Falling Off the Hierarchical Ladder

In our increasingly authoritarian world, I’ve been thinking a lot about social hierarchy.

My interest has been especially stoked by the seeming indestructibility of Donald Trump’s charisma for that mass of people who think he’s the messiah. How does it happen that vulgar, monstrous, narcissistic, ridiculous men become world leaders and world destroyers, over and over?

My contemplation of hierarchy was also provoked by the Academy Awards, a spectacle that I am always happy not to watch: the nauseating mixture of liberalism and show-off wealth, the Marie Antoinettishness of it all. I don’t enjoy the foolishness of seeing artworks ranked, and I have no desire to idolize actors, only to enjoy their work. (I have a theory that the potency of acting fame, a potency way beyond that of famous writers, musicians, and other artists, is stoked by how long we get to stare at them onscreen, to absorb them intimately for long minutes. I’ve looked into Nicole Kidman’s eyes and studied her gestures and facial expressions in a more sustained way than I’ve done with my own wife, for God’s sake!)

I’m not claiming to be in the least immune to hierarchical consciousness, even though, on the face of it, I’ve lived less involved with hierarchical structures than most people: I’ve never worked for a for-profit company, never served in the armed forces, never participated in league sports, never really been that involved in formal structures of power and status. I’m also a younger sibling, and was younger than most of my peers throughout public school (I entered college at age 16), which cultivated both a keen sense of striving and a certain expectation that others would be more naturally “ahead” of me. This was my main experience of “marginalization,” and while it wasn’t very potent, it is the closest I’ve come to being a woman, or a person of color, whose instincts for status-seeking must inevitably be boxed in by the realities of sexism and racism.

Even if I’ve managed to dodge a bunch of hierarchical interactions, however, it’s been just that, a dodge, motivated, at least in part, by anxiety about being on the losing end. The cold truth is that ever since I achieved the status of teacher’s pet in the first grade, I’ve been as competitive and status-conscious as any man.

One of the true mercies of becoming old, however, is that we get kicked off that hierarchical ladder. My base of admirers/supporters/friends had dwindled from natural causes, and I certainly don’t expect to replace them with young people. My relevance to the fast-changing culture has dissipated, and I’ve become too lazy to try to win it back. Technological changes have left me in the dust. My body has begun to slow me down. And I see, with more and more clarity as I age, how high status is a function of luck and vanity as much as talent and virtue.

All of which guides me to cultivate love, rather than high status, in the time left to me.

One of the most interesting Talmudic tales tells about the time when the sages capture the yetzer hara, the evil urge — the urge to power, to ego-driven sexuality, to self-assertion. They capture the demon, but they’re warned not to kill it, because the world, they are told, will not survive without the yetzer hara. So they conduct an experiment, confining it to a cave for three days — and in the course of those days, everything comes to standstill: no eggs in the birds’ nests, nobody working or building homes, everybody just sitting around.

Sounds like retirement. As David Byrne writes in one of his many wonderful songs:

“Heaven, heaven is a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.”

And what do the sages do? They blind the yetzer hara, then turn it loose again. When it comes to Judaism, there is never the hope of changing human nature, only of channeling it towards the social good.

Hmm . . .

Here’s a song of mine on the subject of surrendering the urge for status.