An orphan’s unlikely journey from foster care to Yale, and its lessons for the upper crust
The writer Rob Henderson recalls a classmate at Yale, where he was an undergraduate, telling him that “monogamy is kind of outdated.” But she was raised by monogamous parents and said that she planned to have a traditional marriage.
Henderson shares that anecdote in his new memoir, Troubled, an account of his upbringing in foster care and his escape into the Air Force and higher education. For him, “Monogamy is kind of outdated” is a “luxury belief,” a term he coined. He defines it as an idea or opinion “that confer[s] status on the upper class, at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” Henderson suggests that members of the upper class know, on some level, that these luxury beliefs are harmful, because, like the woman at Yale, they have no intention of putting them into practice in their own life.
Brad Wilcox: The awfulness of elite hypocrisy on marriage
He developed the concept while observing how social class operates at Yale, where he felt like an outsider because he had such a difficult childhood. In his telling, people become more preoccupied with social status when their material needs are met, and people at prestigious and thus influential institutions are more interested than most in seeking still more prestige. This upper class once signaled status with “material accouterments,” Henderson argues. But now luxury goods are so widely available that the affluent “have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.”
“Luxury beliefs” is a clever, thought-provoking conceptual framework that pithily captures some truths about American culture and politics. But when he applies the concept, Henderson can fall into one of two pitfalls: making ungenerous assumptions about why others believe what they believe, or assuming the superiority of his proposed policy conclusions without making adequate arguments that they are in fact best.
In Henderson’s earliest memory, he is 3, burying his face in his Korean-born mother’s lap. In another early memory, she cannot console him as he sobs, because she is handcuffed. He clings to her, not wanting police officers to take her away.
Thank goodness they eventually did: His birth mother regularly tied him to a chair so that she could be uninterrupted while getting high in the next room. The neighbors, after many instances of hearing his incessant crying, called 911. Found covered in bruises, Henderson was taken by the state. His mother was deported and didn’t ever see him again. He never met his father.
Effectively orphaned, he went into foster care––a system that failed him. Foster siblings started giving him beer at 4 or 5. He was smoking marijuana at 10. One foster brother participated in a murder and then hanged himself. One of his foster parents used him as free labor and threatened to let him drown.
Henderson’s struggles as a child are rendered so evocatively, with such well-chosen details, that I teared up reading them. Those readers who have never thought about what it would be like to grow up without a family can scarcely help imagining how they’d have fared in a nightmarish childhood with stints in 10 different foster homes.
Troubled aims to achieve more than empathy building, however. Henderson’s goal is, first, to “share a firsthand view of what life was like for a kid growing up in disorder.” And then he tries to draw on the perspective he gained in prestigious institutions to offer insights and lessons that might help kids like him.
Life in the foster-care system—and the social conditions that its most typical charges inhabit—convinced the author that instability is ruinous for children, far more ruinous than mere poverty or lack of educational attainment.
“Marital discord, missing parents, frequent relocations, and unreliable caregiving create an insecure and mistrustful working model of the self, others, and relationships,” he writes. He notes that in Los Angeles, where he spent his childhood, the high-school graduation rate for “socioeconomically disadvantaged” students was 86.6 percent in the 2017–18 school year, whereas the graduation rate for kids in foster care was 64.5 percent.
Life in the military convinced the author that a highly rigid environment can save people who lack discipline and mentorship from the reckless decisions that ruin so many young lives.
Henderson joined the Air Force on an impulse after driving drunk, getting in street fights, and watching a sociopathic friend kick a dog off of a cliff. A part of him recognized that if he didn’t escape, he was going to wind up in prison or worse. Where he grew up, teens can travel a long way down the path to self-destruction before seeing any dire consequences, he reflects: “You can commit a lot of crimes before finally getting caught. You can do a lot of drugs before they start to take over your life. You can have a lot of hookups before confronting the consequences of pregnancy.”
In contrast, “no institution is more aware of the latent impulsivity and stupidity in young people, especially young men, than the military,” he writes. “It has evolved into an environment in which it is very hard to do something reckless, because the consequences of failing to meet standards are both clear and severe. Major infractions like not showing up to work or failing a random drug test result in literal jail time.” As a teen, Henderson’s freedom “simply allowed me to make a lot of bad decisions,” he notes. “The military stripped me of those freedoms; it was a giant coercion machine. It demanded that I conform to certain beliefs and behaviors which, at seventeen, was beneficial.”
And yet when he arrived at Yale, he discovered that his classmates did not seem to value family stability and discipline as much as he did.
He wondered: If there is strong evidence that familial instability is ruinous for children, and that rigid environments help some among us avoid catastrophe, why weren’t those truths and their implications more of a social consensus among the people he encountered in college? This is where he turns to his “luxury beliefs” concept. Henderson was mystified by what his Yale peers believed, because he felt he knew from experience that if people lower down the socioeconomic ladder adopted or internalized these beliefs, they’d suffer.
Henderson often discusses “luxury beliefs” in ways that state or imply that their proponents are guilty of bad faith. In one example, Henderson asks a Stanford student how he founded a start-up. “Ultimately,” the person answered, “it all comes down to luck.” Henderson argues that stressing luck at the expense of hard work raises a person’s status at places like Yale and Stanford (perhaps because it suggests humility and awareness of privilege), even as it hurts people at the bottom. “Successful people tell the world they got lucky,” he writes, “then tell their loved ones about the importance of hard work and sacrifice.”
He considers white privilege to be a luxury belief. “Upper class white people gain status talking about their high status,” he reasons. “When policies are implemented to combat white privilege, it won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt.” More generally, he repeatedly assumes that privileged people who urge attitudes with downside consequences that mostly affect the lower classes are driven by a desire to benefit themselves, never mind the less fortunate.
But often, unselfish motivations play a part in what he calls “luxury beliefs.” For example, Henderson writes that at Yale, he learned a term that he had never heard before: fat-shaming. “It was remarkable that students who seldom consumed sugary drinks and often closely adhered to nutrition and fitness regimes were also attempting to create a taboo around discussions of obesity,” he observes. “The unspoken oath seemed to be, ‘I will carefully monitor my health and fitness, but will not broadcast the importance of what I am doing, because that is fat shaming.’ The people who were most vocal about ‘body positivity,’ which seemed to be a tool to inhibit discussions about the health consequences of obesity, were often very physically fit.”
Maybe, as with other “luxury beliefs,” some Yalies inveigh against fat-shaming, for better or worse, to raise their own status. However, just as Yalies are likelier than average to come from intact, wealthy families, they are also more likely to be careful, diligent self-starters with higher-than-average impulse control and neuroticism. And like people everywhere, they project their own qualities onto humanity, as though their experiences are representative, rather than fully grasping our society’s psychological diversity.
Read: The weight I carry
If you and your friends all happen to be the sorts of people who require no outside pressure to exercise and eat right; who suffer more than usual when met with implicit criticism, let alone overt stigma; and who know more thin people with eating disorders than morbidly obese people, fat-shaming might rate higher on your list of social ills than it would for someone from a different milieu, not because you’re trying to raise your social status, but because you are responding to the needs of others as you understand them.
Of course, there is also ongoing disagreement about whether fat-shaming, however defined, is an effective or counterproductive way to address obesity.
On that issue and many others, the “luxury belief” framework can easily stray into begging the question, or assuming the truth of an argument without arguing it. Consider drug legalization. Henderson notes that his birth mom was able to get drugs, which hurt both of their lives. “If all drugs had been legal and easily accessible when I was fifteen you wouldn’t be reading this book,” he declares. “All my foster siblings’ parents were addicts, or had a mental health condition, often triggered by drug use.” Nevertheless, he complains, “the luxury belief class doesn’t think about that because such consequences seldom interrupt their lives. And even if they did, they are in a far better position to withstand such difficulties.” But what about the other side of that debate?
Although drug legalization may be an esteemed position at Yale today, drug prohibition was long the near-consensus throughout society. And then as now, prohibition imposes much heavier costs on the lower than the upper classes. Members of the upper classes can do drugs recreationally while insulating themselves from the rise of drug cartels; the destruction these cartels have wrought across entire developing countries; the domestic street violence inextricable from black markets; the dearth of quality control that kills so many drug users, especially in the lower classes; and the lengthy prison sentences disproportionately meted out to lower-class drug users and dealers.
As with America’s experiments in regulating alcohol, drug prohibition and drug legalization both have huge downside costs from which the upper class is protected. The poor will bear the brunt of the effects of whichever policy is chosen. It makes as much conceptual sense to suggest that decades of drug prohibitionists were championing a “luxury belief” as it does for Henderson to apply the label to legalization.
We’re all tempted to overstate the degree to which those who disagree with us have malign or selfish motives, and to underestimate how much our policy instincts are shaped by over-indexing for our own social psychology. When urging attitudes or policies that fail at scale, academics and meritocratic elites are often extrapolating from what works for people like them. Their motive is trying to treat others as they would want to be treated.
But good intentions aren’t enough to prevent bad outcomes. Raised in a different milieu and more conversant in the needs of those who inhabit it, and deprived of the sort of family that so many in the upper class enjoy, Henderson can be sharp-eyed about the blind spots of the social setting he ultimately joined. The ideas in his book offer a novel perspective, even when he is applying the concept of “luxury beliefs” too promiscuously. His arguments ought to be debated at the places that he critiques, such as Yale.
But in passages where Henderson is too reductive or uncharitable, Troubled risks being dismissed rather than engaged with by readers who do not recognize their own motives in his confident descriptions of them.
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