When Your Opinions Are Social Jewellery
The TRIGGERnometry duo interview Rob Henderson, coiner of the term luxury beliefs:
Luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes… The way that people used to demonstrate their social class was through material goods, through expensive items… Today, it’s not necessarily the case… [Affluent] students will often downplay their wealth or even lie about how rich their parents are… [Now,] it’s luxury beliefs. It’s the unusual, novel viewpoints that they’re expressing to distinguish themselves. They crave distinction, that’s the key goal here…
An easy way to show that you’re not a member of the riff-raff, the masses, is to hold the opposite opinion, or a strange opinion that maybe doesn’t make sense, because it shows you’re not one of them. It’s not just the opinion itself, but the way that you express it. If you express it using vocabulary that no-one has ever heard of, for example… You often are not paying the price for your luxury beliefs, but even if you do, it’s still not nearly the same as the cost inflicted on the lower classes if they were to adopt those luxury beliefs too. […]
I talked to a friend of mine who was telling me, “When I set my Tinder radius to one mile, just around the university, and I see the bios of the women, a lot of their profiles say things like ‘poly’ or ‘keeping it casual’ – basically, they’re not interested in anything too serious.” He says something like half of them have something like that in their bio. And then he said, “But when I expand the radius on my Tinder to five miles, to include the rest of the city and the more run-down areas beyond the university bubble, half the women are single moms.” And basically, the luxury beliefs of the former group, the educated group, trickled down and ended up having this outsize effect on the people who are less fortunate, who don’t have the [social and] economic capital of the people who can afford that belief.
Several examples are given, along with their likely effects if enacted by the cash-strapped and credulous. One or two of them have of course been touched on here before. Indeed, we have a tag for such things, via which you can find one of Mr Henderson’s early articles on the subject.
Mr Henderson’s Substack can be found here.
Also, open thread.
This Philadelphia ten year old invites you to hold his beer.
Various ruthless measures seem more attractive with each passing year.
Tactic, not goal.
Agreed. How should a sane society treat Marxists? Asking for a friend.
Fence?
I-285, the beltway around Atlanta. Locals call it The Fence because it has tended to keep this sort of behavior out of the outer suburbs. Though that situation seems to be changing lately, depending on whom you talk to.
How should a sane society treat Marxists?
whup whup whup whup whup
@ccscientist: Not an exclusively Left-pondian phenomenon. Damian’s been noting the reactions of the Good People(tm) to the many and varied non-white candidates for Tory leader.
Luxury beliefs
I remember reading Paul Fussel’s essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb”. One of the points he makes is that, generally speaking, it was the lower classes in the USA who went to fight overseas, and everybody knew that the grunts in the trenches were delighted the war was ended by dropping two bombs, rather than expending another million lives like theirs. By expressing the belief that the bombs should not have been dropped, one signaled that one belonged to the upper classes, who were never conscripted, and did not even know anybody who was.
Meanwhile, in Telford, a young woman speaks out on TV about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. She expresses concern that the police in Telford failed to keep hundreds of children like her safe from rape gangs, and that the same police continue to turn a blind eye to the perpetrators of these crimes.
When she returns home, those same Telford police, who can’t summon the resources to investigate violent child sex-crime, manage to find time to track her down in order to intimidate her.
Oh come on. Surely not! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcM7T1shgXs&t=618s
By expressing the belief that the bombs should not have been dropped, one signaled that one belonged to the upper classes, who were never conscripted, and did not even know anybody who was.
While I understand the general point being made, I don’t think that can be applied to the UK.
The mortality rates of the officer class in both world wars, though especially in the first, was notably higher than for other ranks and I think I’m right in saying that on the whole, the officer class generally drew from the better educated classes which tended to also be the more affluent classes in many (but not all) cases.
Actually, that reminds me of what I suspect is another myth promoted by the Socialists in the UK, which goes something like this:
The reason why Labour did so well after the war was that the working class had had their consciousness raised by the experience of fighting cheek-by-jowl with the men who, in peace time, were the leaders of their country, the managers of their factories, and so on.
This experience, so goes the myth, led them to realise their lives were being run by men who were less competent, less intelligent, less courageous and so on.
No doubt there was some class-based animosity between the ranks to support the myth, but the mere fact that it’s so flattering to Socialist pretensions suggests that it’s likely largely fallacious.
Meanwhile, another brawl in
AtlantaStaffordshire.Lost boy.
Context: Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. The police were serving a warrant for murder.
So toddlers hurl racist insults, and actually assault, the police. There can be no doubt that the children’s family are all scum. Utter scum.
I-285, the beltway around Atlanta.
Thanks, appreciated.
“And basically, the luxury beliefs of the former group, the educated group, trickled down and ended up having this outsize effect on the people who are less fortunate, who don’t have the [social and] economic capital of the people who can afford that belief.”
It has been my belief for some time that the worst thing white Americans ever did to black Americans, not excluding slavery, was “the 60s”. Until the 1960s, black Americans were, in spite of racist abuses, steadily improving their social and economic conditions. The abolition of those abuses climaxed in the 1960s.
Yet by numerous measures (crime, illegitimacy, drug use) black social conditions began declining immediately and have never recovered. IMO, this decline is directly traceable to “the 60s” elite glorification of destructive practices and rejection of traditional norms.