An acquaintance of mine made a thoughtful comment about how a car salesman struck out with him because of making the wrong sort of appeal. While in the market for a new(er) vehicle, the fellow I know went to a car dealer and the salesman told him that if you wanted to be somebody, you needed a fancy and expensive vehicle. This appeal, as might be imagined, offended him to such an extent that he posted his bad experience online, possibly leading to bad word of mouth advertising for the dealership in question given that those who are similarly offended by such an appeal would be turned off from doing business with them.

There are some people who are immensely status-conscious and who long for the respect that the ownership of status symbols brings. The value of status symbols, though, is in their rarity, in their ability to distinguish between a small elite and a large (and envious) group of people who are most definitely not elite. And there exist some conflicts of interests between elites and the companies that sell status symbols. For one, elites like to keep their numbers small and powerful, so that they have the maximum distance from the common herd, but companies (unless they can sell limited products for huge profits) often prefer to have as wide a market for goods as possible for their own revenue stream. This leads to the tension of there often being more status symbols than there are those who are considered genuinely elites.

Of course, if someone is particularly status conscious and has a reasonable income, they can often make drastic cuts in their lifestyle to afford a small number of status symbols–a nice home or a nice car, or perhaps a private jet or a nice boat. In their own eyes, they might think that such a purchase would make them elite, but they would find out to their sorrow that elite status is not so much about owning a single positional good, but owning enough goods and possessing the right kind of access and memberships that one is recognized as an elite across the board. This is a much more difficult matter, as elite status is not strictly about possessions but is also about standing, and this means that one who genuinely wants elite status craves the recognition of others who (in his eyes) already possess that status.

And elite status is rather tricky. It is far easier to be recognized as an elite on a smaller and local level–which might require a golf course membership of a particular kind and recognized civic participation, than it is to be an elite on a national or global scale. Elites are and have always tended to be hierarchical in nature, going at least as far back as the Roman Empire, when the signing bonus of the soldier of a Roman legion allowed him the funds to become a big man in a village after retirement, but would be nowhere near sufficient to become a leading citizen of a large city, much less the whole Roman empire. For that to happen there had to be generations of good reputation and generally steady building of resources and honor, unless one had the luck to be the crony of the emperor or one of the very small list of Senatorial elites.

We need to remember this fact, that as soon as a good becomes marketable enough to sell well beyond elites, that some other rarer good will then become a marking tool of status. Acquiring elite status is not a one-off purchase, but rather it is a dedication to seeking the right connections and relationships and possessions, and it is often a fruitless task given the lack of interest elites have in giving their prized status to just anyone. It is far better to dedicate one’s self to being somebody in providing a worthwhile contribution to the outside world, whether in one’s own community or elsewhere, and if being somebody in the moral sense leads to increased reputation and status, that is all the better. It is only worth having elite status, after all, if that elite status is a reward for faithful and noble deeds, rather than simply shabby and wasteful politicking. It is, sadly, all too easy to forget that.