In this context, neutral language is a typical “luxury belief,” an expression coined by American psychologist Rob Henderson to qualify ideas and opinions that serve to raise the social and moral status of those who promote them. Instead of flaunting their place in the world by owning things like watches and fine clothing, many began to use the views, vocabulary and behaviors associated with the progressive elite of middle- and upper-class students and professionals, influential in politics and culture, says Henderson. Adopting a belief in luxury is like virtue signaling, but at the cost of harming the poor.
One example he often cites is the “defund the police” movement, which spread across the United States in 2020, when Democratic-affiliated protesters, from their elite universities and safe neighborhoods, advocated for defunding the police. For the residents of the violent areas, this meant a public tragedy. It was similar to what is happening today in Brazil when residents of gated buildings described police repression as fascist, and attributed the support provided by those in the line of fire to ignorance, reactionism, or the fact that they “did not understand the research question.”
Henderson knows the characters on both sides of this story well. He graduated from Yale University and a Ph.D. From Cambridge University, he never met his father and lived with his mother until he was three in a trailer, before moving to a Los Angeles slum, where he ended up in orphanages, due to reports of abuse, until he was adopted by a family that was less poor and dysfunctional than the original. His entry into the army and the scholarships he received there saved him. The Belief in Luxury thesis, he says, was born out of the shock, upon entering Yale, of seeing colleagues talking about white privilege and advocating, in addition to the end of policing, the extinction of the family as well. Henderson, the son of a Korean mother and a Mexican father, lived in his childhood and youth with white people who were just as miserable as him, and he says that the lack of a stable family, more than poverty, is what profoundly affected his life.
Exaggeration of neutral language could have the same end as the pronoun declaration fad in the United States. When octogenarian and somewhat gender-ambiguous Joe Biden began declaring himself “he/him,” millennials realized the practice had become easy. Likewise, for Henderson, some ideas that he classifies as luxury beliefs—such as drug decriminalization and white privilege—can become popular over time, and thus abandoned by elites because they no longer serve to distinguish them from the masses. It is, as we know, a population that the left – from universities, media and parties – seems to have wanted to distance itself from for a long time.
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