Down The Rabbit Hole Cnb
Vanya Lamunyon
Look, I know now that in Wonderland, I would be something of a clueless tourist. But when my ketamine guru, Dr. Remi Drozd, asked me that question, I feigned the confidence of someone who treats the rabbit hole as a bunny slope.
After sticking the needle in my arm, he reassured me that we could up the dose if needed. Then came a bougie eye mask and Apple headphones. The world went dark, my hands clammed up, and I did breathing exercises until the drugs kicked in a few minutes later.
Hesitantly, I loosened my grip on reality. I could feel my heart race and my chest rise and fall with every quickened breath, but at that moment, I became completely dissociated from my physical body.
During my initial intake session with Drozd, we discussed my history of mental health struggles, treatments, and medications, as well as my physical health, to make sure the treatment was a good fit for me.
But I was committed to putting my all into this. The things I wrote about being grateful for were small and kind of stupid: stickers, blankets, the romaine and gorgonzola salad from South Coast Deli. However, to my surprise, it all helped me feel less dissociative and more in touch with my feelings. After a few days, I was kicking myself for my default skepticism. I was not quite as disgustingly optimistic as Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, but ever so slightly closer to singing about my affinity for raindrops and kittens.
My week of breathing flew by, and before I knew it, it was time to get high. Walking into Lucid Therapeutics on Milpas Street, I was greeted by a comfortable, earth-toned waiting room and a kind receptionist, who asked me to take off my shoes and leave them by the door. I was wearing the Baby Yoda socks my old college roommate bought me at Disneyland. Admittedly, it had been a while since I did laundry.
We walked down a hallway lined with private rooms, and I was deposited in a breathable, curtained lounge area with plush pillows and cushions covering the floor. I immediately took note of the tissue box on the table in the center. It interrupted the kind of blas amusement I had so far been feeling toward the whole experience. Damn, I thought, am I gonna cry? For the record, I hate crying.
The web was a symbol of how the treatment made me feel: more connected to myself and the world around me. If my head was the prison, then ketamine was the sharpened spork I could use to chisel my way out.
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If you decide to join me (warning: long), by the end of this essay you'll know most of the important things I know about social status. There are wider and more practical perspectives we could take, but today we're going straight down, i.e., into the theoretical and evolutionary roots of the thing.
In seeking to understand particular forms of human behavior, especially social behavior, it often pays to look for analogues elsewhere in the animal kingdom. In a way, this makes perfect sense: humans are animals, after all, creatures sculpted by the same inexorable forces that have given rise to all other life forms. But we're also far and away the most intelligent species on the planet, which suggests that we're capable of many things no other animal can do. Why, then, is it so useful to study other species? Haven't we largely risen above our biology?
The clearest non-human analogue to social status is the dominance hierarchy, found (most famously) in chickens, chimps, and wolves, but also in many other social species including fish and even insects. Sometimes these hierarchies are linear: alpha dominates beta, beta dominates gamma, and so on, as in the "pecking order" among chickens. Other times they're more despotic, i.e., when a lone alpha dominates all other members of the group.
Regardless, the logic of dominance is fairly straightforward. By bullying weaker individuals, stronger individuals secure for themselves more and better food, mates, territory, and other resources. Occasionally this leads to outright violence, but more often the weaker individual chooses to yield, preemptively, to the stronger one.
The beginning of wisdom about social status is learning to distinguish its two (and only two) primary forms: dominance and prestige. These are, as one research paper puts it, the "two ways to the top."
It might help to think of these as different systems, each of which can be broken down into a high-status component and a low-status component. So Dominance & Submission are one complementary pair (of interlocking instincts, emotions, and behaviors), while Prestige & Admiration are a different complementary pair. They're the four sides of two coins:
The dominance system and the prestige system have at least one thing in common: There are perks to having high status (whichever form it takes). Other than that, the two systems are almost complete opposites:
Most interactions, of course, involve a mixture of dominance and prestige, and eye behaviors must adapt on the fly. During a small staff meeting, for example, the CEO is likely to be both dominant and prestigious, so her employees need to use context to decide which patterns of gaze and eye contact are appropriate. While she's talking, she's implicitly asking for attention (prestige), and her employees oblige by looking directly at her. When she stops talking, however, her employees may revert to treating her as dominant, issuing the kind of furtive glances characteristic of submissives who hesitate to intrude on the leader's privacy, and yet still wish to gauge and monitor her reactions.
At this point, I hope you have a feel for the difference between dominance and prestige. Now we're about to head further down the rabbit hole, to investigate the evolutionary origins of the prestige system. What purpose, in other words, did prestige serve for our ancestors? (And therefore, by extension, what purpose does it serve for us today?)
Consider the two instincts/behaviors that make up the prestige system. On the high-status side, we have prestige-seeking: striving to impress others. On the low-status side, we have admiration: celebrating or fawning over a prestigious individual, i.e., paying respect. Note what we mean by "admiration" here is more than just passive respect from a distance. It requires active deference to the prestigious individual: giving them your seat, buying them drinks, offering to set them up with your brother or sister, etc.
So admiration, rather than prestige-seeking, is the lynchpin of the prestige system. The central question we need to answer, then, is why people freely admire (defer and give respect to) prestigious individuals. In other words,
Henrich and Gil-White begin with the observation that low-status admirers are attracted to their prestigious superiors and hope to spend more time around them, and that their admiration therefore acts as a bribe.
Admirers, in other words, are sycophants. (I realize this doesn't sound flattering, yet, but hang in there.) They pay respect to a prestigious individual in order to cultivate access to him. They may bring him gifts (large or small), run errands for him, support him in conflicts, defer to him in mating scenarios, or all of the above. Or they may simply flatter him and sing his praises to other members of the group. These, as we've seen, are the perks of high prestige.
This account harkens to the relationship between master and apprentice. The apprentice (admirer) needs to spend a lot of time watching the master in order to learn the desired trade. The master, for his part, is willing to tolerate and even teach the apprentice, but only if the apprentice makes it worth his while.
Now this account of admiration clearly fits the bill. It explains most features of the relationship between prestigious individuals and their lower-status admirers. And, critically, it provides a self-interested reason for an admirer to suck up to a prestigious individual.
Finally, if admiration were motivated by a desire to learn, teachers would be among the most prestigious members of society. But this just isn't the case. Research professors are more respected than teaching professors, for example, and we (the lay public) care a lot more about who wins the Fields Medal or the various Nobel Prizes than who wins Teacher of the Year.
The Arabian babbler is a small brown bird found in the arid brush of the Sinai Desert and (you guessed it) the Arabian Peninsula. It spends most of its life in small groups of three to 20 members. These groups lay their eggs in a communal nest and defend a small territory of trees and shrubs that provide much-needed safety from predators.
When it's living as part of a group, a babbler does fairly well for itself. But babblers who get kicked out of a group have much bleaker prospects. These "non-territorials" are typically badgered away from other territories and forced out into the open, where they often fall prey to hawks, falcons, and other raptors. So it really pays to be part of a group. (Keep this in mind; it'll be crucial in a moment.)
Most of the time, however, babblers get along pretty well with each other. In fact, they spend a lot of effort actively helping one another and taking risks for the benefit of the group. They'll often donate food to other group members, for example, or to the communal nestlings. They'll also attack foreign babblers and predators who have intruded on the group's territory, assuming personal risk in an effort to keep others safe. One particularly helpful activity is "guard duty," in which one babbler stands sentinel at the top of a tree, watching for predators while the rest of the group scrounges for food. The babbler on guard duty not only foregoes food, but also assumes a greater risk of being preyed upon, e.g., by a hawk or falcon.
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