Economically speaking, whether you're a grumpy loser, a cheerful loser, or a smart loser... you see the world through clear eyes, and cope. You're set in a role or station in life where the output of your effort is wholly realized by someone else.

As you learn throughout your career, your skill or engagement might lead to incremental career progress, but no real leverage of any kind.

Meanwhile, at the top you have Corporate. These are the sociopaths; economic winners. They are smart — they care about getting power, and little else.

Whether you're a wealth guru; a high-earner but low in mental fortitude, or someone who brilliantly grabs real power only to immediately squander it, or someone who never quite goes over to the dark side but certainly thinks about it.

The losers and the sociopaths are actually pretty alike. They are alike in that they both see the world through clear eyes, as it actually is. The losers basically understand how the world works, and how their role fits within it — so do sociopaths.

But in the middle, in between the losers and the sociopaths, is a very different group. That group is the middle managers: the clueless.

At the top and at the bottom you have rational realists, but what’s interesting is the clueless in the middle, and how they interact socially.

These jobs both shape, and select for, a particular kind of detachment from reality. Middle management is a fascinating construct: both your employees & bosses have literal jobs and responsibilities, but your day is spennt in a construct of his own creation.

Everything about their world is subjective and arbitrary. These are people who, in effect, have slipped into a job, worldview, and self-image that is friendly but deeply alienating.

Everyone else is at peace with reality to some degree; but not these guys.

They are tormented by their detachment from reality. But at the same time, they compete with one another to double down on that detachment.

(With the exception of HR, whose explicit isolation from the other groups in both the org chart and floor plan is flawlessly executed.)

Everything they say is some form or another of posturetalk — meaningless, performative babbling. This is the language of living inside a construct; where your entire world lives within arbitrarily drawn boxes, and you have nothing concrete to attach to.

When people speak back to middle management, they use a different language: Babytalk. Babytalk is the language spoken from the literal, to the clueless. It’s placating, soothing, or often misdirection.

The three other languages spoken, which don’t involve the Clueless, are Powertalk (the Sociopaths’ internal language, which is entirely about competitive information-gathering and retroactive deniability).

Gametalk (The Losers’ internal language: recurring games or coded rituals to get through the day).

And the rare instance where Corporate actually speaks directly with the losers: Straight Talk. It’s the one and only time where people actually speak directly, with zero encoding.

the traditional metaphor of “climbing the ladder of social class” is wrong in an important way. There isn’t one single ladder; there are three - each with different values, norms and goals.

You have the first, and largest ladder, Labour. Next, you have the “Educated Gentry” ladder that corresponds to what we typically call the Upper Middle Class. And finally, you have the elite ladder.

Climbing the labour ladder means making more money. At the bottom are really tough jobs, typically paid hourly, informally, or with tips. Above that there are stable, but modest blue collar jobs; then high-skilled or good Union-protected careers.

Finally at the top you find “Labour leadership”, which doesn’t mean being a union boss, but means, “You’ve made it. You own stuff. You drive a new F-150, you have income properties, you enjoy nice things.”

If you’ve made it to Labour leadership, you are by no means hurting for money. But you have not actually escaped the category of “economic losers”, because the Labour ladder does not create paths to leverage.

That is the fundamental difference between how the labour ladder works versus how the elite ladder works. The people on the labour ladder fully understand this. They see the world as it is, with clear eyes, remember?

Skipping the middle ladder for a second, we move to the Elite ladder. The Elite ladder has a lot in common with the Labour ladder: it’s straightforward. You move up by getting more money and more power.

The only fundamental difference is that you climb the Labour ladder by working hard, whereas you climb the Elite ladder by acquiring leverage.

The bottom of this ladder is an entry point - Jr Investment Banker roles you can jump into, or founding a startup now also qualifies.

The next rung up are the executives who run successful businesses. They are powerful, but nervous. Above them is Old Money: the multigenerational dynasties with power that extends beyond business and into media and politics, like the Bushes and extended Vanderbilts.

And finally, at the top of this ladder, are the Barbarians. These are the scariest people in the world.

The middle ladder works completely differently from the other two. This ladder isn’t about money or power; it’s about being interesting. You climb this ladder by being more educated, and towards the top, by having costly habits and virtues.

At the bottom is also a transitional layer: it’s how you get onto this ladder if you weren’t born there, often via Community or 1st generation College. Above that is the upper-middle class Petite Bourgeoisie.

Higher up the ladder are “elite creatives”, people with obscure or virtuous-sounding PhDs, notably interesting lives, or Blue Check Marks on Twitter. (They may well earn less money than those below them on the ladder - this ladder isn’t about income.)

At the very top of this ladder is an exclusive group: “Cultural leadership”. The litmus test for attaining this group is, “could you write an opinion piece in the New York Times.”

Generally speaking, the farther you go up this ladder, the more detached from reality you get. Importantly, this isn’t seen as a problem: it’s actually a virtue, so long as you portray it correctly.

Sixty years ago, this group sought refuge and status in the suburbs, explicitly detaching themselves from the reality of dirty, dangerous cities. Now, it’s fashionable to move back downtown, detaching ourselves from the reality of gas-guzzling, chain restaurant normie suburbs.

The farther you go into expensive, performative habits (Doing triathlons, eating farm-to-table) and coastal echo chambers (“I don’t know a single person who voted for Trump”; “We should ban cars"), the farther you progress up this ladder.

On the way up this ladder, you earn social status by doing things that detach you from normie reality.

David Brooks wrote a fabulous book on this phenomenon called Bobos In Paradise, about the peaceful merger between the Bourgeois and Bohemian classes that created this strange but durable social tier.

These are people that would be mortified to show off a $10,000 watch, but excitedly tell you about their $100,000 kitchen remodel filled with 100-mile diet cookbooks and single-origin Japanese knives, or their 6-month work sabbatical they spent powerlifting.

This is a group of people where a Subaru is a higher-status car than a Cadillac, but the highest status car is none. (Or, now, a Tesla.)

What’s interesting here isn’t the language of Labour or of the Elites - both of these groups see the world more or less as it is. It’s the language spoken by and to the Educated Gentry.

Both reveal the extent to which this group has become detached from normal reality, and also the care taken by others (mostly labour) to manage this detachment carefully.

So some examples of Posturetalk (the Educated Gentry talking to anyone; but mostly to each other) include Farmer’s Market Banter (“Praise me for how sustainable I am”), Academia Banter (“Validate my obscure pursuits”) and Blue Check Mark Twitter (“Enshrine my Takes”).

Examples of Babytalk (speaking to the Educated Gentry) include Uber Driver Banter (“I’m willing to entertain this conversation but please give me a 5-star rating, I really need it”),

Whole Foods Marketing material (“You areso wise for shopping here.”), and Prestige TV (“You are so smart for watching The Good Place”).

This keeps getting back to why the language part is so important. People's pride in their proficiency with and knowledge of chopsticks isn’t a superfluous detail, it’s a consequence of being spoken to in Posturetalk / Babytalk throughout your adult life.

When you’re in that environment all day, this is a natural reaction: it’s a kid’s idea of what grownups celebrate.

Look at any clueless person's interactions that highlight proficiencies they’re proud of: made up but authoritative-sounding trivia, law enforcement and survival skill LARPing, a cappellas...

these are all upper-middle class values that are stoked by the perpetual fear that your peers don’t take you seriously. (As Brooks points out in Bobos, the highest possible compliment within this social class is to call someone “Serious”, as in, “He's a serious kiteboarder”).

Language is the fundamental reinforcement mechanism of why arbitrarily constructed environments eventually turn you.

The more you have committed to being seen as interesting within your particular area, the more you detach from reality and move into a construct of your own creation.

As this evolution takes place, more of your and your peers’ language will become Posturetalk, and more of the language that gets spoken to you by outsiders will become Babytalk.

As more of the language surrounding you becomes Posturetalk and Babytalk, the more conclusively you will double down on being “serious” about whatever you’re pursuing, as both a defence mechanism and in pursuit of real praise.

This drives the cycle forward again, as your values and environment become increasingly defined by doing Triathlons or whatever.

In conclusion: don't be Michael Scott.

Source: https://danco.substack.com/p/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social