One of the many moral panics of our time is that of “victimhood culture”. Apparently, we are too indulgent of those who can claim victim status, a state especially rife among students. The story goes that this has turned us all into eternal babies, coddling us, protecting us from “micro aggressions” and signalling an erosion of individual grit and autonomy in favour of mimsy whining.

In an effort to invert unfair power structures, some claim, victimhood culture has only succeeded in replacing them with different unfair power structures, where those who used to be at the bottom now hold the whip hand over those who used to be at the top. Women terrify men, who are forever fearful an offhand remark will become a harassment lawsuit, and racial minorities secure jobs at the expense of white people the moment their unusual names are spotted on a CV. The writer Lionel Shriver called it “privileging the disadvantaged”. Shriver also told BBC Radio 4 that white men in the UK are on the bottom rung of society, because they are considered to be the most powerful demographic (reader, I can reveal they are). Victimhood culture advocates engage in a lot of doublethink.

Academic John McWhorter writes that the story reveals “something else modern America is about: victimhood chic."

I have tried to find this victimhood culture in real life and am sad to report that its dividends are elusive. In my experience, the most extreme manifestation is people being mildly annoying on social media by constantly prefacing their thoughts by alluding to their race, gender or sexual orientation, or assuming that people are being rude to them because of their identity. But, despite the rarity of victim culture in the wild, when it emerged that American actor Jussie Smollett may have fabricated a racist and homophobic attack on himself in Chicago, it was immediately obvious to many why they thought he did it. It wasn’t because he was a creep or a sociopath or an attention seeker: it was because of victimhood culture.

Victimhood culture is one of those phenomena, like “political correctness gone mad”, that isn’t a real thing, but has nevertheless been adopted by the right and the left, and made mainstream with little questioning as to why. It wasn’t just Fox News and Trump supporters who relished the opportunity to point out that Smollett’s actions were a manifestation of our fetish for the victim. African-American academic John McWhorter writes in the Atlantic that the Smollett story reveals “something else modern America is about: victimhood chic. Future historians and anthropologists will find this aspect of early-21st-century America peculiar, intriguing, and sad.” In the National Review, Andy Ngo goes further to claim that “because of the mainstreaming of academia’s victimhood culture, we are now in a place where we place more value on being a victim than on being heroic, charitable, or even kind”. CNN hosted a talk show entitled “Jussie Smollett and the victim culture”.

This reaction is in itself a tell. The eagerness to extrapolate from one incident and make sweeping statements about how society is just too nice to victims and therefore encourages such fakery shows that society isn’t actually predisposed to being nice to victims at all. It is a miserly conditional sympathy that is withdrawn the moment victims let us down. All the Smollett case has done is give people an excuse to default to their comfort zone, to believe that all allegations of homophobia and racism are suspect, probably overblown or made up. While the Smollett story developed, two other stories broke: the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that there were now more than 1,000 hate groups operational in the US, and the FBI foiled a plot by a white nationalist to murder Democratic party politicians. At one point, CNN cut away from live coverage of an FBI press conference about this to rerun old footage of Smollett news.

This insistence on the centrality of “victimhood culture” is symptomatic of a society that is intolerant of victims – waiting to pounce, to roll eyes, scoff, and ideally (but alas rarely), find a gotcha moment to prove that victim narratives are suspect. A focus on the minutiae of safe spaces and trigger warnings (which the BBC has put before violent dramas for decades), is an overreaction to the baby steps societies are taking to recognise grievances that were, until recently, considered trivial.

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Smollett is not the hill I am going to die on, but his is a story, if one steps back and removes it from tribal infighting, that is ubiquitous. It even has its own cautionary Aesop’s fable on the dangers of crying wolf.

How many people do you know in your own personal and professional lives whom you suspect have embellished, exaggerated or made up illnesses or inflated relationship troubles? How awkward is it for you to point this out without sounding like a jerk when it seems that everyone else is lapping it up?

Earlier this month, the New Yorker ran an entire profile on the jaw-dropping lies of writer Dan Mallory, who managed to elicit support and indulgence from academic supervisors, employers and friends by faking several terminal illnesses, and inventing the death of his mother and the suicide of his brother. But still people were too cautious of appearing churlish to accuse him of lying. There is even a pathological manifestation of the condition called “factitious victimisation”, of which Munchausen syndrome is an extreme version.

The only pattern here is one of people taking advantage of natural sympathetic responses to adversity because they are mendacious or damaged. It’s just rare that they are high-profile celebrities. Smollett is an aberration; victimhood culture is the real hoax.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

• This article was amended on 25 February 2019 to correct the name of writer Dan Mallory