Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
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Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
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Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
#2Needs "2022".
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
#3Is this the new codeword for "champagne socialism"? Interesting how "trickle down economics" isn't provided as an example of a luxury belief, seems like it would fit the provided definition extremely well in the context of US politics.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
#4“there are no starving people with celiac disease”
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
#5Kind of falls apart at the end with the defund the police thing. If you ask poor people "do you want to defund the police" they'll mostly say no. If you ask them "would you rather see fewer police in your neighborhood, and more medical and social response teams instead?" they'll mostly say yes. So in a sense sure "defund the police" is a luxury belief but also... no.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
#6Reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by Huxley:
"If you’re to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself—often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others"
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
#7This piece does not really touch on the many confounding variables that are found when examining the correlation between esoteric beliefs and social status. Level of education, for instance, is a biggie, even when accounting for the perceived prestige of where one goes to school.
The author dismisses some concepts, like cultural appropriation, by saying that the working-class people he grew up with not only didn't trouble themselves with it but didn't even realize that it was a concept.
But just because someone with low education and/or low status doesn't know about or understand a topic doesn't make that topic merely a status symbol, any more than it makes calculus a status symbol.
I agree, in part, with the author that certain pockets of higher education can veer into navel gazing and ivory-tower perspectives, and it can lead students to adopt distorted views of the world. But I don't think it can be said that just because a point of view is more prevalent among higher-educated people (who may indeed have higher status) that means the idea is bunk.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
#8The author is arguing extreme ideas like defund the police is self serving without anyone’s real interests in mind. Instead of calling it luxury beliefs, this the next phase of identity politics. A new litmus test.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
#9Given that working class rubes like myself who finished college in a place my man can't even find in a map are somehow able to know what “cultural appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative” mean, and do that by the same means as everyone else (reading about it) I'm going to presume that the good man has a very peculiar understanding of what "elite" means.
Re: Luxury beliefs are status symbols (2022)
#10This guy's Twitter account is full of the worst replicating psychology stuff. He's an outrage merchant surfing the present wave. When I pointed out one such failure to replicate he blocked me.