I’m gonna live forever.
I’m gonna learn how to fly – high!
I feel it comin’ together.
People will see me and die. Fame!

I’m gonna make it to Heaven.
Light up the sky like a flame; fame!
I’m gonna live forever.
Baby, remember my name.
– From the musical Fame

I hope to persuade you that the seemingly frivolous title question holds a secret with the power to reshape human relations. That a wish for fame belies the existence of a crippling, undiagnosed malady, one rather like malnutrition, except that it’s a disease of the self, not the body. Let me explain.

In a world that sees people as Somebodies and Nobodies, indignities abound. The primary source of man-made indignity is rankism. By analogy with racism and sexism, rankism is defined as what somebodies do to nobodies. To be sure, not all somebodies abuse their power advantage. We’ve all known somebodies who are devoted to serving others and wouldn’t think of abusing their rank, just as prior to the civil rights and women’s movements there were whites who weren’t racist and men who weren’t sexist. On the other hand, most of us, even quasi-somebodies, have gotten a taste of the indignities routinely visited upon those taken for nobodies.

Rankism is now appearing on the radar screen. To do so, it needed a name, and at last it has one. (If it’s new to you, google “rankism” and see where the meme is taking hold.) But, many victims of rankism are still in the position of women before the word “sexism” elbowed its way into the language. Rankism’s victims know that the indignities to which they are subjected are unjustified, but as yet they have few tools with which to resist their tormentors.

So long as rank-based abuse is regarded as business-as-usual, humiliation and indignity will remain unchecked. There are two ways to deal with this. We can either follow the example of identity politics and de-legitimize rankism (as the civil rights and women’s movements have de-legitimized racism and sexism, and as the gay and disability movements are doing to overcome homophobia and ableism). Or, we can attempt to acquire enough power to place ourselves squarely in the Somebody camp and so enjoy the relative security that status provides in a society saturated with rankism. Everyone knows that it’s imprudent to indignify a somebody. Who hasn’t fantasized getting even with those who put us down when we were vulnerable by shoving our Oscar, Emmy, MVP award, Pulitzer, Nobel, or simply our promotion, in their faces? Accrue enough fame in life and you may even attain immortality and, in the words of the song, “live forever.”

It should be noted that avoiding rankism by seeking status and fame is the same strategem employed by victims of identity groups who sought to blend into the dominant group. Passing as a somebody is like passing as a white or a straight. Until we can dismantle rankism, this is an understandable recourse for sidestepping its cruel injustice.

Dignity assures belonging. It’s more than respect or courtesy. To live in dignity affirms, nurtures, and protects. Dignity is the social counterpart of interpersonal love. In the West Side Story ballad Somewhere, when the lovers sing “There’s a place for us,” they are claiming a right to the dignity of inclusion. Contrariwise, in her famous “nobody” poem, Emily Dickinson captures the indignity of exclusion:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
The there’s a pair of us—don’t tell.
They’d banish us, you know.

Nobodies are marginalized to the point of invisibility. Since humans are social creatures, banishment carries a threat of being deprived of social and material resources critical to health and happiness, and sometimes to survival itself. No wonder we’re so sensitive to indignity. It poses an existential threat.

Fame promises an escape from whatever ghetto we’re in, real or imagined. It deters detractors and may even squeeze a few crumbs of recognition from those who have begrudged us a smile while we were clawing our way out of Nobodyland. It’s no coincidence that Oscar-winners enjoy better health and longer lives than runners-up.

Like liberty, we’re often unaware of dignity until we lose it. A hint of disrespect may be a test of our resistance to subservience, or a reminder of our place in the hierarchy. A slight is often a precursor to pigeon-holing us as a nobody.

When strangers ply us with questions like “And you are?”, “Who are you with?”, or “Where did you go to school?” they are likely sizing up our power as belied by our affiliations.

The more recognition we can amass, the less likely it is that anyone will dare to nobody us. Fame is a bulwark against indignity. It proclaims our worth to anyone tempted to put us down and threatens retaliation if they persist. It even helps to quiet the critical voices we have internalized—of parents, classmates, and teachers—that echo in our heads long after these naysayers are gone.

The Miasma of Malrecognition

But alas, as everyone knows, there is not much room on the Red Carpet. Acquiring fame is like winning the lottery: many are called; few are chosen.

What then can we do until the dignity movement has garnered the support to put rankism in the doghouse with the other ignoble isms? Fortunately, there is an antidote to indignity more accessible than fame. It is called recognition. We gain recognition through the contributions we make to others and from their acknowledgment. These contributions need not be Oscar-worthy to gain us the dignity we need to thrive. In fact, they can be quite humble in conventional terms. But they must be accurately understood and acknowledged by all involved.

Genuine recognition must be differentiated from both false and inflated praise. The self-esteem movement fell into disrepute because the respect it offered was often disingenuous and exaggerated. What is required instead is a precise understanding and appreciation of each person’s role, and the contributions he or she makes to others. These contributions can be anything into which time, effort, and care have been put—a home, a theory, a dance, a business, a garden, a pie, a blog, any job well done.

Children sense insincerity in exaggerated praise, and soon learn to discount it. The extreme adulation visited upon celebrities and superstars can be deadly. Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Di, and Michael Jackson were first lionized and then destroyed by their responses to celebrity. The situation is reminiscent of the grotesque distortion that ordinary bees impose on their queen by force-feeding her royal jelly.

Recognition is to the self what food is to the body. And like food, too little or too much can be harmful. We must understand the effects on those who suffer from either a deficit or a surfeit of recognition and take steps to avoid malrecognition, much as we now guard against malnutrition. Seeking fame to preempt indignity and heal the wounds of malrecognition is like overeating to protect against malnutrition.

Rankism and its counterpart—the miasma of malrecognition—lie at the source of much of the social dysfunction that now vexes human societies worldwide. Effective policies to overcome school failure, poverty, chronic disease, criminality, discrimination against women, terrorism, and war require a redistribution of recognition and the de-legitimization of rankism.

In a subsequent post, I will describe a dignitarian society, one in which rankism has lost its bite, dignity is secure, and, although some people are better known than others, we seek salvation not via the vain pursuit of fame, but through service.

If I loved you,
Words wouldn’t come in an easy way—
Round in circles I’d go!
Longing to tell you …
How I loved you—
If I loved you.
– Carousel, Rodgers & Hammerstein

When we fall in love, we don’t know our beloved. She’s a mystery. We’re constantly looking for her—in our mind, on the street. We contrive “chance” encounters. When we meet, we’re jumpy and off-balance.

We want to gaze upon our beloved, inhale her aroma, absorb her essence. Everything we behold is suffused with love. The world is new.

Why do we love? To complete ourselves. To give us purpose. To know our quest. To bring us home. To accept ourselves. “You’re nobody till somebody loves you.”

In adolescence, as we struggle to put together a viable self, our basic guide is love—love for ideas, art, cultures, but above all, love for particular individuals. Love, while it sometimes leads to folly, is nonetheless the best catalyst there is for defining ourselves and identifying our task. As Charles Baudelaire said, “Nature, whether in cookery or in love, rarely gives us a taste for what is bad for us.”

Young love is fanciful, fleeting, and fragile—in a word, romantic. As we come to know our lover, we lose a piece of our innocence. Once love has been acknowledged and returned, it either evolves or turns into memorabilia. Memories aren’t experience, whereas love must be experienced or it’s just habit. Disappointed, we may conclude that love has not lasted. But, in truth, it has as many lives as a cat.

As routine displaces novelty, we may be tempted to shift our attention to someone new and taste again the thrill of romantic love. This is the point of no return. As the mystery that fuels romantic love is dispelled, we either move on or get serious.

If we follow its lead into deeper waters, love morphs into something with the potential to remake us. This is the love of familiar, committed partners, variously known as conjugal, married, or spousal love. Marriage is love’s crucible—it has the tensile strength to contain the heat of self-transformation.

Here, we know our partner. There’s neither the mystery nor the uncertainty to stoke fevered romance. In fact, relationships between mortals invariably include conflict as well as canoodling. But we do not abandon our partner or abort the process just because our ego takes a hit. The bonds of marriage bring us back to try and try again. In “sparring” with our partners, we root out the false in each other and grow.

In a long-running, committed relationship, we love our partners because they love us in spite of the fact that they may hate something about us (often the very same things that bother us about ourselves). A love strong enough to incorporate criticism continually renews its lease on life. As we respond to our partner, a subtly altered person steps into our shoes. Instead of settling into habit, the relationship is recharged by the advent of changed partners.

Sometimes the business of love completes itself for one or both partners. Two people may either hit an impasse or, for reasons they may only dimly surmise, cease to support one another’s continued development.

At moments like these it will seem that love has indeed ended, that the relationship is beyond hope. The point of the sword is hard to find, and having found it, it’s a mistake to wriggle off before getting as clear as you possibly can as to why you’re doing so. Achieving a blameless understanding of a break-up may take years, but it’s a high-return investment in the rest of your life. As we better understand how ex-partners served our development, they may come to feel like old friends.

During a long relationship, there are moments when we see our partners as we did at the outset—with beginner’s eyes. A certain smile, a fragrance, a toss of the head, a posture or gait, can make our hearts leap.

At the start, there was mystery: What does a smile mean? Will our love be returned? Now, we know. The smile holds not mystery but meaning: together, we go forward. The gaze of love holds not a question, but an answer: refreshed, love endures.

For years, poet William Butler Yeats famously courted Maude Gonne—in vain. As part of his suit, he wrote When You Are Old, in which he reproaches his beloved:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Yeats’s attempt to draw Maude Gonne to him by conjuring up a regretful old age for her was no more successful than are most self-serving admonitions. Yet it produced a diamond of unrequited love.

In Words, another poem written long after his failed suit, Yeats asks himself how it would have affected his life if his court had succeeded. By this time, he’d “come into [his] strength” as a poet, “and words obey[ed his] call” (though Maude Gonne did not):

That had she done so who can say
What would have shaken from the sieve?
I might have thrown poor words away
And been content to live.

When life won’t oblige us, we too can draw inspiration from those who refuse our call and crush our hopes. No suitor wants to admit it, but those who don’t return our love often give us something as valuable as those who do. Like Yeats, novelist Henry James saw an upside in the failure of love, remarking stoically that he’d had to “give up life to be conscious of it.”

We tend to discount our unrequited loves. But not having our way with someone is often as important to the narrative of our lives as the outcome we so ardently desire. The next time you raise a glass to love, consider a silent toast to love unrequited.

Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.
– Tennessee Williams

This question comes from an old friend in response to Quests and Questions—A Path to Your Self. When a Facebook friend said she was struggling with the same question, I decided to put off blogging on “Why do we procrastinate?” and grapple with this one instead.

If you have to stick with your job to pay the bills, then you may feel that asking this question of yourself is pointless. But it’s not. Rich or poor, young and old, we all dream of something different, something better, if only when we gaze at the stars. And, regardless of our lot in life, we can give this perennial question a new answer—either by doing differently what we’ve been doing, or by pursuing something else on the side.

To those “nine to fivers” who feel stuck in their jobs, I want to say that what you’re doing with your life isn’t just what you’re being paid for. No matter how humdrum or even hateful your job, “what you’re doing” consists not only of the tangible product of your labor, but also of the effects you’re having on others as you go about your work and life.

The actual contribution made by people emptying bedpans is less the clean pans and more the dignity or indignity sown among those for whom they’re working. The indelible contribution of a teacher is less the knowledge she imparts than the confidence she builds in her students. What you give a child is not your time, but your self.

Even for those who love their work, a job has two aspects: what we do and how we do it. The “how” may trump the “what” and so displace it as a truer description of the impact your life is having on others. And, in the end, isn’t our effect on others the best measure of what we’re doing with our lives? A “nobody” janitor may spread wellbeing among his co-workers, while his “somebody” boss makes his subordinates ill.

If finances require you to put up with work you’d never choose of your own accord, you can nonetheless begin doing your job in a manner that endows your life with renewed purpose. We all know people who, while coping with personal hardship, bring out the best in everyone they touch.

Like many of the questions listed in Quests and Questions, this one benefits from tweaking. If you say to yourself, “Yipes! I probably have only twenty years left! I better get going and do something significant,” then you’ve raised the bar on yourself and made it all the harder to risk a new venture.

Every quest begins with a single step, and baby steps are wobbly. Moreover, we never know if we’ve got twenty or forty years, or ten minutes. It seems to take most of us about ten years to get good at anything, but typically we have a lot more time than that. Even at seventy, age is not a convincing excuse for standing pat, because when you stop growing you start dying.

So, let’s recast the question in age-independent form, and simply ask “What shall I do with my life?”

Where to look for the answer? How to identify your quest? I know of no better advice than that of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

Look back upon your life and ask: What up to now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and see how they form a ladder on which you have so far climbed up toward your true self.

In our formative years, we fancy ourselves doing this or that, but life may have led us to do neither. Later, in maturity, what draws our attention is usually something that has bid for it on previous occasions. Our early loves keep calling out to us: Don’t forget me, please don’t forget. Even when we’ve labeled a relationship a disaster, there is usually something about a spontaneous affinity that remains pertinent to our present predicament—if we could only locate the baby in the bathwater.

If we can but give our loves their due, they will guide and motivate us for a lifetime. This is not as easy and painless as it might sound, however, because becoming a novice and revisiting virgin terrain means dropping the pretense of being in control. This should not be surprising: a quest is not a quest if the end is known; a question’s not a question if the answer’s given.

We love certain things and people—books, ideas, films, music, art, characters in literature, and the special people in our lives—because they offer hints to realizing the dreams of our youth. Each of those dreams is a rung in the ladder of love on which we’ve climbed toward our self.

But the self towards which our loves lead does not pre-exist. Rather, we build it as we climb the ladder in pursuit of our quest. Step by step we forge a more integral identity, a more selfless self.

To figure out what to do with your life, take stock of your past enthusiams and passions. Line up the objects you’ve revered, the things and people you’ve loved, and then extrapolate love’s arrow. It won’t point to the end of your quest, but it may suggest your next step. Risk that step. Then another. Three steps and you won’t look back.

You can’t know where your quest will take you, but as you go forward, the bridge that connects your old and emergent selves will rise out of the mist, like a developing Polaroid, and come into sharp focus. Not only you, but others, too, will recognize and acknowledge your new vocation.

The price you have to pay for the vitality and joys of the questing life is uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes the certainty of multiple failures. As Samuel Beckett says, “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.” And then, fail better still, until, little by little, you come up with something you want to share with others. As it happens, that’s enough.

Quests and Questions—A Path to Your Self

Every other mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: “So? Did you learn anything today?” But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?”
– Isidore I. Rabi, (1900-88), Nobel-laureate in physics

The knights of the Round Table sought a quest and then lived it—to the ends of the Earth. Through their quests, Arthur’s knights forged their identities. Their quests inspire and guide us as we recapitulate in our own lives their character-building trials.

Today, quests come to us as questions. They begin as tiny discrepancies between our felt experience and the conventional wisdom and end only when we either abandon ourselves and join the prevailing consensus or we bring conventional thought into alignment with our personal truth.

Instead of slaying dragons, we pose and answer questions. Our questions can be personal, political, aesthetic, scientific—anything. A question lies at the heart of any troubling confusion in our life.

Identifying a heartfelt question and pursuing it with integrity is no less demanding than chivalric questing used to be—and no less transformative. Questioning something that others take for granted may isolate you. Some will take you for a nobody and drop you. But if you can survive lonely vigils, surmount criticism, and endure disrespect, then the pursuit of a question is a contemporary path to finding out who you are.

The first step in a modern-day identity quest is to stop brushing our questions aside and take them to heart. This means putting them into words, no matter how sophomoric, outrageous, or politically incorrect they may sound. Once you’ve got a crude first draft of your question, you can begin revising it until suddenly you realize you can’t rest till you’ve found an answer. Pursuing a question may still take you to the ends of the Earth. Rarely do earnest attempts to answer well-formulated questions not yield at least a taste of enlightenment.

The best gifts I’ve ever received have been questions I couldn’t shake off. Good questions are better than good answers, in this sense: they give us purpose, whereas a good answer stops our exploring and makes us a teacher. Catching a good question—and most questions come uninvited and whispered, not shouted—is a skill to be cultivated, as Izzy Rabi’s mother knew. Those who learn to notice and follow their questions, never get old. When I taught physics at Columbia, I knew Rabi. In his sixties, he was as playful as my own children. I ran into him at a conference a decade later and he announced, “Today I am three score and ten plus ten percent.” Do the math and you’ll see it was his way of letting me know it was his 77th birthday.

I’ve often find that my first “answer” to a question, though it may feel like a breakthrough, later ceases to satisfy. Revisions proliferate, and may even bring about a reformulation of the original question. Recast, it gets back under my skin. Also, it’s not unusual to have several questions in play at a time. Progress on one question often leads to progress on another. As the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, a familiar old identity morphs into a new one.

Answering questions may not seem as glamorous as slaying dragons, but it’s a mistake to think of pursuing questions as mere intellectual exercise. Every one of my questions had its origin in emotional turmoil, and, until I found an answer, sent me questing far and wide.

A key criterion that an answer has to meet before it satisfies is that it must explain behavior not judge it—no matter how bizarre or even repugnant the behavior may be. For example, damning laziness or lying or bullying or prejudice, illuminates nothing, but examining these behaviors for what they reveal about power relationships is revelatory and holds the promise of changing them.

The classic example of substituting righteous judgment for sober understanding was dismissing Hitler as an evil madman. Partisan ideologues continue to make the same mistake today. Vilification reinforces in people the very behaviors we would like to change. Humiliation only stokes revenge. Even subtle condescension comes round to bite.

What does work is dignity. What’s required for individual and social wellbeing is dignity for all. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That breathtakingly simple idea is what leapt out at me once I had answers to the apparently unrelated questions that I propose to share with you over the coming months.

I’ve already posted a few of these questions, and my personal answers:

• Why are we obsessed with sex?
• Why do we seek a partner?
• Why do we hate good-byes?
• What is the source of indignity?
• Who are the somebodies and nobodies?

In future, I’ll take up other questions that fueled quests, including:

• Who am I?
• What is intelligence?
• What is genius?
• What is enlightenment?
• What happens to us after we die?
• Are people the same the world over?
• Why are we fascinated by celebrities?
• Why are we drawn to mystery?
• Must love end?
• Why do we get bored?
• Why is it hard to admit we’re wrong?
• Why are we lazy? (Why do we procrastinate?)
• Why do we like to travel?
• Why do we want to be rich? famous?
• Why are we skeptical of do-gooders?
• Why do we lie? exaggerate? hate?
• Why do we use drugs?
• Why are we prejudiced?
• Why is there torture? rape?
• Is there a better game than war?
• Why is life hard?

Some of these questions are cuddly dog-sized dragons. Others are fire-breathing tyrannosauruses. All they have in common is that they grabbed hold of me.

Your own questions will announce themselves to you—if you’ll let them. There are no “right” answers, only right pursuit. Follow your “dragons” and they’ll lead you to your self. Slay even one, and you’ve earned a place at the Round Table.

Who are the nobodies? Those with less power. At the moment.

Who are the somebodies? Those with more power. At the moment.

Power is signified by rank. Rank in a particular setting. Somebodies hold higher rank than nobodies. In that setting. For that moment.

A somebody in one setting can be a nobody in another. A somebody now may be a nobody later. Because rank is contextual and precarious, we’re all once and future nobodies.

Abuse of the power signified by rank is rankism. When somebodies use the power of their position to put or to keep others down, that’s rankism. When somebodies use the power of their position in one setting to exercise power in another, that, too, is rankism.

Dignity is innate, universal, and non-negotiable. No person’s dignity is less sacred than anyone else’s. Equal dignity requires equal opportunity. Rankism is an indefensible abridgment of the dignity of nobodies, and a stain on the honor of somebodies.

We’re all potential victims of rankism, and equally, we’re all potential perpetrators. Securing dignity for all means disallowing rankism. Though we haven’t eradicated the familiar, ignoble isms, we have de-legitimized them and that’s not nothing. To bury them, we must take on the mother, the source, of them all, and that’s rankism.

Who are the nobodies? They are Everyman, Everywoman, Everychild. In our heart, each of us aspires to become someone new, someone more. The nobodies are us. Therein lies our power.

Nobodies of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our shame.

What is rankism? First, some examples; then, a definition.

An executive pulls into valet parking, late to a business lunch, and finds no one to take his car. He spots a teenager running towards him and yells, “Where the hell were you? I haven’t got all day.”

He tosses the keys on the pavement. Bending to pick them up, the boy says, “Sorry, sir. About how long do you expect to be?”

The executive hollers over his shoulder, “You’ll know when you see me, won’t you?” The valet winces, but holds his tongue. Postscript: That evening the teenager bullies his kid brother.

The dynamic is familiar: A customer demeans a waitress, a boss humiliates an employee, a principal bullies a teacher, a teacher mocks a student, students ostracize other students, a parent beats a child, a coach bullies a player, a professor exploits a graduate student, a doctor insults a nurse or patronizes a patient, a priest abuses a parishioner, a caregiver mistreats an elder, executives award themselves perks and bonuses, police use racial profiling, politicians serve the special interests. Surely, you can add to the list.

Most such behaviors have nothing to do with racism, sexism, or other discriminatory isms. Yet perpetrators of these insults, like racists and sexists, select their targets with circumspection. In every case, a disparity of power and rank figures in the choice of target and higher rank shields perpetrators from retaliation.

Rank signifies power. Sometimes rank is abused, as in these examples, but often it’s simply an organizational tool used to get a job done in a timely manner. Many bosses, coaches, doctors, priests, and professors interact with their subordinates without insulting or exploiting them. Yet in the hands of a sadistic bully, rank is a cudgel if not an instrument of torture. What can victims of rank abuse do to protect their dignity?

Those abused on the basis of color unified against racism. Women targeted sexism and the elderly took aim at ageism. By analogy, “rankism” denotes abuses of power associated with rank. Once you have a name for it, you see it everywhere. More importantly, once you call it by name, everyone else will see it too, and perpetrators will find themselves on the defensive.

“To have a name is to be,” said Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractals. As “sexism” gained a foothold, men’s desire to avoid being labeled “sexist” caused them to modify their treatment of women. Likewise, the desire of perpetrators to avoid being labeled rankist will make them think twice about insulting the dignity of subordinates.

Rankism is what people who take themselves for “somebodies” do to those they mistake for “nobodies.” Whether directed at an individual or a group, rankism aims to put targets in their place and keep them weak so they will do as they’re told and submit to being taken advantage of.

In the examples above, rankism consists of abuse of the power attached to rank. Another expression of rankism occurs when the abuse lies not in how rank is used, but in the very fact of ranking in the first place. There are lots of hierarchies whose only purpose is to justify privileging one group over another. Then, high status is used by the creators of these fabricated hierarchies to rationalize the privileges they’ve arrogated unto themselves. Contrariwise, the inferior status of the less powerful is invoked to justify their on-going exploitation. The irony is that while the less powerful are forced to serve as benefactors to those of higher rank, they are routinely depicted as dependent and inferior.

Examples of rankism based on pseudo rankings include the illicit hierarchies maintained by racism, sexism, ageism, classism, ableism, and heterosexualism (or, homophobia)–in short, the familiar isms that plague societies and that, one by one, are being discredited and dismantled.

Like abuses of legitimate rank, the use of illegitimate rank is a source of humiliation and indignity. Both expressions of rankism are indefensible violations of human dignity. Rankism is simply an umbrella name for the many ways that people put others down to secure advantages for themselves. All forms of rankism have their roots in predation and have evolved from the practice of slavery.

The relationship between rankism and the specific isms targeted by identity politics can be compared to that between cancer and its subspecies. For centuries the group of diseases that are now seen as varieties of cancer were regarded as distinct illnesses. No one realized that lung, breast, and other organ-specific cancers all had their origins in cellular malfunction.

In this metaphor, racism, sexism, and homophobia are analogous to organ-specific cancers and rankism is the blanket malignancy analogous to cancer itself. Rankism is the mother of all the ignoble isms.

Now that rankism has a name, we must learn to say it aloud. It was not easy to use the word “sexism” at first. Men utterly refused, and women demurred for fear of seeming “uppity.” As we overcome our reluctance to be uppity nobodies, and gain the confidence to stand up for our own and others’ dignity, rankism will become insupportable.

The demise of rankism in all its guises will mark the dawn of something new in human affairs–dignitarian societies. In a dignitarian society, no one is taken for a nobody and, regardless of role or rank, everyone is accorded equal dignity.

…there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. – G. K. Chesterton, from The Man Who Was Thursday

As the debate on same-sex marriage intensified, The New Yorker ran a cartoon showing an old couple in their living room, the husband holding a newspaper. “Gays and lesbians getting married,” he muses, and then adds, “haven’t they suffered enough?”

The punch line brings a knowing smile to anyone who has experienced the bonds of marriage. Why do people pair off? And when they do, why not settle for the looser ties of friendship or partnership? Why seek the freighted marriage bond?

As one-half of a couple, each person is matched by one other, so neither can be out-voted. In any group larger than two, allies can be sought to break a tie and settle a disagreement. Put more than two people together, and politics enters the picture.

In contrast, neither party in a couple has a right to the mantle of impartiality. Absent agreement, there’s stalemate. Grandstanding is of no avail–the stands are empty. Theatrics yield to inner certainty, which, as it develops in one party, has a way of drawing the other towards common ground. In a group, politics intrudes, and the goal of politics is consensus. But, as one person in a twosome, we’re forced to articulate our personal truth. In so doing, we define and create unique adult selves.

A relationship with just one person is therefore a place to grow up. “The point of the sword is hard to find,” and many who might not find it on their own, or as part of a larger group, do so as one half of a couple. This may be an underlying reason that the institution of marriage has not been displaced by more communal arrangements. Partnerships promote individual maturation better than the geometries of larger groups.

The stronger the walls of a container, the more pressure it can hold. Given its universality and history, marriage has stronger, higher walls than alternative vessels. Nothing quite holds our feet to the fire like marriage. That’s why, when it comes to relationships, it’s deemed the gold standard.

In most long-term relationships there are moments when we hate our partner’s behavior. In the heat of battle, we may even believe we hate the partner him- or herself. By taking a stand against specific behaviors, partners expose the false in each other. Romantic love gives way to married love as partners negotiate this rocky road together. A formal, socially-sanctioned partnership can contain disagreements long enough to allow us to discover that our apparent antagonist is, in the larger game of life, our ally.

Will gender equality, control over reproduction, and financial independence of women and men alike transform the institution of marriage into something new? Or, will leveling the conjugal playing field simply raise the level of the games played thereon? No one knows, but regardless, it won’t give any person or group the right to reserve unto itself the most durable crucible of personal transformation. That crucible is marriage.

I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.
– John Keats, from a letter to Charles Brown (1820)

A friend of mine hates good-byes and says so when it’s time to part. Eager to dispel the awkwardness that seems to grow as farewells are prolonged, I sometimes ere on the side of abruptness. What can our feelings about leave-taking tell us about ourselves?

Our distaste for good-byes is a reminder of our unfathomable mutual dependence. An individual self cannot come into being, let alone endure, absent the recognition of others. We depend on others not only to nourish our material persons, but to sustain our immaterial personas.

Recognition is as essential to the self as nutrition is to the body. That humans are social animals, understates the case. We are existentially interdependent—body and soul. Deprive us of human contact and we begin to disintegrate. That’s why solitary confinement is torture.

Malnutrition cripples a child. Similarly, malrecognition—a diet of indignity—warps the psyche. Chronic indignity sows indignation. Turned inward, indignation makes us ill. Turned outward, it erupts in Columbine, Virginia Tech, and in other violent rampages.

Emily Dickinson wrote:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

Emily knew that what stands between us and exile is affiliation. Autonomy is a myth and exposing it as such has political implications that we are only now beginning to comprehend.

Have you noticed that old folks tell the same stories over and over? They are desperately trying to shore up identities that, because of a paucity of recognition, are breaking down. By telling us their stories, they are staving off the disintegration of self, one day at a time. You can’t really blame them—their struggle is at once heroic and tragic. That you’ve heard it all before is a measure of their need to repeat themselves. One day you’ll need a comprehending ear to offset the recognition deficiencies that plague old-age.

Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. … this is the magic glass … .

So spoke Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick. Without that “magic glass,” we gradually cease to be. I see you seeing me and I exist. I see you seeing me see you and we exist. Mutual re-cognition is the glue that holds us together, not merely as friends, but as individual selves. In co-creating and exchanging a blizzard of signals, verbal and non-verbal, we are reinforcing the synapses that form the neural nets that encode our very selves.

Good-byes are poignant preludes to the leave-takings and withdrawals that deprive our psyches of the sustenance they need to maintain our selfhood. As such, every good-bye is a premonition of disintegration, a foretaste of death, another step on the path to “adieu.”

No wonder we’re not fond of good-byes.

[This Q/A pair is one of a series of short answers to life-long questions, collected from friends and strangers alike. Other questions include: Why do we seek a partner? Why do we exaggerate? Why do we want to travel? What is enlightenment? Why do some prefer dogs, others cats? Why do we lie? Is there a better game than war? Must love end? Why is life hard? A tagline for the series might be Emerson’s observation: “It is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another." If my answers provoke you to come up with answers of your own, they’ve served their purpose. There is no gift like a good question. Moreover, a question can be re-gifted endlessly. If you have one you’re willing to share, please leave it here.]

We were quick to look at the Gates Affair through the lens of race. But it soon became clear that race was not the whole story. To bring things fully into focus, we needed a second lens—that of rank. The lens of race highlights the well known injustices of racism. The lens of rank reveals the less well recognized indignities of rankism.

Rankism has not received the attention that racism has, but perhaps its time has come. Before looking through the lens of rank, a common misconception must be cleared away. Rank, in itself, is not the problem. Like race, rank just is, a fact of life. Rank tells us who’s in charge. Used properly, it’s a useful organizational tool. The problem lies not with rank per se, but in rank abuse. By analogy with racism, sexism, and ageism, abuse of the power signified by rank is rankism. Once you have a name for it, you see it everywhere.

Rankism is the principal cause of manmade indignity. As indignities accumulate, it becomes harder to repress the indignation they seed. Beyond a threshold that varies according to personal history, indignation erupts. It is not hard to understand why Professor Gates felt humiliated by treatment he interpreted as another instance of the racial profiling that has long dogged African-Americans and others lacking the protections of social rank. On top of that, a pillar of common law has it that “a man’s home is his castle.” Homeowner Gates might reasonably have assumed that he outranked a law enforcement officer on his home turf. While giving vent to his indignation can be questioned, it’s not difficult to understand his anger.

Now turn the lens of rank on the attending police. Police are trained to assume command of unruly situations. While on duty, the understanding is that our guardians outrank us, precisely so they will have the authority they need to stabilize volatile situations. As public servants, we expect the police to exercise their authority according to strict rules that safeguard individual rights and the public interest. On those occasions when our guardians do abuse their rank, victims’ only resort is to take the matter to higher authority. That minorities and the poor, more than others, must pursue justice in this way is evidence that rankism falls disproportionately on them.

The Gates Affair, and the discussion it has provoked, were incubated in America’s racial history and aggravated by confusion about rank and its proper use. To reach a judgment on the Gates Affair, one must decide whether or not Professor Gates improperly attempted to assert his rank—as a Harvard professor or as homeowner—over the policeman. It is equally germane to ascertain whether or not Sergeant Crowley overstepped his legitimate authority in arresting Professor Gates. My purpose here is not to rehash, let alone try to pass judgment, but rather to find, in our obsession with the incident, a clue to the crux of the matter. The Gates Affair is that rarest of teachable moments—one that provides an opportunity to drive home an old lesson while offering us a new one.

The Gates Affair reminds us of our sorry history of racial profiling and gives new impetus to ending it. It also suggests that we’re more likely to eradicate profiling if we show our guardians the same dignity that we seek for ourselves.

But, more important than assigning blame in the case is turning the lens of rank around and seeing what it tells us about ourselves and our relationships. The clash between Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley grips us because it mirrors our own struggles with rank and its rightful use.

How much deference is due our boss, our spouse, elders, children, teachers, doctors, religious leaders, and elected officials? Where does the proper use of rank end, and rankism begin? When it is we who are outranked, do our superiors treat us respectfully? If not, why not? In those areas where we hold rank over others, do we protect their dignity as we would have them protect our own?

At long last, we’ve got racism in our sights. But rankism is still largely below the radar. Like racism and sexism before they were identified, rankism is endemic, ubiquitous, and seemingly impregnable. It’s an unrecognized source of dysfunctionality in families, schools, the workplace, religious institutions, and heathcare. Like the more familiar isms, now finally on the defensive, it too will have to be rooted out of our social institutions if we are to perfect our union.

The Gates Affair offers an opportunity to widen our lens so as to take in all varieties of rank abuse and to recognize the indignities that arise therefrom. The professor and the policeman will have served us well if the incident with which they are identified is seen as a milestone towards an America in which, without exception, everyone—the public and the police, employees and employers, students and teachers, blacks and whites, young and old, gays and straights, everyone—is held in equal dignity.