Welcome to Civilization 3.0.

The Post-Christian, Post-Virtue Culture of Victims...

...always looking to "out-victim" each other.

//A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services at a major university to join faculty and administrators for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.

Faculty at the meetings noted that students’ emotional fragility has become a serious problem when in comes to grading. Some said they had grown afraid to give low grades for poor performance, because of the subsequent emotional crises they would have to deal with in their offices. Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such “failure” as the end of the world. Faculty also noted an increased tendency for students to blame them (the faculty) for low grades—they weren’t explicit enough in telling the students just what the test would cover or just what would distinguish a good paper from a bad one. They described an increased tendency to see a poor grade as reason to complain rather than as reason to study more, or more effectively. Much of the discussions had to do with the amount of handholding faculty should do versus the degree to which the response should be something like, “Buck up, this is college.” Does the first response simply play into and perpetuate students’ neediness and unwillingness to take responsibility? Does the second response create the possibility of serious emotional breakdown, or, who knows, maybe even suicide?

Two weeks ago, that head of Counseling sent us all a follow-up email, announcing a new set of meetings. His email included this sobering paragraph: “I have done a considerable amount of reading and research in recent months on the topic of resilience in college students. Our students are no different from what is being reported across the country on the state of late adolescence/early adulthood. There has been an increase in diagnosable mental health problems, but there has also been a decrease in the ability of many young people to manage the everyday bumps in the road of life. Whether we want it or not, these students are bringing their struggles to their teachers and others on campus who deal with students on a day-to-day basis. The lack of resilience is interfering with the academic mission of the University and is thwarting the emotional and personal development of students.”//

Divide and Conquer

Maybe the end goal of Victim Group Balkanization is to permit someone - someone in control of the government, i.e., "the thing we all do together" - to set the agenda for everyone?

//Speaking on a panel in Oxford this week, as part of spiked’s ongoing Down With Campus Censorship! tour, it wasn’t long before I heard the immortal non-rebuttal: ‘Well, that’s all very well for you to say, as a white-cis-heterosexual male.’ In Edinburgh the following night, we didn’t even have to wait to go out for questions before I was reminded of both the colour of my skin and the contents of my pants by one of my white-cis-heterosexual female opponents in the course of her opening remarks. For the rest of the evening, ‘speaking as a [insert multi-hyphenate identity here]…’ was, naturally, the preface to almost every audience contribution.

Privilege-checking has become a source of mockery for students who actually retain one foot in reality. But this trend, so popular among SU bods and blue-haired pseudo-radicals, hasn’t come out of nowhere. These are the children of multiculturalism. People who, from nursery on, have been constantly reminded just how different we all are, and how we’ve been placed into our own pre-packaged boxes.

It’s a tragedy that even a discussion of something as universal, as human, as freedom is so quickly divided up along racial or sexual lines. Sure, none of us think in abstract. Our ideas are inevitably informed by our experience. But even bothering to come together and talk about these things assumes that we can reach some sort of understanding: that the best ideas, and the most cogent arguments, will win out no matter who they come from. They can appeal to the reason of all of us. The rise of this new, PC-garbed racialism on campus – the eternal, whiny chorus of ‘check your privilege’ – rubbishes this universalist spirit. On some essential level, goes this toxic logic, we can never understand one another, let alone come together to pursue common goals.

"First, do no harm."

The government has got to stop "helping."

What do low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common? It cannot be simply low incomes, because children from other groups in the same low-income brackets outperform whites in England and outperform blacks in America.

What low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common is a generations-long indoctrination in victimhood. The political left in both countries has, for more than half a century, maintained a steady and loud drumbeat of claims that the deck is stacked against those at the bottom.

The American left uses race and the British left uses class, but the British left has been at it longer. In both countries, immigrants who have not been in the country as long have not been so distracted by such ideology into a blind resentment and lashing out at other people.

In both countries, immigrants enter a supposedly closed society that refuses to let anyone rise — and they nevertheless rise, while the native-born at the bottom remain at the bottom.

Those who promote an ideology of victimhood may imagine that they are helping those at the bottom, when in fact they are harming them, more so than the society that the left is denouncing.

Spot On.

Jim Geraghty observes:

Much of the stir comes from Anita Dunn's telling author Ron Suskind that the Obama White House "actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women." Then she denied she said that, and then Suskind played a tape of her saying that, so that's pretty much all you need to know about Anita Dunn, along with her fondness for Mao.


Now, if the White House really was a hostile environment for women, that's terrible. But I'm going to go out on a limb and offer the insane theory that if you had to pick the group of people most prone to complaining that they're being ignored and disrespected, you would probably pick a bunch of Democratic political staffers, lawyers, academics, apparatchiks, and wonks. No? If you had gone to the staffers who were African-American, or Jewish, or gay, or not from Chicago, or some other demographic distinction, and asked them, "Does the president listen enough to you and people like yourself, or are you sometimes snubbed?" it wouldn't be that hard to generate some tales of indignation and woe. For a bunch of these folks, their entire worldview is based upon the patriarchy and the establishment keeping them down, and they can't suppress those instincts of victimization just because they voted for the new boss. I suspect that upon entering the White House, a lot of folks find that their egos simultaneously swell and get more fragile. Then they're put in a high-stress environment, where any error reflects badly on the munificent Sun King, and they're working extraordinarily long hours, convinced that the future of the country and/or liberalism depends on every move they make. Throw in a walking harassment lawsuit waiting to happen such as Rahm Emanuel, and you have the single most combustible working environment since the Hindenberg.