Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the seating area next to the Valu-Mart with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches at 7pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at my apartment front door for 7:30 instead. (There is free city parking at Bridgeport and Regina, 22 Bridgeport Rd E.)

Discussion

Hold on to your hats, this week we're diving into the culture war, as a little treat >:)

Rob Henderson is a cultural critic who's fairly popular on Substack and coined the term "luxury beliefs" in 2019. From its Wikipedia page, "A luxury belief , according to its proponents, is an idea or opinion that confers status on the upper class at little cost, while often supposedly inflicting costs on the lower class, in their view".

Henderson claims to be politically agnostic, and I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He does mostly gets airtime in conservative places like Fox News and Rod Dreher's substack, but I think if you ask him, he'll say it's because he's been frozen out of mainstream and left-leaning spaces. Also he has like three lesbian moms, surely that gives him lived experience points?

Some standard examples of luxury beliefs, according to its proponents (strawmanning a bit for effect):

• Police should be defunded (people who advocate for this all live in safe and wealthy neighbourhoods with good security)
• Drugs should be legalized (people who advocate for this come from communities and families who have not been destroyed by addiction)
• The nuclear family should be abolished (people who advocate for this all come from stable nuclear families)

I'll also talk a little about the contents of his book and the book event I went to if we have some time.

Readings

Luxury Beliefs Are Status Symbols - Rob Henderson, 2022
A good overview of the concept.

ONE OF
When Everything is Eugenics, Nothing Is - Amy S.F. Lutz, 2024
Defunding My Mistake - Y Meskout, 2023
Luxury belief case studies. Lutz is the Vice President of the National Council on Severe Autism and writes about autism, Meskout is a public defender writing about the police. Are they pointing at something real, or letting their own personal experiences blind them to the larger issues?

ONE OF
Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs - Scott Alexander, 2018
A Chemical Hunger – Part I: Mysteries - Slime Mold Time Mold, 2021
Two case studies that steelman specific luxury beliefs. I think the best case against luxury beliefs being real is that if you dig into most of them, you find well reasoned articulate justifications for them that do actually cleave to reality. Well, is it actually that, or is it all just clever sophistry?

Questions

Noodle on these before the meetup.

1. What are some beliefs that you/your social circle/rationalists hold, that could be maybe construed as luxury beliefs? 
2. What evidence supports or contradicts the primary claims made by luxury belief proponents?
3. How seriously should we take the notion of luxury beliefs, and what are the implications of taking it seriously?
4. Are there examples where beliefs popular among the underprivileged could be considered "luxury beliefs"? Would that complicate the overall framing?
5. Are there examples where beliefs that seem aligned with uplifting the underprivileged have failed to deliver on that aim or even been counterproductive? (Besides the obvious one. Guys, we haven't even really tried that one seriously.) What can we learn from those cases?