Virtue Games vs Competence Games

Discussion

Erik Torenberg:

"There are two prestige games we play within tribes in order to increase our status: virtue games and competence games. Virtue games are about enforcing the norms of the group. Competence games are about being useful to the group. Before settling in tribes, we used to primarily play dominance games — but prestige games (i.e. virtue, competence) took over once we began to collaborate with other tribes.

In some ways, the industrial revolution cemented the prioritization of competence games over virtue games. We started caring much less about caste and social background, and caring much more about who can build the best bridge or the best internal combustion engine, etc. This meant that status became much more “liquid,” meaning you could rise or fall much more often according to your level of competence.

But in other ways, virtue games have reinvented themselves today. They’re played by all the whistleblowers, activists, and cancelers. Some change history — but some just cause problems. Why do they do this? Among other reasons, they get a status boost from it. There are millions and millions of ordinary people with ordinary lives who suddenly feel like they're fighting the good fight against the forces of evil. As humans we have this need to feel like heroes, and modern life grants us very little opportunity to do so. Religion and wars used to serve this purpose. Today, it’s politics and activism.

To be sure, everyone wants status. But not everyone can be competent. That’s hard. Competence takes years of practice, in addition to natural talent and opportunities. But, for better and for worse, nearly anyone can become a victim. Given how much we empathize with victims, we struggle to adjudicate harm and reflexively take the side of the victim, even in circumstances where the harm was exaggerated, partly to counteract how much we’ve failed to defend certain victims historically.

This partly explains cancel culture: a warped amplification of our natural desires to gossip, seek revenge, and accrue status points from taking other people down. In a society where status inequality is salient and acquiring status is hard to come by, this makes sense: If people don’t feel like they can gain status from building things, they’ll try to remove status from others by taking things down.

Some people don’t think a crash in status is that significant, but what are we without status? As a reminder, status is the system that rewards people for being useful to the tribe. If you're valuable to the group, you earn status. If you're not, your reputation decreases. And the punishments are dreadful: everything from mockery to humiliation to even execution.

For millions of years, this has been true for us just as it’s been true for most animals: the more status you get, the better everything else gets.

This forms the basic heuristic in the human brain: get status and everything else will get better.

The irony, however, is that once you assume a lot of status, you’re now suddenly incentivized to hide how much status you have. This is because you have become a threat to others who don’t have status and see status as zero-sum — which in some relative sense, it is."

(https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/status-vulnerability-and-status-vulnerability)