‘The Common Good’ – A Luxury Belief if There Ever Was One
Earlier this week, I came across an interesting interview with author and political scientist Matt Goodwin about his new book ‘Values, Voice and Virtue’.
In the interview, Matt referenced work on the Luxury Belief System elaborated by one Rob Henderson.
I was curious about this, as I have been working on something tangentially-related in my exploration of wealthy NGOs and the people who choose to work for them (more about that here).
Rob’s basic idea is that since many previous status markers, particularly in the area of conspicuous consumption (new cars, international travel, etc.) have become more affordable, ‘elites’ have had to adopt a new method of distinguishing themselves from the hoi polloi. After all, what makes them better, if not their wealth?
I see things a tiny bit differently: while some things have become cheaper, certainly this has been off-set by a great deal of movement in the other direction e.g. on housing, high-end groceries and ‘experiences’. Thus, we could still be distinguishing ourselves based solely on material goods and conspicuous consumption if we wanted to be doing so (it’s one thing to spend a weekend in Marbella, another to tour Japan for three months).
I think the real crux of the matter is that many people who consider themselves ‘elite’ simply don’t like others who are just as well off financially. These people are all among the more fortunate, with the rest of society trailing them significantly. There is a group of people (those in low-paid jobs) they could all look down on if they wanted to. But clearly, that is not enough, and some way to distinguish yourself from people who can also afford $25 a bottle olive oil is what is really being sought here.
Many people in the trades, particularly those who go into business for themselves, are quite affluent, as are many tech workers, many of whom never attended university. The great tide of prosperity post-WWII lifted a lot of people who are now in their 40s, 50s and 60s into the class of the affluent. At the same time, the property bubble and off-shoring has created many new people who are less affluent (in low-paying jobs) or (and this is the critical point) affluent only by virtue of their inheritance (not by their income). I think it is predominantly this latter category of people, who are generally living a lifestyle far in excess of what they themselves have technically earned according to the present rules of society, who deeply resent those who are out-earning them. Their life-experience is significantly above what it should be according to the meritocratic rules of the present economy. In my experience, if those who have benefited from childhood wealth and inheritance are hostile towards one set of people, it’s anyone who (against the odds) pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.
And the views of these people (the bootstrappers) are at profound odds with those who derive a great deal of their lifestyle or position from inherited wealth and nepotism (the coasters (‘coasting’ through life)).
The bootstrappers (even very liberal ones like me) tend to value what are now considered more conservative arrangements: hard work; tests measured via hard data (especially math and science); stability; financial independence; strenuous education; some religious orientation, etc. Slack off with a bootstrapper and they will likely punish you quite harshly and not care all that much how you feel about it. They may even let you know that they are doing you a favour. The bootstrapper philosophy is ‘life’s hard, get a helmet’ and they dislike taxes that don’t have a clear return on investment. Afterall, the bootstrapper has gotten where they are by keeping return on investment calculations front and center in their heads.
Coasters, on the other hand, believe quite sincerely that we live in a ‘just world’ (after all, everything was handed to them and that seems quite just). There may be some minor injustice – people using the wrong pronouns, diminishing rainforest, lack of completely equal gender pay – but these are minor things that do not go to the root of society. Life is not essentially unfair, difficult and competitive. Coasters tend to live paycheque to paycheque. They are confident they will never hit the wall of deep financial insecurity, having never experienced it, and thus feel confident living well beyond their means. When things go wrong, they run to someone else to fix it. Yes, they bought a house three times what the salary rule said they should, but don’t they deserve a fifty-acre kitchen? It’s very unfair that because they have to pay this off they only took three holidays this year and their wedding cost a mere $40k. We all know people like this, and yes, they are a spoiled minority, but they are there.
The bootstrappers know exactly where they came from and will lie awake at night recalculating interest rates and plotting how to get a better deal.
As you will note – I’m basically agreeing with Rob: the fading bourgeoisie who are coasting on their parents’ and grandparents’ wealth can’t distinguish themselves from the nouveaux little-bit-riche based on consumption alone. The only point I make is that it is a battle largely between these two groups with a lot of other people left in the dust, genuinely really struggling, and that the coasters, I think, barely perceive these others (even though, as Rob points out, they do immense damage to them) and undertake their reactionary beliefs primarily to keep the bootstrappers down.
To make matters more complicated, many of the bootstrappers look down on the coasters. They’re rarely as smart or hardworking and after all, daddy helped them out a lot. So, the coasters need some way to try to flip those tables.
Enter the Luxury Belief System.
The coasters can afford one thing the bootstrappers can’t, and that is to entertain beliefs that have almost no bearing on reality and that don’t need to make logical sense.
I would argue that this is a pinpointed attack right on the bootstrapper. Bootstrappers need for e.g. college admission to be based on hard tests results – not their ‘mindset’ or ‘attitude’ or the fifty extracurricular dilettantish activities the coaster did while the bootstrapper was working at KFC or milking cows after school. Bootstrappers have also gotten where they are by being practical. So, they are highly unlikely to entertain theories or fads that will obviously not last, or engage in the much beloved ‘thought experiments’ of the coasters. Most bootstrappers would genuinely not like to talk for the next five years about whether someone they don’t even know wants to be called ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘zhe’ or whatever, for the good reason that they mainly just don’t care. They have bills to pay. They have income to earn. This house doesn’t pay for itself!
For this reason, they can’t afford the ‘luxury’ of ‘rethinking their most basic values’ every few days as coasters often argue everyone should do, nor the luxury of eternal self-introspection, nor the luxury of bouncing through fifty hard-core environmental measures, none of which they will actually live by for more than 24 hours. Continuous self-indulgence is actually quite expensive in terms of the time commitment. Only people who clearly aren’t challenged in their lives – the kind of people who are working a 20-hour week and getting paid for 40, rather than an 80-hour week and getting paid for 50 – can afford such luxuries. Thus, in short, I would see the Luxury Belief System as something particularly targeted at the coasters’ biggest competition – the bootstrappers, rather than at society in general. It demands a huge investment of the one thing bootstrappers don’t have – time. Because that is what they are using to buy their financial security with – whereas the coaster got it handed to them (the trust fund their parents set up for university, the internship with Uncle Joe’s friend that turned into a job, the down payment on the apartment that isn’t a two hour commute from the first workplace). You might have as much money as they do (indeed, in many cases probably more), but certainly if you are not up with the cause du jour, you are merely a rich ignoramus (just like Donald Trump).
As if that weren’t all bad enough, I also think there is another angle of this new Luxury Belief System that relates to politics, and is even more crazy than the material side of this vicious little battle. This is the coaster attempt to reconfigure the idea of ‘democracy’ as directed solely at finding ‘the common good’. This is one of the most arrogant ideas I have ever heard, but you’ll see it repeated again and again in conversation about democracy. If you don’t agree that democracy is about ‘the common good’ you are A BAD PERSON these days.
I always ask myself how much such people had to coast through life to believe that they don’t need to utilize politics to fight for their own interests. Because the idea that you are just sitting here at the table discussing policy with NO interest of your own, NOTHING personal at stake that you can’t afford to lose, NO measure that could possibly be ruinous to you, is frankly bonkers. Julius Caesar couldn’t afford to approach policy this way, much less anyone else.
Democracy, or indeed, any pluralistic politics, is a contention between parties, individuals and interest groups. Interest rates going up or down benefits different groups of people. All policy creates winners and losers. Any rule, however minor, on tax or fireworks or farming regulation, creates a division between those who benefit from it and those who don’t. While there are things that are generally good for most of society (I would say, tax-funded education and healthcare), this still isn’t universal, and also depends on good execution.
Thus, ‘I’m just here to figure out the common good, because I don’t need to fight for my own interests’ is the ultimate Luxury Belief, yet one the coasters have sought to normalize as the ‘right’ approach to politics. And those who hold it look down on those who see politics as a pluralistic battle (which has become something of a minority belief among writers in this area). The stellar example is, of course, Brexit, the ‘right’ answer being ‘Remain’, with those who voted Leave either too stupid to perceive their own interests or somehow obligated to set aside their own interests for ‘the (pre-determined) common good’. There are a whole ream of ‘common goods’ out there that people are apparently expected to give up everything of importance to themselves for (in what is a curiously fascist, or at least unreasonably patriotic, attitude).
To give an example of this in practice: during a radio debate with Lawrence Lessig, I pointed out that I voted pro-choice in the recent Irish abortion referendum, partly because as a woman of childbearing age, it was certainly in my interests to keep my options open. To this, Lessig responded (rather nastily) that this ‘shows the kind of person you are’. This isn’t because Lessig is pro-life – what he objected to was that my own self-interest had been one of my motivations for casting my vote the way I had. I should still have cast a pro-choice vote, but I should have done so for purely selfless reasons. It’s an amazingly nihilistic attitude in which one is encouraged to erase oneself from reality (much like the 2004 film Butterfly Effect (I don’t recommend it, it’s quite disturbing; I only watched it because I got it for free from a grocery store)).
There’s something very disturbing about this particular Luxury Belief, which preaches that it is WRONG to fight for your rights, wrong even to perceive the need to act in your own self-interest at all and that politics should be devoid of self-interest and thus, apparently, even self-expression.
Like many a bootstrapper, I don’t buy it, for the very reason that I would likely be lying dead in a ditch by now if I didn’t stand up for my own interests. Looking back on my life, I only wish I’d done more of it earlier, because like most people, I haven’t encountered very many people who had my best interests at heart. Instead, the ‘objectively right’ thing to do, has, thus far 100% of the time, turned out to be me doing something at my expense for their benefit. My parents often told me that no one would hand me anything in life – turns out they were right. I’ve been very lucky in some ways, but (like most people) I haven’t lived a life of luxury where things just miraculously worked out for me at every turn. What most of us are going to get in this life is approximately what we can prevent other people from taking. Interests may align to a large degree, and it’s nice to help people who help you, but you definitely need to acknowledge that there are interests for that to happen, and that there is not one nebulous, ultra-fascist ‘common good’ that can be declared and then wielded against all opponents.
Like most Luxury Beliefs, the belief in a ‘common good’, not composed of pluralist votes, or on the basis of considered interests, but divined from above, is thus unconvincing. Efforts to construe democracy this way – as a ‘finding’ of the ‘one ‘truth’ are thus a fantasy that, like the other rapidly changing Luxury Beliefs, has contributed more to polarization and divisiveness than honesty about pros and cons ever could.