Does status mean mimetic influence over evolutionary competition?
I would say yes to your question, however, I need to explain why because there are different ideas about how mimetic influences work.
My research has shown me that there is a difference between mimetic influences and social influences the emerge from personal interactions and personal relationships. Personal relationships create dynamic changes that often go against the status quo.
A good example is the story of Romeo and Juliet. More recently, think back to when interracial marriage was largely taboo and frowned on. However, people fall in love regardless of race, social status, education, etc. Those who dare to do this, or anything else that it is looked down on by most people, find themselves going against the current, like trying to swim upstream. If they proceed, they actually bring slow changes to the status quo. We can see how much has changed over the last 100 years.
This is the result of personal relationships dynamics driving changes in the memes that influence society.
However, memetic influences are not driven by personal relationship dynamics, from what I have learned. Memes influence society through impersonal relationships, which happens largely unconsciously. When we feel social pressure or peer pressure, we are feeling an impersonal pressure from the group as a whole or from society itself. It can feel personal to us when we feel this pressure, but it actually comes from going against the status quo.
The status quo of a society is actually created by a third-person consensus, which comes from how we see things as outsiders. This is impersonal and largely unconscious, which is why it is hard to change. Simply being a part of a society means going along with others we don't know, to get along with everyone. A status quo, and the recognition of status, emerges because people do try to get along.
I found another interesting aspect to this aspect of social pressure: It gets stronger when a society is larger. In small groups, it is generally a weak force and personal relationships are stronger. People feel freer to be themselves. But when societies grow large, such as in large institutions, the pressures to go along with the status quo grow as well. This is why it is far more difficult to change the culture in a large institution than it is in a small start-up company.
This is also why we see long periods of stagnation in evolution, followed by bursts of evolutionary change when the status quo is jolted or forced to change by large scale events, such as the volcanic eruptions that led to the decline of the dinosaurs.
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