I’m really excited to release my first podcast! Occasionally, I will do podcasts with special guests, exploring themes which have featured on my Substack. This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Rob Henderson, an academic and essayist who is well-known for his theory of luxury beliefs. Rob is doing a PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge and writes essays for a range of online outlets. In a series of essays which have gone viral, Rob has introduced the concept of luxury beliefs. Luxury beliefs are ideas that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.
Rob is like me but a generation younger. I grew up in Red Bluff, went into the military to get out and also have a degree from a pretty good University, though not Yale.
I would like to know more about this theory of luxury beliefs. Most people, of all classes, believe a bunch of things that are pretty clearly not true, as part of a mostly internally consistent belief system, usually one that is promulgated by a group they are in. "Religion" "Trumpism" "Liberal wokeism" are all easy examples. Most people don't want to do the hard work of reconciling inconvenient facts with their preconceptions so they just ignore them, down vote them on Reddit, what have you. It's only with a certain amount of intellectual maturity and humbleness can you start to accept that two apparently contradictory things can be true at the same time.
God gave us two texts, nature and The Bible. If they seem to contradict each other, it is because we don't understand one of them well enough yet. - St. Augustine (paraphrased)
I will quibble a bit with the "Defund the police" bit. Most activists wanted to divert money from the police into social services. You can hire a social worker for less than a police officer and the social worker is more likely to get a better outcome from a mentally ill homeless person. While it is true that poor people don't like the "Defund the police" motto, no one actually does. It was a bad motto in the first place. But we can and should demand better policing and a better response from our government to issues like homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction. We aren't going to arrest our way out of these problems.
Fantastic interview! Such a fundamental issue now. Much of the left points to anti-intellectual trends of the right, but themselves fail to truly open up their thoughts to debate.
It would be quite interesting to explore the effects technology and personalization algorithms have with reinforcement bias of these luxury beliefs. Personalization algorithms have created an inversion of our previous institutions of group-selected culture amplification (newspapers, encyclopedias, books, and the vertical human chains of selection ie: what books does your neighborhood store carry) to where your desires are provided to you readily, accelerating luxury belief adoption.
Excellent discussion. I think "luxury beliefs" is a perfect descriptor for the impulse behind all the virtue-signaling we see going on these days. People who mouth p.c pieties at cocktail parties and who get their knickers in a twist when someone doesn't use the "correct" language or exhibit the "correct" philosophical position, yet who do nothing to actually help people. They are the human counterpart to the puffed-up peacock.
Rob is like me but a generation younger. I grew up in Red Bluff, went into the military to get out and also have a degree from a pretty good University, though not Yale.
I would like to know more about this theory of luxury beliefs. Most people, of all classes, believe a bunch of things that are pretty clearly not true, as part of a mostly internally consistent belief system, usually one that is promulgated by a group they are in. "Religion" "Trumpism" "Liberal wokeism" are all easy examples. Most people don't want to do the hard work of reconciling inconvenient facts with their preconceptions so they just ignore them, down vote them on Reddit, what have you. It's only with a certain amount of intellectual maturity and humbleness can you start to accept that two apparently contradictory things can be true at the same time.
God gave us two texts, nature and The Bible. If they seem to contradict each other, it is because we don't understand one of them well enough yet. - St. Augustine (paraphrased)
I will quibble a bit with the "Defund the police" bit. Most activists wanted to divert money from the police into social services. You can hire a social worker for less than a police officer and the social worker is more likely to get a better outcome from a mentally ill homeless person. While it is true that poor people don't like the "Defund the police" motto, no one actually does. It was a bad motto in the first place. But we can and should demand better policing and a better response from our government to issues like homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction. We aren't going to arrest our way out of these problems.
George Orwell was right about luxury beliefs: "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them."
Fantastic interview! Such a fundamental issue now. Much of the left points to anti-intellectual trends of the right, but themselves fail to truly open up their thoughts to debate.
It would be quite interesting to explore the effects technology and personalization algorithms have with reinforcement bias of these luxury beliefs. Personalization algorithms have created an inversion of our previous institutions of group-selected culture amplification (newspapers, encyclopedias, books, and the vertical human chains of selection ie: what books does your neighborhood store carry) to where your desires are provided to you readily, accelerating luxury belief adoption.
Excellent discussion. I think "luxury beliefs" is a perfect descriptor for the impulse behind all the virtue-signaling we see going on these days. People who mouth p.c pieties at cocktail parties and who get their knickers in a twist when someone doesn't use the "correct" language or exhibit the "correct" philosophical position, yet who do nothing to actually help people. They are the human counterpart to the puffed-up peacock.