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Troubled - Rob Henderson


james22

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  • Parsad changed the title to Troubled - Rob Henderson
  • 3 weeks later...

Henderson is best known for developing the concept of ‘luxury beliefs,’ which are political ideologies and policy proposals that confer social status on the well-to-do folk who support them. Meanwhile, those same policies injure poor and working-class people when implemented at the state’s behest. His insight is startling and applies to many more interventions than obviously daft ones like defunding the police.

 

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/misery-loves-company/

 

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about one aspect of this book: the extent to which dishonesty is entirely normalized in our society among the elite. The luxury classes people pretend to believe that marriage doesn’t matter, but very few of them have children out of wedlock. They pretend to believe that fat-shaming is a serious moral affront, while they spend a fortune on organic food and personal trainers to keep themselves fit and trim. They pretend to believe many things that their lives betray they don’t actually believe at all.

 

It’s easy to think that most of them are just going along with the crowd and don’t realize they’re lying, but the truth is that most of them do know, which is why they expressed agreement with Rob in private. This is a familiar dynamic; I used to get DMs on Twitter from people apologizing that they couldn’t follow me (though they made a point to daily read my tweets) without upsetting their coworkers. These people included a couple of college professors, a Unitarian minister, and a couple of therapists, and possibly others I’ve forgotten.

 

Dishonesty is so normalized that this kind of performative fragmentation—signaling that one believes certain things while acting as if one believes other things—may eventually be recognized as a marker of intelligence and proper preparation for class climbing (or class maintenance, if one starts off in that class).

 

https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/agency-is-a-life-defining-skill

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