Being tough is out of style, except in sports and criticizing doctors…soccer notwithstanding.
Trudeau’s tears make the front page. It is woke to cry.
Canada used to be tough. Life was hard. You needed grit to survive.
Parents wanted children to grow up and leave childish things behind. Life is better now, softer.
Toughness has less value in a world of Starbucks and Superstores. Why celebrate pioneering toughness when there is no pioneering left to do?
Toughness also has a dark side. Grit without compassion is cruel, heartless. Humans are born cruel and learn compassion. For those raised poorly, “Grow up,” might mean, “You are nothing.”
Grit without compassion is cruel, heartless. Click To TweetIn a time when children were raised to be seen and not heard, victims were silenced.
Did victims embarrass us; make us uncomfortable?
Maybe we pretended that mental illness, deformity, and disease did not exist?
All the best families have old stories about a cousin who never left her room. Grit became cruel. Something had to be done.
Victimhood
Social extremes create overcorrections. We were probably cruel on our quest for toughness. Now we coddle on our quest for compassion.
Modern society celebrates victimhood. We indulge every slight and woe. No complaint is too small to ignore. No insult is too small to lecture and scream at a hostile world that let the insult happen in the first place.
We have become a fragile people, a society of soccer players in a land of hockey.
The opposite of toughness is not compassion. The opposite of toughness is coddling. Who hurt you, dear?
We rescue victims and celebrate victimhood. Individual behaviour and personal responsibility means little. Your state of oppression trumps all. Go ahead; throw rocks at windows and set cars on fire. Your status as a victim explains everything. It is your lived truth.
We have become a fragile people, a society of soccer players in a land of hockey. Click To TweetPeople used to measure character by one’s response to hardship. Now we measure character by the hardship life throws at us. All that matters is what has happened to us, not how we responded to it.
Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, social psychologists, wrote, The Rise of Victimhood Culture — Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. They look at university campuses and describe three cultures: honour, dignity and victimhood.
In an interview for Quillette, they said:
People in an honour culture have a low tolerance to slight, even if unintended. They use violence to defend their honour with pistols or swords. They rarely appeal to authorities. They take things into their own hands. Physical bravery is celebrated. Virtue flows from one’s behaviour.
In a dignity culture, people develop a low sensitivity to slight. They avoid taking violence into their own hands. They appeal to authorities only in cases of real, physical violence. They ignore criticism and offence. “Sticks and stones may break my bones…”
Members of a dignity culture believe in the inherent, inalienable moral worth of individuals. They feel no need to defend themselves against insult. In fact, overreacting to insult shows that you don’t understand your inherent worth. Virtue lies in being restrained, prudent, and quietly self-assured
People in a victimhood culture (VC) are oversensitive to slights and vigilant for insults. VC combines a high sensitivity to offence with a high dependence on others to solve it.
VC emphasizes each person’s victimization. Conflict indicates oppression. Oppression proves victimhood. Victims deserve special care and deference.
Victimhood is the source of moral worth. Privileged people are morally suspect.
Privilege is to victimhood, in a victimhood culture, as cowardice is to honour, in an honour culture. Virtue rests in how others have treated you; indeed it is your identity.
What’s the solution?
We should correct bad things that hurt people. But should we give victims special privileges to compensate their pain? How long do the privileges last? Who should pay?
Human cruelty will never go away. It is a fact of our nature, no matter what dreamers say.
We should judge people on their behaviour, not on the behaviours that were done to them. We need to correct wrongs, and at the same time, help people see that they are far more than the trauma they suffered.
If we define ourselves by our victimhood, we become slaves to that identity. We do not heal.
Some say doctors should stop whining. Grow up. Get a backbone. People who say that are cruel. They do not understand.
However, there is wisdom in refusing to be defined by what has been done to us. We should fight to correct injustice. Victims are more than the sum of their scars.
If people cannot rise above their trauma, they are doomed to a life of outrage and bitterness.
We should fight to change the world with dignity. Without dignity we are nothing but animals snarling at insults.
Photo credit: The Post Millenial: Four things Justin Trudeau should be apologizing for.
Complex ideas in a changing world. Mental health impacting 30% of young adults. We are better at diagnosing. We can provide solutions. Whether we crumble under past traumas is dependant on personality as well as the ability to ask for help. Nobody should want to be a victim. Whether it is cancer or mental health ( both of which I have experienced) it is a label that many abhor . Do we have a victim culture? Maybe because it is good press and the media pursues it. We are indoctrinated in every newspaper and this was never evident in the past. Somewhere there is a balance. I hate the aggression in hockey. I hate the whiners in soccer that cry on the field for impact But somewhere we will reach a balance with empathy and help for those that need it. That would include those with trauma in childhood.
Great comments, Pat!
I agree with your call for balance. And I agree that we never saw the victim mentality in the media in the past.
Thanks for taking time to read and post a comment!
Cheers
Great piece Shawn. If only the world was as it should be……
Thanks Eddie! If only…
In this new world of snowflakization and identity politics anyone can become a victim one way or another…victimhood has become near universal and with competitive escalation from rival victimhoods…..”you may be a victim but I’m more of a victim than all of the rest of you”…at the end of the day these pseudovictims swamp the suffering of actual victims.
It must be a miserable state of affairs to be constantly shoring up oneself as being a “ victim” and to be on the constant allert for anything that could be interpreted as a “ microaggression” so confirming one’s status as a “ victim”, allowing the exaggeration of the supposed “trauma” experienced.
Pseudo victims assume a perverse authority …” I am a victim…you are not…I am allowed to pontificate on the topic and you are not because you never suffered x, y or z” ….any contrary opinion is regarded as being offensive and is labelled as “ hate speech”…any attempt at actual debate is closed down and groups ( mobs even) of fellow pseudo victims turn to threats, shouting down others and resorting to violence.
This is the most pampered generation in history …and its members can only be cured of their snowflake like neurosis by experiencing real suffering…Jung stated that a “neurosis is a substitute for real legitimate suffering “….he nailed it…the snowflake generation may yet experience real suffering be it by war, civil war, economic collapse, mass starvation…the Four horses of the apocalypse may well make their appearance unless they grow up and accept responsibility for their lives and throw away their comfy victim culture.
You hit a number of the issues raised in the article I referenced. Well said.
Victimhood culture creates an oppression olympics in which contestants vie for the highest degree of intersectionality. Indeed, inter-victim turmoil breaks out as members dismiss the status of other victims.
I worry about your comments on suffering. I worry that you might be right. Normally, life brings enough suffering on its own, but not in our coddled society.
I hope we can start talking about this in a broader forum. Too often anything close to this gets shouted down.
Thanks again for posting a comment!
It was a rather repetitive windup to Jung’s observation.
In my early years ( I spent my first 4 years in German refugee camps ) I met Holocaust / Holomodor/ Gulag / Hungarian uprising survivors and later also in my practice …they were ( they have died off over the years) the least neurotic of people/ patients…they were very grounded to say the least and one suspects that their very real suffering was a factor in their non snowflakedom.
Wow. That explains a tonne. It gives me a better glimpse into you, especially. Thanks again for sharing!!
Somehow we have to force our governments to stop enabling victimhood. A leader of a local indigenous band once told a close friend of mine, “Every time I put my hand out, your government puts money in it. I’ll not stop putting out my hand until the money stops.” Somehow I can quite understand that attitude.
Thanks Ralph.
I would do the same. We all would, I suspect. The whole Indian Affairs Act and the issues involved boggles my mind. I hope people get a chance to check out Flannagan’s “First Nations, Second Thoughts.” It’s impossible to have open debate on this complex and loaded topic in most circles. I sure hope things improve for this group of Canadians soon.
Thanks again for posting!
Our profession should in fact seek a balance …. between honour and dignity.Take matters more into our own hands and lead in a morally responsible (rather than superior) way.Our council are acting like victims and turning on our own colleagues,as it appears to be the easier route …. We will eventually reap what we sow.
Very interesting, Ramunas. I like the idea of self sufficiency and solving our own problems. I do not like the idea of a thin skin and brittle pride. People who seem ready to fight at every little thing exhaust me. I suspect you agree.
I hope we can promote a rational, classical liberalism that welcomes vigorous debate about everything. JS Mill said we should support nonsense speech. If it’s wrong, it gives us a chance to correct it. If there’s something good in it, we can strengthen our own opinions by adopting the good points.
Thanks again for reading and posting!
Great article Shawn and actually something that my wife and I discuss frequently. Our context is around raising our kids. We let them fall down. My daughter takes some pride in showing me her latest blister or scrape because it was usually acquired doing something challenging or cool. Unless it is an adult problem, we push them to solve it themselves with advice prn. How else will they learn to function as adults that challenge themselves and solve their own problems?
Their biggest frustration is how they see victimhood work out well for their peers. They have been know to tell whiny compatriotes to “suck it up buttercup”. They got that quote from karate rather than hockey 😉 Eventually the pendulum will swing back, but for a group with victim culture – that has to come from both within the peer group and “the parent group” if there is one.
Keep up the great insightful writing. It is important to our peer group.
Loved your comments, Lonnie Doctor.
I have hope when I hear things that kids say who are taking martial arts. They have a different approach to pain and sacrifice on the road to achievement.
Thanks again for your encouraging comments!
Cheers