Hanania&Henderson&Upton&Lizzo&Morlock&Eloi

In Which A Caveman Tries To Explain Dumb Stuff To Some Very Smart Dudes

You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, "I understand how: I do not understand why"? It was when you thought about "why" that you doubted your own sanity.’

Or, alternately:

Ah, you've been with the professors and they've all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well-read, it's well-known
But something is happening here and you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Yesterday a friend forwarded me a really thoughtful Substack article by Richard Hanania entitled “Anti-Woke as Autism”, in which many topics are considered including, but not limited to, the difference between the way the “woke world” treats beauty and the way beauty is treated in the “real world”. You’re encouraged to read it but here’s the money shot:

(I should note that I didn’t pick Lizzo or Kate as examples here; Richard did.)

[A woman who looks like] Kate Upton gets treated like the most important person of everyone else’s day, while Lizzo (not the real Lizzo, just the non-famous woman who looks like Lizzo) is an eyesore and at best a distraction from the rest of life.

Society gives Lizzo a consolation prize. She gets her own academic departments that praise her race and sex, and maybe can even take fat studies classes. The university administration will hire dozens of bureaucrats to affirm various facets of her identity throughout her college experience. The wider culture will affirm “black is beautiful,” while nobody but the most anti-social lunatics will dare proclaim that “blond hair and blue eyes are beautiful.”

Does this mean Lizzos have higher status than Kate Uptons? I could see how a ChatGPT whose understanding of our society was developed through text alone can come to that conclusion. But for individuals who gain their understanding of human society by being embedded in it as active participants, the idea is absurd…

A lot of anti-wokeness strikes me as a kind of autism, mistaking social desirability bias for underlying reality.

Hanania here is responding to a series of Tweets and articles by the similarly thoughtful and perceptive Rob Henderson, who coined the phrase “luxury beliefs”:

Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. But if you visit Harvard, you’ll find plenty of rich 19-year-olds who will eagerly explain them to you. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is “I was educated at a top college.” Consider the Veblen quote, “Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education. Only academics educated at elite institutions could have conjured up a coherent and reasonable-sounding argument for why parents should not be allowed to raise their kids, and that we should hold baby lotteries instead. Then there are, of course, certain beliefs. When an affluent person advocates for drug legalization, or defunding the police, or open borders, or loose sexual norms, or white privilege, they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, “I am a member of the upper class.”

Hanania and Henderson have gone back and forth on a troubling question that I will, without their consent, phrase like so: Why do “Elites” say or claim to believe certain things while obviously acting in direct contradiction to those statements or professed beliefs? As an example: For the past seventy years, the media has been lecturing us about the evils of conventional heterosexual marriage, portraying it as everything from “square” to outright abusive. At the same time, the government has been steadily increasing the financial penalties for stable heterosexual marriage (higher taxes, reduction of welfare benefits).

Did this “assault on marriage” work? Yes and no, depending on who you are. In 1970, the percentage of Americans in a stable marriage was about the same regardless of class or wealth. Today, just 20% of low-income adults are married, compared to 60% of upper-middle-class people. Forget the “missile gap” — we now have a “marriage gap”! All of that anti-marriage media, from Updike’s brilliant Couples to the recent film adaptation of Revolutionary Road, is underwritten, developed, and promoted by “elites” — but they don’t take the advice they’re giving.

You’ll find similar statistical oddities in everything from transgender identity, which decreases sharply as household income increases, to interracial relationships, which are most common among people who did not complete college. (Interracial marriages, by contrast, are linked to increasing education for white-male-Asian-female couples, but linked to decreasing education for Black-male-white-female couples. What does that mean? You’d be wise not to theorize about it in public.) If you’re looking for a single relevant statistical marker for abortion, it’s income; poor people are far more likely to get abortions than wealthy ones, while high school graduates get more abortions than college graduates.

The wealthiest and most successful Americans appear to live in a time-warp 1950 where everybody goes to a good college without trying very hard, Mom and Dad stay married, nobody kills their baby fetus tissue, and people tend to shy away from outlier sexual identification or behavior. And yet the upper class, as a whole, aggressively promotes and financially supports the most progressive public policies possible, from de facto open borders to late-term abortion-on-demand to an extraordinary amount of sexualization directed at pre-teens. By and large they have been successful in this. You could even suggest that they have worked tirelessly and extensively to create a brand new America… in which they simply don’t take part.

Rob Henderson’s take on it — and again, I’m paraphrasing him without his consent — goes something like: Elites display progressive beliefs as a sort of potlatch and wealth display, an approach I covered in a 2021 post on college admissions. Richard Hanania, by contrast, suggests something less deliberate: rich people like to say things that are perceived as kind and forward-thinking, because they want to be kind and forward-thinking. When it comes to actually putting that stuff into practice, however, they hold back because those beliefs are, in fact, repugnant to them. A rich person might tell you that Lizzo is as beautiful as Kate Upton, but he doesn’t really believe it and in his private life he will only date Kates, not Lizzos. They will tell you to get an abortion, or to come out as transgender, or leave your husband of 25 years for some “Eat, Pray, Love” action — but they won’t do it themselves. Last but not least, they will work night and day to reduce the number of white people in good colleges, executive jobs, and stable homes… with the understanding that the “white people” being reduced here won’t come from their cohort, but rather from the Trump-and-gun-and-Duramax-loving BadWhites in the middle and lower-middle classes.

I think Rob Henderson is closer to creating the “Grand Unified Theory” of elite behavior than Hanania is; the former spends a lot of time trying to figure out why people behave the way they do, while the latter is content to simply find dropped stitches in the blanket, so to speak. But they both fail what I’ll call

the MaintenanceCosts test

which I have named after a valued reader of my Substack who almost always boils down otherwise incomprehensible “elite” behavior to, you know, gettin’ that paper. His argument is usually that people are trying to maximize their individual utility and that they will do anything possible to improve their financial/property/estate/lifestyle situation; therefore, any seemingly inexplicable behavior on their part just has to do with making money.

I am often tempted to reply to him, and sometimes I do reply to him, with questions like: “If Target Corporation is only motivated by making money and increasing executive compensation, why would they go to great expense to re-open stores that were looted or burned to the ground and might be again, with a similar lack of criminal prosecution or civil restitution?” Rob Henderson’s idea of “luxury beliefs” would seem to explain that scenario better. Target wants to emphasize the power and success of its executive and corporate presence, so they perform what amounts to a potlatch: we are so successful that we can just throw millions of dollars down the toilet in the cause of social justice!

To which Richard Hanania might say: but you won’t see any Target executives choosing to shop there on a daily basis.

To which MaintenanceCosts might say: there are sound business reasons for rebuilding that particular store.

Against that last, I have this to offer. Twenty-six years ago, your humble author had a gig working for the real estate department of Kroger Supermarkets. It was there that I learned just how close to the bone the average “big box” store operates, grocery or otherwise. Decisions that seem inconsequential, like doing angled parking instead of straight grids or doing the facade in zoning-required brick rather than painted concrete, can tip the whole operation into the red. There is no possible scenario in which I can imagine Target making money, or breaking even, on their looted/burned Minneapolis store. The smartest thing to do would have been to walk away, pay the landlord something, and declare a massive but fully understood loss.

(Sidebar: The reader will notice that I have not considered the reasons offered by Target themselves for rebuilding the store.

"When George Floyd was murdered nearby, I felt the same anger, despair and exhaustion that I know many of our Black team members and guests across the country also felt," Target group Vice President Cephas Williams said in a letter published in September. "As demonstrations for racial justice followed, I’ll admit I struggled to ground myself in Target’s purpose, especially as a Black man who knows the challenges people of color face in this country every day."

There’s little to distinguish the above from any extremely moral or religious public statements made by Victorian-era factory owners. I’m sure that Cephas Williams had some legitimate feelings about the whole thing, the same way I’m sure the Medici popes probably believed in some sort of God, but only an extremely naive person would ever take a public genuflection, whether to Jesus or Fighting Structural Racism, seriously.)

Let’s consider the fact, however, that MaintenanceCosts has shown himself to be anything but stupid in his comments. Therefore it’s worth taking his opinion as seriously as I take Henderson and Hanania. Which poses a challenge to me, your humble author:

Can I reconcile all three of these philosophies in a Grand Unified Theory Of Elite Behavior?

Tough gig. I mean, Rob Henderson has a Cambridge doctorate is psychology, Richard Hanania is a respected political analyst with two best-selling books to his credit, and I believe MaintenanceCosts was smart enough to buy an LS430 before they went to the moon. Compared to this trio, I’m just a (literal, genetic) Neanderthal with poor impulse control and a love of iambic pentameter.

Oh well. Let’s try this on for size anyway. Long-time readers know my fondness for the Eloi/Morlock dynamic, as seen in The Time Machine. In that story, the Eloi do nothing but enjoy themselves, while the Morlocks do all the work. Occasionally, the Morlocks come up and eat a member of the Eloi. HG Wells, the author, meant it as a metaphor for society, and it’s been used in countless critical works as well as a remarkably intelligent Mel Gibson film:

There’s just one little problem with The Time Machine, and it’s this: the Eloi and Morlocks are biologically different. Not so different that you can’t see the common human ancestor, but different nonetheless. It would be impossible for a Morlock to join Eloi society. You’d spot him the moment he crawled out of the ground.

The American Eloi of 2023 don’t have that luxury of guaranteed difference. Instead, they face the continual nightmare prospect of simply being replaced piecemeal by people who look very much like them. They know this can happen because it’s how most of them became Eloi in the first place; the majority of elites in this country don’t trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower. It takes a generation, at most, to wash the stink of new money off a family. Two generations later, they’re plugged into the power structure. There is nothing permanent about our overclass.

In their shoes, how would you fix this? How would you make sure that your ascendancy was permanent? Don’t forget that the American Eloi are deeply and thoroughly racist to a degree that no Grand Dragon Wizard of the KKK could ever begin to approach. They are racist at a granular level, truly believing that they and their cohort are superior to West Virginia coal miners and Compton gangsters alike.

So. Let’s say that you wanted to design a college admissions strategy that satisfied all three of my spiritual advisers: Henderson, Hanania, and MC. I think you’d drastically increase minority admissions for races that you believed to be incapable of matching your achievements, which penalizing the races which you think might be equal or superior to yours. And you’d cut out a slice for your own children, to preserve the power structure.

This passes the Henderson test because it has the appearance of a potlatch: the alumni of the Ivy League and the better California schools tilt the table so disadvantaged minorities with lower test scores can take the place of high-scoring white and Asian kids. How generous! How noble! How public-spirited!

It passes the Hanania test because those same elites will move heaven and earth to get their kids into the good schools as legacies or via Lori Loughlin-style theatrics. The elites believe that black kids from Chicago should have a chance at Yale — but not at the expense of their kids. Some other white kids need to take the hit. Or maybe those Asian kids, whom everybody knows are just inhuman test-taking machines who never spent a whole winter in Vail or Switzerland.

Does it pass the MaintenanceCosts test? Well, here’s the best part. The elite don’t really think that “disadvantaged people” got a raw deal on the SAT. They just think the disadvantaged people are stupid. Therefore, replacing smart kids with stupid kids makes it easier for their own children, who may or may not be as “excellent” as they were, to compete at an elite level. The “woke” approach to college admissions is good business. It makes money for the next generation of elites.

There you go. All three philosophies reconciled. Easy as pie. Let’s try something harder: body positivity. Social media is positively overloaded with so-called “bopo” content that celebrates overweight young women.

(It’s always overweight young women, not overweight old men. There is no “bopo” movement for decrepit old hippos like your six-two, 248-pound author. We are just fat and worthless.)

At the head of BOPO we have people like the aforementioned Lizzo and the model Iskra Lawrence, who started her career at 195 pounds and has gained considerable weight since then. Almost all the BOPO models have pretty faces and are in their twenties; you’re not going to see BOPO content with a 60-year-old woman on a Rascal scooter. The whole thing is hugely inauthentic and boils down to “if you were born with a pretty face and you put on weight in a proportional hips-and-bust manner, you can still be a model.”

Yet it has massive momentum, from department-store ads to Sports Illustrated, so you know it has powerful backing. Which means the Eloi are behind it. Let’s apply all three tests.

BOPO passes the Henderson test because it puts the elites in a position to be publicly kind to fat people, accepting them for who they are. The potlatch here: those obvious, but unspoken, aesthetic consequences of putting an obese person in your company’s advertising and public image presentation. “Here at The Arena Group, we will gladly take a hit on newsstand sales of our Swimsuit Issue in order to put a BOPO model on the cover!”

As for the Hanania test: go to a ski slope or an upscale private school. There’s not a lot of real-world BOPO going on. Rich moms still want to be thin, their daughters still want to look conventionally hot. Being a 225-pound woman might be all well and good for the trailer parks, but it doesn’t fly in Manhattan co-ops.

Last but not least, the MaintenanceCosts test. Fat people spend money too. What more do you need to say?

As for my Eloi Preservation Grand Unified Theory? Also simple. By promoting different “beauty standards” for the proles, you further differentiate the elite from the regular people, while preserving opportunities for the elites. Particularly the elite daughters, who will now be thinner and more conventionally attractive than their prole competitors by default. If you don’t want your elite husband to run off with a lower-class secretary, why not eliminate secretaries (in the name of FEMINISM!) then make sure that all the lower-class women that are still in the vicinity feel free, encouraged even, to be obese, heavily tattooed, and oddly dressed?

Just for fun, I’d encourage you to apply all three tests, and my pet theory, to all of today’s major social movements. If you find one where one or more of the tests fail, or where my “Eloi” idea doesn’t work, feel free to keelhaul me in the comments. This is one of those situations where I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong — or, at least, recovering my childlike wonder in Winston Smith’s “why”.