As a child, Rob Henderson was in the running for the I’ve-had-it-worse-than-you cup. His mum was a drug addict. Father unknown. Shuttled through various foster homes. Adoptive parents split up, using him as their battleground. Small town America, little to no money, and zero prospects.
The children Henderson grew up with didn’t have much in the way of choices; for most, it resolved to drugs or crime. Henderson, however, took the only other real option: enlistment. He joined the US military.
As with many others, the military began to give Henderson some of the structure his chaotic home life had always lacked. Couple that with a formidable natural intelligence, and Henderson began to make his way out of the milieu into which he had been born. On leaving the military, he was able to enrol in college where his intelligence finally had an outlet. Henderson excelled. After completing his degree, he went on to do a Masters at that most Ivy League of American universities, Yale.
Henderson had arrived among the intellectual elite. The people whose parents and professors made the policies that affected the people he had grown up among. And, basically, he discovered that they were completely clueless. They had not the slightest idea of the effect of the ideas they espoused. Almost all his peers came from intact, two-parent families but all of them argued that there was no reason to say that was better than single-parent families. Their other ideas similarly championed personal and sexual freedom and licence, while they themselves generally belonged to conventionally moral families.
In short, they lived morally conservative lives while espousing complete libertinism.
And they thought this was the right thing to do, not because of its effects on the poor but because it brought them status among their peers. Henderson slowly realised that, as markers of their own status, his peers at Yale were propounding luxury beliefs, a set of ideas that marked them out as different from other, lower-status Americans.
Social status is something that goes deep into our evolutionary past. It was literally a matter of life or death. Now, though, to signal status, when everybody can own a Rolex or an indistinguishable replica, something else is needed because luxury goods don’t do it. The marker for superior social status today is not what you have but what you believe. And who cares what effect that has on people who can’t buy their way out of a husband leaving home or an addiction leading to the loss of a job?
Well, Rob Henderson does and his evisceration of our current ‘elite’ is as measured and savagely polite as any I have read. Read this book. It might be the most important of the last ten years.
