Racist Threats and Attacks that Rattled a California University Campus Were Faked, Police Say - ""Every single one in this photo will get what is coming to them," read the ominous Instagram message sent to several students of color at the University of La Verne, east of Los Angeles, in March 2019... Dominguez Peña, who was living in campus housing and named in the threat, found her parked car emitting smoke. Someone had tried to start a fire with a backpack inside the vehicle... Some students blamed the university for allowing racism to fester and warned that it would only be a matter of time before another racist attack. Two months later, Dominguez Peña reported she was attacked by a masked individual who placed a bag and rope over her head, groped her and slammed her head against the railing in a dormitory stairwell... the LVPD said at a press conference that Dominguez Peña, 25, had faked the threats against herself and others in ten total separate "incidents." The same day, she was arrested on felony charges of making criminal threats and perjury, as well as seven misdemeanors related to electronic impersonation and filing false police reports... Administrators offered support by inviting guest speakers to talk about social-justice issues and requiring diversity training for faculty and staff. But to the leaders of Decolonize ULV, these were crumbs that failed to satisfy their demands for real change... She had bruising on her. She had scrapes on her arms, marks on her neck," Robertson-Stewart says, which seemed to validate her claim of an attack. Her reason for declining medical assistance? "She says she didn't trust anybody." Again, the campus community rallied in support of a student they believed was the victim of escalating racially-motivated violence. By now, some were demanding the administration be fired and replaced for failing to stop the spate of hate crimes. The climate of fear and anger continued for the remainder of the academic year. Roberston-Stewart said the mood at the graduation ceremony was muted rather than celebratory: students believed a violent suspect was still at-large. "One of the elements of every hate crime hoax is a cinematic story," says Wilfred Reilly, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Kentucky State University and author of the 2019 book, "Hate Crime Hoax." As part of his research, he compiles alleged hate incidents in the U.S. Last year, he categorized the incidents reported at ULV as having a high probability of being hoaxes. "When you have alleged victims who are part of activist subcultures, you should apply more suspicion, especially when you see GoFundMe efforts to raise money."... after Jussie Smollett's alleged hate crime hoax scandal early last year, some media outlets wanted to interview her before they would bring wider coverage to the alleged racist incidents at ULV. He says she refused to speak with journalists even though she continued to remain outspoken on campus. He also wonders now how the brazen attack she described in May could have happened with no witnesses or suspect observed in such a busy stairwell of a large residence hall surrounded by cameras. "An element of a hate crime hoax is the lack of actual evidence," Reilly, the professor, says. "Another is a refusal to cooperate in an investigation." The majority of reported hate incidents are real, he says, but poor data gathering also underestimates the number of incidents that are faked or misinterpreted as hate crimes. According to his research, university students are disproportionately overrepresented as perpetrators of fabricated hate incidents. At the press conference in March announcing Dominguez Peña's arrest, LVPD police chief Nick Paz said she was "trying to instigate some racial issues within the university." He said the LVPD expended significant resources in an extensive investigation that required help... Robertson-Stewart says what he regrets most is how this incident will affect future victims of racism on campus. "Who's going to believe that racism actually happens there now?""
When you fetishise being a victim, you incentivise victimhood
Meme - Chad Griffin: "From the moment #JussieSmollett came forward, there have been leaks & spin from some within the Chicago PD that have been used to discredit and undermine him. This is exactly the treatment that victims of hate crimes fear and why they often stay silent."
From 2019. There're probably still some credulous liberals who believe this
Jussie Smollett Asks White Prosecutor to Not Use N-Word in Court - "Jussie Smollett interrupted his own courtroom grilling to make an interesting request -- that the prosecutor does not use the n-word in full ... because he found it offensive. The "Empire" actor stopped prosecutor Dan Webb -- who's white -- during his line of questioning during cross-examination Tuesday, and flat-out asked the guy to stop repeating the slur while quoting messages Jussie had sent to the Osundairo brothers on the day of the alleged attack... Webb made a compromise ... asking that Jussie read the messages himself, which he apparently did"
Jussie Smollett starved himself in prison to have 'clear mind' | Toronto Sun - "The ‘Empire’ star – who was found to have paid two men to attack him before being found guilty of five counts of felony disorderly conduct – went on to protest his innocence and claimed that the prison system is “not meant” for self-improvement... “There’s something about being in there and having no choice but to surrender — not to the system, not to a judge or a bunch of old white men, ironically explaining to you about the history of hate crimes and lynching. And you’re sitting there and being like, ‘What? Who the f*** are you?’ But you’re surrendering to yourself and you’re surrendering to – you’re just left there with you, your thoughts, and these walls.”"
BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Self-help and Self-improvement - "‘I don't know where my aversion to any sort of self help stems from. I think it gas something to do with the fact that the very first self improvement book that I ever came across was the Catechism at Catholic school where we had to learn this absolutely off by heart. But most of the injunctions were negative injunctions. Don't do this, don't do that if you want to get to heaven. And the only way you could live by it probably if you go and take yourself to a cave, and eschew all human company for the rest of your life’...
‘Early self help books really came out of religious ideas, because if we sort of think about modern psychology as being a new phenomenon for people, the way that it infiltrated our world was under the auspices of religion. So in those early self help books, it was all about how you can live a character based life so that you can get to heaven. But in the 20th century, we see these books really become much more instrumentalized with Norman Vincent Peale, and the power of positive thinking. And this really was a great way to get modern psychology into the the brains of so many people who would otherwise think of it as anti christian’
‘You would want to say I think that the self help idea, that notion of the self help book really takes off with Dale Carnegie… How to Win Friends and Influence People.’...
There was a USA Today poll a couple years back that asked adults if they could ask God or a supreme being, if they could get a direct answer immediately, what would they ask and the most popular question was what is my purpose here? There are books that are addressing that like Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, or Richard Leider’s, The Power of Purpose, and even most recently, Aaron Hurst the purpose economy, about how we are bringing purpose into our work lives...
Now of course, I do have a rather less personal, hopefully rather more analytic, more sociological objection to self help books and manuals because in their various ways, they all singularly fail to obey C Wright Mill’s famous insistence that the task of sociology is to connect personal troubles, to public issues. To enable people to realize that their feelings of sadness or distress or incapacity are not evidence of personal inadequacy, but the product of circumstances, social or cultural circumstances over which they have little or no control"
Sociology is deeply disempowering and can be seen as an early expression of victim culture
Violent past, privileged future? Politics and entitlement in post-conflict Rwanda - "Claims of ‘deservingness’ can lead to societies where rights and access to state resources depend on belonging and group membership, rather than standards of fairness and equality. So, special rights can present a problem for social justice... Why then can it become problematic to entitle the victims of political crimes?... Besides the recognised Tutsi, the violence in Rwanda left many other victims, including ‘ordinary’ civil war victims and the Hutu that were denounced and killed in RPF-controlled areas or in revenge.But these victims have no place in official memory and no access to reparation programmes, so they feel abandoned and unjustly treated. This uniform denial and neglect of the suffering of parts of the population leads to bitterness and victim competition. So, for example, there have been reported cases of victim egoism in the context of the semi-traditional gacaca courts that were implemented in 2002 to deal with crimes of the genocide. The procedures have reportedly been misused for personal ends including enrichment and revenge. Such incidents, and the fact that only genocide cases and not ‘ordinary’ war crimes can be brought to justice, leads to a continuing feeling of exclusion on the side of parts of the population... research has found that victims tend to behave selfishly, led by a sense of entitlement to ‘equal the score’. Vamik Volkan has observed such “exaggerated entitlement” in studying groups of victims that make claims for their own group regardless of the costs and consequences for others. Additionally, in the globalised field of peacebuilding, the status of victimhood has experienced an “upgrading”. Victims have had an almost sacred “aura” since human rights and related concepts such as Transitional Justice have become dominant. This sympathetic global structure facilitates the emergence of “victims as protagonists” and the evolvement of a “compassion economy” based on the “commoditisation of suffering”. Internationally, victimhood became ‘profitable’ bringing with it moral authority, political legitimacy and possible economic benefits in the form of allocations by, for example, aid agencies.In the Rwandan case, the moral authority that emerged from the victimisation of the Tutsi has built the moral high-ground for claims to power and the mobilisation of support. The leading social group in Rwandan society is constructed around heroes and genocide victims, taken to be Tutsi. So many Hutu feel like second-class citizens, due to an assumed collective guilt.In this way, victimhood is the only thing able to free people from guilt, and provide first-class citizenship and moral superiority... This competition over the deservingness of victim status makes victimhood an attractive resource that can be used for political and economic ends. Especially in the international arena, where claims based on victimhood resonate with human rights discourse, all actors are pointing to experiences of victimisation to gain moral ground and try to secure international support.In Rwanda, these issues do not contribute to deepening understanding and ways of living together. Instead, they foster rumours and resentment. This does not support useful structures for social justice."
Victim culture is poisonous
Expecting To Be Treated With Prejudice May Be Self-fulfilling Prophecy, Study Suggests - ""Those female participants who told us men stereotyped them and treated them with prejudice saw rejection and contempt on the animated men's faces more readily and for a longer period of time than they did on the women's faces," says lead author Dr. Michael Inzlicht, assistant professor of psychology at U of T. "This shows that a person's level of sensitivity to being stereotyped -- their expectation that a person will behave prejudicially towards them -- may distort their perception of reality.""
Victim culture is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you expect that you're going to be discriminated against a priori, you will claim post-hoc that you have been discriminated against (or, if you think men hate you - because you hate them - you will find that men "hate" you)
The face of chauvinism: How prejudice expectations shape perceptions of facial affect - "prejudice expectations lead individuals to interpret out-group faces as more rejecting than in-group faces, but only for female perceivers, and not for males"
Same paper referenced above. This suggests that women are prone to victim culture warping their perceptions (and becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy), but not men
Your Brain Is Constantly Searching for Problems to Fix - "As we showed people fewer and fewer unethical studies over time, they started calling a wider range of studies unethical. In other words, just because they were reading about fewer unethical studies, they became harsher judges of what counted as ethical."
Previously linked. So much for the "myth" of the slippery slope. Victim culture will never die even when the original grievances are dealt with, since people will always look for new ones
The Impact of Hypervigilance: Evidence for a Forward Feedback Loop - "A number of prominent theories suggest that hypervigilance and attentional bias play a central role in anxiety disorders and PTSD. It is argued that hypervigilance may focus attention on potential threats and precipitate or maintain a forward feedback loop in which anxiety is increased. While there is considerable data to suggest that attentional bias exists, there is little evidence to suggest that it plays this proposed but critical role. This study investigated how manipulating hypervigilance would impact the forward feedback loop via self-reported anxiety, visual scanning, and pupil size. Seventy-one participants were assigned to either a hypervigilant, pleasant, or control condition while looking at a series of neutral pictures. Those in the hypervigilant condition had significantly more fixations than those in the other two groups. These fixations were more spread out and covered a greater percentage of the ambiguous scene. Pupil size was also significantly larger in the hypervigilant condition relative to the control condition. Thus the study provided support for the role of hypervigilance in increasing visual scanning and arousal even to neutral stimuli and even when there is no change in self-reported anxiety. Implications for the role this may play in perpetuating a forward feedback loop is discussed... Dalgleish et al. (2001) for example, argued that “anxiety leads to increased hypervigilance for threat, a greater level of threat detection leads to increased anxiety which, in turn, leads to increased hypervigilance, and so on in a vicious circle” (p. 541). Beck, Emery, & Greenberg, (2005) later argued that anxiety disorders were associated with a hypervigilance that led them to misinterpret ambiguous situations and exaggerate minor threats, all of which would further increase anxiety. And empirical evidence for attentional bias across a range of anxiety disorders is quite prevalent
Why victim culture is poisonous and harms those who take it up
Researchers identify a new personality construct that describes the tendency to see oneself as a victim - "Study authors Rahav Gabay and team describe how the social world is satiated with interpersonal transgressions that are often unpleasant and seemingly unwarranted, such as being interrupted when speaking. While some people can easily brush off these moments of hurt, others tend to ruminate over them and persistently paint themselves as a victim. The authors present this feeling of being the victim as a novel personality construct that influences how people make sense of the world around them.The researchers call it the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), which they define as “an ongoing feeling that the self is a victim, which is generalized across many kinds of relationships.”... An initial three studies established the TIV as a consistent and stable trait that involves four dimensions: moral elitism, a lack of empathy, the need for recognition, and rumination. A follow-up study further found that this tendency for victimhood is linked to anxious attachment — an attachment style characterized by feeling insecure in one’s relationships — suggesting that the personality trait may be rooted in early relationships with caregivers... those who scored higher on the measure of TIV were more likely to desire revenge against the person who wronged them. In Study 4, this desire for revenge also translated into behavior — those high in TIV were more likely to remove money from their opponent when given the chance, despite being told that this decision wouldn’t increase their own winnings. Participants high in TIV also reported experiencing more intense negative emotions and a higher entitlement to immoral behavior."
This explains why woke people are so nasty
The tendency for interpersonal victimhood: The personality construct and its consequences - "In the present research, we introduce a conceptualization of the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), which we define as an enduring feeling that the self is a victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships. Then, in a comprehensive set of eight studies, we develop a measure for this novel personality trait, TIV, and examine its correlates, as well as its affective, cognitive, and behavioral consequences. In Part 1 (Studies 1A-1C) we establish the construct of TIV, with its four dimensions; i.e., need for recognition, moral elitism, lack of empathy, and rumination, and then assess TIV's internal consistency, stability over time, and its effect on the interpretation of ambiguous situations. In Part 2 (Studies 2A-2C) we examine TIV's convergent and discriminant validities, using several personality dimensions, and the role of attachment styles as conceptual antecedents. In Part 3 (Studies 3–4) we explore the cognitive and behavioral consequences of TIV. Specifically, we examine the relationships between TIV, negative attribution and recall biases, and the desire for revenge (Study 3), and the effects of TIV on behavioral revenge (Study 4). The findings highlight the importance of understanding, conceptualizing, and empirically testing TIV, and suggest that victimhood is a stable and meaningful personality tendency."
Self-Victimhood Is a Personality Type, Researchers Find - "The study distinguishes TIV from narcissism. Narcissistic individuals also experience moral superiority and vengeful desires, but these feelings tend to spring from the belief that their authority, capability, or grandiosity is being undermined. TIV, on the other hand, is associated with low self-esteem. And while narcissists do not want to be victimized, high-TIV individuals lash out when their victimhood is questioned... "the researchers do not equate experiencing trauma and victimization with possessing the victimhood mindset. They point out that a victimhood mindset can develop without experiencing severe trauma or victimization."... Encouraging people not to be defined by their traumas—real or imagined—seems like solid advice. But when the traumatized person resents challenges to his victimhood status and wants to punish those who want to take it away from him, getting that advice across just might be a challenge."
Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood: The New Personality Construct that Sees Oneself As the Victim - "TIV persons display four victimhood mindset. One, having a more elitism wherein they perceive themselves as immaculate morality while viewing everyone else as immoral. This often develops as a defense mechanism to maintain a positive self-image.The second one is the need for recognition of one's victimhood. It is a normal response after a traumatic event to help reestablish the person's confidence in their perception of the world as fair and a just place to live, which has shattered after the traumatic event. The validation of their suffering or trauma is an important aspect of therapy.The third one is the rumination of past victimization. People high in TIV would ruminate and talk about past interpersonal conflicts instead of discussing solutions. Research suggests that rumination decreases a person's motivation to forgive and increases the drive to seek revenge.Lastly, the lack of empathy also describes a person high in TIV because they are so preoccupied with their victimhood that they fail to see and acknowledge other people's pain sufferings. They feel that their immoral behaviors are justified after they suffer or be reminded of the traumatic event they went through, and so they become oblivious of others' pain."
James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "The concept of microaggressions came from an activist-scholar who had to move seats in an airplane to balance the weight requirement and who felt that it was somehow racist that the two people who happened to be in seats such that they had to move happened to be POC."
Leaked Univ. Utah Diversity Session: Even Well-Received Compliments Now Microaggressions - "participants were instructed that a comment or action can be considered a “microaggression” even if it is well-intended, well-received, and causes no apparent harm. It was stressed by one facilitator that even a genuine compliment can be a microaggression, even if the recipient was flattered by it, as long as the compliment in some way “reinforces” the “systems of power” (which, of course, remain perpetually nebulous and strategically undefined). For example, phrases like “You’re so smart for 15!” and “Wow, you look great for your age!” were touted as two obvious examples of microaggressions (presumably because they reinforce the stodgy, outdated, and hateful notion that young people are both more beautiful and more naive than elders)... the wonder of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is the academic theory from which all wokeness springs, is that it can train soft minds to successfully manufacture grievance from any human interaction. And that is the explicitly stated goal of all critical theories, to stir discontent with the goal of activating pawns in a revolution. Contentedness is the enemy of revolution, so people must be trained out of it. They also must be trained to be pathologically nervous about aggrieving others... I’m reminded of a classic quote by Ibram X. Kendi in “How to Be an Antiracist”: “Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.” As I’ve discussed in past articles about woke indoctrination, when you’re caught up in constant self-examination and self-criticism, you’re not able to critically evaluate the truth of what you’re being told. That is by design. Lastly, a handout about microaggressions distributed to the group revealed another, and more insidious, meaning to “microaggression” that wasn’t accounted for by either Merriam Webster or the diversity facilitator. Apparently, it is actively microaggressive to affirm traditional American values and beliefs, especially those which directly undermine Critical Theory. For example, “America is a melting pot,” “there is only one race, the human race,” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” were listed as common microaggressions. A column on the far right of the document explained the real coded messages behind each of these microaggressive phrases, which included wildly presumptuous phrases like “people of color are lazy or incompetent and need to work harder” and a presumed directive to “assimilate to the dominant culture.” Through courses like these, diversity instructors are training soft minds to associate almost all aspects of language, as well as affirmations about foundational american ideals, with bigotry. Worse, the thought leaders behind it are making millions off the charade. It’s a sham, and does nothing to address the actual racism permeating society, often making it worse, all while under the guise of so-called “diversity” and “inclusion”. It’s past time for us to wake up and tell the Emperor he has no clothes."
Why do so many professional, middle-class Brits insist they're working class? - "Britain certainly has an unusual attachment to working-class identities. While in most western countries people tend to identify as middle class, Britain has long been an intriguing outlier. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, 47% of Britons in middle-class professional and managerial jobs identify as working class. Even more curiously, a quarter of people in such jobs who come from middle-class backgrounds – in the sense that their parents did professional work – also identify as working class... such misidentifications are built on particular origin stories that people reach for when asked about their backgrounds. These accounts tend to downplay people’s own, fairly privileged upbringings and instead reach back into working-class extended family histories that incorporate grandparents and even great-grandparents. Here people find stories of the past – of working-class struggle, of upward social mobility, of meritocratic striving – that provide powerful frames for understanding their own experiences and identity. But should we think of these as misidentifications? After all, these people correctly identify the socio-economic conditions of their working-class ancestors and simply argue it is the legacy of that history that scaffolds their identity. In some ways, they’re right. Research shows that the class position of our grandparents does, on average, have an effect on our own destinations... these intergenerational understandings of class origin should be read as having a performative dimension; they deflect attention away from the structural privileges these individuals enjoy, both in their own eyes but also among those they communicate their origin stories to in everyday life. At the same time, by framing their lives as an upward struggle against the odds, these interviewees misrepresent their subsequent life outcomes as more worthy, more deserving and more meritorious. It is also striking that such misidentification was higher among the actors and television professionals we spoke to. This is not coincidental; there is arguably a particular market for downplaying privilege in these professions. Not only are these arenas disproportionately dominated by the privileged, with class an increasingly fiercely debated topic, but the precarious nature of the work itself – often freelance, short-term, poorly paid, and reliant on informal networks – tilts decisively in favour of those insulated by the bank of mum and dad. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that people feel a particular pressure to tell a humble origin story.
When victimhood is fetishised, it's bad to be "privileged"
All the people encouraging young people to go into the arts or other poorly remunerated disciplines downplay the fact that many of these people have rich families so they don't need to work a "proper job" to survive, which results in tragedy for people from non-rich families
New Microaggression Goggles Help You Find Something Offensive In Any Situation | Babylon Bee - "The product will detect a wide range of microaggressions, including the following:
White privilege
MAGA hats
Smiling at you without your consent
Manspreading
Mansplaining
Manbreathing
Manexisting
Lack of avocado toast
Cultural appropriation
Cultural exclusion
Being hateful toward women
Being too friendly toward women
Not liking The Last Jedi"
Opinion | 'Love Bombing,' 'Gaslighting,' and the Rise of 'Trauma-Talk' - The New York Times - "Like so many online daters before him, Caleb was a creep. But in the language of TikTok — and, perhaps, the language of our current moment — he was more than that: He was pathological. Caleb, better known at this point as “West Elm Caleb,” a 25-year-old furniture designer in Brooklyn who was the subject of viral mania last month, was accused of “love bombing” women by showering them with interest, “gaslighting” them by making them think he liked them, then abruptly ghosting them, leaving his “victims” to bond over their “shared trauma.” There are plenty of words to describe somebody like Caleb: deceitful, manipulative, inconsiderate, liar. There is in fact a word, one we can’t print here, created entirely for men like this. But in the souped-up language of today, none of those words seem like enough. “All pain is ‘harm.’ All ‘harm’ is ‘trauma.’ All ‘trauma’ comes from someone who is an ‘abuser,’” said Natalie Wynn, a philosopher turned popular YouTube personality. “It’s as if people can’t articulate disagreement or hardships without using this language.” And so, Caleb became a “predator.” Call it post-traumatic hyperbole. Or TikTok pseudo-psychology. Or even therapy-speak... when did we start using the language of harm to describe, well, everything?... “Love bombing is a coordinated effort,” the psychologist Margaret Singer observed in her book, “Cults in Our Midst,” that involved “flattery, verbal seduction, affectionate but usually nonsexual touching, and lots of attention to their every remark.” Much like “gaslighting” — which comes from a British play that was turned into a Hollywood film, “Gaslight,” in which a husband drives his wife to question her own sanity — “love bombing” became an important term in the domestic violence space to describe patterns of manipulation by an intimate partner. But the terms are meant to refer to patterns, not individual instances of behavior... If we’ve all been love bombed, has anyone? But where the term has really found traction is on social media, in the various spaces governed by algorithms, primed for hyperbole and awash in the language of self-care. On TikTok and Instagram, especially, there are thousands of self-appointed “wellness,” “mind-set,” “life” or “energy” coaches — as well as relationship experts and those who describe themselves as therapists — to guide you through the process of recognizing a “covert narcissist,” or even an overt one, whose love bombing tactics might include anything from big gestures early on to planning too far into the future... The phrase “semantic creep” has been used to describe how the meaning of words change over time. What we’re seeing today, according to the psychologist Nick Haslam, a professor at the University of Melbourne, could be called “trauma creep” — when the language of the clinical, or at least the clinical-adjacent, is used to refer to an increasingly expansive set of everyday experiences... The word “trauma” comes from the ancient Greeks, who defined it as physical injury. And while the term is still used to describe physical harm, today it’s more commonly expressed in the context of the emotional. That shift was critical in the 1990s and early 2000s to legitimizing the concept of domestic abuse, said the sociologist Paige Sweet, the author of “The Politics of Surviving” — and even helped shelters gain government resources because it “medicalized” the concept. But as words gain useful new meanings, over time, they can also lose precision. “Gaslighting” is now “thrown out anytime someone’s perception of something is challenged,” said Shantel Gabrieal Buggs, a sociologist at Florida State University. “Emotional labor” was once used to refer to a workplace burden; today, it’s an umbrella term for unpleasant household tasks. And #Traumatok, a real place on TikTok with nearly 600 million views, teaches us that struggling with decision-making, overachieving, or the inability to stop scrolling might not be just products of indecisiveness, or drive, or boredom, but “trauma responses.” All the while, the public broadcasting of our personal traumas — sexual assault, self-harm, eating disorders and so on — has become so ubiquitous that it now has a name: “trauma dumping.”... Discussions around systemic racism and inequality have helped usher in concepts like “generational trauma,” or the trauma of racism, or the way that trauma manifests in the body... the age of trauma is unfolding in the age of social media — where everyone is striving, on some level, to rise above the noise, to be taken seriously, to (using another phrase of the moment) “feel heard.” Words have always reflected culture. But at what point do they start to shape it? We know, at this point, that algorithms reward outrage and public shaming online — and that, as the Yale psychologist Molly Crockett explained, those algorithms can’t distinguish between language that is proportionate or disproportionate to the original transgression. We also know that victims of wrongdoing tend to be perceived as more “moral” or “virtuous” than others, and that using medical language tends to give a speaker authority, each of which are likely to result in more positive feedback. It is not a huge leap, then, to imagine that deploying the language of trauma, or of harm, or even of personal struggle, carries cultural capital... Suddenly, Demi Lovato is not just annoyed by having to pass by sugar-free cookies in a frozen yogurt shop; the singer is a victim of diet culture’s “harmful messaging.” The artist who claimed, falsely, that Taylor Swift doesn’t write her own songs isn’t just misinformed or a jerk; his words are “damaging” — the implication being, damaging not only to Ms. Swift but also to the culture. And Caleb? Caleb becomes a meme, self-help influencers capitalize on the spectacle, brands use the moment to sell mayonnaise, and maybe, subconsciously, the rest of us plumb our souls for what we can interpret as our own trauma — because, wow, does trauma get results. “It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like you’re policing the language,” said Mr. Haslam. “But when we start to talk about ordinary adversities as ‘traumas’ there is a risk that we’ll see them as harder to overcome and see ourselves as more damaged by them.”"
Similarly, all stress is now a threat to "mental health"
