The luxury beliefs you hold dearly are breeding a dangerous mono-culture…
Just like poor people buy fake Gucci belts to look rich, the elites now compete on moral grandstanding & virtue signaling to show they're the “real” elite…
My long-time friend Janson Chu and I recently conducted a two-hour interview with Rob Henderson, who is a Gates-Cambridge Scholar pursuing his PhD in social psychology in Cambridge University. It was a far-reaching conversation on topics from cancel culture to elite education, from human nature to postmodern truths, from Timur Kuran to Rene Girard…
My friend Abe Joshua and I were quite inspired by the interview and wrote the following reflection to further explore some of the ideas related to luxury beliefs and mono-culture that Rob presented.
A brief history from luxury goods to luxury beliefs
A central tenet of our interview with Rob was the concept of luxury beliefs—beliefs that function as status symbols for the socioeconomic elite. In the past, elites showed their wealth and status by having luxury goods. However, since it’s much easier to obtain “luxury items” today (almost everyone has an iPhone and wears clothes of similar relative quality), the status once attached to these luxury goods has waned. it’s almost impossible to immediately distinguish who are “the elites” as you walk down the streets. The elites, therefore, now display their status by manifesting a set of “luxury beliefs” on social media, in daily social interactions, and beyond.
For example, in the 1960s, the elites advocated for polygamy as they viewed monogamy was outdated. This belief had a lot of serious second-order consequences as seen from 1960-2005, when the number of working class children who grew up in a two-parent household fell from 95% to 30%, while 95% of children from the affluent class still grew up in two-parent households. In this case, the luxury belief of polygamy only harmed the working class, since growing up in a two-parent family is essential to having a nurturing and stable childhood.
What makes luxury beliefs a luxury?
Simply put, luxury beliefs are a luxury to hold. Most notably within elite academic, finance, tech, and media hubs, the almost ubiquitous commitment to these luxury beliefs is ardently reflected in a very specific and unique dialect of language—let's call this language “Luxury English.”
Luxury English frequently employs a set of terms and jargon that are becoming increasingly abstract, confusing, contradictory, and divorced from any tangible reality or consensus held by the common public. One might recognize terms such as “white privilege,” “LatinX,” “*insert adjective of choice* justice,” or “anti-racism.”
It’s not that these ideas are wrong or unimportant per se – they’re, at best, just not on the minds of most non-elite Americans and, at worst, downright off-putting. A close friend who identifies as Democrat once said: “Every time the Democrats mention ‘defund the police' or 'gender is a spectrum,’ they lose 10,000 votes in the Midwest.”
Is it really a surprise that blue-collar laborers or the working class are thoroughly uninterested in and even irked by progressive gender theory? By poll data, 8 in 10 African-Americans do NOT want to defund the police; and only 3% of Latino-Americans prefer to use the term “LatinX,” if they’ve even heard of it to begin with. (Perhaps these surveys are off, like most surveys on social opinions today, but there are at least some elements of truth behind these numbers).
The truth about Luxury English (and luxury beliefs) is that its primary purpose isn’t to convey information or clarify thoughts. Its primary purpose is to signal to other elites of your status while differentiating oneself from the “non-elites.”
A culture of luxury
Humans care a great deal about social status and acceptance—so much so that we are willing to go to ridiculous lengths to achieve it (we all remember high school). Status is an integral part of how others judge us, and how we judge ourselves. It is also the same reason why the fashion of everything (clothing, make-up, hobbies, etc.) is constantly in flux—to offer ever-changing new ways to distinguish oneself from the masses.
Effectively, luxury beliefs are fashion. One feels pressure to keep up with all the new ideas that the elites in media, education, and business are talking about. In typical American fashion, our culture is centered around learning about and replicating the lives, beliefs, and behaviours of celebrity.
Just like poor people buying (often fake) Gucci belts to look rich or average citizens idolizing Elon Musk, Beyonce, or Obama, decently educated people today are competing with each other on moral grandstanding and virtue signaling whenever they get a chance to show that they’re the “real” elite—or at the very least, are cut from similar cloth.
One culture to rule them all
The propagation of these luxury beliefs is driven by a vocal minority who happen to congregate in large cities and elite institutions, from universities to tech/media companies. This minority is disproportionately wealthy, disproportionally educated, and disproportionately influential. This geographical concentration of wealth, power, and influences effectively creates a mono-culture that is broadcasted worldwide.
Tiger has previously written how the current culture environment has subconsciously shaped those who work at elite institutions (NYTimes, Facebook, CNN, Goldman Sachs, etc.) in such a profound way, such that they all share roughly the same worldview of what constitutes as a threat to society (like Alex Jones, Donald Trump, or even Joe Rogan) and what would be their ideal solutions to the urgent problems of society.
These communities are subject to the same mimetic forces of any community—a desire for acceptance, a willingness to conform, and a distrust of outsiders. These bugs have been hardwired into our human nature for millenia, but we should be especially wary today as their self-reinforcing effects are creating a dangerous mono-culture and ever greater wedge between the plebeians and patricians.
Rob writes a newsletter about human nature and topics in social psychology; his Twitter has many wonderful references to books and articles that may interest you. I highly encourage you to follow his work.
Rob’s upbringing was turbulent to say the least and shaped him to be a conservative. He bounced around foster homes and experienced the loss of his loved ones at a young age. Having graduated at the bottom of his class in high school, he decided to enlist in the US Air Force. Then, as a veteran, he subsequently enrolled in Yale University as an Eli Whitney undergraduate student. Given his working-class and military background, studying at Yale shocked him as the elite higher education culture was not anything like the military or his childhood. You mean read more about Rob’s life journey on his website.
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