Post #173: The Game of Invidious Distinction

25 Feb. 2025

“In making use of the term ‘invidious,’ there is no intention to extol or depreciate, or to commend or deplore any of the phenomena that the word is used to characterize. The term is used in a technical sense as describing a comparison of persons with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or value—in an aesthetic or moral sense—and so awarding and defining the relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately be contemplated by themselves and by others.”

—Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, end of chapter 2

     Invidious distinctions are the weapons we deploy in the great free-for-all that is the battle for recognition. Traditional societies prescribe in broadly predictable ways the channels in which competition must run (though undercurrents are much harder to control than the main stream); in open societies as Karl Popper defined them, on the other hand, the relatively unforced competition for status among its members is as distinctive and central a feature as the free exchange of goods and services. Naturally, even while the field for mutual envy and emulation is in principle quite open, it remains conditioned by traditions and biological facts in such complicated and deeply-rooted ways that to speak of a fully free process would perhaps be misleading. Nonetheless, anything that is serviceable for arousing envious comparison is effective (if not always widely accepted) coin in this unrelenting contest. No one can prescribe authoritatively, for all, what others must accept or reject, though many such attempts continue to be made—as part of the competition itself, though usually involving claims to some higher and more valid vantage point well above the fray.

     Looks or smarts, or better both together; money, old or new (as a measure of established cachet or demonstrated entrepreneurial skill); artistic talent or physical prowess (be it more martial or strictly athletic and civilian); even moral righteousness, high character, or ostentatious piety enter into the arena, the latter usually with pretensions to incontestably superior status.* Name and fame fare best, perhaps, when they are obviously connected to other qualities, but they have often acquired a power of their own quite distinct from their underpinnings. In some cases they have even been known to kick themselves loose of their moorings altogether, if they ever had any. The good-for-nothing nobleman has often been as secure in his position as today’s celebrity known for being famous and little more. In other, more robust cases, several strands of distinction run together and reinforce each other practically to the point of social unassailability.

     No matter how safe and substantial some positions may appear, however, none can be fully secure, by the very nature of the game we play with each other: though there are many long-established patterns (some outright archaic or even fully prehistoric and primordial), in the end all players judge for themselves what “currencies” of distinction to accept, and with what discounts or exchange rates implied between them. With everyone competing in the open society’s scramble for status, there can be no fully binding rules, only conventions, and if there is one overarching de facto principle governing the market as a whole, it is surely to overvalue one’s own currency to the point of partial blindness, while devaluing as much as possible the holdings of any potential competitors. Even to this rule there are occasional exceptions, but not often.

     Thus it is not at all surprising that the intelligentsia, for example, especially in its more academic bastions, pulls so noticeably to the left: such rarefied intellects will usually find it difficult to make money commensurate with their lofty academic standing, and so resent the crass competition from the more monetarily successful, who kick the ball right back and generally disdain academics unless they have an unusual knack for selling their ideas in the marketplace. Thus, too, artistic types typically have nothing but contempt for jocks, who return the favor; the good-looking and the morally-good-though-homely have been feuding for as long as historical record-keeping; while towering above all stand the heroic (or at least the conspicuously brave) and the saintly (or at least the ostentatiously pious or self-righteous), so far above ordinary mankind that it can appear as if they were not also participants in the fray. (It speaks to the great subtlety and enormous complexity of the human condition that even humility and selflessness can be used to mark rank. Would that “holier than though” were a reliable pointer to all that is admirable about human beings; in practice it usually turns out even more obnoxious than pretensions (whether openly expressed or not) to be richer, or smarter, or better looking, or whatever else human fancy contrives in its ceaseless conceits.)

     Meanwhile there is no central bank or supreme court to adjudicate in in all this bustle, and although equivalents to precious metals do exist, as against mere paper and other fiat moneys (or currencies of smoke and mirrors altogether), prices are more or less freely negotiated, and renegotiated from generation to generation, though often along predictable lines. Some currencies are very ancient, indeed, and one might marvel at how well they keep their value considering our radically changed circumstances as a species. Brute physical strength, to give just the most obvious example, may not count for as much as it did in the days of glorified banditry and piracy that Veblen posits as the baseline of his argument in chapter 1; but one would have to be very naïve indeed to believe that such archaic distinctions simply disappear, rather than continuing to fetch, then as now, a commanding price in the right (and perhaps even more, the wrong) markets. Crowns, titles of nobility, and the ornate names that tend to go with them, once the most coveted trumps in the deck, have lost much of their luster; even so, only the uninitiated imagine that they have become worthless.

     Celebrity, meanwhile, has gone from strength to strength: think of actors who used to rank, before the days of the big screen, only barely above prostitutes, though never without sharing also in the shady acclaim of the more desirable butterflies and night-birds. (“The t is silent, dear,” quoth Lady Margot (Asquith) to Jean Harlow, “as in your own name.”) That anyone should wish to make an abject spectacle of himself in front of a crowd, exposing himself in various ridiculous ways in return for fifteen minutes of fame (or notoriety: the two tend to converge where publicity reigns supreme), aristocrats of an earlier stamp would have found so far below their dignity as to be unimaginable. But then they were in a position to take the attention of others for granted and might therefore pretend, complacently but perhaps sincerely, that it meant nothing to them.

     That open societies should allow these various coins of distinction to circulate and compete with one another so freely (the old and the new, the worldly and the spiritual, the high and the low) may invite charges of bad taste and base standards, or even indecency and immorality—but from a more democratic point of view, we may also consider it a signal advantage, because it allows many more desperate competitors to feel that they are winning than if everyone were focusing on the same narrow patches of the playing field. Ironically, invidious misery seems to be most at home not where nearly insurmountable differences loom largest, but where the overlap in aspirations goes furthest and opportunities are most readily comparable!

     Hence the surprising paradox, noted among others by David Hume and Alexis de Tocqueville, that greater equality seems to produce more resentment and discontent than even the greatest social barriers.** (Think about it: is there more notorious social envy in Sweden or in Brazil, in an obscure village or in a shining metropolis lined by shantytowns?) Idealists who are preoccupied with eliminating one form of social competition tend to overlook that a host of others, often more insidious and just as invidious, stand ready to take its place. (The privileged classes of “communist” societies were by no means more benign, but even more hardened and entrenched, than their counterparts elsewhere, even as class distinctions were most loudly disavowed and wished away).

     To make the frustrations and cruelties of this near-universal jostling for position a little more tolerable, we naturally cluster around common valuations, forming into chosen tribes (Wahlverwandtschaften) where we can rely on our life’s savings and investments to count for something. (Even the greatest fortune, say in Confederate dollars, is not much fun if there is no one willing to accept it in exchange, or only at a ridiculously debased rate.) Devaluing what others have to show for themselves is merely the other side of inflating as much as one can the estimated worth one’s own holdings; the two go together naturally and must be allowed, upon sober reflection, to constitute the human default in such matters. Nonetheless, no one is required to live by such pusillanimous standards alone. It remains quite possible, indeed advisable, to give others their due (and sometimes a little more) for things at which they excel, even at the expense of diminishing oneself: not only is it more truthful and more open-hearted, it is also much more likely to win friends. (To make new ones, let them outdo you; to lose old ones, make sure to outperform them without compunction and rub their noses in it without mercy.)***

     Alas, the requisite magnanimity is not easily arrived at, and admittedly it can prove grating (and doubly costly to one’s ego) when others simply pocket the credit advanced with no effort made to reciprocate or return any recognition whatsoever. It happens. Before we point our fingers too eagerly at others, however, denouncing our least favorite currencies as plainly unworthy or even reprehensible, it would be instructive to pause and ask ourselves whether the ones we favor and champion instead are not (perish the thought) simply the ones by which we look best ourselves. If so, we are probably not the detached and high-minded observers that we take ourselves to be, but merely interested and highly invested participants in the same game that we criticize others for playing so enthusiastically.

*Veblen’s discussion has a decided slant towards opulence-based competitive strategies, but he makes it clear that the contest is by no means limited to such intimations of wealth alone. Invidious comparison, he stresses towards the end of chapter 4, can develop just as well towards “the manifestation of moral, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic force,” and indeed he finds these various other directions to be much in vogue in modern times, though still, for the most part, inextricably bound up with the pecuniary dimension.

**Thus David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature II.ii.8): “It is not the great disproportion between oneself and another that produces envy, but on the contrary, the proximity. A common soldier bears no such envy to his general as to his sergeant or corporal. It may, indeed, be thought that the greater the disproportion is, the greater must be the unease from the comparison. But the great disproportion cuts off the relation and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us, or diminishes the effects of the comparison.” Likewise Tocqueville (Democracy in America, vol. II, book ii, ch. 13): “However democratic social conditions and the political constitution of a people may be, it is certain that every member of the community will always discover near himself various positions that exceed his own, and we may be sure that he will fix his attention obstinately in that direction. When inequality is the common law of society, the most marked differences do not much strike the eye; but when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to cause offense. Hence the desire for equality becomes the more insatiable in proportion as equality becomes more complete.”

***No more than Veblen am I talking about whether humans are wise to be so obsessed with outshining one another any way they can. As I’ve stressed in #21 and elsewhere, I would take our defeats and imperfections to be, usually, rather more endearing to others than our triumphs. Nor would I say that the game of invidious distinction is one from which we simply cannot escape in this life. On the contrary, I take the teachings of practically all the great sages of mankind to converge on this central point—that is, the urgent need to reverse direction, inwardly and outwardly, as the precondition of any kind of enlightenment or liberation. To drop out of the game and stop oneself from making invidious distinctions is not nearly enough; one also needs to become fully equanimous with others not doing the same. My own reservations here, in practice not in principle, revolve around the enormous difficulty of the project as I see it described by the Buddha or the Stoics, in particular, though also in Jesus’ reminder that to enter the kingdom of God one needs as it were to die to this world (Matt. 19:39 etc.). To put it in Buddhist terms, breaking free of invidious distinction is quite possible, but it requires leaving behind the very selves we hold so dear, and indeed Samsara itself—nothing less than evolved life as we know it on our planet. As the Buddha supposedly put it himself, “Just as even a trifling amount of feces is foul-smelling, so do I not praise even a trifling amount of existence” (Anguttara Nikaya 1:328).