Wild with Sarah Wilson9 Aug 2022

ROB HENDERSON: Woke “luxury beliefs” are the new Birkins and Bentleys

The wealthy elite once signalled their status with expensive handbags and super yachts. Now they do it with what Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs” - so-called politically correct pronouncements that, in reality, only the rich can afford to live by and thusly differentiate them from the rest of us. We’re talking about such wokenesses as “defund the police” and calls for drug legalisation, death to marriage and putting “polyamorous” on your dating profile. Of course, defunding the police is all very well if you can afford to live in a gated community with low crime and security guards.

It should be said, Rob, now a moral philosopher at the University of Cambridge, comes at this wild idea from a very unique perspective. He grew up poor, a foster kid who was doing drugs at the age of 9 and who had to learn to decode elite signalling as an outsider once he hit the liberal US university scene. This is a super juicy and confronting thesis, evidence of which I can’t stop noticing everywhere and I loved the way Rob applies the wild idea to online dating, cancel culture and conservative politics.

Follow Rob on Twitter

Check out Rob's Website

And you can read the New York Times op-ed we talk about.

His book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class will be published in the European fall of 2023.

We chat about Joseph Henrich’s WEIRD theory and class myths in Australia from my Lech Blaine chat, both ran a few episodes back.

If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" page.

Subscribe to my Substack newsletter for more such conversations.

Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life

Let’s connect on Instagram! It’s where I interact the most.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(215)

INDY JOHAR: "How do we prepare the world for what’s coming?"

Indy Johar (founder of Dark Matter Labs, systems designer) closes this 12-part series on the life-enhancing “what comes next” that we need (and want) to be creating. Indy is one of the world’s most or...

7 Jul 1h 17min

SARAH STEIN LUBRANO: How do we change people’s minds about what’s happening to the world?

Sarah Stein Lubrano (neuroscientist, political scientist, former obituary writer!) is an expert in how to change people’s minds most effectively and for the betterment of all beings. In this chat, we ...

30 Jun 1h 4min

JOHN SEED: Is Deep Ecology the answer?

John Seed (Deep Ecology OG, global rainforest steward) says we can’t save the world. And that the planetary crisis is not a failure of information or awareness; it’s a failure of human identity. We ha...

23 Jun 57min

JEREMY LENT: Can humans build a (beautiful) new civilisation?

Jeremy Lent (author, systems thinker) is a leading authority on civilisations and has just created a manifesto on how to shift from the current crumbling one to what he calls an Ecocivilization. He jo...

16 Jun 56min

FRANCIS WELLER: “Grief will wake us up”…so how do we do good grief again?

Francis Weller (psychotherapist, bestselling author + “soul activist”) believes we have entered a “Long Dark”, a multi-decade (century?) period of collapse and psychological pain that will demand we l...

2 Jun 1h 1min

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: How do we create a values-led politic from this mess?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (historian of fascism +NYT bestselling author of Strongmen) is an internationally recognised expert in how psychologically unstable men come to power and use corruption, sexual predatio...

26 Mai 59min

ZAK STEIN: How do we raise kids in a metacrisis?

Zak Stein (Harvard philosopher of education, AI + kids expert) is worried that we are not raising and educating our kids for the kind of wobbly, harsh future they will be inheriting. Zak is a Harvard ...

19 Mai 1h 11min

MICHAEL MUTHUKRISHNA: Can we cooperate our way out of this? (Warning: a tricky episode!)

Michael Muthukrishna (behavioural scientist, cultural evolution researcher) has a unified “theory of everyone” that says we evolved as a species, surviving crises and collapses, through cooperative no...

12 Mai 1h 16min