The reverse proof that all human life is driven by status games, is to look at what happens when all status…

The reverse proof that all human life is driven by status games, is to look at what happens when all status is stripped away. That experience is humiliation. The most toxic and destructive of all human experiences, far surpassing sadness, grief, depression etc. /1 https://t.co/96QWSgYKC3

And central to our Western culture, which historically is mostly a Christian culture. The Catholic Church built most of Western society, in conjunction with the Romans. And what special sauce did it use to make that work? Girard saw it, as did El Greco. /2 https://t.co/TYxC7vNxoq

It targeted human status games. Christ’s specific role was to absorb the status games of human life, including its critical scapegoating mechanism, into himself. The ultimate status figure, the son of God, took upon himself the humiliation of the losers in status games. /3 https://t.co/CxMuYjfsgl

In 2025 you can’t really talk about this cultural role without somebody immediately assigning you to a ‘team’ in modern status games. You must be ‘religious’, for example, a spokesperson for the church. This is beyond any of that. Girard’s work was anthropological. /4 https://t.co/DMJvBvjjvp

Christ carrying his own cross, to be crucified, is again the top of the status hierarchy, a literal supernatural top beyond all human status games, assuming the role of the bottom of the status hierarchy. The scapegoat, the excluded. ‘Stop this, humans’, is the message. /5 https://t.co/MpKBDzZAb6

‘I’m calling you all out on these games, short-circuiting them from my position at the pinnacle of all status hierarchies’, you could imagine El Greco’s Christ saying. Subjecting himself to the greatest of all humiliations, to make the point. /6 https://t.co/KVYsar3DII

Humiliation as the most destructive, soul-destroying of all human experiences, because it represents the total loss of social status. Research shows it in the history of many if not most serial killers, as a cause of their behaviour. /7

Collectively it can explain the German embrace of Nazism in the 1930s, after their national and deliberate humiliation following WW1. And in our populist times, well…if this isn’t about status, what is? /8 https://t.co/WPxUCzfBBc

Societies are 100% social. Not economic, not political. Social. They run on status. Which (as social animals) is also our identities. Status gives you identity. The loss of it - humiliation - is the loss of everything. /9

Status games are imitation games, humans copy or imitate/emulate those they perceive to be of higher status. They do it in teams, against other teams. ‘Team sports’, as I call it. Look at your social media feed. That’s the business model there. That’s our culture today. /10

Unconstrained and uncontrolled status games. Populism, as that’s sometimes called. The corrosive dismantling of centuries of Western history. The crumbling of a (Christian) civilisation. /end