebration: studies soon showed that one ATM could do the work of no fewer than thirty-seven human tellers (and, into the bargain, rarely fell ill). In the United States, about half of all those employed in retail banking—some 500,000 people—lost their jobs between 1980 and 1995, thanks in large part to the invention of these silkily efficient machines.

  As if all that weren’t troubling enough, employees must in addition worry about the consequences of the pressure put on companies to introduce new and better products into the marketplace. For long stretches of history, the life cycles of goods and services exceeded those of the human beings who produced and consumed them. In Japan, the kimono and jinbaori went unchanged for four hundred years. In China, people were still wearing in the eighteenth century exactly what their ancestors had worn in the sixteenth. Between 1300 and 1660, plough design did not alter across northern Europe. Such stability of production must have given artisans and labourers a reassuring sense that their work would outlive them. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, however, product life cycles have been sharply attenuated, and the trend has shaken workers’ confidence in the long-term integrity of their careers.

  Sudden and decisive trouncings of old products and services by new ones have occurred in almost every area of the economy, as canals were made obsolete by the invention of the railway, passenger liners by the introduction of the jet engine, horses by the development of the car and typewriters by the proliferation of the personal computer.

  The market’s passion for movement and change can burden companies with product-development costs so enormous that their very survival must depend on the successful launch of a single item. Like a palpitating high roller who, instead of being allowed to cash in his winnings after a good run, is forced at gunpoint to continue risking his assets, a corporation may have to let everything ride on the outcome of a few wagers or even a solitary bet, and as a result either amass vast but precarious riches, or, alternatively, self-destruct.

  5. Dependence on the Global Economy

  The survival of both companies and their employees is further threatened by the performance of the economy as a whole.

  The history of the economies of Western nations has, since the early nineteenth century, been one of repeated cycles of growth and recession. Typically, four or five years of expansion have been followed by one or two of retraction, with occasional massive retrenchments lasting five or six years. Graphs of national wealth often resemble the profiles of angular mountain ranges, in whose every valley lie the bankruptcies of long-established firms, the layoffs of workforces, the closings of factories, the destruction of stock. We may seek to attribute these events to unnatural dimensions of economic life, and we may hope that one day we will learn to avert them, but for the time being, the best efforts of governments and central banks have demonstrated that there is little to be done about such turbulence.

  Every cycle follows a similar pattern. It begins when growth picks up and companies invest in new capacity to meet perceived future needs. Production costs tend to escalate a
t this stage, as do asset prices, especially for equities and property, driven up in part by speculators. Inexpensive credit encourages businesses to commit to large, capital-intensive factories and offices. At this critical point, demand and current output both begin to slow, even as consumption continues to accelerate. A lack of savings spurs an increase in personal and commercial borrowing. To satisfy domestic demand, companies start to import more and export less, a trend that soon results in a balance-of-payments deficit. The economy is now officially out of kilter, freighted by overinvesting, overconsumption, overborrowing and overlending. Here begins the slide into recession. Prices are pushed higher by the use of less efficient means of production, by the growth in the money supply and by speculation. Tighter and much more expensive credit raises the cost of outstanding debt. Asset values, inflated in the upswing, are punctured. Borrowers can no longer make their payments, and the collateral available for new loans is restricted. Incomes, investment and consumption all fall off. Companies and entrepreneurs flounder or go bankrupt; unemployment rates rise. As confidence evaporates, borrowing and spending dry up. Long-term capital investments made in better days now come on line, increasing supply and depressing prices just as demand is slackening. Companies and individuals are forced to sell off assets at a loss, deepening the crisis, but many potential buyers wait for the market to hit bottom before purchasing, further delaying recovery.

  Rather than a sign of hysteria, a state of steady anxiety may be a reasonable response to the very real threats of the economic environment.

  Percentage change in U.S.gross domestic product per capita,1890–2000

  2.

  If we are anguished by the thought of failure, it may be because success seems the only dependable incentive for the world to grant us its goodwill. A family bond, a friendship or a sexual attraction may at times render material incentives unnecessary, but only a reckless optimist would rely on emotional currencies for the regular fulfilment of his or her needs. Humans rarely smile without having some robust reason to do so.