Taking down the luxury belief class: Troubled by Rob Henderson

Henderson makes a compelling argument for why class, culture and family structure determine life trajectory through his own heart-wrenching story. Liberals need to read this.

Troubled simultaneously melted my heart and made me angry. Angry for Henderson and at the adults who didn’t give him stability and even angrier at the college-educated parts of society that hold the luxury beliefs that disproportionately harm everyone below them in society as they trickle down.

The affluent have largely abandoned trickle-down economics in favor of trickle-down culture whereby they pluck talented people from ‘marginalized’ backgrounds based on race and gender to join their ranks, and their harmful beliefs about family, crime, substances, and everything that provides structure to life trickle down to the lower classes. This is more pernicious than the belief in trickle down economics, because at least you could name that. They find endless excuses (as did I) for behaviors among the lower classes that they would never tolerate in themselves and their children, as though pitying and excusing people who make self-destructive choices is social justice. This is how we get things like defunding the police, decriminalization/legalization of drugs, and disdain for marriage and the family. Of course, attaining a comfortable place in the white collar class is dependent on avoiding crime, drugs (though the affluent and secure love taking them recreationally), and providing a good life for one’s offspring is dependent on forming a stable family environment.

Maybe I’m so angry because I worked hard, transcending an unstable family environment and working class background (though nowhere near like Henderson’s) to climb economically only to find my peers (again, especially women) adhering to illogical, contradictory and intellectually bankrupt ideas. It would be one thing if they believed them and left everyone else alone. Still, like many religious groups, they want to ensure others come to believe them as accurate, especially the uneducated hoi polloi, because that confers the ultimate status on the elite as the saviors of the marginalized.

Boys need structure, outlets and high expectations.

The lion’s share of the book is a straightforward memoir of Henderson’s early childhood, with vivid details about the failings of the adults around him and the destructive tendencies in young boys who don’t have father figures or structure to inhibit their worst behaviors. When I was in Teach for America, I found their belief that high expectations would transform poor children’s lives to be misguided magical thinking, but after reading Troubled, I reconsidered. The adults in Henderson’s life didn’t have any expectations of him and didn’t watch his school performance very closely. He succeeded at hiding all sorts of bad behavior, including his report card, but he rightly observes that things might have been different if he had been held to any standard. The military turned his life around because of its expectations, rigidity, and discipline, reinforced by dire consequences for misbehavior.

Having grown up during the Bush administration, I, too, mocked and derided the military as the institution enabling neocolonialism and saw patriotism as a conservative value that fed into a militaristic culture. Now I understand that the social milieu of my high school, in which my peers in the International Baccalaureate program had mostly married parents with degrees (and many were academics at the local university), led me to believe these things more than my intellect. I wanted to fit in, and I knew I didn’t. Media consumption, an extensive vocabulary, and political beliefs were my way to fit in (at which I was decidedly unsuccessful).

While I never questioned the importance of college, I realize now that was partly a function of having had two aberrant years in a private elementary school and attending a middle school with rich kids whose parents had degrees. If I had not been surrounded by kids (especially girls) who studied hard, I might have fallen on the wrong path. Some of this was innately cultural; the Indian community largely shunned my family because they mostly had degrees from American universities, and my parents did not; my father did not even graduate high school, and they were always small business owners. My mother’s psychology degree from a little known women’s college in Bombay wasn’t sufficient for a white collar job in the least (and she tried). Money was always tight, and I understood early on that college was essential for a stable income. My parents pushed this belief, too. But suppose you aren’t surrounded by this white-collar attitude emphasizing discipline and delayed gratification. In that case, it’s unsurprising that most young men don’t get degrees, ending up either in prison or the military and/or in hourly jobs that don’t pay a living wage.

I lucked out in part because I am a woman. Girls have more self-control at an earlier age and, therefore, perform better in school regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic status. I saw this when I taught with working-class, mostly Dominican-American kids at a middle school in Providence. The boys struggled, refused to do homework despite my appeals, and saw school as an impediment to their freedom. The girls, even the ones in the remedial math class I taught, wanted to improve their abilities and were striving to do the homework and score well on the tests. Such a culture is easily found among girls because they tend to be more conscientious at an earlier age, and school rewards qualities girls naturally have. School does not provide anything resembling structure for boys, nor does it allow them an outlet to get out their natural aggression brought on by hormonal changes. Most teachers being women means that boys without father figures have only women telling them to do things at school and home. These changes lead to acting out and violence, and we’ve been unable to deal with it. We try to force boys to sit quietly and do work while doing nothing to deal with their naturally destructive, restless energy. This is why boys are the hardest to reach in school. It does not help that doing well in school is seen as decidedly uncool among boys whose parents don’t have degrees and who come from unstable environments like Henderson’s.

The role of discipline and responsibility

Henderson’s meditations on the importance of discipline and responsibility in turning his life around should be considered at length by people who believe these concepts are unimportant and harmful to the marginalized. Some people in the luxury belief class with marginalized identities think they’re sacred victims above reproach, so a call to be accountable and disciplined is heard as criticism and oppression. Discipline is coded as borderline evil and conservative, and this is one of the most infuriating things about this class. They decry imposing penalties and boundaries on those who need it most while valuing it in their own lives to ensure their success. This is what Henderson means by ‘luxury beliefs’ that he examines in the final quarter of the book through his own experiences.

Women should especially read this book. We’ve seemed to develop a total indifference to the plight of men, particularly ones without degrees because we see them as immoral, misogynistic Trump voters are responsible for their failures. There is a political chasm between college-educated women's and working-class men's beliefs at the core of our intractable political problems. Society is utterly indifferent and contemptuous of men without degrees, which is ultimately disastrous for women and children. Suppose the vast majority of men in a society are struggling. In that case, families don’t form, crime and addiction soar (because men are more violent than women), and women are disproportionately subjected to sexual violence from these dispossessed men. Thus, for the sake of women and children, we should care about the legions of men without degrees and encourage their flourishing. Masculinity without an outlet and the taming influence of having to care for a family is destructive, which I have seen firsthand in my own family. I’m seeing a cousin descend into a life of crime, substance abuse, and violence from afar, who has been rejected by a society that can’t do anything to improve his life.

My parents were always highly religious. This meant they never drank and made sure to keep me away from kids who would encourage drug use or sex. They succeeded in both these endeavors until college when I probably let myself enjoy my freedom too much. Contrast this with my maternal uncle, who has been an alcoholic almost his whole life and has physically abused my aunt and cousin when he was a child. This left lasting scars, and soon, my cousin was drinking. He eventually got multiple DUIs and went to prison, like Henderson’s friends. When he came out, he wasn’t a candidate for marriage, nor could he do much more than get a job at Wal-Mart or Indian-owned gas stations. Last I heard, he smokes weed and drinks heavily on the weekends while threatening his parents regularly with physical violence. My mother telling me that he was yelling at his father for not sending him to college will always haunt me, and I see more crime in his future. Our society failed him because the only alternative to college for young men seems to be prison and substance abuse, which will lead to prison eventually, anyway.

Henderson’s story could have been like my cousin’s, but his life took a miraculous turn because he found discipline and structure when needed. I’ve written before about how discipline is essential to a well-lived life and achieving anything meaningful. It quite literally saved my life as it saved Henderson’s. But, if I had continued to believe the bullshit regurgitated to me by my friends, Instagram, Facebook, my therapist, and the culture of feminism at large, I would not be writing this today, nor would I be flourishing.

Education isn’t enough—familial love matters.

Henderson concludes that the spoils of an elite education will never heal the scars of childhood instability or the lack of a loving family, and this should be intuitively obvious. Yet, educated people are singularly obsessed with the importance of getting into college and promote the wrong belief that it can fix everything for a kid who came from nothing. A stable income from education, however, doesn’t erase the real trauma of having grown up poor and without a stable home environment, which I’ve never heard acknowledged. Instead, every election Democrats are waxing poetic about the import of everyone going to college to qualify for the ‘jobs of the future’. This is deeply misguided, and if one genuinely believes college isn’t for everyone, then it’s the governing elites’ responsibility to ensure young men have an alternative environment that constrains their most violent tendencies while giving them purpose and promoting family formation. More stable and employed men means more children with fathers around. That’s not patriarchy.

Henderson eloquently excoriates his peers in these august institutions for overblowing their marginalization and trauma when he knows people who’ve experienced things his classmates cannot begin to imagine. This, understandably, pisses many of them off, and they can’t deal with his questions that dig deeper into these contradictions. Perhaps this is understandable because people usually don’t change their minds given new information and instead view disagreement as an attack. But, these people see themselves as governed by rationality and critical thought, so they won’t be able to see their irrational behavior, as I did not after college.

It is difficult to deny that the elite and college graduates generally adhere to a monoculture. Those of us with degrees who aren’t elite comply with the culture imposed from on high because we would like to think of ourselves as closer to Ivy League elites than people without degrees, so it’s in our interest to go along with it, especially if we are women, for social capital accrual and fitting in. This desire to fit in eats away at one’s ability to form conclusions and is ultimately a significant factor in our political breakdown.

White privilege is the ultimate luxury belief.

White privilege is a concept presented as a rational and natural explanation for why injustice exists in a society with material abundance. This is the ultimate luxury belief that took me the longest to discard because it allowed me to explain my woes by blaming others for how things turned out. And maybe this is why women play the victim card: it will enable us to escape responsibility for failure that we may have brought on ourselves. If I don’t get the promotion, it’s easier to blame men for overlooking me than examining my role in what happens to me. White women, especially, can escape responsibility by invoking their white privilege and casting white men as the villains in their stories. Because even if they have racial privilege, they can hide behind their lack of gender privilege. But no one wants to talk about the only privilege that matters, which is that of class. But to admit that social class matters the most would mean the entire ideological edifice of identity leftism would come tumbling down. It is the one thing no one will ever admit. This is why we can’t have nice things like a functional social safety net.

For those whose lives are determined by class, race and gender don’t matter, and you won’t be able to force us to see that they matter more than money. We won’t have it, because it is an imposition of a myopic worldview forged in a hyper-controlled environment that does not allow for individual experience to complicate it beyond these rigid categories that the culture has created and reinforced despite the stated commitment to dismantle any and every category. As it did in colonial societies, the census creates the population’s understanding of itself - we place ourselves into these ridiculously general categories not because we made them up but because that’s how the media discusses different populations. College-educated people consume such media at the highest rates, so the understanding of media elites is reflected in us. I started thinking of myself as South Asian when I got to college instead of Indian American because I knew on some level that was the more politically correct way to think of myself. But now I realize how ridiculous the label is because immigrants from East or South Asia would never describe themselves that way. We would do well to deprogram ourselves from these rigid categories and the mental prison in which they place us.

College-educated women need to read this the most

Ultimately, I’m not sure that the people who need to read and absorb these messages from Henderson’s experiences will do so. The group that needs to read this the most, even more than young men with similar experiences, is college-educated women. As a class, we need to have more empathy for men. We live in the most liberated and richest society in human history, and yet we’re obsessed with our status as the victims of patriarchy. I see patriarchy nowhere in my life. I have more freedom and choices than I ever could have imagined having if I had been born in India. I’m safe from the threat of sexual violence, which would not be the case in India, either. I contrast this society with India simply because women are subject to daily violence and indignities there in a way they never would be here, regardless of class. There are differences in degree, and the rhetoric erases them such that the argument is emotional and utterly devoid of logic. I don’t see myself as a victim of patriarchy, and seeing myself that way as recently as two years ago did nothing but damage my relationships and mental health.

Troubled left a lasting mark on my psyche and intellect such that I’m even more certain that the beliefs I left behind are harmful and should be excised from our psyches. The college-educated hold all the money and power in our world. So we have more responsibility to use it responsibly for the benefit of all people, to promote actual justice. The affluent in the past have to at least some extent felt the need to serve the public good in exchange for their good fortune, as misguided as it sometimes was. There is no such sentiment among the elite anymore. Money is made by draining society of everything beautiful that makes life worth living by encouraging mental illness and destructive behaviors and by casting suspicion on discipline and responsibility as values encouraging human flourishing. We unthinkingly grant our attention to advertising platforms for an appalling amount of the day (as did I) and then push the illogical things we see there onto others in real life. If you read this, you will come away questioning everything in the best way possible - it feeds your brain and soul. Henderson is a real public intellectual, and we need more voices like his to complicate the harmful beliefs shaping our society.