Cast your mind back, if you can, to high school, or possibly to junior high or even elementary school, childhood being one of the times of our lives when we are the most honest and most open about our natural anxieties regarding status. I grew up in the Eighties, a time when high-school students still spoke unironically about something called “being popular,” which was and is for many people an intense concern.
This is only natural. I do not put quite as much stock in evolutionary pop psychology as some do, but it is plausible that our sensitivity to questions of status and hierarchy is natural, man being a social animal whose well-being is highly correlated with his standing within his social group. (Similarly, it is likely that our hatred for and terror of those who ignore or defy local social conventions is natural as well.) Homo sapiens lives and thrives in social groups — there is a reason solitary confinement is considered one of the cruelest forms of torture, and why men and women in solitary confinement go mad. Even the great joy of voluntary solitude can have destructive effects if indulged in too wantonly.
Comments