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"man is a social animal" sounds all fluffy bunnies but what it means is that there are deep structures in your brain that try to kill you if your perception of your social status is too low. in Dunbar-number-sized social groups most people could clear this bar. most now can't
this means that rational and accurate self-perception, as matters stand with our world-sized pool of fish making everybody small. is a suicide pact. this is the source of a truth we all recognize: in modern society, to be sane is fucking nuts
our survival drive never goes away either, though, so we're continually working out dozens of ways to cope with this. if you run into people on the lowest rungs of society in your day-to-day, you mostly run into ones who are obviously deeply crazy
this is a matter of selection pressure; the ones whose brains couldn't work out some way of hacking their self-perception are mostly dead now. higher up, a very popular solution is celebrity culture, where you identify with a figure of worship and participate in their status
an enormous amount of activity is continually devoted to growing and nurturing subcultures that are large enough to sustain a sense of status and small enough for that sense of status to be accessible, then trying to manage that balance against the vicissitudes of churn
most of culture war can be usefully viewed as people trying to build senses of themselves as important, which gets particularly ugly when your sense of yourself as important is based on your sense of specific other people as unimportant
it appears to be natural to react to other people trying to puff up their sense of their importance with annoyance, but i feel like it would be helpful to keep in mind that as awkward and ham-fisted as this behavior might get, it's a matter of raw fucking survival for all of us
