The dangerous allure of victim politics - "Buruma thought people liked to feel like society's victims, even where they were personally doing rather well, because modern life hollows out our identities. Hyper-capitalism is reducing meaningful beliefs and identity to fast food restaurants, sterile movies and empty gestures. But people want and perhaps need the authentic, the real, and the genuine in life. And so in an external world in which everything seems so empty, we turn inward in a search for authenticity. The only thing that can deliver authenticity is our feelings. And what more powerful feeling than victimhood and struggle? It's quite true that feelings have become something of a modern obsession (Will Davies in his excellent new book about happiness calls feelings ‘the new religion’). They are being elevated to the highest measure of what it means to be human: what matters is how we feel about something. And a growing number of writers – most recently Mick Hume in his new book ‘Trigger Warning’ – think that people’s feelings are fast becoming the only test of whether something should be allowed. Prioritising feelings invariably means that if those precious feelings are hurt, upset, or offended, then these things should be banned or stopped... I suspect the internet makes this worse, because it provides unlimited opportunity to find reasons to feel victimised and assert that claim to the world. Take the modern scourge, internet trolling. Many people – I’ve documented some of them in my book The Dark Net – are genuinely tormented and terrorised by trolls. Others appear to almost revel in it. If you’re not getting trolled, you’re obviously not famous enough. Being trolled by strangers on the net gives you the chance to show how hard things are for you, how right you were, and how noble and magnanimous you are in sharing your suffering with the world. It is very rarely mentioned that the victims of trolls are often far more often privileged, wealthy, happy, and successful than their perceived oppressors, who are often frustrated, jealous, and lonely. There are lots of reasons for progressive to guard against feeling based victimhood politics. First, it’s inherently anti-political. Politics is about disagreement, argument and debate. Feelings, especially those relating to victimhood, cannot really be argued with, debated or questioned – ‘only meekly accepted’, as Buruma put it. Arguing over degrees of victimhood replaces moral reasoning, since victims aren’t always right. This can be used as justification for bad behaviour. Consider the recent case of the Goldsmiths Equalities Officer, Bahar Mustafa. She asked white people not to attend an event for black and ethnic minority students... she argued that she could not be racist or sexist to white men, as she is a BAME woman. Bahar identified herself as a victim. Not personally, but by virtue of her historic status as a member of a victim group. As a victim, eternally and forever a victim, she couldn’t victimise others, especially people who are not victims, like white men. But if only those who claim to feel victimised that can truly speak about it, politics stops being a world of equals people and ideas. That leads toward a world of self-censorship and hecklers’ vetoes. In a strange way, victimhood politics can also keep genuine victims oppressed. In 1950 Bertrand Russell wrote an essay called The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed. He argued that people tend to imagine those who are oppressed have some kind of superior moral quality. It started with Rousseau’s noble savage, if not before, and has been applied to women, to nationalities, to the proletariat etc. Russell said those admiring these superior qualities prefer to sentimentalise them, rather than actually live as them... “Reverence” as Russell put it, “was a consolation for inferiority”. Worse, I think, is that the more we focus on redressing people’s surface feeling of being a victim, the less time and enthusiasm we have to left to resolve deep and structure problems. If everyone declares themselves as victims, then every claim, no matter how grand or trivial, is put together in the same to-do tray, and whoever shouts loudest gets resolution. If Twitter is any guide, we appear to be more worried about internet trolling and Tim Hunt’s (probably / possibly) sexist remarks than we are about ISIS butchering innocent people and North Korea. Some oppressions are objectively worse than others, and we should focus more energy on them. At the very edges of this problem, the constant vigilance – the countless declarations of our society or our institutions being riddled with racism, sexism, Islamophobia etc – can become a counsel of despair... You will find this sense of victimhood sitting squarely behind many of today’s extreme political movements. British Muslims who join or are inspired by al-Qaeda or ISIS are often not themselves particularly poor or in any sense oppressed – seek to personally identify with the (genuine) oppression of other Muslims around the world. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who murdered 77 people in Oslo in 2011 was fairly well off and educated, and yet claimed he (by which he meant White Europeans) were victims of cultural Marxism trying to destroy his culture and religion. The mother of the Tunisian gunman Seifeddine Rezgui, who killed dozens of holidaymakers, said her son was a victim. All in some sense, believing they are victims, and as such their cause was just... The progressive must be on guard that victimhood is never fetishized, is never equated with some mystical superior virtue or assumed moral authority, and that feelings don't become the arbiter of what is right. Above all, the progressive should not seek out a victimhood identity for themselves for the purposes of moral rectitude and righteous indignation. Because in the end, this obscures sight of genuine injustices and fuels a victimhood mentality that does nothing to help genuine victims, and most likely harms their cause."
Is this bigot going to be deplatformed soon?
‘It’s ludicrous’: Ian McKellen sparks debate over trigger warnings in theatre - "When a London theatre decided to warn potential audiences about strong language, sexual references, grief and death in its latest production, the play’s celebrated star didn’t hold back. “I think it’s ludicrous,” Ian McKellen told Sky News. “I quite like to be surprised by loud noises and outrageous behaviour on stage.”... The warning issued by the theatre, the Other Palace, was in line with a growing trend to alert the public about potentially upsetting themes in plays new and old. And not just the theatre: universities applied trigger warnings to more than 1,000 texts, including many classics, an investigation found last year... Others say the power of art and literature to shock or discomfort people is integral to its value, and that the unknown and unexpected is part of the experience. Warnings diminish or remove this. Earlier this summer, Chichester Festival theatre issued a warning about the content of its production of The Sound of Music... This, said actor Simon Callow, demonstrated “a fundamental failure to grasp what the theatre is: not a model for behaviour but a crucible in which we look at what it is to be human”. Theatre is “not a pulpit but a gymnasium of the imagination”, he said in a letter to the Times. “It is perfectly clear that what happens on the stage is performed by actors, on a set, very visibly lit by artificial light, and that the whole thing is an act of the imagination.”... “woke theatre bosses” had “slapped a trigger warning” on a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion at the Old Vic in London. The show contained “portrayals of abuse, abusive language and coercive control”, according to the report... The Globe theatre has warned audiences about themes contained in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (suicide and drug use), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (violence, sexual references, misogyny and racism) and The Merchant of Venice (antisemitism). The latter prompted a response from Tracy-Ann Oberman, a Jewish actor and director, who re-envisaged Shakespeare’s play with its central character Shylock as a matriarch confronting fascists in London’s east end in 1936. “Didn’t the Globe’s last version of the Merchant have trigger warnings about antisemitism?” she said in an interview with the Times. “I’ve got a real, real thing about trigger warnings … If something’s upset you in a play, go look it up, go and find out when and why it was written – why it’s there.” “You’re meant to feel emotions that feel uncomfortable, but in the safe environment of the theatre. You’re meant to feel fear, pity, anger, upset, horror, outrage … it’s meant to be able to change you.”... A survey of UK students last year found that 86% agreed content warnings should sometimes or always be used on set texts, with just 14% opposing them. But an analysis carried out by Australian academics concluded that warnings had no meaningful impact on an individual’s emotional response to the material in question, or whether they avoided the material. Trigger warnings are “fruitless”, the academics said."
Meme - BLAIRE WHITE @MsBlaireWhite: "Y'all want to be oppressed so damn bad. No one has ever been denied any rights because they don't have sex, you absolute cringe ball."
Yasmin Benoit, MSc @theyasminbenoit: "Asexual people deserve equal rights. We deserve legal recognition. We deserve protection. Thank you @stonewalluk for allowing me to march with you again at #PrideInLondon today & for helping me to bring about this change. #ThislsWhatAsexualLooksLike #IStandWithStonewALL"
Sophie Turner Expects to Deal With “Symptoms of Trauma” From Game of Thrones
Keira Knightley had to go through years of therapy over trauma from starring in Pirates of the Caribbean
Everything is "trauma" nowadays
Take It from Someone Who Has Suffered Real Physical Abuse: Words Aren't Violence - "The ordinary challenges of life now are being reinvented as trauma, and words are conflated with violence. It is all part of our ongoing cultural embrace of the “untruth of fragility: what doesn’t kill you, makes you weaker,” as illuminated by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind. Debates, lectures and even ordinary conversations now can be brought to an end when one party declares checkmate by asserting that this or that argument serves to “deny their humanity” or makes them feel “unsafe.” As someone who has experienced nine of the 10 most studied Adverse Childhood Experiences, who lives with chronic physical pain from violence-inflicted injuries, who spends three hours a week with a therapist specializing in trauma, I can attest that such claims strike me as dangerous gibberish. Can words do damage? Of course. But the difference between words and violence is that mentally competent adults nearly always have a choice about how much damage words can inflict, whereas the damage caused by my father’s belt—like all physical abuse—didn’t rise or fall depending on my psychological state at the moment of impact. Our laws, rooted in a wiser age, recognize that only truly vulnerable—not those who merely assert that they feel vulnerable—must be protected from certain very specific kinds of words... If words cause me a level of harm that I can’t—or won’t—seek to control, then I am implicitly resigning myself to an existence without agency or dignity. I reject this way of living. And I refuse to stand silently by while our culture collectively embraces a spirit of morbid passivity. Overcoming verbal abuse is hard—like almost everything else worth doing. In moments of failure, frustration or shame, I feel my mother’s or father’s voice ringing in my head, sneering, calling me worthless. But therapy has helped me learn that the power over how much pain these voices can cause is in my hands. I can work to use my rational faculties, reject their post facto assessment of my worth as a human, and move on. While words are not violence, the media has done a good job blurring the difference. In a 2017 New York Times article, Northeastern University psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett argued that chronic stress can cause physical harm, and so speech should sometimes be regarded as violence in verbal form... Only those with the privilege of having led violence-free lives could make such claims with a straight face. If an otherwise mentally healthy person becomes paralyzed by trauma when someone recites political opinions they disagree with, or describes them with the wrong pronoun, the way they react is their choice. If the ordinary unpleasantness of daily life causes traumatic reactions that cannot be alleviated with a spirit of resilience, that is evidence of a serious mental health problem... I began this essay with the words of Justice Brandeis, which bear repetition, since they show how issues of free speech and psychological self-protection have become intermingled: “Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”... Teaching people to react to words as if they were weapons is teaching them to fetishize their damage—or even to create new damage... When I enrolled at my university as a mature student trying to piece her life back together, I knew there was a chance that I might need some kind of special accommodations. But the university’s disability officer offered me so many accommodations that it was embarrassing. If I wanted to, I could have remained deeply mired in my mental debilitation without even the slightest spur toward recovery. Self-pity is an addictive drug; and students who come to campus looking for ways to avoid stress, instead of deal with it, will find dealers in every office and classroom. We can’t force students to fight their demons. But at the very least, we shouldn’t be encouraging a policy of immediate surrender."
Lived experience is only important when it supports the liberal agenda. Every time it doesn't, the people are told that "not everyone is as strong"
The perils of being perpetually offended - "You couldn’t make it up. An event called ‘An Evening with Cancelled Women’ was due to feature a number of women who had been disinvited from public engagements due to objections from people who disagree with their viewpoints. But it was itself cancelled – due to objections from people who disagree with their viewpoints... These perpetually offended people see themselves as being on the progressive left of the political spectrum, although many would argue that they are in fact an embarrassment to the radical tradition. Often, the demand for censure and silence is made on the basis of the emotional harm that the expression of certain views will cause. These ‘radicals’ tend to be schooled in a mishmash of poststructural and queer theories. They see certain language as so oppressive that its very utterance must be suppressed. Texts, films and speech are all carefully analysed in order to find the hidden forms of oppression that lie within. It is hard not to get away from the impression that these wordplay warriors actively seek the thrill of being offended. While secular in nature, this censoriousness is performed with an evangelical zeal that would have impressed the Witchfinder General. Such righteousness is a heavy burden to bear. The neo-puritans must develop a heightened sensitivity to breaches in the correct mode of thought, even among their own. Excommunication from the group is a real risk. I was pondering these regressive developments while doing some research for a book on stigma. Looking back, it is easy to forget the progress that has been made in recent decades when it comes to race, gender, sexuality and disability... Being perpetually offended requires perpetual protection. And that means that rather than challenging the powers-that-be, today’s self-professed radicals end up demanding greater powers for the government, the police and employers to silence dissenting views and maintain the status quo."
WTF? Corporate America is canceling Mother's Day - "Corporate America, though, has for some reason decided that Mother’s Day is a “sensitive” time, a “challenging” time, or a “difficult” time, so they are inviting customers to opt out of emails related to the triggering day... There is something particularly sick about a society where a company called “buy buy baby” is sensitive about celebrating mothers. What’s particularly fascinating is that this is clearly coordinated somehow. Nothing like this arises organically. So: who? I have no idea, except that it is likely some alphabet-person movement. Why? This is easy: there is a widespread movement to destroy the family."
Meme - Catherine Kronas @CatherineKronas: "Slides from a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Decolonization (DEID) workshop held at @WesternU yesterday. Mandatory training for all housing staff (eg. residence dons, front desk staf, student advisors). Microaggression: "I believe the most qualified person should get the job.""
Schoolgirl, 13, calls for 'nerd-face' emoji to have glasses removed - "A schoolgirl whose dream came true when Disney created a heroine with glasses in a hit film has now set her sights on taking the spectacles off the ‘nerd-face’ emoji. When Lowri Moore, now 13, was nine, a letter she wrote to Disney pleading for its next princess to wear glasses went viral."
Grievance-mongering never ends
This activist says scars aren't Halloween costumes - "In recent years, people have been asking themselves if their Halloween costumes are culturally appropriative. But activist Phyllida Swift says there's one possibly appropriative element of Halloween costumes many people may not even think about — their makeup. After a car wreck left her with a scar across her face at age 22, Swift started noticing facial scars all over villains in movies and scary Halloween costumes."
We Love ‘Lived Experience’...Until It Undermines the Narrative - "There is an unhealthy relationship in our culture between victim status and what is called “lived experience.” Ironically, it is through my own experiences with these two concepts that I have come to see this. I used to look at the world through the lens of victimhood. When I identified as a victim, my lived experience was lauded by all as authentic. However, when I came out as a proudly free-thinking black individual, and no longer claimed victimhood as a part of my identity, my lived experience was rejected and discredited by both friends and strangers alike. This striking selectiveness in other people’s acceptance of my lived experience has led me down a somewhat sad and perplexing path... My entrance into collegiate life was not simply the pursuit of higher education, but an opportunity to reconstruct my entire persona for proper acclimation to American life. However, unbeknownst to me at the time, third-wave feminist theory and critical race pedagogy was sprinkled throughout my various courses of study in sociology, symbolism, and mythology (to name a few). It wasn’t long before I assumed the persona of a black woman with special insight into the experience of social inferiority and harm that I believed those with other shades of skin could never grasp. It was only when I exited the college system that I realized this new persona was not one that I naturally fit into. The worldview that I had assumed was awfully cynical, as I filtered all my daily interactions through the lens of racial power dynamics. Any mistreatment that I perceived from strangers or friends I often interpreted as a diluted form of racism called a microaggression. These perceived microaggressions soon became the main cause of depressive episodes in my day-to-day life. There were times when it felt futile to wake up. At other times, I would burst out crying simply because I was too overwhelmed by the prospect of having to face another day of missed opportunities in a racist society. I came to realize that this “way of knowing,” in the currently fashionable language, was more of a burden than a realization of identity. I vividly recall the day I sat down at my dining table and decided that I’d had enough. Whatever lens I had viewed the world through prior to moving to the States, I wanted it back. The Nelson Mandela approach to reconciliation. The Dr. Ben Carson attitude towards accomplishment. I began to release the grudges that I held against those I deemed “racist.” It was through this process that I reconnected with an essential part of being human, a part of myself that I had lost under the spell of critical social justice ideology. We as humans all have the potential—in fact, we are all bound—to make mistakes. For that reason, we all deserve a chance at a “restart” in the hearts of those around us."
The Tyranny of Fragility: How Alexis De Tocqueville Foretold the Rise of Victimhood Culture - "“The more people resemble one another,” as Harvey Mansfied sums up the Tocquevillian view, “the weaker one person feels in the face of all the others.” Tocqueville describes the massively anxiogenic effects of the novel forms of social comparison that arose after the American and French revolutions... As the good-enough life always lies just beyond the next hill or the next promotion (or in your neighbour’s driveway), people in modern democracies often adopt a deficit-based understanding of their lives. There is nothing wrong with an aspirational mindset—how else would our species have invented and transcended so much? This is all well and good—until this deficit view becomes a raison d’être of modern existence.
This is an interesting downside of equality and reduction of hierarchy
Opinion: A big problem with how we talk about race today - "For the most part, the people I grew up around seemed to share my lack of interest in race. They agreed with Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous dictum about the content of one’s character trumping the color of one’s skin — even if collective overuse had already made it a cliché. On the rare occasion that some petty person did try to use race as a weapon — to bully someone, for instance — the dominant value system would come down on them like a tornado. They would be ostracized and punished. Where I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, racists existed, but they were the exceedingly rare exceptions that proved the overwhelming rule... Though I wouldn’t have known to call it this at the time, the conference was essentially a three-day critical race theory and intersectionality workshop. It was there that I first heard terms like systemic racism, safe space, White privilege and internalized oppression — ideas that were fringe in 2012 but would sweep through elite universities just a few years later. Up until 2012, I had never been immersed in a subculture where my race was considered to be important. The People of Color Conference changed that. At the conference, my Blackness was not considered a neutral fact — irrelevant to my deeper qualities as a human being. My Blackness was instead considered a kind of magic. My skin color was discussed as if it were a beautiful enigma at the core of my identity, a slice of God inside my soul. The conference leaders taught us one idea that pertained directly to my unfortunate afro experience from middle school: a microaggression. A microaggression, I learned, was a statement or action that conveys subtle, unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group. Before learning this term, I had filed the afro fiasco under the heading of “difficult experiences that many kids face in middle school.” In fact, I recall thinking that it was not nearly as bad as the verbal abuse experienced by my White friend for being an unlucky mix of pale, skinny, nerdy and awkward — bullying that eventually prompted him to leave the school. Nor was it anywhere close to the mocking endured by the overweight, pimply White kid whose manner of speech seemed to be permanently slurred. In truth, it wasn’t even bullying. The kids touching my afro were never malicious, only curious. They never teased me or insulted me. And I easily got along with them in every other context. As annoying as their behavior was, the obvious goodwill behind their actions softened my judgment of them. At the conference, however, I was taught to frame my experience differently. It was a microaggression. Whereas bullying can be experienced by anyone, only members of marginalized groups can experience microaggressions. My afro experience was placed on the same continuum as the violent racism I had learned about in history class. At one end of that continuum was Emmett Till and the brave civil rights protesters beaten at Selma. And on the less severe end of that same continuum was me. I had experienced a microdose of the same poison. I was taught that my victimization was special, and that made me special. Where my White friends had the wind of White supremacy at their backs, I faced a headwind. And everything I had accomplished in spite of it was that much more impressive as a result. That was the ideology that I, along with hundreds of other students, absorbed at this three-day conference. The atmosphere, however, was less scholarly than it was spiritual. For instance, many of the students at the conference were gay and came from households that were socially conservative. For some, the conference was the first time in their entire lives that they could voice their sexuality out loud without fear of judgment. There was crying and hugging and warmth. In those ways, the energy in the room was uplifting. But in other ways, it was suffocating. The teachers enforced a strict orthodoxy; dissent was never welcomed and was therefore rarely even attempted. As a kid who enjoyed debating with professors, I couldn’t help but notice, and lament, the stifling conformism... I never imagined that I’d encounter this subculture again. Then I enrolled at Columbia University... I felt acutely aware of my Blackness. And that awareness ironically made me feel less connected to the people around me, not more. I worried that rather than approach me as a blank slate, these students would approach me as a Black man, and, by implication, a victim. In my four years at Columbia, hardly a week passed without a race-themed controversy. In the school newspaper, students would say they experienced White supremacy routinely on campus. A professor of mine once told our class that “all people of color were by definition victims of oppression,” even as my daily experience as a Black person directly contradicted that claim. It felt as if I was dropped into a simulation where the Real Racism dial was set close to zero, but the Concern About Racism dial was set to 10. Though I found the topic of race to be boring in and of itself, the surrounding culture was obsessed with it — and was hell-bent on dragging me in. Eventually, I became curious. Why were White students and professors confessing their inner racism unprompted? Why were Black students in one of the most progressive, non-racist environments on Earth claiming to experience racism all the time? And why were so many otherwise reasonable people pretending to believe them? Why did these kids sound more pessimistic about the state of American race relations than my grandparents (who lived through segregation) do? The more I asked these questions, the more I became convinced that the new race obsession that brands itself “anti-racist” is in fact the opposite. It is racist, destructive and contrary to the spirit of the civil rights movement. Taken to their logical end points, the ideas I encountered first at the People of Color Conference and then at Columbia paved the way toward a social and political hell-scape where skin color — a meaningless trait — is given supreme importance. If these ideas were confined to high school conferences and Ivy League universities, one could make the case that they are not worth worrying about. But they have infected all of our key institutions: government, education and media. Some of our most celebrated and sought-after public intellectuals routinely espouse ideas so extreme that the public has been desensitized to them."
Saying 'the most qualified person should get the job' is a microaggression, Britain's top universities insist - "Britain's top universities warned staff and students that saying 'the most qualified person should get the job' is a microaggression. Russell Group universities, including the University of Glasgow, have issued guidance and even provided training courses to educate people on how to eliminate microaggressions. Guidance from the Scottish university alongside the engineering department of Imperial College London insisted that using the phrase was discriminatory... Other examples of microaggressions included using phrases like 'men and women have equal opportunities for achievement' and 'positive action is racist'. Newcastle University warned students and staff not to respond to discussions around police brutality with 'white people get killed by the police too'... These recent statements and guidance were revealed by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), a group of academics worried about the erosion of free speech on campus. Dr Edward Skidelsky, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Exeter, and director of CAF, was alarmed by these statement and expressed fears over a lack of free speech on university campuses. He said: 'By campaigning against questioning and denial, these universities are advocating an uncritical acceptance of statements in the various, undefined areas that they refer to. 'The effect, again, is to undermine a culture of free enquiry.' Chris McGovern, the chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: 'It would seem that the woke virus has infected universities in a major way. It is cowardly. Universities are supposed to show their intelligence and reason and they are disapplying their intelligence and reason in order to pursue the woke agenda.'"
In the 00s it was predicted that soon it would be discrimination to discriminate against the lazy and the stupid
The Evolutionary Advantages of Playing Victim - "humans have evolved to empathize with the suffering of others, and to provide assistance so as to eliminate or compensate for that suffering. Consequently, signaling suffering to others can be an effective strategy for attaining resources. Victims may receive attention, sympathy, and social status, as well as financial support and other benefits. And being a victim can generate certain kinds of power: It can justify the seeking of retribution, provide a sense of legitimacy or psychological standing to speak on certain issues, and may even confer moral impunity by minimizing blame for victims’ own wrongdoings. Presumably, most victims would eagerly forego such benefits if they were able to free themselves of their plight. But when victimhood yields benefits, it incentivizes people to signal their victimhood to others or to exaggerate or even fake victimhood entirely. This is especially true in contexts that involve alleged psychic harms, and where appeals are made to third-parties, with the claimed damage often being invisible, unverifiable, and based exclusively on self-reports. Such circumstances allow unscrupulous people to take advantage of the kindness and sympathy of others by co-opting victim status for personal gain. And so, people do. Newly published research indicates that people who more frequently signal their victimhood (whether real, exaggerated, or false) are more likely to lie and cheat for material gain and denigrate others as a means to get ahead. Victimhood signaling is associated with numerous morally undesirable personality traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and exploit others for self-benefit), a sense of entitlement, and lower honesty and humility... there may be a personality type that—independent of one’s actual experience of real victimhood or internalization of real virtue—drives individuals to signal virtuous victimhood as a means to extract resources from others. Consistent with this theory, other recent work indicates that victimhood, or the enduring feeling that the self is a victim, may be a stable personality trait. This personality trait is characterized by a need for others to acknowledge and empathize with one’s victimhood, feelings of moral superiority, and a lack of empathy for others’ suffering. This personality trait was found to be relatively stable across time and relationship contexts, and was associated with higher perceived severity of received offenses, holding grudges, vengefulness, entitlement to behave immorally, rumination, distrust, neuroticism, and attribution of negative qualities to others... In general, people reward victimhood signaling... Just as people may fake competence to attain status and benefits (e.g., by doping in sports, or using one’s smartphone during pub trivia), and fake morality to attain a good reputation (e.g., by behaving better in public contexts than in private situations), they may fake victimhood to get undeserved sympathy and compensation. It’s also important to remember that many claims of victimhood are made to strangers online, especially through social media or fundraising sites. This can increase the reach and effectiveness of insincere claims because they are directed toward strangers who have no basis for investigating (or even entertaining) suspicions of fake victimhood, except on pain of appearing callous. When a person knowingly wrongs someone in his or her family, circle of friends, community, or professional orbit, they often are willing to make amends, and so victims can often appeal directly to transgressors for recompense. Even if a transgressor has little remorse, nearby others (such as friends and family) aware of the harm are often willing to provide sympathy and assistance. Third-party appeals to strangers, on the other hand, are perhaps especially prone to falsehood, because the soliciting party is appealing to individuals who don’t know their circumstances or character. This certainly doesn’t mean that all (or even most) appeals of this nature are fake—only that this will be the preferred strategy of those whose claims have been rejected (or would likely be rejected) by those who have the most information. Nearly all people experience disadvantage or mistreatment at some point in their life. Many quietly and humbly work through these challenges on their own or with the help of close friends and family. Only a minority will turn every slight into an opportunity to seek sympathy, status, and redress from strangers. If eventually discovered, they can suffer catastrophic reputational damage, or even go to jail. But in the short term, at least, this group can receive more benefits, with less effort, than the former... it is worth reflecting on the system of incentives we create is precisely that there are genuine victims: Habitual, false victim signalers deplete available resources for genuine victims, dupe trusting others into misallocating their resources, and can initiate a dysfunctional cycle of competitive victimhood within society more broadly. For example, research has shown that people ramp up their own status as victims of discrimination when they are accused of discriminating against others or even when they are merely characterized as being relatively advantaged. This phenomenon may help explain why it is common for people to believe that they are getting the short end of the stick in many situations... Historically, our ancestors may have been better able to discern habitual or false victim signalers from those in true need. We lived in smaller communities where we tended to know what was happening, and to whom—and so those who deceived others were at higher risk of getting caught. In modern, affluent societies, by contrast, people can signal their difficult-to-verify suffering to thousands or more strangers online. Although genuine victims may benefit in such environments (because they can spread awareness of their plight, and solicit support, on a large scale), manipulative individuals inevitably will use the same mass-broadcast tools to extract resources and possibly even initiate a cycle of competitive victimhood that infects everyone. Those who most vociferously declare their victimhood to others may often be villains instead."
Understanding Victimhood Culture: An Interview with Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning - "The combination of high sensitivity with dependence on others encourages people to emphasize or exaggerate the severity of offenses. There’s a corresponding tendency to emphasize one’s degree of victimization, one’s vulnerability to harm, and one’s need for assistance and protection. People who air grievances are likely to appeal to such concepts as disadvantage, marginality, or trauma, while casting the conflict as a matter of oppression. The result is that this culture also emphasizes a particular source of moral worth: victimhood. Victim identities are deserving of special care and deference. Contrariwise, the privileged are morally suspect if not deserving of outright contempt. Privilege is to victimhood as cowardice is to honor... you end up with a system of morality that doesn’t offer much incentive for good behavior. Honor cultures incentivize bravery while neglecting other virtues. But if you want esteem in a victimhood culture, what can you do? It’s not like you can become a victim. Or actually, you can — you can portray yourself as weak and in need of help, you can portray others’ behavior toward you as harmful and oppressive, and you can even lie about being the victim of violence and other offenses. Victimhood culture incentivizes bad behavior. The extreme form of victimhood culture we see among activists on college campuses leads to another problem in that one’s status as a victim comes not just from individual experiences of victimhood but also from one’s identity as part of a victim group. The idea is that all members of certain groups are victims, but that no one else is. Activists even argue that whites cannot be the victims of racism, or men the victims of sexism. Likewise, whether people can be victims of new offenses like cultural appropriation or microaggression, depends on their identity. A white person wearing a hairstyle associated with African Americans would be cultural appropriation, for instance, but an African American wearing a hairstyle associated with whites would not be. Likewise, those who have pioneered the concept of microaggression have made it clear that not all slights count. A white male elementary school teacher may experience stereotypes and put-downs, for example, but to call those microaggressions would be a “misapplication of the concept.”... Jonathan Haidt identifies seven groups that are currently treated as sacred: people of colour, women, LGBTs, Latinos, Native Americans, people with disabilities, and Muslims. Under this schema even many minority groups, such as Evangelical Christians, fail to qualify, and any discrimination against them is ignored or celebrated. We have two problems with this. The first is a fundamental moral objection. We believe in the ideals of dignity culture — that all human beings have an inherent worth and should be treated accordingly — and we object to the new hierarchy of victimhood just as we would any racial and ethnic hierarchy. The second problem is the reactions it may produce. Whites, men, and others who do not have victimhood status are unlikely to accept a new morality and a new moral hierarchy in which they’re at the bottom. And they may end up embracing one in which they’re at the top. We find the recent prominence of alt-right white nationalists alarming, and we worry there will be more of it in reaction to the spread of victimhood culture. It’s a dangerous thing to undermine dignity culture and its ideals of equality... Complaints of cultural appropriation illustrate victimhood culture quite well. As with microaggression complaints, it’s a grievance about a nonviolent, probably unintentional slight that many observers wouldn’t even see as offensive. As with microaggressions, the offense is framed as a matter of collective oppression, of one social group harming another. And in practice, it’s usually an offense defined by identity, something only people in designated privileged groups can be guilty of. Victimhood culture’s high sensitivity to slight means it continually coins new types of offense. And this is certainly one of the most baffling of the new offenses. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, one particularly confusing aspect is that many of the things that get called cultural appropriation were, until very recently, virtues — signs that one was cosmopolitan and open-minded. If anything, we might expect social and cultural conservatives to be the ones most upset about Westerners practicing yoga or mindfulness meditation, or white kids adopting black fashions and hairstyles. In many cases they are, but these days so-called progressives are often vocal and visible critics... it might be more helpful to understand it as a matter of the offenders aping their betters. As sociologist Donald Black discusses in his book Moral Time, various societies throughout history have had rules — sumptuary laws — preventing people from adopting the styles, entertainments, and recreations of their social betters... According to Black’s theory, tolerance of diversity is greater in exactly those places that have more diversity to start with, while concern with cultural purity is greatest where culture is relatively homogeneous."
The Free Speech Crisis on Campus Is Worse than People Think - "A lot of campus critics have pointed to the left-wing political skew of faculty, he said, and have worried about indoctrination in the classroom. But indoctrination is much more likely at campus events outside the classroom, and the political skew of administrators in charge of student life is even greater than that of faculty... Remember, Abrams is a tenured professor commenting about a widely discussed issue and writing about his research in the New York Times—America’s pre-eminent newspaper, hardly some right-wing rag. And what was the reaction at Sarah Lawrence College? Campus activists, after apparently trying to break into Abrams’s office, vandalized the office door, taking away the items he had put up, including a picture of his newborn son, and putting up signs with statements such as “Quit” and “Our Right to Exist Is Not ‘Ideological’ Asshole.” The student senate held an emergency meeting to discuss the offending op-ed, and the college president, Cristle Collins Judd, suggested to Abrams that he had created a hostile work environment and asked him whether he thought it was acceptable to write op-eds without her approval. She also asked him if he was on the job market, perhaps as a suggestion that he should be... Dignity culture fights oppression by appealing to what we all have in common. Our status as human beings is what’s most important about us. But victimhood culture conceives of people as victims or oppressors, and maintains that where we fall on this dimension is what’s most important about us, even in our everyday relationships and interactions. And this means that victimhood culture is ultimately incompatible with the goals of the university. Pursuing truth in an environment of vigorous debate will always involve causing offense—and one of the shibboleths of victimhood culture is that it’s okay to offend the oppressors but not the oppressed. Many campus activists, realizing this, have attacked the ideals of free speech and academic freedom... Recognizing their moral concerns helps us understand better what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt call vindictive protectiveness, whereby activists are simultaneously protective toward some people and vindictive toward others... Jason Manning points out that the [grievance studies] hoax probably gave these fields’ practitioners some “momentary embarrassment, but what is that,” he asks, “against tenure, travel money, professional status, and the ability to spread your politics to the young?”... At Harvard University’s School of Public Health, students are now asked on course evaluation forms about microaggressions. Last Spring, in 43 of the 138 courses evaluated, at least one student reported hearing “verbal or nonverbal slights/insults.” Administrators said they were investigating the seven professors whose courses received three or more such reports.
