Social Status

The Present Focus

Society or, for most of us, a local community, is the setting in which we play out the dramas of our life.

There is no option here because we are all social beings. We all have to manage our lives with others as our context. Naturally we seek to benefit ourselves, and naturally we often find ourselves in competition with others.

As other frameworks have revealed, there are many facets to social life.

  • We must handle and manage our experiences and sense of self (RL4/PH4) as explained here.
  • The Q-arenas within experience are particularly significant for social life because they deal with fundamental socio-psychological requirements, particularly sociability-Q1, relationships-Q3, and acceptance-Q5.
  • There is also the shaping of our endeavours via a primal quest (RH'): a line of inquiry generating the notion of a better self which includes communal existence-R"HK and bringing goodness to life-R"sHK in our communities.
  • In every Tree framework, the dynamic duality reveals an awareness that social pressures play a role in determining our functioning.

However, when it comes to specifically and directly seeking to benefit from social life in competition with others, we require guidance from a different framework. One that is ethical at root: appreciating that the desire for benefit as egotistical in nature i.e. individualist-PH'6L4, while recognizing the unavoidable importance of the social dimension i.e. communalist-PH'6L5 for our existence.

Getting what we want and need in society is captured by the notion of «prospering». Prospering depends on having a socially recognizable presence or standing, a social position that confers a certain status or rank.

Social status is revealed in our interactions with others—which takes us directly to the interacting for benefit framework (PH'6Q4t). Prospering too depends on interactions that govern our well-being and our productivity.

Everyman & the Elites

What no-one doubts is that even the most egalitarian of societies contain respect-deference hierarchies, and functioning effectively means recognizing where one stands in that ranking.

While everyone has a social position, people vary in their concern for social status. For some, status is taken for granted and very little thought is given to altering it. The focus for such individuals is on their standard of living. For others, almost nothing is more important than reaching and maintaining an elevated rank in society, and wealth commonly plays a big part in such cases. A continuum of orientations exists between these two extremes.

Everyone seeks to prosper and we are acutely aware of the consequences of impoverishment. The intertwining of status and wealth in prospering seems unavoidable. However, there will be a complex interplay of cultural factors in any particular society such that no general rules can be stated as to precisely what confers status and the role of wealth.

The present investigations seeks to determine some absolute fundamentals of prospering and social position that are properties of being human and that apply or potentially apply across all cultures.

For simplification, the inquiry will focus on two extremes:

  • Everyman: most of us who are more or less aware of status but who are far more concerned for our (and our family's) standard of living and ordinary civil respect within society.
  • Elites: who are preoccupied with occupying the highest ranks in society, expect deference and special treatment, and expect to be significantly wealthy as well.

Drivers

Prospering and social status have many components, and their development requires effort and determination. The challenges here are much broader than found in career progression, although similarities will be obvious.

The initial framework in this series examines the successive modes of personal effort that enable and maintain financial security.

The drivers for this evolutionary progression appear to be:

  • external competitive pressures
  • ambitions for social advancement
  • aspirations for wealth
  • external pressures e.g. from family
  • emergence of obstacles and set-backs
  • limitations of the current mode of personal effort.

Subsequent frameworks will illuminate the processes that are part of prospering and looking out for oneself. Development of these frameworks depends upon a sufficiently accurate clarification of the spiral trajectory based on the modes of personal effort.

These personal effort modes derive from the interacting-for-benefit mentalities. So it is best to start by being reminded of the originating framework and how this framework leads to several other frameworks that clarify how we self-interestedly position ourselves in society.

Originally posted: 10-Jun-2025