We do not decide what to want as independently as we like to believe. In a complex society, most of what we value is learned indirectly: by watching who gets attention, who is admired, and what kinds of lives appear to succeed. We observe, we imitate, and over time, those patterns harden into something that feels like personal preference. This process is not superficial. It is one of the primary ways human societies organize themselves.
What begins as imitation becomes signaling. Traits become markers. Markers become hierarchies. And hierarchies, once visible, begin to shape behavior at scale.
To understand what this actually looks like from the inside, we have to look more closely at the signals people send, and the signals they choose to follow.
BY SIMON PEARCE FOR THE LIMINAL LENS / READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO SIMON PEARCE AND THE LIMINAL LENS ON SUBSTACK
Signals, All the Way Down
Status, Imitation, and the Hidden Logic of Social Life
Introduction
We do not decide what to want as independently as we like to believe.
In a complex society, most of what we value is learned indirectly: by watching who gets attention, who is admired, and what kinds of lives appear to succeed. We observe, we imitate, and over time, those patterns harden into something that feels like personal preference.
This process is not superficial. It is one of the primary ways human societies organize themselves.
What begins as imitation becomes signaling. Traits become markers. Markers become hierarchies. And hierarchies, once visible, begin to shape behavior at scale.
In earlier essays, we examined the long civilizational rhythms that govern periods of stability and breakdown. But those dynamics do not operate in abstraction. They are expressed through everyday social behavior.
To understand what this actually looks like from the inside, we have to look more closely at the signals people send, and the signals they choose to follow.
Learning What to Want
If we learn what to want from others, the next question is how that process actually works.
At a basic level, it begins with imitation. Children acquire language, habits, and social norms by observing those around them. But more importantly, they also learn what is worth caring about. They absorb signals about what is admirable, what is embarrassing, what is desirable, and what is to be avoided.
This process does not end in childhood. Adults continue to rely on social cues to navigate an environment that is far too complex to evaluate from first principles. Faced with an overwhelming number of possible goals, lifestyles, and identities, we look outward. We pay attention to what others pursue, what others reward, and what others ignore.
Over time, this creates a form of distributed sense-making. Individuals do not need to understand the entire system; they only need to track others’ behavior within it.
René Girard described a closely related phenomenon as mimetic rivalry: people learn what to want by observing what others have and want. Desire, in this view, is not simply internal. It is socially mediated, shaped by models that we imitate, compete with, and sometimes unconsciously adopt.
Once desire becomes mediated in this way, it is no longer just about objects or outcomes. It becomes relational. What matters is not only what something is but also who else wants it and why.
Traits as Signals
When desire is shaped through social influences, it starts to focus on observable models.
Visible success acquires great importance. If someone appears admired, wealthy, influential, or powerful, others naturally look to them as reference points. Their choices, possessions, affiliations, and behaviors become clues about what is worth pursuing.
When people begin imitating the traits associated with successful individuals, those traits start to function as signals of status in their own right.
These traits, and their associated signals, make hierarchies legible.
This creates a reinforcing loop. As more people pay attention to someone, copy them, or orient themselves around them, that individual often gains even more influence, visibility, social centrality, and all of the associated benefits.
Success attracts attention, attention attracts success.
In certain situations, the appearance of success can be turned into attention, which can then be turned into durable forms of success.
In the era of mass media, the potential for status amplification through inbound attention has increased dramatically, alongside the increasing amounts of inbound attention available.
Status increasingly depends not only on achievement but on visibility, while the relative importance of achievement has decreased in favor of visibility as the key driver.
The Social Dynamics of Cliodynamics
When large numbers of people simultaneously compete for recognition, influence, and elite status, the loop accelerates. Signals multiply, imitation intensifies, and status competition becomes more visible and more aggressive.
History offers many examples of this escalation. In the late Roman Republic, elite families competed fiercely for prestige through triumphal parades, public games, and monumental construction projects. These displays were not merely acts of generosity; they were signals in a struggle for status and influence. As competition intensified, the displays grew larger and more expensive, until political rivalry eventually spilled over into open conflict.
Similar dynamics appeared in other societies: aristocrats at Versailles competed through elaborate court rituals and displays of proximity to the king, while Gilded Age industrialists competed through ever more extravagant homes and philanthropic projects. In each case, intensified elite competition drove a signaling arms race.
As discussed in my previous essay, this pattern becomes especially pronounced during periods of elite overproduction. As the number of people seeking elite status grows faster than the number of positions available, rivalry becomes more intense, more visible, and more difficult to contain.
Competition is Stratified
In the animal kingdom, dominance contests usually occur between individuals of similar strength or rank. A weaker animal rarely challenges a much stronger rival because it would be unwise, while a dominant animal gains little social benefit by confronting an individual far below its level. As a result, serious contests tend to occur between near equals, where the outcome is uncertain, and the stakes are high.
Human status competition follows a similar pattern. Rivalry tends to be most intense among direct peers: individuals with roughly similar levels of power, resources, or social visibility.
Punching “up” is difficult (you’ll usually be ignored), and punching “down” is often seen as a sign of weakness.
The ultra-wealthy no longer compete over the same markers that structure middle-class life. Instead, they compete with one another through increasingly elaborate signals of influence, taste, power, and wealth.
Hierarchy is not Monolithic
At the same time, human societies are more complex than animal dominance hierarchies. Status does not exist along a single ladder. Instead, societies contain many overlapping hierarchies—economic, political, cultural, physical, intellectual, and social—each with its own signals of prestige and success. Some are more correlated than others; some may even be negatively correlated.
Some individuals can (and do) try to opt out of these games, but sometimes they merely switch from one status hierarchy to another. Even when some individuals do successfully opt out, societies as a whole cannot. As long as status hierarchies exist, some form of signaling and rivalry inevitably endures.
Everything Becomes a Signal
The moment you move beyond the hermit scenario and introduce a social dimension to achievement, almost anything a person (or group) does can become a signal.
In complex societies, where people must constantly decide whom to trust, follow, hire, or cooperate with, signals help reduce uncertainty about who someone is and what they can do.
Signals spread through social imitation. As they become widely copied, they lose their exclusivity, and social groups begin searching for new ways to distinguish themselves.
What’s in a Name?
Trends in baby names are a simple, benign example of this competitive dynamic in action: they rarely remain constant over time.
Naming patterns tend to follow a recognizable diffusion cycle. New names—or newly fashionable ones—often appear first within small, culturally influential groups. Sometimes these are high-status families; sometimes they are socially visible subcultures with disproportionate cultural influence. Early adopters choose names that feel distinctive within their social circles.
As those names become visible, they begin to spread outward through imitation. Broader segments of society adopt them. Eventually, the name becomes common enough that it no longer signals distinctiveness. At that point, many of the early adopters move on to other names, and the cycle begins again.
Hollywood celebrities and mass media now accelerate this process, but the underlying dynamic remains the same.
In this sense, a name functions as a social signal. Choosing a fashionable name signals cultural belonging and, sometimes, insider status. But signals only work when they are scarce. Once a name becomes too widely copied, it loses much of its signaling value.
Copying a baby name is therefore not very expensive. Anyone can do it. But knowing which names are beginning to circulate among influential social circles—before they become widely visible—requires something more costly: social proximity, cultural awareness, and insider access to those networks.
A clear example is the name Aidan. Originally a relatively uncommon Irish name, it became fashionable among educated American parents in the 1990s. As its popularity spread, a wave of related names appeared—Jayden, Brayden, Kayden, and others. Within a decade, the pattern had exploded across the broader population. Once this happened, many of the original adopters quietly moved on.
The statistical data on baby names clearly reflect this pattern. When researchers plot the popularity of a name over time, the result typically resembles a bell-shaped diffusion curve. A name begins with a small number of early adopters, rises rapidly as it spreads through society, peaks when it becomes mainstream, and then declines as parents begin searching for something less common.
We can see the long-term effects of this dynamic in national naming data. In the United States in 1916, the most popular boy’s name accounted for roughly 5 percent of all boys born that year. By 2016, the most popular name accounted for less than 1 percent. In other words, the cultural turnover of names has accelerated dramatically, as internet access to trend data makes it easier for parents to avoid names that have become too widely used.
Not every family participates in this signaling game, of course. Many parents simply choose names they like. All the same, the pattern is strong enough to consistently appear in naming data across modern societies.
Names, in other words, behave much like fashion: small signals of identity that circulate through society, gradually losing their exclusivity as they spread.
In pre-revolutionary France, this process was more closely tied to last names than to first names. The particle “de” attached to a surname usually meant “from” a particular place. In many cases, it implied that the family historically owned or ruled the estate or town in question. A name like de Montmorency, de La Fayette, or de Talleyrand-Périgord signaled that the family’s identity was tied to a landed domain.
Originally, this was not just decorative. It reflected the feudal structure of power. Nobility derived status from land and military service, so identifying oneself with a place made sense. If your name was X de Y, it implied that your family had once been the seigneurs of Y.
Over time, however, the particle became a status signal rather than a strict description. Families who had purchased land or government offices began adopting “de” names even when their connection to the place was thin. In some cases, the geographic reference was symbolic rather than literal.
There are still vestiges of this in France today.
In other contexts, similar dynamics appear in different forms. Naming conventions can borrow elements associated with prestige and repurpose them as stylistic affectations, often detached from their original historical meaning. We see this in the use of “de” as a prefix for first names among some American communities today
Then again, the process can even invert at the top of the hierarchy. Consider HRH Prince William Mountbatten-Windsor, Prince of Wales. If slightly exotic names like “Tarquin” have been used to signal status for your run-of-the-mill aristocrat or plutocrat’s child, then opting for a more traditional name like William can signal status through a refusal to play that game.
When you own several castles, you don’t need to signal who you are through something as pedestrian as an unusual first name. The last name—and the castles—are doing all the heavy lifting. In this case, an “ordinary” first name is a kind of reverse-flex.
What we see time and again is that the most durable signals tend to be the most expensive signals.
As a signal becomes cheaper to imitate, new signals are sought out and found.
Cheap Signals v. Expensive Signals
In evolutionary biology, it is generally understood that the human chin serves little purpose beyond signaling health and vitality. A chin is biologically expensive to grow and indicates that the person sporting it has “biological resources to spare.”
The capacity to expend resources on “mere ornamentation” is itself an important part of the signal.
A protruding chin is the human equivalent of peacock feathers.
In the modern world, we live inside a complex weave of biology and technology, and chins are just one signal among many: vacation homes, sports cars, and yachts are all escalations in the signaling arms race. Of course, acquiring those kinds of resources requires far more coordination and effort than the surplus calories needed to grow a pronounced chin.
Nor can all of this be reduced to money and the things money can buy.
Physical fitness still matters, partly as a biological factor in its own right, but also as a signal that one can manage substantial resources without descending into health-destroying excess. This is one reason why wealthy individuals often place a disproportionate emphasis on health and fitness.
These types of signals are valuable because they are hard to fake. And they are hard to fake because they are expensive. It is not possible to own a superyacht or a mansion in Southampton without the resources to support it. I’m referring, of course, to the ritzy American Southampton, more so than the English one, although you can still spend several million dollars on a home there if you look hard enough.
This is how large amounts of resources get converted into “mere signaling,” something common sense might initially dismiss as wasteful.
I’m not saying that spending time on these yachts isn’t enjoyable—it probably is. But if it were purely about enjoyment, the same experience could be achieved without ~5000 HP of marine engine power, over 80 crew members, a helicopter, an “optional” submarine, and the vast array of supporting systems required to sustain it.
It’s not all about money, either.
It is difficult to maintain peak physical fitness without the time and discipline to devote to it.
It is also difficult to raise multiple children while maintaining the full suite of signals associated with affluent life unless one has access to extensive support systems—nannies, high-quality schooling, and a range of other resources and capabilities.
What is all this Signaling Ultimately For?
There is no single “thing” being signaled—and that is the point.
Human society behaves less like a single hierarchy and more like a complex system of interwoven nodes. It is a social organism composed of many sub-organisms, with overlapping hierarchies (some visible, others latent), that continually interact and reconfigure.
At a basic level, signaling in the animal kingdom is about attracting mates. In human societies, it extends far beyond that.
Human society is vast and complex, and human cognition has evolved to navigate it. Beyond the basics of family formation, the deeper function of elite signaling lies in demonstrating the ability to coordinate large groups of people to perform complex tasks.
Human society is built on cooperation: within families, tribes, companies, civil society groups, nation-states, and civilizations.
A person seeking to form a family may signal resources and stability, but elite signaling operates at a different scale. What is often being signaled is the ability to coordinate large numbers of people toward shared goals.
Bezos’s yacht, for example, is not just a consumption good. It reflects the enormous economic surplus generated through ideas, organization, and sustained coordination.
We can think of human society as a highly networked super-organism. When the first packet ships departed from Falmouth Harbour for the New World in 1689, they created new coordination problems—risk, timing, and trust — across vast distances. The response was the emergence of maritime insurance markets, including what became Lloyd’s of London: not a single company, but a distributed system of risk-sharing and coordination.
Value in such networks accrues to those who can improve the system’s overall effectiveness. This makes cooperation and coordination central to elite signaling.
Signals of coordination capacity—the ability to organize people, resources, and institutions—are therefore among the most important. Unlike material wealth, which often reflects past success, these signals point toward the capacity to generate future outcomes that make certain individuals or groups a source of potential value to collaborators.
Conclusion
The deeper logic of signaling is not vanity, though vanity often rides atop it. Nor is it reducible to consumption, style, or luxury alone. In complex societies, signaling is one of the primary ways human beings navigate uncertainty about one another.
“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible….”
―Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
We rely on signals to navigate competence, resources, trustworthiness, taste, and social position. We copy the signals of those who appear successful, and in doing so, we turn traits, objects, affiliations, and behaviors into socially legible markers of status. As those markers spread, they lose exclusivity, and the search for new signals begins again.
This process is not marginal to human society. It is one of the ways societies make hierarchy visible and therefore actionable.
At the highest levels, what is often being signaled is not merely wealth, but the capacity to coordinate people, institutions, and resources at scale. The yacht, the title, the body, the family, the name, the school, the ritual, and the aesthetic all become partial indicators within a much larger game.
And because human hierarchies are plural rather than singular, the game never resolves into one simple ladder. There are always multiple audiences, multiple currencies of prestige, and multiple forms of competition unfolding at once.
That is why almost everything can become a signal.
And it is also why, in periods of intense elite competition, the signaling game itself becomes one of the clearest windows into the health, or breakdown, of a civilization.
In stable periods, these signals tend to revolve around wealth, taste, or achievement. But when competition intensifies and the stakes rise, the logic of signaling does not remain stable.
It begins to mutate, sometimes into something far less stable and far more destructive.
Cells Interlinked Within Cells Interlinked
Why self-referential systems detach from reality
People learn what to desire by observing others. Through observation, we learn both what to want and the ways of being that will help us to get what we want. We end up desiring both the outcome and the means to achieve it. Our desires become bundles of means and ends, transcending the simple object fixations of infancy.
Signals, Hierarchies, and Social Order
These legible traits function as signals. These signals form the basis of hierarchies, which in turn give rise to the complex social systems that underpin our civilization.
Over time, this signaling process organizes behavior from small groups to whole civilizations, structuring how coordination occurs.
In high-functioning societies, social signals remain at least somewhat tethered to the underlying capacities they are meant to represent: competence, resources, trustworthiness, and the ability to contribute to shared endeavors.
This relationship is never fixed. It is always dynamic. It can and does drift over time.
When Signals Detach from Reality
In a world where signaling is pervasive, it becomes disconcertingly easy for entire systems of signals to become self-referential.
As Jean Baudrillard argued, signs can detach from reality and begin referring only to other signs: forming closed systems that no longer point to anything outside of themselves.
Signals propagate when they are recognized, rewarded, and replicated, which is not necessarily the same thing as being true.
As many users of Large Language Models have learned, signals do not necessarily require accuracy to propagate. The user must enforce accuracy as a requirement on the system; it will not do so automatically. It cannot.
Here lies a critical point: reality itself is not socially constructed, but the demand for accuracy in our models of reality is.
Different individuals, societies, and historical moments place varying emphasis on whether their symbolic systems remain grounded in the realities they claim to represent.
Over time, signals can inflate, much like currencies. They can lose contact with the underlying conditions that made them meaningful in the first place.
When that divergence grows too large, a correction may eventually come. But these corrections are slow, uneven, and often arrive only after prolonged distortion.
These processes play out over long horizons.
The Truth About Truth
When signaling systems become self-referential, the consequences do not remain confined to status or culture. They begin to affect how truth itself is understood.
Truth is neither absolute nor arbitrary, and confusion on this point has driven significant civilizational drift in the past few decades.
Across modern science, especially in physics, a consistent insight has emerged: what we call truth depends on the relationship between the observer, the observed, and the conditions under which observation occurs.1
This does not mean that truth is optional. It means that truth is constrained.
It also means that truth cannot be fully captured by abstract, universal forms, as Plato proposed. Truth exists at different degrees of specificity, at different points in space and time.
This does not render truth meaningless as a concept.
The common misreading of the observer-dependent nature of truth is to treat it as a license for total subjectivity: the idea that all claims are equally valid. This is the foundation of ideas like “my truth,” where assertions about reality are grounded primarily in perspective rather than in shared methods of verification.
Taken literally, the notion of “my truth” collapses the shared distinction between true and false.
The notion that truth is arbitrarily and socially constructed is easier to sustain in domains that are already abstract and self-referential. The persistence of empirically false beliefs, such as flat-earth theories, illustrates the consequences of this drift.
Scientific practice, especially in the “hard” sciences, with their rigorous methods and traditions for testing reality, cannot operate this way. They rely on constraints.
Rather than treating truth as absolute, science treats it as a bounded approximation. Models of reality hold under specific conditions, and at particular levels of abstraction.
Boyle’s law, for example, describes the relationship between pressure and volume in a gas. It works at the macro level, where the complexity of individual molecules resolves into stable patterns. It cannot predict the motion of a single molecule, nor does it need to: it is a useful and stable guide to reality at the macro scale.
Truth, in this sense, is not arbitrary. But neither is it universal in scope. It is always tied to the level at which a system becomes legible.
The universe may be irreducible at its most fundamental levels, but stable patterns do emerge. These patterns are what we call rules. These rules not absolute, they are not the source code of the universe as we once thought, but they are reliable within the conditions in which we operate.
That’s not nothing.
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
George Box, 1976
A Practical Example
These dynamics are not confined to theory. They are visible in systems that rely heavily on signals to function.
Modern labor markets provide a clear example. Credentials, experience, and institutional affiliations are all signals meant to represent underlying qualities such as intelligence, competence, judgment, and the ability to create value. In principle, they allow organizations to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, using proxies to infer capability.
Over time, however, these signals become targets in their own right.
Degrees are pursued not only for the knowledge they provide, but for the status they confer. Career paths are shaped to maximize legibility rather than effectiveness. Individuals learn to present themselves in ways that align with institutional expectations, optimizing for selection within the system rather than for performance outside of it.
There is some evidence that this shift carries real consequences. Firms led by highly credentialed managers, particularly those trained in financial and managerial disciplines, have been shown in many contexts to favor short-term optimization over long-term value creation. In parallel, functions such as marketing have become increasingly dominated by metrics and performance frameworks that are legible within the system, but not always well aligned with the underlying drivers of demand.2
The pattern is not universal, but it is suggestive. As signals become targets for imitators, the behaviors they were meant to represent can begin to erode.
As more people learn to play this game, the signals themselves begin to degrade. They become easier to acquire, more widely distributed, and less informative. What was once a useful proxy for capability becomes a noisy indicator and, in some cases, a misleading one.
I discussed this in more detail in the previous essay in this series.
The result is not simply inefficiency. It is a breakdown in coordination.
Organizations struggle to identify genuine talent. Individuals struggle to distinguish meaningful paths from performative ones. The system continues to function, but with increasing friction, as more effort is required to interpret signals that no longer reliably point to the underlying reality.
This is what it looks like when a signaling system begins to lose its anchor.
When Coordination Breaks
As signals circulate, they increasingly refer to one another.
This tendency is not accidental. Signals propagate through recognition and reinforcement, not through direct verification against underlying reality. As they spread, individuals respond to the signals of others rather than to the conditions those signals were originally meant to represent.
Under conditions of intensified elite competition, this process accelerates. As more individuals compete for status within the same symbolic space, the pressure within those spaces shifts from accurately reflecting reality to producing signals that are legible, repeatable, and rewarded within the system itself. Speed, visibility, and recognizability begin to dominate over accuracy.
Over time, this creates a self-reinforcing loop in which signals are calibrated against other signals rather than against the underlying conditions of the world. The system begins to close. Meaning is no longer anchored in material conditions, but in the internal logic of the signaling system itself.
This is creates a practical problem for human societies.
When signals drift too far from reality, they stop coordinating behavior effectively. They no longer help individuals identify competence, trustworthiness, or capacity. Instead, they become tools for navigating status within a system that is increasingly detached from the conditions that sustain it.
At that point, the system does not simply mislead. It begins to fail.
