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Life At the Bottom:

I was honored to write the foreword for the 25th anniversary edition of Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple.

As you can probably tell from the title, the book is about life at the bottom of society. Not just in terms of money but in terms of behavior, values, and daily choices. Drawing on his many years working as a doctor with prison inmates and patients in low-income neighborhoods, Theodore Dalrymple describes how violence, addiction, broken families, and despair are sustained not only by material hardship but by ideas that excuse bad behavior and reject personal responsibility.

Dalrymple challenges a comforting story. Many people believe poverty is mainly about a lack of resources or unfair systems. This book argues that culture and norms matter just as much, sometimes more. When society stops expecting discipline, self-control, and accountability, the people who most need those guardrails suffer the most. I read the original version of Life at the Bottom about a decade ago when I was in college. One of the most important books I’ve ever read. Writing this foreword for the 25^th anniversary edition feels like coming full circle. First living the world Dalrymple describes, then discovering his work in college, and now helping to bring it to new readers.

Strongly recommended. It is available today.

Get your copy here or here.

NYC Event:

You are invited to attend my live event with Freya India, one of my favorite writers. May 13 at 6:30pm.

Details and registration here.

Wall Street Journal:

I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal about “microlooting” and the linguistic fashions of the luxury belief class.

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 week 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.”

“Stealing” sounds so tawdry. Microlooting is cleaner—a minor offense laundered into a boutique act of political protest

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.

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:

• A Conflict of AI Visions by

• On hard work by

• Passing It On by

• Why Most Personal Essays Suck by

• How to Be a Serious Reader by

• Criminal-Justice Reformers, Take Note 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. Gen Z are 9.6 times more accepting of violence against speakers than Baby Boomers, and 25X more accepting of violence against speakers than the Silent Generation. Each successive generation is more supportive of violence against speakers than the last. (source).

2. Young women aged 18 to 30 report significantly more negative attitudes toward men than men do toward women. 21 percent of young women say they hold an actively negative view of men, compared with just 7 percent of young men who feel the same about women. (source).

3. In 1870, about 30% of a person’s entire life was spent working—people worked, slept, and died. Today it’s closer to 10%. Thus, in the past 100+ years or so the amount of work in a person’s lifetime has fallen by about 2/3rds. (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:

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors

and I dissect the recent New York Times podcast that has set off a firestorm online. Two of the most fashionable voices on the left, Jia Tolentino (writer for The New Yorker) and Hasan Piker (popular Twitch and YouTube personality), were asked simple questions about stealing. Their answers were worse than you think. They glorify shoplifting. They flirt with endorsing murder. They giggle through all of it.

I went in to this conversation thinking this was just stale 2020-era politics, the kind of thing a smart audience has already moved past. Louise has a very different take. Something darker is replacing the old woke era, and it shares a team with the current mayor of New York.

By the end we asked a question I still can’t shake. In a few years, will we be begging to go back to fights about pronouns?

Read more

It is titled Luxury Beliefs (I know you didn’t see that one coming).

The news was recently announced on Publishers Marketplace:

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the less fortunate.

I first coined the phrase in 2019. I elaborated on the luxury beliefs framework in a series of essays in the NY Post, Quillette, The Free Press, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, as well as here on Substack. Since then, the term has entered everyday conversation in ways I didn't expect. It sometimes gets misused and misunderstood. A full book will help to set the record straight.

The core idea came from my own experience moving between social classes, plus reading deeply about the sociology of class and the psychology of social status. As I spent more time around upper and upper-middle-class people, I noticed a pattern: many of them held beliefs they did not actually live by. And when those beliefs did carry costs, these people had the money and other resources to protect themselves. People lower on the ladder do not have that option.

Most people who hold luxury beliefs are sincere. But I have also met people who express these views for cynical reasons, to protect their reputation or advance their career. They don't necessarily believe what they are saying. They just know that saying it pays off.

Just as some people buy expensive objects they don’t really like just to impress other people, they also espouse luxury beliefs for the same reason.

This will likely be the last time I share anything about Luxury Beliefs until there is a pre-order link, which will be available late this year or perhaps early next year. It’s a good feeling to land a second book deal. It came with far fewer headaches than the first time around with Troubled. But writing about writing and the process of publishing, while mildly interesting, takes time away from doing the actual work of writing the book.

Candidly, there have been moments when I’ve worried whether luxury beliefs will retain relevance by the time the book comes out (late 2027). I’ve thought, well, maybe the moment has passed.

Recently, though, after the lunacy of that recent NYT interview where 3 prominent members of the cultural elite glorified shoplifting (which they termed “microlooting” because so much of upper middle class life is about rebranding disreputable behaviors in order to retain one’s position in the hierarchy) and all but justified the killing of healthcare executives, those concerns were put to rest.

The pathology of elite status signaling, as expressed in the form of luxury beliefs, shows no signs of burning itself out.

From an interview with Jerry Seinfeld:

David Remnick: I was once talking to the writer Adrian LeBlanc, who’s been working on a book about comedy, and I asked, “Who are the two smartest comedians about comedy?” I expected her to name two obscurities. And she said you and Chris Rock, because you study it. You’ve been thinking about this; it’s not just a bunch of jokes.

Jerry Seinfeld: Yes. Chris is the smartest person, maybe, I’ve ever met…I was with Chris a couple of weeks ago, and he was talking about a young comic. He was asking the comedian about what he did that day. And the guy said, “Nothing. But I’m going to do a set tonight.” And Chris explained to him, “You make money during the day. You collect it at night. During the day is where the money is made.”

You make money during the day. You collect it at night. During the day is where the money is made.

Seinfeld is saying that becoming a good standup comic requires you to live life, pay attention to your surroundings, have lots of experiences, and speak with interesting people. Then you take all of this material and convert it into art. Elsewhere in the interview, Seinfeld goes on to say “This is a writer’s game. If you can write, you succeed. If you can’t, you will not make it. The performing, being funny onstage, that’s great. Any comedian can be funny onstage. But the bullets are the writing.”

Good material comes from taking what you have accrued and making it informative, entertaining, or thought-provoking.

As my friend David Perell points out, even full-time writers spend the majority of their time away from their computer. You don’t log 40 hours a week typing away at your keyboard. Doing so would leave you with nothing of substance to say. More from David:

“Experiences become shareable creations the way tree sap becomes maple syrup. It takes 50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. So whenever I feel like I don’t have enough ideas to create something meaningful, I go collect more experiences and spend time processing them by writing and talking to friends.”

Most good writing happens beyond the page. Gathering experiences, observing the world, letting ideas take shape. By the time you sit down to write, you’ve already lived through the material. Even if the exact words have yet to come.

Depending on the type of writer you are, reading is also critical. Being social and engaging with others is important. So is solitude and quiet reflection while engaging with ideas.

When asked for advice on how to become a better writer, C.S. Lewis shared 8 tips, one of which was “Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about…).”

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Shane Parrish of Farnam Street writes, “If you want new ideas, read old books.”

Gustave Flaubert once declared, “My life is as flat as the table I write on.” Aside from a few trips abroad and occasional appearances in high-society Paris, he fiercely protected his quiet routine and solitude—conditions he deemed essential to his work. This reclusive tendency is common among public intellectuals; developing the implications of a system of thought often demands long stretches of retreat from public life, as deep knowledge rarely emerges without the private disciplines of reading and writing.

According to some accounts, Carl Jung was known to value solitude deeply and often retreated to his secluded tower in Bollingen, Switzerland, where he read, carved stone, and reflected in silence—often with his pipe in hand. While he did produce a vast body of written work, he did not always enjoy the act of writing in the conventional sense. Jung viewed writing more as a means of clarifying his thoughts and sharing his psychological insights than as a pleasurable pursuit in itself. Jung wrote extensively. But he preferred quiet contemplation with a pipe and a book.

Hemingway compared daily writing to regularly drawing a few buckets of water from a well; each time the water will naturally rise back to its original level. If, however, you suddenly pump out a large amount all at once, you might find yourself without water for a long while. You gotta take breaks on occasion.

Your unconscious spits out material related to whatever you put in. I learned this while writing Troubled, which consumed my life for the better part of four years. Your unconscious can produce profound insights seemingly from nowhere. But if you spend your days engaged in arguments on social media or whatever, your mind will generate clever dunks during your walks. Read lots of news and current events, and your unconscious will cloud your inner life with gloom and pessimism. Concentrate fully on a project or a piece of art, though, and ideas will come to you. The more mindless external stimuli and meaningless minutiae you absorb, the more mental clutter will block your creativity. If you want those gifts, if you want your unconscious to deliver creative and insightful outputs, you have to protect its inputs.

From mathematician Richard Hamming’s famous 1986 lecture, “You and Your Research”:

“Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, ‘creativity comes out of your subconscious.’ Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you’re aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer. For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.”

At this point, being a regular reader of books will put you ahead of many writers who are merely reacting to the latest headlines and trending topics. Even though I read a lot, I can be guilty of this myself. I’ve noticed that when I write about topics directly or indirectly related to politics and culture war stuff, these posts get a lot more readers to convert to paid subscribers. The occasional culture war essay or comments on topical events. These usually yield a lot of paid subs, which allows me to spend more of my time thinking and reading and writing about the things that I find more interesting.

A few people have asked how much time I spend running this newsletter. In terms of actual, physical, writing, re-writing, and editing, maybe 8 hours a week. But I spend the majority of my waking hours—maybe 50-60 hours a week—reading, thinking, note-taking, brainstorming, speaking with other writers, academics, journalists, and so on. All of that goes into my writing. When I’m in the shower mulling over a recent psychology paper or having a coffee chat with a professor or reading my Kindle app on the train or dictating notes on my phone when I’m out for a walk, does that count as “working on my Substack?” I also occasionally write about my life more generally. Unclear whether “living life” also counts as being on the clock. In a given week, we’re awake for 110-120 hours. So in a typical week, I either put in about 8 hours into my Substack or 100+. Depends on how you look at it. A lot of jobs that require creativity or innovation or unique skill sets are like this. In a way, you’re always on the clock.

I launched the first iteration of this newsletter in January of 2020 on MailChimp. A little over two years later, in April of 2022, I moved over to Substack.

Today there are more than 80 thousand subscribers and 3,183 paid subscribers.

There’s a number floating around out there suggesting you can expect 10% of your free subscribers to go paid. In my experience (and from what I’ve heard from other Substack writers), though, the number is typically something closer to 4 or 5 percent. Paid subscriber growth has slowed somewhat, perhaps because there are more writers on Substack and it’s becoming harder for readers to pay individual subscriptions for each writer they like.

Still, as I’ve mentioned before, I haven’t concentrated much effort on growth for the sake of growth. More than one popular Substacker has told me that they have become a little too preoccupied with tracking metrics, open rates, growth, etc. This to me makes sense if you are just starting out and are searching for feedback from the world that you are writing something worth reading. But at a certain point, each additional minute you spend on growth hacks or whatever is a minute you’re not spending actually living life, reading books, and doing things that make your writing interesting.

With the rise of AI, having a unique point of view is becoming even more important. I worry about whether LLMs are going to make people generally wary of any text they encounter online. Why would you pay for something you suspect might be written by a robot? If a human didn’t care enough to write it, why should you care enough to read it, let alone pay money to do so?

For this reason, I suspect personal writing is going to become more important. I wrote a whole book of personal writing and didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I enjoy writing about psychology, social trends, status games, etc. Given the way things are going, though, I’ll continue to share more personal essays.

I also do occasional livestreams now, but haven’t been keeping to a steady schedule because I’ve been traveling so much. But in the second half of this year, my calendar will be clearer as I prioritize writing Luxury Beliefs. Due to the book, I’ll dial back on the number of essays I write during this time, and will do more livestreams. Anyone (both free and paid subscribers) can watch them live. But only paid subs can watch or listen to the recordings.

Throughout building my newsletter, I haven’t implemented much readership growth advice from other people. Growth is not number one on my agenda. This might be why I haven’t received spectacular bursts of attention and subscribers. I’ve seen other writers who share charts indicating rapid and punctuated instances of major subscription increases. My Substack is not that way. Similar to Twitter, my experience with newsletters (both the first Mailchimp version and now Substack) has been one of gradual, reliable growth, brick by brick, fueled primarily by word of mouth. I think growth is important, it’s nice to see, and I’m not shy about sharing my work online and on Twitter. Still, growth has never been my primary goal.

The psychologist (and excellent Substacker) has written that the “3 most beautiful words in the English language: New Paid Subscriber.”

I remember when I started the first iteration of this newsletter on MailChimp, I added a little donorbox button for readers to tip me if they wanted. Each time I saw $5, $15, or (incredibly) the occasional $100+ donation, it encouraged me to keep going.

Four years after joining Substack, we have jumped up to the number 5 science newsletter on this platform.

Writing online started as a side hustle when I was in grad school. The original iteration of my newsletter began as a hobby, and I found myself putting more and more work into it. It has become a primary income stream, which was unplanned. I’ve discovered that few things give me more pleasure than sharing my writing directly with my readers. I’m happy to support other writers I enjoy reading, and I’ve always welcomed subscribers to support me. After the first year of building a newsletter and seeing the extent of its reach, I realized I could potentially earn a living as a writer. Still, I periodically offer free upgrades to readers who are unable to afford a paid subscription. I grew up poor and spent much of my young adulthood broke, so while I enjoy getting paid for my work, I try to make it accessible to everyone.

This underscores the need for independent writing. Weekly essays delivered to your inbox on a reliable day at a reliable time (Sunday morning), along with bonus posts and recommendations, without any ads, affiliate links, pop-ups, SEO bait, or any other increasingly familiar features of our online landscape.

Mechanical consistency is an underrated approach to building a readership. Everyone wants the secret sauce or the smash hit viral article. But the real secret is to develop a reliable and dependable writing schedule.

The psychologist Dean Keith Simonton points out that one notable attribute that distinguishes high performers is volume:

“A small percentage of workers is responsible for the bulk of the work...the top 10% of the most prolific elite can be credited with 50% of all contributions, whereas the bottom 50% of least productive workers can claim only 15%...the most productive contributor is about 100 times more prolific than the least.”

This goes for anyone in a competitive domain that requires some creativity. It definitely applies to podcasters (the vast majority of podcasters never produce more than 20 episodes) and newsletter writers (so often you’ll see people write a few good Substack posts and then go dark). Regular output is key. Do the work, accept that most of your work will be fair-to-middling, and be grateful for the occasional home run.

Writing is like going to the gym. Don’t over-romanticize it. You go there, you do the thing. Do it enough times and magic will sometimes appear. Gradually you get better at the craft; or you’ll look better with your shirt off. Just stick with your routine.

Interestingly, 19th century English novelist Anthony Trollope’s literary reputation suffered as a result of the revelation that he treated writing as a routine and humdrum task rather than a romanticized and divine calling. Many people prefer the myth, not the reality:

“[Trollope] made up his mind to do his stint of writing no matter what happened. Often he would write on trains. What writers call ‘waiting for an inspiration’ he considered nonsense. The result of his system was that he accomplished a vast amount of work. But, by telling the truth about his system, he injured his reputation. When his ‘Autobiography’ was published after his death, lovers of literature were shocked, instead of being impressed by his courage and industry. They had the old-fashioned notion about writing, which still persists, by the way. They liked to think of writers as ‘inspired,’ as doing their work by means of a divine agency.”

Many of you are recent subscribers, coming here after having read my debut book Troubled. If all goes well, there will be a film adaptation.

One thing I learned recently is that yes, you can use social media and your newsletter to promote a book. But you can also use your book to promote your newsletter and your other platforms.

When you have a book out and it gets some buzz and attention, you get invited on podcasts. Maybe you get a segment or two on TV. Most people who see you on a 3 minute TV segment or listen to you on a long form podcast aren’t going to buy your book. That’s just the reality. A small number of listeners and viewers, though, will look you up online.

Perhaps they decide to follow you on X or Instagram. Or sign up for your newsletter. Maybe they follow you for a while. If, after a few weeks or a few months, they like what they see, they consider getting your book. Maybe they sign up for a paid newsletter subscription.

The funnel goes something like you listen to the person on a podcast —> follow them on X —> enjoy their tweets —> sign up for their newsletter —> take pleasure in or find useful information in their writing —> get their book and/or subscribe for premium membership.

Many people have noted how difficult it is to sell books. Even celebrities with millions of followers are having difficulty moving as many copies as their sizeable social media platforms would supposedly predict.

As with anything, there’s an element of luck that goes into a book’s success. Still, things aren’t entirely up to fortune. Authors have some degree of control.

Platform matters. The medium through which people become accustomed to your work matters. Generally speaking, people will enjoy a creator’s work in the mode they’re used to. For example, if readers enjoy reading a writer’s material online, then they’ll most likely enjoy reading it in book-form, too. But if you’re used to watching a TikTok influencer on your phone or a movie star on the big screen, it’s less clear if that will translate into book sales.

If you want people to read your book, it helps if they’re accustomed to reading your writing. I’ve heard that popular podcasters who become authors often sell far more audiobooks than hardcovers or ebooks. Which makes sense. People are used to hearing their voice. They’re comfortable with that person in their ear. So they buy the person’s book in the format they’re accustomed to. All this implies that if you want people to read your book, start a newsletter. If you want people to listen to your book, maybe podcasting or TikToking is the right call.

I wrote the first draft of Troubled telling myself to not think about the audience, because no one is going to read this anyway. Of course, during the editing process, I did my best to take on the perspective of the reader to help them understand the story. But that first part of the process is key. Letting the ideas flow without allowing self-consciousness to cloud your mind. I worry that I will be stifled as I work on this second book by the fear of wanting the ideas to be good or impressive or interesting or whatever. That if this book isn’t at least as successful and well-received as the first book, I’ve somehow failed. All of those doubts must be set aside for me to make Luxury Beliefs the best book it can be.

A quote from Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act:

“If we can tune in to the idea of making things and sharing them without being attached to the outcome, the work is more likely to arrive in its truest form…How shall we measure success? It isn’t popularity, money, or critical esteem. Success occurs in the privacy of the soul. It comes in the moment you decide to release the work, before exposure to a single opinion. When you’ve done all you can to bring out the work’s greatest potential.”

Something I’ll be keeping in mind as I work on Luxury Beliefs.

Here are some notable posts throughout the past year:

• Experts and Elites Play Fundamentally Different Games

• Older Generations Continue to Surrender Moral Authority to the Most Naive, Narcissistic, Impulsive, and Dishonest Age Group

• Better an Absence of Men Than Imperfect Men

• Sex Differences Don’t Go Away Just Because You Want Them To

• What Charlie Kirk’s Murder Reveals About Historical Amnesia

• Rage of the Falling Elite

• We Act Before We Understand

• Improving Character Is Easier Than Improving IQ

• Being a Writer in the Age of the Influencer

• America’s Future Leaders Are Learning To Become Grifters

• What Dostoevsky Understood About Political Rage

Thanks for your support. Thanks for reading.

I’ll conclude here with this passage from Haruki Murakami:

To understand why these women cross the line with male students, you first have to understand something uncomfortable about the psychology of desire, attention, and power.

It starts with a basic fact about female desire that almost nobody wants to say out loud. What I’m about to explain has less to do with predatory impulses than with something far more unsettling.

Read more

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NYC Event:

You are invited to attend my live event with Freya India, one of my favorite writers. May 13 at 6:30pm.

Details and registration here.

Wall Street Journal:

I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal about the psychology of people who believe “words can harm.”

Many people now believe that words can cause lasting harm.

This belief has grown strong enough for some to justify violence. A recent survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that more than 40% of Gen Z respondents said it can be acceptable to use physical violence to prevent someone from giving a speech.

A newly published paper led by Samuel Pratt at UCLA seeks to measure this belief directly. The researchers built what they call the “Words Can Harm Scale,” a survey asking people how much they agree with statements like, “I could be left emotionally scarred by something I read.”

Read the whole thing here.

The Times:

I also have a new piece for The Times of London reflecting on the American Dream for America’s upcoming 250th birthday. The semiquincentennial (say that 5 times fast).

By most broad measures, Americans today are better educated, live longer and have more disposable income than previous generations.

So why, as this country prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, do so few Americans believe the dream is available to everyone?

The data suggests that we are, as a country, losing faith in ourselves. And when you look at which Americans express scepticism about the future, the pattern becomes even more alarming.

A 2025 study by the Archbridge Institute found that 60 per cent of Americans with only a high school diploma believed their children would do as well or better than themselves. Among college graduates, that number falls to 52 per cent.

Additionally, Americans who earned more than $100,000 a year were more likely to say their kids would have fewer opportunities when they grew up, compared with Americans who earned less than $60,000 a year.

[…]

But it’s not just our wealthiest citizens who are eroding our belief in the American Dream. Social media is adding another layer to this pessimism, especially among the young.

Read the whole thing 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.

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 Mystery of the Female Sex Drive by Roy Baumeister

• Why We Should Be Skeptical About High Graduation Rates by Neetu Arnold

• Collective Narcissism by

• How Communism conquered China by Clark Aoqi Wu

• Income and Irresponsibility by

• Thirst Traps Over Think Tanks: Dems Want Hotter Candidates on the Ballot 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. Relative to conservatives (6%), liberals are 3 times more likely (18%) to say Israel is “an enemy” of the United States. (source).

2. Privileged women are the most pessimistic of all. Women in middle-class professions are less likely to say they feel valued by society, and are less likely to believe that if they work hard they will succeed in life when compared with working-class women. (source).

3. More than one-third of people have fallen in love with someone that they didn’t initially think they could. And over 70% of people have become deeply attracted to someone that they initially weren’t attracted to. (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:

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors

American confidence in higher education has collapsed. A decade ago, 57 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in colleges and universities. By 2024, that number had fallen to 36 percent. Seventy percent of Americans now say higher education is heading in the wrong direction.

Yale University (my beloved alma mater) has decided to, at long last, take this crisis seriously.

In April 2025, Yale president Maurie McInnis asked a committee of ten faculty members to spend a year figuring out why trust had collapsed and what could be done about it.

The Yale committee recently released its findings. It’s nearly 60 pages long; I read it so you don’t have to.

For the first time, insiders at one of America’s most powerful universities are saying the quiet part out loud. The most unsettling part, though, isn’t what Yale and the rest of higher ed got wrong. It’s what it finally admits has been true all along.

If even Yale’s own faculty are now admitting the system has gone haywire, then something deeper is going on. I’ll explain what it is.

Read more

Their message is simple. Reject conventional morality. Pursue money, sex, and status. Many of these influencers speak about women with open contempt. Some drift into antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The manosphere pitches a specific idea about male worth. They claim that women enter the world with innate value—though they often contradict this by telling their followers to mistreat women. In contrast, they say, a man must earn his value through dominance, wealth, and sexual success.

This is a bleak message. It is also a brilliant sales strategy. First you convince young men that they are nothing. Then you charge them to become something. It is one of the oldest cons in the world, updated for the age of the algorithm.

At first glance, the documentary seems to confirm what critics already suspect. The manosphere is toxic and extreme. But the most revealing parts of the film are the layers of hypocrisy. The influencers selling this lifestyle often do not live it themselves.

Early in the film, Mr. Theroux asks influencer Justin Waller a simple question: How many kids do you have? The man hesitates. Later, we learn he lives with his two children and their mother—he describes her as his “wife” though they are not legally married—who is pregnant with their third child. The man leads a fairly conventional family life, yet he spends much of his online career telling followers that men should dominate women, avoid commitment and establish a rotation of multiple partners.

One influencer known as Myron Gaines brags privately to Mr. Theroux that he plans to have multiple wives. But when Mr. Theroux raises this idea of “one-way monogamy” in front of Gaines’s girlfriend, his facial expression immediately changes. He then says, “Who knows? Maybe I’ll only wanna be with one girl after all.” The credits of the documentary reveal that the girlfriend eventually left him.

One of the most candid moments in the film comes when the British influencer Harrison Sullivan (known online as “HSTikkyTokky”) speaks to Theroux over breakfast. When asked why he behaves so outrageously online, he gives a blunt answer. Sullivan says he is just about money. If he attracts attention, he can monetize it. Whether the statements are sincere does not matter. He can profit from it.

The manosphere influencers peddle luxury beliefs that are costly for their audience but relatively harmless for themselves. Romantic commitment and engagement with the real world for me; hedonism and manufactured rage for thee. The young men who take the manosphere message most seriously are the ones most likely to suffer from it.

Some manosphere influencers claim that “the Jews” control society for profit through economic and sexual manipulation of the general public. This is straightforward psychological projection. Many of these influencers run operations that extract money from fans through crypto scams, fake online universities, and overpriced subscription services. Sullivan, who at one point in the documentary says “F*** the Jews,” profits from sexual content made by OnlyFans creators through his Telegram channel.

A revealing moment is when one of the influencers says kids shouldn’t be watching his content and that their parents should be more responsible about overseeing what their kids consume. The filmmakers then show the same influencers on the street taking selfies with adolescent male fans. The young men depicted in the film seem to be looking for structure, discipline and a sense of belonging.

Theroux recently described himself as a “progressive” on the Modern Wisdom podcast. He notes, correctly, that it is striking how many of these influencers as well as their fans grew up without fathers. Theroux then claims, though, that all family structures “can work.”

The second claim sits uneasily beside the first.

The progressive view that children are equally likely to flourish in any family arrangement is contradicted by decades of research showing that children raised in stable, married, two-parent homes do better across nearly every measure. When that fact is overlooked or dismissed, boys who grow up without fathers seek guidance elsewhere.

A culture that prizes individual fulfillment over duty, and personal liberation over stable relationships, leaves young men adrift. The manosphere is loud and ugly. But it did not create the hunger it feeds on.

Here is my discussion with Ben Shapiro about the manosphere:

And on the Open Therapy podcast with Meghan Daum and Andrew Hartz:

And with Louise Perry:

A version of this article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal under the title “Louis Theroux Exposes the Manosphere Scam”

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New York City Event

You are invited to attend my live event with one of my favorite writers, Freya India. May 13 at 6:30pm.

Details and registration here.

Wall Street Journal:

I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal about what we can learn from the first ever documented chimpanzee civil war.

Excerpt:

Warfare is often understood as a contest between visibly distinct groups. But history shows that the worst conflicts can occur within such groups. Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong oversaw the killing of millions of their own people. The executioners spoke the same languages, ate the same foods and practiced the same religions as their victims. Yet the bloodlust was unrivaled.

This isn’t uniquely human. A new study in Science describes a vicious civil war among our nearest evolutionary relatives: chimpanzees. A community of nearly 200 apes that had lived together, groomed together and raised offspring together slowly fractured into two rival groups. Then one group began killing the other.

Read the whole thing here. Alternate link 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.

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 Rise of the Anti-Manosphere by Ari David Blaff

  • Excerpt: “[P]odcaster Chris Williamson, writer Rob Henderson, and former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink...offer young guys a space for sustainable personal improvement beyond the cheap upsells of cryptocurrency and online universities peddled by manosphere personalities.”

• Cops Are Cool Again by Yael Bar Tur

  • Btw, the best police drama ever made is The Shield, which I wrote about here

• Scarcity and Fairness at Theme Parks by

• Where Left and Right Both Go Wrong on Crime by Keith Humphreys

• The Myth of the Independent Girlboss by Inez Stepman

• Stop Pushing College for All by Neetu Arnold

• 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. Extremely conservative men aged 35-45 now have almost 4x as many children (2.14) as extremely liberal men (0.55). (source).

2. California has long depended on a small number of ultrawealthy taxpayers to fund a large share of its government. According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the top 1% of taxpayers generate roughly 40% of the state’s personal income-tax revenue. (source). At a time when there is growing support for imposing greater taxes on the rich, geographic mobility is easier than ever. You can talk about taxing the billionaires but you can’t really be shocked when they decide to go elsewhere. As my friend Rory Sutherland has pointed out, look at how politicians proceed. First, they start with legislation. If legislation fails, they move to economic incentives. If economic incentives fail, they move to persuasion. But if anything, the methods used to get the rich to pay more are anti-persuasive. The states that already have the highest taxes have cities that are struggling. Give us more money to squander, they say, that’ll do the trick. Followed by insults and mock guillotines and slogans about how billionaires “shouldn’t exist” (an ambiguous statement perfectly crafted for plausible deniability).

3. In Denmark, collecting the DNA of people charged with felonies reduced their future rate of criminal conviction by 42 percent. The most powerful deterrent is not the severity of the punishment but the certainty of being punished. (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:

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors

That is not the focus here.

Apparently Adult Braces has sold only about 3,000 copies so far, with around 1,800 in its first week. People are surprised by these numbers because the book received a lot of media attention. There were multiple pieces in The New York Times and The Atlantic. Other outlets covered it, including Slate and NPR. There were also many videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. West went on the kind of interview tour most authors can only dream of. All of that adds up to tens of millions of views. And still, it led to only a few thousand sales in the first weeks.

If every major outlet in America can promote your book and it still sells fewer copies than a self-published romantasy novel, then something fundamental has changed. I’ll tell you what it is.

What I’m about to explain is something every publisher knows and no one in media wants to say.

Read more

Devils (also translated as Demons or The Possessed) by Dostoevsky was published in 1872.

Dostoevsky depicts a generation of older aristocrats and intellectuals who enjoy promoting progressive ideals without confronting their consequences, while their radicalized sons take those ideas to nihilistic extremes, culminating in murders, mob violence, fires, and suicides. At the center are figures like Pyotr, a cold manipulator who binds his group of left-wing radicals through collective guilt; Stavrogin, a charismatic psychopath whose moral emptiness destroys everyone around him before destroying himself; and Stepan, an aging intellectual who finally achieves self-awareness.

You can read my written discussions of Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. Richard and I go deeper into the story.

See my previous conversations with Richard about Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Read more

The 3 of us have decided to get together and record biweekly episodes, speaking about psychology, psychoanalysis, current events, and more.

Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.

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Event at the University of Missouri:

This Thursday (April 9) at 6pm. Details and registration info here.

Wall Street Journal:

I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal about the general public’s understanding of the replication crisis.

Excerpt:

Half of social science studies don’t replicate. That has become one of the most widely cited facts about modern research. It has also become one of the most misunderstood.

“You can’t trust studies,” people say, “because they don’t replicate.” But how do we know they don’t replicate? Because of studies.

The same people who dismiss research often rely on research to justify their doubt.

Read the whole thing here.

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:

• Selection, Not Origin, Drives Immigrant Welfare Use by

• The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026) by Steven Pinker

• Robert Trivers (1943–2026) Reflects on His Life and Work by Robert Trivers

• Two Decades in the Swamp by Ilya Shapiro

• Vitamin baby by

• Doomers in Love by Mana Afsari

• 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. Liberal teen girls are the heaviest users of social media: 31% say they spend more than five hours a day on these platforms, compared to 22% of conservative girls, 18% of liberal boys, and 13% of conservative boys. (source: Girls by Freya India).

2. Height is 90% heritable. But it is still malleable. Before Korea was divided, Northerners were taller than Southerners. Today, North Koreans are 6 centimeters shorter, on average, than South Koreans. Did their genes change? No. Their environments did. (source).

3. “Masochism” is named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose novels explored pleasure in pain and submission. When psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing coined the term in 1890, Sacher-Masoch found it deeply humiliating, which presumably only made the whole thing more exciting for him.

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:

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors

I find the weird taboo around discussing money in upper middle class circles to be obnoxious.

The higher you go, the blurrier the rules get. At a wage job, everyone knows you make $17.25/hr. In white-collar roles, pay is a moving target. You’re expected to negotiate, which quietly screens for social fluency. Others don’t know what you’re earning and there is a stigma around speaking about it.

There’s a reason this rule exists, and it’s not about politeness.

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Check out my review of the documentary here.

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Wall Street Journal:

I have a new piece out in the WSJ.

Remaining Calm Doesn't Win Every Argument

In moments of intense disagreement, you’re signaling what kind of person you are.

In a new paper, Zihan Yang and Cory Clark at the University of Pennsylvania examine how others interpret those signals. The results are striking. Remaining calm, what the authors call a “stoic display,” consistently improves how others see you. Crying and yelling, by contrast, damage your reputation.

This may seem obvious. But the researchers also discovered something more interesting. How you react during a conflict doesn’t only change how others see you. Your reaction also changes how observers see the person with whom you’re arguing. Making someone cry makes you look cold or insensitive. So tears can damage the other side’s reputation. There’s a catch, though. The person who cries is also seen as less competent, less professional and less desirable as a friend or colleague.

Read the whole thing 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.

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:

• My friend Alex runs one of my favorite newsletters about books. Strongly recommended. Check it out here

• China and the Future of Science by

• Personality and Dreaming by

• Blue Cities Are Finally Showing Sanity on Drugs and Crime by Keith Humphreys

• Crypto-Communism and Game Theory by

• How ‘Harm Reduction’ Fails Families by Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Sarah Font

• How the American Healthcare System Rewards Psychiatric Overdiagnosis by and Jeffrey A. Singer

• 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 higher in the belief that words can harm tended to be younger, female, non-White, and politically liberal. People with higher “words can harm” scores also rated themselves as higher in intellectual humility, empathy, moral grandstanding, and the belief in the importance of silencing others. (source).

2. California has long depended on a small number of ultrawealthy taxpayers to fund a large share of its government. According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the top 1% of taxpayers generate roughly 40% of the state’s personal income-tax revenue. (source).

3. What Nietzsche was looking for in a wife (source: I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux):

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:

Amazon (US)

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop

Amazon (UK)

Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)

Other book vendors

Subscribe now

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This was recorded in Miami. Peterson Academy paid for travel and accommodation. That was my first time flying first class. I learned you can’t hang out in the Admirals Club or United Club or any of these airport lounges unless you’re flying international. Domestic flights don’t count. Rootless cosmopolitan global elites don’t want me to access free food or free coffee.

The lectures went well. The camera crew and staff were all extremely professional. Lots of thoughtful questions from the attendees. I noticed a lot of racial diversity as well as a gender balance among the students. I asked the staff if this was intentional. Maybe they wanted it to look good on a brochure, like colleges do with their admissions pamphlets. The staff replied that it was not intentional, this was just how it worked out. Everyone is interested in learning about psychology when the courses are not suffused with ideology.

After recording this series, I hosted a small meetup in Miami. One of the attendees was a muscular guy who was about 5’5.” He introduced himself and told me, “I thought you’d be shorter.” I guess because I sometimes post about male height studies. I post these findings because it’s one of the few prejudices that is still openly acceptable to express. It is bizarre that fat shaming is taboo but height shaming is not. Fat people have more control over their weight than short people do over their height. Especially now with Ozempic and other weight loss meds. Shaming a fat person can actually get them change their behavior and lose weight; shaming a short person will do nothing to change their height. Yet the former is bad but the latter is fine. Consistency is too much to ask for. I know. But I still find it mystifying.

Anyway. I’ve recorded 2 different courses for Peterson Academy, which you can check out here.

Yale

I’ll be speaking at Yale this Tuesday (March 31) at 12pm. The event organizers tell me it is open only to members of the university. If you are and you want to attend, reply to this email telling me who you are and I can give you the specific location.

Devils (also translated as Demons or The Possessed) by Dostoevsky was published in 1872.

We discuss a ghastly crime perpetrated by the character Nikolay Stavrogin, as well as Dostoevsky’s portrayal of women and their role in society. The governor’s wife, Yulia, represents a type that appears in every era of political upheaval, where misguided sympathy and open-mindedness inadvertently lay the groundwork for a revolutionary movement.

See my conversation with Richard about Part 1 here.

You can read my written discussions of Part1 here and Part 2 here. Richard and I go deeper into the story.

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An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder.

A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.

He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.

Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.

Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.

Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.

When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.

He had set forces in motion that he could not control.

He suffered a nervous breakdown and fell into depression. His doctors and family sent him to the French Riviera to recover. He checked into a hotel in Cannes. There, he apparently shot himself, though rumors persisted for years that he had been murdered and the suicide had been staged.

His wife Zinaida returned to Russia and continued living off the enormous fortune her husband had left behind. Then came 1917. The Bolsheviks seized everything. She survived by selling off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to keep.

The lavish country estate she and her husband owned later became the personal residence of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the communist revolution. Today it is a museum called Lenin’s Gorki, filled with the possessions and mementos of the first leader of the Soviet Union.

In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin points out that in most cases of societal collapse and state breakdown, “the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites…were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.”

Everything Collapses

Devils by Fyodor Dostoevsky (also translated as Demons and The Possessed) is a novel divided into 3 parts. We’ve discussed Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

This is a discussion of Part 3 of Devils, in which Dostoevsky’s portrait of political radicalism is brought to its catastrophic conclusion.

Recall that in Devils, the older generation of liberals espouse a mild form of progressivism. They are well-read, shaped by Western European ideas, and fond of gathering in pleasant surroundings to discuss injustice and inequality over a glass of wine. They believe in reason, equality, and gradual reform.

But much of this is performance. Their beliefs serve as a kind of badge, a way to show that they are thoughtful and morally serious people. They praise radical ideas, but they like the sound of revolution more than its consequences.

By attacking tradition and chipping away at trust in long-standing institutions, the middle-aged liberals of Devils hollow out the moral and cultural foundations their children will inherit.

When these children of affluent liberals come of age, they do not follow their parents into comfortable moderation. Instead, their kids, now in their twenties and early thirties, become enamored with socialism, atheism, and nihilism.

What had been building beneath the surface of Devils erupts in Part 3. Over the course of a few days, everything falls apart. Fires spread across the town. People are beaten, robbed, and executed. Others are coerced into false confessions. The tone shifts from satire to something closer to horror.

At the center of it all is Pyotr, the organizer of the local radical cell who has been pulling the strings from the beginning. As the chaos peaks, he flees the consequences, leaving behind a broken group and a town in ruins.

Marya Lebyadkin (the disabled woman married to Nikolay Stavrogin) and her brother are murdered by Fedka, a low-level criminal. Liza (engaged to Mavriky but in love with Stavrogin) is killed by a mob that believes she helped arrange Marya’s death so she could run off with Stavrogin.

Fires break out. People are shot. Others take their own lives. Each disaster feeds the next.

What is striking is how little of this is driven by ordinary people.

The radical cell is made up almost entirely of the sons (who I describe in Part 1 as “radical zoomers”) of intellectuals and aristocrats (“moderate boomers”).

When peasants and workers do occasionally appear in the story, they are simply living their lives. They do not debate systems or propose dramatic reforms. The gap between them and the radicals is wide and obvious.

The revolutionary fervor is not rising from “the people.” It is being conceptualized and imposed by a small group of educated men who are obsessed with abstract ideas.

The younger generation seems to be acting at least in part on parental failure and personal resentments.

Pyotr at one point says to his father, Stepan, in essence, “Why would I help you? You were never there for me.” There is real bitterness there. I discuss this in my review of Part 1.

Dostoevsky’s question, by the end, is hard to ignore. What happens when a generation is raised on negation, skepticism, and wholesale abandonment of tradition? Part 3 offers a clear answer.

The Tragedy of the Well-Meaning Intellectual

In the midst of all the chaos and violence, Part 3 slows down during Stepan’s final days. Stepan, recall, is an aging washed-up intellectual in his fifties who failed in his duties as a father to Pyotr and as a quasi-stepfather to Stavrogin.

Stepan leaves town on foot and begins what he imagines as a spiritual journey. He pictures himself walking out into the countryside, meeting peasants, and reconnecting with something real.

Earlier in the novel, Stepan imagines himself as an intellectual rebel, someone important enough to be monitored by the authorities. He likes to think of himself as a dangerous and influential figure. In reality, no one is paying attention.

On this final journey, the performance becomes complete.

While walking along a roadside, Stepan first encounters two peasants on a cart. He thinks to himself, “It’s strange that I feel as it were conscience-stricken before them, yet I’ve done them no harm.”

Stepan feels guilty in front of them even though he has never personally wronged them. His guilt is abstract. It comes from a vague awareness of class difference, from the sense that his life has been easier than theirs.

There is sympathy in it, but also distance. Moral concern mixed with liberal condescension.

This dynamic still feels familiar. You see versions of this today.

When the peasants explain that their cattle died in a plague, Stepan responds, by saying something like “Oh, yeah, that happens to you Russians.” Then he catches himself and corrects it: “No, I mean we Russians.” He speaks as if he is observing his own country from the outside rather than living inside it.

Even 150 years ago, cosmopolitan intellectuals felt detached from their own countries, viewing their fellow citizens through an anthropological lens colored with condescension.

At the same time, there is something almost innocent about Stepan.

You see this in small moments. When he arrives at a cottage, Stepan orders pancakes and vodka. He imagines that the peasant woman serving him takes a natural pleasure in it. He believes he understands her. He says, “I always know how to get along with the peasants to perfection, to perfection.”

Many years ago I witnessed a professor at an elite college, a Gen X white guy, boast to his students that he got along better with black people than with white people. He expressed this as a point of pride. Unsurprisingly, the students saw right through it.

Near the end of his journey, though, Stepan finally admits the truth about himself:

“I’ve been telling lies all my life. Even when I told the truth, I never spoke for the sake of the truth, but always for my own sake. The worst of it is that I believed myself when I am lying…The hardest thing in life is to live without telling lies and without believing in one’s lies.”

Here we have one of the clearest statements of self-deception in the novel. Stepan is not just lying to others. He is lying to himself, and he believes those lies.

Among all the characters, Stepan comes closest to a real redemption arc. He does not save anyone. He does not undo the damage he has inadvertently caused. But he gains a kind of self-awareness.

What makes this moment powerful is the contrast with what comes just before it.

Prior to skipping town, Stepan attends a literary event hosted by Yulia, the governor’s wife.

Stepan confronts the radicals directly. He does not try to impress them or position himself alongside them. He pushes back.

The young radicals respond by calling him an “Agent provocateur.” In modern terms, they accuse him of being a government plant, a “fed.” The charge, of course, is revealing. Anyone who does not fully accept the socialist framework must be working for the enemy.

Stepan rejects this. He argues that Shakespeare matters more than boots, that art and beauty are not luxuries but the highest achievements of civilization. This is exactly what the radicals cannot accept. For them, everything must be reduced to material needs and political struggle.

Dostoevsky then shows how the crowd responds:

“To begin with, there was a furious volley of applause. The applause did not come from all, probably from some fifth part of the audience…The rest of the public made for the exits, but as the applauding part of the audience kept pressing forward towards the platform, there was a regular block. The ladies screamed. Some of the girls began to cry and asked to go home.”

In other words, these women listening to Stepan, the moderate liberal intellectual condemning their radicalism, were literally shaking.

The scene breaks down into noise and panic.

Stepan’s position explains the reaction. He is not a radical, but he is not a defender of the old order either. He has sympathy for new ideas but cannot follow them to their extremes. In today’s terms, he resembles a classical liberal, someone who believes in culture, in art, in gradual progress, and who finds himself attacked by those who are further left than him.

In this moment, he does something he had not done before. He tells the truth as he sees it.

At this same literary reading, a visiting professor takes the stage. He is theatrical, trying to present himself as a dangerous radical. But the narrator cuts right through it: “There is nothing he likes better than exhibiting the bankruptcy of Russia in every relation before the great minds of Europe. But he regards himself at a higher level than all the great minds of Europe. They’re only material for his jests.”

This is a critique of the Russian intelligentsia. They borrow ideas from Europe and use them to attack their own country. Criticizing your own society to impress Europeans (who are viewed as more enlightened) becomes a way of signaling sophistication.

Of course, this has never, ever, happened in the U.S. Our intellectuals would never glaze foreign countries and denigrate our own.

The Architect of Chaos

Pyotr (Stepan’s son) is the mastermind of the radical cell. He more or less succeeds in his aim of creating chaos while escaping any responsibility.

He becomes a fugitive, but a comfortable one. He boards a train to Petersburg. At one point, he is even invited into a first-class compartment by a well-placed passenger. He accepts without hesitation.

Behind Pyotr, though, is a trail of destruction.

Marya Lebyadkin (the disabled woman married to Nikolay Stavrogin) and her brother are found murdered. A low-level criminal named Fedka carried out the killings, but Pyotr set the conditions.

Liza’s death follows a similar pattern of chaos and misreading. The crowd blames her for Marya’s murder, believing she wanted Marya gone so she could be with Stavrogin. A mob forms. She is beaten to death.

Liza’s story has its own internal logic. She is drawn to Stavrogin, and becomes entangled in his emptiness. She moves toward danger on her own. Not exactly suicide, but close to it. Something like “suicide-by-criminal,” placing herself in a situation where her destruction becomes almost inevitable.

Pyotr wanted to create disorder for its own sake. He ties people together through shared guilt, pushes them toward violence, and then abandons them.

Earlier, we contrasted Pyotr with Stavrogin. Stavrogin is charismatic, physically striking, and effortlessly draws people in. Pyotr is the opposite. He is not personally appealing. He does not seem to have close relationships. There’s no sign he has ever been romantically involved with anyone.

Instead, he finds satisfaction in manipulation.

Pyotr even explains part of his method. He talks about how he rambles on purpose, how he makes himself appear less intelligent than he is. This lowers people’s defenses. They underestimate him. They trust him more easily. And that makes them easier to control.

The broader movement in the novel reflects this fragmentation. It is not a unified ideology. It is a loose alliance of socialism along with different flavors of nihilism.

There are political radicals who claim to believe in a new social order.

There are abstract thinkers like Shigalov, who construct elaborate theories about how society should be reorganized according to a socialist framework.

There are philosophical figures like Kirillov, who take ideas about freedom and existence to advocate for “rational” suicide. And then there is Stavrogin, whose nihilism is personal and internal, a kind of moral emptiness.

What unites all of these characters is that they no longer believe in the old structures. They have lost faith in religion, in tradition, in any stable vision of the future. This creates a moral vacuum. And in that vacuum, different people respond in different ways.

Pyotr chooses destruction.

One of the clearest windows into Pyotr’s mind comes during the discussion about whether to murder Shatov, a former radical who the group believes will betray them to the authorities.

A man named Virginsky initially resists.

He says, “With all my soul and strength, I protest against such a murderous decision.” It is a direct moral objection. But Pyotr does not argue against it in any straightforward way. Instead, he manipulates the conversation.

Pyotr responds, “But?”

Virginsky asks, “But what?”

Pyotr says, “You said, ‘but,’ and I’m waiting.”

The trick is simple. Virginsky never said “but.” Pyotr inserts it, as if it were already part of Virginsky’s statement. This creates pressure. Virginsky starts to doubt himself.

He then replies, “I don’t think I said that. I only meant to say that if you decide to do it, then—”

Pyotr interrupts again: “Then?”

By falsely accusing Virginsky of saying “but,” Pyotr tricks him into explaining what he “really meant,” which leads to his capitulation.

Virginsky then goes on to say, “I am for the cause.”

The radical cell comes to an uneasy consensus: We must kill Shatov.

Pyotr plans the murder of Shatov for two closely related reasons.

First, Shatov is a liability. He has broken with the group and could go to the authorities. That alone makes him dangerous.

But that is not the full story.

Pyotr is also trying to bind the group together. By pushing them to commit murder, he ensures that they are all tied together by collective guilt.

Romanticizing What You Cannot Fully Inhabit

Shatov’s story is one of the most emotionally intense in the novel.

Shatov represents a different response to the same crisis that affects every other major character. Whereas Stavrogin dissolves into callous indifference and Pyotr into manipulation, Shatov tries to rebuild a sense of meaning.

As mentioned in Part 2, he comes across as a kind of stand-in for Dostoevsky himself.

In Part 3, his estranged wife returns after three years of separation. She is pregnant with Stavrogin’s child. The situation could easily be treated with bitterness or resentment. Instead, Shatov helps care for her during childbirth. He is overwhelmed with emotion that she has returned to him.

At the same time, there is a clear sense of loss in her character.

The book’s description of Shatov’s thoughts about his wife:

“He looked at her features with anguish: the first bloom of youth had long faded from this exhausted face. It’s true that she was still good-looking—in his eyes a beauty, as she had always been. In reality, she was a woman of twenty-five…the light-hearted, naive, and good-natured energy he had known so well in the past was replaced now by a sullen irritability and disillusionment, a sort of cynicism which was not yet habitual to herself, and which weighed upon her.”

My read here is that Stavrogin is a psychopathic vampire who drains people of youth and life.

Elsewhere, the book comments on the topic of women aging.

At one of the novel’s social gatherings, an old general remarks: “As a rule, there’s an irregularity about female beauty in Russia…These rosebuds are charming for two years when they are young…even for three…then they broaden out and are spoilt for ever…producing in their husbands that deplorable indifference which does so much to promote the woman movement.”

In other words, husbands lose interest in their wives (because they get fat), which then drives women to feminism. It’s unclear how much Dostoevsky himself endorses this way of thinking. The general who makes these remarks is making snide observations about female appearance while society collapses around them. His banal chatter contrasts grotesquely with the unfolding catastrophe.

Returning to Shatov, he knows his wife has given birth not to his own child but to Stavrogin’s but he plans to raise it as his own.

One of the characters mockingly describes him as “going in for being a father and a ninny,” meaning he embraces his stepfather role. Today the worst people among the online right would call Shatov a “cuck.”

Dostoevsky seems to treat Shatov sympathetically, even if others do not.

There is also a deeper layer to Shatov’s character.

At one point he says, “Since I cannot be a Russian, I became a Slavophil.” It is a revealing admission. Shatov is, in fact, a Russian.

But what he means by his strange declaration is that he recognizes that his identity is mediated through ideas. He is not organically rooted in the culture he is trying to defend. He has to think his way into it.

Slavophils were Russian intellectuals who idealized Russian culture, Orthodox Christianity, the peasant commune, and traditional Russian values. They were often Westernized intellectuals (spoke French, read European philosophy) who romanticized “authentic” Russian peasant life they didn’t actually live. You can see parallels to this today among conservative elites and intellectuals who have never lived among “the people,” “the heartland,” and “real America,” romanticizing a way of life they’ve never actually witnessed up close.

Shatov’s wife shows flashes of affection toward him but also treats him with undisguised contempt, despite the fact that he is a good man.

She has betrayed him by sleeping with Stavrogin. Yet she speaks to him harshly, almost cruelly. He responds with patience and concern. He asks what he can do. She tells him to stand aside, to be quiet, to leave her alone. When he offers her his bed, she reacts with irritation. When he tries to find a midwife to assist during childbirth, she lashes out again, accusing him of abandoning her.

The tone shifts back and forth between tenderness and hostility.

And yet Shatov remains steady. When the child is born, he is filled with joy, even knowing the child is not his. It is one of the few moments in the novel that feels genuinely warm.

Which makes what follows much harder to watch.

Almost immediately after the birth of the child, everything unravels.

A member of the radical cell arrives at Shatov’s house and asks Shatov to come with him. The group then murders him.

The sequence is abrupt and brutal. The moment of new life is followed immediately by death.

Dostoevsky gives Shatov a deeply tragic fate. He’s vulnerable. He’s humiliated. He’s destroyed. Dostoevsky, I think, is showing the cost of Shatov’s earlier errors. Shatov had been part of the radical circle. He didn’t fully break from it. He has some agency in how he ends up where he does, even if he does not deserve what happens to him.

“Rational” Suicide Becomes a Farce

Kirillov, as we covered in Part 1, developed an elaborate justification for “rational” suicide.

Pyotr needs Kirillov to kill himself. But first he tells Kirillov to sign a confession note claiming responsibility for Shatov’s murder.

An exchange captures the difference between Pyotr and Kirillov.

Kirillov says that the ultimate expression of free will is to kill oneself.

Pyotr impatiently responds, “If I were in your place, I should kill someone else to show my will, not myself.”

Kirillov keeps saying he’ll kill himself but as the minutes pass, Pyotr begins to panic that Kirillov won’t go through with it.

The narrator describes it this way: “Pyotr Stepanovich had by now lost all faith in the suicide.” The phrasing is worth sitting with.

Pyotr had no faith in God, but did have faith in Kirillov’s suicide.

He has built his plan around an expectation, and that expectation is crumbling.

Dostoevsky here seems to be suggesting that even in a world that has rejected religion, people still rely on faith of some kind. They form expectations about what will happen, about how others will act. They build plans on those expectations. When that belief collapses, they panic.

You can see this in Pyotr’s behavior. The calm manipulator starts to unravel because his faith has dissipated.

When the suicide finally occurs, it is chaotic and unsettling.

Kirillov signs the confession before his death, taking responsibility for Shatov’s murder.

Dostoevsky’s Psychopathic Man

By the time we reach the end, Stavrogin (son of the aristocrat Varvara, and, as a child, tutored by Stepan) is already hollow and beyond redemption. We discussed his confession of a horrific crime in Part 2.

Stavrogin’s story ends in suicide, but even that raises questions.

Prior to taking his own life, he writes a letter to a young woman named Dasha. Here, we get a glimpse into his mind, though even here it is hard to know what to believe.

Stavrogin writes, “I’m still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do something good and of feeling pleasure from it. And at the same time I desire evil and feel pleasure from that too.”

He is describing a complete collapse of internal moral structure. Good and evil are interchangeable, reduced to whatever produces the most pleasurable sensations for him.

Then comes a striking claim: “I can never shoot myself. I know I ought to kill myself, but I’m afraid of suicide, for I’m afraid of showing greatness of soul.” He frames suicide as a kind of grand gesture and rejects it for that reason. To him, it would feel performative, inauthentic.

This is where the contradictions emerge.

Stavrogin also writes, “I couldn’t have been one of them,” meaning the radicals, “not because I was afraid of the ridiculous. I cannot be afraid of the ridiculous.” Yet as we covered in Part 2, in his interaction with retired Bishop Tihon, Stavrogin suggests the opposite. Stavrogin is deeply concerned with appearing ridiculous. He is extremely vain.

His letter is difficult to trust. It is filled with claims that contradict both his actions and earlier evidence in the novel. Consistent with our growing understanding of Stavrogin as a nihilist.

He says he cannot kill himself. Shortly after, in the novel’s final pages, he does.

My read here is that Stavrogin has exhausted every experience available to him. He has tried pleasure, cruelty, indifference. He has tried behaving honorably and he has behaved reprehensibly.

Nothing gives structure to his life. Nothing makes him feel anything other than fleeting pleasure, if that. For him, suicide is the next inevitable step.

In his letter, Stavrogin mentions that on some level he admired Pyotr and the radicals because they, unlike him, actually believed in something.

Part of the reason Stavrogin affiliates with them is that they offer him a kind of borrowed purpose.

In the end, his involvement with the radicals was just another way for Stavrogin to pleasurably pass the time and distract himself from his own emptiness and moral rot.

So what is Dostoevsky saying through Stavrogin?

He may be the novel’s purest example of what happens when all moral structure collapses. He is intelligent, handsome, capable, and charismatic. But without any stable internal sense of right and wrong, those traits become dangerous. They enable him to destroy others before destroying himself.

One question that arises here is how Dostoevsky portrays young women in the novel. It is hard not to notice a pattern. The young women in the novel are drawn to Stavrogin in spite of his cruelty and inner void. Liza, who is engaged to a decent man, tries to leave him for Stavrogin. Shatov’s wife becomes pregnant by Stavrogin. Another young woman named Dasha is drawn to him.

I have an answer to what is going on here, which I covered in this piece about Luigi Mangione.

The Power of Ideas: Well-Fed, Well-Born, and Eager to Burn It All Down

Near the end, we finally get a clear statement of what the radicals in Devils have been trying to accomplish all along.

A member of the cell, Lyamshin, confesses to everything.

He explains the plan:

“When asked what was the object of so many murders and scandals and dastardly outrages, he answered with feverish haste that ‘it was with the idea of systematically undermining the foundations, systematically destroying society and all principles; with the idea of nonplussing everyone and making hay of everything, and then, when society was tottering, sick and out of joint, cynical and sceptical though filled with an intense eagerness for self-preservation and for some guiding idea, suddenly to seize it in their hands.”

First, undermine everything. Next, create confusion and chaos. Then wait for society to become desperate. Finally, step in and take control.

Earlier in the novel, Shigalov, one of the intellectuals in the radical cell, makes the same point.

A striking feature of the novel is that the radicals are not the poorest or most desperate people in society.

Stavrogin, Pyotr, and the others are, by the standards of their time, relatively privileged. They are sons of educated intellectuals and aristocrats.

And yet they are the ones captured by these ideas.

They are not talking about wages or hunger or being overworked and underpaid. They’re not saying, “My life is so hard, and that is why I joined this socialist movement.”

This raises a broader point. There’s a strong tendency to explain political extremism in material terms.

People ask whether political rage stems from poverty, or inequality, or some other kind of economic frustration.

But Dostoevsky suggests that ideas themselves can be enough.

This is hard for many people to accept. In his seminal 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that “Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization.”

Material causes feel concrete. Ideas are less tangible. You cannot see them or hold them. But they shape how people interpret the world. They define what seems right, what seems possible, what seems worth doing.

In Devils, socialist ideas spread and take hold with enormous force. Imported from Europe, reworked by intellectuals, they moved quickly through a small group and produced catastrophic consequences.

Dostoevsky suggests that once certain ideas take root, they can operate independently of material conditions. They become their own driving force.

Dostoevsky is a master at holding you in suspense as disaster builds toward the inevitable. Describing the experience of reading a Dostoevsky novel, the twentieth-century Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote that “the reader often feels as if he were present at a distressing, prolonged, and extremely complicated trial. One must, however, pay this price for the enjoyment—painful, yet so uniquely deep and moving—that one derives from the magnificent works of this singular genius.”

In his diary, Dostoevsky wrote “People call me a psychologist: this is inaccurate. I am a realist in the higher sense: that is to say, I indicate all the depths of the human soul.”

Devils (also translated as Demons or The Possessed) by Dostoevsky was published in 1872.

Devils follows a cluster of older intellectuals and younger radicals in a provincial Russian town. They debate big ideas—freedom, equality, revolution. Dostoevsky depicts what happens when people absorb ideas from the previous generation and take them further than their elders intended.

What makes the novel so sharp is its grounding. It plays out in gossip, literary readings, and dinner parties where radical ideas circulate and gain respectability in polite society. Dostoevsky knew what he was writing about. He was arrested as a radical leftist as a young man and served time in a Siberian prison. He came out the other side with a different view of human nature. One that took seriously both humanity’s capacity for self-destruction and the need for something to believe in.

You can read my review of part 1 here. Richard and I go deeper in the story.

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