status hierarchy: role-play

There is a scene in the film Chopper that has stayed with me for years. Someone is talking about the importance of another prisoner when Eric Bana, in the role that established him as a serious dramatic actor, cuts straight through the mythology and asserts that, inside jail, the man is just another bare bum in the shower. It is a crude observation, but an unusually democratic one. Strip away the titles, the money, the uniforms, the followers and the mythology, and every one of us is simply another human being inhabiting a fragile body while trying to make sense of a mind. Whatever consciousness ultimately is, we still do not, and probably never will, properly understand the relationship between the mind and the body that carries it. The emperor, the billionaire, the celebrity, the philosopher, the prisoner and the labourer all begin from remarkably similar material.

The mistake is to imagine that power, wealth or authority resides inside the individual. It rarely does. These things emerge from the relationships surrounding them: institutions, laws, markets, technologies, habits, expectations and the willingness of millions of other people to keep reproducing the same arrangements through time. Remove those relationships and the fortune, the office, the reputation and the influence evaporate. The person remains, but the system that animated their significance does not. That does not make our institutions unreal; their consequences are often immense. It means their reality is relational rather than intrinsic. Civilisation is an extraordinarily elaborate agreement that we continually recreate together. It feels permanent only because we keep performing it.