Rob Henderson is the author of "Troubled: The Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class" and a prolific writer. He is also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and is a prolific Slate writer with 75,000+ subscribers.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000Okay, everybody, very special conversation for you today.
00:03:20.000And so, you know, after experiencing all of that disorder, I had to get out of there as soon as I could.
00:03:27.000So I fled, enlisted in the Air Force when I was 17.
00:03:31.000And with some hiccups and missteps along the way, eventually I found myself at Yale on the GI Bill and then off to Cambridge on a scholarship.
00:03:41.000And throughout that experience, traveling along the class ladder, I was fascinated by these class differences, the differences between the people who I grew up around in the foster homes in LA, this working class town in Northern California, the people I served with in the military.
00:03:59.000And then I get to Yale and I'm hearing all kinds of strange, bizarre, newfangled ideas that I'd never heard before expressed with such confidence.
00:04:08.000So, I mean, there were two differences there.
00:04:10.000One, the unusual beliefs, but then two, the self-assuredness with which they were expressed.
00:04:16.000And during that period, I was also reading a lot about the sociology of class, the psychology of status.
00:04:21.000And one day, finally in grad school, it came to me: luxury beliefs.
00:04:25.000Luxury beliefs have replaced luxury goods in many cases.
00:04:29.000And so, what these luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent and the credentialed, while often inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society.
00:04:41.000And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief.
00:04:49.000And the elite universities are where these beliefs are born, where they're conceived and born, and then they're propagated throughout the media and then throughout the rest of society.
00:05:00.000And the people who pass through these institutions wield outsized influence on culture, on policy, on discourse, on the stories and aspirations we have and that we tell ourselves.
00:05:11.000And then you see that often the people who promote them are unscathed, unaffected, and then the rest of us have to suffer whatsoever.
00:05:39.000So I really want to spend time on luxury beliefs.
00:05:41.000So just the audience, I think this is a game-changing analysis because it really puts a very crisp and sharp marker on what we're living through.
00:05:51.000The best of all examples, I think, I want your thoughts, is defund the police.
00:05:55.000So defund the police got really big in the summer of 2020, but largely pushed by upper middle class PhDs and college educated, imposed upon the rest of society, but they are immune from, as you say, the consequences or the costs.
00:06:10.000This is something that you'd hear at a cocktail party in Kenny Bunkport or in Aspen, where they're like, you know, yeah, defund the police, but they know they will never have to live with what that means.
00:06:55.000All of these institutions lined up to support this.
00:06:57.000There was a period where, depending on where you worked, if you posted something online in support of law enforcement, you could lose your job.
00:07:10.000What do actual Americans believe about reducing spending for law enforcement?
00:07:14.000And I looked at the data, multiple surveys throughout that period.
00:07:17.000If you break down the results by income category, it was always the highest income Americans who were the most in support of defunding the police.
00:07:23.000The lowest income Americans were always the least in support of defunding the police.
00:07:27.000The higher up you go in education, the more support you saw.
00:07:30.000And even when you break down the data by political orientation, white progressives were the most in favor of defunding the police, and black and Hispanic Democrats were less in favor of it.
00:07:40.000And so this is a clear example here where the people who live in gated communities, safe neighborhoods, low crime zip codes, they were the ones who were promoting this idea that we don't need police, that we need to hire social workers and violence interrupters.
00:07:56.000And then what did you see from the period of 2020 to 2022?
00:08:02.000And poor people, low-income people, are always the most affected by crime because they're the ones who live in those low-income areas, those high-crime areas.
00:08:11.000And there are far more victims of crime than there are perpetrators.
00:08:16.000There's a small number of people who commit most of the crimes.
00:08:18.000And most of the people they victimize are people who are in their proximity near them.
00:08:23.000And that's why, that's one reason, among others, why they did not support this movement.
00:08:27.000And yet you would open the pages of the New York Times, elite media outlets, and they would be writing, publishing op-eds and essays and so on about how we needed to rethink and reimagine law enforcement and policing.
00:08:40.000And it wasn't until you started to see public disorder start to affect the upper middle class in some cases when they started to have to hire off-duty police and private security guards.
00:08:50.000And they were slowly becoming affected by it that suddenly you started to see a lot of counties and a lot of cities rethink this idea.
00:08:57.000And what about the- But they were never affected then.
00:09:00.000If they were never affected, I think we would still be seeing those violent crimes.
00:09:15.000I mean, you have a PhD in psychology from Cambridge.
00:09:18.000So if you were to kind of psychoanalyze, you know, a little pop psychology, someone who is at that cocktail party bragging about, well, I am in favor of defund the police.
00:10:06.000And then if you fast forward to the mid-20th century, a sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu wrote a book called Distinction, a social critique of the judgment of taste.
00:10:15.000And in that book, he coined this phrase, cultural capital.
00:10:19.000And the idea here is that elites, they would convert their economic capital into cultural capital.
00:10:26.000They attend expensive schools and then they learn intricate and arcane knowledge about wine and art and exotic locations to have interesting things to say at cocktail parties.
00:10:36.000My claim is that today, the latest expression of cultural capital is luxury beliefs.
00:10:41.000So now if you hang around elite circles, increasingly it's about these kind of moral signaling, luxury beliefs, this idea about how we need to reimagine society.
00:10:51.000If the conventional view is X, I'm going to take this oppositional view.
00:10:54.000I'm going to believe Y. If most Americans want a strong police force, how do I signal my expensive education and my sophisticated views and beliefs?
00:11:04.000And the fact that I have the time on my hands to read elite media outlets and that I hang around the right circles and hold the proper views.
00:11:13.000Well, you express these luxury beliefs, these interesting ideas and opinions are interesting to you and your circle anyway.
00:11:19.000And so this is the latest expression, I think, of cultural capital.
00:11:24.000The other thing, the other interesting piece of this is sometimes when I talk about luxury beliefs, people will say, you know, Rob, is it really true that the elites care so much about status?
00:11:32.000Or they'll say, well, don't we all care about status?
00:11:34.000Why are you picking on the elite so much?
00:11:36.000Well, there have been two very interesting studies over the last couple of years which have both came to the same conclusion.
00:11:42.000So this is a replicated study conducted twice independently, which found that the higher up you go in terms of socioeconomic status, the stronger people report a desire for wealth and status.
00:11:53.000So, people who are at or near the top of educational attainment, income, prestige, you ask them questions like, you know, you show them statements and ask them the extent to which they agree with these statements.
00:12:08.000It would please me to be in a position of power over others.
00:12:11.000It's important for me that people look at me when I walk into a room.
00:12:15.000It's critical that I have influence over my peers.
00:12:19.000The higher up you go in socioeconomic status, the more likely people are to agree with those statements.
00:12:27.000And luxury beliefs are one way that they show that.
00:12:29.000Yeah, and it manifests in ways like defund the police, but it also goes to people that are bragging about, I have a trans kid.
00:12:37.000And like, yeah, you know, that's kind of like a new status marker that if you have a trans kid, all of a sudden you're like in the end crowd, you're very open-minded and I'm progressive and I'm not imposing my gender binary norms upon my kid who I will not call a son or a daughter.
00:12:56.000And so this obviously stems from the academy largely.
00:13:02.000I mean, Angelo Cotavilla termed the phrase ruling class.
00:13:06.000And so I think it's all these phrases you wrote, you know, you wrote cultural capital, leisure class, ruling class, luxury belief.
00:13:13.000What we're really talking about is the quote-unquote elites or the decision makers, which is a small percentage of the American population, but they wield an outsized size of influence.
00:14:06.000And I think that our elites, I wouldn't spend so much time pointing out their shortcomings if I didn't believe they were capable of being better.
00:14:13.000And I think that the institutions that train them could probably do a better job of selecting the candidates, to be honest.
00:14:18.000But once they pass through these institutions, you hold a large obligation, a responsibility.
00:14:23.000You have been given a series of gifts, your intelligence, conscientiousness, your education, your affluence, your parents, your credential.
00:14:32.000And I think a lot of people are aware of this and they're just going about this, fulfilling that obligation in the wrong way, where they have this very sort of narrow view of what poverty is, of what struggle is, what strife is.
00:14:45.000And they think, well, I want to help poor people.
00:14:47.000And I'm not going to spend the time learning about them.
00:14:51.000But I see police are sometimes mean to criminals who happen to be poor and therefore let's just defund the police.
00:14:58.000It's a very sort of lazy way of thinking.
00:15:01.000It's unwilling, this unwillingness to learn about those communities think, well, what will actually help them?
00:15:05.000Actually, having policing around is good for them because not all poor people are the same.
00:15:11.000The vast majority of them, they work, they want to take care of their families.
00:15:14.000They clock in, they clock out, and they don't want to be harassed or robbed or assaulted.
00:15:20.000But the thing is, a lot of people who pass through elite institutions have no contact with ordinary working class people.
00:15:26.000And so they get this, you know, this warped and distorted view of what that actually means.
00:15:33.000And so, yes, our elites could do more to understand the society that they so do you think, as a psychologist, do you think this luxury belief phenomenon is filling a void, a metaphysical one or an existential one?
00:16:01.000There have been a lot of interesting studies on this of people who are highly educated and report low levels of religiosity, of service attendance.
00:16:11.000They're the most actively engaged with politics.
00:16:14.000They're more likely to get involved with political organizations and activism and attempt to exert their moral view over other people.
00:16:24.000And you see this, I think, a lot with people who are involved, especially with kind of left-wing activism.
00:16:31.000This is one reason, among others, why people on the political right are happier than people on the political left.
00:16:57.000Well, the data show, and this is unambiguous, that people who identify as conservatives or people who identify as the political right, they are happier, regardless of how you measure happiness, whether you measure it through sort of moment-to-moment positive emotions and experiences, or when you ask people about what's sometimes called life satisfaction, stepping back and evaluating your life as a whole, how satisfied are you with your life?
00:17:20.000And people on the right also report being more satisfied, higher levels of well-being, regardless of the measure you choose.
00:17:26.000And people on the left report being less satisfied.
00:17:30.000And people have attempted to explore the mechanisms, what are the causes, and one seems to be religiosity, that people who attend religious services are happier.
00:17:39.000There was one interesting study which found that if you attend, so going from not attending any religious service at all to attending at least one religious service per week has the equivalent increase on happiness as going from the bottom income quintile to the top income quintile.
00:17:55.000And this is all, this is an irrefutable detail.
00:17:57.000Yeah, this is, yeah, this is irrefutable.
00:17:59.000And what's interesting to me is that we spend so much time talking about poverty, income inequality, so on and so forth.
00:18:04.000But if you want to raise well-being, well, one might be attend a religious service.
00:18:08.000I mean, that's a lot less expensive than trying to redistribute or raising everyone's income by $100,000.
00:18:15.000What you're saying is that Zoran Mamdani should be saying everyone should go to St. Patrick's Cathedral, not government-run grocery stores.
00:18:22.000I mean, you know, there's data behind it.
00:18:24.000Well, it depends on what his goals are.
00:18:26.000You know, his explicit avowed goals are.
00:18:28.000If he wanted happiness for the city, but now we have other.
00:18:57.000But so, but the is part of this, though, part of it is this contradiction because they think they're being contrarian to the rest of society, but no one checks them in their place when they say this stuff.
00:19:11.000I mean, you go to some of these environments.
00:19:14.000Again, you could go to any one of these summer enclaves that I could list, right?
00:19:18.000Kenny Bunkport, Aspen, you know, Big Sky, Yellowstone Club, wherever, Jackson Hole.
00:19:23.000And they say this stuff at their liberal dinner parties.
00:19:26.000And it's just this homogenization, right?
00:19:30.000So in some ways, they're not rebelling against anything.
00:19:58.000And yeah, it's that there are these kind of social contagion effects where, you know, if you spend most of your time with people in the top income decile, similarly credentialed people to yourself, you may view yourself as this intellectual iconoclast or this sophisticated, interesting, creative person.
00:20:16.000But actually, if you look at the, you know, the groups that you spend the most time around, chances are there's very little daylight between your beliefs and theirs.
00:20:23.000So there actually isn't as much rebellion, I think, as you might expect.
00:20:45.000Well, I've written about this in different outlets, Substack and elsewhere, and sometimes I think the best thing to do would just be to let the rich buy yachts, buy expensive things, go back to the… Just get out of our way.
00:20:59.000Yeah, go back to the Weblin era where you're just like buying name-brand clothes or whatever and leave the rest of us alone kind of thing.
00:21:05.000But because they need to buy newspapers, that's the other thing.
00:21:19.000And so if there are going to be beliefs that elevate your status, I think they should choose beliefs that do not hurt people who are beneath them.
00:21:30.000So that's how I define luxury beliefs.
00:21:32.000A luxury belief is: does it confer status to the credentialed affluent person?
00:21:37.000And does it also inflict costs on less fortunate members of society?
00:21:40.000But there can also be beliefs that are good for people and that are disproportionately held by higher income credentialed people as well.
00:21:50.000And so I think it would just be worth sort of going through, okay, what are the beliefs?
00:22:23.000And so it's bad because it's bad, and it's bad because elites wield disproportionate influence on society.
00:22:28.000There's a study from 2014 which found that if you support a political policy and you're in the top income decile, it's twice as likely as average to be enacted and to be implemented into law.
00:22:40.000And so yes, they're bad because they're bad.
00:22:42.000There are beliefs that are held, you know, concentrated among elites that are good for society and that elites are more likely to hold than the rest.
00:22:51.000So something like free market principles, for example, a lot of less educated people, they have difficulty understanding free market economics, for example.
00:22:58.000And so if you ask them point blank, they often tend to intuitively, in their gut feeling, hold these kind of semi-socialist views, perhaps because they haven't been educated on how economics works.
00:23:07.000And a lot of elites actually do hold more free market principles.
00:23:09.000So that would be an example of a good belief that isn't a luxury belief.
00:23:50.000They don't get, and you're uniquely positioned to say this as someone who grew up in a very, you know, as your book says, troubled environment.
00:24:03.000And they, yeah, they should be held to a higher standard.
00:24:06.000And they, just because they're increasingly isolated, that doesn't diminish their influence, for better or worse.
00:24:14.000And so, you know, if they're going to wield this influence, they have these responsibilities, these duties, these obligations.
00:24:20.000And this used to be taken for granted: that if you are a member of the elite, modern aristocracy, the ruling class, however you want to define them, that they should actually try to push policies and laws and ideas that make life better and not worse.
00:24:37.000And, you know, you listed some of those woke ideas of transgenderism and other things.
00:24:41.000But in my view, and the one that I spend probably the most time talking about in the book is this denigration of the family.
00:24:48.000So famously, you know, in 2020 in the BLM website, it was we need to dismantle the Western notion of perfection.
00:25:15.000Well, among people who pass through elite institutions, the higher up you go in socioeconomic status, the more intact families are, the least amount of divorce you see, the more importance they place on family and their own personal lives.
00:25:30.000But then when you ask them about their views in general about marriage and about family norms, they take this very laissez-faire, relaxed, permissive, like every family's just as good as any other.
00:25:40.000We shouldn't say anything about single parents.
00:25:41.000We shouldn't say anything about anything.
00:25:44.000And yet, you know, you look at how they live.
00:25:49.000We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries.
00:25:52.000And today, I want to point you to their podcast.
00:25:54.000It's called Culture in Christianity: the Allen Jackson Podcast.
00:25:58.000What makes it unique is Pastor Allen's biblical perspective.
00:26:01.000He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues we're facing today: gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge, Trump in the White House, issues in the church.
00:27:31.000But everyone else, you know, have a good time out there.
00:27:33.000But isn't there something inherently Doesn't this inherently create the kind of the prerequisites of a political revolution in a bad way, where you have an elite ruling class that imposes something they don't want to live under repeatedly.
00:27:51.000I mean, a good one is school choice, right?
00:27:53.000They're all against school choice, many of them.
00:27:55.000And yet they'll send their kid to a private school or firearms.
00:27:58.000You know, they have gated communities and they're against walls.
00:28:01.000I mean, you see all of these inherent contradictions.
00:28:03.000And for a working person, that creates a lot of resentment.
00:28:20.000Two of my favorite words you use back to back, duties and obligation.
00:28:25.000I feel as if we never use those words anymore.
00:28:28.000Especially when it comes to the rich or the, why is that?
00:28:33.000Well, I think because we are at least explicitly, we're attempting to create this egalitarian society.
00:28:42.000No one's better than anyone else, you know, attempting to retreat into these non-judgmental attitudes.
00:28:47.000But what's interesting is that that kind of approach of don't judge people, let people enjoy things, live your life, you do you, that applies for when it comes to judging people for violating those conventional virtues of family, respect, integrity, punctuality, law-abidingness, all of those things that something like our grandparents would have agreed with.
00:29:08.000But when it comes to other things, many credentialed elites are happy to judge you for failing to recycle.
00:29:15.000Of course, they're the most judgmental people in society.
00:29:44.000But then when it comes to, yeah, your political views, using an outdated term for a certain group or for not supporting the latest thing on climate change or whatever, then suddenly the fangs come out and they're happy to condemn you.
00:30:10.000The luxury belief class, because you've really designated them as a class, has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.
00:30:24.000Well, if you look at the political views of the people who were forming these encampments at places like Yale and Columbia and elsewhere, they held very far-left progressive radical views.
00:30:34.000And a lot of people by now, and I'm sure you and many of your listeners have seen the social media posts of Momdani from 2020 and 2021.
00:30:41.000What I found funny about the Momdani posts from that era was they weren't just the sort of normal boilerplate woke stuff.
00:30:48.000Yeah, it wasn't just defund the police.
00:30:50.000It was defund the police as a queer feminist issue.
00:30:53.000It was this sort of like over-embellished, toxic, outrageous.
00:30:57.000Yeah, it was like things that you wouldn't see anywhere else unless you pass through these institutions where it's not enough to just say defund the police.
00:31:03.000It was, you know, it's a queer feminist, all this sort of weird terminology and all the sort of mental gymnastics required to express these bizarre views.
00:31:12.000And, you know, Momdani has, it's funny, he sort of walked away, walked back from some of those views, and he's pivoted more towards this sort of overt economic socialism, the sort of communist ideas.
00:31:24.000But, you know, those two things are intertwined.
00:31:26.000You and many of your listeners, and I'm sure a lot of people have made this point that wokeness is a kind of variant of Marxism.
00:32:09.000What's interesting is that in New York, if you live there in the first place, you already have to be pretty well off, especially if you live in Manhattan.
00:32:17.000And the demographics of Manhattan have changed quite a bit where a lot of people who live there, they have bachelor's degrees, they have upper-middle-class jobs.
00:32:24.000And like I said before, the people who are educated and people who are well-off, they're the most likely to hold these kind of left-wing luxury beliefs, these radical, newfangled views.
00:32:34.000And then they look at someone like Mom Donnie and they kind of see someone like themselves, right?
00:32:38.000And there's a lot of kind of malicious envy going on here where they're mad because they're in the top 10% and not in the top 1%.
00:32:46.000And they see this kind of, you know, Mom Donnie's, he's kind of a Nepo baby, right?
00:32:51.000Like he's kind of this fail son who had well-off parents and he's kind of been floundering in his career for a while and he got this footing in politics where all you have to do is mouth the right slogans and say the right things.
00:33:02.000And in a place like New York, yeah, people are willing to support someone like that.
00:33:26.000And when he applied to Columbia and still didn't get in, despite so he claimed to be black slash African American, despite the fact that both of his parents are ethnically Indian.
00:33:35.000I know he spent a couple of years in Uganda, but if you and I go to Uganda and then we apply to college, we're not going to mark that we're black, but he tried to do that.
00:33:52.000He tried to be, he tried to moonlight as a rapper, didn't get very far.
00:33:56.000He produced some music for his mother's a rich filmmaker, tried to produce some music for her films to some limited success, but he never really got off the ground in his own career.
00:34:06.000And finally, I think in his, I think he was around 30 when he ran for whatever, like a county or city assembly, he finally found something that he wasn't terrible at.
00:34:18.000And politics does seem to attract the worst of our society.
00:35:13.000Yeah, it's sad because when I talk to some of my more right-leaning friends, they say, well, maybe he should get elected because then the rest of the country will see that as an example.
00:35:24.000That's the best analysis I've ever heard.
00:35:26.000But the thing is, the people who vote for him, once his policies are put in place and it actually starts to affect those people who voted him in, a lot of them have means and they can leave.
00:35:52.000And so it's going to be the people who didn't vote for Mom Dani.
00:35:54.000And I point that out in that piece, which is that if you look at the demographic breakdown of the voters, poor and working class voters who Momdani claimed to support, you know, he's talking about rent freezes.
00:36:06.000He's talking about, what, raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour.
00:36:09.000Those people actually didn't support him in the primaries.
00:36:15.000It was upper middle class people, particularly white progressives who supported Mom Dani.
00:36:20.000And a lot of those people, if he gets elected and their life starts to deteriorate, yeah, they're going to flee to Connecticut or Jersey or whatever.
00:37:44.000By the time you're 30, you're almost certainly not going to be living in poverty.
00:37:48.000And this was the discussion that I had with Robert F. Kennedy's team at HHS.
00:37:54.000They were interested in these issues around childhood poverty, how to help people who are living in these circumstances, struggling families.
00:38:00.000And this is a very simple thing that I think could be taught to everyone.
00:38:05.000there was a survey done a couple of years ago they um asked a representative sample of americans across the political spectrum do you think so they told them here's the success sequence Do you think this should be taught in schools?
00:38:16.000And 70% of Democrat parents and Republican parents supported this idea of being taught in school.
00:38:41.000Cause you're implicitly judging them for how they choose to live their lives.
00:38:44.000If you fail to live up to the success sequence, they might feel bad about themselves.
00:38:48.000And what I point out in my pieces about the success sequence is it's so simple that you can't really, you can't really help but be able to hold anybody to those standards.
00:39:01.000So if the success sequence was something like the only way to not live in poverty is first, you got to get a PhD in mathematics from MIT.
00:39:10.000Second is you got to work 100 hours a week.
00:39:12.000And third, you got to practice lifelong celibacy.
00:39:16.000The correct response to that is, well, that's not fair.
00:39:19.000Like no one can live up to those standards.
00:39:20.000We shouldn't even be talking about this.
00:39:22.000But if the success sequence is what it actually is, we should be talking about it because just about everyone is capable of fulfilling those steps.
00:39:28.000You're saying that we don't talk about it because Democrat elites or left-wing whatever progress to be elites, they don't want to come across as preachy or judgy.
00:39:38.000Even though that's all they do all day long, they preach us about guns and environment, climate change, racism, but they don't want to preach or be judgy about graduating high school, obtaining full-time employment, and marrying before having kids.
00:39:50.000I think that's the reason because that's the only group that doesn't want this idea to be propagated and to be taught.
00:40:00.000I mean, many of them are the most likely to live those values.
00:40:02.000So regardless of your political beliefs, if you went through college and you have a white-collar job and so on, like that, you followed those steps in your own life.
00:40:14.000The people around you followed those steps.
00:40:20.000And I think that we were talking about this before, what luxury beliefs or what beliefs that could the elites hold that would actually benefit people.
00:40:26.000I think just talking about this, these simple steps that, look, many people might fall short of those beliefs.
00:40:32.000They may not actually be able to fulfill them.
00:40:35.000That doesn't necessarily mean you should discard them or not talk about them.
00:40:38.000In the same way, by analogy, elites are generally pretty happy to say that you shouldn't use tobacco, right?
00:41:14.000They're the ones that push, you know, NFL helmets need to have end racism on it, end racism in the, we need to run these PSAs against hate.
00:41:21.000Okay, so that is you imposing a value system on the rest of the population.
00:41:34.000Or instead of these like anti-tobacco commercials, what if we ran a billion dollars of ads of do these three things and you won't be in poverty?
00:41:40.000Graduate from high school, obtain full-time employment, marry before having kids.
00:42:31.000I think decades past, when there was real poverty, kind of the Great Depression era, sort of decades before when our society was less prosperous, poverty was serious.
00:42:46.000There was an interesting article in the New Yorker of all places, which found they reported that in the past, poverty meant you went hungry, and today poverty means you get food stamps, you get government assistance.
00:43:19.000And it's funny because the people who are well off and have low BMIs, they're often the most enthusiastic about body positivity, healthy at any size.
00:45:40.000A lot of this is, you know, whether conscious or unconscious, it's undermining those around them.
00:45:47.000No, that's dark that there's some sort of subconscious, I want to say undiagnosed, but mysterious energy force that they want people to stay at their class so they're going to protect.
00:46:00.000I mean, is insecurity a good explanation there?
00:46:06.000The elites are super insecure because they didn't actually earn it and it's not as meritocratic as they'd like to see, which I actually think is true.
00:46:12.000I don't think it's if you spend a lot of time around our nation's elites, they're incredibly unimpressive people.
00:46:20.000There's an element of status anxiety there that they either fear slipping down themselves.
00:46:25.000And so if they can, you know, if they happen to support a set of views, another one, another luxury belief for you is the elimination of standardized testing requirements for elite universities.
00:46:48.000And so they eliminated this requirement for admission.
00:46:51.000And what ended up happening is these institutions received fewer applications from low-income people, from ethnic minorities, from people who, you know, first-generation applicants.
00:47:02.000And it actually sort of re-entrenched the kind of class divisions across society where they actually got more applications from essentially rich kids who wanted to apply.
00:47:13.000And so I don't think it's a coincidence that who benefited the most from the elimination of standardized testing.
00:47:18.000You know, kids from rich families, people who probably are experiencing this insecurity you're describing, the status anxiety.
00:47:26.000And standardized, you know, because what happens when you remove that component from the application?
00:47:30.000What are you relying on when you're evaluating candidates?
00:47:32.000You're relying on things like recommendation letters.
00:47:34.000You know, if you're a kid from a rich, well-connected family, you can get a senior.
00:47:39.000You can get a senator, a CEO, a famous Hollywood actor, whatever.
00:47:43.000And then you're also relying on the essay component.
00:47:46.000And the essay component is filled with all of the class-coded language of where you spend your summer and how you're spending your free time and the values that you care about.
00:48:28.000And so that was, you know, and so if you are like no poor working class kid, like even if they did support the movement, they would never even think that that's an essay.
00:48:41.000But if you are plugged in and you're connected, you know, oh, this is going to come across as subversive and interesting and dynamic, and it's going to make me stand out in just the right way.
00:48:52.000And so without the standardized test, you're not going to be able to identify talented kids who don't know how to speak in that class context.
00:48:57.000I think it's a whole other place you and I could take this conversation where it's like this is just the downfall of objective standards and beauty.
00:49:03.000This just reminds me of like Marcel Duchamp and the entire downfall of art.
00:49:07.000I mean, if you are even in a place where you can accept an essay, let alone accept that person into the essay.
00:49:13.000The essay should not have even been read.
00:49:14.000It should have just been like, you're not allowed that, you're not even allowed in our city.
00:49:19.000I mean, you're not allowed in Connecticut.
00:49:22.000But it's just, it's, oh, yeah, I'm going to tape a banana to the wall and I'm like really interesting.
00:49:26.000Or here's the messy bed and I'm going to call that art or piss Christ or whatever.
00:49:31.000I mean, it just, it plays into this whole theme and I don't quite know how to articulate it over the last hundred years where now a kid gets goes into Yale just by writing Black Lives Matter on the entire essay.
00:49:50.000So the point here for the hidden marriage market piece in Substack was that historically, especially for, let's say, the wealthier half of society, there have been arranged marriages, right?
00:50:04.000You know, the ruling class in centuries past, a lot of it was about consolidating power and that kind of thing.
00:50:11.000But then gradually with the rise of the 20th century, the rise of egalitarianism, meritocracy, all these things, at least as ideals, it became, you know, choose your own partner.
00:50:22.000You know, families became less and less involved.
00:50:25.000But we ended up recreating this assortative matchmaking system through the university system.
00:50:32.000And the way that it works, the way that I explain it is, you know, imagine that you are trying to find a romantic partner for your kid and you solicit suitors and you say, okay, well, I want you to submit your IQ scores.
00:50:48.000I want you to write an essay about the things you care about and your values.
00:50:52.000I want you to send me some recommendation letters and so on.
00:50:55.000And you probably see where I'm going with this.
00:51:04.000So what happens is these universities do this where they're screening all of these people for, you know, before the woke era, they were screening them for academic ability, for family connections, for the things they care about, all this class-coded language, and they bring them into these institutions.
00:51:19.000And now you're surrounded by people who are roughly the same level of ability, interests, you're all these young people.
00:51:27.000And the way that assortive mating works is that the vast majority of people who have bachelor's degrees marry other people with bachelor's degrees or higher.
00:51:37.000And this is, you know, this is what's known formally as assortative mating, that people tend to marry people who are similar to themselves.
00:51:45.000This birds of a feather flock together idea.
00:51:47.000Very rarely do you marry down in class.
00:51:50.000people tend to marry across um and so that is what what i call the hidden marriage market is it's it's higher education where once you pass through the and even if you don't marry a classmate a fellow student um your dating pool changes dramatically once you pass through these institutions and so from that point on you're surrounded by people who work white collar occupations people who are speak your language yeah speak your language exactly and
00:52:19.000is this a good thing it's i don't think it's good or bad um it's it's the way that historically things have always been um i don't think that you would ever be able to change this pattern without some kind of authoritarian overreach that people just tend to like being around people similar to themselves it's not just education and income um and class it's also uh one of the strongest um uh similarities between people in a couple is their political values
00:52:49.000that people uh like to be with others who share their political orientation and so the the strongest predictors uh tend to be a level of education slash social class and then religiosity and political orientation people like people like themselves why are marriage rates going down it's a good question um they might be going back up last six months i don't know because everything's changing a little bit but last 10 years why are they going down i think there are a couple of different reasons here so a lot of people when they talk about uh the decline of marriage rates they're focusing on
00:53:18.000on elites right like people who are uh uh concentrated in metropolitan areas who go to college who and you oh well you know women are going to they're extending their education they're prolonging their time in higher education and they're delaying marriage and delaying fertility actually what you're seeing is um most of the decline in marriage can be accounted for by poor and working class people that's where marriage rates are shockingly low now um why well i think it
00:53:48.000comes down to uh to values so if you are in a culture that valorizes marriage and commitment um people are going to get married and if you're in a culture where marriage is just one option among many and the elites in your society will often denigrate marriage or mock it or uh or you know treat it as uh this kind of uh trivial unimportant thing fewer people are going to get married especially people who who rely on public
00:54:22.000You know, when I talk about my books, sometimes I'll go to campuses and stuff, and I'll do by way of analogy the way that I grew up.
00:54:29.000Imagine that you're a kid in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, safe neighborhood, your parents are married, all the adults in your environment are married.
00:54:37.000And this is more or less the typical environment for a kid like that.
00:54:42.000You're surrounded by married adults, and then you turn on TV, you look at elite magazines, newspapers, glossy periodicals.
00:54:53.000And so, in your real life, you're seeing responsible adults who are getting married.
00:54:56.000But in pop culture and in a lot of the messaging, you're seeing, oh, casual sex is fun, be promiscuous, have a good time.
00:55:09.000It's such like a polyamorous kind of arrangement.
00:55:11.000And so you have these two things, right?
00:55:13.000But the messaging that you're seeing on the screens and in pop culture is counterbalanced by what you're seeing in your real life.
00:55:20.000And so you have real role models and examples.
00:55:22.000But now imagine that you're a kid who grew up the way that me and my friends did in an environment where you aren't seeing married adults.
00:55:29.000You're seeing a lot of single parents or kids raised by grandparents, kids in foster homes.
00:55:33.000And then you turn on the TV, you turn on social media, pop culture, all this kind of elite media, and you're seeing the opposite.
00:55:41.000You're seeing casual sex, promiscuity, polyamory, all this stuff.
00:55:45.000That's not counterbalanced by anything, right?
00:55:47.000Like you're not going to get married if you're not getting that message from anywhere.
00:55:51.000And so I think, yes, for the wealthier half of society, some of it does have to do with increasingly prolonged education and people living in these cities and a lot of this sort of ambition and status chasing and that kind of thing.
00:56:03.000But I think for the lower half of society where marriage rates have really collapsed, it's due to the lack of values.
00:56:11.000We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries.
00:56:13.000And today, I want to point you to their podcast.
00:56:16.000It's called Culture in Christianity: the Allen Jackson Podcast.
00:56:20.000What makes it unique is Pastor Allen's biblical perspective.
00:56:23.000He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues we're facing today: gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge, Trump in the White House, issues in the church.
00:58:00.000But I think what's happening is you're kind of throwing out, or you're rather, you're skipping a step here because even in our day and age, despite all the luxury beliefs, despite all of this kind of stuff we're seeing, if you ask most people, you know, do you want to get married before you have kids?
00:58:16.000They'd like to have a partner to raise their kid with.
00:58:19.000And so when you pay people to have kids, well, it's like, well, most people aren't getting married.
00:58:24.000And so first you need to get married first, and then you have kids.
00:58:26.000And what's interesting is when we look at the fertility decline, there was an interesting analysis published by The Economist last year, which found that what's mostly responsible for the decline in fertility is poor and working class women having fewer children.
00:58:42.000So if you look at college-educated women, the decline in fertility is noticeable, but it's very slight compared to 30 years ago.
00:58:49.000They are having fewer kids, but it's a very small dip.
00:58:53.000But the bulk of the decline in fertility is among poor and working class women.
00:58:57.000And that's because, as we were just discussing, marriage rates have declined.
00:59:02.000So pay these women, pay these men, get married first.
00:59:06.000And then once they're in a partnership, and once you incentivize them to find a partner that they like being around, make it a priority, give them money for it, they're just naturally going to have kids because that's kind of the life course.
00:59:17.000Once you find a partner, most people at that point decide to have kids anyway.
00:59:22.000But I think the reason for that fertility decline, again, it comes down to values, it comes down to culture.
00:59:27.000So you think fertility rates are tied to marriage rates?
00:59:42.000It's this, you know, people don't want to feel judgmental and they want to feel, oh, you know, if you've got a theme throughout our conversation.
01:00:16.000Well, if you look at the people who are what are known as anti-natalists, people who believe you shouldn't have kids, there was an interesting study a couple of years ago which found that one of the strongest predictors of anti-natalist attitudes is high scores on what are known as the dark triad personality traits.
01:00:33.000That's one of the things I want to talk about.
01:00:57.000And psychopathy is callousness, cynicism, disregard for other people.
01:01:02.000And then the third trait for the dark triad is Machiavellianism, which is kind of strategic exploitation and duplicity.
01:01:10.000And if you score high on these three traits, you're more likely to believe that it's wrong to have kids.
01:01:16.000You're more likely to express this view that people shouldn't have kids.
01:01:20.000And sometimes I wonder if this is what's sometimes known as a sort of like a mating interference strategy or a reproductive interference strategy.
01:01:31.000Metaphysically, I have an answer, but you know.
01:01:33.000Well, so I'm drawing here from ideas in kind of animal research, evolutionary psychology, and this kind of stuff.
01:01:41.000And essentially, it's, you know, if I goes back to our earlier point here, where if I can convince you not to have kids, if I'm a dark triad person, I'm a scheming, manipulative, self-entitled person.
01:02:10.000People should know that in their work, in their community.
01:02:13.000Yeah, there are it's hard to accurately sort of sort of diagnose at a glance whether someone is dark tribe.
01:02:19.000But once you get to speak with someone, get to know them, if you speak with someone who regularly turns the conversation around back to themselves, kind of one-uppers, you tell an interesting story, let me tell you something about what happened to me today, and then I come back with, oh, that's nothing.
01:02:33.000Like, let me tell you about what happened to me.
01:02:34.000That's a marker of something like narcissism.
01:02:38.000If you see someone who is what's called known as itinerant, so very frequently relocates in their lives, that can also be a sign of psychopathy because this is someone who regularly burns bridges, whether with their employer, with their friends, with their romantic partners.
01:02:56.000So when people have a pattern of anyone being close to them and it's bad, that's a bad sign.
01:03:02.000And then another, and this is more characteristic of Machiavellianism, is if you ask other people about them and you get a wide variety of different views.
01:03:11.000So, you know, if I ask you, hey, what's the deal with this guy?
01:03:31.000And this is why referrals and recommendations and that kind of thing.
01:03:35.000And so back to the birth rate, you're saying that the dark triad is an interference project.
01:03:40.000That's what I suspect is if you are high on these traits, if you're kind of a manipulative person, you're going to promote antinatalism as an idea in part because you want to reduce other people's fertility, reduce the competition.
01:03:57.000The other thing is people who are high on the dark triad tend to be unhappy people in general.
01:04:02.000And I think they just want to kind of.
01:04:04.000What percentage of the population is high in the dark triad?
01:04:16.000And then perhaps another 5% sort of right beneath them who are not sort of overtly manipulative or scary in some way, but they're sort of.
01:04:25.000What percentage of prisoners are dark triad people?
01:04:28.000So that one I don't know, but I do know that when you just measure psychopathy, that is the lack of empathy or lack of compassion.
01:04:38.000Callousness, cruel disregard for others.
01:04:42.000It's sometimes known as the darkest of the dark triad of the high correlation of prison populations.
01:04:49.000So something like 40% of prison inmates would qualify as clinical psychopaths, right?
01:04:55.000And so you see the most concentration of psychopaths in prison.
01:05:00.000But what's interesting is that you also find large numbers of psychopaths in sort of corporate boardrooms, probably yes, high-ranking politicians, something like 12% to 15% of the people who are at or near the top of their game in terms of business, corporations, politics, around 12 to 15%.
01:05:25.000And then among college students, it's something like 8 to 10% of college students would qualify for a psychopathy diagnosis.
01:05:35.000And so just as a reference point, something like 1 to 2% of the population would qualify as a clinically diagnosable psychopath.
01:05:44.000So it's 1 to 2% of the general population, something like 10% on college campuses, 12% to 15% among high achievers, and then something like 30% to 40% in prisons.
01:05:54.000And so how does that then play itself out in society?
01:05:57.000And what are the checks we have on psychopathic people?
01:06:00.000Well, so one is basically being able to screen for people who are being purposefully manipulative to extract some gain.
01:06:09.000So there was a study a couple of years ago on what's called victim signaling, which is essentially this paper found that people who are high on the dark triad traits are more likely to signal victimhood in order to obtain advantages for themselves.
01:06:24.000And so people who are high on these traits are more likely to say, you know, I'm not.
01:06:42.000Rather, it's people who are high on the dark triad disguise themselves as victims in order to exploit your sympathy, your compassion, your empathy.
01:06:50.000That, you know, oh, I know you're a good person.
01:06:52.000And, well, because I know you're a good person, I'm going to try to position myself in a way to elicit your sympathy and talk about how bad I've had it and so on.
01:07:01.000And historically, we've found ways to screen for that where we have kind of high standards for, okay, well, you've been mistreated.
01:07:08.000You know, we're able to challenge you on it a little bit just to make sure before we devote attention and time and resources to you, like, let's actually evaluate.
01:07:15.000We don't do anything more because we can't judge.
01:07:16.000Everyone's a victim and we're not allowed to challenge it in any way, right?
01:07:19.000And of course, like dark triad people pick up on this and they're like, oh, well, how do I, yeah, they arrive at a new environment and say, well, what can I do to obtain advantages for myself?
01:07:29.000Oh, well, I'll just pretend like I'm a victim and so there you have it.
01:07:33.000So what you're pinpointing is that the modern so smart.
01:07:37.000I've never heard anybody say this and I listen and read a lot of stuff.
01:07:40.000What you're saying, though, is that this modern sensitivity movement, last 20, 30 years, can't judge, you know, can't make people feel bad, is a fertile playground for psychopaths.
01:08:49.000Well, they're able to exploit other people's sympathy.
01:08:51.000If you have, this is kind of a game, you could look at it through a game theory lens where if everyone is cooperating, things can work pretty well.
01:08:57.000But as soon as you have someone who's a defector, an exploiter, they can take advantage of all of the cooperators and they can quickly rise to the top because no one's challenging them, no one's checking them.
01:09:06.000And I think we're seeing a lot of that.
01:09:09.000But what's interesting is that people who are high on the dark triad, they tend to be short-term effective, long-term ineffective because they can.
01:09:14.000That's why they have to bounce around.
01:09:16.000And it's difficult for them to build durable coalitions, to acquire trust from people.
01:09:21.000If you want to build something that lasts and hold on to power, not just momentarily, but for a prolonged period of time, people have to trust you.
01:09:31.000If you were up against a dark triad person, what else is their Achilles heel?
01:09:36.000I mean, generally, I would recommend trying to avoid them.
01:09:40.000But yeah, each person is different, right?
01:09:43.000Like they're different just like anyone who isn't high on the triad.
01:09:47.000What you're saying is like, I'm just blown away by the specificity.
01:09:51.000I mean, it's useful to ask them, you know, to challenge them because a lot of them, just like other people, but perhaps even more so for narcissistic types, is they have a very sort of surface level knowledge of whatever they're talking about.
01:10:02.000They know just enough to sound impressive.
01:10:04.000And then, once you start challenging them and questioning them and so on, you'll see that oftentimes they will start to fall apart.
01:10:11.000And then they'll start to resort to these kinds of manipulative tactics of, you know, what is it, like sort of reorienting and interrogating you instead of calling you all kinds of names, accusing you of whatever ism of the day and that kind of thing.
01:10:25.000And I think that oftentimes you can kind of declare victory at that point where once you've stepped outside of the argument and started lobbying names, then you know that.
01:10:33.000And wokeism is just like the perfect launching off point for the dark triad.
01:10:57.000And yeah, and this, yeah, it's a catastrophic ideology for that reason, where you start to put people who are unqualified into positions of power because we can't stop them because you're a racist.
01:11:08.000So if you have like a black female psychopath who's competing against you and is lying and is narcissistic and is Machiavellian, if you report her to HR, you could get in trouble for being a racist.
01:11:32.000And they tend to be good at that, of sort of identifying weak spots and learning how to disguise themselves in just the right way.
01:11:40.000And yeah, we used to have sort of checks on this: it's good to have compassion for people who are genuinely victims and try to give them a leg up whenever you can.
01:11:49.000But in order to ensure that that doesn't get exploited, you have to be able to question people, to interrogate them, to make sure that their claims to victimhood are valid.
01:12:00.000And often what you find is that people who claim to be victims are the least likely to actually be victimized or the most able to accentuate whatever qualities they share with actual victims.
01:12:14.000And so you saw this with a lot of the elite college admissions policies, right?
01:12:23.000They kind of valorize victimhood and this kind of thing.
01:12:26.000And if you want to get in, then you have to talk about how you've been oppressed in some way.
01:12:31.000But ironically, the people who are the best at speaking the language of oppression are the ones who have been the least oppressed because if you've actually been oppressed, you don't know the class-coded language.
01:12:39.000Well, that's a phenomenal segue to our last thing, which is your book.
01:12:43.000So you've lived a tough life, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class.
01:15:05.000She was a good, good influence for me.
01:15:07.000And then later, when I was writing the book, I decided to take a genetic ancestry test because I'd never known anything about my father, but I thought, oh, maybe it'll be interesting for the book.
01:15:16.000And I discovered that I'm half Hispanic on my father's side.
01:15:49.000But yeah, and so I document not just my life in the book, but some of my friends as well that I grew up around in this very, very tough, poor, impoverished, lot of crime, a lot of violence, a lot of drugs, and how their lives, when I had five close friends growing up in high school, two friends went to prison.
01:16:10.000I had another friend who was shot to death.
01:16:13.000Other friends kind of working menial blue-collar jobs.
01:16:35.000Well, so when I was 14, God, you know, there's so much in the book, but I'll just my I mentioned my adoptive parents divorced and my adoptive father stopped speaking with me.
01:16:49.000So I was raised for a period with my adoptive mother.
01:16:52.000She's a single mom, and she ended up in a relationship with a woman named Shelly in the book.
01:17:41.000It was kind of a diffuse, like I think it was accumulated anger from not ever knowing my father, all the foster homes, all of the, you know, I have the line in the book where I say, if you, if a kid is let down by the adults in his life, eventually he learns to let himself down.
01:19:07.000And he was like, I kind of missed that.
01:19:08.000And I was thinking to myself, yeah, like in the moment it sucks.
01:19:11.000But then as you go on, you're like, oh, this is what I need.
01:19:14.000I need to know what my day is going to look like, what my week's going to look like, what's expected of me, what my goals are, and how to use this time productively.
01:19:21.000And so from that point, I started going to night classes at a community college, finally took the SAT, which I never did in high school.
01:19:28.000And then, you know, to their credit, Yale ended up admitting me.
01:19:49.000And one reason, Charlie, why I went to Cambridge is because I thought, because I was witnessing all the craziness.
01:19:54.000You thought Cambridge must be, I mean, come on, it's Cambridge.
01:19:56.000Yeah, I was like, oh, like, it's in England.
01:19:58.000I had this image in my mind of like these like these dons in the white robes or black robes rather, just like disconnected from the culture war.
01:21:12.000I had this image of what college was, mostly mistaken, also kind of a class thing because I based my perception of college on TV and movies.
01:21:21.000I'm like, oh, you go there, you read books, maybe you go to a party, you have a good time, you read, you study, you come out better.
01:21:26.000And then I get there and it's just demonstrations and mad activism and anger.
01:21:32.000And I got there, you know, again, 2015, I saw all the blow-ups during that year.