Luxury Beliefs: How Progressive Snobs Signal They Are Better Than You

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, White Privilege, White Supremacy - What Are These Things Really About?

Photo by Artem Page on Unsplash

Last week a friend sent me this great talk that ties together beautifully a number of events and ideas myself, and many others, have been covering recently. White privilege and the so-called white supremacy resulting from it, has only recently become such a widely accepted convention. This belief that disparity of outcome between racial groups, concerning socio-economics, justice, and education, exist because of racial antipathy, has a lot to do with elitist snobbery in the form of luxury belief.

According to Writer and Psychology PhD student at Cambridge University, Rob Henderson, luxury beliefs are unusual and novel beliefs that people use to distinguish themselves from the middle or working class. Whereas in the past, people would confer status by displays of material wealth, today it is those who take up so-called luxury beliefs who signal their self-anointed superiority.

“Luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes…if someone in society holds a conventional opinion, a very easy way to show that you’re not a member of the riff-raff or the masses or something, is to hold the opposite opinion” -Rob Henderson

Probably no better example of this is when the freedom truckers descended on Ottawa, Canada last winter with a general message of freedom, and a generally agreed upon slightly more specific message related to Covid restrictions (ie. vaccine mandates and lock downs). But like all spontaneous mass movements, both message and support were mixed. Many working class Canadians, the “riff raff” as Rob Henderson quipped, were generally in support of the truckists (as Terry Glavin calls them). 

I will go out on this limb even further and say, in my view, the people who did not support the freedom rally in Ottawa, not all but definitely the ones most repulsed by the truckists, are most likely to be woke progressive types who hold luxury beliefs. People who embody this type of elitism look down on the working class majority of the country, and signal their virtue and luxury beliefs, so the rest of us know that they are better.

Previously, I wrote about the issue of the freedom rally being characterized as a racist white supremacist movement, which much of the media seemed to associate the spirit of the event with - The Resentment And Fragility Of Anti-Racism - by James Pew (substack.com)

I could not believe the divide in how Canadians interpreted the freedom rally. While I stand with the majority of working and middle class Canadians who supported the message of Canadian freedom, I was shocked at how many people demonstrated loathing for the truckists. You didn’t have to agree with all of their actions, I didn’t, but the many open displays of anti-trucker hostility and over-the-top performances of virtue and luxury belief were cringey enough to make me want to crawl into a deep hole and never come out.

The behavior of broadcasting or performing one's luxury beliefs isn’t just misguided and un-Canadian, it has a very real cost attached. In a recent WRDSB delegation by professor David Haskell, research based evidence was brought forward that shows teaching white privilege does harm. Among other things, it tends to increase hostility toward poor whites. This should not be a surprise to anyone.

Woke elitists and the encroachment of the great illiberal subversion continue unmolested because Woke philosophies of social justice, equity and diversity sound interesting, unusual, even cosmopolitan - they always give the sense of some previously hidden truth revealed, one the ignorant unwashed masses just can’t quite see or grasp. It is gross elitist condescension, self-indulgence, and sophisticated but insufferable snobbery. This is the practice of those who feel superior to everyone else. I believe it is that simple. 

At this point, we all have seen woke types get away with this by using common language in convoluted ways, or  jargon no one is familiar with.

“...it's not just the opinion itself, it's the way you express it. You express it using vocabulary no one has heard of.” - Rob Henderson

The first clue - when someone isn’t making sense, and isn’t even trying to. Understand that when they repeat activist slogans or use obscure buzz words, they are not making an argument. Usually, what is occurring is a display of fake virtue and the conferring of elite status. Call them out, make them explain their novel ideas and luxury beliefs. If they can’t do that, tell them about Rob Henderson’s concept. Explain how parroting an insincere morality, from an actual place of privilege, does little good for anyone, and most likely hurts poor people. 

A final Canadian example can be seen not just with the novel ideas around Indigenizing spaces, like universities, but also in the sophisticated progressive notions to de-colonize them. These particular luxury beliefs lead to the type of phony virtue performance that only obfuscates the hidden rent-seeking processes of the Aboriginal Industry. See The Political Economy Of Truth and Reconciliation by Frances Widdowson, for a detailed discussion of the nature of these rent-seeking processes - which basically get a free pass by the distraction provided when luxury beliefs of progressive elites become widely held.

This all plays into the hands of the corrupt neo-tribal elites who direct the government funds tax-payers believe are to improve conditions for poor Indigenous people on remote reserves, instead to the creation of sinecure positions often related to things like Indigenization. End result, a pattern emerges when luxury beliefs circulate - poor people suffer.

Massaging the superiority complexes of woke snobs by allowing their luxury beliefs to stand unchallenged needs to stop. Don’t stand by and let them talk nonsense, YOU must call them out, YOU must DO BETTER!!…just kidding, do the best you can, that's all I'll ever ask! But do try, gentle reader, to stand up to these elitist snobs.

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