we want it badly enough, we can do anything. Open the door, step

The hidden rules of the status game have helped drive human history. Over hundreds and thousands of years our endless strivings have led to invasion, subjugation, revolution, oppression and civilisation. This should come as no surprise. After all, history is made by people and people are born to play.

During the Raj, ‘many Indians adopted, with the zest of converts, Western ideas such as self-determination and human rights, and were dismayed when the British refused to live up to their own declared values by granting native Indians neither equal rights as British subjects or independence’, writes Harari. This pattern of status-striving has

Historian Professor Yuval Noah Harari describes this as the ‘imperial cycle’ by which conquered cultures are ‘digested’ by imperial games that continue to ‘flourish and develop’ even after its founders are long ejected.

Games up and down the hierarchy turned on Ben Ali. Just four weeks after Bouazizi’s protest, he fled.

Such dynamics drove Tunisia’s ‘Jasmine Revolution’. In the twenty-eight days between December 2010 and January 2011 the lower-middle-income country secured the exile of its president of twenty-four years, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The Tunisian population had experienced a ‘youth bulge’. This led to food shortages and the end of subsidies for

poverty alone doesn’t tend to lead to revolutions. Revolutions – defined as mass movements to replace a ruling order in the name of social justice – have been found to occur in middle-income countries more than the poorest. Sociologist Professor Jack Goldstone writes, ‘what matters is that people feel they are losing their proper place in society

A robust society is one in which the general populace is protected from outside threat and status trickles down in ways that are expected. Even if elite groups – the religious, legal, military, bureaucratic, aristocratic games – get nearly all the rewards, and bottom castes virtually none at all, stability won’t usually be threatened. What creates

The great mass of folk aren’t revolutionary or regicidal. Many don’t seek complete supremacy. One study found more than 65 per cent of people not wanting the ‘highest status rank’. Instead, we’re preoccupied with the busy business of ordinary life and the status we expect it to supply. This is even more true in virtue-based societies and eras. Back