00:00:00.000The whole white privilege idea is itself a kind of luxury belief because, I mean, first what's happening is that the people who seem to be most strident and in favor of this white privilege idea are themselves white.
00:00:11.120And what they're doing is they're elevating their own status, right?
00:00:13.640Like if a white person at, you know, some fancy college or whatever in sort of a position of prominence says, you know, oh, I decry white privilege, is that white person losing status or gaining status, right?
00:00:24.900Are they hurting themselves or are they actually elevating themselves even more
00:00:28.080among their peer group around the people whose opinions they care about?
00:00:38.000Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
00:05:03.220for, you know, responsible for shaping politics,
00:05:05.100the sort of future leaders of the world
00:05:06.380have no idea what's going on among sort of poor and working class people and what's going on with
00:05:11.860the families and with you know with the kids and just the sort of level of disorder and instability
00:05:17.300and why do they not have an idea is it because they're so wealthy and privileged they're divorced
00:05:23.020from it is it because they have a disinterest what are the reasons yeah I'm not okay so why
00:05:28.580why would I mean I think part of it is just um living in a bubble um whether you live in a sort
00:05:34.680of suburb or a gated community or a place where money can shield you from the day-to-day
00:05:40.600sort of, you know, what's happening with people who maybe aren't as fortunate as you.
00:05:49.280I mean, I saw a lot of this when I was, you know, I was at Yale, for example. So it's,
00:05:52.900this university is located in New Haven, which is one of the poorest, you know, cities in the
00:05:57.080Northeast, very rundown. I lived downtown in this area. My apartment was, you know,
00:06:03.820like two or three blocks from from the campus but i on the way there i had to walk through a lot of
00:06:07.540poverty a lot of homelessness drug addiction mental illness and so on and what i noticed
00:06:11.800that the students very seldom left like the bubble of this university you know like around the campus
00:06:16.900there's a lot of security and police and um you know gates where you have to like use your student
00:06:23.040card to access or and so it's like very safe and secure it's like it's a fort it's a fortress yeah
00:06:27.820literally that's how it is it's fortress and you know i sometimes i mean it was really funny to me
00:06:32.420I would like, you know, go off campus and sometimes I'd advise some of the other undergrads and we'd go like, you know, downtown to eat or something, go to a restaurant.
00:06:39.720And I could see like they suddenly became very wary, like because they're not used to it.
00:06:43.460You know, they're not used to being in like a city where so with that sort of level of uncertainty and, you know, is it their fault?
00:06:51.400I don't know. But yeah, there is this sort of distance.
00:06:53.420And I think a lot of their experience of, you know, poverty and what's going on is through, you know, it's sort of filtered through media, through the sort of content they choose to consume, which is often sort of tailored to flatter their own viewpoints, rather than actually seeing it up close and seeing what's really going on.
00:07:16.100So, yeah, I think those are just, yeah, a few of the reasons.
00:07:19.260Okay, and what are these luxury beliefs that these students had?
00:07:24.420Yeah, so luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class
00:07:29.920while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.
00:07:33.460There are a few different pieces to this for how I came up with this.
00:07:36.540I mean, one, I've sort of been discussing just my sort of firsthand experiences.
00:07:41.020But at the same time, I'd also been reading a lot of like sort of old school sociology
00:07:45.300from Thorstein and Babelin and Pierre Bourdieu.
00:07:47.660And, you know, basically they said that the way that people used to demonstrate their social class was through material goods, through sort of expensive items, luxury goods.
00:08:01.680And so, you know, for example, if you walked through the streets of New York or London, too, you know, 100 years ago, you could tell immediately just by how people were dressed how much money they had.
00:08:12.580You know, this person is wealthy, this person maybe not so wealthy.
00:08:17.500You don't really, it's a much noisier signal, what someone is wearing and how it correlates to how much money they have in the bank.
00:08:26.200And so this was puzzling to me because I also saw a lot of this too, where students would sort of downplay their wealth or even lie about, you know, how rich their parents were.
00:08:36.900But then at the same time, I was also reading sort of more modern social psychology papers within the last just couple of years.
00:08:44.420and what social psychology research indicates is that the people who care the most about wealth
00:08:49.900and status are the people who already have it so if you basically take these these measures of you
00:08:54.120know you ask people you know basically your socioeconomic status your level of income
00:08:57.980your sort of position in society how well you're doing at your job occupational success and so on
00:09:02.220and then you ask people questions like you know how much would it interest you to hold a position
00:09:07.380of power how important is it for you to have influence over other people sort of measurements
00:09:11.360of your interest and status um and wealth and so on those two things are positively correlated
00:09:16.640meaning sort of the higher up in society you are the more you care about those things and so this
00:09:21.000was puzzling to me because i saw okay so people these you know sort of affluent upper middle
00:09:25.020class and upper class people really care about status um based on this research but they're not
00:09:30.240doing it through their material goods you know the way that they dress they sort of downplay it
00:09:33.620they sort of dress down in a way so what's going on here and then i realized oh it's luxury beliefs
00:09:37.980It's the unusual and novel viewpoints that they're expressing to sort of distinguish themselves.
00:09:44.640You know, they crave distinction. That's the key goal here.
00:09:46.640Distinguish themselves from the sort of middle class or working class people who, you know, if someone in society holds a conventional opinion,
00:09:54.040a very easy way to show that you're not a member of the sort of the riffraff or the masses or something is to hold the opposite opinion
00:10:00.620or hold a strange opinion that maybe doesn't make sense because it shows like you, you know, you're not one of them.
00:10:07.180and then the way that it's not just the opinion itself but it's the way that you express it if
00:10:11.120you express it in you know using using vocabulary no one has ever heard of for example and i can
00:10:17.400tell a couple of stories about that too you know sort of my you know the culture shock that i had
00:10:21.020uh learning this you know strange words and lexicon and tell us some of those well okay so
00:10:26.920so one example my first my first year i um i try to join this like humor writing magazine on campus
00:29:19.400your level of happiness is the same, basically,
00:29:21.900as like a very sort of wealthy person.
00:29:24.420But we spend a lot of time talking about sort of wealth inequality and so on,
00:29:28.280which I think that is an important topic.
00:29:30.180But often these other sort of norms that give rise to happiness are often overlooked.
00:29:34.880Rob, when I started to become aware of these subjects, these luxury beliefs, as you said,
00:29:43.400someone put forward this argument about privilege. And it always stuck with me, actually,
00:29:48.300which was one of the things about having privilege is that you're not aware that you have privilege.
00:29:53.760And to a certain extent, I'm sympathetic to that idea. Don't you think that we can also use our
00:29:59.340argument with these people who put forward these luxury beliefs? If you've always grown up
00:30:04.340wealthy, if you've always grown up in stability, you don't realize in many ways how lucky you are
00:30:10.740because you've never seen the flip side of it. So you're putting forward these arguments
00:30:15.120and it's coming from ignorance, really, because you've got no idea of the ramification that
00:30:21.620these things are going to have further down the line.
00:30:24.340That's a good point. You know, one of the things I've been thinking about is how,
00:30:28.560So, I mean, so a lot of affluent people, I think, have like at least attempted to imagine what it's like to be poor.
00:30:36.560Maybe through, you know, watching movies or TV shows or something.
00:30:38.800Like you see, like, oh, this might be like, you know, because I think that's like a lot of like, you know, sort of where people get their views from, right?
00:30:47.060It's sort of entertainment and pop culture.
00:30:49.300And so they at least attempt to put themselves in that position of what would it be like to have no money.
00:30:55.240I don't think I've ever met a sort of upper middle class or affluent person who has ever tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up without their family, you know, without their parents, without sort of that kind of stability of reliable caretakers.
00:31:08.940And to me, this is important because if you look at, so for example, so developmental and evolutionary psychologists make this distinction between childhood harshness and childhood instability.
00:31:25.860And harshness is basically low income, low socioeconomic status in your family.
00:31:30.200and childhood instability includes things like a number of relocations in your childhood whether
00:31:36.900there was a father present in the home whether the parents were divorced how many different
00:31:41.080romantic partners the child's parents had when they were growing up and so on just sort of the
00:31:45.660day-to-day disorder that they experienced and literally every single paper I've looked at
00:31:52.540investigating these two things it finds that childhood instability is a much stronger predictor
00:31:57.480of harmful and risky behaviors in adulthood compared to childhood poverty or low income.
00:32:04.700So there was a pretty widely cited 2012 study showing that childhood instability was a significant
00:32:11.140predictor of, you know, in adulthood, so sort of the number of short-term sexual partners,
00:32:16.340teen pregnancy rates, rates of addiction, likelihood of committing a crime, and so on,
00:32:21.420And whereas childhood socioeconomic status was not associated with any of those outcomes in adulthood.
00:32:28.380And there was another study in 2016 which found that regardless of family income, adolescents who were raised in instability were more likely to be committed to drugs.
00:32:39.640And this was across socioeconomic lines.
00:32:42.180So basically a rich teenager who grows up in instability is more likely to be committed to drugs than a poor teenager raised in a stable home.
00:32:48.960um and so basically like this sort of day-to-day disorder and instability has a much stronger
00:32:54.080effect i mean there's even some interesting research on on personality and it sort of
00:32:59.000links with with instability so uh there's this um idea in in psychology called a dark triad
00:33:06.220personality traits um so narcissism psychopathy machiavellianism and you know this is like
00:33:12.780associated with like cynicism, hostility, disregard for other people. And again, so childhood
00:33:19.220instability was significantly associated with these dark triad traits in adulthood, whereas
00:33:25.600childhood poverty was not associated with any of them. And if anything, I've actually seen kind of
00:33:29.720the reverse. There's this interesting finding that low childhood socioeconomic status was
00:33:35.200associated with slightly higher scores on empathy in adulthood. So people who grew up poor seem to
00:33:40.700actually have slightly higher levels of empathy than people who grew up rich whereas childhood
00:33:44.600instability had a completely opposite effect like if you grew up in instability um your ability to
00:33:49.180feel empathy for other people is is um very much declined uh diminished in adulthood which might
00:33:55.320explain why there's more violent crime particularly in some of those areas potentially you know we had
00:33:59.700dr diana fleischman one of our favorite guests great uh on the show and we in the first interview
00:34:04.940do you remember we talked about in that particular context we talked about why women were more
00:34:09.420attracted, some women were more attracted to people with the dark triad characteristics.
00:34:14.340And she talked about how if you grow up in an unstable environment and you see people
00:34:18.540cheating each other, screwing each other over, lying to each other and whatever, you sort
00:34:22.620of learn that to survive in that environment, you have to be like that.
00:35:07.020like i know i feel uncomfortable i feel uncomfortable sitting there going maybe people
00:35:11.260should get married before that you know like what i'm some sort of like conservative from the 1980s
00:35:16.240i'm gonna start shutting down comedians and whatever like that's not who i am and i feel
00:35:21.100that so where's that coming from yeah i mean i think it's uh i mean i feel it too you know
00:35:27.120whenever i talk about this stuff especially early on when i first started publicly
00:35:30.660expressing these views like yeah there was something and i and i think it's just um
00:35:34.820you know for better or worse people uh desire like they don't want to be ostracized they don't
00:35:41.300want to be vilified or ridiculed for their views and i think like this is actually part of part of
00:35:47.280like this is how how sort of norms rise and fall is is not just through um sort of people who are
00:35:55.100are unwilling to impose them but also uh another normalizes in itself that that uh you will be
00:36:01.660punished for for trying to promote it right and so this is sort of what happens where like
00:36:05.920initially it was just uncool to talk about marriage and stuff and then uh and then pretty
00:36:10.080soon like if you talked about it other the norm became like how dare you say that you know and
00:36:13.840this actually sort of further uh uh accelerates the erosion of that norm and so so yeah a lot of
00:36:19.820the the behaviors that that that are you know on average pretty beneficial uh not just for the
00:36:24.440people but for kids and so on uh one contributor was was this view that like oh like now no one
00:36:30.360wants to speak out about it no one wants to express the view and and this is you know why
00:36:33.800why a lot of people are are sort of pushing back now and I think saying that like it is important
00:36:37.360to express your viewpoints and and so on so yeah I think that is you know people people who believe
00:36:44.080in these things they need to get over it and start talking more about it you know one concept that
00:36:48.340always boils my urine to put it mildly is when I see wealthy middle-class white people talking
00:36:55.600about white privilege. And I'm like, you have never stepped foot outside of the city of London.
00:37:02.360If you do, it's because you're going on holiday to a very nice part of Europe or to your summer
00:37:08.680residence. You've never been to a part of the UK like Cornwall, where people grow up in poverty,
00:37:15.120where towns are depressed. There are no jobs. So it's just generation after generation of
00:37:20.440unemployment or in the northeast for example and the fact that they just sit there and spout this
00:37:26.640just makes me so angry yeah yeah it really is a kind of a like a narrow-minded blinkered view
00:37:33.840of yeah i guess of just race and culture and society is just because what they're really
00:37:40.480saying is like the only the only white people i interact with are the rich ones you know and a lot
00:37:45.880of those people themselves who are expressing this view are themselves like rich and white you know
00:37:49.940So, I mean, what's interesting is that a lot of the sort of non-white people they interact with are also sort of much better off than their, you know, counterparts in, you know, more deprived areas.
00:38:00.240And so, you know, the whole white privilege idea is itself a kind of luxury belief because, I mean, first what's happening is that, like, the people who seem to be most strident and in favor of this white privilege idea are themselves white.
00:38:12.540And what they're doing is they're elevating their own status, right?
00:38:15.020Like, if a white person at, you know, some fancy college or whatever in sort of a position of prominence says, you know, oh, I decry white privilege, is that white person losing status or gaining status, right?
00:38:26.320Like, are they hurting themselves or are they actually elevating themselves even more among their peer group around the people whose opinions they care about?
00:38:33.260And by the way, are they getting more privilege as a result, right?
00:38:36.900Because if you're a white person who's in the creative industries, as we once were, before we self-cancelled, then the more you talk about the stuff, the more opportunities you get, the more money you get paid, right?
00:38:49.420So you are actually entrenching your privilege by advancing this concept.
00:41:29.140I think there's some truth to that. I mean, yeah, there's this sort of overconfidence, this arrogance that is sort of pervasive among highly educated and affluent people who think that they know better, who have more time to spend on utopian ideas.
00:41:47.960And I mean, like, I'd never met someone who had like this whole sort of like political theory before about how society should be run until I sort of joined this new social environment and this new class and interacting with different kinds of people.
00:42:02.380And that's just like not something, you know, first you don't have time, but then you just, I think there's also this craving for like power to exercise over people.
00:42:10.320I think the vast majority of people just want to be left alone.
00:42:12.300You know, they just want to sort of live their lives, go to work, you know, spend time with their loved ones and so on.
00:42:18.780But a lot of elite institutions attract the kind of personality who is interested in power.
00:42:24.800I mean, I mentioned that study before.
00:42:25.840People who are interested in wealth and status already have it and they're interested in getting more of it.
00:42:29.980And so they sort of collect the credentials and inhabit elite institutions and so forth.
00:42:35.540And part of the reason for that is because they have an idea in mind about how things should be.
00:42:39.600and they're very interested in in attempting to to enact their favorite policies and so on and
00:42:45.480so i think there is um there is some truth to that and and again like i think a lot of this
00:42:50.660isn't necessarily due to malice you know there's not but they their hearts are you know many of
00:42:55.280them they're in the right place but they just don't um they're not thinking of the sort of
00:43:02.240downstream second order effects of their views that maybe sound good that maybe uh you know get
00:43:08.180get accolades from their peers but then when the rest of society adopts it they they don't think
00:43:13.520through okay well what would happen if this view were to become popular right this has always been
00:43:17.600my frustration because i've always been you know i think i'm probably one of those people in the
00:43:22.040sense that i'm interested in thinking about how society ought to be structured how do we solve
00:43:25.680this problem how do we solve that problem i've always been since i was a kid but what bothers
00:43:31.500me about a lot of this discourse is i think we're not really asking how do we solve this problem
00:43:36.280were asking, what makes me feel good and look good if I express about this problem? I just
00:43:44.000don't see that as a practical answer. And that's always been like the thing I couldn't get my head
00:43:48.000around. These people claim to be wanting to solve the problem, but the moment anyone actually
00:43:52.800mentions the actual solutions, everyone has a meltdown and freaks out and says, well, you can't
00:43:57.840say that and we mustn't talk about this. So there's a kind of impracticality to it. And what worries
00:44:02.400me based on what you're describing is of course our media class our political class our educational
00:44:08.180system all of those institutions are largely staffed and populated and run by the very people
00:44:14.980you're talking about right yeah yeah i mean it's uh i think it's to some degree it is concerning
00:44:20.360uh that the people who you know there's there's a sort of a competing competing motives i suppose
00:44:29.020You know, on the one hand, people do care about what's going on in society and how to improve lives for other people.
00:44:35.720I mean, very few people are like, how do I make things worse?
00:44:38.020You know, they want to make things better.
00:44:39.760But then there's this other motive of sort of obtaining validation from your peers, of doing well in your career.
00:44:47.440And in many of these institutions, your career hinges on the opinions of other people.
00:44:53.080And so oftentimes this sort of self-interest wins out, right?
00:44:56.840Like, or you're able to do the intellectual acrobatics necessary to convince yourself that this sort of silly sounding idea, this luxury belief will somehow make things better.
00:45:07.400You can sort of talk yourself into it.
00:45:09.360And, you know, coincidentally enough, it just happens to align with your self-interest and will advance your career when you espouse it at the same time.
00:45:15.420And I think a lot of people don't take the time to step back and think like, okay, am I expressing this to you because I really believe it?
00:45:20.480Am I expressing it because it benefits me?
00:45:22.580Am I expressing it because, you know, other people around me seem to like it and it's helping my career?