The West Has a Grievance Problem
What happens when everyone wants to be a victim? We’re about to find out.
In the West we used to celebrate excellence, achievement and victory. Now we celebrate victimhood, grievance and participation trophies, and it seems everyone wants to get in on the action. Being American I tend to talk about things from the American perspective, obviously. But much of our cultural rot is shared with the rest of Western Civilization and grievance mongering is among them. Be it protests over reducing deficit financed social services, not getting a free gender studies degree or women having to suffer under the male gaze (warning: nsfw), it seems these issues have no problem crossing the Atlantic.
Society has such a demand for victimization that we have an epidemic of fake hate crimes.
Why?
Is it simply because it’s easier to claim victimhood than to work? Because people have a desire to go viral and be internet famous? No such thing as bad publicity, and what gets more publicity than being a victim on the right side of the narrative?
Or is what seems like a sudden, modern trend the result of something that has been going on for a long time? Have people become conditioned to desire such status and the accolades, and sympathy, that come with it?
I’ve always had a strong interest in history but never really thought much about pop-culture. When I was a kid, history class said everything that happened in the 20th century was “current events”, and other than WWII and the Vietnam War, I didn’t have much interest in it. That changed when I decided to get into law enforcement.
Where I used to live, police are required to have at least a two year degree, but back in the day the job was so competitive to get into that many of us got bachelors degrees instead.
I was a bit of a nontraditional student, going to school on the GI Bill after an enlistment in the Marines. So maybe I came into it a little salty, or maybe it’s just my nature that I didn’t accept everything that was said without examination or challenge. Either way, for the first time I began seeing this trend of victimhood.
“There aren’t very many women in policing you know” accompanied with the tilted head and raised eyebrows indicating you are supposed to assume *and accept* this is because of sexism. Because it couldn’t just be that not very many women want to be cops. Definitely not that. This was a problem that needed a solution! And what was that solution? What is it always?
“We have to tear down this old, outdated structure and build it a new way!” Oh, and reduce standards. Physical fitness standards are sexist of course. Because cops never have to chase people or fight to arrest people who don’t want to go to jail. That couldn’t possibly be the reason for physical standards. Nope. It’s those old white men in the old boys club!
Physical fitness itself is now also racist. Of course.
As an aside, I did a research paper showing that while male police officers vastly outnumbered female officers, both men and women were licensed as peace officers at about an 85% rate of their eligible population. Meaning that the eligible pool of women were hired at the same rate as eligible men. The gender difference in active police officers was entirely due to the hiring pool of women being so small.
That was good to bring my grade in that class from an “A” to a “C”. Odd that.
In the last twenty-some years I have noticed this same pattern play out all over society. Every institution, every pillar of society. Someone is a victim of some terrible “-ism” and it requires the destruction and rebuilding of said institution. Always. Inherent in the “rebuilding” is a reduction of standards. Everything from grammar to grades somehow victimize people and we can’t possibly have that.
We have elevated victimhood to such lofty status that it infects everything from air to video games. Victimhood used to be reserved for people who had something done to them like robbery or assault. Now the perpetrators are victims of the criminal justice system and people who voluntarily choose to attend college and take out loans to pay the administratively inflated tuition are “victims of predatory lending.”
The result of our collective rush to victimhood? The death of standards. All of them.
Reduced standards for behavior, for learning, for our scientists and engineers, for our military and police. The eventual destruction of society as we idiocracy our way to doom. Only not as funny.
