Show Notes
You may think that you don't care about status. You may tell yourself that since you're not bothered about material displays of wealth, that means that you are above petty disputes over where one stands in the social pecking order.
The author and journalist Will Storr says you're wrong. Everybody cares about status, he argues, even if we don't realise it. We are evolved to obsess over status, and to immediately recognise it. You don't identify a high status person (solely) through their expensive car or designer clothes. You also notice their more relaxed postures, their better health, the fact that other people interrupt them less often, the fact that they have more friends. Everyone wants to be high status, whether or not they'll admit it.
These status games aren't something we can avoid, but by better understanding them we can play them more judiciously. That's what Will Storr's book, The Status Game, is all about. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise Perry
As the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt once put it, “a shrinking, aging world is something that we're intuitively, almost completely unprepared to encounter, because all of our experience, in ways that we don't even think about, has been framed by a growing world population.”
This interview was actually recorded before Suella Braverman's most recent Question Time appearance, which sparked a public row over the question of English identity and ethnicity. As it happens, that was one of the topics we covered in our conversation, which is themed around Suella's new memoir, an account of her family's experiences of the British Empire, and her vision for modern Britain.
In this bonus episode for paid subscribers, Rob Henderson and I discussed the new matchmaking scheme from the Singaporean government, which seems to be intended to boost the country's birth rate. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In 2019, Rusty Reno – editor of First Things magazine – published ‘Return of the Strong Gods’, a book that argued that the postwar ideological order of tolerance and openness had overreached, and that we were set to see the reemergence of “strong gods” in politics—that is, the powerful loyalties that bind people to their homelands and to one another.
For this bonus episode Meghan Murphy and I discussed the recent Women’s Convention in Rochester, NY, which we both spoke at. This was a gathering of sex realist feminists, with a lot of mothers and Christian women in attendance. Meghan and I spoke about the historic relationship between Leftism and feminism, and wondered whether we're seeing a decoupling of women's advocacy from the Left-Right binary. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.