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Notes -
Against Luxury Beliefs
I'll link Henderson's entire post about Luxury Beliefs for reference, but for the purposes of this post I'll be focusing on his brief definition:
Henderson speaks of luxury beliefs like Scott's Barber Pole theory of fashion, using many of the same examples. Put shortly: "Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it."
He also frames it as a costly signal of wealth: "They can afford to (defund the police), because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security... Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances."
There are two contrasting claims here. The first is that luxury beliefs impose a genuine cost on the believer that he can afford to bear, like a wastefully pronking gazelle. The second is that the believer does not actually suffer that cost due to his existing position. The wealthy people in all-white gated neighborhoods on private islands bear no additional cost after all the criminals are released on the streets of a far-away city.
I believe Henderson is wrong that these beliefs are a luxury of the upper classes, and that they are rather highly costly expressions of loyalty from an upper-middle-class "Outer Party."
Henderson's income chart for defunding the police has three categories: <$50k, $50-100k, and >$100k. Thanks to rapid income growth and inflation, these categories no longer separate neatly into lower, middle, and upper class. Most of the people with incomes over $100k are not the estate-dwelling ultra-rich, but urban professionals in precarious social and economic positions. Indeed, crime-vulnerable city-dwellers are almost three times as likely to support defunding the police as rural people.
The most radical beliefs expressed in the great "uprising and cultural reckoning" of 2020 came directly from the most precarious and poor members of high status white collar classes: journalists, teachers, librarians, adjunct professors, social workers, petty officials, job-hopping employees of bloated tech companies. None of them were aping Obama or other members of a higher class. And all of these people suffer serious costs because of their beliefs, whether from direct violence from the underclass or indirectly from general social breakdown.
The day after John Kerry bought a beachfront mansion next to Obama's (his Martha's Vineyard one, not his Hawaii one), a woman in tech told me she had led a costly project to remove their business from the Netherlands "because the whole country will be underwater soon, thanks to the Climate Crisis."
Obama installed a 2500 gallon propane tank and whole-mansion backup generator; she had her husband destroy the portable generator that came with their new home, and suffered winter power outages in dignified silence.
Obama's children (and the children of all his class) live completely normal lives, just with more polo lessons and hedge fund internships.
Yesterday this woman instagrammed her Pride Month Announcement: a photo of her five year old son in a dress.
Henderson says that "Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it." But Obama and the ultra-wealthy didn't create or model these dysfunctional and self-harming "luxury beliefs," only to abandon them once they became déclassé. They are entirely the product of a desperately status-poor and precarious outer party in a society where climbing the social latter requires winning a red queen's race of radicalism, caught in an increasingly rapid purity spiral. Those at the top pay little attention to the crab bucket below them, except perhaps to nudge the ladder a little further out of reach.
So why should we care? Because I think charging these people with hypocrisy is counterproductive, unless their name is Soros or their job title is "mayor" or higher. Most of them are not benefitting from these beliefs, and would be much happier not suffering under the constant pressure to one-up each other in expressing them.
Yes this is a fantastic description of something of a core what I think the "woke" is. The affluent talking down on regular people. The culture war has never been liberals vs conservatives. The recent boycotts are not conservative campaigns, in essence is the less affluent go "WTF" and not buying any of it. The affluent don't shop at Target or drink Bud Light. The virtue signaling is worthless for the less affluent because they know they won't have a higher status if they follow the signaling.
I've also considered why all of this virtue signaling is backfiring right now. And I have three interacting reasons which more or less (perhaps not at all but hey I'm only a midwit on the internet with a pseudonym)
The woke thumb on the scale disappeared from Twitter when Elon took over. So the attempts at socially engineering the tiny percentage of people who has had the time for Twitter and not have the promotions and/or punishments to the adherence to the message isn't trickling in to peoples media. The coordination for the journalists is simply gone to affect their biases in reporting.
The cheap access to credit that has propped up non-profitable aspects of woke has dried up. So Buzzfeed News and Vice has been dependent on that a lot of money has sloshed around in the monetary system, and in hard times the bottom line actually matters. All of a sudden DEI becomes corporate waste because it doesn't help the bottom line.
The affluent managed to isolate themselves with everything that they consume through their media thinking that their project is going just fine. But they manage to censor out the real thoughts of less affluent people and not knowing that their social engineering only worked on themselves. People don't watch the tv-shows or movies they promote because they aren't any good, not because they are "conservative". And we would be doing ourselves big disservice buying into their narrative. The little mermaid live remake is not made for children solely based on the run length of the movie and the art style. Anyone blaming the "right" for failing just don't understand children should be catereted to when making a family movie.
I’d add a fourth which is that the entire thing feels coercive from the bottom. It’s always couched as “of course this is just human decency” and with accusations of various forms of bigotry— the implied threat being that “bad things might happen if people found out you’re a bigot”. And increasing needs to perform, especially as connected to schools and jobs, again is coercion from the bottom-view. As are the incessant training modules that nag about privilege to a working class that knows it’s not true.
The truest meme I’ve ever seen was a 4chan meme. The left side is a kid with an old outdated computer in his bedroom, and this is labeled privileged white male. On the right is a very large skyscraper with a corporate logo, and this is labeled the oppressed. And this is what I think is driving the wars. It’s the sneering at the lower class that’s driving the rebellion. It’s a way to punch down at those poor stupid people that aren’t good enough to be elite like them. Their stupid backwards religion, their stupid folkways, their sexual prudishness, and their stupid, backwards desire for autonomy are proof they’re unworthy. It’s not like even if they agreed that a Yale graduate would actually want to get to know an auto service tech from Georgia. But being able to sneer at him makes this class hatred much more socially tenable. It’s not that he ugh works with his hands, no. It’s that he believes in crime-think.
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