Some of the most influential ideas in modern society don’t spread because they’re true or effective, but because they signal status.

Rob Henderson has captured this dynamic with his concept of luxury beliefs: ideas that confer prestige on those who espouse them while imposing punishing costs on the less privileged. You see it across debates on family, education, crime, and social policy, where prevailing approaches often downplay or ignore the role of norms, family and social structure, and cultural expectations, suggesting instead that groups of people are victims of forces beyond them, keeping them down in a victimhood mindset. 

In this Macdonald-Laurier Institute episode of Inside Policy Talks, Rob and I go deeper into the foundational assumptions behind his work. It’s one thing to recognize the norms ‘that work’, but to what extent do our societies depend on these cultural norms —stable families, civic trust, moral restraint—that they themselves cannot generate?

Much of modern policy and social science assumes that if we get the incentives right, or apply the right techniques, we can produce good outcomes. 

But I suggest this technocratic framing leaves out much. It treats norms as useful instruments rather than asking whether they are grounded in something true about human nature and the good life.

What’s more, people who act only for instrumental reasons, or solely to achieve particular outcomes, can never attain deep happiness. They do not know how to act for the sake of ideals themselves. Unlike outcomes, ideals are inexhaustible. Each one is embedded in a higher-order ideal, the highest of which is love. To act in relation to such ideals requires non-instrumental motivation – acting for the ideal itself, not merely for the result it may produce. These are among the deepest lessons of our civilizational inheritance: Athenian virtue and Jerusalem’s Judeo-Christian theological virtue.

Rob rightly notes that the American founders said their freedom-oriented polity would not work for a people who do not promote traditional marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity.

Can a society preserve and refine its formative norms if it regards them as merely useful? I seriously doubt it. Norms endure, and remain living and vital only when they are seen as true, binding, and reflective of our human nature.

In other words, you can’t truly fake it until you make it. We can start the much-needed cultural revitalization in western democracies by imitating these ideals, but we cannot flourish at scale without sincerely believing in and practicing them.