Rob Henderson's Newsletter

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

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The Evolutionary Logic of Emotional Development in Children

The Evolutionary Logic of Emotional Development in Children

2 years ago · 50 likes · 7 comments · Rob Henderson

The Only Reading App I Use:

I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.

If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:

These screenshots come from my Readwise app.

Readwise aggregates your reading highlights from various sources like Kindle, Apple Books, Substack, Twitter, and so on. It stores your highlights in one place, making it easier to stay on top of your reading.

Each morning, it emails me 8 random excerpts from different books I’ve read. Since 2021, that daily message has been a quiet ritual for me: fragments from books I half‑forgot are resurfaced, like my own past self giving me a tap on the shoulder.

Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.

Exclusive Offer for My Readers

Use this link →  https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).

I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.

Links and recommendations:

A Moral Hierarchy Among Murderers by Theodore Dalrymple
The shocking truth about fairness by
Islam in America by Reihan Salam
Low-Conscientiousness Losers Are Bad Senate Candidates by
Steve Stewart-Williams on evolutionary psychology, pseudoscience, and the politics of sex differences
Why we like to believe other people are stupid by

Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here

Three Interesting Findings:

1. Men with two children had an estimated brain age that was 0.6 years younger than their childless peers had, and for men with three children, it was 0.7 years younger. That’s similar to the brain benefit associated with exercising 2.5 hours a week. (source).

2. Fewer than 40% of Londoners are now white British; in 1961, it was nearly 98%. A quarter of the population of Brussels is Muslim. More than 40% of elementary and middle school children in Vienna are Muslim.

3. Some human sex differences are genuinely enormous. For example, voice pitch, has an effect size of around d = 4 (a huge difference). Curiously, the sex difference in voice pitch is larger in humans than in any other ape, including those that are much more dimorphic than us in size. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).

The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.

If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.

Order your copy now:

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Why She Won't Let You Buy Her a Drink

Rob Henderson — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:45:46 GMT

Evolutionary psychology PhD student William Costello joins me to discuss Obsession (2026), the sleeper hit film of the summer.

We use the film as an entry point to discuss what psychology has discovered about modern dating and desire. We cover the research showing that men routinely over-perceive women’s interest while women under-perceive men’s, why 60% of romantic relationships begin as friendships, and that nearly half of young men have never asked a woman out. We get into mate poaching (and the “Lancelot effect” of stealing a friend’s romantic partner), why women reject a man’s offer to buy them a drink, and whether the “friend zone” still exists.

We also wade into borderline personality disorder, the “favorite person” phenomenon, and the controversial idea that self-harm can operate as a bargaining strategy. We also cover the unsettling research on what people really want in their opposite-sex friends.

Join me for my next livestream in the app:

Available for iOS and Android

This Summer's Sleeper Hit Is About A Man Who Can't Ask A Woman Out

Rob Henderson — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:12:16 GMT

With a budget under $1 million, the thriller Obsession has earned more than $100 million in the US and more than $148 million in theatres worldwide. So far, it’s the sleeper hit of the summer.

But it is no shlocky horror flick. I saw it over the weekend and found it to be a surprisingly deep film. At heart, it’s a morality tale for today’s aggrieved young men — a story about male cowardice, female desperation and the nightmare of getting exactly what you asked for. A fitting fable for our social-media age.

First, you have to understand the idea that the film keeps circling around, one that has absolutely nothing to do with the supernatural: a man wants to be wanted more than he wants the object of his desire. It’s an idea that echoes the words of the looksmaxxing influencer “Clavicular”, who has said that knowing he could have sex with a woman is better than actually having sex with her.

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In Obsession, a young man named Baron (nicknamed “Bear”) is obsessed with the beautiful, charismatic Nikki. He’s desperate to ask her out but he can’t find the words. Early on, she tells him that she has lost a necklace and she’s desperate for it back. So Bear goes into a shop to buy her a replacement. He then exits the shop with a gift for himself — a cursed trinket that promises to grant him a wish.

The perfect set-up.

Later, Nikki gives Bear an opening to tell her how he really feels about her — but he fails to do so. He can’t do it without knowing how she feels first. And so, out of pathetic desperation, Bear retrieves the “One Wish Willow” from his bag and wishes that Nikki will love him forever.

It works. Nikki becomes possessed and falls madly, horrifyingly in love with Bear. He gets what he wants, which means the wanting is over. And that’s where the horror begins.

Why would being loved to the point of obsession be so awful? Because real love requires the other person to be free.

The thing that makes Nikki worth loving was that she is autonomous, that she has the power to choose Bear. The wish strips all of that away. Nikki tells Bear that she will be “anything you want me to be”. This isn’t really a person worth wanting at all.

Bear (played by Michael Johnston) is also upset that his friends are growing sceptical of how much Nikki suddenly likes him. Although Bear wants to be wanted by Nikki, that’s not enough. He wants to be seen as the type of man who could be wanted by a woman like Nikki.

Eventually we learn that the real Nikki (played by Inde Navarrette) is still trapped in her now-possessed body. Every now and then she claws her way to the surface. In perhaps the film’s creepiest scene, she whispers, “Kill me, Bear. Please”. That is the real Nikki, awake for one second inside the puppet, begging to be put out of her misery. Bear hears her but he does nothing. He’d rather keep the terrifying and potentially murderous puppet that adores him alive instead of liberating the person who didn’t choose him of her own free will.

I notice that every time Nikki makes explicit or implicit requests of Bear, he always fails to give her what she wants: “Tell me whether you actually like me. Replace my necklace. OK, now I’m possessed and I want you to love me. OK, now I’m trapped in my own body and this is a nightmare, please kill me.”

Bear declines each time.

At one point, the possessed Nikki screams at Bear “Tell me you love me!” and Bear screams back, under duress, “I love you!” Recall that early in the film Bear couldn’t say he liked Nikki until she said she liked him first.

The film portrays Bear as a weak and pathetic man from the very beginning. He doesn’t have the courage to ask Nikki out, even when Nikki directly gives him the chance to do so. Bear’s internal frailty appears again when he is trying to decide how he should kill himself. He picks up a gun but backs out, opting to swallow a handful of pills instead.

You keep thinking: if Bear had simply told Nikki he liked her right from the start, none of this would have happened. The main male character of this film was more terrified of asking a woman out than he was of being in a relationship with a murderous woman who feeds him his own cat.

According to research project DatePsychology, more than half of men aged 18 to 25 have not once gone up to a woman to ask her out in the past year, even though three quarters of women the same age say they want to be approached more often. Which is probably why this film could only be made by a 26-year-old Gen Zer who fears what will happen when men fail to act and resort to dreams and wishes and magical fantasies.

The lesson of the movie? If you like someone, just ask them out.

A version of this article was published by the Times of London under the title “Why every young man should fear Obsession’s message.” It is a modified version of a Substack essay I shared last week.

Official Corruption, Obsession, Hidden Crimes

Rob Henderson — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:10:11 GMT

Why every young man should fear Obsession’s message

My latest for The Times:

The Psychology of Morality:

My new lecture series “The Psychology of Morality” is now available exclusively at Peterson Academy.

I delivered six lectures in front of a live studio audience that explore the origins of morality. The course examines the distinction between moral philosophy and moral psychology, showing how emotions and intuitions often guide our judgments more than rational principles. It also investigates frameworks such as Haidt’s moral foundations theory and Gray’s moral dyad theory. The series also covers dark personality traits and their relationship with moral behavior, and concludes by examining the relationship between morality and happiness, sex differences in moral judgment, and moral development across the lifespan.

Enroll here for immediate access.

Here’s the trailer:

Links and recommendations:

Era-Adjusted Morality by Josh Zlatkus
Intelligence, Large Language Models, and the Left Hemisphere by W. Keith Campbell
The Hidden Crimes of Parolees by Barry Latzer and Kristofer Bret Bucklen
Free to Choose by Theodore Dalrymple
“Rationalist” Dating Strategy by Ilya Somin
Extra Cash Can Alter Fertility Decisions by Roy Baumeister

Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here

Three interesting findings:

1. A study of content from major American and British newspapers revealed that superlative adjectives like “extreme,” “far,” and “radical” were used far more often to describe the Right than the Left, with this lopsided rhetoric taking off in the mid-2010s. (source).

2. People rate fictitious studies showing that men draw better, lie less, or are more intelligent than women as lower in quality, more harmful, and more worthy of being censored than identical studies showing that women do better than men in these domains. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).

3. India is one of several countries in which the government is incapable of getting more than a fraction of its employees to do the work that they are being paid to do. In the education system, on any given day, approximately 25% of teachers are absent. The health care system is worse. Despite an extensive network of public clinics, the average absenteeism rate among doctors is estimated to be 40 percent. These teachers and doctors are all still drawing their salaries. Through a combination of poor oversight, widespread collusion, and official corruption, this absenteeism goes unpunished. (source: Cooperation and Social Justice by Joseph Heath).

The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.

Order your copy now:

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

She's the Monster. He's the Villain.

Rob Henderson — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:00:04 GMT

With a budget under $1 million, Obsession (2026) has earned more than $100 million domestically, and more than $148 million worldwide. A major sleeper hit.

I saw it over the weekend and found it to be a surprisingly deep film. A lot to discuss here.

Early on in Obsession, a young man named Bear goes into the shop to purchase a gift for a young woman named Nikki. He then exits the shop with a gift for himself. A perfect setup.

Many astute moviegoers have pointed out that Bear is indeed the real villain of the film, but they fail at explaining why. Allow me.

This is a story about male cowardice, female desperation, and the nightmare of getting exactly what you asked for.

First, you have to understand the terrifying idea the film keeps circling around, an idea that has absolutely nothing to do with the supernatural:

Why Some Smart People Never Get Anywhere

Rob Henderson — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:15:37 GMT

Personality changes throughout the lifespan.

During adolescence, people become less conscientious, less agreeable, and more neurotic. Psychologists call this the “adolescent personality dip.”

To understand why some people seem incapable of getting their lives together, you first have to understand one of the most important findings in personality psychology.

What follows explains why some highly intelligent people accomplish very little, while others of only average ability manage to outperform those around them.

As it turns out, though, this important trait also has a dark side that almost nobody talks about.

The Luxury-Belief Class Has a New Word for Theft

Rob Henderson — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:34:01 GMT

In a 1955 essay titled “The English Aristocracy,” novelist Nancy Mitford suggested that as goods became more affordable, England’s upper classes could no longer rely on material possessions to distinguish themselves from the masses. Instead, Mitford wrote, “it is solely by their language that the upper classes nowadays are distinguished.”

Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker proved this point last month in a conversation hosted by Nadja Spiegelman at the New York Times. It unfolded in a carefully staged loft that signaled taste and status. Ms. Spiegelman proposed a new word for shoplifting: “microlooting.”

Mr. Piker later remarked that “many Americans, I think, are totally oblivious to this political language.” Piker also spent a good portion of the discussion supporting shoplifting only to pull the rug out from under you by saying that of course he would never do anything so lowly. He explained that his father taught him not to steal, so he would never do it. But he moves between indifference and active support for others to do it.

“Stealing” sounds so tawdry. Microlooting is cleaner—a minor offense laundered into a boutique act of political protest. Indeed, much of upper middle class life is about rebranding disreputable behaviors to retain one’s position in the social hierarchy.

See here:

The pattern is familiar. Mitford sorted vocabulary into “U” (upper class) and “non-U.” U-speakers said “vegetables” and “spectacles” and “lavatory.” Non-U speakers said “greens” and “glasses” and “toilet.”

Today, the favored words of the upper class come from a mishmash of therapy culture and human resources. Lazing off at work has become “acting your wage.” Saying no means “setting boundaries.” Infidelity is “ethical nonmonogamy.” Prostitution is “sex work.” Divorce can be called “conscious uncoupling.” Neglecting close relationships is “protecting your peace.” Listening to someone vent is “emotional labor.” Recall that in 2021 the AP Stylebook announced that a “mistress” must now be called a “companion, friend or lover.”

And shoplifting is “microlooting.”

Five years ago, I texted a high-school friend who had been released from prison. “Good news,” I told him. “You’re not an ex-felon anymore, you’re a justice-involved person.” He replied, “Okay Rob, you’re not a college graduate anymore, you’re a classroom-involved person.”

The vocabulary you use indicates your membership in the educated class. A typical working-class American couldn’t tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. When people use the phrase “epistemic violence,” what they are really saying is, “I was educated at an expensive college.” The affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary. Ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

Just as in Mitford’s day, today’s elites likewise spend years at private schools and universities. They absorb the speech patterns, manners, habits and approved opinions of the new upper class. This process shapes them into members of the elite and distinguishes them from everyone else.

Unusual vocabulary fits into what I call “luxury beliefs.” These are ideas that confer status on the elite while inflicting costs on everyone else. Glorifying “microlooting” is a luxury belief because the people praising it aren’t the ones who pay for it. The business owner does. The shopper who watches prices rise to cover the loss does. The broader public does, in the form of locked shelves, shuttered storefronts and entire chains pulling out of the cities that need them most.

The aim for the luxury belief class is both to excuse their misconduct and to enhance their status.

If the action can be framed as political, it gains a kind of moral sheen. Petty theft is recast as virtue. It isn’t enough to get something for nothing. Many members of the luxury belief class want something for nothing plus applause from their peers.

A shoplifter who calls it shoplifting is simply a shoplifter. A shoplifter who calls it “microlooting” is signaling education, upbringing and cultural capital. The clerk restocking the shelf, however, sees it for what it is: theft.

A version of this article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal under the title “‘Microlooting’ Is a Luxury Belief.”

Joblessness, Moneyball, Antidepressants

Rob Henderson — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:33:47 GMT

I recently appeared on Stossel TV. I’m in the video for only a few seconds, starting at around 28 seconds:

Wall Street Journal:

I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal about the psychology of joblessness.

The first major finding is that people’s mental health begins declining well before they actually lose their jobs. This might seem obvious. If you think you’re about to be fired, of course you’ll feel stressed. But the paper challenges this interpretation.
The researchers did something clever. They looked not only at whether people lost their jobs, but also whether they expected to lose them. Survey participants were asked to estimate the probability that they would be fired within the next year. Those who expected to lose their jobs showed almost the same mental-health decline—both before and after the layoff—as people who didn’t expect it. Being mentally prepared didn’t provide much protection. The effects of job loss looked remarkably similar.

Read the whole thing here or here.

The Only Reading App I Use:

I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.

If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:

These screenshots come from my Readwise app.

Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.

Exclusive Offer for My Readers

Use this link →  https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).

I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.

Links and recommendations:

Half of Los Angeles’s street homeless are from somewhere else. by
When Mayhem Counts as Progress: Eight Percenters Are Everywhere! by
Audience Capture and Short-Form Slop by
Moneyball for book publishers and Substack writers by
Tyranny of the online minority by and
The Health Risks of Alcohol Are Widely and Systematically Overstated by Roy Baumeister
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here

Three interesting findings:

1. Although sex differences in most personality traits are modest, when considered together, the resulting multivariate differences are larger. One study found a multivariate effect size for the personality sex difference of 2.71 (an enormous difference). As the psychologist Paul Erwing put it, when it comes to personality profiles, men and women are virtually different species. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).

2. Roughly 1 in 6 American adults, an estimated 44 million people, are now on antidepressants. In young adults, those numbers are even higher. Thirty percent of college students take psychiatric medication, up from 9% in 2007. (source).

3. Who are the most physically aggressive human beings? Tremblay’s (2000) research provided a surprising answer: small children. 25% of two-year-olds’ social interactions involved some degree of physical aggression, such as pushing or hitting another child. (source: Concise Introduction to Social Psychology by Roy Baumeister).

The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.

Order your copy now:

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Does Looksmaxxing Give Women the Ick?

Rob Henderson — Sun, 24 May 2026 13:04:16 GMT

The clavicle bones.

“What would you rank Timothée Chalamet?”

Braden Eric Peters, aka “Clavicular”, a man who has spent years sculpting and surgically altering his face and body, recently considered that question on the podcast Impaulsive.

“I would say … around 6.25 … 6.5,” he replied.

“And his SMV?” the podcast co-host asked Peters, referring to Chalamet’s “sexual market value”.

“Pretty high,” Peters, 20, said in his flat monotone. “He’s only gonna get girls on birth control though,” he added, before going on to explain that this is a bad thing because “women with higher oestrogen … are attracted to, like, more masculine faces.”

Welcome to the weird and twisted philosophy of looksmaxxing, the online subculture devoted to optimizing male appearance through gym routines, skin care, jawline exercises and surgery. Clavicular himself is an advocate of “bonesmashing”, or hitting one’s face repeatedly with a hammer to change the face shape. He told the New York Times that he suspects he is sterile after years of injecting himself with testosterone.

This is one reason no one should be seeking his advice. Another is that he is dead wrong about what makes men attractive to women.

The looksmaxxing movement has grown out of the manosphere — a toxic movement of aggrieved male voices. The manosphere has been around for more than a decade, but it has grown louder, angrier and more organized in recent years. What began as scattered online spaces for men lamenting the modern dating landscape has developed into a network of podcasts, influencers and self-styled gurus who now reach tens of millions of young men. Prominent voices include Andrew Tate, who has built an online empire telling young men that women are property, and Clavicular associate Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist who greeted the overturning of Roe v Wade by tweeting “Your body, my choice”.

Some of what draws young men to this world reflects real problems. Boys now trail girls at almost every level of education. They are more likely to be unemployed, more likely to die by suicide and more likely to live with their parents in to their thirties. To many young males, the phrase “the future is female” sounded like a celebration of their own growing irrelevance.

More constructive voices, including Jordan Peterson, Scott Galloway and Chris Williamson, have urged young men to take responsibility and make something of themselves. Clavicular and his imitators would say they are also doing precisely that — taking matters into their own hands by reshaping their faces and physiques to win female attention.

But, ironically, the very purpose of looksmaxxing, which is designed to attract women to “masculine men”, will not achieve its purpose. Because the harder a young man tries to appeal to women, the more likely he is to appeal to other men instead.

That is the lesson from a recent experiment by the PhD student William Costello. Costello posted two photos side by side on X. One was of Clavicular. The other showed Felix Yongbok Lee, a popular K-pop singer with extremely feminine features. Costello asked his 20,000 followers to pick the more attractive of the two.

Men picked Clavicular. Women, in contrast, preferred Yongbok Lee. This is consistent with studies indicating that men overestimate women’s preferences for highly masculine features.

Some male commenters claimed that the female commenters were lying. This is a comforting belief, allowing men to ignore feedback that contradicts their assumptions.

A much simpler explanation is that women mean what they say.

Looksmaxxers like Clavicular may not be aware of it, but they are optimizing themselves not for attraction from women, but for respect from men. That, in fact, is the hidden logic of “looksmaxxing”. Men respect signs of dominance and toughness. A heavy jaw, sharp cheekbones, a hard stare. These features impress other men because they signal strength. So when a young man imagines an attractive male face, he tends to imagine an exaggerated version of those traits. He then sets out to build it.

Women, generally speaking, want something different. They tend to prefer a face that is softer than men assume. When masculine features get too extreme, they stop registering as attractive and begin to appear bizarre or even frightening. The looksmaxxer who has carved himself into a comic book caricature has pushed past the point where most women find him appealing. (Relatedly, some women make a parallel mistake, assuming men prefer extreme thinness when many men actually prefer healthier, curvier female bodies.)

A man who spends hours every day fine-tuning his face and body exudes qualities women tend to dislike. He can come across as vain, high-maintenance and self-absorbed — less like a secure partner than someone perpetually scanning for the next option.

Clavicular attracts female attention largely because he is famous, and fame draws attention no matter the face attached to it. A non-famous man who puts in the same hours would turn most women off, no matter how the final product looked.

Notice what Clavicular is actually doing. He openly boasts about his looksmaxxing routine, and the public boasting is what made him famous. The fame, more than the face, is what now draws women to him. His followers can’t replicate that, but they can adopt the looksmaxxing routine. They must conceal, though, the extreme looksmaxxing protocol Clavicular tells them to adopt, because in an ordinary man it reads as vanity and artifice, which many women consider to be red flags.

In short, Clavicular is selling a map to a destination (female attention) he reached by a different road. It’s unclear if even he understands this.

None of this means looksmaxxing is entirely irrational. It is actually a reasonable response to the world young men now live in. Dating apps and social media platforms reward looks before anything else. Before a woman knows whether a man is kind, competent, funny, or interesting, she sees his pictures. She might share them in a group chat where her friends weigh in. A man who fails to clear the bar on physical appearance never gets the chance to be judged on anything else.

For an ordinary young man on a dating app, “just be yourself” is not a strategy when the first filter is a photograph. He can see, correctly, that looks matter a lot in his actual life, even as the people around him insist otherwise.

The basic version of looksmaxxing is good for almost everyone: exercise, a decent haircut, clothes that fit, better posture, a reasonable diet. But the looksmaxxing protocol that Clavicular tells them to adopt gives women the ick.

The figures young men are listening to have almost nothing to say about becoming the kind of man a decent woman would want to be with. That work does not involve a hammer or a syringe. It involves character, which cannot be bought, or injected, or chiseled. It is the slow, unglamorous work of growing up.

A version of this article was originally published in The Times of London under the title “Clavicular says he knows how to attract women. But really, he attracts men.”

The Female Choice Fertility Paradox

Rob Henderson — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:35:50 GMT

Louise Perry and I discuss whether, historically, monogamous marriage was affirmative action for men. We get into whether falling marriage rates are causing the fertility collapse, why women’s stated preference to have 2.7 kids translates into only 1.6 children, and the parallels between the historical obligations of childbirth for women and military service for men. Louise makes the case that it all comes down to one thing, and it isn’t the one that most people want to hear.

A striking chart:

Hypocrites, Michael Jackson, Parkinson’s Law

Rob Henderson — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:53:31 GMT

You can now catch my recent talk at the University of Austin:

Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.

Wall Street Journal:

I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal about Michael Jackson and why some artists get cancelled while others don’t.

I was hanging out with some fellow graduate students at the University of Cambridge in 2019 when one suggested seeing the new Liam Neeson movie, “Cold Pursuit.” Another student, referring to an unflattering confession Mr. Neeson had recently made, replied, “No, he’s racist, remember?” The first student said, “I read online that people forgive him and he’s OK now.” He pulled out his phone to verify. A few minutes later we walked to the theater.
Nobody had reconsidered Mr. Neeson’s character or weighed the evidence against him. What they’d instead done was consult the social-media consensus to find out what they were permitted to enjoy.
Last month, many moviegoers did something similar. They packed theaters for “Michael,” the new Michael Jackson biopic, which took in $217 million worldwide in its opening weekend. That’s the biggest-ever U.S. and Canada opening for a biopic.
This is strange, because Jackson faced allegations of child sexual abuse for decades.

Read the whole thing here or here.

The Psychology of Morality:

My new lecture series “The Psychology of Morality” is now available exclusively at Peterson Academy.

Enroll here for immediate access.

Here’s the trailer:

Links and recommendations:

Habits for Americans in an Age of Disruption by Ben Sasse
if you can’t get a job today, it’s your fault by
The Ambitious Personality by
The Cool Factor of the Left by
Why College Turns People Into Socialists by
Women Complain about Men by Roy Baumeister

Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here

Three interesting findings:

1. Wolves and dogs cycle through an elaborate sequence before a fight: stiffened posture, growl, snarl. Each signal is an honest communication—an escalating declaration of intent that gives the other party a chance to back down. The system evolved this way because violence is expensive. The entire architecture of threat signaling exists to make actual combat unnecessary. (source).

2. Women’s sexual desires change more across the course of their live more than men’s do. A 55-year-old man wants and likes pretty much the same things he did at 25, while over the same age range a woman’s sexuality may have transformed several times. (source).

3. As the Royal Navy steadily shrank in size (fewer ships and less actual work), the number of Admiralty officials grew—from 4,366 in 1914 (when Britain had the world’s largest navy) to 33,000 in 1967. The historian C. Northcote Parkinson distilled this into what is now known as “Parkinson’s Law”: work expands to fill the time available for its completion, showing how bureaucracies naturally grow and protect themselves regardless of the real workload. (source: Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary by Robert Nisbet).

The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.

Order your copy now:

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Without Pity or Platitude

Rob Henderson — Sun, 17 May 2026 14:08:41 GMT

Below is the foreword I wrote for the 25th anniversary edition of Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple.

The most important lessons are usually learned from experience.

Occasionally, an author whose experience has imparted vivid, deep, and durable lessons emerges to share them with the rest of us. That is precisely what Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of Anthony Daniels, has done with his remarkable book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.

Dalrymple spent his career as a doctor in places most of us would rather avoid: prison wards, inner city hospitals, and the crumbling neighborhoods that feed them. There, he saw poverty at its most corrosive—an affliction involving not merely a shortage of money but of meaning, responsibility, and hope.

Policy can provide for material needs, but culture flows from ideas. Intellectuals mocked the family, ridiculed self-restraint, and treated the police as an oppressive force. Those utopian notions seeped down into Dalrymple’s wards, where they wreaked havoc on those least equipped to resist.

I witnessed that havoc firsthand. I spent my childhood in foster care, moving between unstable homes where theft, violence, and neglect were part of daily life. At 17, I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, where I spent eight years, before enrolling as an undergraduate at Yale at age 25.

The Ivy League, I discovered, was dysfunctional in its own way. Like many upwardly mobile individuals who encounter members of the “luxury belief” class, I was mystified to hear elite university students deride marriage, family stability, personal responsibility, self-control—the very norms that had fueled their rise and served as my ladder out of chaos.

It was in college that I first encountered Dalrymple’s writing, through his City Journal essay, “A Taste for Danger,” in which he recounts some unpleasant memories from his youth before telling the reader: “The only thing worse than having a family, I discovered, is not having a family. My rejection of bourgeois virtues as mean-spirited and antithetical to real human development could not long survive contact with situations in which those virtues were entirely absent.” Finally, I thought, an upper-middle-class person who understands.

Dalrymple insists that freedom and order are partners, not rivals. Clear moral norms and the expectation that adults will behave responsibly are not mere bourgeois niceties. They are the minimum conditions for ordinary people to build decent lives.

Dalrymple is indispensable because he refuses to romanticize the poor or celebrate intellectual rebellion. He writes about people who trade stability for fleeting pleasures and a culture that cheers them on. Without pity or platitude, he cuts through the fog of jargon, reminding us that stability is fragile, that tradition is wisdom distilled through trial, and that humans are capable of virtue only when we believe we should be.

As Life at the Bottom turns 25, its warnings feel more urgent than ever.

Dalrymple’s many years of working as a doctor—doing rounds in impoverished neighborhoods, prisons, and other bedlams of vice and crime—have made him a keen observer of moral and spiritual poverty. He has thought deeply about what originates and what sustains this culture. In Life at the Bottom, Dalrymple brings together 22 of his most important City Journal articles, on far-ranging topics including⁠ violence, suicide, neglect, abuse, broken relationships, victimization, drugs, illiteracy, innumeracy, nihilism, despair, victim-mentality, nonjudgmentalism, promiscuity, jealousy, father abandonment, serial stepfatherhood, and sexual abuse.

Since its publication in 2001, little has changed. The dysfunction Dalrymple documented has not faded. In many ways it has grown worse.

In 2022, while living in England as a doctoral student, I witnessed a commonplace scene in a local Tesco grocer.

Two teenage boys—one white, one black—roamed the aisles, laughing as they stuffed goods into their pockets. A white cashier stared past them with the bored detachment of someone waiting for his shift to end. But a security guard—almost certainly a South Asian immigrant, judging by his accent and manner—intervened, ordering the boys to empty their pockets and leave. The young thieves accused the security guard of “racism” and grabbed another candy bar before strolling out. These thefts are seldom reported, disguising the true rate of crime in the community.

Many immigrants to Britain and America haven’t yet absorbed the spiritual and emotional poverty of the native-born underclass. They take their jobs seriously—including jobs, like the Tesco security guard, that our own elites see as unimportant or beneath them. This is one of the greatest contributions that immigrants make to the West: they still believe that work matters.

That scene at Tesco reminded me of a story that didn’t make it into the final version of my book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.

When I returned home shortly after basic military training, I saw one of my old friends, Tyler, who had been raised by his grandmother. His mom was addicted to drugs and his dad was in prison. He was working ten hours a week at a local Burger King.

We had lunch at Applebee’s, where a sign out front announced that they were hiring full-time servers. “Ask for an application,” I told him. He smirked: “You ask for an application.” I grabbed one and brought it back to the table, and we filled it out together.

He got the job. On his first day, he didn’t show up. He “didn’t feel like it.”

Many upper-middle class people to whom I tell this story make excuses for Tyler: “Well, working at Applebee’s doesn’t sound fun.” True. But most of responsible adult life isn’t fun. Studying for a Ph.D. isn’t fun. Working 80-hour weeks at a consultancy isn’t fun.

The upper middle class already understands that hard work matters—they don’t need to be told. What they should do is preach the value of effort to those who, as Dalrymple shows again and again, have lost faith in it. Yet many affluent people, despite working relentlessly—and even bragging about it privately—publicly claim that effort is dull or meaningless.

Not long after his decision to abandon his new job, Tyler got drunk and high and crashed his motorcycle with a friend on the back. Tyler walked away with scrapes; his passenger cracked his skull and fell into a coma. Had Tyler been busy with a full-time job, perhaps that night would have gone differently. If a steady job were more valued than getting high and tearing down the highway, maybe his life would have taken a different turn. Instead, Tyler got his third DUI that night and went to San Quentin State Prison for 18 months. Soon after, another friend of ours was locked up as well.

The stories in this book repeatedly show the harms of the pervasive “nonjudgmental” worldview. In polite society, with rare exceptions, saying that some actions are better, more worthwhile, or more moral than others marks one as a reactionary outcast. For the underclass, this refusal to judge leads to the misery that Dalrymple describes. The upper and upper-middle class, meanwhile, has enough structure in their lives to avoid paying the full price for the values they publicly espouse.

Another theme is the habit of ignoring reality. Dalrymple recounts warning a young woman that, being smaller and weaker, she should avoid boyfriends who physically beat her. She dismissed the advice as “sexist,” returned to her abuser, and got beat up some more. The pattern repeats: personal choice is denied, all misfortune is blamed on systemic forces, and judgment is equated with oppression.

Where do these ideas come from? From the affluent and the credentialed, the group I call the “luxury belief” class, who promote views that confer social status at little cost while inflicting real costs on the poor and working class. For decades, they have passed these ideas down through schools, entertainment, news media, and politics. Members of the luxury belief class can carry on feeling righteous at a safe distance from the neighborhoods where these ideas inflict real damage.

Yale law professor Daniel Markovits, in The Meritocracy Trap, calls them “non-practicing libertines.” They live with strict discipline—working long hours, marrying before having children, sending their kids to good schools, and following all the old bourgeois virtues—while publicly espousing permissiveness.

For the elite ideas-festival crowd, every basic human good is to be picked apart or deconstructed with smug condescension. With equal fervor, they rehabilitate vice by asking, “What if this bad thing is actually good?”

Though today’s elites speak the language of 1960s countercultural left politics, their private lives reflect the square 1950s morality their predecessors rejected. Look closely at a liberal Park Slope nuclear family in the U.S. and you’ll see little difference from a mid-century suburban Republican one. Both are deeply committed to stability and achievement, which helps propel their kids toward academic and career success. And both embrace a convenient moral justification for that success: in the 1950s, belief in God and country; today, a commitment to social justice and ethical consumption.

The luxury belief class walks the Fifties and talks the Sixties.

The attributes that predict professional success—such as impulse control, academic aptitude, and personal accountability—also predict long-term romantic stability and marital commitment. Those who lack these characteristics require strong social norms and regular reinforcement.

Until relatively recently, those norms provided a framework that encouraged people across all social classes to adopt behaviors conducive to long-term success and community cohesion, which minimized the behavioral gap between those at the bottom and those at the top. People at the bottom used to be far more likely to get and stay married, obey the law, prioritize family stability, and adhere to the broader social norms set by their society’s elites.

But as those elites have become more insular and focused on self-perpetuation, the behavioral gap between them and lower-income groups has widened.

Elites’ unwillingness to publicly model and enforce these norms has contributed to a growing divide in family structure, marriage stability, and social behavior. Elite families thrive thanks to education, stability, and delayed gratification, while those below them struggle to replicate these patterns, leading to deeper social and economic inequality.

In my memoir, I describe the harm that luxury beliefs have done to the poor and working classes. A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will in all likelihood be fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents will often take that first hit of meth to self-destruction. Many policymakers believe this unfairness should be solved with subsidies and clean-needle programs. A better solution is for elites to preach publicly the discipline that actually governs their lives: behave responsibly, set an example, and stop performing guilt for each other’s approval. That might be called “elitist,” but the choice is never between having an elite or not. It is between having an elite that accepts responsibility and provides leadership and an elite that does neither.

Elites have always been somewhat hypocritical. But I prefer what I call the “John F. Kennedy model of hypocrisy” to what we have now. In private, JFK was flawed: often unfaithful and absent as a father. Yet in public, he presented himself as a devoted husband and father because he believed it was important to set an example. Today’s elites do the reverse. They get married, have children, and live stable, conventional lives. But ask their views on the importance of family, marriage, lawfulness, hard work, punctuality, integrity, or honesty, and you’ll get an apprehensive—or even dismissive—response.

Today’s opinion-shaping elites and tastemakers are still drawn to theories that justify rebellion against the civilized restraint that they privately observe. The obvious truth—that human brutality must be restrained by law or by custom—rarely makes it past the editorial gatekeepers.

Dalrymple illustrates how elite ideas, peddled by academics, trickle down in his essay “How Criminologists Foster Crime.” After some academic social scientists began proposing that repeat offenders might be “addicted” to crime, he soon encountered inmates who claimed they had an uncontrollable compulsion to steal cars. The theory offered inmates an excuse for their past and a permission slip for their future.

Much the same happened after postwar elites embraced moral and cultural relativism, along with pop-Marxist ideas that blamed social ills on material deprivation or shadowy political forces. These beliefs seeped into the lower classes, becoming even more destructive. If our personalities are simply products of our environment, then the inanimate world is our master, and we cannot be held responsible for what we do.

In prison, Dalrymple heard three different men convicted of stabbings say: “The knife went in.” No perpetrator, no ownership—just an event that happened. Why would a barely literate young man believe in free will when the educated people above him have abandoned it?

As the phrase suggests, “luxury beliefs” can only survive in prosperous societies.

Dalrymple narrates with grim amusement how doctors come from Mumbai and Manila, brimming with sympathy for the poor and impressed with how well the British government provides for them. But after a while, they notice something strange: many patients don’t seem grateful. One doctor was shocked when a heroin addict, whose life had just been saved, cursed at the staff and acted like he was being held hostage. Over time, these visiting foreign doctors realize that in a system where benefits are treated as entitlements, gratitude fades—as does basic decency.

As Dalrymple wisely notes, though, perverse welfare-state incentives are not sufficient to explain the squalor of the underclass. To create these conditions, you also need the ideological or philosophical scaffolding peddled by intellectuals that undermines relationships and obligations.

Indeed, for life satisfaction, our relationships are at least as important as money. Yet our elites are reluctant to promote the nonmaterial factors that give rise to a rich and fulfilling life: marriage, friendship, social bonds, neighborliness, and so on. Those don’t require money: people have been forming friendships, sacrificing for loved ones, and getting married for millennia, back when they lived on the edge of death. That’s how they survived in a dangerous world. As Dalrymple notes, if human fate were determined by material circumstances, then we should all still be living in caves.

Affluent and credentialed people typically know what is required for a satisfying life, which is why they have higher rates of marriage, steady employment, and law-abiding behavior, all of which reliably lead to health, stability, and success. Instead of pouring money into endless programs for the poor, elites should share what they know. They should promote wise choices and strong norms. They can share their wealth, but they should also share their values—the steps they have taken to live fulfilling lives.

Instead, cultural elites have lowered expectations for those who grow up in instability and squalor. The prevailing attitude is that if a young person comes from a deprived background, we should expect less from him. This is wrong. Such a person should be held to higher standards, precisely because the alternative is to sink to the level of his environment.

Young people from stable, affluent backgrounds do not require as much outside pressure. They have options. They are not surrounded by constant harmful distractions.

The young people most in need of strong norms and high expectations are those who have neither. Having helped to create the chaos that traps people in poverty and squalor, our elites choose to expect nothing from those who are trapped. This can lead only to disaster.

Regardless of where one starts in life, if you drop out of school, refuse to work, and raise children in violence and squalor, you are responsible for the results. The luxury belief class may have dismantled the guardrails that could have helped you avoid those choices, but they did not make those choices for you.

In developed countries, living a relatively prosperous life is not complicated. It would be easier if social norms were stronger and the people who follow them were celebrated—especially by those who have the most cultural influence.

Some years ago at the University of Cambridge, I told a fellow doctoral student about my high school friend Antonio, who was recruited to play college football. All he had to do was attend two weeks of make-up classes and get a B. He went for the first three days and then stopped.

My friend said, “Maybe it’s good he didn’t go to college. If that’s who he was and what he enjoyed doing, maybe he wasn’t meant to go.”

I asked what she would have done if it was her son.

“Forced him to go to class and threaten to kill him if he didn’t.”

When affluent, educated, and well-connected people validate and affirm the behaviors, decisions, and attitudes of marginalized and deprived kids, they believe that they’re being compassionate. But they would never do that for their own children. It’s fine if Antonio and I skip class and ruin our futures; it’s not fine if their kids do so. Many of the most influential people in our society have isolated themselves and their children from the world I grew up in, while paying lip service to the challenges of inequality.

Everyone reading this book already knows that discipline, work ethic, family stability, and self-control are good for people. But our elites have made it a moral taboo to say so plainly. Theodore Dalrymple refuses to play that game. He tells the truth. And one of the harshest truths in this book is that the people most eager to dismantle the norms that make life livable seldom deal with the results. They celebrate “liberation” from structure while living inside it. They enjoy the warm glow of their luxury beliefs while those at the bottom pay the price.

This was published in City Journal under the title “Theodore Dalrymple, Truth-Teller.” Reprinted from Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass (25th Anniversary Edition), by Theodore Dalrymple, with foreword by Rob Henderson (Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2026).

You're Invited: A Conversation About the "Troubled" Film

Rob Henderson — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:10:33 GMT

Conspiracy Theories, Big Brother, Scarcity

Rob Henderson — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:16:46 GMT

The Long Shadow of Luxury Beliefs

Rob Henderson — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:15:40 GMT

You can now watch my live discussion in Vancouver at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute with Brian Lee Crowley :

This was recorded live with an audience of perhaps 100 or more people in attendance. I didn’t get to stay in Vancouver for very long but found it to be an attractive city. I hope to return and check out the sights at some point.

On stage at the event, Brian mentioned—along with Troubled—another book called Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple. A special 25th anniversary edition of this book was recently released. I was honored to write the foreword.

City Journal recently reprinted my foreword, which you can read here.

Thinking Class, Free Will, Smokers

Rob Henderson — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:16:19 GMT

The Sexual Economy Isn't What You Think

Rob Henderson — Sun, 03 May 2026 12:42:39 GMT

Gustave Moreau, Hercules and the Daughters of Thespius (1853).