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What are the consequences of social ambition?
The notion of generalized nepotism.
Our species, *homo sapiens*, operates in the wild within hierarchical social groups. Social ambition is the strong instinctive motivation that individuals have, even in our modern urban societies, to try and climb the social ladder. The basic strategy for doing so is to form alliances at various levels.
Indeed, every individual finds themselves at the center of various circles, with individuals inside each circle competing against those outside it. For example, an individual may compete with their siblings within the family, but is allied with the entire family to protect themselves from the rest of society. The individual competes with colleagues for a promotion, but is allied with them against competing companies, which in turn compete with each other but are allied within larger corporations to defend common interests. The individual is part of a social class that competes with other classes, but all these classes may be united within a national state that competes with other states, and so on.
This system of multiple circles around the individual is what I call generalized nepotism, which leads to permanent 'us versus them' conflicts. Such a system is therefore extremely violent, and although violence is contained in prosperous times by the rule of law, this system remains anxiety-inducing. Indeed, another individual is always both an ally when considering a large enough group, and an enemy when considering a smaller one.
At the behavioral level, this leads individuals to intensively practice hypocrisy, meaning showing respect and kindness toward people they actually care little about, or even detest, deep down.
Alliance Strategies
There are two main alliance strategies. One is to seek allies through apparent kindness (the chimpanzee Chester in the documentary Caribbean Primates). The other is to terrify them in order to impose servile loyalty (the chimpanzee Tony in the documentary Caribbean Primates).
While the end of the 20th century saw the fall of many myths, such as the idea of convincing little girls that their happiness would come from meeting a prince charming, the myth that the problem with the game of alliances is only tied to the behavior of individuals who use terror persists.
The reality observed when carefully studying group behavior is that the issue lies in the very concept of the alliance game, as opposed to how individuals play it. Indeed, for alliances to be stable, they need to be based on dogmas. As a result, regardless of how the alliance game is played, it leads to a disregard for facts in favor of respecting the dogmas that bind each group, fostering the 'we who believe in the dogma' versus 'them' mindset.
There are also secondary alliance strategies, all the more effective given that the human language is sophisticated and allows us to effectively shape others' mental images:
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lying. It consists of presenting others with a deliberately distorted or simply truncated version of reality in order to obtain more alliances. This is the strategy used when self-deception through cognitive dissonance is no longer sufficient to create complicity. Perhaps it is also, in humans, the main tool for acquiring power and fame, although the alliances thus formed are fragile.
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showing off. It involves exaggerating signs of high social status (lifestyle, position, diplomas, self-promotion, clothing, vocabulary, body language) in order to encourage others to seek an alliance.
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exclusive circles. It involves displaying signs of recognition (clothing, vocabulary, body language) to facilitate the identification of potential allies.
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victimization. This is a variant of seeking allies through kindness, where the individual seeking the alliance does not target individuals lower in the social hierarchy, but those higher up. The goal is to obtain protection not based on the lower-ranked individual's loyalty, but on the higher-ranked individual's empathy.
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Main Consequences of Social Ambition
To summarize, social ambition leads to a preference for respecting dogmas and ignoring their negative practical consequences and the suffering they generate. Added to this is a second human characteristic, cognitive dissonance, which allows them to do this while maintaining a positive self-image.
Go Deeper
To better understand social ambition and generalized nepotism, watch the documentary Caribbean Primates by Jack Silberman and Jean-Christophe Ribot, available on Arte Replay, and then refer to Chapter 2 'Generalized Nepotism' in the book From Capital to Reason.
Then see the question 'How to succeed in life?' which presents the major behavioral alternative in the life of a human being, namely, following the path dictated by social ambition or going beyond it.