Rob Henderson's Newsletter

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

From the archives:

Is It Ever Okay to Ask a Woman for Her Phone Number?

Is It Ever Okay to Ask a Woman for Her Phone Number?

2 years ago · 104 likes · 24 comments · Rob Henderson

Links and recommendations:

Reproducing civilization by Joseph Heath
Poverty and Inequality: Disputing the Size of the Problem by Roy Baumeister
Turns Out Wearing a Hi-Vis Vest Gets You Into Everything for Free by David Allegretti
Casual sex and the paths to parenthood by By Dmitry Grigoryev, Albina Gallyamova, and Elizaveta Komyaginskaya
Cornell’s Real Crisis Is Irrationalism, Not Rape by Heather Mac Donald
We Need to Talk About Community Violence Intervention by Charles Fain Lehman

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. Psychologists have documented a gender-equality paradox for sex differences in mental health: They’re typically larger in wealthier, more gender-equal nations. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).

2. Among white males who grew up in middle- and upper-income families, who is most likely to be a successful entrepreneur by age 35? One of the strongest predictors was whether they as teenagers engaged in delinquent behavior. (source).

3. Bookselling was once in a panic about the Kindle. Today, the e-reader market has plateaued at some 10% of traditional publishers’ revenue, while about 75% comes from paper books, a technology essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century. (source).

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)

Poor People Lie Upward, Rich People Lie Downward

Rob Henderson — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 15:34:42 GMT

You can now catch my appearance on Figuring Out with Raj Shamani.

When Raj’s team contacted me a while back inviting me to do the show, I looked him up and learned that with 20 million YouTube subscribers, Raj is the number 1 podcaster in India. It seems like every other week I learn of another young person with a massive online following who I’d somehow never knew of before.

Raj and I met recently to film at a studio in NYC. Very sharp interviewer. Raj asked questions I’d never been asked before. One of the longest podcasts I’ve ever done.

Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.

A Guilty Person’s Idea of How an Innocent Person Would Behave

Rob Henderson — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 14:27:43 GMT

Why would Elizabeth Holmes invite a film crew into her home during her final weeks with her children before being sent to prison for fraud and conspiracy?

“This seems like a strange sacrifice of precious family time.” Yeah. That’s what a normal person would think.

Halfway through the film, Elizabeth Holmes said six magical words that a lot of people missed. With these six words, she unintentionally revealed something stunning about how her mind works.

Bad Company, Socialism, Jealousy

Rob Henderson — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:22:01 GMT

You can now catch my conversation with Evan Barker on her podcast Bad Company with Evan Barker.

Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.

“When Socialists Demand Redistribution, They Always Mean Other People, Never Themselves”

Die Presse

I was recently interviewed by Jeannine Hierländer who writes for Die Presse, a German-language newspaper based in Vienna.

Feel free to translate it with the AI model of your choice.

The Only Reading App I Use:

I’ve been using Readwise for more than five years now.

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:

The Anti-Bullying Paradox by Carolyn D. Gorman
The Beginning of the End of History by Francis Fukuyama
Your Book Review: Lee Kuan Yew’s Memoirs
Making Economics Humane Again by Paul Mueller
Why Does Education Reform (Almost) Always Fail? by Robert Verbruggen
What Women on a Matchmaking Site Are Looking for in a Husband by Rosemary L. Hopcroft

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:

Smart People Love New Ideas, Even When They're Bad

Rob Henderson — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:31:55 GMT

Human beings are not impressive animals at first glance. We are not especially strong. We are not particularly fast. We do not have claws, thick hides or sharp teeth. Our great advantage is that we can learn from one another.

One person finds a better way to hunt, cook, build, speak, trade or travel. Others copy it. Then someone improves it. Others copy that too. Over time, these small acts of copying become culture.

Copying is not always wise, though. Sometimes a new method of doing something is better. Sometimes it’s worse. The challenge is knowing when to switch to a new approach and when not to.

A new paper in Personality and Individual Differences asks who is better at making that choice. The authors study how intelligence and personality shape social learning, or the practice of learning from others.

The researchers focus on two mental habits:

The first is “content bias.” This is the tendency to adopt a novel solution when it is better than the old one.

The second is “maintenance bias.” This is the tendency to stick with a solution because it is familiar.

Both habits are useful. Without content bias, people would fail to implement real improvements. Without maintenance bias, they would chase every fad.

Human progress requires both. You need enough openness to notice a better idea. You also need enough caution not to discard what already works.

The researchers created two simple tasks. In one, participants learned a code to open a padlock. In the other, they learned a route through a maze.

After practicing the initial solution, study participants were shown a new one. Sometimes the new solution was better. Sometimes it was about the same. Sometimes it was worse.

Then came the key choice: stay or switch.

The basic result is reassuring. People were generally more likely to switch when the new solution was better. They were less likely to switch when it was worse. In other words, people showed content bias. They could typically tell when the new way was actually an improvement and then implemented it.

But there were also signs of maintenance bias. When the old and new solutions were equal in quality, most people stuck with the one they already knew. This is probably because all else equal, a familiar solution is less risky. A new method may look equal on paper. But you still have to pay the cost of learning it. And the new method might have unpredictable outcomes or side effects.

Importantly, the researchers also measured intelligence and personality.

Intelligence was measured with several tests, including vocabulary, pattern reasoning, working memory and processing speed.

Higher intelligence predicted a greater willingness to switch to new solutions, especially when those solutions were better. Smarter participants were more likely to adopt real improvements.

This makes sense. Intelligence helps people solve novel problems. Smart people are better at noticing when a new approach is superior.

More interestingly, though, smarter people were also more likely to switch even when the new solution was similar or inferior to the original approach.

The authors suggest that the reason for this is that more intelligent people face lower costs when they experiment with new ideas. Trying out a hard or awkward new solution carries fewer penalties for intelligent people. They also enjoy the challenge.

Intelligence helps people not only by making them choose better, but also by making potentially bad choices less costly.

A smart person can try a novel solution. If things go wrong, they are better equipped to recover. For a less intelligent individual, the same mistake is more costly.

Personality played a role too. The researchers looked at the Big Five personality trait openness to experience. Open people tend to be curious, imaginative and more willing to try new things.

So you might expect people high in openness to be better at finding better solutions.

That isn’t what the study found, though.

Openness did not predict switching to superior solutions. Instead, open people were more likely to switch to solutions that were similar or worse. Open people were not especially better at identifying improvement. Rather, they were drawn to novelty itself.

This finding captures both the upside and the risk of high trait openness.

Open people challenge routines and resist conventions. A healthy society needs these creative types. Still, novelty isn’t the same as progress. Sometimes the new thing is worse.

Sometimes the old solution has been around a long time because it works.

Intelligence and openness, two traits linked with higher levels of education, are also associated with interest in novelty. Even if the novel approach is not better. And even if it’s worse. But if you’re a smart person with all of the accompanying benefits your intelligence can supply, you can more quickly recover from your mistakes. Most others can’t.

You might see a connection between this finding and luxury beliefs.

If you are a bright individual, you will have some difficulty imagining what mental life and everyday existence can be like for someone whose IQ is more than 10 or 15 points away from your own.

This is especially true if you have only ever spent time around similar individuals to yourself. Ironically, highly intelligent people are one of the groups most susceptible to this blind spot in their thinking. I grew up around many people with average or below average intelligence. Sure, they had some difficulty with getting through Algebra II or explaining the motifs of the assigned reading. Overall, though, they were just as capable of everyday problem solving, responsibility, and good moral character as anyone else. Still, people who are not in the top half of intelligence often find it helpful to have some guardrails and healthy heuristics, or rules of thumb, for wise decision-making. And frequent and regular reminders of what good decisions look like and how to avoid bad ones.

Human beings have been shaped to imitate. But not all imitation is equally valuable.

A healthy culture needs smart people who can spot new and improved solutions. It needs curious people willing to test new paths. And it needs enough respect for the familiar to remember that not every novelty will necessarily lead to progress.

Social Paradox, Confession, Bedroom Generation

Rob Henderson — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:55:47 GMT

Yesterday I spoke with Ben Shapiro, you can catch the conversation here (starts at around 20:30):

Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

From the archives:

The Age of The Social Paradox

The Age of The Social Paradox

2 years ago · 152 likes · 14 comments · Rob Henderson

The Best Sleep Upgrade I’ve Ever Had:

I’ve been using Eight Sleep for more than a year, and one thing I’ve come to appreciate is how much the product learns over time.

Eight Sleep has now analyzed more than 1 billion hours of sleep data.

As you probably know, sleep advice is usually pretty generic. Go to bed at the same time. Put your phone away. Keep the room dark. Don’t drink caffeine too late. Exercise. Reduce stress.

All good advice.

But people are different. Something that is often overlooked, though, is that even the same person is different from one night to the next. A hard workout, a late flight, a stressful day, or a warmer room can all change how you sleep.

Eight Sleep uses data from your own sleep history, along with patterns from a much larger group of sleepers, to make the Pod more responsive to you.

I like the basic idea. Most sleep products tell you what happened after the fact. Eight Sleep is trying to use what it learns to improve what happens the next night.

That is a much more useful goal.

And the best part is that I don’t have to think about any of this. I go to bed. The system works in the background.

That is what good technology should do. It should make your life better without asking you to spend more time thinking about the technology itself.

Exclusive Offer for My Readers

Use my code ROBHENDERSON at eightsleep.com/robhenderson for up to $200 off the new Pod 6.

You get 30 nights to try it at home and return it if you don’t love it.

Links and recommendations:

The Concept Creep of Nonconsent by Christina Buttons
Hunter‑gatherer societies are often put on a pedestal as paragons of equality – but the reality is more complicated by Duncan Stibbard Hawkes and Christopher von Rueden. I wrote about this here
Your Book Review: The Tale Of Genji
The Dark Triad and Career Choices by W. Keith Campbell
Did medieval people love their children? by Samuel Hughes
Why People Support Involuntary Treatment by Stephen Eide and Valerie Franchitti

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. Over 70 percent of people say they’ve fallen in love with someone they knew first as a friend or colleague, and nearly half (49 percent; 44% of men and 52% of women) say they fell in love with someone they didn’t initially think it could happen with. (source: The Intimate Animal by Justin R. Garcia).

2. A poll of 1,550 15-year-olds in the UK found that 37 percent “hardly ever” left their bedrooms during free time. We are raising a “bedroom generation” of teenagers who leave school, shut the door and disappear to scroll. (source).

3. The average husband-wife IQ gap is between 12 and 15 points. To be clear, the gap could go either way. Wife or husband could be lower. (source).

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)

Is Modern Dating a Market Failure?

Rob Henderson — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:59:52 GMT

Can a government-sponsored dating app defeat the free market? People don’t seem entirely happy with the existing options from Silicon Valley.

Details and transcript below:

You’re Not Who I Thought You Were

Rob Henderson — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:46:14 GMT

I recently asked you to fill out a survey.

1,455 of you responded. So I should note that the following results describe the readers who responded to the survey, not everyone who subscribes.

Here’s what I learned.

More women than I expected

64 percent of you are men and 36 percent are women. I’d assumed the proportion of female readers would be smaller.

Women were also more likely to have read my book. Among women, 64 percent have read all or part of my book Troubled. Among men, it’s 46 percent. This is consistent with the general finding that women tend to read more books and more memoirs than men.

Mostly married, with children

64 percent of readers have at least one child, and 24 percent have three or more.

Two-thirds of you are married. Among married readers, 83 percent have kids.

11 percent are in a committed relationship, while 21 percent are single. 1 percent of you are in a situationship.

Male (65%) and female (69%) readers are married at about the same rate, single at the same rate (21% each), and report the same number of kids.

You are highly educated

90 percent of you have at least a bachelor’s degree. More than half have a graduate degree. I love the highly educated. I love the poorly educated.

One in four subscribers has a doctorate or a professional degree. 11 percent of you have a PhD, 9 percent are lawyers, and 6 percent are physicians.

Income aligns with level of education. About 38 percent earn more than $200,000 a year, and 11 percent earn over $500,000. At the same time, 10 percent earn under $50,000, which includes students and retirees.

Men are about twice as likely to report income over $500K (13% vs. 7%). Women are more likely to say “unsure” about household income (9% vs. 3.5%). Men are far more likely to be business owners (11% vs. 5%) or executives (9% vs. 2.5%); women are far more likely to be full-time parents or homemakers (12% vs. 1.5%).

Nearly a quarter of you are retired. Which helps to explain the next finding.

What you do for a living

No single field dominates. Tech is the largest group at 14 percent. Healthcare and medicine come next at 12 percent. After that the shares get smaller: business and consulting at 8 percent, academia at 7.5 percent, finance and investing at 7.5 percent, law at 6 percent, and K–12 education at 6 percent. Smaller shares work in retail and hospitality, nonprofit organizations, media, the arts, and the military.

Politics

I asked you to place yourself on a scale from 1 (very liberal) to 5 (very conservative).

Overall, you are a slightly right-of-center bunch:

There were no sex differences in political orientation.

I also asked whether you are more conservative, more liberal, or about the same as the people you spend time with. 61 percent of you say you are more conservative than the people you spend time around. Only 6 percent said more liberal. In other words, most of you feel like the odd one out in your own social circles. Most of you feel your peers are to your left.

To modify a line from the great Chris Rock, every college-educated conservative has a bunch of liberal friends. And every college-educated liberal has one token conservative friend.

When I have meetups or events, sometimes attendees will tell me they feel a sense of gratitude or relief to be around others who also feel like the odd one out in their everyday lives. Many of these people aren’t even conservatives, but rather center-left liberals who didn’t join the great awokening.

Religion

26 percent Protestant, 21 percent Catholic, 5 percent Jewish, 3 percent Orthodox. Other readers identified as Hindu, Buddhist, and members of other faiths.

About 30 percent are atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, and that share is roughly the same at every age. Interestingly, younger readers are not less religious than the older ones.

Race and ethnicity

78 percent of readers are white. The rest of the readership is spread across many groups. Around 4 percent are East Asian, 4 percent Hispanic, 3 percent South Asian, and 2 percent Black. Smaller numbers identify as Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American, or Pacific Islander, each at 1 percent or less.

A handful of readers skipped the boxes entirely and wrote their own answers. These included “Italian American”1 and “Mediterranean” and one person who described himself as a “genetically planetary mutt” (same, you’re not alone in this). One reader used the space to complain about being asked at all. I’m sorry about this.

You read a lot

A bunch of nerds. Nearly half of you finished more than ten books last year.

68 percent of you read at least four Substacks regularly, and 62 percent pay for at least one. You are the kind of readers that writers and publishers wish existed in larger numbers.

As for this particular newsletter, 54 percent of you read all of my last four posts. Thank you for that.

Most of you found me through a podcast (17 percent), Twitter/X (16 percent), Substack’s recommendation system (12 percent), reading Troubled (12 percent), or an article I wrote in another outlet (10 percent).

Men came to this newsletter via Twitter/X at twice the rate of women (20% vs. 10%).

Women came to this newsletter through Troubled at nearly three times the rate of men (19% vs. 7%). The book probably accounts for a sizable share of my female readership.

Younger readers found me through podcasts. Among readers under 25, 41 percent came from a podcast. That number drops with each age group: 30 percent for 25 to 34, 27 percent for 35 to 44, 20 percent for 45 to 54, 12 percent for 55 to 64, and just 8 percent for readers 65 and up.

My Twitter/X was the main source for readers between 25 and 54. About one in four in that age range found me there.

About 20 percent of respondents 65 or older discovered the newsletter through Troubled. Among younger age groups, the share was about 10 percent.

48 percent of you have finished reading Troubled, and 4 percent have read part of it. I take that as a good sign, because most people who start books never finish them.

Women were more likely to have finished my book: 58 percent, compared with 42 percent of men. Women also reported reading more books overall. 31 percent finished at least 21 books in the past year, compared with 24 percent of men.

Higher-income subscribers were more likely to have read Troubled. What’s really going on here, of course, is that reading my book will make you rich.

Your lives are not what you expected

I asked how much your life has departed from what you expected at 18. The majority of you say your lives went in a very different direction. About 63 percent of you say your life is dramatically different from what you anticipated as a young adult.

Readers from different childhood classes gave very different answers. Among readers who grew up poor, 53% say their life is “not at all what I anticipated” at 18. That drops to 30% for working class readers, and 21% for middle class readers.

Readers who grew up upper-middle class or wealthy are the most likely to say life went about how they expected.

How you grew up

I asked how you would describe the social class of the household you grew up in. The largest group, at about 45 percent, said middle class.

For the other categories, about 28 percent of you came from working-class or poor backgrounds, roughly the same share as those who were raised in upper-middle class or wealthy households.

Given that 90 percent of you now hold a college degree and more than a third live in households earning over $200,000 a year, a good number of you, like me, have traveled a long way from where you began.

Social mobility

Most of you have climbed up the ladder.

I asked whether your current socioeconomic position is higher, lower, or about the same as the family that raised you.

57 percent said higher. About 10 percent said lower.

Put another way, for every 1 reader who slipped below the family they grew up in, more than 5 have risen above it. More than a quarter of you grew up working class or poor, while very few of you live that way now.

Hidden preferences

I asked whether you have ever enjoyed a book, movie, or show but kept quiet about it because of what others might think. 36 percent overall said yes. But there were some interesting age differences:

Maybe people stop caring what others think as they get older.

I also asked whether you would want to know what people say about you when you aren’t around. This one split almost perfectly: 49 percent yes, 51 percent no.

But there was a sex difference such that men were slightly more willing to hear it than women.

Final thoughts

The biggest surprise was how much my picture of readers differed from the people who answered. I pictured mostly young men, but the readership was much more varied.

I was also intrigued by the gulf between where many of you started and where you are now. Most of you have degrees, careers, and families. Perhaps some of you read about class because you have crossed its boundaries and noticed things that are hard to explain to people who have stayed in one place.

I was also struck by how many of you have lives you could not have pictured at 18. My younger self would have had difficulty imagining mine. As a kid I daydreamed about success but had no idea how I would attain it. I certainly would not have expected that my future would consist of spending an afternoon analyzing responses from my many online readers.

Thanks for telling me a little about yourself. You are not who I pictured. You are more interesting.

Back in 2018 I was in a Rite Aid in New Haven and heard a guy shouting into his phone “This lady kept calling me white! I was like listen I’m not white, I’m half-Italian half-Jewish.” A line would elicit laughter from the online right and online left for very different reasons.

Is Striving Cringe?

Rob Henderson — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:02:42 GMT

On December 26, 2024, Vivek Ramaswamy argued that American firms hire foreign-born engineers over native-born Americans not because Americans are less capable, but because of a difference in culture.1

American culture, Ramaswamy suggested, celebrates the prom queen over the math-olympiad winner. Or the jock over the valedictorian. On television, we prefer Slater to Screech and Stefan to Steve Urkel.

The post drew angry reactions, especially from the very online right. As I will explain, this controversy continues to expose a tension between our praise for hard work and our contempt for people who visibly do it.

A lot of us admire the gifted slacker, the artist struck by inspiration, the athlete who makes it look easy. Many people have mixed feelings, though, about a person who studies all weekend or practices nonstop. There is something about the striver that threatens a fantasy they would prefer to keep intact.

Once you understand what that fantasy is, the appeal of the gifted slacker becomes much clearer:

Anger, Human Nature, Narcissism

Rob Henderson — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:56:15 GMT

You can now catch my discussion with Peter Copeland on the Inside Policy Talks podcast.

Links for Apple Podcast and Spotify.

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

From the archives:

You Can’t Treat Me This Way: The Evolutionary Logic of Anger

You Can’t Treat Me This Way

2 years ago · 208 likes · 17 comments · Rob Henderson

Rob Henderson 2026 Reader Survey:

I’ve been meaning to run a reader survey for a while to get a sense of my readership, and now here it is.

I’d like to learn a little more about you: your background, what you read, how your life has turned out, and a few things you might not ordinarily be asked.

There are 26 short questions which shouldn’t take more than 5-10 minutes to complete.

So if you have a few minutes, please take the reader survey here.

I’ll post the results with some analysis in an upcoming post.

Upcoming talks and speaking invitations:

Over the past couple of years, I’ve spoken at Princeton, Cambridge, the University of Missouri, Columbia Business School, Harvard, the University of Austin, Claremont McKenna College, and the American Enterprise Institute, among other institutions. I’ve also spoken at the All-In Summit. These talks have covered luxury beliefs, the psychology of status, social class, the young male crisis, and what my journey from foster care through the military to Yale and Cambridge taught me about opportunity. In 2027, I’m currently scheduled to speak at Stanford on February 2 and at Yale on April 20.

I’m available for additional speaking engagements in 2027, including keynote talks, moderated conversations, and Q&As for companies, universities, conferences, and other organizations.

Main topics include:

Luxury beliefs. How ideas become status symbols and why their consequences differ across social classes.
The psychology of status. How the desire for respect and admiration shapes our beliefs, choices, and behavior.
Family, stability, and opportunity. Lessons from Troubled about growing up in foster care and finding a different path.
Personality and human behavior. Why people respond differently to the same situations, and how personality shapes relationships, work, and decision-making.

If you would like to invite me to speak, please complete this form.

Links and recommendations:

The Replication Crisis in Medicine by Richard T. Bosshardt
In Defense of Human Nature by Francis Fukuyama
Sizing Up Freud’s Theory of Self-Deception by Roy Baumeister
Female-Breadwinner Couples Are Still More Likely to Split Up by Rosemary L. Hopcroft
How Washington Funded the Politicization of Science by John Sailer
Perfection’s Prison by Theodore Dalrymple

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. People ages 20-29 are nearly three times more likely than people over 65 to meet criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (source).

2. Powerful men in history, who often could arrange to have any sort of sex life they wanted, typically had both one high-quality mate and a series of other sex partners on the side (e.g., the king would have a queen; but he would also have various concubines and mistresses). (source: Concise Introduction to Social Psychology by Roy Baumeister).

3. People who paid someone else to do tasks they didn’t enjoy (like cooking or cleaning) reported higher life satisfaction than those who didn’t. People were happier, on average, when they bought time rather than things. (source).

Back when I was 22, my instructor at Airman Leadership School (mandatory training to become a non-commissioned officer) was a Filipino American guy who had served time in prison. He later reformed himself, got really into mindset/self-help stuff, and managed to get a waiver to enlist. Years later he became an instructor. One day after class, he told me to get a cleaner for my apartment. I asked whether it was a good use of money. He replied by asking “Henderson, how much is your time worth?” I hired a cleaner.

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)

What Communism Does to Kindness

Rob Henderson — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:36:16 GMT

Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated.

With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado.

Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, “Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership.” In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday.

All of which raises some natural questions: Where is this revolutionary romance coming from? And as it steadily seeps into our leadership class, where will it lead?

The best guide to understanding these questions is a book published more than 50 years ago under a pseudonym—because the author feared what pro-Maoist intellectuals would do to him if they discovered who wrote it.

Simon Leys, whose real name was Pierre Ryckmans, was a Belgian-Australian scholar of Chinese art and literature. In 1974, he published Chinese Shadows, a record of the cultural and political destruction he saw in China in the years just after the Cultural Revolution. The book is full of eerily relevant observations. One of them, which I will get to, is the most haunting thing I’ve read about what political terror does to the human soul. And nearly all of them describe habits of mind that didn’t die with Mao. In fact, they are now alive in America.

First, some background. In The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976, the historian Frank Dikötter explains how it began. Mao Zedong wanted to purge rivals at the top of the Communist Party. So he turned to radical students, giving them permission to denounce every authority except his own. Party officials egged on these young militants as they raided the homes of “class enemies” and turned them into social outcasts. What followed was violence, looting, the legitimization of hatred, and the denunciation of family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

When the resulting catastrophe became impossible to deny, Mao and the regime’s officials disavowed their own shock troops, claiming that an “extreme left” had been responsible for the atrocities.

Sound familiar? Americans witnessed a milder version of this in the summer of 2020. Rioting and looting that year caused between $1 billion and $2 billion in damages. As this transpired, prominent voices in politics and media minimized the destruction. And some leading officials quickly insisted that the destruction was not the work of their own residents. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, later the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, estimated that 80 percent of those causing damage came from out of state, while Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared that “the people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents.” Jail records showed the opposite.

If the scale is different, the pattern is the same: indulgence first, followed by disingenuous disavowal after the damage is done.

Leys saw the pattern clearly: Communist governments alternate between stretches of relative relaxation and unexpected spasms of revolutionary terror. As Leys writes, “The Cultural Revolution had been hard on Chinese nerves—the years of unremitting tension, battle, uncertainty, and violence...the authorities evidently realized it was necessary to give the masses some breathing space; for two years, no new mass movement was started.”

The absurdity of the period is hard to overstate. After each revolutionary spasm, museums were closed so that historians could rewrite history to conform to the latest dogma. Here one can’t help but think of a recent White House report which details how the Smithsonian has been rewriting the country’s past to fit the dogmas of the present. According to the report, the museum describes Mickey Mouse as part of the “vestiges of long-standing traditions of blackface minstrelsy.” It described ukuleles as “a product of U.S. imperialism.”

An old Soviet joke illuminates this trend: “Under communism, the future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable.”

The rewriting extended to biography. Mao was raised well off, but he was described as a “member of the working classes.” Regime-approved figures were invariably described as having “working-class origins.” Enemies of the regime, even those who grew up in dire poverty, were always described as having a “wealthy capitalist background.”

Enter Zohran Mamdani, the son of an Ivy League professor and an award-winning filmmaker, who campaigned for mayor as the tribune of New York City’s working class. The socialist movement behind him is powered less by workers than by the highly educated. Class, in these circles, is mostly about the aesthetic costume you wear for political purposes rather than the objective material facts about your life. Mao’s propagandists understood this, as did Mamdani’s social media team.

The Red Guards, the paramilitary youth movement guided by Mao, were upset that red, the color of the revolution, meant “stop” at traffic lights. They demanded the signals be inverted so that traffic would advance on red and stop on green. The regime officials talked them down, telling them that stopping on red was a way “to respect the revolutionary order.”

For a movement devoted to abolishing class, the Communist hierarchy was obsessed with status. Officials fussed over exact titles, the length of red carpet rolled out for each guest, the order in which leaders’ names were presented, and who sat where at dinner.

Leys tells the story of a young European diplomat naive enough to believe the regime actually cared about equality. He decided, instead of using a car, to ride a bicycle to the Foreign Affairs Ministry. A Chinese interpreter intervened and told him to take a car. “To ride in a car marks you as an official,” Leys wrote, “but the model, color, and size will vary according to your importance.”

The regime also eliminated first, second, and third class on its trains. The new categories were “sitting hard,” “sleeping hard,” and “sleeping soft.” These were the same classes as before, and the fares still ranged in price. But the word “class” was removed, so obviously everyone was equal now.

Top officials earned more than workers, lecturers, and lower-level bureaucrats. More important than pay, though, were the privileges that came with power: foreign travel, university seats for one’s children, jobs for relatives, and access to scarce goods through personal connections.

Ordinary people measured status in humbler forms. By the early 1970s, bicycles in China were “like cars in the West: both a vehicle and a status symbol. In rural areas, many girls ask boy friends to guarantee them the ‘three things that go round’ (a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine) before agreeing to marry them.” Even after decades of revolutionary emphasis on egalitarianism, the marriage market still operated based in part on the ability to obtain resources. Human nature is unchanging in that way.

What the revolution could change, though, was the status of acceptable reality. The Propaganda Department of the Party’s Central Committee determined the variable “truth” of the moment. The significance of historical monuments, art, literature, science, and medicine was determined by how well each served the aims of the regime.

Some people refused to play along and paid the price. Wang Shih-wei was an experienced revolutionary and Marxist theorist who pilloried the emerging ruling class for being “arrogant, unmerciful, intolerant of criticism, hungry for privileges.” He ended his essay by apologizing for writing so much about “affection” and “human warmth.” Was this, he asked, a sign of his “petty-bourgeois sentimentality”? Five years later, he was executed. When other intellectuals challenged the regime and defended the value of truth, the regime replied that the idea that “all men are equal before the truth” is a “bourgeois slogan.”

Lu Xun, the celebrated satirist and essayist, regarded the writer’s job as being a permanent critic of power, any power. Mao rejected this view, stating that Lu Xun’s combative satire was formerly justified only because he lived under an oppressive regime without free speech, but that in the communists’ “liberated zones,” where writers supposedly enjoyed full democratic freedoms, critical journalism in the Lu Xun manner must be abandoned.

In other words, when the bad guys are in charge, it is right to challenge the power structure. But when the good guys (communists) are in charge, it is wrong to challenge the power structure.

The universities absorbed the lesson. The psychological climate for teachers and professors was “poisoned by fear and defeatism.” Applicants without the proper class background had “practically no chance of admission,” though applicants from wealthy, landowning families could theoretically get in by demonstrating “a progressive conception of the world.”

Ideology seeped into every corner of life. Activists forbade the private ownership of goldfish and songbirds—two popular Chinese hobbies—in order to liberate the energy required for revolutionary activity and the hatred of class enemies.

Everything got uglier, too, and on purpose. Citizens tried to look as poor and shabby as possible, to avoid their neighbors’ envy and escape persecution. Bookshops were set up like pharmacies, with a counter between customers and shelves to prevent access to forbidden or problematic texts. In libraries, books that did not conform to the ideology simply vanished.

Organized religious life was brutally suppressed. The regime understood that devout individuals and religious organizations could challenge communist ideology. The same logic played out in Cambodia. In Survival in the Killing Fields, Haing Ngor describes the communist takeover: “They abolished religion – disrobed the monks, destroyed the Buddha statues. They abolished family too. They wanted us to renounce personal attachments of any kind...this was ‘liberation’, because it freed us from the time of caring for others and gave us more time to work.”

The Cultural Revolution’s most visible destruction was concentrated in the large urban areas, where officials, institutions, students, and organized political factions were densely gathered. Cities are where government officials and their shock troops resided. The bureaucrats of the regime sensed that ordinary people held them in low regard. So they built “watertight walls” between themselves and the citizens they ruled.

All of this brings me to the passage worth committing to memory. Leys observed that communism transformed Chinese culture from being hospitable, welcoming, and warm to being cold, sanitized, and alienating. He noted the “scars” in people’s psyches and the “electric tension” in the atmosphere. The “Maoist regime has only repeated Soviet experiences,” he writes. Both regimes cultivated cynicism and pessimism, and both eroded commonsense morality and kindness. Leys quotes Nadezhda Mandelstam, on life under Stalin:

“There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretence was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in the realist literature at the end of the last century. The unexpected result of this kind of critical writing was that kind people disappeared. Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality but it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth. Everything we have seen in our times—the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant ‘unmasking’ of people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action—all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind.”

Kindness has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. A regime that rewards denunciation will produce denouncers.

Will Storr offers another example in The Status Game. He describes the men sent to strip peasants of their land and possessions during the forced collectivization in the Soviet Union. They were told to “throw your bourgeois humanitarianism out of the window and act like Bolsheviks worthy of Comrade Stalin.” One of these men, Lev Kopelev, was disturbed by the screams of children but scolded himself for feeling pity. As Storr writes, “Status was awarded for actively suppressing natural human sympathy.”

We now have our own taxonomy of permitted sympathy. After Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk in December 2024, 41 percent of voters under 30 said the killing was acceptable. His alleged killer became a hero to them. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September of 2025, many progressives argued over whether he deserved to be mourned. The logic in both cases was similar to the pattern described by Leys. First, decide who counts as a victim. Then decide who deserves compassion. If a person falls into the wrong category, cruelty rather than kindness is the right response.

What does Leys suggest we do? He placed his hope in ordinary people. For example, he describes meeting a young museum curator in the backroom of an art shop, where the curator unrolled a dozen forbidden paintings. Shop assistants periodically slipped in to look at the paintings, “as if conscious of taking part in some clandestine ritual.” Leys wanted, he writes, “to thank them for being, simply, what they were”—human beings willing to risk punishment for the sake of appreciating beauty.

Leys even devised a test to see who around him was capable of independent thought. He would ask people where in China they would most like to live. Most gave the approved answer: wherever they could best “serve the people.” Once in a while, though, someone would reply with a region known for its pleasant climate, or a particular town where family members resided. Leys took note of such individuals because they had dared to admit that they loved a place, or a person, for reasons of their own. As George Orwell noted in 1946, caring for ordinary things unrelated to ideology could make “a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.”

Refuse the small and forgettable reward that comes from joining an online pile-on. Show sympathy for a victim of violence even when you dislike what he stands for. Notice and befriend people who have not been captured by ideology. These are all approaches we’d do well to adopt today.

Leys wrote under a pseudonym for good reason. The largely pro-Maoist Western intelligentsia of the time was furious at him for recording his honest observations of the regime, and eventually they tracked him down and exposed his true identity. He was not surprised. “I have seen intellectuals of the left...refuse to publish the truth, even though it was absolutely certain, even though they did not contest it; but they found it painful, they preferred to ignore it, it was in contradiction with their moral and material interests.”

Consider the case of novelist Lao She, who killed himself during the Cultural Revolution. His suicide was considered a scathing denunciation of the Maoist regime. Western Maoists developed a three-part defense. First, Lao She did not commit suicide; that is a Taiwan fabrication. Second, his suicide can easily be explained by his bourgeois mentality. Third, in any case, the episode is pointless, so why harp on it?

In other words: that didn’t happen, it’s good that it did, and why are you so obsessed with it? Western activists and ideologues still use versions of this tactic today.

Western praise for communism, Leys concluded, was “a myth, an abstract ideal projection, a utopia which allows them to denounce everything that is bad about the West without taking the trouble to think for themselves.”

The DSA members who toasted Mao’s 132nd birthday never lived in the country over which he ruled. Leys did. Mao promised to clear away the reactionary forces oppressing the masses. What he actually obliterated were museums, libraries, intellectuals, novelists, goldfish, songbirds, and kindness itself.

Leys hid his name to tell the truth about a regime that punished honesty and kindness. Every social order gets the character it rewards, and the question worth asking about ours is what we are rewarding now.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Free Press under the title “How Communism Kills Kindness.”

Rob Henderson 2026 Reader Survey

Rob Henderson — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:37:55 GMT

Christian Bale, Freud, Indians

Rob Henderson — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:45:59 GMT

Here’s my conversation with journalist Meghan Daum and clinical psychologist Andrew Hartz, Ph.D. on episode 16 of the Open Therapy podcast.

Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.

Kids in Foster Care Need Stable Relationships

Wall Street Journal:

I have a piece out in the Wall Street Journal about actor Christian Bale’s foster care village in California.

Alternate link here.

Upcoming talks and speaking invitations:

I’m available for additional speaking engagements in 2027, including keynote talks, moderated conversations, and Q&As for companies, universities, conferences, and other organizations.

Main topics include:

Luxury beliefs. How ideas become status symbols and why their consequences differ across social classes.
The psychology of status. How the desire for respect and admiration shapes our beliefs, choices, and behavior.
Family, stability, and opportunity. Lessons from Troubled about growing up in foster care and finding a different path.
Personality and human behavior. Why people respond differently to the same situations, and how personality shapes relationships, work, and decision-making.

If you would like to invite me to speak, please complete this form.

And thank you to everyone who has already invited me to speak or come along to an event. Always a pleasure to meet readers in person.

Links and recommendations:

Walker Percy’s Prophetic Vision by Richard M. Reinsch
Freud in the Rearview Mirror by Roy Baumeister
An Evolutionary Perspective on Socialism by Marc Defant
How Fatherhood Transforms Men: An Interview With
Trauma is Apparently Contagious by
Just bury your trash by Alex Chalmers and Rob Wiblin
Gen Z voters hate capitalism — but they’ve barely even seen it by By E. J. Antoni and Annie Heim

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. Having good health and a high income correlates with happiness, but only slightly. The only objective predictor of happiness that had a big effect was having abundant vs. negligible social support. People with friends tend to be happy. People who are alone in the world, or who feel lonely, are generally unhappy. (source: Concise Introduction to Social Psychology by Roy Baumeister).

2. Female-breadwinner couples are 36% more likely to separate than male-breadwinner couples, all else equal. Equal-earner couples also face a slightly higher risk, being about 6% more likely to separate than male-breadwinner couples. (source).

3. Younger Americans have a more unfavorable view of India than older age groups:

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)

What Are You Really Buying With a “Good School”?

Rob Henderson — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:52:29 GMT

Source

Many affluent, liberal parents say they believe in equal opportunity in education. Then they move to “the right” district to make sure their own child never sets foot in an underperforming school.

One mother chose differently. The reaction to her decision rests on an assumption about education that deserves far more scrutiny.

What I’m about to explain calls into question an assumption that parents build their lives around, sometimes at enormous expense.

You have to separate two things that even very smart people routinely confuse.

Doomsayers, Wage Premium, Self-Esteem

Rob Henderson — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:38:05 GMT

Your Job Gives You More Than Money

Rob Henderson — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:24:26 GMT

Dark Forest, Young Men, Blood Boy

Rob Henderson — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:58:10 GMT

Hot Women Keep Becoming Political Problems

Rob Henderson — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:32:57 GMT

Shaming can change who people see as desirable.

Men’s opinions can sometimes influence women’s judgments of other men. If men, especially high-status men, outwardly hold a particular man in low regard, women will often begin to see him as less attractive.

The question is whether women have the same power. Can women make another woman less attractive in men’s eyes by attacking her reputation or her character?

To understand the reaction to the latest Sydney Sweeney controversy, you have to understand something critical:

Apparently Criminals Don’t Have Free Will, But Elites Do

Rob Henderson — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:54:31 GMT