To try and determine the causes of status anxiety, Alain de Botton
travels to America, to see how a meritocratic society works, when
everyone is supposed have equality of rights and opportunity. Drawing
heavily on the 1831 work by Alexis de Toqueville, “Democracy in America”
and under the assumption that “their anxieties are destined to become
our anxieties”, de Botton observes that, unlike the feudal, class
society of de Toqueville’s Europe, where everyone knew their place
within their social milieu, in American society where class has been
abolished, the slightest perception of inequality is brought all the
more starkly into focus. Not only however is the distinction between
rich and poor more evident - when everyone is perceived to have the
equal opportunities to succeed - failure is regarded as laziness and
weakness. Anyone who works hard will succeed.
Returning to the
common thread that lies behind much of his work, de Botton then goes on
to question whether those who succeed and achieve the riches they
desire are happier in proportion to the wealth they accumulate.
Evidently they are not – but the question remains why not? And if not,
is there another way, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed, in returning
to a simpler way of life, that of the “noble savage”? And where does
Christianity’s promise of rewards in the afterlife fit into all this?
In the first part, de Botton chooses well in selecting America and
examining a society where status anxiety is endemic, finding the root
causes and putting them to a number of philosophical and social
contexts. Most crucially, he chooses his interview subjects well,
questioning preachers, bums, aspirational businessmen and right-wing
fundamentalists, giving each of them an equal say, allowing extreme and
valid viewpoints to be aired, without ever going for the cheap shot or
attempting to undermine the interviewee with his own cleverness.
