Inner Security (Mind Shift #3): From status to relatedness

How pulling rank is losing its weight

This essay is the final one in a four-part series; it continues from the previous installment: Inner Security Mind Shift #2: From Power to Resilience. If you are enjoying reading my writing, please support me to continue this offering by becoming a paying subscriber today.

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In addition to money and power, status is another thing that we traditionally use to anchor our sense of security in the world. The process of social ranking and maneuvering for rank-based advantage is most likely operating — at least in the background — of any group setting. Whether we are aware of it or not, as social creatures, we are constantly posturing and positioning.

As soon as we walk into a room full of people, or enter an online space where there’s a group configuration, the first thing that we do is look around, scan our environment and assess the situation. We check to see who is familiar and who is unknown. We gauge who might be a potential friend versus a potential foe. We note who the leader or the teacher or the “alpha” member of the group is. We know intuitively which group members are higher status and which ones are lower status.

Status is our systemic way of comparing ourselves to those around us, and it is the natural way we humans tend to position, rank, file, and organize ourselves, relationally speaking. It is social standing. Our status is always relative to a group, or collective field. The status we have as an individual within a group can be tied to things like money or power but it can also be based on things like role, seniority, gender or ethnicity.

What underlies status seeking behavior (and along with that, awareness and vigilance around positioning) is the basic assumption of hierarchy. It is rooted in the idea that some people are better, or more valuable, or somehow more important than other people. Some people simply matter more than others; that’s what status says. It’s critical to grasp that layout of high-status and low-status individuals to know how to navigate. The rules of the road tell us to prioritize the needs and preferences of high- status people and sacrifice those of low-status people.

It’s not hard to imagine how we might pin our sense of security to status. Naturally, we expect that those who enjoy a higher rank or higher regard can (theoretically) command more resources or have greater control over outcomes than others without the same level of status. Some people are born with advantages in the status game. We might call this inborn advantage, our privilege. If we were born with a winning lottery ticket for certain characteristics that happen to be associated with high status, then we’re already ahead of the pack, through no merit of our own. It seems unfair, but is it insecure? It seems like if we source our security from status, we can pretty much count on it, if we’re born with a lot of the things that determine it.

That is, assuming of course that the rules of the game don’t change…

The world is so volatile and uncertain now. Any marker of status that puts us into an advantaged category can easily be flipped and put us into a disadvantaged class instead. Imagine for example, that you come from a long line of wealthy landowners that has made its fortune from cotton farming for many generations. That has status advantages, until it doesn’t. One day the government comes along and prohibits slavery, taking away your main source of labor, and then even decides to levy an additional tax, for the privilege of being able to own land and property.

We can see that status is not a reliable source of security. So then what is the inner-sourced version of status? When I first wrote about this third pillar of inner security, I referenced it as being relationships. But I have since realized that that is not quite right either. Now I see it not as relationships, but as relatedness. If we have a strong sense of relatedness, we will tend to have better, stronger relationships. But relationships are still the outer manifestation of the inner quality.

If we assume equality as our fundamental operating principle rather than hierarchy, then the idea of status instantly evaporates into irrelevance. What remains to connect us in the web of interdependence is relatedness. In other words, there is a return to the recognition of self in the other, of other in the self. I am another you. You are another me. The spiritual realization of Oneness, played out between human and human in the way we engage and exchange with each other.

Relatedness is what greases the wheels of the new economy. It helps us by unsticking the scarcity-induced tendency to calculate and withhold from neighbors, or to conquer and extract from customers and suppliers. As residents of the same global Earth village and members of the same human family, we look after each other and we are looked after by each other. 

Many of us buy insurance plans from soulless corporations that gladly take our premium payments, and then do everything they can do to avoid paying up when we call them up in our crisis moment. What if instead, we bought social insurance instead? In other words, relatedness reminds us to make deposits into the revolving account of our local community, so when we’re doing well we help others, and we generate the goodwill within that community, to care for us when we’re the ones who are down and out.

To create healthier exchanges in the new economy, we need to tend to the way we connect and relate with each other as human beings. Remembering relatedness is what gives the process of exchange its generatively. It allows us to share resources and experience more abundance, as we make the act of exchange into a sacred act of creation. Inner security is sourced from this essential truth: that when we are rooted in relatedness, one cannot succeed without the accompanying desire to support those with less, and one cannot fall down without feeling held by community.

Outsourcing security to money, power, and status leaves us feeling insecure, because we are counting on idols that are never a sure thing. Ultimately, inner security comes from recognizing what is here already. We don’t need to rely on the false promises of money, when we remember that we are full of untapped resource. We don’t need to strive for power over others, when we remember that resilience equips us to weather anything. We don’t need to count on status to ensure our future, when we remember that relatedness keeps us safe within the web of humanity.