"Luxury beliefs"

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The topic of "Luxury Beliefs" came up in another thread.

The term "luxury beliefs" was introduced by Rob Henderson in the essay ‘Luxury beliefs’ are the latest status symbol for rich Americans, published in the New York Post, Aug. 17, 2019.

He wrote:

In the UK, our Home Secretary (immigration/security/policing minister - yes it's weird), who is a certified wingnut, recently made a speech about "luxury beliefs" that basically left everyone confused because it isn't a term in the political lexicon here. It was obvious from context that she was trying to paint Keir Starmer (leader of the opposition and very likely to become Prime Minister next year) as "woke", and she linked the two terms together. Seemed like she was trying to say that only rich people support queer rights, which, weird.

The line about "beliefs which rich people profess which are supposedly harmful to poor people" makes more sense, although not really sure it's quite as good an attack line as Braverman might think. There has been a recent pattern of the Tories importing US talking points without properly adapting them for a British audience, or for the situation they find themselves in.

I think, Mona, you've successfully evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of Henderson's viewpoint.

The term "Luxury Beliefs" seems to make more sense when defines as "beliefs which only the wealthy can afford to express", such as "homeless people are just plain lazy" (they're not), and others even more offensive than that.

If the average wage-earners were to express such beliefs to the wrong people, they could lose their jobs (and income), and be blacklisted from gainful employment.  But if billionaires were to speak the same beliefs, their jobs and incomes would be safe -- they would have the "Luxury" of hardly feeling the loss.

Anyway . . . this term just seems like a societal principle someone would "discover" just to become the first expert on it.

A correct example of a "luxury belief" in Henderson's sense (a left-wing-identified belief, expressed by some rich people, that would actually harm most poor-to-middle-class people) would be "defund the police."

What is actually needed, in lieu of "defunding the police," is a bunch of specific reforms to police practices and priorities. But merely "defunding the police" would likely result in more violent crime, which would harm everyone except people who can afford bodyguards. So, yes, "defund the police" is a "luxury belief."

But Bob Henderson and various other right wing commentators have been using the term "luxury belief" to apply to various left-wing ideas that are alleged to be harmful to poor-to-middle-class people, but really aren't, at least if enacted in a larger left-wing context.

For example, I've seen one right wing commentator dismiss a proposed increase in teacher's salaries as a "luxury belief" on the grounds that taxes would need to be raised to pay for it. The commentator claimed that these taxes would necessarily have to be primarily sales taxes, which harm primarily the poor, and property taxes, which harm primarily the middle class. The assumption here is that any increase in the kinds of taxes that would affect primarily the rich would be completely unthinkable.

So basically, the poor would be better off if they were pressured into conforming to traditional, conservative social norms? No, thank you.

It does sound like a conservative version of the term "privilege," (mentioned here as a "luxury belief") which I'm wary of as well, though perhaps not for the same reasons as this Henderson person.

Although I do sometimes jokingly picture self-declared "allies" who get offended on behalf of other groups ordering their butlers to bring them caviar in order to cheer themselves up while they're posting these things on social media.

How do these "Luxury Beliefs" expressed by people of the Conservative Right differ from their "Alternative Truths"?

Aren't they really just the same old coprolites wrapped in a prettier package?

“Luxury Beliefs” is a new way of describing a phenomenon formally know as “Limousine Liberals”.

I think I can share what this means to me, communicatively, and why I use the term.

You could say I have a very (Rene) Girardian view of neurotypicals, quite similar to how Professor John Gray describes them in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. It's a style of Darwinian meets Machiavelian thinking that Bret Weinstein has often talked about as well in terms of how the classes shake out, about how good people can't make it anywhere near power because DC is King's Landing from Game of Thrones.

Something Bret has brought up in the past when talking about groups who aggressively chase power - it's silver to raise your kids with every advantage to succeed but golden to simultaneously damage other people's kids so they're less competitive with your own kids. If you're doing things which are that insidious, even the word 'evil' seems appropriate here, the way you cover it up and get away with doing it is by being as superficially virtuous as you can, let the consequences of your behavior and the ideas you spread do the work of damaging other people while you win, and wring every last drop out of plausible deniability that you can so that people can't come after you because there aren't many ways you can punish incompetence outside of a job (a good parallel example is people who commit insurance fraud by putting a can of solvent next to a space heater - Wwwwoopsidaisy! How careless of me!! $$$).

I'm also used to the accusations of incompetence, stupidity, being an imbecile for NOT being like this from people who are like this. They use the guise of social norms as a mask for divide and conquer games and they'll need to aggressively drive the stick into you if you not only seem intelligent and perceptive but worse - you seem (threateningly) foundationally honest!

When I see politicians on TV - that's what I see.

When I look at the college population, like the girl Rob Henderson gave an example of who said that she felt like marriage was a bygone institution and that people should get rid of it - she's trying to get married but definitely doesn't want to encourage anyone else to, there's two types of people in this sort of thing and I think she was probably the slightly more benign type but even that type is engaging in gross negligence for personal gain quite often.

To unpack what I mean - the first type are your proper cluster B dark triad DSM types who may have learned their superpowers when the dropped the spoon from the highchair, mom or dad picked it back up, they dropped it again, and they realized at that moment that they had power over their parents. Fast forward that into adulthood you get characters like the one Densel Washington played in Training Day (Alonzo), and I can say that I worked with at least a few girls in the restaurant industry who were popular in the psychopathic sense and if you ever caught them out on something you'd very quickly see both how they see themselves and how they see you ('Poor mentally ret*d child can't even begin to imagine the grandeur of my corruption!').

The other type, the gross negligent, are simply 'Monkey get status point'. If they care what's actually true at all it seems to be only nominally. What they understand is saying certain things raises their status, saying certain things doesn't, and so they'll say whatever raises their status. Worrying about whether what they're saying is true may not even occur to them or they may just have enough upstairs to be able to consider that for them to have better lives in any real sense they have to be helping the world get better, ie. it's really hard to have a great life if the world is on fire and even if you're rich if your home country starts having third world levels of distrust and even violence it's not going to be a better life but a worse one, just that instead of using any extra brain power they have toward leaving the world better than they found it they channel all of that to competing against their peers (they're people who don't even seem to have normal spates of interest or hobby).

This is where I don't put this level of Machiavellianism outside of upper-class neurotypical character. I've been dragged to charity balls before and I almost felt sick to my stomach the energy I got from most of the people there (the best way I'd describe it - imagine the lower dregs of the top 500 power families in an area that know precisely what number they are in pecking order, who'd be gleeful if the family one notch above them had a daughter get pregnant out of wedlock so that family could lose face so they could move from 281th to 280th while the other family goes 280th to 283rd). I was talking to someone else, on a completely different forum, who was on the spectrum about these kinds of things and she recommended that I watch 'The Age of Innocense' by Martin Scorsese, good movie although admittedly some of the characters there were even likeable / relatable whereas it felt like 2/3rds of the people who were at charity events reminded me of some of the worst people in that movie meets Kings Landing, just that there being no flayings they tack their social violence to the apex of a vaulted ceiling.


With those pieces in place - do I think upper-class and ESPECIALLY pseudo-elites, like the mid-to-bottom of the pack of elites whose parents sent them to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc., they got an underwater basket weaving degree (or the closest equivalent that can't be directly laughed at), they're likely unemployed if they went for the kind of academia position or professorship where there's 200 applicants per one job, they don't have the humility to serve coffee at Starbucks or greet at the door at Walmart (or - going back to what I said earlier, if another power family sees another power family's son or daughter working a meanial job - five slot family status demotion!).


There's a Russian-American social scientist named Peter Turchin whose become well known for his ability to decode social dynamics and one of the things he's been talking about for quite a while now is what's referred to as the 'overproduction of elites'. What he described is the problem of there being five elites to one elite position, all of them have Luciferic pride but the unlucky 80% also get to carry his scorn as well. Turchin has also mentioned that when there are revolutions and overthrow of countries it comes from there being too many dispossessed elites who become deeply vindictive busy-bodies who are trying to overthrow the ones who put them and their family to shame and he's been suggesting that the 2020's would be that very problem hitting the United States and perhaps some other western countries as well who had similar 'everyone goes to college' ideas.

The TL:DR of my post above for anyone glancing over this thread - check out Peter Turchin and his concerns about overproduction of elites, it's instructive.

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Thanks for the extra context, I agree now that the terms are largely synonymous, though I'd still argue that "luxury beliefs" better conveys that these aren't sins confined to the wealthy.

As a Marxist I feel like I wouldn't be doing my job here if I didn't point out that most of these "luxury beliefs" are really just beliefs that capitalism makes it expensive to have.