Victimhood culture ported into COVID-world
One regular refrain of mine has been that almost none of our “pandemic response” dysfunctions are actually new. They were almost all around before, but the “pandemic response” amplified them and encouraged them to appear in new guises. And maybe I still need to write a long, “the world is broken right now for these 743 reasons” post. But for the moment I’m still mentioning them one by one.
One of those pre-existing dysfunctions is victimhood culture. There is a lot to victimhood culture, and Bradley Campbell, a good sociologist whom I’ve had a few interactions with on Twitter, literally wrote the book on the subject if you’re interested. But one common manifestation is what is sometimes called the “oppression olympics”, so named because people are competing to show that they are the most oppressed, because being oppressed is how you gain status in victimhood culture.
We could spend a long time just talking about that. For one, this is perverted Christianity. Many historical cultures saw the oppressed as weak and pitiful and worthy of scorn (and frankly maybe we’re moving back in that direction now), but Christianity had an appropriate concern for the weak and victimized. Victimhood culture took that appropriate concern and twisted it into things like the oppression olympics.
Two… it’s just upside-down that you don’t gain prestige for doing something great, you gain prestige for being a victim. If you want to get a piece of public art constructed in your honor today, surest way to do it is to get the media praising you for being a victim of one of the designated oppressor groups.
And finally this means that he who can claim to be the most unprivileged sort of “wins the olympics” and is placed into a privileged position… which means you’re no longer unprivileged, not at all, but you have to keep talking as if you are because that’s how you maintain your privileged position, which is not really a stable way for a culture to think and leads to fresh absurdities.
Ah yes, but how did this port over to COVID-world? This way:
This is victimhood culture, COVID-style. We have made ridiculously irrational fear into a virtue. People therefore go out onto social media to brag about how afraid they are. The oppressor group… varies a little bit from time to time, but lately it is especially the unvaccinated, and it could also be people who won’t wear a mask, or for a while it was people who persisted in attending gatherings with other people, and generally it’s all you people who keep this pandemic going. And he is being oppressed by you all and is making sure the world knows it. He doesn’t really want this to end because this is a way to gain status. Glenn Greenwald doesn’t quite say it the way I would, but he basically gets it.
I could end this post here but let me say one more thing. I replied to Cabellero to say basically what I said here, and someone replied to me and said “don’t worry, he’s lying”. He’s not really that afraid, he’s just pretending to be because, again, status. And that may be true for him, but you can read through the other replies and many of those people, I think, are not, they really are afraid. And therefore I have to highlight a reply also by the good Georgi Boorman.
There is sometimes this idea that “you just want to go dunk on the liberals”. No, we want to help people. If the problem is that people have been bamboozled into this crazy fear by the media and health officials and it is hurting them and their children, compassion is dragging them out of that.
It wasn't very satisfying, in 1942, to be one of the few people in the world who were publicly criticizing the war. My point is that if no man is an island, that means you can't take much pleasure in being right so long as most everyone in authority is making life worse.