Reacting to Rob Henderson’s Evidence-Free Luxury Beliefs Concept

Rob Henderson — Pillar of Rational Thought

Rob Henderson is a PhD candidate at Cambridge University with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Yale University. He’s made a name for himself for conceiving and propagating the idea of “luxury beliefs”, which he first wrote about in the New York Post in 2019. He recently appeared on the popular Jordan Peterson podcast, where he fleshed out the idea once again before their discussion moved on to other topics.

Henderson has an educational background that suggests he’s highly intelligent, and his undergraduate degree presumably would have taught him how to reason with at least a modest amount of scientific rigour. Yet if he knows how to reason scientifically, he didn’t bother to do so when he conceived of his concept of luxury beliefs.

Is the idea of luxury beliefs a scientific theory?

To begin, it’s important to note that Henderson presents his idea as a theory. He describes it without any caveats, limitations, or hints of uncertainty. He just lays it out as fact. So even if he doesn’t use the word “theory”, he implies that’s the status his idea deserves.

A theory in scientific terms is an explanation that’s withstood testing through the scientific method. It’s the next step after someone forms a hypothesis. When hypotheses haven’t been disproven through testing, a body of knowledge emerges that one can be confident overlaps with reality. That is what we can then call a theory, in the scientific sense.

Note that testing a hypothesis involves trying to disprove its validity, rather than the opposite. If someone who has proposed a hypothesis only gathers evidence in support of it, they’re just engaging in confirmation bias. Not only is that bad science, it’s bad reasoning altogether.

As we’ll see, Henderson’s theory of luxury beliefs is really just speculation, more akin to a hypothesis in scientific terms. Nevertheless, speculation can be, at times, superficially plausible to the extent that it warrants further exploration. But Henderson’s luxury beliefs idea doesn’t even meet that low bar.

What are luxury beliefs?

The hypothesis is basically as follows:

1. Affluent people care about displaying their affluence.
2. Today, it’s harder to display one’s affluence with luxury material goods because those goods have become more affordable.
3. Luxury beliefs are beliefs affluent people hold that can make them appear virtuous, but are harmful to the lower classes. People who hold these beliefs have the “luxury” of being able to hold them without suffering the consequences of implementing those beliefs.
4. Luxury beliefs are another way to display one’s affluence, apart from luxury material goods.
5. Therefore, affluent people display their affluence nowadays by holding and professing luxury beliefs.
6. Luxury beliefs trickle down to the lower classes, causing them harm.

What are examples of luxury beliefs?

The following are examples Rob Henderson cites as luxury beliefs:

1. Polyamory is a good lifestyle to adopt.
2. Religion is harmful or useless.
3. One’s success in life is more due to chance than hard work.
4. White people enjoy certain privileges, from being white, that non-white people don’t enjoy (AKA “white privilege”).
5. Terms stemming from woke identity politics like “heteronormative”, “cisgender”, and “cultural appropriation” represent important concepts.
6. Drugs should be decriminalized or legalized.
7. Anti-vaccination policies are a good idea.
8. Borders should be open.
9. The police should be abolished.

Notice anything peculiar? With the exception of anti-vaccination policies, all of the above ideas are popular on the left, and their opposite idea is popular with conservatives.

What parts of the luxury beliefs concept aren’t controversial?

It’s hard to know where to begin when cataloguing the flaws in Henderson’s hypothesis. But first, let’s dispense with his premises that are uncontroversial, or at least supported by some empirical evidence.

For one, a body of research does exist suggesting that affluent people care about displaying their affluence. They also care about social status more than the lower classes do. This might be because of a human bias towards loss aversion. Conspicuous affluence may have a plausible evolutionary explanation of some sort, like the conspicuous display of a peacock’s tail.

Second, people also adopt certain beliefs because they’re fashionable, or because their peer groups have adopted them, rather than on those beliefs’ intellectual and empirical merits. Of course, this isn’t confined to the affluent; it’s basically universal.

Where does Henderson’s concept begin to falter?

We already run into problems at the second premise. Luxury goods continue to be very expensive, and can easily be used to display one’s affluence. If some of those goods have decreased in price over the years, there are always more expensive options available. The market adjusts.

Henderson buttresses his observation that affluent people don’t display luxury goods as much anymore by pointing out that it’s now considered gauche to display one’s affluence through luxury goods. Instead, the affluent are now self-effacing, and admit to their privilege.

If the affluent appear more modest today, it’s difficult to see how that’s a bad thing. People don’t like being reminded of their low social status relative to others. But people also don’t like humble-bragging, or attempts at admitting one’s privilege conspicuously.

In any case, Henderson makes the unsupported leap that the new version of conspicuously displaying one’s affluence is to profess luxury beliefs. Mind reading is notoriously difficult, so he needs to find some way of supporting his idea without just saying “these people say they believe X for reason Y, but I know the real reason they believe X”.

Do people profess luxury beliefs disingenuously?

Henderson says a sign that affluent beliefs are luxury beliefs is that they’re professed by hypocrites. He cites an anecdote about a woman he spoke to who said polyamory was great, but she intended to live monogamously herself. He’s also said that a dating app on university campus will find about 50% of women who say they’re polyamorous. Presumably, he doesn’t believe they’re telling the truth.

This anecdote does little to support the luxury beliefs concept. First of all, being a hypocrite doesn’t make someone wrong. Ideas must be evaluated on their merits, not on the traits of the people professing them. If this “hypocritical” woman Henderson cites doesn’t personally wish to practice polyamory, it doesn’t follow that polyamory is wrong or harmful.

Second, it’s not clear that this woman is a hypocrite. If someone supports polyamory as a lifestyle option, in a general sense, it doesn’t imply that this person needs to adopt the lifestyle themselves. They could view it as an abstract ideal but not one they’re personally capable of achieving.

This is a bit like how someone might view having a healthy diet. It’s a good idea, but many people don’t achieve it. For the supporter of polyamory, they may genuinely feel that if people overcame their jealousy they could enjoy having multiple partners, each of whom could provide them fulfillment in different ways. Sure, that might be naïve, but it’s not disingenuous.

Another reason Henderson believes some affluent beliefs are luxury beliefs is that they will be completely outlandish. In his view, one could only profess such beliefs if one had the luxury of not being affected by their negative consequences if they were implemented. Examples of this include supporting open borders and abolishing the police.

But what Henderson hasn’t done, crucially, is offered a way in which these outlandish beliefs are supposed to increase the social status of the affluent people who profess them. Having outlandish, intellectually untenable views normally results in a loss of status, especially among people who are in a better position intelligence-wise to notice how untenable those views are.

Personally, I would accord negative social status to someone saying we should abolish the police. To be fair to them, I’d probably first ask them to clarify to see if what they support is replacing the police with something functionally identical that they don’t want to call “police” for some reason. If they told me they literally want to abolish the police, I’d probably conclude they were an idiot. That would hardly be a win for them.

Do luxury beliefs trickle down to the lower classes?

Henderson also offers no good reason to suppose that luxury beliefs trickle down to the lower classes. He makes the incredible suggestion that the faster fall in marriage rates in the lower classes since the 1960s, and the resulting increase in single-parent households, are because of the trickling down of luxury beliefs. There are so many problems with this.

Recall that Henderson’s hypothesis begins by explaining that luxury beliefs are a recent phenomenon. He says they arose because of the supposed drop in price of luxury goods, or the fact that conspicuously displaying social status with material wealth is now improper. Was this true in the 1960s too?

Today we see a sharp difference between the beliefs of the lower classes and those of the college elites Henderson discusses. Political polarization has never been greater. Not only that, we see incredible variation in the beliefs of any social class. If the trickle-down effect of luxury beliefs were happening, we’d expect a much smaller political chasm between the upper and lower classes. We’d also expect more uniformity regarding the specific luxury beliefs Henderson says would trickle down.

Henderson also seems to have a fairly restricted view of who the affluent luxury believers are. Basically, it’s only left-wing college students at elite universities. Other affluent people don’t count. Yet a look at the data reveals that there are plenty of right-wing wealthy people. In the US, only a small majority of wealthy people vote Democrat. Contrary to the commonly held view of right-wing populists, wealth is not strongly correlated with leftism.

There are also plenty of non-affluent people with avant-garde luxury beliefs who go to ordinary universities or colleges. Perhaps Henderson would consider these people to be affluent, by definition, because they’re pursuing higher education. Yet there’s a major difference between the student body of Harvard and that of Evergreen College. The latter is far less affluent, but also far more progressive. It would feature more students with the beliefs Henderson identifies above.

If we go back to the example Henderson proposes, i.e. the one about falling marriage rates among the poor since the ‘60s, and parallel rise in single-parent households, we can posit so many more plausible alternative explanations.

For one, buying expensive jewellery and having a large-scale wedding are still entrenched cultural practices, both of which are very costly. One might even call them luxuries. Simple economics could help explain the fall in marriage rates among the lower classes.

Another possible explanation is that inescapable poverty breeds crime. That leads to broken homes because fathers get incarcerated. This is a particular problem in the US and particularly so among Black communities.

Yet another possible explanation is that poor education in poor neighbourhoods leads people to have less wisdom about their life choices. When they feel trapped by poverty, they don’t think long-term. So they have children out of wedlock, and fathers don’t stick around as often.

Still another explanation is that the lower classes are more religious, which leads them to use birth control less because they believe it’s sinful to do so. They may also believe sex out of wedlock is sinful, but human nature being as frail as it is they end up having pre-marital sex anyway, leading to more unexpected pregnancies and absent fathers.

Are the reasons I’ve offered correct? Probably not, or at best they’re incomplete explanations. They’re just thoughts off the top of my head which I haven’t looked up to verify their accuracy. But they’re still much more plausible explanations than the luxury beliefs hypothesis.

Are the beliefs Henderson cites harmful to the lower classes?

Oddly, Henderson takes it for granted that all the above beliefs would be harmful to the lower classes if members of the lower classes were to hold them. He offers no support for his presumption.

Contrary to Henderson’s presumption that the criminalization of drugs is good for the lower classes, it has led to the incarceration of huge numbers of men in the US, which in turn has led to single-mother households. Decriminalization of drugs, or tightly-regulated legalization of drugs, are sensible policy alternatives.

In addition, drug decriminalization, or tightly-regulated legalization, aren’t fringe empirically unverified policy choices that only ultra-woke privileged students promote. On the contrary, decriminalization has been slowly gaining popularity around the world as governments realize more and more what an abject failure the US-led war on drugs has been.

The government of Portugal decriminalized possession of all drugs, and the data suggests this has been a resounding policy success. In Switzerland doctors can prescribe heroin, which is another policy success that has verifiably reduced the harm of drugs. Some people are opposed on principle to such an approach, but the data strongly suggests it simply leads to better outcomes for society.

Amazingly, the policy that Henderson appears to like, i.e. criminalizing drugs, has had the exact opposite effects he presumes it’s had. It’s the criminalization that has fueled the crime, addiction, and deaths caused by drugs. Criminalization increases price, which drives crime to feed addiction. It also prevents quality control, which leads to overdoses, sometimes from people taking a different drug than they expected.

Again, decriminalization is not a fringe policy proposal. It’s backed by ample empirical research, sound economic theory, and diverse opinion-makers like the libertarian Cato Institute, the centre-right Economist newspaper, the more-or-less politically neutral Scientific American magazine, and the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union.

Religion, too, is not clearly a net positive for the lower classes. Henderson views it as beneficial because it offers meaning and community to people who can’t find it at work, because members of the lower classes have jobs instead of careers. Here he fails to take a sufficiently granular approach and fails to weigh the costs of religion against its benefits.

Anti-theists object to religion because its core tenets are scientifically false, its morality is often twisted and cruel, and it encourages dogmatism over critical thought. Religion is also a business. Its leaders offer dubious benefits to its followers, who are encouraged to donate and/or tithe. Tithing (i.e. paying 10% of one’s gross wage to the church) is a greater burden on the lower classes, who tend to live paycheck to paycheck.

Sure, religion can also provide community and comfort, but it’s not at all clear that its benefits outweigh its costs on society or the lower classes in particular. Perhaps Henderson would question his pro-religion presumptions more if he thought about its role in repressive theocracies. Few conservatives are fans of Islam. Does he think it plays a positive role in the lives of the lower classes in predominantly Muslim countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia?

It’s also not unambiguously bad to acknowledge the important role of chance in one’s life success, no matter which social class one belongs to. Believing that all of one’s success is the result of one’s hard work has its own harms associated with it. It means having less empathy for those that don’t succeed and opposing policies that would help them. The flip side also applies to one’s failures. If someone who fails at life believes it’s all their fault, they might end up miserable, perhaps even suicidal.

That’s not to say that there can’t be some benefit to believing, especially on a personal level, that one is the master of one’s own destiny. Having an internal locus of control can be a motivating factor in one’s success. Acknowledging the role of luck also doesn’t have to mean dismissing the importance of hard work. Again, a granular approach is necessary here. Part of the “luck” of success is having the habits and personality to do that hard work.

Does Henderson consider facts that don’t fit his hypothesis?

The fact Henderson restricts his analysis to left-wing beliefs at elite universities (with the one exception of anti-vaccine sentiment) means he fails at hypothesis testing. He doesn’t examine any of the facts or trends that might contradict his hypothesis. If he did, he would soon realize how weak it is.

For example, anti-COVID vaccine sentiment is objectively harmful to people who have that belief, because it puts them at risk of getting COVID, which includes a non-trivial risk of death. One could call anti-COVID vaccine sentiment a luxury belief, yet it’s clear that it didn’t originate from elite universities and isn’t propagated by them either.

Anti-COVID vaccine sentiment is far more predominant among the lower classes, i.e. those who are not college educated. It emerged from right-wing populists, who are, or were, virtually all Trump supporters. These are the same set of people who regularly attack the excesses of woke culture at universities, and the same set of people that Henderson’s article would strongly resonate with (with the exception of his view that anti-vaccine beliefs are harmful).

After all, Henderson’s article is like a delicious treat to the ascendant populist right in the US. They resent the latte-sipping cultural elites who live in the big coastal cities, and were educated at the top universities from which Henderson has drawn his “data” (i.e. anecdotes). Now the right-wing populists can also single out these cultural elites as a harmful force for society because of their luxury beliefs and find new reasons to resent them further. The populists are unlikely to notice how poor Henderson’s hypothesis is because his views reinforce their pre-existing beliefs.

There’s also an underlying current of intellectual arrogance to Henderson’s hypothesis. One gets the sense he feels so certain in the correctness of his conservative views that he came up with a way to explain away the opposing views held by his university peers, i.e. “they only believe that because they’re affluent status seekers displaying their luxury beliefs as a way to move up the social hierarchy. Obviously the ideas themselves have no merit”. No need for Henderson to examine the ideas themselves, he can just discredit their source.

Personally, I’ve noticed that attacking the source of an idea, rather than the idea itself, has a particular appeal to conservatives. Above, Henderson pointed out the supposed hypocrisy of the woman he met who spoke in favour of polyamory but practiced monogamy herself. Once again, if someone’s a hypocrite it doesn’t make them wrong. I see this same fallacy committed especially often in discussions of climate change, e.g. “Leonardo DiCaprio is campaigning for governments to do more to tackle climate change, but he takes private jets himself!”, as if DiCaprio’s words would somehow be more correct if they were spoken by someone who lives in the woods and has zero carbon footprint.

Getting back to information that contradicts Henderson’s hypothesis, we can ask ourselves: are there other costly (i.e. “luxury”) beliefs that people hold that didn’t originate in the affluent class? If one takes a few minutes to think about it, the answer is obvious: plenty.

Take Q-anon, or basically most right-wing conspiracy theories. It’s costly to have those beliefs. They could be viewed as luxury beliefs in the same sense as the costly mating signal of the peacock’s tail. They take up time and mental energy that could be used for more useful purposes.

Like luxury beliefs, right-wing conspiracy theories could be argued to be harmful to the lower classes that believe in them. They cause distrust in government institutions. They lead their followers to believe sinister forces greater than them control society for nefarious purposes. This is similar to the effect of believing luck is important to one’s life success, discussed above, that Henderson claims is harmful to the lower classes. Both sets of beliefs can be argued to make its adherents feel powerless: “why bother trying, it’s all out of my control anyway?”.

No one would seriously argue that conspiracy theories like Q-anon, Pizzagate, or the Biden-Ukraine story originated from cultural elites as luxury beliefs that trickled down to the lower classes. Yet these have many of the same features. They can provide a kind of status to their believers, who garner accolades from fellow believers for being able to “see the truth”. They could also be argued to confer a sense of virtue in their believers, for having acquired special knowledge or insight that others have failed to obtain.

So what’s really going on here?

If I were to guess, I’d say Henderson is simply a highly conservative person who arrived at university and hadn’t been in touch with left-wing woke politics prior to that. He had a strong sense of certainty in his own views, so when he encountered opposing views, he didn’t even bother entertaining them to evaluate their merits. Instead, he dismissed them as nonsense. After that, he had to find a way to reconcile the apparent intelligence of his peers with the “nonsense” views they held.

Also, Henderson faced views that were antithetical to his own rather than just mildly discordant with them. It was probably a shock to hear such different views, which made them all the more noticeable. The conspicuousness of the woke views he encountered motivated him to come up with a unique class-based explanation for their origin instead of a universal one.

But a universal explanation for the beliefs of woke campus students would accord better with Occam’s Razor. If Henderson had bothered to attempt to look objectively at any group of people with certain political leanings, he would have unearthed plenty of hypocrisy and irrational beliefs. He could have come up with any number of similar mildly plausible-sounding evolutionary explanations. There’s nothing unique about woke college students in this way.

Henderson probably can’t perceive the exact same phenomena taking place within conservative communities, because he at least partly agrees with other members of those communities. He probably doesn’t experience the same level of discord if someone says the 2020 election was stolen from Trump than if someone says they favour open borders. Yet the former claim is both highly popular among conservatives, and flatly, demonstrably false.

Conclusion

Thinking rigorously is hard, while reinforcing one’s pre-existing beliefs is easy. Much as Henderson was shocked to see his otherwise intelligent peers embrace irrational beliefs, I’m shocked to see him propound an idea with so little evidence backing it up and so little plausibility. The idea of luxury beliefs is intellectually bankrupt, but I’m sure it brought many smiles on the faces of conservatives. They love a good story about the moral corruption of the left and especially left-wing cultural elites.