You want to be in the Cool Kids' Club

Social Status Signifiers as a Tool of Behavioral Aversion

This is part of the Persuasion series. Find the previous article here.

For this post it is useful to discuss the socialization and independence of the individual from the perspective of the development of the child. We all understand that there is a push-pull between individuality and community.

If everybody runs in his own separate direction it’s not going to be very easy to accomplish anything as a group. Humanity has several social mechanisms to start getting people in line early on. These can be instinctive and they can be designed.

Why do so many people have bad memories of their teenage years? These are the years that society’s conformity mechanisms slam into place and start to seriously punish those go against them. This takes many forms but today I am going to focus on social ostracization and exclusion. The “Cool Kids’ Club.”

The reality for most people is that support from others is a big help if you want to get far in life. Support from individual friends, support from the community as a whole, support from institutions that represent those communities. There are a few exceptions: here you are talking about “true geniuses.”

It’s a commonly known fact that true geniuses are very poorly socialized. Beethoven was renowned for his unkempt hair and disorderly nature. Nietzsche was notorious for being difficult to deal with. A true genius is a person doesn’t really “need” others to get by in life. They need him. He provides so much value with his talent that society kowtows to him to benefit from his genius. For basically all humans it is the other way around.

Since the normal man does not provide exceptional value purely by dint of his own mind, society feels free to cast him aside to be trampled by horses. Society will feel especially inclined to exclude and damn him to failure if he makes everybody else’s life harder for no good reason.

For example, if he is unnecessarily annoying or difficult to deal with without providing anything in return, other people will shut him out. This is the harsh and transactional nature of life which becomes more and more evident as boys transition into adulthood.

The average boy realizes in puberty that he cannot rock the boat too much if he’s going to succeed. He needs to give a little to get along. This is a tax on individuality as well as a cost that means people don’t get everything they want. So it’s natural they look back on these years with some discontent. But at the end of the day it is a “necessary evil” in order to keep society functioning smoothly and human nations progressing forward.

This process of socialization of a child ingrains a deep wariness of any indications that he is about to be ostracized or excluded from a large and important group. This is the desire to stay at the “Cool Kids’ Table.” If you are not a true genius, you cannot be entirely independent. If you cannot be entirely independent, you have some degree of dependence on something larger than you.

In grade school these are social cliques. In adulthood these are entire institutions or the society at large. If an average person does something, and the social clique laughs at him for doing it, he will develop a strong aversion to further doing that activity. He knows the end result of repeating that activity. It could lead to total exclusion from a powerful supportive social group, without which he may not succeed or even survive.

When I talk about “attacks on status,” this is what I am talking about. When you see a person generate a narrative around how “lame,” “not like us cool kids,” or “socially backwards” a person or a group of people may be, this is a time to carefully study what he is saying.

At times he may be pointing to an activity that will genuinely harm your ability to thrive if you continue doing it. But at times he may not. He may be piggy-backing on your intense desire to not be excluded from the cool kids’ club in order to condition you to be averse to an activity. That activity may actually be beneficial to you.

Knowledge and application of social status, ostracism, and ridicule is a powerful persuasive technique that hijacks your useful and natural socialization instincts and turns them to the purposes of the hijacker. Know about this yourself so you can defend yourself.

Find the next Persuasion article here.