This Losing Face Obsession Can Explain Why We Are So Stuck

Risks to our reputation are necessary to advance

Image by Gerd Altmann

The perks of living in a community are many. We have been living in society for so long that I suspect our definition of social animals has more to do with natural selection than it does with some innate aspect of the human condition. Living in a community caters to our social needs. Living in a community is (most of the time) safer than life in isolation. Living in a community enables our potential to reach heights that would be otherwise insurmountable.

Reputation plays an enormous role: the more reputation, the more perks. Earn the respect of enough people and your quality of life is extremely likely to increase. In its origin, I suspect reputation was built by being honest and reliable, by being of service, basically by having others think that the community is better off with you in it than out.

However, we are so deep into the reputation game that reputation seems to operate more like a currency than a measure of respect. Some are born with more of it. Some are born with less. Reputation is traded to accumulate more of it, as much as possible. Sometimes reputation is lost, sometimes it is invested: you lose the respect of a small community to earn that of a bigger one. In the reputation game, little can be…