Luxury Beliefs and the Decline of Society

Decadence is usually defined as “moral or cultural decline, characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury.”

This definition suggests that, if a society indulges in excessive pleasure and luxury, then it will decline.

I’m skeptical of this proposition. Compared to earlier eras, modern society is breathtakingly indulgent. We have achieved such heights of luxury and comparatively lax morals that it’s a wonder Western society continues to exist at all. And yet, here we are, creeping ever closer to becoming a Type I civilization on the Kardeshev scale.

Sometimes harms result from our indulgences, sometimes not. Conservatives were convinced that gay marriage would trigger the immediate downfall of the West. By all accounts, they were very wrong. For that matter, somehow we even survived the “satanic” rock music of the 1970s!

And we will continue to become increasingly more indulgent, more open to social experimentation. There’s nothing to be done about it, and it’s hard to see this as a distinctly bad thing. As I’ve written previously, “Societal decadence is a kind of filter that civilization must pass through.” What’s the alternative, to stop enjoying the luxurious comforts and hard-fought liberal values of modernity? Not gonna happen.

But there is one particular type of luxury that we would be better off disavowing sooner rather than later. I’m referring to so-called “luxury beliefs.” This is a concept, coined by

Rob Henderson

, that’s become popular among the anti-woke/heterodox crowd, and I think for good reason.

Luxury Beliefs Are Bad

A luxury belief is an opinion that confers social status to elites while causing harm to lower classes. For example, the educated elite often signal their opposition to nuclear families, even though they themselves are more likely to get married than people with lower incomes, and even though the nuclear family is a powerful tool for wealth generation.

The elite also enjoy a number of luxury beliefs related to drugs and crime. For example, among the highly educated living in coastal cities, it is (was?) socially advantageous to vocally support defunding the police, even though people living in neighborhoods that would be most impacted are opposed to this.

Possibly the most disturbing luxury beliefs are related to the environmental movement. Consider the case of Greenpeace’s wrongheaded fight against GMOs: As reported by the Spectator, Greenpeace and other anti-GMO activist groups have blocked countries in Southeast Asia from cultivating Golden Rice (rice enhanced with vitamin A). Each year, as many as 500,000 children go blind from vitamin A deficiency, and the WHO estimates that up to half of these children die within 12 months. Golden Rice could go a long way toward solving this problem, but Greenpeace is too concerned with the fake harms of GMOs to care.

Luxury beliefs are effectively society-level unforced errors: they cause unnecessary harm with the only “benefit” being that elites get to feel some sense of smug satisfaction. It would be much better for elites to stick to more practical indulgences: vacations, second homes, sex, plastic surgery, unnecessarily expensive bottles of wine, etc.

The sooner luxury beliefs are abandoned, the better. Then society can safely continue on with its broader decadence project.