Selfies of sobbing influencers, trigger warnings right and left, documentaries with celebrities in which they’re openly vulnerable – perhaps too much so – or the use of increasingly therapeutic language in the public sphere are some of the displays of a trend that’s been with us for a while now, and shows no signs of going anywhere: victimhood chic. An aesthetically pleasing victimhood that has two clear consequences: social immobility and political complacency.
In his bestseller “The subtle art of not giving a f*ck,” Mark Manson coined a term to define the state of social media in 2016: “victimhood chic.” According to Manson, publicly sharing injustices attracts “far more attention and emotional outpouring than most other realities on social media, rewarding people who may feel perpetually victimized by mulitpling the amounts of attention and sympathy they receive.”
Marketing agency HyperSocial’s CEO Braden Wallake’s post of himself crying on LinkedIn after firing two employees last summer to prove bosses are also people with feelings and, who would have known, also suffer, is a spot-on example of the panorama Manson is talking about.
The key is imitating
In an interview this summer, Scott Lyons, an American psychologist and author of the book “Addicted to Drama,” pointed out that in the West we are experiencing an epidemic of drama, in part, due to social networks and the resulting attention economy. “The whole world is now our stage to portray this great drama and be rewarded with likes,” he notes.
According to Lyons, social networks, by rewarding increasingly dramatic language and content, have progressively desensitized users to external and foreign realities, by encouraging narratives and situations that are increasingly dramatic, increasingly intensified, to generate intrigue and hold the attention of as many users as possible.
“Stories that generate sadness, anger, or fear are the most shared. They creep into our lives, so we start recreating them, replicating those scenarios and imitating that language in our social media posts, even though we’re not living through [such dramatic] experiences,” says Lyons.
The hashtag #traumatok has more than 4.7 billion views
This does not mean that victims don’t exist. Of course they do. But as Tel Aviv University researchers explain in “The Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood: The Personality Construct and its Consequences,” a victim mentality can be developed even “without experiencing trauma or serious victimization.”
TraumaTok, one increasingly popular space on one of the social networks most used by young people, exemplifies how and to what extent the trend of victimhood chic has evolved. TraumaTok is a space within TikTok dedicated entirely to sharing traumatic experiences via short videos of just a few seconds for the consumption and enjoyment of followers. Stories oftentimes enlivened with a dance or cute filter, and whose main objective is to accelerate their viralization and thus increase the demand for similar videos in the future.
If there are still any doubts about the magnitude of this merry-go-round demonstration of negative experiences, just check the scope of the phenomenon: the hashtag #traumatok has more than 4.7 billion views.
From honor to victimhood
In the academic article “Microaggression and Moral Culture,” Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, sociologists and academics at California State University and West Virginia University, respectively, analyzed the evolution from the culture of honor of several centuries ago to today’s culture of victimhood.
As they explain, in ancient times honor was the barometer by which a person’s worth was measured. Therefore, conflicts and offenses required a quick and violent response, and were resolved on a personal level, providing justice through a duel or physical confrontation.
In cultures of dignity, such as those that prevailed in Western countries during the 19th and 20th centuries, dignity was considered intrinsic to all people, regardless of any external grievance. The reaction to more or less serious offenses evolved to require direct but non-violent action. Therefore, instead of engaging in personal vendettas, conflict resolution was left in the hands of third parties, such as the courts.
Feeling like a victim has become a sign of prestige
However, the current culture of victimhood “is characterized by concern about status and spreading awareness on slights, combined with a great dependence on third parties. People are intolerant of offenses, even if they are unintentional, and react by drawing the attention of the authorities or the general public. Victimization is a way of attracting sympathy, so instead of emphasizing their strength or inner value, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization.”
Or, as Daniele Giglioli put it in his paper “Critique of the Victim” (Herder, 2020), “the victim is the hero of our time.” Feeling like a victim has become a sign of prestige, because “it demands listening, promises and encourages recognition, triggers a powerful generator of one’s personal identity, of right, of self-esteem. It makes victims immune against any criticism, it guarantees innocence beyond all reasonable doubt.” A depiction that is increasingly common.
Heroes without responsibility
However, victimhood chic is not an attitude that is cooked up and consumed exclusively on social media or on places like TraumaTok. For Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and professor at New York University, the current situation is also due to an environment – a culture and an education – that highlights and emphasizes victimhood.
T-shirts with “Anxiety Queen” across the front, biographies with some reference to a mental health problem seasoned with emojis, TV shows that emphasize and can even glamorize traumatic episodes – “Euphoria,” for example – or self-referential memes of anxious experiences or depressive disorders are routine in today’s pop culture.
The campus culture at some universities is also revealing. In places that should be bastions of critical thinking and freedom of expression, a low tolerance for “uncomfortable” opinions is rampant, as if students – or professors – were children who could be left traumatized simply by hearing them. Hence the trigger warnings that precede the reading of classics such as “Peter Pan” or “Northanger Abbey,” the boycotts of lecturers with an ideology other than the “official” one, or the “lynchings” of professors in the very public space of social networks for a comment made in class.
Another consequence of victimhood chic is the denigration of any public debate, by conceiving politics as a performance art, with a strong emotional component
You could say that this is intolerance disguised as victimhood. Or a pathologization of the everyday experience of living, which results in a sense of virtuous but powerless victimhood. As Haidt explains in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, this culture of victimhood has a clear consequence, and it is social conformism, mainly among young people who perceive themselves in this way. “You are not going to take risks, you are going to ask for adaptations, you are going to play it safe, you are not going to try hard and go for the best, you are not going to start your own company.”
Because one of the collateral effects – and main incentives – of victimhood is the abandonment of one’s own responsibility in the face of external realities, handing it over to third parties. And, why deny it, it is more comfortable to delegate accountability.
Father State will protect you
Another consequence of victimhood chic is the denigration of public debate, by conceiving politics as a performance art, with a strong emotional component, instead of as an executive activity based on reason.
For James L. Nolan, professor of sociology at Williams College, governments increasingly adopt a therapeutic function, becoming involved in the emotional well-being of their citizens, and pushing subjectivity or one’s emotions as the dominant form of expression. As he commented in an interview on Spiked, “this emphasis on emotions undermines reason and the ability to engage in civil discourse based on reason. Increasingly, what has greater cultural relevance are appeals to emotions, to the depths of feelings. In this way, people are discouraged from gathering to talk about major social problems through appealing to reason. Instead, whoever is capable of expressing the deepest emotional indignation wins.”
However, at the same time, more and more citizens are inclined to demand that the State satisfy their emotional needs, accepting – sometimes even demanding – to be treated as victims and saddling politicians with the responsibility of solving all their problems. By “robbing” citizens of their capacity to act and create their own fate, the culture of victimhood causes a generalized infantilization of society.
This, in turn, can open the doors to political authoritarianism. Because, if more and more citizens feel incapable of taking responsibility for their own lives, who is left to hold the State accountable?
Helena Farré Vallejo
@hfarrevallejo