Creating an Elite
29th August 2021
Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.
Everyone has always hated the “fetch quests,” but everyone does them, because that’s how you level up. Leveling up becomes the point of the game, not winning the game. Extend the concept a bit further, and you’ve got social media, where people utterly abase themselves for nothing more than “likes” and “upvotes” and “retweets.” Yeah, what this mainly tells us is that people are idiots, but it also reveals something important about elite formation: So long as you get a critical mass of people doing it (for social proof purposes), you could get people engaging in cutthroat, take-no-prisoners competition over jellybean collections.
Give people a way to identify themselves as “elite,” in other words, and they’ll kill themselves and others to do it, no matter how silly the activity.