There is a sort of classic observation here that people who proclaim not to care about X sure seem to care a lot about X since they bothered to proclaim as much.
And indeed, I think that goes on a lot with status. This makes sense, especially for people who are losing the status games they find themselves playing. It's both a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the cognitive dissonance of finding one's self low status when expecting to be higher status, and a bid to create an alternative status hierarchy where they can be high status.
Well-adjusted people who aren't celebrities know that the only way to win at status in the modern era is to become part of an alternative status hierarchy. This might mean being high status at work, at school, in a hobby, at church, in a friend group, or even just in your own house among your family. Heck, I think a non-trivial amount of why people like having pets is that pets treat their owners as high status!
But some people get stuck here. They can't figure out how to get on top of any status hierarchy because they don't really understand how status works. They don't have an intuitive model of it, also don't have an explicit model, and thus feel like status is some kind of blackbox that's out to get them.
The only solution for the autistic is likely to simply learn how status explicitly works and learn to manually master it, same as any other complex game can be mastered.
I think "narrative" actually is a better framing in most cases than status as a partial or total order on people. I suspect that usually it's the frame in which they're holding themselves that creates an apparent order, "main character" versus "NPC", or even something like "I know the truth, unlike these innocent bystanders."
It's an interesting conundrum because in the realm of actual PvE problem solving, sometimes there is a skill issue. But then the skill issue often gets made a forall-skills issue, and from there into a classical status issue.
I saw a tweet thread the other day, in which a self-proclaimed autistic guy was freaking out about how much "normies" care about "status". I won't quote the thing because I'm going to mildly insult the guy: the whole time I read it I was thinking for a guy hates status-talk, you sure are full of yourself.
So, technically, he doesn't care about status in the way that the average person does. He doesn't seem to care about what others think of him, except insofar as it helps him when they think certain ways. Yet that thread really seemed to be drawing on the exact same processes that people use to regulate and signal status.
This seems odd, what's going on? I think we can explain it with a multi-part mechanism for social status.
There are several components needed for a social ledger to exist. Everyone keeps track of their own ledger, they signal what's on their ledger to each other, and then everyone updates. This guy has the first part, just not the second part. He has something status-ish going on, but he can't signal. I think of this as having a personal narrative, a story that he tells himself about who he is.
Status is just a special case of a shared narrative. For a narrative to roughly converge in a group of people, everyone has to be sending out signals which inform the rest of the group as to what their version of the narrative is. This means there might be disagreement. If Alex's ledger says "Alex is the leader" and Bach's ledger says "Bach is the leader" then the two are in conflict. If Caleb, Dina, and Ethel all think "Bach is the leader" then, if the system works correctly, Alex will update.
This might help answer another question: why don't people signal high status all the time? My guess is that the ledger-keeping circuits are approximately rational, on some deep level. Someone once pointed out that vector calculus is a rare skill, but learning to throw a ball is not. The deeper wires of our brains are, in fact, pretty good learners. To trick a rational circuit is a non-trivial task.
Narcissism and the other cluster-B type disorders might be thought of as a certain type of failure to update one's own narrative based on evidence.[1] The ingoing pipeline is broken. This leaves the cluster-B brain free to settle on any narrative it wishes, and importantly (since the outgoing pipeline is intact) free to send signals of its chosen narrative to other brains.
Autism-ish stuff seems to harm both the in- and the outgoing pipelines. This individual can't signal properly or read signals properly! They might end up with a self-serving narrative or a self-deprecating one, but it is cut off from the social fabric: they exist in a tribe of one.
This is probably not completely right, I think the broken-ness might also involve the self-narrative system trampling on other parts of the brain.