Thanks for your comment, Jonathan. I have read Jordanetics, as I have read the 12 Rules for Life (and, incidentally, I have also been devoting 1 lecture per year to Maps of Meaning). I wouldn’t dismiss Jordanetics as you do, but that’s because I see it primarily as a useful essay in anti-idolatry (i.e., in humanizing JBP) than a work of slander. You make a fair point, and I don’t want to read too much into the 3-day loss of sleep, but I also cannot imagine such a level of anxiety outside of the prestige economy.

Thanks. And, I read the article you linked.

Hi Daniel! 🙂 Good point. There is a danger of mistakenly identifying prestige economy (PE) only with the PE of an out-group, rejecting that version, but then being blind to one’s own participation in the more tacit in-group PE. At the same time, it is not reasonable to demand a sacrifice of prestige that has absolutely no public or personal consequence (just to prove that one doesn’t value it).

Speculation: I am not against going to the meta-level, and continuing upward (meta-meta-…) until we reach a type of religious sphere, which is not more public than the previous levels, but in a sense more personal. At such a meta-meta-… level, we might even re-invent such propositional wheels as “We are all equal in God’s eyes”.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2017/10/06/breitbart-emails-trace-neo-nazi-moves-of-steve-bannon-milo-yiannopoulos-report/#66ed9803925c

Your last note made me think that the prestige economy can perniciously extend into the realm of character. “JBP.. …has all the more opportunities to demonstrate character by spending into the prestige economy, and show that he is driven by other values.”

Signalling one’s good character by bowing out of the prestige economy, could be just another transaction in the prestige economy. Prestige on a meta-level.

It’s like leaving a room through a door that looks like the exit, only to realize it enters back into the same room.