Luxury beliefs, a term coined by Dr. Rob Henderson, defines it as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. Just like second homes on the beach or Bentleys, luxury beliefs are thoughts that can only be afforded by people whose wealth shields them from the very harm those beliefs can cause to the rest of us.
"Defund the police" "health at every size" "marriage is just an oppressive institution of the patriarchy" or ‘’the youth are lazy’’. These are just a few of the ideas that are becoming common doctrine among the 21st century elites. More shallow, backward, and funny amongst the elites in third-world countries.
Luxury beliefs have a lot in common with luxury goods.
Luxury beliefs are valuable assets. They are status symbols that people are reluctant to relinquish.
For example, if you randomly give a pen to someone and offer them the chance to exchange it for another one, more often than not, the person chooses to keep the one they were given.
The idea is that owning a thing somehow makes it more valuable.
Beliefs work like this, too.
Often people’s beliefs are held tenaciously. And seem impervious to open discussion.
People get utility from their beliefs simply because they are their beliefs.
The way we treat beliefs can be generalized to the way we treat objects.
In Ghana, where I was born, and just like many other third-world countries, it is very common to hear all kinds of ideas about poverty from affluent people, politicians, or others who have been corrupt enough to climb the success ladder spew rubbish about the less privileged, poor or even the youth in general.
The elite in poor countries allude that poverty in these countries is largely attributed to the lack of entrepreneurship.
‘’Look at all those men sitting around having their eleventh cup of ataaya (mint tea) of the day’’,
‘’These countries need more go-getters and movers and shakers to pull themselves out of poverty’’.
Observers from the rich countries say.
However, it is very common knowledge for anyone who has ever lived, even for a brief period in a third-world country to realize it is teeming with entrepreneurs. On the streets of poor countries like Ghana, it is very easy to meet men, women, and children of all ages selling everything you can think of, and things that you did not even know could be bought.
In many poor countries, you can buy a place in the queue for visa section at the American Embassy (sold to you by professional queuers), the service to ‘watch your car’ in street parking lots, the right to set up a food stall or merchandise on a particular corner (sold to you by some corrupt local police boss or landguard) or even a patch of land to beg from (sold to you by the local thugs). These are all the products of human ingenuity and entrepreneurship, in my opinion.
In contrast, citizens in rich countries do not even come near to becoming entrepreneurs. They mostly work for a company, some of them employing tens of thousands, doing highly specialized and narrowly specified jobs. Even though some of them dream of, or at least idly talk about, setting up their businesses and becoming my ‘own boss’, few put it into practice because it is a difficult, daunting, and risky thing to do. As a result, most people from rich countries spend their working lives implementing someone else’s entrepreneurial vision, and not their own.
The upshot is that people, in my opinion, are far more entrepreneurial in the developing countries than in the developed countries. Moreover, there are a plethora of things that might go against you as an entrepreneur working in an underdeveloped country. Things go wrong all the time. And I mean all the time.
From endless power cuts that screw up the production schedule to corrupt custom officials who won’t clear your goods or spare parts in time to fix your machine to inputs not being delivered at the right time because the delivery truck broke down- yet again- due to potholes on the road to the police officials who are always bending, and even inventing rules all the time to extract bribes. Coping with all these obstacles requires agile thinking and the ability to improvise. I have been there before.
Operating any business in a third-world country is not as easy as people think it is. You have to compartmentalize not only your tasks but your emotions as well else you run the risk of going mad.
Take an average American businessman on the streets of Texas and watch how they dwindle in this business climate. I bet he/she would barely last a week in the face of these problems if he were made to manage a small company in Accra, Maputo, or Ouagadougou.
So we are faced with an apparent puzzle. Compared to the rich countries, we have more people in poor countries (in proportional terms) engaged in entrepreneurial activities. On top of that, their entrepreneurial skills are much more frequently and severely tested than those of their counterparts in rich countries. Then how is it that these more entrepreneurial countries are the poorer ones?
One of the most prevalent luxury beliefs among the rich in poor countries is typically blaming their countries’ poverty on the ignorance, laziness and passivity of the poor.
‘’If only their fellow countrymen worked like the Japanese, kept time like the Germans, and were inventive like the Americans’’,
Many of them would say, if you would listen, their country would be a rich one.
‘’The youth are lazy. All they do is spend time on social media looking for the next tik tok dance challenge and rant about trending issues with half-baked ideas they certainly have no clue about’’
The point is, it is extremely easy to wag fingers at others, especially in areas we are faring better than them.
It is easy for the rich to think poor people are lazy and uninventive.
It is easy for the intelligent to think others are dumb and mentally retarded.
It is easy for the old to think the youth nowadays are crazy and clueless. Now although there might be some truth to the latter however saying ‘All Youth’ is such a sweeping generalisation one has to wonder how morally self-absorbed you could be to put such a statement forthright.
It is a luxury belief of the elite in third-world countries to think the reason there is a wide income inequality is simply because the youth are lazy and social-media-ridden.
Just remember the next time you hear a rich man from a third-world country assert that the youth in his country are ‘lazy and unproductive’, they are projecting their self-indoctrinated luxury beliefs.
It takes a lot of self-introspection, contentment, and gratitude to realize that most of the seemingly inalienable privileges we enjoy in life are either happenstance or luck. Cos things could have been way different than they are at the moment.
Our realities always change but one thing remains the same;
Luxury Beliefs Are The New Status Symbols.
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"On the streets of poor countries like Ghana, it is very easy to meet men, women, and children of all ages selling everything you can think of, and things that you did not even know could be bought."
Is it not written that, if hard work and dedication were truly the keys to success, then African market women would be the richest people in the world?