The Comforting Addictiveness of Victimhood — Part One
The politics of victimhood have been playing patty cake with the Identitarian Right and Left for over a decade. A recovering victimhood addict explains why it's dangerous.
This is the second of four Establishing Shot foundational pieces that are the pillars of my yearslong thinking about critical theory and the three heads of Woke Cerberus. Breaking down the politics of victimhood turned out to need more words and room to breathe than I initially thought. Plus, a flurry of recent events related to this very subject needed to be incorporated. I’ve broken it into two parts to ease digestion, like assorted berry-flavored Tums.
As always, I’m just following Substack’s instructions for building a media empire that rivals Murdoch’s:
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PIGGY THE SCAPEGOATED BLACK SHEEP
As I recall, my first breakthrough in therapy happened within the first few sessions. I was still downloading my complex, eventful, obscenely privileged, and exotic childhood; luckily, Dr. Borkheim is also an Ameropean, Paris Chapter, around my age, and went to school with people I know. It might have been further down the line than the first sessions — I have a lot of life to untangle.
Like many patients, I’d begun “the work” for completely different reasons than what I ended up being treated for; I was at a dead end, unable to melt the permafrost that had settled over my career early on, and in the sixth year of a hopeless romantic entanglement with a brilliant young bisexual, who by his own admission was a pu pu sampling platter of every personality disorder on the DSM-IV menu.
I knew for certain that both of these things were the inevitable result of being a terrible human being; when it came to the career aspect, I had destroyed every opportunity that had come my way, or so I’d always assumed. I could sense a swell rising in the ocean of my professional life once more and wanted to “surf the wave to success, rather than wipe out like I do every time.” I was concerned that I too had an undiagnosed disorder, but online tests kept lying to me and telling me the opposite. I went into therapy to man up and fix my flawed self once and for all, for my own good and those around me.
I didn’t know that it wasn’t normal for people to spend every morning until lunchtime — or on bad days until the gym — squabbling with their families over past and current injustices. Long before beginning therapy, with the help of Wikipedia I’d established that I was “the identified patient” of my family, as almost all black sheep are; in other words, the chronically ill, disabled child into whom the family pours their toxic dysfunction.
An underlying issue that I couldn’t perceive yet was that the better barnyard-animal analogy for the dynamic with my family was a scapegoat. As my close friend Julie in Melbourne, the only friend I have who has had a similar experience playing, put it, “When people ask me, I tell them I’m from Lord of the Flies Island. Because every morning it was ‘let’s break Piggy’s glasses!’”
Black sheep, scapegoat, Piggy: Welcome to your childhood; the abattoir’s down the hall, three doors on the left. Careful: the blood on the floor is slippery, and don’t mind the screaming.
Toward the end of the session that kicked off the first breakthrough, Dr. Borkheim casually said, “This is your comfort zone.”
“My what?”
“Being the family’s whipping boy. It’s your comfort zone.” The memory of him saying that still feels like a slap across the face, as a life-changing breakthrough in therapy should feel. Perhaps cued by my bugged eyes and uncharacteristically loss for words — stripped from my tongue by cognitive dissonance raging across the neural pathways of my brain, as self-perception warped by over half a century of victimhood battled the invasion of a possible truth — Dr. Borkheim clarified: “I’m not saying it’s comfortable; it’s that over time you’ve come to feel comfortable in that role. It’s a sort of safe space.”
There are a host of symptoms that arise from enduring systematic abuse over decades. In my case it was the most warped self-image this side of true insanity, resulting from two distinct eras of my life: the psychological and physical abuse in childhood, when I bore the brunt of my parents’ force-five hurricane marriage; and after I grew to my full six-feet-three-inches and developed a sushi-knife-sharp wit and tongue “that could fell a man’s ego for life at ten paces,” as I put it, and could fight back. That’s when the abuse became purely psychological, a classic case of gaslighting.
My ex Jonathan Kemp, the author who taught queer theory at the University of London, said one night when I was rocking myself to sleep in the bosom of vodka-infused insecurity with a twist of anxiety, “If people knew how you really feel about yourself, they’d never believe it.” My outside presentation of self was in diametric opposition to my self-perception.
In my experience a breakthrough isn’t like getting a kink in your lower back snapped out by a chiropractor, especially one of that magnitude and duration; you don’t hop off your therapist’s sofa and sail out of the office with your posture restored and the confidence of a 90s supermodel. I had to work it out, thinking, revisiting, reframing, and above all talking both to myself and anyone who would listen. It seemed that I would shake someone’s hand and say, “Nice to meet you. I’m Piggy the Scapegoated Black Sheep. Let me download every detail about my relationship with my family.”
A year and a half after the breakthrough, it was Wes who dealt the second verbal slap, a few months after we began dating. We were in his SUV on Fountain in West Hollywood, me yammering as much to myself as to him, when he said, “Will you shut up about your family?” For a variety of reasons, Wes hadn’t seen his mother and father in nearly nine years while he was waiting for his green card to come through; he missed them. And that shut me up and locked the conversation about the abuse away where it belonged: between me and my therapist.
Over time, I stopped drinking without thinking about it; that’s when I realized that my comfort zone made of razors and thorns had been replaced by a cushy Tempra Pedic fluffy with relative happiness and healthy self-esteem 98% of the time. I didn’t know it was possible; I thought that state of being was my lot in life, that I was lucky if I felt okay about myself and my place in the world more days of the month than not.
As Julie said to me forty years ago, shortly after we’d become instant friends, “Sometimes family are more trouble than they’re worth.” Having given up trying to bring them into any kind of productive dialogue, of making them understand what happened, of getting them to stop “beating the wolf until he bites, just to say he’s bad” by manufacturing situations and pretexts that proved to them and others what a terrible person I am, I estranged myself from the adults in the family.
I don’t need justice; I need peace after these many long years to enjoy the rest of my life free of indignant rage, rancor and heartbreak. I don’t need them to see things through my prism of truth; I want to be free, for it to end — the only way that could happen is if I simply walked away.
I’m no longer a victim, nor even a survivor. I just am.
However, it didn’t happen as quickly or easily as it might seem broken down into these morsels of words your eyes skim easily, your fingers scroll mechanically. Omne trium perfectum: Good things come in threes. The direct translation is more precise for this purpose: Everything that is three is perfect. There was a third slap that liberated me, to become “I just am,” but its place is further ahead in this narrative. You’ll have to stay with me and read on.
THE MYSTICAL VACUUM CLEANER
When you embark on an Eastern spiritual path — a real one, not hot yoga, or anything designed to make you feel better about yourself, which jerry-rigs the strict practice of self-abnegation to the Western concept of the supremacy of the individual, thereby canceling its purpose — there are a few cheesy jokes that rotate between the interrelated esoteric disciplines of the three major religions: Sufism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The first I remember is “Why don’t Buddhists vacuum the corners of a room?”
“Because they have no attachments.”
My attachment to my victimhood is why it was a comfort zone. In my view, religions are interfaces that help as many people as possible interpret the realities of Existence, which seem mysterious and inexplicable, but they aren’t: science will explain all of them, eventually, even if it’s AI that will do it for us. In response to my nurturing, I constructed a personal religion that interpreted what was happening to me.
For reasons that I’ll elaborate on in future posts about esoteric spirituality and psychology, in the West we call this personal religion “identity.” People generally tend to cluster in mini-cults that share the same genre of identity: fashionistas, filmmakers, spiritual warriors, activists, Republican, hockey fans. It has a practical purpose when used as a tool for social interactions, best illustrated by the caste system, where your place in society, your profession, the rituals and superstitions particular to your subculture — your tribal markings — are determined at birth, written onto your mind as you evolve in that community.
Identity becomes destructive when it is placed above everything and everyone else, as we’ve seen with Wokeism. When the cult of identity is fused to victimhood it produces the sort of social strife we’re currently besieged by: the culture wars. If you accept that everything cultural is a type of religious belief in the expanded modern sense, the culture wars become holy, with sociopolitical conquest and domination as the goal, the shining Jerusalem upon a hill that must be flushed of its oppressive heretics and rule mankind under the doctrine of the new one true faith.
From my viewpoint as a member of one of the three “oppressed” groups of Wokeism, who also had a front-row seat at the outbreak of the Holy Culture Wars, it was critical-theory-based identity-and-victimhood activism that started them, not Conservatives, who are reliably consistent and steadfast in their beliefs: small government; lower taxes; big military; fewer entitlements. To those perennials are added causes of the moment, like the immigration crisis, but that’s so dire that it’s a bipartisan issue.
According to the Gospels According to Woke, the putative oppressors are White men. Critical race-feminist-and-gender-queer theory states that we are born with the “original sin” of a compulsion to oppress women, members of the expanding gender-queer spectrum, and “people of color.” Oppressing the three heads of Woke Cerberus is our entire motivation in life, rather than greed or natural dick-measuring competitiveness between men and same-race tribes, which are what our motivation has always been, but there I go victimizing again with my fragile White-privilege gaze.
Those of us who refuse to kneel to Wokeism — and prove our remorse and atone for our original sin by joining the fight and denouncing and canceling all who push back — are merely proving how righteous, urgent and immediate the Holy Culture War is. The more we call bullshit and push back, the more martyrs we create.
If you’re a White gay man you are still an oppressor. No matter how much discrimination you have endured, your fragile White-privilege gaze cancels it. Just when we thought that subjugation crap was almost over more of it rises up; there’s no rest for the natural-born wicked. Yeah, well: toss another faggot on the pyre, Marie. Unlike the faux victims of Woke, we know how to handle it — let’s say it’s in our DNA. We don’t need attachments to vacuum the corners; we just use our amazing sucking abilities, no gag reflex.
Victimhood, whether real or make-believe, as is the case with Wokeism, is critical to maintaining the Marxist oppressor-oppressed dynamic; without it, there are no oppressed. In the Victorian Era, when Marx was writing, oppression was cut and dried; Charles Dickens can tell you all about it. A hundred and fifty years later, it isn’t: there’s no longer any real institutional oppression in America or any country in the Global North. The Civil Rights Act and other laws protect fundamental rights; if they have been violated, and you have the evidence to support your claim, you can seek justice through the legal system and likely win.
Not all rights are fundamental. Abortion is a far murkier subject than equality or habeas corpus. By overturning Roe v Wade, the Conservative Supreme Court didn’t take away a fundamental right; it scrapped an agreement that should’ve been codified into law long ago, when Liberals had enough of a majority.
Alito’s words in his decision that this is about a procedure that only women can have, not about women themselves, should be taken at face value; the notion that Conservatives are raging misogynists bent on victimizing women in a real-life version of The Handmaid’s Tale is an absurd accusation made by people who don’t really know any Conservatives, but somehow know them well enough to speak for how they think. Bear in mind that it isn’t just the major religions of the world that proscribe it: abortion is the only procedure specifically prohibited by the original Hippocratic Oath, you know, the one that supposedly says '“First, do no harm,” but actually doesn’t.
HISTORY IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN THE PRESENT
How do you keep the oppressor-oppressed dynamic alive in an age when there is no widespread systemic/institutional/structural oppression? By making up new crimes and social laws as you go along, thereby keeping your halo of martyrdom intact, and your ally-devotees feeling righteous and pure by supporting you unconditionally, unquestioningly. Punishment for violations is swift and merciless, with no due process: much more than being banned on social media, you are effectively banished from society, your means of survival cut off.
What constitutes offenses are determined by the tenets of Wokeism in the moment the putative crime against humanity occurred, with the complicit or tacit approval of legacy media outlets whose opinions and values people trust, and of human resources departments of companies big and small that are now expected to implement DEI programs, or risk not being in compliance with ESG, the version of DEI applied to a business as a whole to determine if it is worthy of investment or trading. Non-compliance to ESG means diminished funding and investment from financial institutions and Wall Street, which imperils all employees.
With no evidence-based, measurable indicators of oppression — e.g., objective data that supports claims of a lack of diversity, equity and inclusion — Wokeism deploys critical theory constructs and intersections as a kind of blockchain to mine for new crimes that are in violation of new social laws and civil rights.
On top of crimes nobody knew they were committing, historical crimes committed by specific White groups, like slaveholders, are passed down to all Whites living in the present, regardless of what kind of Whites they are, or whether they might have been historically oppressed themselves; colonialism and slavery prove that oppression is part of White “DNA.”
To use both sides of my family as an example, we were forced by the English, who conquered us after 800 years of fighting, to leave Scotland during the Highland Clearances to make way for vast estates of English lords. On my mother’s side, my ancestors were transported to Australia for crimes as petty as “impersonating an Egyptian,” or “stealing fish from a river, lake or pond.” It doesn’t matter what oppression my people suffered because they were White, so it’s just as well I don’t blame the English for what other people’s ancestors did. Plus, I don’t even know their names, so how can I assume their victimhood as my own.
I call the mining process “Whac-a-Woke,” a version of Whac-a-mole, except when you whack one Woke construct, two more appear in its place. If you add to this mix the situational narcissism, both personal and communal, that the Selfie Era has created to this Petrie dish of false oppression, you have what Elon Musk correctly calls “the woke mind virus".” Going back to my point about the expanded definition of ‘religion,’ all of them are mind viruses.
We know from history that similar movements — the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution; McCarthyism; Mao’s Cultural Revolution — always peter out at some point, but we have yet to achieve herd immunity from this particularly virulent and changeable mind virus. To stretch the virus metaphor to its limit: People and institutions that have taken a firm stance in support of the Woke cult of victimhood are resistant to listening to reason and letting objective truths determine what is real social justice worthy of activism, much like those who refused vaccines during the Pandemic. All legitimate, evidence-based opposition is dismissed as “grievance,” often accompanied by hate laughing.
There is no true equality with double standards.
— Me
COLOR BY NUMBERS
When I was mapping out the four Establishing Shot posts for this newsletter two months ago, I intended to address the addictiveness of victimhood by using equal examples from all three heads of Woke Cerberus. But last week a series of concerning events happened that was given no importance by non-Conservative mainstream media: a Rasmussen Reports survey revealed that 47% of Blacks either disagreed or weren’t sure about the statement, “It’s okay to be White.” To keep this piece timely and relevant, I’m going to focus on modern antiracism as a stand-in for all three heads of Woke Cerberus in the victimhood discussion.
The survey results went viral a few days after it was released when Scott Adams urged Whites to “get the hell away” from Black people. Adams was canceled, dropped from every newspaper that ran his strip, and lost his agent. I’m not interested in whether or not Adams is a racist, or whether it was indeed hyperbole and intended as a joke, as he claimed. I’m not even calling out the usual double standard that as a comic writer he should have been taken at his word and accorded the same diplomatic immunity about racist statements that are accorded to Black comedians who regularly make casual racist jokes about Whites, or launch into unfunny screeds about “Alphabet People,” as Dave Chappelle has branded members of the LGBT community, a pejorative nickname that has now been added to the many we’ve already been saddled with over the centuries.
Tangentially, it’s worth noting that this Scott Adams double standard means that Chappelle isn’t uncancellable because he’s a comedian, but because he’s Black. Why isn’t Adams’ statement a subversive joke, too? Are they saying Dilbert isn’t subversive comedy? Its snarky, oblique satire singlehandedly changed cubical-workplace culture, the relationship between managers and employees, the role of human resources, and on and on.
In my view it doesn’t matter whether it was a joke or not — it was simply idiotic; however, if hugs and cuddles from rightwingers are what he wanted, then it wasn’t that idiotic. I’m only interested in the Rasmussen survey itself.
Almost all media outlets, including AP News, which is supposed to be politically neutral, tried to undermine its importance by pointing out Rasmeussen’s Conservative bias; that the survey question itself was popular on alt-right site 4Chan; and by highlighting that nearly all the media coast to coast had dropped Dilbert, thereby bolstering Conservative grievances about the corruption of objective journalistic standards by Wokeism.
While Rasmussen is Conservative, it’s nonetheless an approved pollster on Liberal aggregator FiveThirtyEight, which gives it a B score and adjusts the results by three to four percentage points. AP News’ polling company, AP-NORC, doesn’t have a grade for some reason, but is adjusted by two to three percent. This still means that ~43% of Blacks don’t think it’s okay to be White.
I wasn’t merely saddened when I read the Rasmussen numbers, I was heartbroken. I knew that Black assumptions about the White experience were deeply flawed and dangerously pervasive, but the extent of their reach in the Black population, and how much they have formed the Black victimhood comfort zone, was yet another reality that I’ve avoided contemplating till now. As much as I haven’t wanted to believe it, we can observe Black racism everywhere, not just against Whites: the greater threat to Asian Americans is Blacks.
As New York Times columnist John McWhorter, one of a small, barely heard but growing number of intellectual Black voices of reason in the Holy Culture Wars, said about the responses to Liberal White responses, "victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community's response to all race-related issues… it's time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning as 'understandable' the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it.”
As the saying goes, “The path to Hell is paved with good intentions.” We reached Hell in June 2020, and have been terrorized by Woke Cerberus guarding its gates ever since. In all of my travels, I have encountered few communities as well-intentioned as Anglo-American Yankees. A highly pragmatic bunch, we usually know when something is counterproductive, but not when it comes to modern antiracism.
The implications of the Rasmussen numbers are that America’s true “original sin of racism” is also — perhaps even mainly — Black racism. The very possibility of that goes against an orthodoxy that McWhorter agrees with me has become a religion. A fellow atheist, he believes that because Wokeism is a faith, its tenets aren’t up for discussion.
I agree with that, but freedom of religion also means freedom from it. People also need to be aware of exactly what they’re supporting, whether vocally, through their actions, or simply saying, “If that’s how they feel, it must be real. I can’t speak for the Black experience.” As I’ll explain in later posts specifically about modern antiracism, the problem isn’t Whites speaking about the Black experience, it’s Blacks speaking about ours by assuming that race is something we think and talk about as often as they do. That’s not how the human mind works: It prioritizes what it important or threatening, and race simply isn’t either to the vast majority of Whites. Assuming that it is a preoccupation is pure projection.
There’s been a lot of explaining and debating about the numbers and Scott Adams in essays and comments outside of the mainstream media, especially here on Substack — this interview between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter is a great example. I take the numbers at face value without the need for someone to explain them to me; the rest is just quibbling that only reveals how people are processing the information personally and socially, whether they feel they’re victims, or they’re Conservative bullies, or independent cartoon aficionados muttering, “Wait, Dilbert? Him, canceled, too? Aw: He got me through that miserable job at Citibank that was, like, years of back-to-back Mondays in February, even in the summer. But isn’t he like, the snarkiest man alive? Maybe he was joking?”
As Julie from Melbourne would tell you, “It’ll all come out in the wash, pet.”
DON’T MIND ME
The purpose of this newsletter isn’t to add yet another voice of White male “grievance” into debunking Wokeism — if you’re anti-Woke, you have grievances; if you’re pro, you’re a snowflake — or supporting the wolf biting after he was provoked; there are plenty of better-informed academics and opinionators than I who can rebut false accusations and beliefs. The national Whac-a-woke championships are all theirs.
Quibblers & Scribblers is about storytelling and applying the fictionalization process to deconstruct social narratives, in order to get a better understanding of how we got to this point. It’s the best way I know of sifting whatever tiny nuggets of value there are in this mess from the piles of worthless muck that are hiding them.
Black victimhood of an unusual kind was on display last week, when Chris Rock blew Netflix viewers away — according to Twitter, at least — with a live performance, the last ten minutes of which he spent addressing Will Smith’s Oscar slap.
Just when you thought that we finally had one grievance vented by a Black male comic where White people can’t possibly be involved, Rock gives the reason he waited a year before his response to Smith’s legendary aggression and sadism in his last line, giving it pride of place in his ten-minute slam: “I got parents, and you know what my parents taught me? Don’t fight in front of White people.” Mic drop.
But… why? What has any of this got to do with White people? He even punctuated his long-awaited response about public aggression by another Black man with a mic drop, the gestural equivalent of five exclamation marks, after blaming his cowardice on us.
In fairness to a veteran, highly skilled comedian like Rock, part of whose role is to highlight the absurdities of social dynamics, he was stuck in a predicament: Woke orthodoxy states that Blacks can only be victims, and that includes Smith; the true oppressor must always be White, never mind that the biggest threat to Black men is other Black men, not cops, and certainly not Whites.
Why didn’t he press charges for assault and battery there and then at the ceremony, thereby teaching children and young people — or everyone who appreciates him enough that he gets paid “a million dollars to voice a donkey” — there are consequences when you commit a violent crime? Because Will Smith wasn’t the actual perpetrator — it was really Whites?
Arch-Woke feminist Roxane Gay — an upper-class Black lesbian who has spun a healthy career out of racial victimhood, despite being married to a White woman and having gone to Exeter, the most elite boarding school in Yankeedom, therefore in all the Americas, and then to Yale in the 90s, no sane person’s idea of a Wasp’s nest of racism — had this to say about Rock’s final slam at White people in a piece for the New York Times, ‘Chris Rock Looks Very Small Right Now’:
In the awkward void of his mistake, I was struck by just how terrible the last joke was: silly and unartful, not at all profound. By the way he strutted offstage, Mr. Rock gave the impression that he nailed the punchline. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
Listening to Rock, reading Gay, McWhorter, Loury, my mind engages in its own form of click-surfing: to Dave Chappelle’s problematic street-bully comedy; to Charles Blow’s monomaniacal, unworldly hate-writing; to the brilliant, crypto-Machiavellian manipulations of both Blacks and Whites by Colin Kaepernick; to the disingenuousness of The New York Times, the traditional clarion of my natal world and therefore our well-intentionedness, and the newspaper’s incubation of the highly problematic 1619 Project, as well as providing a bully pulpit for the aforementioned opinion writers and too many other socially destructive voices to list in one thought; to how India challenges Western moralism and assumptions about human nature and fairness; of Bob Marley’s song about mental slavery, how well I know exactly what that means, not just because of being Piggy the Scapegoated Black Sheep, raised in an isolated pen, nourished on his own victimhood, but also because of the spine-bending burden of gay shame, fear, self-loathing, and the longing to be straight and free; to how Chappelle’s backhanded appreciation for gay men by rehashing the stale, moldy lie that he wishes he were gay, which only deepens the subjugation of we, his Alphabet People, per his characterization nothing more than sex addicts slathered in baby oil dancing on Pride floats, kneeling at glory holes, kneeling to be fucked, kneeling after the first blow of a teen’s baseball bat, but in the seconds before the next one crushes our skulls and switches off our minds forever, we don’t see our lives flash before our eyes — rather, we’re given a glimpse of freedom from our victimhood, finally.