Luxury Beliefs and the Lake Michelle Lifestyle
(In this article I discuss the concept of luxury beliefs, how they are driving our coming dystopia, and why South Africa is the final form desired by America’s communist elites. I don’t want to give too much away, but there will be talk of winding driveways, buskering bums, cocktail waitresses, corgis, and a classic monologue by John Cusack.)
In 1993 Paul Fussell published a book called “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System”. In 2020 I did a podcast episode about “Class” with the glorious Sandra Tsing Loh, who wrote the definitive review of it. Fussell’s book is about the class system in America, which we pretend doesn’t exist, but absolutely does, just not in the same form you find it elsewhere. Fussell’s book toes the line between parody and anthropology, sometimes serious, sometimes over the top, but always insightful in one way or another.
One of those insights has to do with what makes something “luxury”. At the product level, this may have to do with quality, exclusivity, or brand cache. But when it comes to objects and lifestyle generally, luxury is often expressed with useless extravagance. A Belgian shepherd working on a farm isn’t a luxury, it’s a tool, a cost that has to be justified by output. The queen’s corgis, although derived from a breed that also worked as herders, are now slow and low and high maintenance dogs, though arguably cuter. They have been been ornamentalized into uselessness.
To show the link between uselessness and luxury, Fussell uses the example of a driveway on a upperclass estate. To be truly luxury, it can’t be a straight A-to-B connector. It has to be unnecessarily windy. Anti-utilitarian. It has to symbolize the owner’s possession of so much wealth that he can build and maintain things that are completely for show, extra in the modern sense of that word.
A couple years ago, academic Rob Henderson coined the term “luxury beliefs”, to refer to ideas that are attractive to the very wealthy, but essentially anti-utiliatrain. These luxury beliefs include things like “defund the police” and a grab bag of other ideas that Henderson believes are harmful to the lower class. From my perspective, many of Henderson’s choices of dangerous luxury beliefs mark him as a Neo-con, the most destructive group of elites over the past 30 years, the people who are now handing over their magic wand of death to the woke Neo-Comm(unist)s who’ve taken over our institutions.
That said, the concept of luxury beliefs is extremely useful. Perhaps unsurprisingly, National Review, that decaying rag and ancient Republican Party gatekeeper, has the best description of how Henderson’s neologism came to exist:
The mass availability of consumer goods made possible by global capitalism has rendered the ostentatious consumption of [luxury] goods inadequate as a class marker. Henderson asserts that, in the vacuum created by mass consumption, elites in Ivy League universities and popular culture have sought to distinguish themselves from the masses by adhering to a set of “luxury beliefs.”
In other words, now that middle class kids are wearing Balenciagas and shopping at Armani Exchange, the elites need a different kind of fashion to distinguish themselves. Many of these fashionable beliefs have subsequently escaped the world of toy ideas toyed with by an elite minority, and found themselves implemented in the real world, often to disastrous results. Henderson describes how the cool new intellectual poses staked out at Oberlin seep out into greater Ohio, in the form of bad policy and bad culture, like the idea that the nuclear family is a relic, an idea that’s been so disastrous to intergenerational mobility among the lower classes.
If I had to pick my own most destructive luxury belief of the moment, and setting aside the hair-ball of woke ideas being thrown up all around us, I’d have to pick “inflation is good” as the best of the worst. It’s the perfect meme to carpet bomb the proles with. Inflation destroys their economic standing, while preserving the wealth (and improving the relative wealth) of the upperclass who have stocks and hard assets instead of a fixed salaries and pensions. It’s a perfectly anti-utilitarian belief in that it destroys while granting to those who hold it the standing that can only come by demonstrating your status as someone completely divorced from the everyday worries of paying for milk or child care. It’s a winding driveway built right through a slum on expropriated lands.
Abiding luxury beliefs
To hold luxury beliefs is to signal, with ideas, that you are above the fray. You don’t need bourgeois values like hard work or productivity, because the world provides for you. Or it should!
In the first episode of my new show I interview author Larry Leamer about his book “Capote’s Women”. This is a group of ladies who chose to be well kept, but strictly ornamental, appendages for wealthy husbands. Their carefully crafted and dutifully maintained looks are their value add to the Kennedy’s and Guinness’s of the world. The main thing they “produce” are envious looks. They represent the idea that luxurious living is explicitly anti-utilitarian. To be fabulously wealthy is to have the most gorgeous and pampered corgi of a wife.
I pointed out to Larry that this attitude reminded me of a movie hero that one might not associate with this ethos, John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything. When asked what he wants to do with his life, Dobler gives the iconic answer:
I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.
Cusack’s character distills the essence of luxury belief into a lovely nugget. For Dobler, saying he doesn’t want to be a cog in the machine is just another way of saying he doesn’t want to be forced to provide actual utility to anyone. I’m going to hold off on judgement of the morality of this sentiment, and instead look at the consequences, which are more interesting to me.
At the local level, the existence of a (small) group of Dobleresque slackers, perhaps bumming their way around Europe selling friendship bracelets or buskering for change, neither helps nor hurts their world. They might spread STD’s among their fellow bohemians for a while, then move on to making real music or getting a real job. At worst they become burn outs, little Lebowski’s who might raise the ire of big Lebowski’s, but the problem with our world isn’t some Dude and his desire to live a life of toking and bowling. The problem is when luxury beliefs meet real world power.
The final social solution
Every social class seeks a final form for society, and the final form for American elites is to turn our country into South Africa. Or the Vatican.
Their ultimate goal is to build a walled garden of luxury around themselves. A place of safety, tranquility, and abundance surrounded by vast slums populated with a never ending supply of a serfs to be invited inside the garden to trim the hedges and feed the peacocks at minimal cost. As to what happens inside those slums? Who cares! So long as the pockets of wealth are insulated from the rabble, whatever happens outside of the walled gardens is irrelevant. Or, in an even more extreme version, poverty outside the walls reinforces the relative wealth of the elites, and lets them bargain down their labor costs to the most impoverished bidder.
The uber-wealthy, and certainly the uber-wealthy who make up today’s elites, don’t want to live in an egalitarian society, where everyone has access to the same stuff. Those windy driveways would no longer convey uppercrust status if everyone had one. Fussell talks about this directly in “Class”, and about how status symbols can drift downward from the very wealthy to the poor, at which point they completely lose their cache and are abandoned by the rich. This happens all the time to names; the word “Madison” used to conjure up images of elite NYC businesses and past presidents, now it’s what lower-class families call their girls. As a side note (and don’t get mad at me, I’m just the messenger), girl’s names are much more likely to be used as fanciful signifiers than boy’s names. The perpetual need for separation from the mob is one of the driving factors Henderson sees behind the rise of luxury beliefs.
Luxury beliefs often serve the cause of class warfare in a low-key, almost instinctual way. How often have you heard someone who has made it to a pinnacle of success talk about how what really matters is spending time with family? In fact, they would say, that’s what you should strive for. Forget about competing to rule the world! Find the true joys of family and stop being such a workaholic. Don’t be like me all full of regret in my Hollywood mansion with my harem of compliant bimbos. Such a hallow life!
The road to Lake Michelle
The ultimate luxury belief is that you, as an elite, are not just richer and more powerful, but inherently superior to the people below you. Those dumb rubes, are dumb rubes. The reality that so many normies are waking up to — that we not only have a two-tier system of justice and laws and rules (recall who got their livelihoods destroyed in the name of public health, and whose jobs are spared). To the elites this is a feature, not a bug.
In other words, the ultimate luxury belief is that government’s role is to protect the elites and shit on the peasants. What makes this a luxury belief, and not just a run-of-the-mill evil belief, is that it’s held more and more openly as a kind of ideal, barely disguised. Of course Cuomo won’t go to jail for his genocide of nursing home residents or his sexual misadventures! Of course the policeman who shot the unarmed January 6 protestor is a hero, and all those non-violet protestors can rot in jain forever. They were a threat to the elites, and must be dealt with appropriately. Their trespass was way worse than your average murder in a bad neighborhood.
What our elites want is a final form that looks like the picture above, taken over Lake Michelle in South Africa. Study the picture for long enough and you might just be able to figure out which half you’d rather live on.
In the US we’re more uncomfortable than the Afrikaners were with images like this of literal walled gardens to keep out the bottom dwellers. And our bottom dwellers expect at least a chance at social mobility based on hard work, if not an outright guarantee that anyone can make it if they put in enough hours.
I know this is something I keep harping on, but this is why the Metaverse is so absolutely vital to New World Disorder. Meta is the drug that will make the nightmare go down easy. It’s opium in its purest form, a series of pleasant experiences piped directly into your cranium. Don’t worry about the real world! In VR you can be the king of your universe, and while you may own nothing except a bag of NFTs, you will be happy — so long as your actions continue to please the oligarchs, or at least don’t threaten them in any way.
While the people on the right side of the photo above enjoy cocktail shrimp and Iordranov Martinis by the lake, you can live on the left side of the photo and have those very same things in your virtual reality, so long as you spend 10 hours a day trimming the hedges of the people on the right side, and so long as you accept that they have the right to occasionally rape you with de facto immunity (though certainly not de jure immunity, writing that directly into the law would be gauche!). Don’t worry though, you can always take your anger out on your virtual pets or kids or, really, who gives a shit so long as your actions don’t spill over onto the right side of the story?
The ultimate luxury belief is that this is how things should be. That makes communism the ultimate modern luxury belief, in that it functions as a pseudo-scientific version of the divine right of kings. To the useful idiot leftist, the image above represents the ultimate failure of capitalism. But every communist leader in history has understood that maintaining such a stark bifurcation requires something more than the light touch from a laissez faire invisible hand. To achieve Lake Michelle, it’s not enough to have winners and losers — the free market has no problem creating these, but it does so on a continuum, and with way too much mobility for the elite’s comfort.
To sustain a true bifurcation requires a rich set of government interventions, from zoning laws to barriers-to-entry to complex regulations about who can do what and when and which officials have to be bribed and how. South Africa did it with race (and class), but the modern way is to do it in the name of equality (ahem, equity). And progress. Price fixing is sold as a way to protect the unwashed masses from unscrupulous profiteers. Nationalizing the gas industry is to give it to The People, never mind that The People who will ultimately benefit are the few on the right side of the picture.
Lockdowns make everything better
In case you haven’t noticed, Covid, or more precisely our response to it, has been a great benefit to our elites and their ambitions. At the financial level, it’s been a huge windfall. I must admit that at the beginning of the pandemic I wondered why so many powerful people would go along with anti-business policies like lockdowns. But it turns out that these new rules have been phenomenal for the elites. Since 2020, the richest 500 people on earth have increased their net wealth by a trillion dollars. Since numbers like this don’t make sense, think about handing over all of Oklahoma to these 500 people, at least in terms of the net-present-value of the state based on its GDP. That’s quite the gift, even if you don’t like tumbleweeds and tornado ravaged plains.
But the Covid regime has been an even greater gift to the elites from a social perspective. It’s fast becoming a permeant way to distinguish the elites from the masses. At the directly visible layer, this takes the form of an excuse to explicitly separate servants from their masters with masks. Is that black man in a suit here for the party, or is he part of the waitstaff? No need for awkwardness, if he’s wearing a mask, he’s the help. If not, don’t put your foot in your mouth by handing him your coat!
At the less directly visible level, the Covid regime has ushered in rules about who can have their job terminated by politicians at a moment’s notice, and who is protected because they can work from home (or, more fashionably, their cottage in the Hamptons).
Fussell points out that how much you earn is only one part of class, and sometimes not the most important part. Your job’s title and respectability matters much more. When we lived in Toronto, my wife was close friends with a woman who worked as a bartender at a night club. She made more than your average tenured professor in tips, but her job was immediately sacrificed in the name of public health at the beginning of the pandemic. Meanwhile, those professors never missed a paycheck. When it comes to social class, power and prestige trump take home pay, and eventually that power and prestige (in this case assisted by media narratives about the “right” pandemic measures), were used to eliminate that embarrassing paycheck gap too. In fact, they aggressively reversed it, driving the bartender’s wages down to a monthly welfare payment.
This is not for you, peasant
Take another look at that image of Michelle Lake. Notice how there is a lovely boundary of green trees to hide one half from the other. The wealthy need not see (or hopefully smell!) the underclass on the left, and the impoverished have no line of sight of how the other half (or 1%) lives. Best not to rub in their face what they don’t have!
When Fussell wrote “Class”, he called the people so rich they could make the right side of the photo look like the left side “top out of sighters”. These were the people with so much (usually intergenerational) wealth, that they could disappear into isolated wonderlands. For the most part, these uppercrust elites preferred to keep their sanctuaries secret, like Epstein Island would have remained if not for a handful of meddling journalists. By and large, old-school elites were big fans of dense hedges and Vatican-style walls.
For the current generation of power-mad communists, hiding their deviance and their power to subjugate others is viewed as spoiling the fun. Or perhaps these folks are simply too young and undisciplined to know better. My own hope is that this will prove to be their undoing, but who knows?
Clearly though, they lean in to the luxury belief that elites are entitled to rule over peasants. It’s so manifestly their divine right that they feel perfectly comfortable rubbing the peasants’ faces in the chasm between life on one side of Lake Michelle and the other. It’s not enough for them to be able to throw lavish dinner parties, their servants must be humiliated with masks, literally dehumanized, lest the sight of their vile, disease spewing faces betray their underlying humanity.
Old money understood the need for discretion, but the new crop of communist elites has yet to learn this lesson, which is why get caught in awkward moments like AOC’s Tax the Rich dress at the Met Gala, wherein Brooklyn’s favourite commie decided the best use of a very expensive ticket to the ball would be to let her make a splashy entrance in an eye-catching dress in front of the masked help.
Today’s commie overlords are so far removed from the concerns of the peasantry that they can’t even imagine why their actions would be offensive, or else they view those creatures as so far below them that they have no power to avenge the utter humiliation of watching a politician pull $10 ice cream bars out of a stocked $10,000 fridge, right after most $15/hr jobs were eliminated as as “non-essential”.
Though I should note here that communist elites have, in other countries, figured out how to make a virtue out of their glorious inequality. Look at any photo of a public location in North Korea and you’ll see giant portraits of the glowing and chubby faces of the Kim’s looking out over a scene where skinny peasants struggle with loaded cargo bikes. The beauty of communism, from an elitist point of view, is that it always recognizes that some pigs are more equal than others, and that anyone who doubts this is an enemy of the state (ahem, of The People).
If this seems counterintuitive, or if you are naive enough to believe that what we’ve seen so far isn’t “real communism”, note that the enemy for all communist regimes isn’t the rich or even the poor. It’s the middle class. The bourgeoisie.
To achieve the Lake Michelle lifestyle, the middle must be routed. The Kulaks rounded up. The women like that young bartender who was making $1000 a night at a Toronto nightclub, they either have to be destroyed (as was achieved with the lockdowns), or absorbed into the elite, if they are talented enough to make the jump up to ruling class (and say what you will about AOC, she’s nothing if not a talented propagandist for the new wave of woke overlords).
Communism, the idea that societies don’t need a middle class, and that the world is best bifurcated like Lake Michelle, is the ultimate luxury belief. If it spreads, it will be absolutely devastating to the vast majority of people, but espousing it provides a clear marker that you are someone who expects to live on the right side of Lake Michelle, certainly not on the left.