“Those are conventional examples of the Law of Status,” the anthropologist said, opening a viewscope  “But do not think that the Law of Status requires that the status be about beauty or strength or wisdom or wealth.  A sapient species can determine status in very different ways.”   “Now this species,” the anthropologist said with a smack of satisfaction,” has a very strange sense of status indeed.”

The blue-white-green of the planet seemed ordinary enough in, and when the viewscope altered, the creatures it showed looked like a standard bipedal type.

“Don’t be fooled by appearances,” the anthropologist said.  “It would of course take years of study to understand their status system in all its nuances, like I do.  But reduced to essentials, this species competes to introduce new social conventions and symbols.  Those who successfully introduce them and those who adopt them the fastest gain the most status.  The more useless or even destructive the innovation, the greater the status in introducing or adopting it.”

“I don’t understand,” the listener said.

“Oh, its quite simple really,” replied the anthropologist.  “Obviously a species-member who is able to convince the rest to adopt a destructive social practice must be high status indeed, so that member of the species gets high status.  And obviously a member who is able to accurately predict an innovation will become a norm, even though the innovation is ugly and destructive, must be high status.

Further, status increases the more convincingly the species-member is able to themselves believe that the norm is not destructive and that the species-member always believed in it.

Status also increases the nimbler one is at adopting new conventions, so the fads often succeed each other at a bewildering pace.”

“Bizarre and disgusting,” the listener said.

The anthropologist was pleased and added brightly.  “Oh, it gets odder.  Like all species, they like to think that many of their social conventions have the status of morality.  They will ferociously condemn behavior or attitudes that were standard and practiced by everyone just a few of their years earlier.  Parenthetically, I might add that their years are not unusually long.  They consume their surplus in introducing new taboo words and behaviors, and condemning the prior though still recent taboos.”

“Truly extraordinary,” the  listener said.

“Yet at the same time that they claim their vicious fads are universal morality ,” the anthropologist added, “they more or less openly also admit that they are recent innovations.  Those members of the species that agitate for low status for late-adopters call themselves ‘Combatants for Socially-conventional Morality.’  Their reigning belief system is called “the Doctrine of Change that Succeeds,” or, in their high status language, ‘Progressivism.'”

The anthropologist clacked thoughtfully.  “They call their planet Earth,” it added.