Understanding Victimhood Culture

It compares it with dignity cultures and honor cultures and specifies some specific characteristics of the victimhood culture.

I wonder if there is a philosophy similar to dignity culture but where order is earned and not granted - a mix of libertarianism (no obligation to participate) but credit on behalf of productive engagement.

Alas, I do feel that social media enables tribalism and thus identity conflict. And, I think that’s why I’m not on Facebook anymore. At least, I didn’t find participation to be productive, but rather ranking by popularity, momentum, and signals of the newsfeed’s algorithm.

Complex stuff, but I hope that’s a statement others can engage with as I’m genuinely curious about understanding the landscape by looking through other lenses.

It is unfortunate that the authors seem to be tip-toeing around white supremacy, and instead choose to invent a new term like "victimhood culture" to neatly label what is actually a wide-ranging and diverse counter-cultural movement.

Their stance could almost come across as sympathetic to this movement. Instead, they end with "And finally, it’s important to combat victimhood culture and to deal with the problems it creates ...".

To me this reeks of the same old white privilege and condescension that have led our society to this point. We desperately need to address the dominant culture and the problems it has created and continues to create, the latest of which appears to be this book.

Labeling the dominant culture a "dignity culture" is, at this moment in history, beyond the pale.

> People generally eschew violent vengeance in favor of relying on some authority figure or other third party.

My experience with people involved in this is that vigilante behaviour seems to be growing in popularity with this crowd. For example, note how many times you'll hear about people upsetting someone on Twitter, and then see them lose their job after thousands complain to the company about it or track down their home address/personal details or what not. Trying to have some blacklisted from the internet or their industry for some perceived slight definitely seems like taking the law into their own hands, even if its perhaps a bit less violent simply by virtue of being online.

I'd also certainly consider behaviour at protests from some of these people as violent, with actions by groups like antifa at protests against right wing figures speaking in colleges being violence inspired by victimhood culture.

Still, the rest of the article makes sense, and jives pretty well with reality.

The most objective argument I have to support this is that they keep talking about "whites" as a race. Never "white Americans", "caucasians", "white europeans" etc etc, just "whites" or "white people". Which is hugely problematic considering the entire concept of white as a race is incredibly modern. Before the 19th century, there wasn't a concept of whiteness, you belonged to a nation rather than a race. And it kind of makes sense, since where do you even draw the line on white? Are Egyptians white (Rami Malek...)? What about much of the middle east, many Syrians could pass for either white or Arabic? Or some western Asian countries, like most of the -istans?

Ultimately, the idea of a white race was created on classist principles. The Irish were accepted as whites, despite being persecuted for centuries, as they were seen as "better than black". They weren't seen as white at all since that concept had not been created until mass immigration to the US. There's a good quote on this: [1]

>The Irish, arriving poor, were in direct contact and competition with the African Americans whose social class they shared. They managed to become identified as white through their complicity in the oppression of blacks. Despite, or perhaps because of, calls from Daniel O’Connell in Ireland for the Irish in America to support the abolition of slavery, the American Irish felt their tenuous position in America would be weakened further if they were to associate themselves (or allow themselves to be associated with) the plight of the Africans in America.

My point isn't really to start a debate on whiteness or anything like that. My point is that throughout this entire interview, where they say the word "white" in various forms eighteen times, and use phrases like "white supremacy", "whitesplaining", "whites cannot be the victims of racism", they never once mention that whiteness is a concept that was made specifically for discriminatory purposes. Even if that doesn't fit their agenda, mentioning the origins of the "white race" should be a prerequisite to talking about race hierarchies at any such length. It's like an electrical engineer not knowing what electrons are.

A lot of this interview just reeks of Jordan Peterson-esque pseudo-intellectual tripe. They even mention him in passing, and the site seems to have multiple articles on him. I probably won't have the patience today to actually debate any of this in length, but I implore anyone who is taking this article seriously to look up the troves of valid criticism of Peterson [2], because a lot of it applies to this article too: I honestly do not think the authors are qualified to discuss the sociological concepts they're talking about, and this is coming from someone who freely admits he does not have the qualifications to discuss it either. We shouldn't be giving a platform to people like this.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130428181555/http://www.polsis... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LqZdkkBDas