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Notes -
In my experience, the most ruthless social climbers indeed come from families that encourage such strategies for personal gain.
Even if the parents weren't training them, they were enabling/tacitly approving the behavior. I can't say if they would literally sit at the dinner table in the evening and discuss/scheme how to get back at rivals and enhance their standing, but they surely gave them hints and ideas.
I used to look at the kids who were driving extremely fancy cars and had all the expensive accessories and wonder if they thought they were fooling anyone, we all knew their parents were buying that stuff for them and didn't the parents know they were spoiling their kid for no reason?
And now I think yeah, those parents probably knew exactly what they were doing and that was the point. Either the parents had low status in school and are now using their money to give their kids a boost they never had, or the parents were high status in school and saw exactly how beneficial it was to win the status games and want to make their kids learn the same lessons.
(and of course such parents are using their kids success to play status games of their own with their own peers).
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