You unlock a lot of psychological doors within yourself if you decide not to rank yourself against other people. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:
(Originally published in 2019.)
A few years ago I wrote an article on status, to rather mixed reviews among the online commenters. Today I’m going back to status, “doubling down,” as people like to say these days.
The proximate cause of this return to status is a set of studies I’ve been doing on Jesus. One of the things I’ve become clear on while doing this work has been Jesus’ strategy for getting his teachings to the people of Israel. And a major component of that strategy was to avoid any mixture of status with his personal image.
Jesus fought to maintain his “mind-slot” as an outsider and a non-powerful person. If he had allowed himself to become famous, people would have believed him for the wrong reasons. To whatever extent they believed him because he was a famous healer (or whatever), the degree of internal changes that his believers bore would be that much reduced. And people being changed on the inside was more or less the only thing he really cared about.
The lower strata of the middle class – the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants – all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population. — Karl Marx
Sun von Rommel: To the extent individual responsibility and the rights necessary to freely fulfill it remain, each of these individuals remain free to “do something about it!”
In another vein, Rosenberg speaks to why Rand emphatically admonished that the rational man wishes to “do,” not necessarily to “win.”