Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

500 | HOW THE MIND WORKSThe Kwakiutl of the Canadian Pacific coast enjoyed annual runs ofsalmon and abundant sea mammals and berries. They settled in villagesrun by wealthy chiefs who tried to outdo one another in competitivefeasts called potlatches. The guests at a potlatch were encouraged togorge themselves on salmon and berries, and the chief boastfully showeredthem with boxes of oil, baskets of berries, and piles of blankets. Thehumiliated guests slunk back to their village and plotted revenge with aneven bigger feast, in which they would not only give away valuables butostentatiously destroy them. The chief would start a roaring fire in thecenter of his house and stoke it with fish oil, blankets, furs, canoe paddles,canoes, and sometimes the house itself, a spectacle of consumptionthe world would not see again until the American bar mitzvah.Veblen proposed that the psychology of prestige was driven by three"pecuniary canons of taste": conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption,and conspicuous waste. Status symbols are flaunted and covetednot necessarily because they are useful or attractive (pebbles, daisies,and pigeons are quite beautiful, as we rediscover when they delightyoung children), but often because they are so rare, wasteful, or pointlessthat only the wealthy can afford them. They include clothing that istoo delicate, bulky, constricting, or stain-prone to work in, objects toofragile for casual use or made from unobtainable materials, functionlessobjects made with prodigious labor, decorations that consume energy,and pale skin in lands where the plebeians work in the fields and suntansin lands where they work indoors. The logic is: You can't see all mywealth and earning power (my bank account, my lands, all my allies andflunkeys), but you can see my gold bathroom fixtures. No one couldafford them without wealth to spare, therefore you know I am wealthy.Conspicuous consumption is counterintuitive because squanderingwealth can only reduce it, bringing the squanderer down to the level ofhis or her rivals. But it works when other people's esteem is usefulenough to pay for and when not all the wealth or earning power is sacrificed.If I have a hundred dollars and you have forty, I can give away fifty,but you can't; I will impress others and still be richer than you. The principlehas been confirmed from an unlikely source, evolutionary biology.Biologists since Darwin had been puzzled by displays like the peacock'stail, which impresses the peahen but consumes nutrients, hinders movement,and attracts predators. The biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed thatthe displays evolved because they were handicaps. Only the healthiestanimals could afford them, and females choose the healthiest birds to