It's popular to be a victim these days. Much more popular than I recall it being earlier in my lifetime. It even goes so far as to regard people who aren't victims with contempt.
Agreed. When I was young, victimhood was mostly scorned. "Don't be a crybaby." "Shake it off." "Toughen up." "Words can't hurt you." These were the messages I got from parents and teachers when I was feeling sorry for myself.
That seems to be an orthogonal issue. Namely, the expectation that whatever wrong you have suffered should be righted. The message is to shut up because nobody is going to help you. Certainly effective to getting the victim to stop complaining. But that's not the same as actually coping with the issue, or better yet, solving it.
Well, maybe it seems like it's just trying to get you to shut up, but part of that message is that you're the one who's in control of your reaction, and that's what you can reliably control in that kind of situation. That even if your feelings are hurt, fundamentally you can still be OK, if you can learn to let it slide off you rather than getting all tied up about it. That's a pretty helpful, if difficult, lesson to learn.
Except that, kids who let slide first attempts at bullying get bullied again and again and again. And it escalates. It also creates a cycle in which a kid that was bullied once is more likely to be bullied again.
The kids who are able to set boundaries, say no, respond etc are more likely to stop whole dynamic even before it starts.
Or you can teach them to fight to be treated fairly and to fight for others to be treated fairly. That's what I see out of the generation in their 20s. They don't seem to see themselves as victims. They have a keen sense of justice and are willing to speak out.
Being OK isn't mutually exclusive with defending yourself. But if you're really OK, you might not feel the need to engage, because it might not really matter. The point is not to let your emotions control your response. If you calmly decide that you need to push for something, then that's the response you go with.
Sometimes coping with issues is just learning to ignore them, you must learn that even though you feel hurt there it is not worth putting energy into dealing with what people say and do.
People forget that 50% of the people on the planet are below average, its best to remember that when you're dealing with life. You can't expect these people to have reasoning and logic skills, emotional resilience or even base levels of compassion.
"Toughen up princess" can frequently be the best advice you can give someone.
Teaching that words can't do you permanent harm, yes. How you feel when being called a name, or having someone say something hurtful may not be a choice. But whether you dwell on it, whether you choose to continue to feel hurt, whether you choose to act in revenge... all of those things are within one's control. We absolutely should teach self-control and mastery of one's emotions to children. It helps them become sane, happy adults.
It is cruel to withhold this education from them, because a state of perpetual offendedness is misery.
I really don’t know what you mean by teaching mastery of ones self control to children.
They are kids not monks. You can teach them all the self control you like, I don’t think there is a serious argument that let’s say for some particularly sadistic reason I wanted to bully them and do real harm. How difficult do you think it would be exactly?
Kids or adults for that matter aren’t failures for feeling hurt. The idea that you can’t hurt someone without physical pain is really not a serious idea.
It’s entirely possible to get overcome that and genuinely not let it impact you, I’m not saying that, I’m saying for a lot of people it’s not a normal reaction. The goal of life isn’t to not feel emotions in response to words. I genuinely am not even sure you would even really want that if you had a choice.
Self-control: Governing one's behavior and reaction.
Mastering one's emotions: Feeling the emotion, understanding it, and developing skills for overcoming negative feelings. Also, the ability to choose not to act based on strong emotion.
In a crisis, or in critical or chronic situations, possession of these two related skills usually yields superior outcomes.
It isn't "wrong" to feel the feelings. It is wrong to let the feelings dominate you to the point of paralysis or drive you to harmful behavior. Children can't help going through phases as their brains develop where they're overcome with emotions. You help them by teaching them it is OK to feel sad or angry. Then you help them by teaching them how to cope through action, or focus on something else like goals.
Having negative emotions is normal. Coping with negative emotions, mastering them, is a valuable skill.
Words do not inflict physical injury. You teach that. Words can inflict emotional pain. You also teach that this is so. Words can inflict mental injury, and you teach that, too. But you start with the far simpler formulation of "sticks and stones" until metaphor and nuance are available tools.
It's like teaching children about strangers. There are exceptions to every rule, but if you value their safety when they're small, you teach them the rule "Do not talk to strangers." Young children don't have the social context to parse exceptions until they're older... when the teaching has to add resolution and detail.
I see what he's saying, though I have different philosophy of what the world needs.
If I'm attempting to repeat back his sensibility: It's an aspiration for people to be self-responsible. Look after self, then others. We're individuals first, and must look after ourselves, and then the collectivist-minded activities come after looking after the self.
This self=>others axis is the basis of Maslow's hierarchy. But it's the inverse of many cultures' (including the blackfoot tribes from which Maslow borrowed the model, which put community at the bottom of the pyramid of needs, oddly enough)
I respect his view (it's rather effective in some contexts, esp environments of scarcity), but I'd rather embrace the collectivist and interdependent aspects of humanity as the foundational principle.
My general impression is that both of these worldviews could save us in different contexts. Maybe the collectivist would save us from climate change, and individualist would save us in some armed conflict. I feel we need to keep both, and keep them balanced, and respecting one another. It's like keeping a seed vault -- different wisdoms for later, and part of a diversity of thought we should probably preserve for unknowable future challenges.
> I don’t think there is a serious argument that let’s say for some particularly sadistic reason I wanted to bully them and do real harm
I think you'd be surprised. I had some tough great uncles who taught rough lessons and were damn proud of it.
Why is it so much the problem of the person being targeted though? The approach you describe seems not to address the behavior of the aggressors at all.
There's a tricky balance that needs to be struck between personal agency and the mechanisms which society puts in place to prevent aggressors from victimizing people.
One such mechanism is the mentality of "believing victims". Not a bad thing on the face of it, but my feeling is that we've tipped over into a world where people are incentivized to become victims. In this way the mechanism ends up becoming weaponized and wielded like a cudgel by those good at playing the victim against a new set of victims who just aren't as good at that game.
These new victims may end up even more disadvantaged due to ideological fashions which shape who we see as victims (e.g. "girls are more likely to be victims than boys") and dictate to what degree we should mete out empathy (e.g. "we have to make sure we aren't overly empathetic towards the white kids since we are biased and they are privileged").
That just gives a pass to people who employ abusive behavior since the entire burden of adjustment is shifted to the receiver, incentivizing more abuse.
I'm not sure why you're making sarcastic responses to things I didn't say in the first place.
If there is no disincentive for abuse, then abusive people will continue to inflict abuse on others for as long as they derive some emotional/social/financial gain from it. You are arguing that it is wholly up to those others (ie non-abusive people) to change themselves by making themselves less attractive targets in some fashion. But this has a cost and meantime the abusive person is gaining in strength and confidence. Also, new people are coming along all the time who are vulnerable to abusive behavior, so if previous targets become unattractive, abusers can rely on a relatively steady supply of new ones. I think you need to explain what the overall benefit of your approach is at the collective level.
It's also perplexing to me that you equate inflicting penalties upon abusers with 'becoming the abuser instead'. An abuser, by definition, is someone who inflicts pain or suffering on someone else who doesn't deserve it. Retaliation against abuse cannot be considered abuse, unless you want to argue that there is no such thing as a right to self-defense, only to self-protection. That seems similar to suggesting everyone become like turtles or snails, building shells which they can withdraw into when attacked but never developing any retaliatory capability.
I look forward to considering your alternative perspective.
Contra: words spoken to children can and do have powerful effects, especially from parents and other family, and especially if it accompanied by physical abuse. “I am going to rape you,” followed up by that very action, will lead to damage that is difficult if not impossible to overcome.
Like with most things, the best is probably some middle path, and society will overshoot one way and then the other. Whether we are currently “overshot” or not is up to the reader to decide :)
I feel quite a bit of alignment with this article.
But also, I def understand that scorning victimhood is exactly the sort of thing a culture would do when those in control (and with greater influence to shape narratives) are hurting a ton of people. It's a ridiculously effective way to avoid reckoning with our impacts on each other. And so of course someone with power to shape a narrative would use that ability to make being "too much of a victim" the taboo (not maliciously, just for self-preservation and limiting their own cognitive overhead of existing).
I'm firmly in the middle of this conversation. There's a balance of what's healthy for society imho. We have pockets in various places where unhealthy levels of one view or the other have concentrated. And sometimes these bubbles have moments of floating up to the top levels of societies, in fad-like ways. Then we see how things start working, and we learn and adjust <3
> "Don't be a crybaby." "Shake it off." "Toughen up." "Words can't hurt you."
That is different issue. When kids are bullied, these are good for adults, because they force the victim to be silent, so that peace is kept. If you are educator and believe those, problem with bullying is essentially solved.
You don't have to deal with bullies themselves. You dont have to spend effort teaching bullied kid how to effectively set boundaries. You dont have to listen to yelling as the kid is trying to set boundaries for the first time and inevitably failing.
You dont have to do anything, except telling the bullied kid to shut up.
Sure. We all got these as kids. Twenty years later, I am much happier when I am able to communicate my unhappiness to people who care about me and who are able to get me through the tough times. Secure attachment is a pleasant thing.
But I'm not a safetyist. I much prefer to face the world as it stands. But I have a place of voluntary individuals who provide me support and I am stronger for it.
I was recently reading Nietzsche and I'm sorry I won't quote him correctly, but he said something like this: that the weak would use their weakness as an insidious power, to control, to manipulate, to coerce, to bully; it was all just a deep down ploy to exert their tyranny on those stronger. I found it fascinating.
True, but it's been weaponized extremely well by one side in recent years (2012~14 and onwards). Reminds me a lot of how it was weaponized by the other side in the late 80s and 90s.
I honestly have no idea which “side” you mean. Seems to me that both mainstream political sides are mainly about victimhood now. The whole point of Trumpism is “actually I’m the victim”
Reminds me of this spoof commercial I heard on some comedy radio show one time for the drug Nothingenol - for people who suffer anxiety over not having been diagnosed with a disorder.
