I recently saw a video clip of Dr. Jordan Peterson saying something that struck me as very insightful: if you want to advertise something to humans, the obvious idea is to frame it as offering success and well-being, but this is wrong. The humans don’t in fact care much about success and well being. They care about not suffering terribly and failing miserably. This is because “success” and “well-being” don’t really have much to offer, because human capacity for joy is quite limited. The threat of terrible suffering, however, is the primary motivational force, because the pit of doom is endless and promises untold horrors, and people would do anything to avoid that.

This struck me instantly as true, and it explained something I struggled with previously, which is the issue of status symbols. You see, status symbols are an obvious trap, something the super-wealthy people produce (thus increasing their wealth) and the people who are barely out of poverty buy, wasting their money and crippling their chances of ever becoming well-off financially. Essentially, one would do much better buying shares of LVMH or some other luxury-item business on the stock market, than buying their products. Basically, those luxury goods are upper middle class aspirational purchases, where someone who is barely out of poverty takes whatever money it is that makes him not poor, and throws it into fire. So, if you never want to make financial progress in life, do buy luxury goods and status symbols, because that’s the way to go. The reason people do that in such overwhelming numbers despite obvious reasons against it must obviously be very powerful, but the exact formulation eluded me. I used to think it was an equivalent of a peacock’s tail – a boastful show of opulence that serves no purpose for survival, and is in fact a hindrance to survival, so if someone can still pull that off, it’s a sign he’s really well off. An example of such a status symbol is a lawn. Initially, to have a piece of land in front of your house under grass or some aesthetically pleasing but non-productive trees was a statement of wealth – “you see, I have so much land already, I don’t have to plant something useful by my house, I can just waste it”. This explains other status symbols as well – they are intentionally wasteful displays, a show of how much money you can piss into the wind, because of how rich you are. Of course, when the poor or middle class people try to imitate that, and waste critical resources trying to look rich by doing what rich people do, they are completely ruined, but none of this still explains why people do it at all. Rationally, a response to “how much money can you waste on stupid bullshit” should be “none at all”. Also, wastefulness might be a show of opulence when really wealthy people do it, but when poor people do it it smells of despair and fear, like a scared cat puffing itself up to look bigger, not a peacock’s tail. This is where Peterson’s explanation clicked – they don’t do it because they want to achieve something positive, like being successful and happy. They do it because they desperately want to distinguish themselves from the grey, hopeless masses of poor, disenfranchised, doomed people barely clinging to the bottom rungs of the society ladder. There’s an instinctive recognition of dangers of being invisible, never seen by anyone important, never recognized enough for anyone to pay attention to you in any way because you are not distinguishable from the bland, grey, unimportant masses of people who barely make a living, working for slave wages. People are afraid of being losers, of being dismissed and mocked as irrelevant and unsuccessful, and will do almost anything to avoid this humiliation, and this explains sacrificing critically valuable resources at the altar of the false gods of status symbols.

However, there’s more to it than that. This is only the lowest “octave” that everybody recognizes, the physical one. It also extends into the spiritual realm, and I think that’s where the real issue lies. People don’t want to be mocked by Satan for being losers and failing his “tests”, and will keep investing their spiritual energy into attempts to achieve enlightenment in this world, to Satan’s great joy of course, because that’s how he can keep milking them dry. The spiritual equivalent of a Rolex or a Porsche are the spiritual achievements such as samadhi, or various demonstrable siddhis. Those things won’t necessarily get you any closer to any worthy goal, but they are a spiritual Rolex you can casually wear to some equivalent of a spiritual cocktail party, at least in your mind, and you think it will make you acknowledged, seen as worthy and accepted. In reality, the spiritual abilities that are of greatest use are usually the least “flashy” and “showy” ones, and collecting “experiences” like butterflies for your collection only shows your insecurities and fears of being unsuccessful and unimportant. It’s not necessarily even the experiences and abilities – sometimes it’s the spiritual titles, belonging to an established lineage and similar nonsense that gets people involved in cults and submissive to all kinds of weirdos who carry flashy titles, but that, obviously, seems like a path to being a weirdo in an orange robe who is generally recognized by others as spiritually successful. It’s the same circus as the Rolex and Ferrari crowd, only a different wagon, because if you know you’re not successful, you will go to great lengths trying to persuade others that you are. If you actually are successful, you won’t give a fuck. But of course, there are fakes who understand that and thus pretend to be the successful ones who don’t give a fuck. 🙂

Obviously, trying to fake achievement is something people devote an inordinate amount of time and effort to, in every sphere of interest and activity, and one could say that the same amount of effort, if invested in productive venues, could produce actual results. However, it seems that people actually give up on believing that they can actually do that – that they could achieve something real, be actually successful at something real and worthy, and trying to fake it is a sign of that. It’s a sign of someone who believes he has no chance of real achievement, but is desperately afraid of the depths of the pit of doom that awaits the losers.

The irony is, acknowledging that you’re a loser is the way to win.

When Satan mocked the souls that they would be nothing without constantly being in God’s presence, the “losers” acknowledged that, stating that God is everything of value and without Him they are nothing. Those “losers” are still with God in heaven, while those who wanted to be cool, emancipated and successful “winners” got lost here in Satan’s maze of reflections, illusions and quagmires, without God and all hope, still desperately trying to “achieve” and “succeed” in order to avoid Satan mocking them as losers.

Even in purely material things, avoiding the pitfall of posturing, acknowledging that you’re poor, saving and investing all your money, acquiring skills and living a modest life, are something that will eventually result in quite a portfolio.

So, what’s the lesson here? Trying to avoid failing miserably is probably the strongest motivational force in human life, and it can convince people to do the most desperate and counterproductive things. Also, people don’t “fake it until they make it”, they fake it because they gave up.