Luxury beliefs are an elite indulgence we can ill-afford
Do you believe we should defund the police? Do you think we should maximise freedom, always and everywhere? Do you have faith that children will be just fine regardless of who’s raising them? If so, congratulations—you’re a member of the elite, a distinction marked these days less by possession of luxury goods and increasingly by possession of luxury beliefs.
Luxury beliefs are status symbols that confer distinction on those who profess them. They elevate their holders above the plebian mass and, just as importantly, prevent the proles from entering the elites’ club. So far, so Louis Vuitton handbag, and if luxury beliefs were as vapid as an expensive accessory perhaps they’d do no real harm. Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. Writing for the New York Post, Rob Henderson identifies the issue: luxury beliefs are “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”
Henderson’s backstory has made him an up-close observer of this phenomenon: “I was born into poverty and grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and all around California. I fled as soon as I could at age 17, enlisting in the military right after high school.” After his air force service, he went to Yale and he’s now a doctoral candidate at Cambridge. His personal experience gives him a distinctive perspective on the ideas and attitudes of the elite.
Take defunding the police, a common shibboleth among US progressives. Henderson points out that compared to the wealthy, “the poorest Americans are seven times more likely to be victims of robbery, seven times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault, and twenty times more likely to be victims of sexual assault.” The wealthy, already secure in their safe neighbourhoods and gated communities, have the resources to replace police with private security. The poor do not. They, not the wealthy, would bear the brunt of the change if the elite’s slogan were taken seriously.
Here's another common example of a luxury belief identified by Henderson—that family structure doesn’t matter. Kids will be just fine, no matter who’s raising them, as long as they’re loved. Think back to the establishment of the Families Commission in the early 2000s, which was quite deliberately named for plural families in order to be “inclusive” and to “have regard to the diversity of New Zealand families and family groups, which have many different forms and structures”. Heaven forbid that we ask whether some family structures, on average, produce better outcomes for children than others—and they do. For example, a 2009 report commissioned by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner concluded that young children were more likely to be seriously assaulted or killed by a “non-biological father”. The more recent Productivity Commission report, A Fair Chance for All, told us multiple times that that sole parents and broken families are more likely to experience persistent disadvantage but, in a case of what looked like wilful blindness, failed to provide any solutions to address this. But whether or not we want to face it, there’s no getting away from the reality, even if it only crops up in official reports now as an embarrassing aside.
We could multiply examples of individual luxury beliefs, but it’s more important to try to understand the undercurrents that produce them. Let’s look at three of those drivers, a combination of modern technology, ancient heresy, and contemporary philosophy.
The first is the digital revolution. This is the change wrought by the masters of the technological universe, Silicon Valley titans like Facebook founder and Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg who famously declared he wanted to “move fast and break things.” Mission, as they say, accomplished. No doubt Zuckerberg and his family, with a reported net worth of more than US$100 billion, will be just fine in the world they have helped to make. The same can’t be said for their customers. The relationship between social media algorithms and an increasingly bitter and polarised political discourse is just one example of the price the majority are paying for the tech elites’ luxury. In addition, researchers like Professor Jonathan Haidt have been tracking the link between social media and social pathologies, which has particularly affected teen girls and features most starkly in increased rates of mental illness and hospitalisation for self-harm. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The consequences of lionising digital disruption appear even before we get to the emergency room, for example in the growing trend for those same teen girls and young women to show up in front of plastic surgeons wanting their bodies edited to match the images they painstakingly adjusted for Instagram.
This uncontrolled social and technological experiment is closely connected with the second driver of luxury beliefs—the contemporary return of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. Among other things, Gnostics believe that what truly defines us is our spiritual essence, that physical phenomena like our bodies are “inferior—if not a prison to escape, certainly a mere instrument to be manipulated to serve the goals of the ‘person’”, according to Princeton professor Robert George. In other words, the heresy holds that our bodies and our souls are separable, and what truly defines each of us is some ineffable ‘inner self’.
Indeed, altering our bodies to match our internal idea of ourselves, to more closely conform to who we wish to be and how we wish to be seen by others, is understood as an act of liberation. But, argues the writer and cultural critic Mary Harrington, this freedom of the few is purchased by the servitude of the many. What she calls “luxury Gnosticism” sounds fine for the elite when, for example, they choose to outsource the bodily labour of pregnancy and the physical transformation it entails; it’s a different story for the surrogate severed from the child she nurtured in her womb.
Of course, most contemporary Gnostics aren’t aware they’re merely carrying on an ancient tradition. Instead, they think of themselves as pursuing the modern principle of autonomy, the third driver of luxury beliefs. This is what leads us, like juveniles, to assert our independence, to say, like Hugh Grant’s character in About a Boy, “Some men are islands you know. I’m a bloody island. I’m bloody Ibiza.” As independent beings, we’re entitled to do what we want so long as we don’t harm others.
But how do we define “harm”? If we’re committed to the project of independence and the idea of our island-hood, we’ve already baked in the assumption that what we do has little relevance to our neighbours. That neuters the concept of harm as a limiting principle from the outset. We see this starkly in the practice of euthanasia. Most of the pro-euthanasia rhetoric, here and overseas, focuses on individual choice and autonomy, on self-mastery and self-actualisation—to live life on your individual terms, in accordance with your conception of dignity. It’s even in the name of the legislation, the End of Life Choice Act. But what if we’re not independent? What if we’re interdependent, “social animals” as Aristotle said? In that case, autonomy might have wider consequences; individual choices start to look like a societal template. As usual, the most vulnerable people are hit the hardest by the new norms.
Look at the Canadian experience; recent investigative journalism in The New Atlantis has shown that factors like poverty and lack of access to medical treatment are key factors propelling the uptake of what is euphemistically called “MAiD”, medical assistance in dying. To be clear, these aren’t supposed to be valid reasons under the current legal regime, and yet they are there. Perhaps that’s why recent polling found that, “Half of Canadians would agree to allow adults in Canada to seek medical assistance in dying due to an inability to receive medical treatment (51%) or a disability (50%)”, and a quarter of Canadians would support extending euthanasia eligibility to the homeless and those in poverty. In the words of Alexander Raikin, the journalist who wrote the article in The New Atlantis, “the picture that emerges is not a new flowering of autonomy but the hum of an efficient engine of death.”
There’s a common thread linking these three drivers—the idea that we can make and unmake our selves and even our own reality. You can be whoever you want to be, have it all, break the mould. Reality is a blank slate waiting for you to inscribe your unique narrative on it. This is the project of self-creation, animated by the ultimate luxury belief—that the world is fluid, and so are we. Of course, this works out a lot better if you have some capital, financial or cultural, so you can create some structure and stability in this newly liquid society where the old sources of security and meaning—family, faith, nationhood, culture, memory, and tradition—have been swept away. Everyone else may just find themselves struggling in the rising waters.
Luxury beliefs are selfish, harming the weak for the sake of the strong. They’re also pervasive, so loosening their grip on society and our selves will be difficult. But change is possible once we’ve acknowledged the problem. At a personal level, we have a choice to make—will we live for luxury, as though status and comfort are the goal of life? Or will we instead pursue truth instead of falsehood, contentment instead of indulgence, even if it puts us offside with the elites? At a societal level, we have to re-examine the beliefs we encode in our laws, policies, and culture. That starts with reflecting on anthropology—what is it to be human? Are we truly independent and autonomous, as the elites believe, or are we inter-dependent in ways that might mean we should limit ourselves for the sake of our neighbours, especially those who are most vulnerable? Do we create ourselves, our meaning, and our worlds, or do we find them by understanding ourselves in relation to reality, history, culture, that we did not make? Might this mean changing the cultural norms that support and even celebrate fluidity, social experimentation, and unfettered choice?
“Luxury” originally meant something like debauchery, a state of “sinful self-indulgence”. Luxury beliefs fit that original definition pretty well. They might be clothed in the language of empowerment and care, but they take more than they give, and we should reject them and refuse to repeat these shibboleths. Maybe that will limit our opportunities and our ability to enter into the ranks of the elite and obtain the prestige that accompanies membership of that club. But that membership imposes a terrible cost, on us and on the most vulnerable members of our society. No-one should want to join a club that exacts that price.
Thanks Alex. 'Luxury beliefs' beautifully describes some of our present struggles. This is an excellent piece subtly connecting various political/community movements and helping the reader think about them from another perspective. Thanks again.
Many thanks, Alex. Insightful, well-researched and articulate. Legislators could do with a touch of such acumen.