This is an excerpt from an articlew about the Ponzi scheme mogul, Bernard Madoff, who lost billions and billions of investors' dollars. (Click here for link to original article.)
In addition, it was status anxiety that propelled smart people to hand over enormous sums of money to Bernard Madoff without paying adequate attention to what he was doing with it."What strikes one about the investors in the Ponzi scheme is desperation -- and not necessarily desperation to become rich, but to earn status, honor, and esteem," Botton wrote me in an email. "If our position on the ladder is a matter of such concern, it is because how we feel about ourselves depends to an unfortunate degree on what others think of us.
"Except in societies where status is fixed at birth, our position on the ladder hangs upon what we achieve -- and success is uncertain," he continues. "And from failure will flow humiliation: a corroding awareness that we have failed to convince the world of our value and are henceforth condemned to consider the successful with bitterness and ourselves with shame. That's where Madoff came in: he promised an instant and painless release from these status anxieties."
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