Transcription
You may know, you will have seen him on the podcast circuit, Rob Henderson. Rob Henderson, I was listening to him last night on Chris Williams. A brilliant guy, the coiner of the phrase luxury beliefs. And there's an additional take I'll have on that, which is that people could you define? Yes, I ought to explain this.
So Rob's thesis, he grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles. He's just published a book uh which I really recommend. It's actually a a bestseller in the US already uh called Troubled about his childhood. and um he effectively had a you know he I think has only a couple of memories of his mother don't think he ever knew his biological father ended up being fostered and fostered in turn in a slightly dysfunctional home and I think you know he Rob would probably agree when I said that he got his together by joining the USAF to some extent and then ended up uh going to Yale and then on USA US Air Force and um
Uh, one of the interesting points of the book is that the stability of your home background has a bigger determinant on your future success. This is not, by the way, I want to be absolutely clear about this. This isn't destiny, okay? It's simply statistics. But if you look at statistics, then generally people's life outcomes are more predicated on the kind of stability of their family background than on family wealth or on education. And yet what Rob noticed is that when he got to Yale, it was fashionable to say, you know, I think marriage is just a social construct, you know, and uh, you know, I think people should be free to, you know, live in, you know, open partnerships with, you know, polyamory and so on, you know, you know that. Now, those people themselves didn't actually adopt those behaviors, but it was fashionable to advocate for them. Yeah. And he argued that this was and and he coined the phrase effectively uh you know fashionable beliefs in that there were beliefs that people held not because they really believed in them or that there was empirical evidence that these beliefs were uh indeed true or useful but simply because it raised your status holding that belief.
Wow. There there are certain beliefs. It's very interesting if you talk for example on the question of cannabis legalization. Okay. Now, by definition, if you've got into Yale, okay, you're probably not a stoner and you don't have a major problem with drugs, because if you did have a major problem with drugs, you probably wouldn't have got there. But it's very fashionable people who've got there who don't have a problem to go, yeah, it should all be decriminalized and blah blah blah, simply because that's a belief which has become almost arbitrarily fashionable. Um, and so you cleave to the beliefs that high status people uh tend to have regardless of anything else simply because they make you look good and feel good. Yeah.
Now, what's interesting to me is that to some extent the political left might have taken a wrong turn here because if you if your principal motivation is the redistribution of wealth and resources, okay, there are ways psychologically where you can get rich people to give their money to poorer people and still feel good about it. Okay, there are all sorts of psychological tricks. I mean, that's philanthropy after all. You know, that's the Gates Foundation at an extreme level, but it's also paying tax, paying duties. You know, airlines have worked out ways in which rich people pay considerably more to fly to the same destination than poor people. There are lots of ways in which you can separate the wealthy from their money without making them feel bad. But there's no way you can remove someone's or reduce someone's status and still leave and leave them feeling better. That that mechanism just doesn't exist in my opinion. So by turning politics into a status war between tribes where each group seeks in many ways to essentially promote policies and beliefs which make their own group look and feel good and uh and which perhaps demonstrate their commitment to a group that holds those beliefs and thereby diminishing the status of people who disagree with you you'll never change anybody's mind.
Now, if you look at advertising, you can look at all the world's advertising, you will not see a single, for example, advertisement from Ford going, "If you drive a GM car, you're a moron." Okay? Now, I'm sure it's been tried. In fact, I know it was tried, but it never I think it never ran in the very late days of um Bill Burnback, I think, where they kind of showed monkeys drinking other brands of beer. M and that that was an ad which Burnback himself killed because he said what we're trying to do is to win over our competitors drinkers and you're portraying them as as apes. Yeah. Okay. You can't change people's minds by diminishing their status. Okay. I mean the least persuasive message you can possibly say you can possibly construct is effectively I am right and you're wrong you dumb piece of Okay. It's not persuasive in many ways. If you want to persuade people, you do the opposite. You practice flattery or you do things that elevate their status or make them feel good about doing something. And as I said, you can make people feel good about surrendering money and resources and time. Okay? All sorts of voluntary activity goes on in life. We've got evolutionary mechanisms for that. What we haven't got as far as I can see is any evolutionary mechanism by which I can actually reduce my status and feel good about it.
Have you read heard of um Will Store's status game? Yeah, I've read it. It's fantastic. I've literally the science of storytelling um the status game has has um and his point is to be fair which is that your p I mean this is where of course you know great restaurants aren't always about food. 100%. Okay. It's about in particularly in places like New York. I mean, I find it a bit irritating in New York. You say, "Where are you going this evening?" You name the restaurant, they go, "Oh, that was so last year." And you go, "Well, is the food any good?" Because I'm not really interested in whether it's last year or this year. But you have this kind of weird kind of I guess it's a positive feedback effect where places just become hyper fashionable for a time and then basically hit a peak and fall off. I think London and the UK is less guilty of that. Generally we a good restaurant can remain a good restaurant for decades much more easily here. I think social media is is is what pulls gasoline on the status the sort of beginnings of the status fire because it's like I think what we'll su actually when I said um I I think I said fashionable beliefs he actually calls them luxury beliefs. luxury beliefs, the fashion beliefs, luxury belief. But I I think pulling this again into kind of food and drink, the ultimate um as you as you said, you can't say you you buy a Ford because you're a Yeah. But where I think this has almost gone to the next level is, you know, those um vegan meat brands. Yes. Who have their way of almost saying it is we're going to like look, we're not going to be like tofu or um uh like tofu, what's the other one? hemp, which is like a kind of I know exactly what it is. They're going to say we are we are in terms of this binary piece we're talking about earlier. It's like we are um we are bacon. We are and it's almost you had you had of course the brand which I think is now owned by Unilever called the vegetarian butcher. You had a brilliant branding effort in Beyond Meat. Yeah. Which was effectively saying this isn't a compromise. This isn't actually a substitute for meat. It's actually meatier than meat itself. Yeah. And that's a very clever branding in a sense, you know, um Tesla very cleverly did it with electric cars because it had always been assumed that an electric car was a kind of compromise, you know, that it was slower. It had obviously had lower range. That's kind of inevitable at least at this stage. But, you know, it had, you know, uh that you bought an electric car entirely as an act of self-sacrifice to benefit the planet. And Tesla comes along with a car which is basically a saloon car which has the performance of a super car. Yeah. Okay. I mean literally it it squares the circle if you like. It it doesn't it actually says this isn't a contradiction at all. There's no there's actually no compromise required when you have an electric car. You can have an electric car which is a better car. M
But that question of of turning politics into a status game where you seek to demean for example I mean calling people racist for things which are not remotely evidence of racism on the part of the person using the language for instance um uh particularly some of that status game I think is evidenced by people taking up arms on behalf of minority groups rather than actually letting the minority groups speak for themselves. I find something creepy about that. Well, that's I want to hear from trans people. I don't want to hear from a bunch of political activists affecting to speak on behalf of the trans community. I want trans voices on the TV talking about their own personal experience. Okay? And so when you have those people who essentially take up a kind of white savior approach, that's a status game. That's a luxury belief going on there. Now, it happens on the other side as well. I'm not suggesting this isn't in any way one-sided. What I'm saying is that there is no real form of persuasion that's effective that is preceded by the humiliation of the person you're trying to persuade.
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