And so today I'm "doubling down," as people like to say these days, because once you recognize the perversity of status, you also recognize that we very much need to get past it.

One of the things I've become clear on from studying Jesus is that his strategy for delivering his teachings to the people of Israel was carefully built around the status problem. In particular, he carefully avoid any mixture of status with his personal image.

Jesus fought to maintain his "mind-slot" as an outsider and as a non-powerful person. If he had allowed himself to become famous, people would have believed him for the wrong reasons. To whatever extent they believed him because he was a famous healer, their internal changes would have been that much reduced. (Those of you who have read the gospels have noticed him charging people who were healed not to tell anyone.)

People being upgraded on the inside was more or less the only thing Jesus really cared about, and I think this evasion of status was a stroke of genius on his part.

Status poisons more or less everything it touches. Status is a person's condition, position, or standing relative to that of others.

And so status automatically creates division and conflict. It forces us to think in terms of position, hierarchy, and dominance, and can't possibly do otherwise; it is built solely upon our standing relative to others.

To be very blunt about it, status is a primitive and barbaric model of seeing other beings. Not only does it poison our relationships, it poisons our self-image. It requires us, always, to think of ourselves as above or below every other person.

Status stands before us as an evolutionary hurdle. If humanity is to rise as a species, we must transcend status. Until we do, humans will continue to think in conflict-centered terms, and human history will overrun with stupidity and with blood.

Status is a hypnotic belief in man versus man, and its damage accrues whether we see ourselves on the "above" or "below" side of the exchange. If above, we're given to arrogance and abuse. If below, we're given to resentment and to lashing out. Both errors lead to internal subversion and external conflict.