A conversation with Rob Henderson on his bestselling book, and how elites don’t practice what they preach

When Rob Henderson arrived at Yale as an undergraduate, one of his then classmates told him “monogamy is kind of outdated.”

This classmate said she planned to get married, and for it to be a monogamous relationship — but still, she said, society needs to “evolve” beyond the idea of traditional families.

This struck Henderson as strange. He was unlike many of his Ivy League friends. His mother was a drug addict, and he never knew his father. He was placed in the foster system in California as a toddler and flitted from foster home to foster home before he was eventually adopted. Not longer after, his adopted parents divorced and his adopted father refused to speak to him.

Later, after struggling with substance abuse and dangerous behavior as a teen, he joined the military, where he served eight years. He started at Yale in 2015, admitted as a non-traditional student. It was a time of upheaval at the university, as students protested against a professor and her husband, also a professor, after she issued a letter saying students shouldn’t worry so much about how people dress up for Halloween.

Henderson was confused by their anger and many of the ideas they championed. Most of Henderson’s classmates were wealthy, while he was not, but over time he realized it was much more than their finances that divided them.

It was something closer to home: having an intact family.

At the time, Henderson hadn’t coined the term “luxury belief,” but this experience was one of several that informed the development of his theory. He defines luxury beliefs as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”

How he arrived at this theory is detailed in his memoir “Troubled” — which provides an in-depth look at his difficult path from childhood to adulthood, and how it informed his current ideas about society and family.

As Henderson reflected on the difference between his upbringing and his classmates’, he began to theorize that the new American elite gain their status through luxury beliefs. Back in the mid-20th century, the elite “exhibited (cultural capital) through having intricate and arcane knowledge about wine, art, history, furniture and their extensive educations and the way that they dressed and carried themselves,” Henderson said. Today, elites claim their status through their luxury beliefs, he said.

Luxury beliefs are “new-fangled ideas that are often born in elite universities and inculcated throughout the world,” Henderson said in a phone interview with the Deseret News. The examples he gave of some of these beliefs include denigrating the importance of marriage or decriminalizing hard drugs. While these beliefs may confer status on the upper-class, they come at a cost for everyone else.

When he arrived at Yale, he wasn’t “fully prepared for just how different our families were, and our towns and our communities.”

Like the statement about monogamy being outdated, Henderson said he would “run into these strange statements over and over” leading him to come up with his theory. “I realized that this rarified segment of society — it wasn’t just economically, but socially — had maxed out in every metric of capital: economic capital, cultural capital and social capital.”

According to Henderson, the “elite” are the highly affluent and the educated who yield a lot of influence. Key to his theory is that those who hold luxury beliefs often don’t practice them.

“Many affluent people now promote lifestyles that are harmful to the less fortunate,” Henderson wrote in his memoir. “Meanwhile, they are not only insulated from the fallout; they often profit from it.”

An example Henderson uses in his book is how some of the people who work in the tech industry in Silicon Valley profit off technology that they don’t let their own kids use. An example of this is William Siu, the founder of a video game app company. He penned an op-ed for The New York Times saying he creates games, but doesn’t let his kids play them.

A report published in BMC Public Health found that kids who live in lower-income households use their phone more and for longer periods of time than children in higher-income households.

Henderson referenced a report that showed “if you compare kids from households that earn more than $100,000 a year, they spend two hours less per day in front of screens compared with kids in families that earn $35,000 or less per year.”

“In other words, if you’re from a poor family as a kid, you’re spending two hours more per day using addictive technologies than kids in rich families,” Henderson said.

Henderson hypothesized that one of the reasons for this apparent disconnect may be that people who hold luxury beliefs don’t try to put themselves in the shoes of people like him. “I’ve never met anyone trying to imagine what it would be like to grow up without a family or to be raised by a single parent who works full time and whose time and attention and resources are stretched so thin that they don’t really have time to monitor,” Henderson said.

He shared an example that didn’t make into his book.

When Henderson was growing up, his little sister was a picky eater. His adopted mom and her partner Shelly would cook healthy meals for the family. His sister would tell them she wanted chicken nuggets or pizza. They were able to “go through this negotiating process night after night to make sure she had a proper dinner,” he said.

But in single parent households, it can be difficult for these kinds of conversations to occur. “If you have one parent who is frazzled after a long day and the kid just wants chicken nuggets, they just give them chicken nuggets because they’re tired and it’s understandable,” Henderson said.

But it’s not just about what’s inside an individual home, it’s also about the broader community. Henderson said when he grew up, he and his friends would look around their communities and not see many stable, committed relationships. “Suddenly marriage is not really a viable, realistic option for you because you’ve never seen this.”

Henderson thinks many people who create pop culture, write essays and op-eds and produce social media and mass media content don’t think a lot about what it’s like to grow up without an intact family.

“They just don’t think about all of these downstream consequences of families that aren’t intact,” he said. “Having two married parents is one of the strongest predictors of social mobility.”

But Henderson said social mobility shouldn’t be the only focus when it comes to helping kids. Money won’t solve all their issues. “Let’s focus more on what happens before age 18 than what happens after and try to promote more stability and security for kids in poor and disadvantaged communities,” he said.

And Henderson thinks marriage and stable families are a big piece of the puzzle.

“Even if having an intact, stable, loving home with two married parents has zero impact on college graduation rates and the likelihood of future incarceration and so on and so forth, we should still be promoting having those loving, stable, secure families for kids, because the emotional pain of a child is still important, regardless of their future.”