Imagine living in a society where status is assigned not by how you act. Imagine living in a society where your status isn’t assigned based on your merits. Imagine living in a society where you’re discriminated against based on characteristics which are outside of your control. Imagine living in a culture where your merits count for nothing, your success counts for nothing, what you say and what you do, again, counts for nothing.

I’m not talking about the 1960’s. I’m talking about today.

Many people talk of a world gone mad, how instead of fighting poverty we preoccupy ourselves debating nomenclature and making semantic arguments. But what is happening?

A Change of Culture

We have reached a point in society where the hypothetical scenario above is sadly hypothetical no longer. It’s the reality. It started on campuses in the US and has since spread like fire. No longer are we living in a culture of dignity; a culture whereby you gain status, gain recognition through your own work. We are inhabiting a culture of being offended, a culture of breaking down at the smallest hurdle.

This is bad.

We have undergone a major cultural change before. In the early 1900’s we still lived under a honour culture. We were easily offended. We were often upset. But what would we do when the inevitable happens, when we get minor hurts? We would fight it out. We would draw arms, and we would do all it takes to protect our honour, rather like the juveniles of today’s world.

Then we changed. You could even say we grew up.

Humans learnt to suppress their annoyance to minor issues. People learnt to ignore those who offended them. People would live by their dignity. Minor disagreements would be ignored, and larger ones dealt with in private and swiftly. We lived in a culture of tolerance. This is called a dignity culture.

This is good.

And about 100 years later we see another major shift. We are moving out of the mature dignity culture, into one of victimhood. No longer do people brush off the smallest of offences, but now they want blood for them. Not physical blood like the juvenile honour culture we moved on from, but metaphorical blood. They want the offenders offences to be suppressed. This is explained extremely eloquently in Jonathan Haidt’s talk on The Rise of Victimhood Culture.

The Victimhood Culture

The perpetrators of the victimhood culture are effectively going back to primary school. They need an authority figure to arbitrate any disagreement. If you say you don’t like someone? Expect to lose your job. If you choose to voice your opinion on something? How dare you speak violently towards me!

If you look up the word violence in the dictionary you get the following:

Violence: Behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something Google



Physical force. Physical force. Physical force. Nothing is mentioned about words. Nothing about disagreement or minor clashes. Clashes are normal in life, they need not be stopped!

However in a victimhood culture, this is not the case. Anything you say that could offend anyone cannot go unpunished. You make the ‘women driver’ jibe, despite being in full knowledge that women are statistically safer drivers when newly qualified? That cannot go unpunished. You disagree with someones religious or political views? Your obviously violent comment must not go unpunished. Get the picture?

Anything you say or do that could offend any arbitrary victim anywhere in the world needs stopping. Bring in the thought Police. In George Orwell’s novel 1984 nothing can be said or thought against The Party, however in our new culture, you cannot say or think or do anything that anyone might disagree with.

People are forced to self-censure to avoid any offence. Gone are the freedoms of modern western democracy, and here are the freedoms to say and do whatever you like as long as it fits a set of norms decided by a bunch of oversensitive students!

It almost seems as if these perpetrators of the new culture have failed to grow up?

The Victim, The Privilege and The Oppressor

The victimhood culture characterises all of the populous by how much victimness they have. A persons victimness is decided by various characteristics – the majority outside of your control. This victimness is equivalent to your social status. The higher the victimness the better you clearly are as a person, and the more you should be cared about.

The converse to victimhood is labelled privilege. The less victimhood you have the more privilege you’re assigned.

Enter the Oppressor. In victimhood culture (this culture that has started to swarm our streets!) those with a high level of arbitrary victimhood are defined to be oppressed, and those with a high level of arbitrary privilege are defined to be Oppressors.

Now as the wording suggests, the oppressor needs to be punished for their oppressing. So the vindictive arbitrary victims want to punish those who they claim to be oppressors on account of uncontrollable characteristics which they possess. Forgive me for saying, but this sounds very similar to the rationale behind the Apartheid?

The Holy Trinity

So how do you attain this arbitrary victimhood? Be one of the main 3 victim groups:

Black People

Women

LGBT

There are a few other groups however the above are the main 3. The outcome is divisions in society. You are either categorised as Good/Victim or Evil/Oppressor.

These victims are decided on the basis that at some point in recent history, some of the said group have had some sort of disadvantage (be it natural or discriminatory) at some place in the world. In some cases (though not all) the discrimination is still ongoing. The blame for said disadvantage is then pointed at all of the oppressors.

So what if you’re a Straight White Man/Woman? How do you raise your status? The only way to raise your status if not arbitrarily a victim, is to stand up for the so-called victims. Recall – they aren’t real victims. They’re assigned the label victims arbitrarily.

The Problem?

But why is this victimhood culture a problem? The culture sets out to tell people if they are suffering or not. If you’re an arbitrary oppressor then you’re not allowed to suffer, however if you’re a victim you must be. It paints the world in a simple black and white between the good and the bad, ignoring the fact that all people have the same frightening capacity for great evil.

This culture sews more divisions in an already divided society. It prevents people from having freedom of thought or expression by prioritising the rights of some over the rights of others. Ironically there is evidence to suggest that the culture actually benefits the oppressor far more than it benefits the oppressed, however that is a story for a different day.

In fact this new victimhood culture brings about a form of competition. A competition to try to prove you’re a victim, and in doing so sew even more division in society. Take the case of Dawn Hilton-Williams, a black woman who was caught going 15 mph above the speed limit. Dawn was pulled over by the police officer, had to sign a court summons and was allowed go on her way. When she left the spot at which she was pulled over, she started an emotional live stream on Facebook complaining about the outrageous racism and racist threats she had just received. Dawn claimed the cop had threatened to pull her from the car, amongst other lies. The body-cam footage of the incident were released by the county sheriff and can be viewed online. All of her claims were false, and the complaints received about her case were dismissed.

Dawn was trying to pull the victim card. She had committed an offence but was unable to take responsibility for her actions, and tried to play the part of the victim. While certainly not her intention, Dawn is also contributing towards a culture of hostility towards police, the idea that the police are bad, a culture of seeing people in black and white. Dawn wanted to see herself as a victim of racial discrimination, because by being a victim, it would raise her status and her opinion of herself. Can you see the problems this causes?

Last but by certainly no means least I’d like to touch on something I discussed here, while there is definitely many inequalities in our world, we need to work towards equality of opportunity. Sadly this new culture we’re finding ourselves engulfed in looks for equality of outcome, the vindictive nature of the culture works almost like a form of social Marxism to bring down those who are believed to be doing well, instead of what I believe to be a far kinder alternative – working to help those with genuine disadvantages. And with that I hope you can see quite how much this new culture brings about a massive injustice.

[The above post was inspired by the works of Professor Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist and Author of bestseller The Righteous Mind]