We’re No Longer Good Enough for Our Woke Friends
Snubbed by high-status elite wanna-be's
Or, why status-seeking is the only game in town.
Our woke friends dropped us because we’re no longer good enough for them.
Because my wife and I failed to virtue signal any of the most common orthodox, left-wing beliefs; Black Lives Matters, multiculturalism, diversity, DEI, climate change, etc. we are now seen as low status by some of our oldest friends.
Oh, and I overturned a long-standing shibboleth of elite, left-wing orthodoxy: drug and alcohol use should be a personal choice.
Long story short; I’m an alcoholic. Three years ago I got sober.
But, our failure to certify the left-wing orthodoxy was not even our greatest sin. The greatest sin we committed was finding religion.
My journey initially began with AA but I ultimately wound up in a small Christian church.
AA is an interesting organization. AA is an organization where the lowest alcoholic is elevated in status by sharing his story. To encourage connection, alcoholics get vulnerable with each other:
“Hi my name is Mullet and I’m an alcoholic.”
In other words, AA inverts the traditional status hierarchy where high achievement leads to high status.
For example, I was at an AA meeting two weeks ago when a big, bearded, leather jacket-wearing man stood up and told a room full of addicts how he’d been raped as a 10-year old boy. His life thereafter turned into a downward spiral of alcohol and heroin. He told us this story as a 50 year old; after decades of addiction.
His vulnerability instantly marked him as a leader; someone to pay attention to within the context of our AA meeting. His story helped me. His experience demonstrated that he had walked the walk of an addict. His sobriety showed me that the AA community could help me get sober.
The first of AA’s 12 steps is to admit that we are powerless to overcome our struggle with substances by ourselves. Step Two is to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. AA doesn’t mention God. Your higher power could be Allah, Buddha, Mother Nature or something else.
Addicts come in many flavors; substances just make addiction more fun.
If addicts were good at introspection and self-awareness, we’d likely never have started using. Drugs and alcohol are simply the emotional tranquilizers we’ve chosen to mask our real problem. Our most common problems are anger, envy, lust (pornography), pride (emotional detachment) and gluttony (drunkenness). These problems (sins) lead to damaged relationships. Come to an AA meeting and I’ll tell you mine.
Sharing my story in an AA meeting puts me in a vulnerable state that allows me to connect with another addict. Connection is healing. Confession is good for the soul. Admission is the price of admission.
Rob Henderson references Oscar Wilde so I will too:
“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
Our Old Friends
We’ve known our old friends for 30 years; we raised our children together. We have many commonalities. Did we just grow apart? I suspect not - nothing so banal. I’ll tell you why I believe her motivations were more sinister; but first, some more details about the friendship that ended.
When she asks about it, the other wife doesn’t disclose any particular reason. She doesn’t say:
“It’s because you now believe in God and I now see you as White Christian Nationalists.”
We’ve never had any rancorous or adversarial political discussions about Trump. We’ve never had any arguments.
My wife and I don’t bring up our newfound faith in conversation with our old friends. We pray before eating, but not if we’re eating with them since we don’t want them to feel awkward.
I don’t proselytize. Other than a couple of Facebook posts, my wife hasn’t either. Before my conversion, I was not seeking God. In fact, I actively avoided Him. I even partied with her husband - drugs and alcohol was pretty much all we had in common.
Neither my wife nor I voted for Trump, but many of the new friends we’ve made at our church did. We’ve chatted about the election, but only our woke friends seemed distressed.
Luxury Beliefs
Rob Henderson‘s Luxury Beliefs helps me frame this experience and help me understand what seems to be happening.
Because my wife and I failed to virtue signal any of the most common orthodox, left-wing belief; Black Lives Matters, multiculturalism, diversity, DEI, climate change, etc. we are now seen as low status by our old friends.
Because we don’t have a sign in my front yard that says “Just Be Kind“ we’re no longer classy enough to be with our old friends. I’m kind of OK with losing them; she dated several of my buddies in college, but I was never into her.
Frankly, I’m a little surprised that I’m still in contact with her 30 years later. However, I’m disappointed with how she’s treating my wife and a little bit angry at how casually she will discard people.
What are Luxury Beliefs?
High status people in today’s world no longer signal their elite status with money, nice cars or nice houses because everyone has money, nice cars and nice houses.
It’s not what you drive or how you dress, it’s what you believe that signals your membership in the upper class.
These are the Luxury Beliefs that Rob Henderson helped me to understand. By the way, Rob was in Miami in December and he shared with me how he learned about luxury beliefs. Rob was reading Oscar Wilde, who spent time observing the habits and behaviors of rich people over 100 years ago.
“It’s not me, it’s you…”
We just took a nine day vacation with our old friends. My wife and her old friend didn’t spend one minute alone together. They didn’t talk. That’s when they knew it was over.
But, I did spend time with them. I was unaware of the pending drama. I’m sitting there; chatting away; innocent as a jaybird. And, one conversation stuck in my head. We were discussing the recent election, ten days previous in November 2024, when the husband made a strange comment:
“We are all white and we all have a responsibility to make black friends, invite them in our social circles and invite them into our homes. Being an anti-racist is the only way we’re going to overcome racism.“
His comment struck me as racist, but I didn’t say that since I was trying to keep things civil.
Is the only criteria for inviting someone into my home that they should be black?
I’m still trying to puzzle out what my response should’ve been?
My sense, at the time and still is, that he was not looking for an intellectual conversation; he was simply signaling his luxury beliefs.
Trying to Find God
I’m new to faith. At 54, I was not seeking God.
When I hit my alcoholic rock bottom and I turned to AA and eventually to a Christian church, I started asking myself “What is everyone else doing?” (besides my new AA and Christian friends).
So, I found Theo Vonn on the Joe Rogan podcast. Theo Von is a comedian/cultural critic who acknowledges Christ as a “helper“. Theo takes a pragmatic view of faith:
“Why wouldn’t you use a ‘helper’ if you knew you had one always available to you?“
Theo is acknowledging that he doesn’t have all the answers. Theo doesn’t lean on his own understanding. Theo ‘feels’ faithful but he’s not trying to prove the existence of God with ‘facts’. You wouldn’t ask Theo to do your math homework, invent an iPhone or teach you astronomy. With Theo, science and faith are not incompatible.
Theo is describing a modern day ‘hack’; a way to access your inner wisdom in an age of infinite information and distraction:
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.”
What if you could access an internal AI Chatbot (God) without your phone?
What if, at any time of the day you could access a secret, inner source of wisdom and guidance to help you deal with your mom, figure out dating challenges or interrupt that negative internal narrative that you’re having with your boss right now?
That’s what Theo is saying to Joe Rogan when he talks about a ‘helper’.
Prayer, accessing an inner voice that helped me make better decisions, is how I quit drinking 3 years ago. I recognized that I don’t have all the answers; my way of dealing with fear and anger by drinking alcohol was slowly killing me.
My “Oh, shit!” moment happened after a night of drinking and partying and spending money in places I shouldn’t have been. A Bourbon Street drug dealer broke my arm at 2 AM after I spent all my money at a strip club. I consider it my personal miracle. How many Bourbon Street drug dealers do you know that go out at 2 AM unarmed?
“Do not lean upon your own understanding.“ - 2nd Proverbs
By the way, drug and alcohol use is also a luxury belief. Those old friends of ours? Big-time druggies.
Elites, whose neighborhoods are disproportionally less affected by drug use, believe drug and alcohol use should be a matter of personal choice. Elites believe drugs should be legalized.
Rise Up by Pushing Others Down
Jeffrey Skilling of Enron famously created a cutthroat company culture called ‘Rank-and-Yank’ that paid executives based on ruthless sales quotas. One of Skilling’s employees was quoted as saying:
“If I'm going to my boss's office to talk about compensation, and if I step on some guy's throat and that doubles it, then I'll stomp on that guy's throat.”
Skilling was sentenced to 24-years in federal prison and Enron went bankrupt, largely as a result of it’s corrupt culture.
How do we play the status game?
The status game is a rank-and-yank system of winners and losers. My source for this is Johann Kurtz’ excellent essay here:
“As an explanatory factor, status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute.”
Johann Kurtz
There are three types of status games:
Virtue games
Dominance games
Achievement games
So, what is status? From Johann’s post:
“Status describes the perceived standing of the individual within the group. It denotes their social value and their place within the formal and informal hierarchies which comprise a society.”
Johann Kurtz
A couple of examples might help; human players communicate their intent to play the game to other humans. ‘Signaling’ is a term that comes from anthropology where apes or gorillas might signal dominance behaviors (described below) by thumping their chests with their hands or fists.
Virtue signaling is a term that has become popular as members of the new Woke movement virtue signal their luxury beliefs about leftist doctrine, such as climate change, drug use and minority rights. But, lest you think virtue signaling is uniquely leftist; it’s not. Christians have long been champions of virtue signaling; loud public prayer, church attendance, public fasting or abstinence from alcohol.
Dominance signaling should be easy to prove; great apes or gorillas beating their chests with their fists, alpha males strutting naked in the high school locker room and generals with racks of medals on their chests.
Achievement signaling is seen in academics (especially therapists and social workers) with more letters after their name than in their name. Another flex enjoyed by the uber-wealthy is family names on university buildings paid for with large endowments.
Our old friends are upper middle class, retired at 50 and empty nesters. Both of their children use drugs - in fact, they use drugs with their parents. Both kids are employed in event management producing rave music shows because they enjoy the lifestyle so much.
However, drug economies disproportionally affects poor people in low income neighborhoods. People from lower income neighborhoods join drug gangs. Crimes related to drug dealing happen in these places. Drugs affect women, children and families with their economic and violent side-effects.
According to Rob Henderson:
“Why are affluent people more susceptible to luxury beliefs? They can afford it. And they care the most about status. In short, luxury beliefs are the new status symbols.”
I’m fairly certain our old friends have never read Rob Henderson, Johann Kurtz, Oscar Wilde or even Substack. They get their news from Heather Cox Richardson and NPR.
I’m disappointed that my wife’s old friend would casually discard us the way she has but I’m not surprised. Status has given me a lens to understand America’s political divide. I used to think it was simply differences of opinion such as who would be the better president.
I now think the political divide has a lot more to do with people‘s beliefs about themselves. Even radical woke leftists want to see themselves as the hero of their own story. They’re playing the status game, whether they know it, or not.
I used to think peoples’ intentions were more innocent; less calculating. But, by looking down at me and my wife, because of our newfound faith, our old friends see themselves as higher class.
Don’t you find that the so called ‘woke’ think they are loving to people in general but truth is they are horrible to people in particular
If they are druggies the only reason why they won’t be friends is because alcoholics and drug addicts can’t be around sober people. It makes them feel guilty.