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So I have an analogy that I think is useful for understanding our current obsession with victimhood — one that I think is more constructive than the common critiques. In the modern discourse we’ve created, a victimhood claim is like paying mafia protection money. I’ll explain.
When it comes to victimhood culture, I think people focus too much on what claims of victimhood allow people to *attain* and not enough on what it allows people to *avoid*. For people who want to understand political culture right now, the second is much more illuminating.
Most commentary and research about claims of victimhood and the adoption of oppression identities tend to focus on how these claims are intended as ways of garnering attention, status, material transfer, etc.
And it's very natural and intuitive to see people acting this way as selfish, opportunistic, manipulative, etc. But it may be missing the bigger part of the picture.
It's important to understand that this is very much a binary discourse. If you aren't somehow a victim or oppressed in today's society, then you can only be the other thing: Privileged. And being privileged in today's political discourse is just about the worst thing you can be.
It requires constant acts of submission, expressions of guilt, and a surrendering of one's political identity. That hollowed-out identity is then replaced with an approved set of beliefs that keep you in the good graces of elite culture. The downside is you are a zombie.
To be labeled privileged is to experience a political and cultural death. How to avoid this? The only way to avoid it is to become the other thing: a victim or some category of oppressed person. In other words, a claim of victimhood may be more an act of negation than affirmation
Oppression identity has sort of become an entry fee into political and cultural discourse — the only way you can participate confidently and with conviction, be fully heard, and guarantee that your beliefs won’t be easily dismissed because of your identity.
People naturally want political freedom and to be unburdened with a restrictive identity, but we’re increasingly setting up a system that requires highly divisive, exclusive, and alienating expressions of victimization in order to attain that.
And the impact goes beyond political expression. This discourse and the hierarchy it theorizes is increasingly impacting people’s professional opportunities and their standing in the workplace. There are real material considerations at stake.
This dynamic goes a long way toward explaining why we see so many claims of victimhood coming from the places you'd least expect it — among the professional class at elite institutions of high culture, academia, and media. In other words: The most privileged places in the world.
Any rational definition of “privileged” would apply to this class of people, and that’s precisely why the threat of “privilege” discourse to a person’s status is felt so strongly here and why the need to neutralize the threat is so acute.
So to me, this all looks like a protection racket — like a shopkeeper paying protection money to the mafia. And not just because it keeps you safe, but because it also *keeps the system going.* It is self-perpetuating.
When you claim victimhood, you aren’t just buying your safety. You are also affirming the discourse itself and increasing the pressure everyone else feels from it. Which forces more people to participate. An endless cycle.
Again, I think it’s easy to fall into a pattern of understanding this behavior solely through the lens of individual selfishness, opportunism, etc. And those things no doubt play some role — people respond to the incentives that are created by any system.
But it’s the system that produces that behavior, and I think it helps to take a more generous systemic view by looking at how all of us can become ensnared in these oppressive, viral systems of belief, and how the system can use all of us to perpetuate itself.
I guess what I’m trying to says is…maybe we're all victims in the end? ;)
