The NEW Status Game: From Underground Cool To Beneficiary Politics

The best way to know about a cool band, circa 1995, was to know about them before anybody else did. If you knew them before they were cool, while they were still uncool, and you had proof of your foresight so that once they became cool you could say, “see?!” That was the best feeling. The problem was, at that rare point of success, you also had to declare them un-cool. In 90s slacker culture, popular just did not track as cool.

It was all very confusing.

But, I am hung up on how much this dynamic seems to apply right now, especially given how not only confusing the world is today, but how extra middle school cafeteria the current socio-political environment feels.

Are we all just psycho-teenagers now? Yeah, I think so. Kind of, right?

Just like 90s slackers navigated the politics of cool, today’s citizens and investors are navigating the politics of victimhood and beneficiary statuses. If you can understand how these roles are currently being assigned, you too can have a chance for maintaining both your agency and integrity.

Way back in the 90s, I was very well-practiced at getting my "I found it first" status bump from my friends. It was a positioning strategy. You had to skate to where the 7-inch record of a puck was going, grab a shirt or sticker, and wait for the crowd to catch up. Easy to say, hard to do, but if you got enough reps in, you would be right once in a while, and that was so worth the effort.

Fast forward to today. The discovery aspect may not be quite the same, but the beneficiary aspect, or positioning yourself for maximum status lift once the crowd realizes what is cool, is everything. This is true in markets, it’s true in politics, and it’s forever true in culture.

Recently, I had the chance to speak with Peter Atwater on Excess Returns about his work on sentiment, confidence mapping, and how people get cast as victims or beneficiaries in social, political, and market systems.

I’ve written before about how Atwater’s confidence map is a handy way to visualize the feelings of pushing and pulling between certainty and control in in any situation. With certainty on the x axis and control on the y axis, you end up with 4 quadrants of experienced feelings. When you are confident, you feel increasingly in control and certain. When you are not confident, you feel like a victim, sometimes increasingly uncertain and powerless.

Dominant leaders today, Atwater argues, are constantly manipulating these perceptions, assigning roles to different groups to shape outcomes. Once you see his confidence map, you can’t unsee it.

This dynamic echoes the Karpman Drama Triangle (which you can read more about here, appropriately referencing Pulp Fiction too!). In any dramatic situation, there are always these three roles: persecutor, victim, and rescuer. The persecutor picks on the victim, the victim appeals to the rescuer, and the rescuer tries to save the victim from the persecutor. It’s a rule. Drama will exist as long as all three roles are present.

Atwater points out that dominant leaders, think Trump, Xi, Modi, play a simplified version of this triangle. They pick a group to rescue (the victims), identify an enemy (the persecutors), and cast themselves as the hero (the rescuer). Policy becomes the enforcement weapon of choice, and the outcome is that you are either a beneficiary or a victim of the drama’s resolution.

If you are a financial markets oriented person, this means you need to rush to invest into the area where policy is creating beneficiaries, or at least avoid where it is creating new victims. It is winner-take-all, and it is brutal. Look at tarrifs and sector reactions, in the US and abroad.

If you are a “just trying to survive this world” oriented person, this means you need to pay extra close attention to any area where policy is creating beneficiaries, or at least avoid where it is creating new victims. It is also winner-take-all, and it is also brutal. Look at any publicly funded institution and how the drama-roles have been framed.

On the whole, this means the system is less free than ever. Policy, not merit, increasingly picks winners and losers. You can decide how right or wrong it is and debate that wherever you like, but the reality is - it’s here and we all are dealing with it on our own ways (re: lives).

The only way I know how to deal is to reconnect to what I believe in. Funny enough, Peter helped me realize I already have a toolbox for how to survive and thrive in a world where status games are everywhere and it’s called not getting beat up in middle school and occasionally being cool in high school.

I have to throw one more reference into the mix. Because while I only learned this in the past few years, it’s the most perfect explanation of what I was mastering 30 years ago. This is something I like to call the Ricky Gervais court jester strategy. 

Gervais points out that if you position yourself to never be the highest status, and often point out that your status is quite low so others feel more like bumping you up than slamming you down, you simply can’t lose. You’ll never be a sell out, and you’ll never be a victim.

In Gervais’ case, you take how he’s rich, famous, and powerful - all of which would put him at the highest level of status in most rooms you can even imagine - but then think about what he always talks about first. He won’t tell you he’s rich but he will point out how he’s balding. He won’t tell you he’s famous but he will tell you he’s getting fat. He won’t tell you he’s powerful but he will tell you how his cat runs his house.

You can do this too. All he’s doing is maintaining his integrity, keep his sense of humor, and never letting himself to be boxed into a role he cannot control.

In a world where some of us want to maintain our integrity, at whatever level of internal purity, this becomes the new mantra. Do not become a victim. Stay nimble, stay curious, and keep your strategic positioning. It is not about avoiding success. It is about managing how your success positions you in the broader drama triangles.

The coolest slackers, in hindsight, figured out how to stay fans. They admitted to liking the old songs more, but they did not remove themselves from having fun. They held an ethical high ground. If a band did something truly stupid, then - sure, they would abandon ship. But, they also allowed artists to grow, staying fans of quality core ideas for longer, and guess what? Sometimes it pays off.

I’m increasingly of the view that the system is more rigged than ever. Leaders will keep picking beneficiaries and victims for the time being. If you want to understand the game, study Peter Atwater’s work.

We don’t have to win. We do have to survive. And, per my high school science classes, surviving starts to look a lot like winning over the long haul.

If you’re reading me, I have a hunch you also want to survive with your integrity intact. Please, just remember this: Stay a discerning fan. Keep your agency. Never let someone else pigeonhole you into a role you cannot control. Do not require drama to survive. Require curiosity, ethics, and the freedom to reposition yourself as needed.

ps. said another way, you know I had to do it, “don’t sell yourself to fall in love with the things you do.” There’s no reason to sell yourself out. Just fall in love and stay there - you know what love is.

pss. Don’t miss this interview with Peter on Excess Returns, it’s about WAY more than investing:

psss. I have lots of great Peter Atwater posts and content here, and get his book!