The most essential stabilizing feature of a society is a status hierarchy that young people—especially young men—can reliably climb by following a clear and pro-social set of rules. 1/

It is thus much better to have a society where the young have low status and the old high, than a society where one group has high status at all ages, and another is always low. Everyone is willing to do their time. But if you don't see a path up, you will tear things down. 2/

The pace of status climbing matters less than the reliability. People are happy with working hard to go from the 20th percentile to the 25th. Historically, few have had any better option. 3/

You apprentice and labor, you do your time, you become a leader. When status is organized by age, everyone is upwardly mobile, everyone is content. 4/

Our current malaise is based on two memes: 1. The unwillingness to do your time in exchange for a small gain in lifetime status; 2. The loss of confidence that doing your time will bring returns. 5/

Meme #2 (low return to hard work) is mostly wrong. But most true for the humanities class—journalists, writers, meme-makers. Their industry was most disrupted by the tech revolution and will be again by AI. And they've convinced too many people that its true for everyone. 6/

I don't know if status is now less reliably organized by age, or if this is another false meme. It's probably again true for the humanities classes — folks in their late 20s and 30s who feel they have done their time, but are in the same scrambling uncertain mass as ever. 7/

Hierarchy and inequality are not the problem; we have always had them. It's loss of belief in safe ways to get ahead. Tearing down hierarchy and inequality can make things worse; hierarchical unequal systems can offer people the most reliable positive sum life expectations. /N