#Rob Henderson

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

During my conversation with Richard Hanania about the 2019 Academy Award-winning film Parasite, I talked about how viewers and critics were quick to assume that Parasite was about a rich family and a poor family.

It shows how little people know about class.

This is how the director of the movie, Bong Joon Ho, characterized the Kim family:

“The father has accumulated numerous business failures, the mother who trained as an athlete has never found particular success, and the son and daughter have failed the university entrance exam on multiple occasions.”

This is not the profile of a poor or working class family. The Kims are not poor, they are failed middle class.

This is why, in an early scene in the movie, they were so bad at folding those pizza boxes.

In high school, I worked at an Italian restaurant as a busboy and dishwasher.

In his terrific memoir on slum tourism, Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell uses the French term plongeur—a person employed to wash dishes and carry out other menial tasks in a restaurant or hotel—to describe his occupation as he was struggling in Paris.

Plongeur sounds much better than “bus boy.”

Anyway, my coworkers in the pizza station were, like the rest of us in the back of the restaurant, guys from fucked up families. They drove beat-up motorcycles and had long hair and tattoos, or were stoners or community college dropouts whose highlight of the week was getting paid on Friday and drinking away the weekend.

The girls mostly worked as servers, and were generally more put together. Though there was plenty of binge drinking and drug use among them as well. Many restaurants function like this, with sweaty guys in the back cooking food and scrubbing pans and the cheerful women up front, serving food and interacting with patrons.

Guys I worked with could fold a pizza box with their eyes closed while stoned out of their minds.

So the Parasite scene didn’t make sense to me at first, until I realized what I was seeing.

Working class people would figure out how to fold pizza boxes and do it fine. Bitter middle class people think they’re too good for it.

The Kims middle class origins also explains why they were able to seamlessly interact with the well-to-do Park family (more on them soon).

Skeptical viewers have questioned why the Kim son had a friend who studied in a university. And why the Kim son was able to teach English to the Park daughter so well despite his poor background.

And astute critics have wondered how it’s possible that the Kim daughter who is obviously adept at graphic design (forging her art credentials) and interacts easily with the Parks came from a poor family.

The Kim son and daughter were raised by middle class parents, that’s why.

The Kim family represents a great fear of affluent people, including film critics: Downward mobility.

The Kims are middle class people who slipped down the economic ladder. The Parks are middle class people who ascended the economic ladder.

The Park mother is easily duped by the Kim daughter’s discussions of art and its therapeutic powers. This is because the Park mother is a philistine who doesn’t actually know that much about art. She’s not from some well-bred old money family. She and her husband have only recently arrived at their current economic station.

Parasite is not about entrenched class divisions. It’s not about a poor family and a rich family. It’s about a downwardly mobile middle class family and an upwardly mobile one.

Which is why resentment builds and explodes into violence. Envy is reserved for those who are similar to ourselves.

Working class people are generally not envious of the very rich. Nobody I knew growing up hated Bill Gates or Hollywood celebrities. They mostly envied well off people in town. People who had big houses or had a boat docked at the Shasta Marina.

Who envies the actual rich? Upper middle class people.

People tend to envy and resent those close to their social strata.

In his fascinating book Envy: a theory of social behaviour, the sociologist Helmut Schoeck wrote:

“The best means of protection against the envy of a neighbor is to drive a Rolls-Royce instead of a car only slightly better than his...overwhelming and astounding inequality arouses far less envy than minimal inequality.”

There are a couple of reasons for why resentment and envy are strongest for those nearest to us.

First, there's proximity.

Working class people work for, and take orders from, upper middle class professionals. This (sort of) describes the relationship between the Kims and the Parks in Parasite.

But upper middle class professionals work for, and report to, the very rich. We never see the father of the Park family at his job, interacting with much wealthier colleagues.

The second reason people reserve scorn for those close to our social strata is that they remind them of their failings.

When people have expectations for their lives that are not met, but they see others similar to themselves achieve the same things they desire, they experience resentment and anger.

This is why people feel the most schadenfreude, joy from seeing others’ misfortune, when the person experiencing the misfortune is similar to themselves.

Other research has revealed that similarity and domain relevance are key predictors of malicious envy.

This means that a person who is similar to ourselves and who is successful in a field we also aspire to do well in is especially likely to trigger feelings of resentment and a desire to take destructive action to sabotage them.

This is why critics and the chattering classes loved Parasite. The film allowed them to identify with resentful middle class people who are down on their luck, under the guise of sympathizing with the poor.

Parasite allowed identification with resentment and envy to masquerade as compassion.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Rob Henderson

Published: Apr 25, 2024

Perhaps counterintuitively, gender equality is leading to greater gender-related differences.

In most wealthy nations, women have been steadily closing the gap with men on several fronts. In the United States, women now earn the majority of the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. Women now receive more than half of STEM college degrees, and the proportion of women in the tech sector has risen in recent years, to 35 percent in 2023 from 31 percent in 2019. Among Americans younger than 30, women’s earnings rival or even surpass men’s in many metropolitan areas, including Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.

As these gaps have narrowed, we might have expected men and women to become more alike in other ways, including their cultural values and politics. Yet we are seeing the reverse.

This is especially true when it comes to political orientation. Recent polls have highlighted increasing polarization along gender lines on various political issues. Since 2014, women younger than 30 have become steadily more left-leaning each year, while young men have remained relatively static in their political views. In 2021, 44 percent of young women in the United States identified as liberal compared with just 25 percent of young men — the biggest gender gap in 24 years of polling.

In the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch recently articulated this stark contrast in a piece titled “A new global gender divide is emerging.” He observes that while older women and men are similar in their political views, young women have veered sharply to the left of young men.

Burn-Murdoch cites the influence of the #MeToo movement, suggesting it empowered young women to address longstanding injustices.

The Washington Post’s editorial board suggested that such polarization is to be expected in the United States, “a large, unwieldy democracy.” The Guardian proposes that digital spaces and social media influencers are luring young people into disparate online platforms that cultivate more extreme political views. No doubt these all play some role.

However, I’d like to propose an idea from my home discipline of academic psychology: the gender-equality paradox. This emerged as one of the most mind-blowing findings that researchers published while I was pursuing my recent doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge.

The paradox is straightforward: Societies with higher levels of wealth, political equality, and women in the workforce show larger personal, social, and political differences between men and women. In other words, the wealthier and more egalitarian the country, the larger the gender differences.

The pattern exists not just for political ideology but also for things like academic preferences, physical aggression, self-esteem, frequency of crying, interest in casual sex, and personality traits such as extraversion. In all these categories, the differences have been largest in societies that have gone the furthest in attempting to treat women and men the same.

Of course, there is an overlap for all of these attributes — aggression, for example, is a trait that both women and men can exhibit.

But there’s less overlap — meaning greater differences — in more-equal societies. In China, which scores low on gender parity, the overlap between men and women in personality traits such as extraversion and openness to experience is actually very high, 84 percent. In the Netherlands, which is among the most gender-equal societies, the overlap is just 61 percent.

More recently, a study of 67 countries found that although women generally tend to hold stricter moral views, gender differences in verdicts in hypothetical court scenarios are largest in wealthier and more equal societies. Specifically, women view misconduct more unfavorably than men in most places, but this difference in judgment is larger in richer and more equal countries.

This gender gap has also been found for physical differences in things like height, BMI, obesity, and blood pressure. Across societies, men tend to be taller, heavier, and have higher blood pressure than women. But in rich and relatively equal societies, gender differences are particularly large.

The gender-equality paradox might also help to explain why the gender gap in political orientation has grown among young people. One natural explanation is that young women are outpacing men in higher education, with men now making up just 40 percent of college students. Some evidence suggests that college tends to cultivate more liberal attitudes.

However, even among college students, women are more left-leaning than men. A Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey of 254 colleges and universities found that 55 percent of female students identify as liberal, compared with only 40 percent of male students. Interestingly, at schools ranked below 200 by US News and World Report, 45 percent of women and 33 percent of men identify as liberal. At top 25 schools, though, the difference is more pronounced, with 71 percent of women and 54 percent of men identifying as liberal.

The gender-equality paradox can help to explain why the gender gap is largest at the most selective US colleges, where family income tends to be higher and sociopolitical equality tends to be especially highly prized.

In an interview in The Times of London, the psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams succinctly summarized the paradox: “Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes them the same.”

There are a variety of possible explanations for the gender-equality paradox, but one prevailing view is that as societies become relatively more prosperous and equal, people more fully express their underlying traits and preferences.

Of course, culture matters in explaining gender differences — just not in the way most people think.

In less affluent and less egalitarian societies, gender differences in physical traits are flattened due to scarcity — that is, the absence of food and other resources stunts growth, especially for men, leading to smaller physical disparities. Moreover, gender differences in psychological traits narrow in response to rigid social expectations.

In the most equal nations of the world, it’s not harsh gender socialization by parents and media, strict societal expectations, or institutional forces that widen the differences between men and women. In the absence of dire poverty and strict social expectations, people are in a position to express their intrinsic attributes and preferences.

The freer people are and the more fairly they are treated, the more differences tend to grow rather than shrink. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that Gen Z men and women are diverging along political lines to a greater extent than earlier generations did.

Rob Henderson has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge and is the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”

[ Via: https://archive.today/zzoqm ]

--

Abstract

Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result primarily from perceived gender roles, gender socialization and sociostructural power differentials. As a consequence, social role theorists expect gender differences in personality to be smaller in cultures with more gender egalitarianism. Several large cross-cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality-Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, subjective well-being, depression and values-are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically-evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.

==

For reference, "liberal" is used here in the American sense of "left-wing," rather than the sense of classical liberalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion, constitutional government and privacy rights. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Much of what constitutes modern day "leftism," such as Critical Theory, modern "color conscious" conceptions of "antiracism," and gender ideology is extraordinarily illiberal.

[ex-foster]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-the-luxury-beliefs-of-an-educated-elite-erode-society-0mx8fd2nl

"a 2020 survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest reported the lowest support. Throughout the remainder of that year and into 2021, murder rates throughout the US soared as a result of defunding policies, officers retiring early or quitting, and police departments struggling to recruit new members after the luxury belief class cultivated an environment of loathing toward law enforcement.

Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year, the poorest Americans are seven times more likely to be victims of robbery, seven times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault and 20 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault. And yet many affluent people are calling to abolish law enforcement."

Rob Henderson's concept of luxury beliefs is very interesting. Like myself, Rob Henderson is a former foster kid who went to college. He wrote a memoir on his experiences and notably has made certain observations on the college elite's "progressive" mindset. Rob exposes how the elite politically correct push backwards beliefs to demonstrate their social status.

As a woman who aged out of foster care, one of the things I was told by my social worker was that foster kids often become homeless when they age out of the system and that the girls become prostitutes. It was a great fear of mine that I would become homeless and that my fate would be to be a prostitute because there was simply no other forms of support. When I encountered liberal feminists who claimed that "sex work is work" it was shocking. You would think that feminists would try to be allies to girls from foster care and that they would be concerned by the high rates of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation that they encounter. But these "activists" do not care about foster kids. They push a harmful lifestyle because it's a luxury belief. They live privileged lives and can do Only Fans from their bedrooms meanwhile girls that age out of foster care often end up homeless.

The more that I look into social justice warriors, the more I realize that they really have antagonistic attitudes towards less fortunate people - especially girls from foster care.

[arcticdementor]

[nicklloydnow]

“These findings were later echoed by the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

In his body of work, Bourdieu described how “distance from necessity” characterized the affluent classes. In fact, Bourdieu coined the term “cultural capital.”

Once our basic physical and material needs are met, people can then spend more time cultivating what Bourdieu called the “dispositions of mind and body” in the form of intricate and expensive tastes and habits that the upper classes use to obtain distinction.

Corresponding with these sociological observations, the biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed that animals evolve certain displays, traits, and behaviors because they are so physically costly.

(…)

So for humans, top hats and designer handbags are costly signals of economic capacities; for gazelles, stotting is a costly signal of physical capacities.

Veblen, Bourdieu and Zahavi all claimed that humans—or animals—flaunt certain symbols, communicate in specific ways, and adopt costly means of expressing themselves, in order to obtain distinction from the masses.

Animals do this physically.

And affluent humans often do it economically and culturally, with their status symbols.

A difference, though, is that human signals often trickle to the rest of society, which weakens the power of the signal. Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it.

(…)

The yearning for distinction is the key motive here.

And in order to convert economic capital into cultural capital, it must be publicly visible.

But distinction encompasses not only clothing or food or rituals. It also extends to ideas and beliefs and causes.

In his book WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy, the author Michael Knox Beran examined the lives and habits of upper-class Americans from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

He writes that “WASPS” had mixed feelings about their fellow citizens.

These upper-crust Americans viewed ordinary Americans as “sunk in moronic darkness” and that “It is a question whether a high WASP ever supported a fashionable cause without some secret knowledge that the cause was abhorred by the vulgarians.”

This still goes on today.

In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accoutrements.

But today, because material goods have become a noisier signal of one’s social position and economic resources, the affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.

The upper class craves distinction.

(…)

A 2020 study titled “The possession of high status strengthens the status motive” led by Cameron Anderson at UC Berkeley found that relative to lower-class individuals, upper-class individuals have a greater desire for wealth and status.

In other words, high-status people desire wealth and status more than anyone else.

(…)

Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances.

There are other examples of luxury beliefs as well, such as the downplaying of individual agency in shaping life outcomes.

A 2019 study led by Joseph Daniels at Marquette University was published in the journal of Applied Economics Letters.

They found that individuals with higher income or a higher social status were the most likely to say that success results from luck and connections rather than hard work, while low-income individuals were more likely to say success comes from hard work and individual effort.

Well, which belief is more likely to be true?

Plenty of research indicates that compared with an external locus of control, an internal locus of control is associated with better academic, economic, health, and relationship outcomes. Believing you are responsible for your life’s direction rather than external forces appears to be beneficial.

Here’s the late Stanford psychology professor Albert Bandura. His vast body of research showed that belief in personal agency, or what he described as “self-efficacy,” has powerful positive effects on life outcomes.

Undermining self-efficacy will have little effect on the rich and educated, but will have pronounced effects for the less fortunate.

It’s also generally instructive to see what affluent people tell their kids. And what seems to happen is that affluent people often broadcast how they owe their success to luck. But then they tell their own children about the importance of hard work and individual effort.

(…)

When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.”

Working class people could not tell you what these terms mean. But if you visit an elite university, you’ll find plenty of affluent people who will eagerly explain them to you.

When people express unusual beliefs that are at odds with conventional opinion, like defunding the police or downplaying hard work, or using peculiar vocabulary, often what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top university” or “I have the means and time to acquire these esoteric ideas.”

Only the affluent can learn these things because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

To this extent, Pierre Bourdieu in The Forms of Capital wrote, “The best measure of cultural capital is undoubtedly the amount of time devoted to acquiring it.”

The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education.

Members of the luxury belief class promote these ideas because it advances their social standing and because they know that the adoption of these policies or beliefs will cost them less than others.

(…)

Why are affluent people more susceptible to luxury beliefs? They can afford it. And they care the most about status.

In short, luxury beliefs are the new status symbols.

They are honest indicators of one’s social position, one’s level of wealth, where one was educated, and how much leisure time they have to adopt these fashionable beliefs.

And just as many luxury goods often start with the rich but eventually become available to everyone, so it is with luxury beliefs.

But unlike luxury goods, luxury beliefs can have long term detrimental effects for the poor and working class. However costly these beliefs are for the rich, they often inflict even greater costs on everyone else.”

[marajuc]

“You and Your Research” 

One of the reasons I don’t devote more time to live events, public speaking, social media, emailing, etc. is because I need to have a clear head to do my work. And in order to do that, my schedule has to be clean. My mind and my time must be free. This was how simultaneously I wrote a book, completed my PhD thesis, and built a newsletter. Each minute spent screwing around on social media or traveling on the road to another gig is a minute I’m not actively thinking, reading, writing, and so on. In his biography about the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the author Michael Ignatieff notes that in the old days, to be a good scholar, you had to have lots of unstructured time to connect dots that most people are understandably too busy to immediately notice. You have to be a little bit selfish. The comedian Adam Carolla says “I like to work really hard, but only once in a while.” Many people in creative professions are like this. They kind of bob around for a while thinking about things. They do a few live events, take part in a few low-effort endeavors. And then suddenly, when the moment is right, the person devotes an enormous amount of time or energy to a passion project. This is the right job for me. I’ll read a few books. Browse some academic papers. Take walks. Write notes. Hit the gym. Take a few meetings. Go to Paris for a weekend. Write some essays. Visit my sister in California. Fire off a few tweets. It’s a pretty good life. But first I had to be a normal person working a series of tough jobs for a while and had to learn something about the value of real work in order to be in a position to be thankful for how things are now. At some point I’ll start getting restless, talk to my agent, and maybe see about doing another book or something. But I have a lot of essays I want to write first. Which requires keeping a unoccupied calendar. Jordan Peterson has described how when he was writing Maps of Meaning, the book out of which many of his other ideas grew, he had to make painful sacrifices with his time.

Likewise, from the classic 1986 talk “You and Your Research,” by the mathematician Richard Hamming:

“Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, ‘creativity comes out of your subconscious.’ Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you're aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.” - ROB HENDERSON

[classichorrorblog]

Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

“Why do authoritarian governments engage in propaganda when citizens often know that their governments are propagandizing and therefore resist, ignore, or deride the messages?”

This is from a fascinating paper titled Propaganda as Signaling by the political scientist Haifeng Huang. The common understanding of propaganda is that it is intended to brainwash the masses. People get exposed to the same message repeatedly and over time come to believe in whatever nonsense the authoritarian regime wants them to believe.

And yet regimes often broadcast silly, unpersuasive propaganda. Huang observes that propaganda might actually be counterproductive, because the official messages often contradict reality. Why display public messages that everyone knows are lies, and that are easily verifiable as lies?

He gives us an answer: Instilling pro-regime values and attitudes is one aim of authoritarian regimes. But it’s not their only aim.

Alongside the desire to brainwash people, the regime also wants to remind people of their power. When citizens are bombarded with propaganda everywhere they look, they are reminded of the strength of the regime. The vast amount of resources authoritarian regimes spend to display their message in every corner of the public square is a costly demonstration of their power.

Propaganda is intended to instill fear in people, not brainwash them. The message is: You might not hold pro-regime values or attitudes. But we will make sure you are too frightened to do anything about it.

Huang describes how China’s primetime news program, Xinwen Lianbo, is stilted, archaic, and is “a constant target of mockery among ordinary citizens.” Yet the Chinese government airs it every night at 7 pm sharp. The continuing existence of this program is intended to remind citizens of the strength and capacity of the communist party.

The willingness of the government to continue to undertake costly endeavors to broadcast unpersuasive messages is a credible signal of just how strong and all-powerful it is. In fact, Huang compares this to political campaigns in democratic countries. Political ads rarely contain new information. They almost never change anyone’s mind. The function of political ads, though, isn’t to persuade. It’s to “burn money” in a public way. They are costly signals of the political campaign’s willingness to expend resources which shows their commitment.  

Huang goes on to report the results of his empirical research. He asked Chinese citizens how familiar they were with the Chinese government’s propaganda messages. He found that people who were more knowledgeable about these messages were not more satisfied with the government. But they were more likely to say that the government is strong, and were less willing to express dissent. Authoritarian regimes aren’t necessarily trying to convince you of anything. They’re trying to remind you of their power.  

Interestingly, Huang even says that the overt insipidness of regime messaging is part of the point. He writes:

“For this demonstration of strength to be well taken, propaganda may sometimes need to be dull and unpersuasive, so as to make sure that most citizens will know precisely that it is propaganda when they see it and hence get the implicit message.”

The regime is saying: Yes, we know this message is tiresome and obviously false. But we are showing this to you to tell you that you are helpless to do anything about it.

People are more likely to rebel against a regime when they sense that it is vulnerable. By broadcasting a consistent message repeatedly, the regime is attempting to bolster its power.

A weak organization can’t produce such messages. They can’t expend the resources. A strong organization can play the same program every night on all networks. They can broadcast the same message on every website and advertisement and television series. As Huang puts it,

“Citizens can make inferences about the type of government by observing whether it is willing to produce a high level of propaganda, even if the propaganda itself is not believed by citizens.”

That is, even if everyone knows what they are seeing is nonsense, the fact that everyone is seeing it means that the regime is strong enough to broadcast bullshit.

People are deterred from dissenting against the regime not because they believe in their dull messages but because they believe the regime has more power than themselves. Moreover, these official messages dictate the terms of acceptable public discourse and drive alternative ideas underground. They habituate citizens into acting “as if” they believe in the official doctrine, if for no other reason than that they do not publicly question it.

The political scientist Lisa Weeden, in her study on the cult of Hafiz al-Assad in Syria, discusses why authoritarian regimes coerce their citizens to engage in preposterous rituals. She notes that,

“The greater the absurdity of the required performance, the more clearly it demonstrates that the regime can make most people obey most of the time.”

If the regime can make the people around you partake in absurdities, you are less likely to challenge it. You will be more likely to obey it. Of course, this doesn’t mean regimes are not interested in indoctrination. They would prefer if people really did hold pro-regime attitudes and values.

But the purpose of propaganda is not limited just to instilling desired beliefs. Often, demonstrating the regime’s strength, capacity, and resources to intimidate people is a more important goal.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/luxury-beliefs-that-only-the-privileged-can-afford-7f6b8a16

‘Luxury Beliefs’ That Only the Privileged Can Afford

By: Rob Henderson

Published: Feb 9, 2024

In the same way that you don’t notice the specifics of your own culture until you travel elsewhere, you don’t really notice your social class until you enter another one. As an undergraduate at Yale a decade ago, I came to see that my peers had experienced a totally different social reality than me. I had grown up poor, a biracial product of family dysfunction, foster care and military service. Suddenly ensconced in affluence at an elite university—more Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%—I found myself thinking a lot about class divides and social hierarchies.

I’d thought that by entering a place like Yale, we were being given a privilege as well as a duty to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, I often found among my fellow students what I call “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class but often inflict real costs on the lower classes. For example, a classmate told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her what her background was and if she planned to marry. She said she came from an affluent, stable, two-parent home—just like most of our classmates. She added that, yes, she personally planned to have a monogamous marriage, but quickly insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.

My classmate’s promotion of one ideal (“monogamy is outdated”) while living by another (“I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways. Some would, for instance, tell me about the admiration they had for the military, or how trade schools were just as respectable as college, or how college was not necessary to be successful. But when I asked them if they would encourage their own children to enlist or become a plumber or an electrician rather than apply to college, they would demur or change the subject.

In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accouterments. As the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen famously observed in his 1899 book “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” status symbols must be difficult to obtain and costly to purchase. In Veblen’s day, people exhibited their status with delicate and restrictive clothing, such as top hats and evening gowns, or by partaking in time-consuming activities, such as golf or beagling. The value of these goods and activities, argued Veblen, was in the very fact that they were so pricey and wasteful that only the wealthy could afford them.

Today, when luxury goods are more accessible to ordinary people than ever before, the elite need other ways to broadcast their social position. This helps explain why so many are now decoupling class from material goods and attaching it to beliefs.

Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top college.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary. Ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

When my classmates at Yale talked about abolishing the police or decriminalizing drugs, they seemed unaware of the attending costs because they were largely insulated from them. Reflecting on my own experiences with alcohol, if drugs had been legal and easily accessible when I was 15, you wouldn’t be reading this. My birth mother succumbed to drug addiction soon after I was born. I haven’t seen her since I was a child. All my foster siblings’ parents were addicts or had a mental health condition, often triggered by drug use.

A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will probably be just fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents is more likely to ride that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This may explain why a 2019 survey conducted by the Cato Institute found that more than 60% of Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree were in favor of legalizing drugs, while less than half of Americans without a college degree thought it was a good idea. Drugs may be a recreational pastime for the rich, but for the poor they are often a gateway to further pain.

Similarly, a 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest Americans reported the lowest support. Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $50,000 a year, the poorest Americans are three times more likely to be victims of robbery, aggravated assault and sexual assault, according to federal statistics. Yet it’s affluent people who are calling to abolish law enforcement. Perhaps the luxury belief class is simply ignorant of the realities of crime.

Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95%. By 2005, 85% of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30%. As the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam stated at a 2017 Senate hearing: “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas.”

In 2006, more than half of American adults without a college degree believed it was “very important” that couples with children should be married, according to Gallup. Fast-forward to 2020, and this number had plummeted to 31%. Among college graduates polled by Gallup, only 25% thought couples should be married before having kids. Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: Most American college graduates who have children are married. Despite their behavior, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant. Their message has spread.

I noticed that many Yale students selectively concealed their opinions or facts about their lives. More than one quietly confessed to me that they were pretending to be poorer than they really were, because they didn’t want the stigma of being thought rich. Why would this stigma exist at a rich university full of rich students? It’s a class thing. For the upper class, indicating your social position by speaking about money is vulgar. Sharing your educational credentials is a classier shorthand, but broadcasting your seemingly altruistic and socially conscientious luxury beliefs is the best of all.

It is harder for wealthy people to claim the mantle of victimhood, which, among the affluent, is often a key ingredient of righteousness. Researchers at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University recently found evidence of a “virtuous victim” effect, in which victims are seen as more moral than nonvictims who behave in exactly the same way: If people think you have suffered, they will be more likely to excuse your behavior. Perhaps this is why prestigious universities encourage students to nurture their grievances. The peculiar effect is that many of the most advantaged people are the most adept at conveying their disadvantages.

Occasionally, I raised these critiques with fellow students or graduates of elite colleges. Sometimes they would reply by asking, “Well, aren’t you part of this group now?” implying that my appraisals were hollow because I moved within the same milieu. But they wouldn’t have listened to me back when I was a lowly enlisted man in the military or when I was washing dishes for minimum wage. If you ridicule the upper class as an outsider, they’ll ignore you. The requirements for the upper class to take you seriously—credentials, wealth, power—are also the grounds to brand you a hypocrite for daring to judge.

But negative social judgments often serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness. To avoid misery, I believe we have to admit that certain actions and choices, including single parenthood, substance abuse and crime, are actually in and of themselves undesirable and not simply in need of normalization. Indeed, it’s cruel to validate decisions that inflict harm. And it’s a true luxury to be ignorant of these consequences.

Rob Henderson is the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class,” which will be published on Feb. 20 by Gallery Books.

[ Via: https://archive.today/FAksi ]

[ex-foster]

I'm reading a book review for Rob Henderson's book (Troubled - a memoir of growing up in foster care) and I find it interesting that there are liberals reviewing this book and expressing caution because Henderson leans conservative. One reviewer wrote that Henderson was raised by two women in a romantic relationship and didn't seem homophobic so surely he isn't "too" far right (she hopes).

But I'm wondering as a former foster kid, why do liberals seem to not advocate for foster kids to the same degree they advocate for LGBT or other groups. It is as if they don't see foster kids as a group worth defending. It's quite clear that the left cherry picks who they choose as their disadvantaged mascots. And honestly I'm just really tired with liberals at this point because the only time they ever bring up foster kids is when they want to use us as arguments in the abortion debate. So they understand that we are often targets of abuse and we suffer a fair amount of trauma and our aging out statistics are abysmal. However it just seems that the typical liberal attitude towards us is that our abuse and trauma can not be overcome. Some pro-choice people genuinely believe that life is not worth living if you are raised in foster care. And they will even go as far as to call us "unloved" or "unwanted" as if we are incapable of forming connections in our community. They signal to us that we don't belong and shouldn't be alive.

[scenesandscreens]

Director - Alex Garland, Cinematography - Rob Hardy

"Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home - "Don't do this". But here we are."

Civil War (2024)

[imthursdaysyme]

Sleepover shenanigans

[starxcxboy]

— Devs (2020), an FX original miniseries created, written and directed by Alex Garland.

[nathanbates]