"The past 200 years in the West have seen staggering increases in wealth and economic opportunity." "And yet, there have been no comparable increases in our level of happiness." "Despite being so much richer than a few generations ago, are often more anxious about our own importance and achievements than our grandparents were." "I call this modern state of restlessness and dissatisfaction," ""Status Anxiety"." "I want to explain where I think much of it has come from, how it affects our lives and what I believe we could do about it." "STATUS" "If we are surprised that being richer hasn't made us happy and secure, it's because we don't understand the psychology of satisfaction." "When do we feel that we have enough?" "What enables us to feel prosperous and content?" "Chiefly, a comparison with other people." "But, it's not good enough to compare ourselves to people who are very remote from us in time and place." "It's not going to help anyone feel very rich to be told they have infinitely more money than one of their mediaeval ancestors who lived in a mud-walled cottage." "We only feel content when we compare ourselves to people who are like us, our friends and colleagues, our neighbours." "In short, the sense of being a success is all relative." "No one spends much time resenting the Queen or Bill Gates." "But we are liable to get extremely resentful if someone we think is basically just like us, moves into a bigger house or gets a slightly better job." "We most envy people who we take to be our equals." "The modern world is based around the idea that we are all, essentially, equal." "Not necessarily financially equal, but equal in terms of rights and opportunities." "It's a lovely idea which brings with it one nasty side effect." "In a world in which you could believe that those at the top belonged to an inherently superior caste, you didn't need to feel humiliated by anything you didn't have." "You might detest those who had more than you, but you didn't need to feel ashamed or anxious." "But in a world in which everyone is supposed to be equal, but where there is still a lot of inequality around, it's hard not to take the achievements of others as an implicit reproach for everything you don't have and haven't done." "The best place to go to understand all this, is the country where the idea of equality first took hold some 200 years ago." "America." "Young, ready and hungry..." "In 1776, America had a revolution which changed the world." "Help us to discover the secrets to our dream..." "The new democracy abolished the rigid, class-based hierarchies of Europe." "Say to yourself, every day "it's possible"..." "From the first, this basic sense of equality energised America." "But it also, quite unintentionally, increased Americans' anxieties about what their true place was." "You can't tell me nothing about this subject, because I was poor." "But I was blessed and I'm not poor now." "Their anxieties were destined to become our anxieties." "The person who first, and perhaps best, understood the problem of modern equality was a young French aristocrat called Alexis de Tocquville." "In 1831, he came to America in order to study what he called" ""the future shape and temperament of the world"." "When de Tocquville travelled to America, the Europe he was leaving behind was still essentially an aristocratic society, run along feudal lines." "This was a world in which you tended to accept the status that you had been born into." "But in America everything was different." "This was a democracy and here you could change your status, according to your luck or your talent." "De Tocquville, writing about his journey later, wrote that what he had come to see in America was the future, and what he saw when he got there left him both impressed and frightened for all of us." "De Tocquville distilled the experiences of his nine-month journey into a book called "Democracy in America"." "Its eerie, following his footsteps 170 years later, to see just how prescient he was." "He foresaw the problems that would arise when the old social hierarchies based on class were abolished." "There would be no limits to what we could legitimately expect from life." "De Tocquville was struck at how wealthy ordinary Americans were." "They enjoyed a standard of living far superior to that of their counterparts in old Europe." "But de Tocquville noticed something else, perhaps more interesting." "That, despite their affluence, they constantly wanted ever more and felt great envy at anyone who had something that they didn't." "In a chapter of his book entitled" ""why the Americans are often so restless in the midst of their prosperity"," "Du Tocville analysed the relationship between equality and a gnawing sense of envy." "So where are we now?" "What is this house?" "This is the Delaware model." "Which is...?" "How does it fit in to the range of models available?" "It is a very popular model." "I would say that this model is on the larger end." "Not our smallest and not our largest..." "And does it come with all this furniture?" "The young Frenchman was immediately intrigued by the houses Americans built." ""I was surprised to perceive, along the shore, a number of little palaces of white marble, several of which were of ancient architecture." "When I went the next day to inspect more closely," "I found that the walls were of whitewashed brick and the columns of painted wood." "In the confusion of all ranks, everyone hopes to appear what he is not"." "And this is the, you say, the colonial style?" "This is ...this is a pretty traditional two-storey colonial with..." "Is that a Doric column?" "Those are our decorated, decorator columns to enhance the room, where we put the mirror back there which is also decorator touch." "Right." "De Tocquville said" ""when inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention." "But when everything is more-or-less level, the slightest variation is noticed." "That's the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting the inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance." "And of that disgust with life, sometimes gripping them, even in calm and easy circumstances."" "Is this real stone?" "That is called a nonstandard option." "Joannie Hartley works for Washington Homes." "Their slogan is "Making the American Dream affordable"." "Is that a standard piece, do you know?" "Yes." "Oh, no-no-no, above the door, that is a decorator item." "In a society of equals, it is natural for people to want what others have." "Between 1970 and now, the proportion of Americans who defined the things in this store as "necessities"" "rose continuously." "3% in 1970 thought a second television essential." "Now it is 75%." "There have been equivalent increases in the numbers feeling they need the other products here at Best Buy." "This relentless process from luxury to decency to psychological necessity, had been noticed by de Tocquville." "He thought it explained why the Americans' greater wealth would not necessarily make them happier." "The reason was that all barriers to social expectation had been removed in the United States." ""In America", wrote de Tocquville," ""I never met a citizen too poor not to be able to glance with hope and envy at the pleasures of the rich"." "Move into a better house, get a better car, buy better clothes..." "Poor citizens, de Tocquville noticed, compare themselves with rich ones and trust that they, too, will one day follow in their footsteps." "My son wants to look just like everybody else." "If they are sporting Michael Jordans, he has got to sport them, too." "So, if I say it 'no I can't get them for you', what is this child going to do?" "It is going to go out there and rob somebody?" "Maybe steal, kill, whatever, to get it?" "Some people from humble backgrounds do become very rich in America." "But, unlike the poor of aristocratic societies, low status Americans are prone to view their condition as nothing less than a betrayal of their expectations." "The differences between democratic and aristocratic societies came out particularly well, de Tocquville thought, in the different mindsets of servants under the two different systems." "In aristocratic societies, de Tocquville argued that servants tended to accept their fates with good grace, they didn't feel there was anything humiliating in being a restaurant manager or waiting on tables." "In democratic societies, however, the atmosphere of the press and public opinion, relentlessly suggested to all citizens that they could become anything on earth that they wanted to be." "However, as time passed, and the majority of people failed to realise their dreams, they fell prey to a kind of bitterness." "And a sense of despair and the hatred of themselves, and their masters, grew fierce." "I met Blaise Pugh at Freddie's, the restaurant where he works." "Though it is just around the corner from the Pentagon, it has a 'Key West' feel." "But it is not where Blaise wants to be." "He has set his sights on being a TV chatshow host." "I am a fun person, I am a lot of fun." "I would like to be on television every damned day." "Really?" "Every day?" "Every night?" "Every night." "With your own show?" "Anywhere between nine and 11 would be fine." "No no no you can't sit there...." "I need to spray it with Lysol." "We had a naked model in here this morning who had her err... her naked crotch on there." "Why do you need to spray?" "I don't mind." "You don't know where she was last night." "I have an idea." "Blaise's agent, Dorothy, had got wind of the job for him." "I rushed round." "Blaise is here today to do a head shot." "He has got a casting call in New York next week." "If they like his look, which we hope they do." "They're looking for a character type of dude." "And if they like him it's a possible $40,000 job." "What is your ambition Blaise?" "Just to be instantly recognised." "But for what?" "Famous for being famous." "But not necessarily for anything in particular?" "Exactly." "Just famous for being famous." "And Dorothy, do you think that could happen?" "Oh, absolutely." "Are you guys familiar with Dateline?" "They voted him personality of the week, eight years ago." "Failure is not an option." "Somebody once said to me "what happens if you don't..."" "Well I won't know because I'll probably be dead trying." "Do your Sean Connery." "Well, it is been a while, let's see..." "Miss Moneypenny....." "You did a terrific job." "When I next met Blaise, he prove difficult to recognise at first." "Roncom is offering 20% off today." "Roncom is having a sale and I'm just out promoting Roncom...." "The rigid, hierarchical system of almost every Western society until the 18th century was unjust in a thousand ways." "Roncom to its having a sale across the street..." "But it did offer those on the lower rungs one notable freedom." "The freedom not to have to compare their achievements with so many more successful peoples, and so find themselves inadequate as a result." "Roncom is having a sale today..." "Do ever think, when you are doing this kind of work, do you ever sort of think, you know, maybe I should just accept that maybe I won't make it to the next level." "No." "And that maybe I should just accept that, you know, life in the restaurant business is my lot?" "But it's not where I'm supposed to be." "But do you ever despair, do you ever just say," "" I should just accept, really, that what I am is a restaurant manager." "I am not Johnny Carson I am not David Letterman, I'm a sponge"?" "Well, no, you see I can't, because I am, they just don't know it yet." "We are all more like Blaise than we care to admit." "We torment ourselves with comparisons between our lives and the lives of those a few rungs up the ladder." "It obviously does not make us any happier." "Why are we so unable to curtail our painful aspirations?" "Roncom is having a sale across the street..." "It isn't just comparisons with others which stop us feeling content." "It is also what we demand of ourselves." "So find some reasons that can keep you strong when you want to give up." "We are all now expected to succeed." "Here's what I want you to repeat after me please with power and conviction." "Say, "it's possible"." "Les Brown is one of America's top motivational speakers." "He was flying-in that evening to meet me." "Something about the prospect made me feel lethargic, even desperate." "I said hello, Mr Butterball, how are you?" "Les, how are you?" "How was your flight?" "Young, ready and hungry...." "That's how I got into it, because I love connecting people." "Right." "One of the, sort of, paradoxical things of watching your tapes, reading your material is that it's incredibly optimistic." "But watching it has kind of made me feel that I'm kind of a loser because I haven't achieved as much as I might have done." "I do that." "I don't want you to sleep at night." "Particularly if you have not been living up to your potential." "Does it frustrate when you meet people who you feel are not living to their potential?" "Oh, absolutely not." "When I see those kind of people I look at them, and I check them out," "I see what kind of physical fitness they are in." "They perhaps would be very good in cleaning my house, washing my dishes, driving me around, you know, cleaning my clothes, cutting my grass." "Some people choose a life of mediocrity." "That's your choice." "There are people who decide "I don't want to do anything but what I'm doing." "I want to do drugs, I want to be an alcoholic," "I want to be worthless, I want to be no good," "I want to be a criminal.." People make choices." "But what about those people who say," ""I don't want to be a criminal, I want to be chief executive, etc,"" "but they happen to be a criminal they or they happen to be a drug addict." "They don't happen to be." "They have chosen to become that." "So whatever you are, whatever you are in life, you have chosen it." "Wherever you are at some point in time, you have made an appointment to be there." "But with this very tough philosophy one could say, that actually, you have been a very privileged man." "Privileged?" "You have been a very privileged man." "How so?" "Well, you were born into a loving family, you were born with gifts, a gift for public speaking a very quick mind, a very intelligent mind." "These are gifts." "I didn't start out like this." "I was not an orator." "I trained myself." "I never had any college training." "I saw a guy speaking and I said 'Hey, I think I would like to do that'." "How much money have you made, Les?" "Over 37 million dollars." "In how long?" "18 years." "You've got to continue to work on yourself personally, to work on yourself professionally," "you have got to be hungry." "My basic feeling with Les is that he is very inspiring, obviously, you come away from his company feeling like this really is someone who can help you to make your, life make your millions, etc." "But I suppose there remains a dark undercurrent of all this." "That it raises your anxiety levels." "You think, "I should be so much more than I am"." "And in many ways, I think that life simply isn't as flexible as Les makes out." "And I think that the old resignation to one's condition is obviously negative in all sorts of ways, but it can also be quite calming." "It helps you to accommodate yourself with what could be quite harsh and quite unbudgeable conditions of life." "So, I think there is real benefit, sometimes, to an approach that sees life as essentially a cruel joke." "Our expectations for our lives have grown exponentially in the democratic age." "A philosopher who thought deeply about what that might mean for human happiness was John Jacques Rousseau an eccentric, shrill but unsettlingly persuasive 18th century Frenchman." "Rousseau had a fascinating idea about what it is to be wealthy." "Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money." "It's a question of having what we want." "Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire." "Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, however much money we may actually have." "And every time we are satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess." "There are two ways to make people richer, reasoned Rousseau:" "To give them more money, or to restrain their desires." "Modern societies have succeeded spectacularly at the first option, but by continuously inflaming our appetites, they have at the same time, helped to negate their own most impressive achievements." "This analysis led Rousseau to one of his most provocative ideas, his concept of 'the noble savage'." "Rousseau argued that the so-called 'uncivilised' peoples who lived in the forests, in the language of the day, "savages"" "were not just morally better than the corrupted inhabitants of cities like Washington DC, they might also be happier." "Modern societies might actually leave us feeling more deprived than primitive ones, where people contented themselves, in Rousseau's words" ""playing with crude musical instruments, or using sharp-edged stones to make a fishing canoe"." "I think it is possibly quite easy to dismiss Rousseau's ideas as a piece of romantic fantasy." "But if so many people in the 18th century took these ideas so seriously," "I think it's because they had before them one stark example of many of its apparent truths in the shape of the fate of the North American Indians." "Here's a picture of my grandfather and my grandmother and my aunt." "Warren Cook is deputy chief of what remains of the Pamunkey Tribe, once led by a mighty Powhatan, king of Virginia and father of Pocahontas." "It is just another picture of my aunt." "I don't know why she has a gun, but, probably to get an Englishman." "Reports of native American life from the 16th century onwards had described it as materially simple, but psychologically rewarding." "Communities were close-knit, egalitarian, religious, playful and marshall." "Well we have here how the people sort-of dressed and what they sort-of looked like." "These are called John White's Drawings." "And then, of course, a little bit of their music and their flutes and the rattlers." "So, incredibly simple instruments." "Of course, you are talking a very primitive people, of course." "Within only a few decades of the arrival of the White Man, the technology and luxury of European industry had awed the Native Americans." "When the English came over, everything of course changed." "The native people wanted the thing that the English people had." "Do you think before the English came, they were more or less happy with what they had." "I mean they had led a very simple life, what is your sense of..." "Of course they were happy, they didn't know any better." "They couldn't be unhappy because they didn't know what they didn't have." "I once read a letter between two English merchants saying the problem with the Indian tribes is that many of them don't want enough things." "And then, the other merchant said, yeah but if you try and interest them in Venetian beads they will love those." "Well everything was new." "They would try something new and exciting, and they had never seen before." "Their new possessions didn't appear to make the Indians much happier." "Rates of suicide and alcoholism spiralled and communities fractured." "The Tribal Chiefs would have known what Rousseau was talking about." "How much land did the tribe have?" "Well, just about all of Virginia." "All of Virginia?" "And now it's got?" "1100 and some acres, that's about it." "And do you think the culture that they have put in in its place," "I mean we drove through on the way here, through endless strip malls," "Walmarts, you know, KFCs, all these big brands." "That's the culture that has replaced the native American culture." "What you think of the new American culture?" "You've got 10 times more things to be anxious about now." "What we are anxious about now?" "We are anxious about everything." "We've got all these psychological problems, we've got Prozac kids, Prozac women, Prozac men..." "But surely there..." "You've lost maybe just a simpler type of life, without the anxieties." "The Indians ceased listening to the quiet voices that spoke of the modest pleasures of community and of the beauty of the empty canyons at dusk, and that, thought Rousseau, was what we had all done." "I get angry when you read about it, you go back and kind of relive probably what the poor people went through." "I get mad about that." "When you meet English people now do you feel angry or do you forgive them?" "You English?" "Yeah!" "That's why I'm asking, nervously." "Would you like to swim?" "Are you going to throw me in?" "It was an American psychologist," "William James who first explored, from a psychological angle, the particular problems that societies create for themselves when they start raising huge expectations in their citizens." "And James illustrates this kind of fascinating dynamic between expectations and fulfilment, in a kind of theory that he writes." "He says that our self-esteem that thing that we are searching for, self-esteem is a result of two things:" "success the number of things that we are successful at, over expectation the number of things that we expect to be successful at." "And what he is really saying by this is that in order to have high self-esteem you can do two things:" "either become more successful or lower the number of things that you expect to be successful at." "And the problem, James says, of modern American societies, and also western European, is that they are constantly placing us under huge pressures to succeed." "They are constantly raising the level of our expectations and in so doing, they are making self-esteem a very elusive thing indeed." "Every rise in our levels of expectation, entails a rise in the risks of humiliation." "And if we do fail, how much sympathy can we expect from other people, when the system seems bent on removing every excuse we might have for our failures?" "I worry about trying to survive, trying to make it, you know, just working hard and trying to provide for my kids, trying to keep a nice home over their head and make sure something someday it's hard." "Move into better house, get a better car, buy better clothes." "And when God gets finished tell him to give you the mike and let you testify." "It seems I will never buy the big, big house like I see on the TV." "You have got to decide to be relentless, you have got to decide to never give up, you have got to be hungry." "If you are rich you are rich, if you are poor you are poor." "It's not, you know, ..and then and if you are in between, you've got to strive to stay where you are at, or you are going to fall under." "God is sick and tired of his people looking like lemons in the face." "He wants you to enjoy your life." "I worry about my safety, you know, I am a young black man." "Most young black males are either dead or locked up." "You know?" "That's horrible." "I don't want to have to worry about that." "You know what I mean?" "That's not living to me." "That's not living at all." "See the only time normal times I would be able to get to get on camera, is if I was coming out of court, do you know what I mean?" "Or something else." "No country embodies the meritocratic ideal like America." "It is, we are constantly being told, a wide-open country, where anyone who works hard can succeed." "This constant striving can disturb the mental calm of people who are, to all intents and purposes, rich." "But it has will also change their attitudes towards the poor." "Of course, America isn't a meritocracy, you only have to look around you to see that the system is weighted in favour of certain groups, and massively weighted against others." "You only had to remember the issue of race." "Yet the key point is that Americans perceive that their society is, in fact, meritocratic and there is a cruel logic to the whole idea of a meritocracy, because if you genuinely believe that those at the top merit their success," "you have to believe that those at the bottom must merit their failure." "Jenny Lamont begs by the side of the road to feed her two children." "What do you think when you see people like her?" "Do you think they have been unlucky?" "Or do you tend to assume that they have, in some way, brought it on themselves?" "That they are losers, even?" "I think a lot of the middle-class people and people that have money, yeah they look down on me." "When rich people come, they'll be rolling their windows up or they weren't even pull their car up next to you." "They don't want to have anything to do with you." "So who are the people who help you most?" "Mexicans, Indian women and a lot of women." "Why do you think that is?" "Because they have been there and they know that you wouldn't be out there if you didn't need it." "Thank you so much ma'am," "God bless you, thank you." "You have a nice day ma'am, thank you so much." "My husband and I were together for 26 years and my husband recently died." "I was a bookkeeper for a small company." "I worked there for seven years and I lost my job." "I came home from work he was in a coma on the couch." "I called the ambulance, hey took him to the hospital," "he died September 11, 02 of the year anniversary of the plane crash." "And I went into a real bad depression," "I was still at my job at that time." "And at that point, you lived in a nice house?" "I had my own apartment, two-bedroom apartment." "But I couldn't play the rent, so I just recently got evicted and I have to be out on the 13th of this month." "So where are you living now?" "My father-in-law has let me stay in his basement." "When you need to feed your kids, you do anything." "It's real degrading going out there, but it's how I feed my kids." "So I don't care what the people said to me is, what they yell at me, or anything." "Thank you so much ma'am, God bless you, thank you." "They don't know my story." "They don't know what's going on in my life." "Are you surprised by what has happened to you when you look back on your life?" "Are you....are you shocked?" "How do you think about what has happened to you?" "I try not to because I get depressed, you know, because everything I had was great, my life was great, and I kind of lost it, like, within a month, everything was gone." "From the middle of the 19th century, especially in the United States, perceptions of the relative virtues of the poor and the wealthy began to change." "The possession of money began to seem less like a fortunate blessing, and more like proof of moral superiority." "I felt a bit nervous about meeting Grover Norquist." "He is one of Washington's most prominent neoconservative lobbyists." "Can you make sure the front desk does not put calls through?" "So what do you see as the most fundamental ideas about American society and the economy?" "Well, it based..., the United States, from day one was founded down the basis that anybody could do and be anything they wanted to." "Didn't matter who your parents were, didn't matter what are they did." "That you were in charge of your own future, there is no ceiling, and there is no floor." "If you want to be a bum, you can be a bum." "If you want to accomplish great things you can do that, it's up to you." "The State's responsibility is to provide for a free and open and Just society, to execute murderers and otherwise leave people alone." "Why shouldn't the state help the needy?" "Because to do that, you would have to steal money from people who earned it and give it to people who didn't, and then you make the State into a thief." "Why is it theft?" "To take money that you didn't earn?" "Could you give me one second?" "Damon." "Damon." "Whatever you're doing shouting over there, it comes right through the walls." "Could you make sure people are quiet, because we are getting noise louder than just talking noises through the walls." "You are suggesting that taxation is theft?" "Taxation beyond the legitimate requirements of providing for Justice, is theft, sure." "It strikes me that there is a lot less guilt towards the underprivileged in American society, compared to in European society, why do you think that might be?" "If you believe that somebody's property and wealth, is not necessarily legitimately earned, because he is an Earl or a Duke for he got it from his great- great- great-great-grandfather who stole it from the Normans or the Saxons," "or something." "Well then, Proudhon "property is theft"." "And in Europe, a lot of property was theft." "In the United States because we take so many immigrants, it's a little hard to argue that you can't succeed when you see five-year-old Cambodian children coming out of the killing fields of Cambodia becoming the best speller in the country at aged 12." "OK, that person can do it and you are telling me that you can't get out of bed in the morning and go to work because life is unfair?" "Do you think it is nicer to be poor in Europe than it is in the United States?" "Nicer?" "I don't know, maybe less dignity if the government is willing to do more for you." "When people give you money for not working, it is destructive of human dignity and eventually destructive of human liberty." "It turns people into lazily folks who don't want to accomplish anything and just sort-of sit around." "Why would you want to have anything to do with that?" "I don't believe in the American dream." "You know." "I really don't." "I think it is just words, you know?" "In America, it became possible for the first time, to argue that the rung of the ladder each person stood on, accurately reflected their true qualities." "Conveniently for the successful, this reduced the need for welfare, redistribution of wealth or even simple compassion." "Given this relentless logic, voices like Grover's will only grow louder." "DAMON" "If you met someone who was very successful in every way, had lots of fame, money respect, and you asked them why they were successful and they said "well it's just good luck", you would think they were being unduly modest." "Similarly, if you met someone who was a failure in every way no job, no money, no respect and you asked them what had happened, and they said it was just bad luck, you would think they were trying to hide something." "Essentially, luck has disappeared as a plausible explanation for what happens to people in their life." ""Winners make their own luck"" "is the punishing, modern mantra." "And yet, for all our unwillingness to put much faith in luck, we are, in important ways, more at the mercy of forces beyond our control than ever before." "The globalised economy has brought great reward to its winners." "But it is also constantly creating large numbers of losers." "In traditional societies, high status and the respect it brings, may have been inordinately hard to acquire, but they were also pleasantly hard to lose." "Modern societies have sought to make status dependent on achievement, primarily financial achievement." "But the nature of the economy that those societies have created is making that achievement ever more precarious." "Bethlehem steel outside Baltimore was once the largest steelworks in the world." "Now all but one of its furnaces lay rusting, its workforce down from 32,000 to 2000." "Joe Rizell has worked there all his professional life." "There is always been a sense of pride in the steel industry, a lot of the people in the steel industry are patriotic, people who enlisted in the Army, we were doing lot of work that would build America and people knew that." "I thought I would be unable to retire here like my father." "My father is second-generation, my father worked right here in this mill." "We are on slippery slope now, we could be here today, gone tomorrow, we just don't know." "There is a lot of uncertainty." "For most of us, our work is the chief determinant of the amount of respect and care that we will be granted." "The globalised economy is making that work more unstable, opening up an anxiety-inducing gap between what we need and what the world will give us." "Constant pressure from imported steel coming into the country has made these jobs very precarious in terms of" ""Are they going to last?" "Are you going be able to get to your retirement?" "Are you going to get your pension or not?"" "No matter what it seems we do to make ourselves more productive, and we are more productive than we have ever been, it never seems to be enough." "Does all this makes you more sad or more angry?" "I'm more angry than sad, but the anger is towards people saying there is free trade and fair trade when I know there is not." "The sadness is seeing an industry that doesn't have to be destroyed, be destroyed over time by he globalisation of trade, with no plan on how that should be done, just having chaos reign." "We seem determined to remove any excuse we might point to for failure." "Just when more and more of us are less secure in our jobs than ever." "I am interested in the consolation still available to the unsuccessful, when the world doesn't give them the respect that they need." "Move into a better house, get a better car, buy better clothes and then when God gets finished, tell him to give you the mike and let you testify." "Over the course of the 19th century, many Christian thinkers, especially in the United States, began to change their views of money and worldly success." "Increasingly, in a departure from traditional Christian thought," "American Protestant denominations have suggested that wealth might be a reward from God for holiness." "Made money your friend." "Touch a neighbour, say:" ""make money your friend"." "Make all the money you can." "Our friend, de Tocqueville, also noticed this new American tendency for Christianity to align itself with the materialist values of the rest of the culture." ""The evangelical mission", he said," ""appears here to be an industrial enterprise"." "Bishop Jimmy Ellis III, founded the Victory Christian Centre in a rundown Philadelphia neighbourhood in 1983." "His congregation now numbers 1600." "We need to learn how to become friends with money." "You know the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ." "That though he was rich, yet for your sakes, he became poor, that you, through his poverty, might be rich." "And that's not spiritual riches there." "People try to make it spiritual, it is not spiritual." "The whole chapter is something about money." "So let me try and understand:" "So, Jesus became poor, so that we can become rich on Earth." "That is right." "Sunday morning in Levington, Suffolk England." "For centuries, all across the West, people have been coming to services like this." "On offer, has always been the consoling reminder that there might be more important things in life than status and success." "The very fact that we still retain a distinction between wealth and virtue, and ask of people whether they are good, rather than simply important is, in large part, due to the impression that Christianity has left on Western consciousness." "...for Jesus Christ's sake, our only mediator and advocate." "It has become rather unfashionable to take Christianity all that seriously, in Britain at least." "And yet, the fact that we don't, may be a major cause of our modern status anxieties." "We have largely lost the Christian sense that there is no necessary connection between a person's value and their status in the world." "For Christians, Jesus had been the highest man, the most blessed, and yet on earth he had been a humble carpenter, ruling out any simple equation between a person's status and their position in heaven." "It is worth dwelling on just how much consolation there must have been in that very simple idea." "You can't tell me nothing about this subject, because I was poor." "But I bless God I ain't poor now." "I didn't have no bank account, but I thank my God that I followed him." "I thank God I know what God can do for you, if you just follow and obey him." "In "The City of God", written in AD 427 in the closing years of the Roman Empire, the theologian, Saint Augustine, explained that all human actions could be interpreted from either a Christian or a Roman perspective." "The very things esteemed so highly by the Romans, amassing money, building villas, winning wars, counted for nothing in the Christian outlook." "Saint Augustine urged Christians to replace Roman values with a new set of concerns:" "loving one's neighbours, practising humility and charity, and recognising one's dependence on God." "Practising those values offered the key to elevated Christian status." "Over coffee and biscuits at Ian and Margaret Angus's," "Canon Geoffrey Grant explained." "How can you tell if someone is spiritually rich?" "Is that connected to if someone has got quite a lot of income?" "Not necessarily, no, I don't think so at all." "Do you think that the Lord rewards people who are good with riches?" "Absolutely." "Absolutely." "I mean if somebody has got a very nice car, doesn't that show that God thinks that this person is quite good?" "I don't think so." "You get ...a classic example is Mother Teresa." "Jesus Christ came in order to make us abundant, so that we wouldn't have to live in poverty and we wouldn't have to live in lack and that is part of the new covenant that he provided." "So there might be people here who have little money but they are very rich, spiritually." "They are rich spiritually and that comes out when they come to church and when you talk to them." "They are pillars of the village and they will go round spending their whole lives looking after their neighbours." "On the whole, if you saw 100 rich people and 100 poor people, would you in a way.." "if you had to make a choice... would you say that the richer group was the holier group, not just rich but also holy and that the poor group was in a way maybe the more sinful group." "No, I would not advocate that at all." "I would not advocate that at all." "Because riches, is not an indication of holiness." "But before, you said it was." "Excuse me?" "No, I said that's a part of it, I was very clear," "I said that it is a part of the blessing of God." "But you don't have to be rich in order to be holy." "Because many rich people are not holy and many poor people are not holy, too, so the richness itself is not holiness, no." "So what, overall, can we say about riches?" "I mean, is riches a sign of holiness or isn't it?" "I mean if you had to make a sort of generalisation." "Riches is a by-product of walking with God." "Geoffrey, what is your own attitude towards the wealth for yourself." "My car, for instance, is 16 years old." "Why don't you get a newer one?" "Really because I haven't been able to afford it and I'd rather have the car I know than buy a secondhand car." "So it doesn't really matter to you what car you drive?" "No, I don't, as long as it goes and it's reliable." "And perhaps that is what God thinks about us." "The Bible does not say money is the root of all evil, the Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil." "And you can have plenty of it and don't love it, and the key to that is being generous." "I believe the Lord is so good Amen." "He has been better to me than I have been to myself." "Hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah." "Coming to hear Bishop Ellis here in Philadelphia," "I think what is striking for me, is to realise just how much Christianity has been readapted to fit a new, American, model." "To fit the idea of the American dream." "And I think what is particularly striking perhaps to someone coming from Europe, is just how much that consoling message, the traditional message of Christianity that you can both be poor and spiritually rich has been lost." "And that, I think, is a very troubling lesson indeed." "Until the late 19th century, it was the spires of churches and cathedrals which dominated the skyscape of every town and city in the West." "City dwellers engaged in worldly tasks could remind themselves of a vision of life, which challenged the authority of ordinary ambitions." "There is no doubt that it's worldly values that have now triumphed over spiritual ones." "And there is one aspect of this decline in Christian belief with particular implications for status anxiety." "In an age which could believe that what happened to you on Earth but a brief prelude to what might happen in the next life, the pressure to succeed and fulfil yourself would inevitably be lessened." "But in a secular age, in which the whole idea of an afterlife has become increasingly unbelievable, the pressure to succeed in this life has inevitably heightened." "What you achieve, right now, in your own life is all that you will ever be." "No wonder we are slightly more worried." "Everyone's searching to be someone." "Everyone's looking to be someone." "Everyone's going out of their way to be someone." "So basically everyone's looking for status." "You know, everyone look for a better job, a better education, you know, a better way of life?" "So it's all about status." "We look for rewards in terms of promotion, in terms of money, in terms of buying a nicer house." "For most of us, the reward we really want is attention." "It's terribly boring to be ignored." "And I think this is part of the joy and part of the game of contemporary life, isn't it?" "We are constantly classing others and we are constantly judging others." "Once you start being aware that gestures have meaning, objects have meaning, there's no escaping it." "I want to explore how those anxieties affect almost every aspect of our everyday lives." "We worry about being made redundant and how it will affect the way others see us." "We worry about being passed over for promotion." "We worry about being kept waiting." "We worry about our colleagues and, even close friends, doing better than us." "Of course, what gives a person status in a given society keeps changing." "Throughout history, people have been awarded high status for a wide variety of things." "In ancient Sparta, to have high status you needed to be warlike, aggressive, bisexual and good at spearing enemies." "Among the Inuit, the highest status people were those who could harpoon fish and seals." "In 18th century Britain, you needed landed wealth, horses, a languid elegance and a polished after-dinner dancing technique." "Whilst in the 21st-century, it is fashion, business, sport, or all three." "Though the way that high status is earned may have changed throughout history, the consequences of high status are familiar from really any time or society and they come down to being treated well, to being treated with respect and even, you could say, a kind of love." "Just as romantic lovers will enjoy the care and attention of those who love them, so too, those with high status will enjoy the care and attention of the world." "It is common to assume that the worst thing about low paid work is the money, just as the money is the best thing about highly paid work." "But there is another way of looking at the issue, a way that puts status at the heart of the subject." "One could argue that what makes low paid work really distasteful is the way that one is treated." "It is not like money per se, it is the lack of status involved." "Many low paid jobs leave us treated as if we didn't properly exist." "No-one cares who we are and what we think." "We are machines for performing a simple task, not humans with as rich and as complex an identity as anyone in a boardroom." "Conversely, part of what keeps people working, even once they have made a lot of money, is the respect they receive from others." "They are looked up to, esteemed, and sometimes photographed on their way to the shops." "Strada is a chain of restaurants owned by thirtysomething millionaire Luke Johnson, who made his fortune selling a chain of pizza restaurants." "Luke could have retired a long time ago, but he decided to keep working." "I think we are all, in a way, trying to prove ourselves to some audience or another." "I remember once reading a survey amongst businessman or business people both men and women, and it was trying to tap into their motivations, as to why they were in business and why they continued to strive for success even after they have achieved a certain amount." "And the single phrase that summed it up, in a very short sense, was "I'll show them"." "And I think an awful lot of people, perhaps in their past, have a schoolteacher who put them down, or perhaps a parent who said, "you will never amount to anything"." "Someone who criticised them or didn't believe in their potential." "So, I think for a lot of people, it's about proving the sceptics wrong." "One of the people who first analysed how we often want money for the status it gives us more than anything else, was the great Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith." "There is a revealing the passage in his book, "The Wealth of Nations", where he bluntly asks what the rat race is all about." ""What is all the toil and bustle for?" "What are people aiming at with their ambitions and their frenzied pursuits of wealth, power and pre-eminence?" "Are they looking to supply their basic needs?" "No." "The wages of the poorest labourer can supply those." "What, then, are they after?" "They want to be treated well, they want to be attended to, to be taken notice of, with sympathy, kindness and approval. "" "One of the things which makes Adam Smith such a central figure in the history of his subject is his analysis of the reasons why people are accumulating wealth, and his emphasis on the fact that they are doing this because they want dignity and respect," "not just fancier clothes or bigger houses." "Few things trigger status anxiety more powerfully than school reunions." "This is Hayward's Heath school." "People gathering here left 30 years ago." "It can be agonising to compare ourselves to people who were once our equals." "More specifically, to have to hear of their success." "Plenty would agree with Gore Vidal's line," ""every time a friend of mine succeeds, a small part of me dies"." "Why did I dress like this?" "Why didn't I come in jeans, like I was this afternoon?" "Why didn't I wear clothes that were much more relaxed or even maybe a T-shirt with some political statement on it?" "And that is very interesting to me, and I think there's a certain status - if I dress well, then, chances are, people are going to see me, maybe, as a little more successful." "Or at least they are going to see me as somebody who's at least reasonably clean shaven, who looks after himself and has some basic manners." "Why do we care so much about having status?" "Perhaps because our self-esteem is so dependent on the esteem in which we are held in by others." "It's as if we are suffer from a congenital uncertainly as to our value, growing confident in ourselves when others value us, and losing confidence in ourselves when we are ignored." "The great American philosopher and psychologist, William James, went so far as to suggest that if we are were completely ignored by everyone that we came across, it would feel worse than being tortured." "Whilst writing his book, "The Principles of Psychology" at Harvard in 1890," "James got many of his insights from simply interrogating himself." "He noticed how differently he felt on days when he'd been greeted warmly and admired by people and days when he was ignored and on his own." "What really impressed William James was just how much the views of others influence our sense of ourselves." "It seems as if our whole identity is held captive by the judgements that people around us have of us." "If they laugh at our jokes, we develop a sense that we are funny." "If they praise us, we develop an impression of high merit." "But if they ignore us when we walk into a room or lose interest in us after we have revealed our occupation, we are liable to fall into feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness." "There is a part of the child in all of us." "What do babies need to thrive?" "A stark study was made about this in Austria in the 1940s." "Two sets of babies were tracked who both had identical and excellent material care, but one set of babies was looked after by loving, smiling mothers, the other by faceless nurses in a huge, state-of-the-art orphanage." "It was found that those who were looked after anonymously had severe development problems." "The death of some orphans was even ascribed by doctors, to nothing less than a lack of sustained attention." "We look for rewards, in terms of promotion, in terms of money, in terms of buying a nicer house." "For most of us, the reward we really want is attention from whoever it is you are working for." "And if you ask yourself "Who am I working for?" "Who do I want to notice how well I am doing?" "Is it my partner, am I still trying to please my own father?" "Is it my mother?" "Is the children whom I want still to see me as....", you know." "It is sometimes quite interesting to work out for yourself, because you will find, I think, everybody will always find, that they are actually looking for somebody's attention and approval." "I think we want to feel secure about the people we love and who love us, more than we want anything else in the world, including to win a million on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'." "If you said to somebody, "who wants to win a million or who wants to be entirely secure in their love relationships, sexual and nonsexual?"" "I think I know what the answer would be." "So that's what we are looking for, security, a feeling of being safely loved and it not being risky." "Just like babies, we need those small signs of care and attention that we capture with the word 'love'." "Without this love, we may not die, but we will end up anxious and sad." "You could say that say that there are two kinds of love that we search for throughout our lives romantic love and love from the world." "Romantic love is familiar enough, is it's the stuff of every novel, love song and magazine article." "But our search for love from the world is no less intense, but it tends to be spoken of in rather shameful, caustic terms, as though this was something that only a deficient or envious soul would be interested in." "But far from it, our search for status is linked to something that is as essential to us as light, heat, food and water." "Once we work out how central the need for love is, a lot of things become clearer." "From why we go shopping to why we sometimes kill one another." "Much of the reason why we go shopping is unconnected to any urgent material need." "We often shop in order to persuade the world that we are worthwhile, interesting people." "We often shop for emotional, rather than practical, reasons." "A lot of consumption is about acquiring status symbols material objects whose primary use is psychological." "They are objects that signal to the world, that we are worthy of dignity and respect." "This is the home of Stephen Bayley, a style consultant who worked for many years with Terence Conran." "And an expert on why we buy designer goods." "I'm not certain objects make us more lovable, but they certainly make us more interesting." "I mean, knowing I was going to be talking to you today," "I made a very conscious decision about which of five wristwatches I should wear and I was very, you know, perhaps some would say, anxious about what your expectations might be because I thought you would be thinking I would put a Rolex on" "and instead I have chosen a particularly obscure form of antique watch with a brown ostrich strap." "Now I'm not, I suppose some people this is the most monstrous form of affectation and they are probably right, but I find it absolutely fascinating that the mere application of a device to one's wrist," "can entirely change, you know, one's style and the way in which other people interpret me." "I am acutely aware of the status messages which objects convey and I remember some years ago going through a particularly, sort of, philosophically-trying ordeal with a fountain pen." "And because of the way I see the world" "I have always been anxious to acquire, you know, the simplest and best table, you know, the simplest and best whatever, chair, watch, whatever" "I had identified a particular brand of fountain pen as, and I write a lot so pens are quite important to me personally." "I had identified this sort of fountain pen as the ultimate of its kind." "So, I saved up and I bought one and I loved it and then, to my horror, I found that this hitherto exclusive and rare device was becoming more and more popular." "I remember going through this terrible, terrible moment of self-examination, thinking "should I now, now that my revered fountain pen has becomes popular, should I hide it away and not use it?"" "And ultimately I decided, "no", the best thing to do was actually just bash on and brave it, because I thought it was ultimately more arch to hide it away." "The man responsible for the term 'status symbols' was the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who wrote a wonderfully witty, even bitchy, book called "The Theory of the Leisure Class", in 1899." "Having observed the rich at leisure near his home in Connecticut, he became fascinated by how people acquire certain luxury goods to symbolise their high status." "Many clothes were deliberately designed to show that the people wearing them didn't need to work, indeed, couldn't possibly do so in something so impractical." "People are often mocked for their interests in luxury goods, luxury cars or clothes." "And they are described as greedy for wanting these things, but I think that is to miss an emotional subtlety of the whole subject." "People are attracted to status symbols principally because they want to feel valued." "Most modern cars are very efficient in getting you from A to B." "So, if there is a continuing appetite for so-called luxury cars, the reason typically has little to do with engineering, ABS brakes and satellite communication." "It has to do with wanting to be treated nicely." "What is special about this car?" "Well, we are in an environment, it is a very nice place to be." "Looking at the dash as a whole, you have got acres of walnut wood, a stitched leather top of dash..." "We also have a feature in here called 'active seats' which will massage your posterior for long journeys to make sure you don't get a numb bum." "'I drive' controls the display panel that you look at in the centre." "It has the facility to control the navigation system in the vehicle so you are able to dial up at your front door wherever you want to go by roadname and house number to that detail and it will take you there." "What's in the tray below?" "The tray below is your ashtray." "Right." "Even I have one of those." "Even you have one of those." "Tell me, what will owning a car like this do for you as a person?" "It would be wrong to, sort of, compartmentalise owners of cars, but certainly this car is going to say a lot about you, that the visual appearance of the car is a strong, muscular appearance to the car, it has a lot of purpose to it." "I think owning a car like this gives you a tremendous amount of confidence." "Perhaps it's those who strive hardest to be successful who are most haunted by feelings of failure." "Scratch the surface of almost anyone who has made it to the top their chosen field, and you will find an unusually vicious fear of being a loser." "After all, what need would there be to be so impressive, if it wasn't for a fear of being the opposite." "There is a sad, emotionally-deprived side to upmarket car sales." "Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury goods could, I think, more accurately be read as the record of emotional trauma." "It's the legacy of people who have felt pressured by the insensitivity of others, to impress them through the use of material objects, and that really places the onus for what is going on in the world of luxury goods," "not just on the buyers but also on their audience, because, I think, it's an uncomfortable, but very true fact, that the amount of love that you receive from the world, is dependent on the number of status symbols that you can wield." "Signs of how much we crave respect don't only live in our appetite for shopping." "They also live in our extreme touchiness about whether or not we are being taken seriously." "A touchiness that can lead people to challenge each other to fights, and even fatal duels, to prove themselves." "From its origins in Renaissance Italy, until its end in the First World War, the practice of duelling claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people the world over." "Status was a matter of honour." "The reasons for challenging someone to a duel were often petty in the extreme." "In Paris in 1878, one man killed another who had described his apartment as 'tasteless'." "In Florence in 1902, a literary man ended the life of a cousin who had accused him of not understanding Dante." "And in France, under the Regency of Philippe D'Orleans, two officers of the guard fought over the ownership of an Angora cat." "Duelling symbolises a radical incapacity to believe that our status could be our business, something that we decided and then didn't change according to the shifts in the views of our audience." "To the dueller, what other people make of him is the only factor in settling what he can think of himself." "He can't continue to remain acceptable in his own eyes if those around him think him a fool or an effeminate, a liar or an idiot." "He would rather die by a bullet or a stab-wound, rather than let unfavourable ideas about him remain lodged in the public mind." "Even though duelling may have gone out of fashion, many disputes and lawsuits continue to be fights about status." "22-year-old Damian Cope became involved in a confrontation after telling a gang member to put away a gun, because there were women and children about, in a park in South London." "In Burgess Park that day, there was a notorious gang member and, for whatever reason, he felt that Damian disrespected him." "He has got a Confrontation with Damon, in gang-slang that's when a gang member has a Confrontation with you, he produces, and lets Damon see, he has a weapon." "And Damian disrespected him by telling him to put the weapon away and fight him on a one-to-one and the best man would walk away." "And for that, Damian gave himself serious problems." "The consequences are then there is a standoff this person is going to get it." "I clearly remember the last time I looked at the clock it was 9:30 and I fell asleep and the next thing I knew was the phone was ringing and it was Fiona, Damian's girlfriend, and she was screaming down he phone "Damian's been shot"." "I jumped up and I said "What?"." "She said "Damian's been shot"." "I felt suddenly very weak, and like, something had been zapped from me it was like I felt Damian leave," "I felt him leave my body because I carried this child for nine months," "I grew him for 22 years and, as his mother, I felt him leave." "We eventually got to the UCH" "Joanne the nurse and two armed police officers were coming towards the entrance and I knew by her face what she was going to say, and she just nodded her head and said, "I'm so sorry, he's gone"." "And I said "please take me to Damian, please I am begging you, please take me to my son"." "She took my hand and she took me down a corridor, and I saw my child laying there and I hugged him," "I asked him why and why and why somebody had shot him" ""what did you do so bad for somebody to take your life?"" "Damian Cope's death is a shocking example of the consequences of a dispute about status." "Very few of us pick up guns when we are insulted." "But the feeling of vulnerability to others' view of us is sadly only too common." "It is worth asking why this anxiety about status should nowadays be worse than it has ever been in history." "Living standards in the West have hugely improved in the last 200 years." "There have been major increases in life expectancy, economic opportunity and wealth generally." "And yet, despite these improvements, it is possible to argue that we are, today, much more status conscious and status anxious than we ever were in the days of lords and ladies and horse-drawn carriages." "And for a reason why, we should travel back to history and there we will see that, for all their many disadvantages, old societies had one big advantage when it came to status." "Before the middle of the 18th century, status tended to be handed out in very particular ways." "Firstly, it mattered not what you did, but who you were, who your parents were, what kind of background you had." "Consequently, there was real cynicism about the character of those at the top of society." "They weren't necessarily the best, they were those who had been handed their privileges on a plate." "Secondly, there was very little social mobility, you tended to stay where you were." "And thirdly, a related point, people tended to have very low expectations of the kind of life that they could have." "Under the old feudal system, only a very few had ever aspired to wealth and fulfilment." "The majority knew well-enough that they were condemned to exploitation and resignation." "The working classes were considered creatures lacking in reason and, therefore, naturally fitted to leading dismal lives, as beasts of burden were to tilling fields." "The notion that inequality was fair, or at least irrevocable, was often shared by the oppressed, themselves." "With the spread of Christian teachings during the later Roman Empire, many fell prey to a religion that taught them to interpret their unequal treatment as part of a natural and unchangeable order." "In his book, "Policratus", of 1159, the English mediaeval philosopher, John of Salisbury, became the most famous Christian writer to compare society to a body." "And to use the analogy to justify a system of natural inequality." "In Salisbury's account, every part of a State can be compared to a part of an individual human body." "So the ruler was rather like a head, the parliament like the lungs." "The treasury like the stomach, the army like the hands and the working classes, in general, like the feet, with the peasantry, in particular, being compared to the toes." "Behind this, admittedly, rather insulting metaphor, lay the idea that everyone in society had been accorded an unalterable role." "According to the old class system, to ask why some people were allowed to feast in banqueting halls, while others were condemned to tilling the soil, was an impossible question, almost as impossible as to ask whether God really existed." "In the old status system, you either have status or didn't." "And if you didn't, there wasn't much you could do about it." "The old system was patently unfair." "Then, gradually, in the middle of the 18th century, a new way of distributing status emerged, a way that gave hope to millions of people and dramatically changed their lives, but, at the same time, a way that brought a new level of anxiety to the lives of many." "The new system was called meritocracy." "I travelled to America to look at how the creation of the United States in 1776 fundamentally changed the way status was distributed." "The constitution of this new country was based on an idea that would come to affect almost every aspect of life right across the modern western world the idea of meritocracy." "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights." "That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." "Those words were first drafted by Thomas Jefferson in June 1776." "In his autobiography written in the end of his life," "Jefferson explained that he had spent his career trying to create what he called 'an aristocracy of talent' to replace the old aristocracy of privilege and, in many cases, of brute stupidity." "He believed in the infinite perfectibility of every person." ""Talent belongs to everyone", he wrote," ""it is as much part of a man as his arm or his leg." "It belongs to everyone to a greater or lesser extent"." "From the early 19th century onwards," "American bookshops grew filled with autobiographies of self-made heroes, and compendia of advice, directed at the not-yet-made." "Morality tales which told of wholesale personal transformation and the rapid attainment of great wealth and immense happiness." "The growth of the mass media helped ordinary Americans to start dreaming that they could, one day, have the same kind of life as the high status people they read about." "Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan and Vogue brought an expensive life within the imaginative reach of all." "With enough talent, anyone could do anything." "Good morning everybody." "It is 8:30 and time to be in class." "Would you please stand for our Pledge of Allegiance." "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands." "One nation under God." "Indivisible..." "We need to have a moment of silence, please." "This is Jefferson High School, just outside Washington DC." "The pupils here are imbued with the ideals of meritocracy on a daily basis." "Thank you, and have a great day." "This American ideal doesn't, of course, involve a search for equality, merely an initial period of strictly-policed, equal opportunity." "If everyone has had the same chance to go to school and enter university and sit exams, then, so the idea goes, there will be perfect justice in any aristocracy that subsequently emerges among Americans." "Students here really are taught that they could become anything that they wanted in life." "That if they work hard enough, that if they believe in themselves enough, they can achieve anything." "It is an immensely moving idea, one that you can feel energises the whole of a school like this." "Every person of school-age who enters this nation, no matter what their background, is welcomed into a school." "And our public school system, is that system that has open doors for every person." "So you need not be of a certain economic group, ethnicity, geography." "If you are living in the United States, even if you are an illegal immigrant, you are entitled to go to our schools." "Which is an awesome undertaking and very difficult." "In some of my schools, we have taken in young people, who have actually come straight out of the jungle and they may be 15 years old and they have never been in a school in their life." "They are literally illiterate, they do not read or write the language that they speak." "And then we, of course, we immense them in English." "Is the United States is a genuine meritocracy?" "We strive to be." "It is an eternal goal, yes." "Do you want your class to win money?" "Of course you do." "Penny Wars is going through Thursday of this week." "Put pennies in your class's locker and put other types of coins in other classes' locker." "Take away from their total." "The winning class will be announced on G-day." "That would be the end of your morning announcements - have a great day." "The American dream took a long time to filter back to the motherland." "As late as the 1930s - over 150 years after the American Revolution - the English writer George Orwell complained that Britain was a country still filled with inequality, corruption and injustice." "But there was about to be a new pressure for change." ""What we need now in Britain is a revolution against class privilege." "We need to fight against the notion that a half-witted public schoolboy is better at his job than an intelligent mechanic." "Although there are gifted and honest individuals among them, we have to break the grip of the old aristocracy." "England has to assume its real and just shape"." "In March 1936, George Orwell came to Wigan in Lancashire and spent two months here." "He was appalled by the poverty that he saw all around him." "But what appalled him even more was what he felt to be the causes of poverty." "The fact that those who seemed to have low status, didn't seem to deserve it." "He came away calling for a revolution, a revolution in the class structure." "This wasn't to be a violent revolution, he said there wasn't to be red flags and street fighting." "But what he wanted, in his words was" ""a fundamental shift in power towards those in the society who deserve it"." "Things have largely gone George Orwell's way." "Whatever the differences between politicians on the left and right, what they are all agreed on is the priority to get a true meritocracy up and running." "They may differ about their views on how to do this, but they all agree on its central importance." "If you come to Wigan today, and visit one of its biggest comprehensives, Kingsdown School, you will find Orwell's ideas for a meritocracy being put into action." "The league table came out." "And, once again, we are at the top, the top of the tree." "I think we have been there all year." "I don't think there has been any point at which we have fallen off the this top position." "But there are still a couple of months left in school where we can be caught up, if we let our standards drop." "We don't want to come second, we need to make sure that we finish at the top." "The school was in decline when I first came because attendance was low and morale was pretty low, too." "And I think the people in the community didn't have a very good image of the school, really." "And didn't have a lot of confidence in the school and things were a bit depressed." "So what did you start doing since you came here?" "What we really had to do was raise morale, really, and build self-esteem and those were the key things to do." "To make sure that the young people felt valued and that the school was somewhere where they felt that they could succeed." "So we took as our motto 'your opportunity to succeed'." "Three years ago, 10% of the students who left this school, left with nothing." "No qualifications at all." "Last year, every single student left here with four GCSEs and 96% had five." "Now that is an astonishing improvement and then there was a 400% increase in students gaining five or more GCSEs at higher grade passes." "They have made tremendous strides forward." "The benefits of a meritocratic system have been extraordinary." "People who, for generations, were held down within a caste-like hierarchy have finally been allowed to fulfil themselves in whatever way their talents allow." "Race, class, gender, age - all of these have stopped being obstacles to advancement." "An element of justice has entered into the distribution of rewards." "Alongside meritocratic, educational reform has come efforts to promote equal opportunities in the workplace." "We are repeatedly told that, through effort and diligence, we can make it to the top." "This is Chilwood, a factory in Wigan that produces toiletries, packaging and over 400 sanitary towels a second." "I think anybody who really decides that they are going to go for it, the opportunities, may not be in the exact job or position that they are currently occupying, but there will be opportunities." ".. round the corner, almost." "It happens." "We have got good examples of it here." "People who work hard and go for it will be recognised, because we aren't over-brimming with talent but, you know, you find it, you have got to use it, and it happens." "There is no doubt at all, it happens." "I started with Chilwood in 1986 as a service person, which was for a three-month trial basis." "During that period, an opportunity became available within our Sampro division which I applied for, as a service person in that department, a more permanent position." "I was successful in achieving that position," "I then moved on within Sampro to become a line operative, and then a Number One operative." "About 1994, I was asked to go on to our clingfilm department our retail foodwraps." "I was then offered a position of Senior Supervisor within our retail foil division." "Following that, a position became available in 1998 for a Production Manager within our Personal Care department." "I was then offered my present position, which is a Manufacturing Manager." "So I have worked my way through the factory from right at the bottom, through every department up to where I am now." "There is a pride in the way that many people now speak about how they got to the top, a pride that would have been impossible in the days before meritocracy, when you only got places because of who your parents were." "Earning good money and having an important job-title indicate more positive things about you than they ever used to." "But unfortunately, in a meritocracy, having no money and no impressive job-title also say many more things about you, than they ever used to." "I don't enjoy it at all, to tell you the truth." "I find it very monotonous, very boring, unrewarding." "There is no challenge in the job." "It is the same thing day-in day-out." "You just get used to this routine and you come in, do the same job you did yesterday, and it's the same thing the day after." "And I've had enough of it, in all honesty." "A meritocracy is something I'd like to believe him, but from where I am, from my position in life it's hard to grasp." "It's not something I see day-in day-out around me." "It's a struggle really, in this environment, to try and rise." "You feel like you are banging your head against a wall sometimes." "There's a darker side to meritocracy." "If the successful merit their success, it necessarily follows that the unsuccessful have to merit their failure." "In a meritocratic age, an element of justice seems to enter into the distribution of success, as well as failure." "Financial failure becomes associated with a sense of shame that the unsuccessful of old had thankfully been spared." "Now the question of why, if one is in any way clever, able or good, you are still unsuccessful, becomes far more difficult, as a question, for those of low status to have to answer." "The rich, at the same time, come to seem as though they are deserving of what is going right for them." "And this radically undermines the plausibility of a lot of left- wing socialist thinking, based as-it-was on the idea of the rich are, essentially, thieving, plundering bastards." ""All of my life I've been waiting,"" ""And all of my life I've been struggling for it"" ""There's nothing to show, except police cars"" ""And nothing to fear, but misery"" "For a flavour of left-wing disaffection and a pint of ale," "I have come to a meeting of the Socialist Alliance of Wigan, who meet to every week to hear a band, and plan the revolution." "To them, ideas of meritocracy are little more than pernicious lies." "It seems to me that there is a kind of interesting, potentially-sad conflict between the idea of meritocracy and the ideas of the left." "A lot of left-wing thinking has been based on the idea that those on the top are somehow there because they have robbed someone, they have exploited someone, or they have generally behaved in unethical ways." "That's fairly clear." "Right." "So there's a kind of conflict between meritocracy and the left." "And I just want to raise that with you." "How do you read that conflict?" "What does that make you think?" "There is no meritocracy in this country." "What there is, is an illusion, the illusion that people can get on in the world." "They can get bigger cars, they can get bigger houses." "And it's like chasing a dream." "Now, as the socialists we would say, that in any society, any society, those that rule society, rule society and maintain their rule by a combination of force and fraud." "What's the fraud?" "Well, obviously the force is the police and banker." "But the fraud, the fraud is the idea that somehow you can get to the top." "And that's a fraud." "So you think that in our current society, that you can be clever, energetic and diligent and you will not get to the top." "Yes, that's right." "Well, the illusion is that you actually you can get somewhere." "Actually, you can get somewhere, you can get a nice house, you can get a nice car." "And you can get all those things and it's true that people do get those things." "But they get them on the basis of debt, they get them on the basis of insecurity." "We all want to improve the quality of our lives but what we find is, is that the nature of the society we live in militates against the majority doing that." ""Down into places where your past was"" ""Find a way to the fools that murder"" ""And I've got to change"" ""I cannot be the same, yeah "" ""Coz all of my life, I've been waiting"" ""And all of my life...."" "Socialism used to console by telling us that we, personally, were off the hook for low status." "But the argument has lost much of its force." ""Winners make their own luck" now runs the harsh, modern line." "Living in a meritocracy means living in a highly fluid society where we are no longer divided into Lord and Peasant, Aristocrat and Commoner, but where we are said to have a choice about what we want to make of our lives," "whether to be a winner or a loser." "If we fail in the struggle, we are likely to end up ashamed, angry, but, significantly, without anyone else to blame for our misfortune." "And even if we succeed, we will know that in these precarious times, our status is unlikely to remain safe for long." "In so many fields, we are only now as good as our very last performance." "So we have ended up with a curious paradox." "Our wealthy, opportunity filled, societies have had the odd effect of hugely raising our levels of status anxiety." "Who has high status today?" "Who do we all look up to?" "Whom do the newspapers favour with respectful profiles?" "Rich people." "People who, through their own efforts and merit, have been successful in business, entertainment and the arts." "People who make no secret of their achievements." "This can seem a dispiriting state of affairs." "It can seem shallow or unfair." "But it is made all the worse, because we often assume there is nothing that can be done to alter the ideals of our society." "We tend to think it is natural that certain groups have high status, while others are marginalised." "But, in fact, it isn't inevitable at all." "It is possible to imagine a world where there has been a radical redistribution of respect." "Islington, North London." "It's Sunday morning, people are getting up." "Then they do that most routine of things, they buy the Sunday papers." "It seems an innocent enough activity and a million miles from our anxieties about status." "But in truth, such everyday sources of information, contain a myriad of subtle but insidious messages about who in the world matters and who doesn't." "It was Karl Marx who first brilliantly analysed the way that our values are being shaped without us realising." "And he coined a useful word to describe the process: "ideology"." "Marx defined an ideological statement as one that sells itself as being naturally true, when it is, in fact, made-up, to uphold vested interests." "We were, Marx thought, being bombarded with such statements all of the time." "In Marx's eyes, is largely those at the top of society who are responsible for disseminating ideological beliefs." "So, in a society where power is largely concentrated in the hands of aristocrats, the idea of being an aristocrat and inheriting money is seen as inherently noble." "But in a society where those at the top are business people, entrepreneurs, the idea of making money in trade and business is seen as the leading noble idea." "In Marx's words, "the ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class"." "The sociologist, Max Weber said:" ""the ritual of reading the Sunday papers has replaced going to church"." "Taking his cue from Marx, Weber was suggesting that just as priests in pulpits used to be the main source of ideology, it was now the media." "Ideological ideas would never rule if they were seen to rule too forcefully." "The essence of ideology is that, unless our political consciousnesses develop, we will simply fail to spot it." "Ideology is released into society like a colourless, odourless gas." "Take a random selection of articles in the Sunday papers." "Articles about where to be seen in France this Summer, how women can now look more beautiful for longer, why Filipinos make the most reliable domestic servants, how to find a promising country home and why we can no longer rely on jobs for life," "but how exciting flexible careers can be." "No wonder if many of us finish reading the papers feeling a bit dispirited." "We are being subtly rebuked for all the ways in which our life doesn't conform to the dominant status ideals." "All the ways our career isn't as stellar, our house isn't as fashionable, our social diary isn't as packed." "We may end up feeling as guilty for our failings as if we had spent the morning being berated by a priest." ""Ideological ideas", said Marx," ""are phantoms formed in the human brain that keep prisoners in their cells without a need for bars"." "Marx wasn't alone." "Although the very idea of politics changing anything is out of fashion, it is worth remembering that many of the groups who have status today, only do so because they fought for it, politically." "They wrote pamphlets, changed laws, organised strikes, lay down in front of tanks, and burnt their underwear in public." "I caught the bus to Denmark Hill in South London." "From 1842 until 1871, it was the home of the critic and writer John Ruskin, who fought a passionate campaign to raise the status and conditions of the British working class." "Ruskin hated almost everything about the world that his mid-Victorian contemporaries were creating." "He hated railways, Oxford Street, the sprawl of suburbia, Crystal Palace, but also smaller things like the invention of the foldaway umbrella and the telegram." "But what he hated most of all were the values of his mid-Victorian contemporaries." "He hated their obsession with wealth." "He described them as" ""the most wealth-obsessed people that have ever existed on the face of the earth"" ""The ruling Goddess of the age could very well be described as the Goddess of getting on", he wrote bitterly." "Ruskin believed that the Industrial Revolution, and the wealth it was producing, had warped the values of his contemporaries." ""The modern haste to be rich", he said," ""was condemning the workers to life in a labyrinth of black walls and loathsome passages." "A life of filthy slums, polluted air, and dangerous, stinking factories"." "Most educated Victorian opinion believed there wasn't much that could be done about such degradation." "That it was just the inevitable, natural outcome of the laws of economics." "But Ruskin would have none of it." "He demanded free education, decent housing, and access to green space for everyone." "And most of all, he challenged the central idea of his age" " the idea that there was something admirable about being rich." "Ruskin, too, was desperate to be wealthy." "But he had a very different idea of wealth in mind." "What he wanted was not money." "He wanted kindness, intelligence, sensitivity, godliness, a set of virtues he referred simply to as 'life'." ""There is no true wealth", he wrote, "but life"." "That country is wealthiest which nourishes the greatest number of happy and noble human beings." "Most of those people commonly considered 'wealthy' are, in truth, no more wealthy than the locks of their strong boxes." "Ruskin made a difference." "He set in train many of the arguments that were to lead to the creation of the Welfare State." "He remains an inspiring example of how, by making a lot of noise, by acting politically, a person can start to alter the values of his world." "In 1906, six years after Ruskin's death, twenty seven Labour MPs entered Parliament for the first time." "And when they were asked who was the person who had most influenced them to pursue politics, seventeen of them answered that it was John Ruskin." "Mahatma Gandhi, for his part, said that John Ruskin had been the single greatest influence in his life." "Potters' International Hotel, off the A323, near Farnborough, Hampshire." "The Everywoman, "Women in Business" lunch." "In low ceilinged rooms, business women are picking at salads." " Are you all in business?" " Yes." " What business are you in?" " Well we have a new wonderful new business." "Its call Glass Suckers." " Uh huh." "What's that?" " Its decoration on your glasses." " On your glasses?" " With a miniature suction cup." "This is not an event to set the world alight." "But stop and think about it for a minute." "Less than 100 years ago, this gathering would have been literally inconceivable." "There weren't any women in business at all." "This particular route to status and respect was blocked to them, and the fact that things have changed so much is down, in large part, to political agitation." "Women being able to open a bank account in their own right was only 30 years ago." "Even the women here, they wouldn't have believed 20 years ago that they would be here." "People listen to you more if you are running a business that is successful, if you are employing people." "Suddenly people will sit up and listen to you." "The political response to status, has been to insist that our contemporary status ideals are not inevitable, but manmade." "And so, they can be changed." "I'm going in search of people who have learned to live by different ideals." "Jill and Tony Warley and their friends Ann and Peter Simpson, are going away for a weekend in the country." "They find the packing much less stressful than most of us do." "That's because they will not be wearing anything when they get there." "You walk through those gates and all the stress drops off you." "And it's just a nice place to be and it is a very sensible way of being." "You just forget everything else about the rest of the world." "When I was working, I could never wait to get home and take all my clothes off, in the right weather of course." "What do you think of textiles, who keep their clothes on?" "Why do you think they do keep their clothes on?" "I think, perhaps, they are scared if they shed their clothing, they are shedding the thing that they feel protective i.e. I have got a uniform, I'm a policeman, my uniform protects me." "I'm an airline pilot I have my uniform, it protects me." "If I take it off, who am I?" "And it is more-or-less a code between naturists that you don't talk about people's jobs." "You don't ask for their surnames, and you don't ask what sort of job they do." "Aztec Sun and recreation club in East Grinstead stands in a long tradition." "From the start of the 19th century onwards, a new group of people began to be noticed in the West, they often dressed simply." "They didn't much care about money or convention and they came to be described as "bohemian"." "There have been all kinds of bohemian movements in the last 200 years." "The Romantics, the Surrealist, the Dadaists, The Punks, the Hippies and, of course, the Naturists." "And there's perhaps one thread uniting these very disparate movements, and that is a decision to stand outside of the bourgeois mainstream and live for a set of new, independent values." "Being naturist, does that give you different perspective on the way that people outside of the naturist community use their clothes to, maybe, show-off or bolster up their position?" " Yeah, the designer labels, yes." " People who we meet who wear the fancy labels." " Yes, it's done for show." "Look what I've got because I'm shopping in the right shops." "And their little carrier bags what they have bought it in." " But you feel outside of all that?" " We go to the cheapest place because we have to wear clothing and clothing is what we wear." "Bohemians don't necessarily set out to abolish status altogether, merely to insist that it be distributed according to their own rules" " Once you're in the club, do you feel there are still differences in peoples' status?" " Yes, you've got the caravans around" " Is it size that matters?" " It is in caravans, yes." " We are only tent people." "Bohemians pose an important question for us." "Who are we going to get to judge us?" "Whose opinions should we give weight to?" "We can learn from the Bohemians that status is available from a variety of sources." "Above all, from our friends." "Our choice of audience can be our own." "Charleston in Sussex, is a temple to British bohemianism." "It was the home of the painter Vanessa Bell, sister of the writer Virginia Woolf." "Here, in the 1920s and thirties, Vanessa Bell and her friends," ""the Bloomsbury Group", started an experiment in living, whose effects we are all still feeling today." "Vanessa Bell's granddaughter, Virginia Nicholson, showed me around" " Virginia, there is amazing atmosphere in this house." "It feels so, sort of, relaxed and dare I say it, bohemian?" " Of course, this is where I remember everyone having dinner and meals and there was a great sense of conviviality here." " What sort of subjects of conversation would people?" " That's a hard one!" "Life, art, gossip, sex, who had taken to the bottle, who had had a letter from so-and-so," " But it's all very, kind of, handmade, sort of, hand painted" " Absolutely, I mean I always loved the lampshade because it's like an upside-down colander and completely makeshift" " They didn't bother too much with having things properly made." "Because it's not expensive is it, to live like this?" "No-no, they never had much money." "This is not an elite of people who were living a grand way of life, at all." "It is just people in a rented farmhouse in the countryside." "You know, just letting-rip a little bit." "The place was wide-open, you could do anything." " You feel more creative just walking around." " You feel it was messy, you know?" " Nicely messy." " Nicely messy and that was a way of life, here." "Being a Bohemian isn't about having a certain kind of job, income or even house." "It's about a way of looking at the world." "In the words of the children's writer, Arthur Ransome," ""Bohemia isn't a place, it's a state of mind"." "And what that state of mind boils down to, is a spirit of independence and freedom, a commitment to live by your own values." "I think the core values were about living for art and rejecting materialism." "Rejecting the bourgeoisie." "Rejecting everything that they saw the bourgeoisie as standing for." "They believed in truth, didn't they?" "These ideas of true living, true loving and a great questioning of everything:" "Why can't we do things differently?" "Why can't we have different kinds of sexual relationships?" "Why can't we paint our houses in different colours?" "Why can't we dress differently?" "So, it is about breaking rules and giving themselves a sense of validation, in a way, by doing that." "It's one of the cheering things bohemia that people who set out to simply to live as they choose, often end up winning greater freedom for everyone." "Many of the freedoms we now take for granted:" "to talk to who we like, to have relationships with who we like, not to have to wear a hat in public, even to put garlic in our food, were first established in bohemia." "Experimentation was of the essence here, and you can go from everything:" "to the simple infidelity, to the menage a trois, to the menage a quatre, to the commune and points beyond." "And I think that that generation broke through a lot of barriers which we ought to be grateful for." "In a curious way, we are all Bohemians now." "The bohemian attitude has one serious drawback." "It can easily spiral off into wilful eccentricity." " Are you taking that for a walk?" " Yeah, I'm talking it for a walk." " It is a new kind of pet." "In 1850, the French poet, Gerard de Nerval, ceased conforming to bougoise ideas of suitable pets and acquired a lobster, which he led around Paris on the end of a blue ribbon." " Is that real?" " Yeah, it's a lobster." " Ah, Nikki, don't touch it." " It's called Augustus." " Augustus, Hello." " See, it's sweet, isn't it?" ""Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog?"" "Nerval questioned, "they are peaceful, serious creatures." "They know the secrets of the sea and they don't bark"." "Whatever the eccentricities of certain bohemians," "The Bohemian movement's enduring contribution, has been to stand up for an alternative way of life." "It has leant dignity and seriousness to a set of values overlooked by the bourgeois mainstream." "Like Christianity, of which it was, in many ways, a secular replacement, appearing at just the time when Christianity was beginning to lose its grip on the imagination of people, bohemia stood up for a spiritual," "as opposed to a material, way of evaluating ourselves and others." " Come on." "The whole idea of ownership is just so utterly vulgar." "Why would one want to own anything?" "This is my car." "Big deal!" "It looks much like someone else's 'my car'." "Everyone's got a 'my' and what does it reflect?" "Nothing, except, you know, what Volvo said you ought to have." "They buy the lie." "They do buy the lie, of the new car every year, of the house that you have to own." "I really feel that people have been robbed of life," "I really do feel they have been robbed of the freedom of choice, the freedom of understanding and enjoying the world that we live in." "In its infinite, an infinite beauty." "People have been robbed and they have been sold this lie - hook, line and sinker." "In the Essex countryside near Harlow, I found bohemian values alive and well." "Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher are members of CRASS, an anarchopunk music and art collective they founded in the late 1970s." " The door is never closed to anybody, you know?" " Anyone who comes to the door, you will let them in?" " They will always be welcome and there is an unspoken understanding that you come to share, not to take." "We have had strangers that have come into the house and they have fallen asleep on the sofa and you think "that's incredible, they feel so safe"." "And I think that's quite a wonderful thing to happen.... and you can be in the middle of... just about to serve a meal up and maybe three or four people come through the door." "And it's like feeding the 5000, it does stretch." "It's not a problem." "We grow a lot of food, we grow most of our food." "We have a choice of maybe ten vegetables in the winter." "And we have the choice of maybe fifteen in the summer." "So, yes, we are self-sufficient, if you don't fancy other foods that sometimes you fancy." "It's not so much a matter of doing without as doing with," "I mean we, naturally, do without." "And so anything else, I mean if Gee goes shopping or if I go shopping, we come back with, you know, chocolate biscuits, then that is how other people would see" ""being without", if you see what I mean." "Because that's a special treat, you know, and we're all a little bit excited about it." "Demolished to two minutes!" "And so we've learned to live very, very simply and one can live verry, very simply and it's to do with expectations." "Do you think of yourselves as a Bohemian?" "I mean, does that word appeal to you?" "It appeals to me more than the other things that people like ourselves are often defined as being." "I mean, because I like the historical context of it." "I mean, I think the Bohemian essentially seeks an authenticity." "There are many cynical people who, for example, they might watch you in the garden and just think "Oh, these are just two old hippies living in the country"." " What do you think about that attitude?" " I don't really mind at all what people think." "That's their business, isn't it?" "I don't really care what people think." "It really does not concern me what other people think." "So you really have, in a way, managed to completely uncouple yourself from concerns about status?" "I don't even understand...." "I mean, when I say:" ""I don't understand the meaning of the word"," "I mean I understand in the 'dictionary' sense..." "You just don't feel it." "It is not an emotion you recognise." "I can't comprehend it." "Penny and Gee have made real material sacrifices to live the way they do." "But perhaps we don't need to starve ourselves of chocolate biscuits to gain something of their mental calm." "I am going to suggest some ways that we can all deal better with our anxieties about how well we are doing in life." "Marcus Aurelius was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180AD." "As such, he was the man with the highest status on the planet." "But he was also, unusually for people who ruled the world, a philosopher." "Marcus Aurelius stood in a long philosophical tradition writing about status, one dating back to the Ancient Greeks, 600 years before him." "And the enduring legacy of that tradition been to insist that what you are worth, has very little to do with what other people think of you." "Marcus Aurelius wrote his great work of philosophy," ""The Meditations", whilst he was battling against bloodthirsty Germanic hoards on the furthest frontiers of his Empire." "Can I just do a quick health-and-safety, because they are very conscious here." "Can we make sure that any pointy, sharp things are on that side of the rope and when we are back here." "There was a disappointing turnout when I came to watch the Colchester Roman Society, but they went on, undeterred." "Marcus Aurelius would have been proud of them." "As an Emperor, his behaviour would have been endlessly examined." "Praised by some, criticised by others." "But he was aware of how untrustworthy it all was." "He wrote his Meditations to remind himself to submit any views he heard about his character and achievements to his own reason, before allowing them to affect his estimation of himself." ""My decency does not depend on the testimony of someone else." "Will anyone despise me?" "Let him see to it" "But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything which deserves to be despised"." "The Colchester Romans, like their most philosophical emperor, know better than to judge their own performance by the amount of applause they receive." "Philosophy isn't saying that you are always admirable in everything that you do." "Where it is really useful, is in helping you to decide for yourself, by a process of logical thinking, how much justice lies in the world's assessment of you." "Perhaps the most trenchant advocate of this tradition was the 19th century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer." "He said, "we will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, of the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors." "Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others, pays them too much honour"." "This is the New Media Age 'Effectiveness Awards'" " a prestigious annual Awards ceremony for the dot com sector." "Many of us work as much for the respect of our peers as for the money we earn." "Schopenhauer urged us to beware." "Schopenhauer believed that we are prone to chronically overrate the opinions of others." "We don't stop to ask ourselves on what basis these opinions have been formed." "If we did, we would often find that ideas of who is successful, and who is a failure, are based on nothing more than suspicion, rumour and fashion." "There is a sense of 'YES'." "It's been adjudicated and we have been voted the best in the country, and we are very, very pleased to get it." "We are over the moon." "To actually get recognised by these really influential and prestigious people it is just the most amazing feeling." "It feels really surprisingly fantastic." "Like there is some sort of justification in terms of what we're trying to do." "Schopenhauer said, "Other peoples' heads are too wretched a place, for true happiness to have its seat"." ""Would a musician be flattered by the loud applause of his audience", the philosopher asked, "if it were known to him, that it consisted entirely of deaf people?"" "Schopenhauer's argument could be described as 'intelligent misanthropy'." "Its drawback is that that we could end up like that philosopher himself did." "With few friends, living alone in a flat in Frankfurt with only a poodle for company." "But it also offers us a bracing antidote to our anxieties and vulnerability." "The people whose good opinion we crave, don't actually know us." "So why let their verdicts govern what we make of ourselves?" "So what Schopenhauer urges us to do, is to trust ourselves, to analyse ourselves, rather than base our ideas on public opinion." "What matters is not what we seem to the world, what we, in fact, truly are." "If politics sets out to change the way that status is distributed, and philosophy reminds us to be sceptical of other peoples' judgements about our standing and success, there is another, perhaps even more fundamental way of rethinking the whole subject." "Art has traditionally had a very hierarchical sense of what and who is important." "And that hierarchy has really been a reflection of the hierarchy outside the world of art." "It is Kings and Queens who have come at the top." "Most portraits are of aristocrats, or of subjects from antiquity, from the Classics." "But in the 17th century, we see something new appearing, that suddenly ordinary people are given some of the canvas." "They are told that they, too, can be important." "In an artist like Peter de Hooch, behind me the famous Dutch 17th century artist, we see that it can be an ordinary life that matters." "That a woman tending her child, sweeping the yard or doing some laundry, also has value and dignity." "Within paintings like de Hooch, lies an implicit subversion of any vision of life that could dismiss as insignificant and valueless, a woman's domestic care." ""True status", art like this argues," ""does not necessarily lie where society conventionally places it"." "Jamie Thraves has made a film called "The Lowdown" about drifting, insecure, inarticulate, twenty some things who can't decide what to do with their lives." "Nothing very dramatic happens in it, but it reminded me of the message in art like de Hooch's, that even ordinary lives and everyday events can be full of significance, and are worthy of respectful attention." "Sometimes I get depressed coming out of the cinema, because I think that the lives I have just seen portrayed have got nothing to do with my life at all." "Maybe they are much more glamorous, the ending is happier." "At the end of 'The Lowdown', you don't think going to live happily ever after, and yet," "I think, it does leave you feeling good, because, for me at least, it shows me what real life is like and, as I say, it makes you feel," "kind of, less alone with the messiness of what real life is like." "Ummm...." "I think that's the kind of thing I wanted to get across." "I felt that, to me, that there's a huge chunk chunks chunk of life where nothing major happens and I wanted to watch a character that is going through that period." " Does that make sense?" " Yeah, but don't you think that many works of art, and this is kind of the problem with a lot of them, draws away from those tiny moments and shift our attention to extraordinary events so it's almost as though we feel a bit embarrassed and lonely" "with our tiny moments." "So that most of our life is spent sitting on a bed with your girlfriend umming and erring, but yet films tend to teach us that is not where the action is, that is not what's interesting." " Yeah I guess" "I just think.." "I was saying this.., you know, the idea that when you lose your keys,.." "in that moment that you lose them and you panic." "I find that all the things that are wrong in my life, all come to a head in that moment." "And, you know, someone's face is just constantly, constantly interesting." "Everyone's face is, isn't it?" "So I think that if you are just pointing a camera at a face, you're always going to be getting something interesting." "So I don't think you can go wrong." "You don't have to leave your bedroom to make an interesting piece of drama." "Where art is really useful, is in helping us to deal with failure." "Many of the greatest works of art are the stories of people who failed spectacularly in life." "Our fear of failing at things, of losing our job or our status, perhaps wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for an awareness of how harshly other people tend to judge failure." "First story on the agenda today, right:" "Oedipus." "A guy, basically, shags his mum and then cuts his eyes out." "Oh, and kills his dad." "So, it is an everyday tale, so we need a front-page headline" "Sex with mum was blinding..." "Clubfoot love rat ...tops his dad..." "Clubfoot love rat tops his dad..." "Yeah, that's it." "What we mind when we lose our status isn't just that we might have less money, it's also the way that other people are going to talk about us for having failed." "I think that's where art comes in." "Many of the greatest tragedies of Western tradition are stories of people who have lost their status, who have become, one way or another, losers." "I visited the offices of the Daily Sport in Manchester." "I wanted to see how a group of tabloid journalists would be inclined to interpret the harrowing stories of failure in some of the great works of world literature." " Right, Othello." "I'm having trouble with it, because I thought that was an ice-cream." " Does anyone know what Othello is about?" "He kills his lover in a jealous rage." "His lover was male or female?" "Female." "What was he jealous about?" "That she was sleeping someone else." "And was she?" "No." "So is that the full extent of the play?" "The whole three hours?" ""Jealous man kills girlfriend"?" "That's the headline." "Sick squadie sicko squaddie sicko squaddie - better, yeah sicko squaddie ....smothers" "What was the name of his bird?" "love cheat smothers shag-happy ...squeeze yeah no, that's a bit 1950's" "Yeah, squeeze is a bit....errr" "Ahh, nice bit of alliteration, though" "Desdemona" "Sicko Squaddie Smothers Shag-Happy Mona" "There we go." "That's cool, that's a winner, that!" "And then, Madame Bovary" "Go on, fill us in." "In a small French town." "Unhappily married to local Doctor." "She takes... she starts having an affair with a younger guy, a young student." "She starts running up debt, huge debts." "She can't repay the debts, she can't tell her husband about it." "She is in despair." "Her lover lets her down." "She commits suicide with arsenic, and dies shortly after leaving a distraught husband and little daughter, two-year-old daughter" "Slimy Frog in Bizarre Love Triangle" "If there is something incongruous about these headlines, it's because we are used to thinking of the subjects they refer to, as inherently complex, naturally deserving of a respectful attitude, rather than a prurient and damning one." "There is nothing about many of the characters that we find in art that makes them inevitable objects of concern, and even pity." "If we do end up thinking of them as noble and dignified, it all has to do with the way that they are portrayed on the stage or on a page." "It's the achievement of many artists to lend to people who could be described as losers:" "emotional-compulsives, suicides, murderers, a level of sympathy that is owed, but rarely paid, to every human." "The ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, reports an interesting custom practised by the Egyptians at their grandest social gatherings, feasts and picnics." "When revellers were at their most exuberant, their thoughts focused on pleasure and power, servants would pass between the tables, carrying skeletons on stretchers." "The ritual was designed vividly to remind partygoers of their mortality." "The anecdote intrigued me." "It might seem unnecessarily grim to turn our thoughts to death, but doing so may, in fact, be one of the fastest ways to dispel any worries we might have about status." "Nothing helps us as much to sort out our priorities in life." "The effect of the thought of death can be to lead us towards whatever we most value, and, at the same time, to encourage us to pay less attention to the views of other people." "Other people who will not, after all, have to do the dying for us." "The prospect of our own extinction can lead us to take more seriously what we most value in our hearts." "The contemplation of death has a long history in Western art." "Vanitas paintings were hugely popular the 17th century." "They were hung in domestic environments, often in studies or bedrooms." "In this time there were a lot of very wealthy individuals and a lot of people making a lot of money, from trade." "And so, this newfound wealth made a new wealthy class who were buying these sort of paintings." "The canvases feature a contrasting muddle of objects." "Symbols of frivolity and worldly glory, and among them are placed the two great symbols of death and the brevity of life." "A skull and an hourglass." "The Latin inscription here:" "Omnia Vincit:" "Death Always Wins." "The purpose of these works was not to leave their owners depressed by the vanity of all things, rather, it was to embolden them to find fault with specific aspects of their experience." "And to urge them to attend, more seriously, to the virtues of love goodness, sincerity, humility and kindness." "So how much would this reminder the worthlessness of money and riches, how much would something like this now, set you back?" "This one here." "In the gallery we are asking £50,000 for it." "It is a pity that powerful people today don't follow the example of their 17th century counterparts." "Because we might find the thought of death, rather stimulating." "Above all, it brings authenticity to social life by removing from us many of the reasons for which society honours its members." "For example, the capacity to throw dinner parties, or to work effectively" "In so doing, death reveals the fragility and so perhaps, the worthlessness, of the attentions we stand to gain through status" "There may be no better way to clear the diary of engagements, than to wonder who, among our acquaintances, would make the trip to the hospital bed." "Mary Allen used to run Royal Opera House." "Now, she spends most of her day gardening and trying to write a novel." " No, I used to get up at five o'clock in the morning, leave the house at 5:30, get to my desk at six." "Then I would have three hours before anybody else turned up, when I could do my reading and my thinking and my writing." "Nine o'clock through till seven I had meetings." "And then at seven o'clock I would have to go out, either to a performance or a dinner, or some kind of function." " Do you get chance to look at the flowers?" " Occasionally." "Fleetingly." "Very, very fleetingly" " But on the whole, what were you mostly taken up with?" " Just keeping the whole thing on the road." "I remember in February 97 thinking, "I can't carry on doing this much longer"" "because I feel terribly empty." "You know, what do I do with my life?" "I think about arts funding, arts politics." "A bit of art if I'm lucky." "I've got nothing else had my head." "I've got nothing else I can talk about." "In 1999 Mary was diagnosed with breast cancer." "She quit the high-flying career that had meant so much to her." " How did the thought of death change your values?" " I think it makes you reassess instant almost instantly and overnight." "I think one of the most important things to me was realising that, through all the those years when I had been at the Arts Council and the Royal Opera House, I had hoped that my friends would wait and wouldn't mind the fact that I wasn't spending too much time with them." "But I had always assumed that time, if not infinite, there was a reasonable amount of it." "And that one of the most important things to me me then was just to spend far more time and energy, and make much more of a commitment to, personal relationships - so that's my husband, my family, friendships." " And what started to matter less?" " Oh. ..." "Work." "Work suddenly had the status of nothing but providing you with the money to live." " Whereas before, what had it been for you?" " Beforehand, I think it had been a means means through which I could achieve all kinds of subsidiary objectives." "Like feeling good about myself, intellectual stimulus, in fact, all kinds of things that I could have provided for myself through other ways." "As conditional love starts starts to seem less interesting, so too, may many of the things we pursue in order to secure it." "If wealth, esteem and power buy us the kind of love that will last only so long as our status holds yet if we are destined to end our lives defenceless and dishevelled, then we have an unusually clear reason to concentrate our energies" "on the relationships which matter." " Did your concerns about status diminished, once you found out?" " They vanished." " Vanished?" " Vanished." "Well, it's irrelevant really, all I can concentrate on, if I am to die in the next year or two, is travelling from now to that point and travelling through that experience." "And it is the quality of my life that matters." "Not what anybody else thinks about my life." "But my experience of my life." "And I think I had never before that really been so firmly been clear that it was my experience of my life that counted, not what anybody else thought." " Why do you think we so often need death to remind us of what's important in our lives?" " Partly because it's actually rather a sweat to get going on all of this." "It's much easier to carry on on just doing what you've always done." "I've always wanted to write, and it actually would have been easier if, when I lay on my deathbed," "I could have said:" ""I might have written if I 'd have had time, I could have written"." "To say on your deathbed "I tried but I wasn't terribly good"" "is much more challenging." " Yes" "Contrary to what an optimistic mindset teaches us, everything will, in fact, turn out for the worst." "We will die." "Our achievements will be forgotten." "Everything we have strived for will be ignored and, perhaps mocked, and even or names will be stamped into the ground." "Whatever our status, we are all fated to end up as up as that most democratic of substances, dust." ""There is no wealth", said John Ruskin," ""but life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration"." "If there is something strangely calming in the idea that we are all going to die, it is perhaps because something within us instinctively recognises how many of our worries are bound up with things that are, in the wider scheme," "pretty petty concerns." "To consider ourselves from the perspective of a thousand years from now, returned to dust, in a smashed vault is to be granted a rare, soothing vision of our own insignificance."