“Tendency of Feeling Like A Victim In Relationships”

Discussing an academic article, and its correlation to Leftists proponents of Critical Race Theory today.

I read this paper, and it was like reading an evaluation of American society today, even though it was a paper centered on studying Israeli Jews. This isn’t surprising, given we are all human beings with similar behaviors, reactions, etc. If we are to get back to reason and maintain freedom of speech, choice, democracy, and everything that brings people to America to this day, we need to start to understand how we got to a point where CRT is reigning supreme in order to figure out how to get away from it. As Aristotle said, “knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom,” so looking at the problems in our society, figuring out the root of the issues, is what I’m trying to do. This is just my own analysis of the paper.

The paper starts off explaining that victimhood is defined as an isolated affect of trauma rather than a personality trait, but cited studies that have shown it can become an inherent personality trait which is stable, and can be learned through culture, education, the media, etc. If we perpetuate a culture of victimhood, people are more likely to feel and internalize the idea that they are victims; leading to issues, theories, and policies centered on the idea of oppressor vs. oppressed and righting perceived wrongs. They draw on research to suggest the subjectivity of feelings of victimhood. When given a certain situation, some people tend to see it as a normal part of life and nothing to feel bad about, whereas others find offense, perceiving a wrong and fulfilling the victimhood role. Given it is the same situation, one can see the definition of who, and who is not, a victim can vary based on internalization of what being a victim is, the narratives we live in, and individual experiences. The problem is when this tendency to see oneself as a victim spills over and, as the authors argue, becomes a lasting and key part in someone’s identity — coloring both personal relationships and in the grander scheme of the culture one lives in, the relationships of the person’s group to society as a whole. The authors call this tendency to see oneself as a victim as “trait victimhood” or “TIV” and the tendency for that to reach to a collective scale (their group within the culture at large) as “perpetual ingroup victimhood orientation” or “PIVO.” That is how I will refer to the two throughout the rest of this review.

In both TIV and PIVO, this paper lists 4 traits that people who lean towards seeing themselves as victims exhibit. The four are:

1. The need for their suffering to be recognized: it is stated that research has shown when someone does you wrong, and they recognize the wrong, it helps the healing process to have it said and responsibility to have been taken. This makes sense in the limits of individual cases, where a friend might have betrayed the other and to move on, recognition and an apology is needed to let go. Everyone has been in that situation and can relate. But does this help on a collective level? And when does it cross over to a cycle of apology and recognition without the next step of letting go and moving on? In our society today, a parallel can be drawn to white people apologizing for being white (for example, posting black boxes and promising to stop talking and listen) as a recognition of a collective wrong that occurred decades ago (Jim Crow laws) and what is argued to be continuing today (oppression of BIPOC). But movements like the BLM and CRT don’t seem to be “accepting” the apology, nor moving on. The progress that has been clearly made has been overlooked in favor of the continual negative view of all white people, the white privilege, and the “white supremacy” that supposedly still reigns supreme. If we are looking at the tendency for the need of suffering to be recognized, today’s leftists, and CRT theory, have that checked off.
2. “Moral elitism”: this refers to seeing the perceived “oppressor” as immoral, while the victim is morally superior. It gets to a point where whoever has been deemed to be an oppressor is now looked at as immoral without a chance to change. The notion that white people are forever and irrevocably racist is an easy and all too present example of this tendency. People start to think of “us vs. them” and look to the world and its people in black and white terms (no pun intended). You are either bad or good. The victim who has been hurt is good, the perpetrator is bad. This is where we start to lose sight of the world as it truly is outside of our perceptions — too complicated and gray to box in to any one way or side. It is easy to see how this has collectively become a part of American society — everywhere you look you can see groups accusing the other as evil and bigoted with the inability to change, while their side can do no wrong and excuses for any bad behavior can easily be seen as logical. If you read the link to excusing the bad, before you decide it is awful to suggest a person’s past criminal history excuses any wrongdoing to them — I am not suggesting Floyd should have been handled the way he was and I hold Chauvin guilty of at least manslaughter. But the point is the immediate dismissal of his character from the start and insistence of upholding this man as an innocent and harmless victim who did not resist arrest (although he did) and was one who “would give his shirt off his back” while failing to mention he was also one to put a gun on a pregnant woman’s belly. So in reality, Floyd wasn’t an all out bad guy — people have the capacity for change — but he was also nowhere close to a hero. He was not an all around good guy. He does not deserve the status BLM has given him. The moral elitism phenomenon has created a world where truth and complexities cannot exist if it does not neatly fit in to the ideology of the victim. The leftists can have this tendency checked off, too.
3. Lack of empathy for other people or other groups. The paper points to certain attributes that people who tend to score high on TIV exhibit, which amount to a lack of empathy for anyone that can be seen as opposition to themselves or the group they identify with (the ingroup). These traits, with the linked examples of how the leftists and CRT proponents exhibit this attribute as well, are:

• a preoccupation with their own suffering, often leaving no time to see other people’s and groups’ suffering. In this very racialized world of today, this piece was not only published but defended, as if white people (you know, the nice ones) don’t have real problems, leading real lives, full of pain and suffering just as much as joy;
• a “sense of entitlement to behave aggressively and selfishly.” Watch the full video. Understand that these people, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, are ok with the city burning if the jury does not do what they want them to do. They are ok with burning the city…it is “the least of [their] problems.” One supporter literally said “I don’t mean to say we need to start killing all white folks but…maybe.” Let that sink in for a minute before you move on…

People with a lack of empathy become groups with a lack of empathy. The article notes, citing another study “a society that is engulfed by the deep sense of victimhood focuses on its own fate and is completely preoccupied with its own suffering…members are unable to see things from the rival group’s perspective, empathize with its suffering, or accept responsibility for harm inflicted by their own group.” This goes to the fourth trait:

4. Rumination of Negative Feelings. Our society, I believe, is at a critical point. We are quickly becoming this sort of society we cannot get over past or perceived wrongs, and are therefore unable to forgive, unable to connect, and continue to look for the negative of each other. Right now, we are so polarized that it is all an “us vs. them” and though the right has its own share of wrongs and bitterness and hate, it is the left that is predominantly espousing these traits into the mainstream. It is to the point that conservatives are looked to as purely evil and bigoted. Not people who have opposing viewpoints, but the enemy to overthrow. If we cannot get back to the traditional liberal ideas of freedom of speech and the ability to uphold that value with understanding that others do not have to agree with us to have our respect, we will go down the wrong path.

So, the leftists/CRT activists have all the tendencies for TIV/PIVO. What are the consequences of this trait? There are 3 cognitive biases, the authors discuss:

1. Interpretation Bias: people with TIV go into the world and into situations with the idea already in their head that they will be hurt — especially in situations where there is room for interpretation. For example, before asking for help moving, you assume your friends of family will say no. This correlates to individuals with PIVO, in that they tend to see the outgroup (conservatives for example) as hostile without the ability to give them the benefit of the doubt they would give to someone in their ingroup (fellow leftists). An interesting point the study mentions is “participants with high PIVO scores also responded faster, indicating that their responses were more automatic” in the interpretation bias test. So not only do you start to look at another group as hostile, but it becomes second nature to do so, without thinking of them first as flawed human beings deserving of the attempt of understanding.
2. Attribution of Hurtful Behaviors: People with TIV/PIVO “experience offenses more intensely” and “attribute more malicious intent to the offender.” Just look at Ijeoma Oluo’s first couple of chapters in “So You Want To Talk About Race.” Intent no longer matters in a situation where one just feels hurt. If a person thinks you were intentional when you bumped into them and therefore hurt them, paraphrasing a point she made in her book, it does not matter if is was an accident. It does not matter why you did what you did, it only matters how the “victim” felt. Now to say this is a fringe view would be one thing, but one look at the raving reviews of this book can put that point to rest. Also vital to mention is the finding “when primed with reminders of historical group trauma, attributions of malevolent intentions to the outgroup increased among high but not low- PIVO individuals.” This study, as mentioned before, involved Israeli Jews. But if you look at society in the United States today, one can easily draw a parallel to the historical trauma of black Americans and the now all too common accusations of white supremacy and racism across the board for all white Americans, no matter your character, purely based on the fact that you are white. Maybe, if we keep reading psychological studies and think critically, we can start to see this phenomenon as a mental distortion to overcome instead of reality. This is very much in line with the psychological viewpoint of strength from within; and TIV/PIVO are associated with its opposite: the authors state individuals with TIV/PIVO have “an external locus of control, that is, the belief that it is not the self that has control over one’s life and future but, rather, fate, mercy of other people, or superior forces.” It has been said by many wise men, from Marcus Aurelius to the Buddha, and it has been reaffirmed by psychology, that you are in power and when you feel it, TIV and PIVO are less likely to flourish within you. If we can see that TIV and PIVO don’t fair well for individuals or groups, why allow a system such as CRT (which meets all the criteria discussed) to thrive?
3. Memory Bias: basically a rumination of the negative, and a reduction of the positive. You recall all the negatives and attribute those traits to today’s population of the outgroup.

All of this, the study continues leads to a lack of forgiveness, an unwillingness to forgive and move on from perceived hurts, and essentially a very narrow and rigid view of the world and people in the community that have been “outed” as perpetrators based on nothing they themselves committed, but rather their perceived actions or the historical actions of their ancestors. It continues to discuss research in the finding that most people with TIV or PIVO tend to have anxious attachment rather than secure or dismissive — these three are based on the attachment theory. The study is worth the read, and much more can be said about all this. But the point to be made is we are basing the future of the country on theories rooted in unhealthy psychological constructs. It is a narrative in direct opposition to sound psychological studies. It is something to learn from, and reflect. And the next time we are in a situation where we jump the gun to judgement, we can maybe take a step back and truly look at whether or not it is warranted, and whether we can instead take someone on good faith and try reasoning instead.

Till next time,

-Sensible.