> So victimhood is a learned behavior after a certain age.
As a brown guy with kids in the school system, that's why recent trends in education alarm me. I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. It's dangerous experimentation with kids' psychology.
Growing up as one of the few brown kids in what was (back then) solidly Republican Virginia, I learned we should treat everyone like we'd want to be treated ourselves. I don't think it would have helped my personal or professional success--not to mention my mental health--to be socialized to look out for these dark and foreboding forces around every corner. That's irrespective of whether it's true or not. If our white neighbors hated having Bangladeshis move in next door, they never let on, and frankly I think I'm better off not having dwelt on what was in their deepest thoughts.
I value what you've written, and I agree although my experience was (possibly?) the inverse.
I was a poor white kid in a wealthy white area. While I lived in that area, I only got to briefly attend a private school because of my mothers boyfriend. Everyone knew I was the "poor kid", and my mother, who did her best, was _obsessed_ with the fact that everyone knew we were "imposters" - not wealthy, not married, from a broken home, "gold-digger", etc etc etc. The list of victim-tokens is miles long. It was an illusion - I don't think more than a small handful of adults and certainly no kids ever held my status against me.
When I lived on my own as a teenager, I had no shortage of people explaining why I was a victim due to my life experiences. Obviously, this isn't even close to the the same level of experience as racism, but I completely agree with "they never let on, and frankly I think I'm better off not having dwelt on what was in their deepest thoughts".
Fearing what was in the "deepest thoughts" of others crippled many people in my life. If anything, in my experience, that fear of judgement "in a deep thought" is a _much_ larger hindrance than any actual action that was taken against us. I see echos of this in the politics of people I've met all around the country. And the great irony is that kids who grew up in wealth and surrounded by healthy parents seem oblivious or to not care whatsoever about such judgements from others. Are they ignorant or inoculated?
I'm _extremely_ cautious of even inhabiting the thought that the victim mentality hurts more than the victimization, as obviously that can turn callous incredibly quickly... But it's not a _useless_ thought either.
It's learned by going through trauma or PTSD enduring experiences. That's what the empirical data showed. It is not learned by simple teaching and seeing others attitudes, that bit was a non proven hypothesis that the interviewee said they think cultural differences might have an effect, but their experimentation were only done in Israel.
So when you hear "learned behavior" don't think as in this is what my parents told me or taught me. It means this was learned by being mistreated as a child, not given consistent care and attention, and such.
> You don’t need to have been victimized, physically abused, for example, in order to exhibit TIV. But the people who score very high on TIV are generally those who have experienced some kind of trauma, like PTSD
> when a child is very young, and care is uncertain, perhaps the caregiver, or the male figures in the child’s life, don’t act consistently, sometimes they may act very aggressively without warning, or they don’t notice that the child needs care. That’s when the anxious attachment style or ambivalent attachment style is created
> This is just my hypothesis, but there are certain societies, particularly those with long histories of prolonged conflict, where the central narrative of the society is a victim-oriented narrative, which is the Jewish narrative
The mere act of caring about your children's schooling, and taking measures to ensure its quality is a far more solid predictor of good outcomes than nearly anything else. At least, that's what economic data from the last fifty years says.
These "narratives" are just that, fictional stories told to support a prevailing social ideology, and yes, they are dangerous, not the least because they ignore the facts.
Appropriate advice at the individual level is often very different than, and sometimes the complete opposite of, appropriate advice at the demographic scale. It's fine to tell your brother to quit the shit and pick himself up by his bootstraps or whatever; it's both inappropriate and ineffective to translate that notion into social policy.
Systemic racism is a macro concern. Talking about it, and what to do about it, is a conversation totally different than the conversation you have with your kids about their lived experience. Being aware of systemic racism doesn't make anyone a victim. It makes them cognizant, smarter, better actors in the system.
Same thing but I have girls. I don't want them growing up with the locus of control outside of themselves. The studies are convincing that that is the worst thing you can for a child.
> I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about.
My local PBS station recently aired a series on Asian Americans. The first episode was all about how they were ill treated in the past, and their fight for civil liberties.
I didn't bother watching the other episodes. Certainly not a show I'll ever let my (Asian) children watch. It was a good episode if the topic was specifically about civil right struggles by Asian Americans, but deciding to start a series about a whole group of people with how they were mistreated is problematic. There's a lot more to Asian Americans than just their treatments by whites. Why not begin with their achievements and cultures, and leave this for a later episode? Is their mistreatment so important to their identity?
If I watched a series on African Americans, and it began with all the (real) systemic racism - their low graduation rates, high teen pregnancies, high unemployment, and tied it to the centuries of slavery, it would be equally problematic. Why not begin the series with things like "Every single new genre of American music in the 20th century (rap, rock n roll, etc) was pioneered by African Americans"? How many people know the negatives, and how many know this accomplishment? Ask yourself: Would a documentary series starting with their problematic statistics result in more people knowing the negatives vs the positives?
When I talk to people from my home country, you'll see this dissonance: They all sympathize with the "plight of the black man", and they'll all tell me to stay away from them. They watch documentaries like these.
I don't want my children growing up believing they are victims of society, even if there is truth to it. I grew up in a third country, and my race was definitely discriminated against in nasty ways. Yet my parents and school did not try to inculcate a sense of victimhood, and I can tell you - it's extremely beneficial not to be weighed down by that belief. And the racism there was more overt than here - often having to deal with it in stores and in school.
Of course, there will be conversations with my kids about it. But it will be somewhere in the middle of the list of important discussions to have, not on the top.
I agree with this 100%. The problem is that I present white (although I do not identify that way) and so I have been stripped of the right to even suggest the very point you just made under extreme penalty of being labeled a “racist”. Which is…the worst thing you can be in American culture.
My voice isn’t worth much and I am afraid, but if you stand, I will stand with you.
If they are teaching about systemic racism well then they are teaching what you can do about it. It’s not a ghost.
And teaching kids the truth in these matters is rarely a bad thing. Being able to identify things like using prison populations to prop up the population of conservative districts is something that only can be addressed if recognized to begin with.
As another brown guy with kids my anecdote is that I was discriminated by my high school counselor[1] but I took that as a life lesson. The lesson wasn't that white people are evil, but that bias is real and I have to be aware of what's going on and stand up for myself. The lesson has served me well and I've been very successful. Bias of all types is real, it makes no sense to me to hid that fact from my kids. I just teach them that it's one of many obstacles in life and the only way to achieve your goals is to work harder than the people in your way.
[1] A couple example incidents: 1) I wasn't even made aware of AP classes because I didn't look like the kids in those classes. I had to do self study to take the test after I learned about it, which I ended up aceing. 2) I lost out a big scholarship that I would have easily gotten if my counselor had worked with me the way she worked with the white kids.
You might have been better off not having dwelt on what was in their deepest thoughts, as long as what was in their deepest thoughts did not result in you getting arrested for no reason, getting killed by the very people who you thought existed to protect you for no reason, your kids not getting accepted in the schools, or after school programs they deserved for no reason, etc.
It’s amazing to me that brown people, like myself, who do really well in this country relative to most minorities, live to pretend as if they should just be the model minority without realizing that the only reason they can is because of all the blood sweat and tears spilt by the minority, often black, activists before them.
Of course, the ultimate irony, is that there is no evidence that victim hood is practiced by actual victims. If you consider the past 4 years, for example, it was spent with the President of the United States complaining on a nearly daily basis about everything. His entire base is built on little more than a laundry list of grievances. Their entire political movement at the moment can be reduced to complaining about “cancel culture” which is little more than complaining that white people cannot get well paid speaki by spots to spout racist bullshit.
If victim culture exists on a racial basis in the US, it exists almost entirely within the majority community, which shows that there’s absolutely no evidence that discussing real victimization causes a sense of victim hood amongst victims.
In fact, there’s good reason to believe that understanding that the racism they face might be systemic both allows the victims of the racism to not feel like victims anymore, but instead look for ways to succeed despite it, and allows them to not look negatively upon individuals anymore, because they learn that the racism is systemic and endemic, and as a result, is something that is exhibited by them as well.
I agree with you completely to the extend that I feel like world has grown little bit weird recently. "White supremacy" is especially ironic, considering there's countries where white people were oppressed and sold as slaves and had to fight for their own freedom, these people don't owe anything for anyone.
What really makes me nervous is the talk of "white privilege". Although it is not meant as such, it is saying that in the world as is, all things being equal, white people are superior to people of color. For example, if you had to evaluate totally objectively whether you should hire a white CEO or a person of color as CEO, and they were otherwise equal, if you believe in the framework of systemic racism/white privilege, you should hire the white CEO.
Moral persuasion, and aiming for an ideal world, will only be effective so far, and then people will turn to what gives them an advantage.
In the short term maybe a generation will not know how to deal with the knowledge of a system that is lopsided, but in the long-term waking up to the fact and then fixing the system is the only way we can have a better system.
When I was about 14 I was diagnosed with autism; specifically, PDD-NOS ("Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified"; nice catch-all). This diagnosis wasn't accurate, and was mostly based on my lack of social ability (I never really had most of the other signs of autism). Today I'm plenty sociable, and I'm basically just a normal guy.
I can't blame them for making this misdiagnosis though. I grew up in a single-parent household. My mum was essentially a deadbeat mum who could hardly be arsed to take care of her kids (or be arsed to do anything else for that matter, like, say, have a job). While she was only rarely physically abusive, she was very emotionally abusive, as well as just neglecting in her parental role. She always acts like everyone else is wrong; to this day she bitches and moans about how everyone else wrongs her all the time. Everything I did as a child was wrong somehow. Her TIV is high.
Furthermore, I was bullied a lot at school; I was already quite insecure, and this only made it worse. Kids can be very mean, and the insecure shy kid is a good target. This was at a time when it was shrugged off with "boys will be boys" so little was done about this from the school other than send me to Teakwando lessons :-/
For most of my teens and twenties I felt horribly insecure in all sorts of ways. I didn't have the courage to actually apply for a programming job until I was 25. For a very long time I felt like people being nice to me were just humouring me; this was extremely silly and paranoid, and I let many potential friendships pass me by just because I was too insecure to actually ask people if they're keen to have a drink or whatever. At the time though, it was extremely hard to get over this. This didn't really change until I had my first girlfriend at 27.
It's no surprise I was diagnosed with autism, even though it was wrong. My problems mostly weren't inherent to my character, they were just results from my attitude.
This only made it worse; well-intentioned and empathic as the youth care[1] people were, they basically just see you as a victim to be pampered. It certainly didn't help me move forward, as all you feel is "woe is me", and the constant focus on your shortcomings is essentially just an assault on your self-confidence.
If I look at myself from 15 years ago vs. now then in many ways I'm the same person: I still like the same things, my politics are still similar, I have the same sense of humour, etc. But in many ways I couldn't be more different. It was a slow change that took about 4 years; there was never an "aha!" epiphany. This isn't an intellectual thing anyway, it's an emotional thing and overriding emotion with intellect is often very hard. People with depression can't be fixed by telling them there is nothing to be depressed about, and insecure people can't be fixed by telling them there is nothing to be insecure about.
Now, the context and situation is completely different than yours, but the point of the story is that how you see yourself, and see yourself in relation to others is extremely important. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and claim it's one of the major factors determining your success and happiness in life (however you may measure these things), perhaps even the most important factor.
Perhaps I'm applying my own personal experiences a bit too much here, but what worries me especially is the effect is has on self-confidence of these kids. It's fine to have these kind of discussions in politics or academia, but teaching them to kids? I find it worrying. I think a more "deal with it" message along the lines of "yeah, you're gonna encounter racism and it sucks, you're still a great person with a lot of talents, so just deal with it" would be a lot better. It's unfair, but it is what it is, and if the end-goal is to empower black people then we should focus on what is effective, not what is perceived as "fair".
Perhaps this is also partly why both Asians and Latino people tend to do so much better than black people: a more positive empowering attitude in spite of racist obstacles. I think it's unfortunate that questions such as "what do these people do better?" are often explained as victim blaming of black people. In spite of mountains of text being written on this, especially in the last year, I find there's a sore lack of careful analysis on this topic as everything is infused with judgements and morality which clouds everything. Just the other day a HN discussion on the best messaging on these topics netted me a "white supremacy apologist" accusation/insult :-/
In the end, a lot of these questions are empirical questions, and should be answered as such. What you then do with the answers is very much a morality question, but it's an entirely different thing.
[1]: (presumably the US works different, but in the Netherlands kids with these kind of issues are more or less automatically enrolled in our communist Nazi socialist despotic "youth care" service, more or less like CPS except also for every-day normal guidance and counselling, and not just protection).
It has zero to do with kids being told that this or that is unfair, that racism or sexism exists. The article blames lack of emotional support from parents. That sentence is literally tl;dr for the following:
> So when a child is very young, and care is uncertain, perhaps the caregiver, or the male figures in the child’s life, don’t act consistently, sometimes they may act very aggressively without warning, or they don’t notice that the child needs care. That’s when the anxious attachment style or ambivalent attachment style is created.
and followed by the following:
> Yes, normally children internalize the empathetic and soothing reactions of their parents, they learn not to need others from outside to soothe themselves. But people with high TIV cannot soothe themselves.
It is quite odd to take that quote out of context and make it argument about something completely different, as if surrounding context in article supported the other claim.
I think that the idea that discussions of systemic racism or white supremacy are teaching kids to be victims isn't a fair assessment of how such education is structured.
It's just like how kids are taught about climate change, as best I can tell. It's a problem, and they all need to be aware and do their part. Teaching kids about climate change hasn't lead them to all give up since the planet is likely going to be in bad shape from global warming, it's empowered them, at least some of them, to fight for a future in which we change things and make things better.
The thing is, racism doesn't go away if you pretend it doesn't exist. Maybe you didn't experience it, but per the 2000 census, about 1 in five Virginians are Black.
You being one of the few brown kids means you likely grew up very differently from many Black and Brown students in Virginia, and I expect that is likely the result of decades of white Virginians working to end school bussing and other integration efforts, creating new school districts and private schools, shifting school attendance boundaries within districts.
I think you have to remember that racism is not natural, that it's effects and results, which have been normalized, need not exist, and consider how much our country fails to do right by kids who are BIPOC.
That's what systemic racism is. It's structures and institutions and systems which perpetuate unequal outcomes. We know that integration helps Black students (and their kids) succeed, and that studies generally fail to demonstrate any significant negative effect on white students. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/7/1/21121022/did-busing-for-s...
There doesn't have to even be any outright in your face animosity against Black and Brown people, it's just that, places with higher levels of Black and Brown people in Virgnia are more likely to undertake school district or school attendance rezoning, and rezoned areas are more likely to concentrate people who are poor and Black or Brown, or who are middle to upper class and white.
And that's just how it's failing kids with school segregation, do you want to know the stats on childhood hunger? as of March 2020, about 1 in five families surveyed said they didn't have enough food. Just the lack of subsidized school lunch during Covid in many places means kids are going without necessary nutrition. And, surprise, Black and Hispanic kids are twice as likely as non Hispanic white kids to face hunger in America. That is, again, systemic racism.
I imagine that probably doesn't help their personal or professional success, not to mention their mental health.
I linked two places people could donate to help feed hungry kids above, you can ignore me or disagree with what I said, but seriously, if you are doing well, you can spare a few bucks at least.
>I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about.
Learning this history is the first step of "doing something about it".
Brown/black people should know their history too, we can't just paper over the historic criminality of certain groups of people because it feels uncomfortable or somehow may make people unpatriotic. Everyone has a right to their history and black/brown people have been denied it in certain parts of the world, thanks in many cases to censorship and/or propaganda sucking the air out of the room.
I do find it interesting when new immigrants come to the US and "model-minority-explain" to the people (African Americans and others) that built this country for free and are actually the only reason non-white immigrants are even allowed into the country, that they should just move on or not pursue a better understanding of the history it was illegal for them to learn.
Sucking up to the majority for better standing at the expense of the purposely created minority underclass is a huge disservice to the people of this country/planet.
I always considered the current culture of cultivated-victimhood to be rooted in the manner Western people fundamentally define themselves by their triumphs against adversity. In the absence of real adversity, people seek and create surrogate adversity for themselves to triumph over. From this process they can rationalise themselves as having the inner-strength to overcome such barriers.
This is a clever comment and I'm surprised to see no further discussion. In the West, everyone needs to be the hero of their own story. Everyone needs to be an Achilles or a King Arthur, therefore everyone needs a dragon to fight. The bigger the enemy, the more morally entitled your actions feel.
This is similar to my belief as to why modern American politics is the way it is. It's so much left vs right, red vs blue, etc.
During the cold war, we had a common enemy in communism. Sure there were disagreements, arguments, fights, but at the end of the day, most everyone could agree that we had to stand up for America.
Now those common enemies aren't such a threat, so we look across the aisle for our enemy.
It used to be "we just have different visions for America but we all want to succeed" and now it's "OMG you are trampling my right to ___________ you Nazi!".
Your comment says all this much better than I ever could, though.
I don't think that people experiencing racism have "surrogate adversity", but I can certainly relate to the general notion. I've "struggled" with this because I too had no "real" adversity in life and people like some greek philosophers and Nietzsche put adversity into their centre of attention. I'm convinced that sometimes, people just get hurt by adversity without any advantages later on. It’s also perverse to think that the pain serves a kind of purpose, it justifies an extremely toxic and abusive mindset. If it happens and you can grow from it - that's wonderful. But it should never be used as an excuse to do harm or to endure abusive situations, especially if the abusers are using this kind of narrative.
This is a good time to recommend some supplementary reading: The Coddling of the American Mind[1], a book that does a great job of outlining what has changed in the last 30 years and why there is very much a generational gap at play with how people perceive themselves. It turns out, raising kids in an environment of "safetyism" where nothing ever goes wrong makes full-grown adults really unresilient, and more prone to thinking of themselves as victims.
If you are a victim you are entitled to treat your victimizer with contempt and, increasingly, violence. It removes your victimizer from then normal moral calculus.
All the better if the victimizer can be made a general category, and as amorphous and abstract as possible, thereby allowing your manipulator to direct your anger at whoever they choose from that category.
Note that this does not necessarily mean that you aren't a victim with legitimate complaints.
Zizek has talked a lot about victimhood and makes, imo, some great points. One point he makes is that people today assign virtue to victimhood, which doesn't really correlate because victims can turn out to be assholes themselves. I agree with this point and think it's a major reason why it's trendy to be a victim. If victims get all the attention and support these days just for being a victim of something, why not join the crowd?
> which doesn't really correlate because victims can turn out to be assholes themselves.
And, in particular, victimhood is often contextual and temporal. The oppressed person today may turn around and oppress someone else tomorrow. (And, in fact, fewer things predict likelihood of abusing more than a history of being abused.)
If our culture's moral system is based on partitioning the graph of interactions into "victim" and "victimizer", then the system is completely unable to handle the reality that there are cycles in that graph. There are homophobic Black people and racist queers. Anti-trans women and trans mysogynists.
It's impossible to reliably take sides in an environment like that if your moral code just says "side with the victim". Which victim? When? Do we side with J.K. Rowling because she was a victim or domestic assault, or vilify her because she's anti-trans?
As our moral culture gets increasingly polarized, it gets increasingly unable to accurately model the world as it is.
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.
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.
US tech appears rife in this right now. I follow lots of engineers on twitter and some folks seem to spend more time enrolled in their own victimhood or the victimhood of others who cause they love to rally to (because they get to point victims and their own invented perpetrators). I often want to point this out, but I would risk losing my job.
As someone who was abducted and kidnapped at gun point, PTSD and trauma are experienced differently by different people.
PTSD/trauma may be the result of being victimized, but it is not “learned” any more than a bone might “learn” to break under stress.
What happens under extreme trauma is an onslaught of electric signals and chemical reactions in the brain, essentially adrenaline (fight or flight) and cortisol (stress) responses. They help you survive when needed, but terrible for the brain and body in extreme amounts and/or prolonged exposure.
The issue is not that it is “learned” but that in some people the trauma essentially fires otherwise dormant pathways in the brain and instead of these pathways going back to a dormant state the neurons and pathways are potentially strengthened by the single acute episode and remain turned on. It creates an awful feedback loop where these neurons and pathways fire from normal/non traumatic stimulus moving forward because the connections become so strong they become a default pathway. Then regular firing of these pathways just reinforces the connections. You could point to that as “learning” I suppose, but it is involuntary. The associated behaviors are commonly avoidance in order to prevent these misfirings but unable to avoid it the responses will usually be consistent with the original response to the adrenaline and cortisol during the trauma.
Not everyone responds the same, because it really isn’t learned but something I would describe more as a physical “injury” to the brain from the natural biological response to the trauma. The 4 pillar model of the article might encapsulate a decent general framework for trauma victims, but it entirely ignores the very real biological responses and physical effects of trauma, so is on par with saying stress and fight or flight responses are learned. If it were learned we would teach soldiers not to have those responses, instead they are trained to manage their reactions to those responses, and even with training trauma can not be prevented in all individuals in all situations.
This is powerful. Powerful in a good way, and powerful in a not-so-good way.
When I first heard about "playing the victim" I was truly shocked. But here and here I would find some good piece of writing about "Don't be a victim..." and similar ideas along the same line. It took me a few well written articles, months to digest them, and deep long meditations, writing about a hundred blog posts but I am now grasping the concept and - date to say - it has changed my life.
I don't know about you, but not everything in my life goes as planned, and at times things go wrong despite my best work, and at times things even go terribly wrong.
In those moments, and in the post-mortem analysis, my starting point is that I was at least partly accountable/responsible for the outcome, the only question is the % of accountability/responsibility; and then - most importantly - what measures to take, anything from "doing nothing" to "hurry to stop the ripple effects" and everything else in between.
It's not that before I was constantly playing the victim, but .... observing the world while taking the polar opposite stand from a victim's position opens interesting perspectives and problem-solving algorithms.
There are truly victims out there, victims of terrible actions and behaviors; I am not referring to them, I am actually talking about me and me only.
I am sure we're going to see more of these writing on the same concept and - IMO - it's pure gold!
My father told me, when I was 10, that I might have never been born if my grand parents got caught during WW2.
I take social darwinism and competition very personally and seriously. I have the most difficulty accepting social hierarchy because they remind me of people being better than others for arbitrary reasons.
I often rationalize that what happened in germany, also happens to a certain degree between human beings in normal times, and it disgusts me. I feel like eugenics won many battles, just not the war, and that if Nazism happened, it tells a lot about the human nature of people around us.
The link here between the individual psychology and the broad political thrust seems very unclear to me. I haf the feeling of having a bias confirmed with very tenuous logic.
I truly believe that most discussions about race get it all wrong. The problem is not race. The problem is culture. Different groups of people of the same race have different cultures. And it is culture, not race, that is the #1 reason for how successful people are in general. That’s why you see different groups of the same race having very different outcomes. And not just for non-whites. The “white trash/red neck” culture is very different from the “urban professional” culture. Knowing about somebody’s culture tells you a lot more about their lives than their race. Your culture is the underlying OS of how you live your life and the decisions you make.
Considering the well studied links between testosterone and social behavior , and the well known precipitous drop in testosterone in recent decades, i wonder why they didn't talk about it
> testosterone seems to possess the ability to influence such processes; in particular, it appears to confer high motivational drive, low fearfulness, and high stress-resilience, either directly or via interactions with other hormones and neurotransmitter systems
Provocative. What he describes as TIV seems like a transparent proxy for sadism and some other dark personality traits and disorders.
We get what we reward, kids do what works for them, and while there is a massive amount of prior art on solutions to mitigating this, I think we're in a spot where we never thought there would be such an acute need to explain to adults what this issue is, and so we've been culturally backfooted in producing critical tools for dealing with it.
I just want to plug in two books by Alice Miller, mainly about childhood, the effects of growing up in a 'not-good' environment - that sort of thing. I found her to be very level-headed.
[1] The Drama of Being a Child by Alice Miller (also know by the IMO bad title 'The Drama of the Gifted Child')
[2] For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
by Alice Miller
Coleman is someone I wish everyone knew about. He’s changed my mind on a number of things and always seems to have unique well reasoned views on the subjects he speaks about.
> You only need to spend only a few minutes watching or reading the news, in any country, to hear and see victimhood raging.
Isn't here the true relationship, rather than a made-up "sickness" called TIV (sounds a lot like untreated depression, but *no expert*) between safetyism and the constant barrage of clickbait-y, outrageous news we can do nothing about?
[+] [-] rayiner|4 years ago|reply
As a brown guy with kids in the school system, that's why recent trends in education alarm me. I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. It's dangerous experimentation with kids' psychology.
Growing up as one of the few brown kids in what was (back then) solidly Republican Virginia, I learned we should treat everyone like we'd want to be treated ourselves. I don't think it would have helped my personal or professional success--not to mention my mental health--to be socialized to look out for these dark and foreboding forces around every corner. That's irrespective of whether it's true or not. If our white neighbors hated having Bangladeshis move in next door, they never let on, and frankly I think I'm better off not having dwelt on what was in their deepest thoughts.
[+] [-] erulabs|4 years ago|reply
I was a poor white kid in a wealthy white area. While I lived in that area, I only got to briefly attend a private school because of my mothers boyfriend. Everyone knew I was the "poor kid", and my mother, who did her best, was _obsessed_ with the fact that everyone knew we were "imposters" - not wealthy, not married, from a broken home, "gold-digger", etc etc etc. The list of victim-tokens is miles long. It was an illusion - I don't think more than a small handful of adults and certainly no kids ever held my status against me.
When I lived on my own as a teenager, I had no shortage of people explaining why I was a victim due to my life experiences. Obviously, this isn't even close to the the same level of experience as racism, but I completely agree with "they never let on, and frankly I think I'm better off not having dwelt on what was in their deepest thoughts".
Fearing what was in the "deepest thoughts" of others crippled many people in my life. If anything, in my experience, that fear of judgement "in a deep thought" is a _much_ larger hindrance than any actual action that was taken against us. I see echos of this in the politics of people I've met all around the country. And the great irony is that kids who grew up in wealth and surrounded by healthy parents seem oblivious or to not care whatsoever about such judgements from others. Are they ignorant or inoculated?
I'm _extremely_ cautious of even inhabiting the thought that the victim mentality hurts more than the victimization, as obviously that can turn callous incredibly quickly... But it's not a _useless_ thought either.
[+] [-] didibus|4 years ago|reply
So when you hear "learned behavior" don't think as in this is what my parents told me or taught me. It means this was learned by being mistreated as a child, not given consistent care and attention, and such.
> You don’t need to have been victimized, physically abused, for example, in order to exhibit TIV. But the people who score very high on TIV are generally those who have experienced some kind of trauma, like PTSD
> when a child is very young, and care is uncertain, perhaps the caregiver, or the male figures in the child’s life, don’t act consistently, sometimes they may act very aggressively without warning, or they don’t notice that the child needs care. That’s when the anxious attachment style or ambivalent attachment style is created
> This is just my hypothesis, but there are certain societies, particularly those with long histories of prolonged conflict, where the central narrative of the society is a victim-oriented narrative, which is the Jewish narrative
[+] [-] slowmovintarget|4 years ago|reply
These "narratives" are just that, fictional stories told to support a prevailing social ideology, and yes, they are dangerous, not the least because they ignore the facts.
[+] [-] sagichmal|4 years ago|reply
Appropriate advice at the individual level is often very different than, and sometimes the complete opposite of, appropriate advice at the demographic scale. It's fine to tell your brother to quit the shit and pick himself up by his bootstraps or whatever; it's both inappropriate and ineffective to translate that notion into social policy.
Systemic racism is a macro concern. Talking about it, and what to do about it, is a conversation totally different than the conversation you have with your kids about their lived experience. Being aware of systemic racism doesn't make anyone a victim. It makes them cognizant, smarter, better actors in the system.
[+] [-] rednerrus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nurspouse|4 years ago|reply
My local PBS station recently aired a series on Asian Americans. The first episode was all about how they were ill treated in the past, and their fight for civil liberties.
I didn't bother watching the other episodes. Certainly not a show I'll ever let my (Asian) children watch. It was a good episode if the topic was specifically about civil right struggles by Asian Americans, but deciding to start a series about a whole group of people with how they were mistreated is problematic. There's a lot more to Asian Americans than just their treatments by whites. Why not begin with their achievements and cultures, and leave this for a later episode? Is their mistreatment so important to their identity?
If I watched a series on African Americans, and it began with all the (real) systemic racism - their low graduation rates, high teen pregnancies, high unemployment, and tied it to the centuries of slavery, it would be equally problematic. Why not begin the series with things like "Every single new genre of American music in the 20th century (rap, rock n roll, etc) was pioneered by African Americans"? How many people know the negatives, and how many know this accomplishment? Ask yourself: Would a documentary series starting with their problematic statistics result in more people knowing the negatives vs the positives?
When I talk to people from my home country, you'll see this dissonance: They all sympathize with the "plight of the black man", and they'll all tell me to stay away from them. They watch documentaries like these.
I don't want my children growing up believing they are victims of society, even if there is truth to it. I grew up in a third country, and my race was definitely discriminated against in nasty ways. Yet my parents and school did not try to inculcate a sense of victimhood, and I can tell you - it's extremely beneficial not to be weighed down by that belief. And the racism there was more overt than here - often having to deal with it in stores and in school.
Of course, there will be conversations with my kids about it. But it will be somewhere in the middle of the list of important discussions to have, not on the top.
[+] [-] listless|4 years ago|reply
My voice isn’t worth much and I am afraid, but if you stand, I will stand with you.
[+] [-] kenjackson|4 years ago|reply
And teaching kids the truth in these matters is rarely a bad thing. Being able to identify things like using prison populations to prop up the population of conservative districts is something that only can be addressed if recognized to begin with.
[+] [-] bosswipe|4 years ago|reply
[1] A couple example incidents: 1) I wasn't even made aware of AP classes because I didn't look like the kids in those classes. I had to do self study to take the test after I learned about it, which I ended up aceing. 2) I lost out a big scholarship that I would have easily gotten if my counselor had worked with me the way she worked with the white kids.
[+] [-] sriku|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] addicted|4 years ago|reply
It’s amazing to me that brown people, like myself, who do really well in this country relative to most minorities, live to pretend as if they should just be the model minority without realizing that the only reason they can is because of all the blood sweat and tears spilt by the minority, often black, activists before them.
Of course, the ultimate irony, is that there is no evidence that victim hood is practiced by actual victims. If you consider the past 4 years, for example, it was spent with the President of the United States complaining on a nearly daily basis about everything. His entire base is built on little more than a laundry list of grievances. Their entire political movement at the moment can be reduced to complaining about “cancel culture” which is little more than complaining that white people cannot get well paid speaki by spots to spout racist bullshit.
If victim culture exists on a racial basis in the US, it exists almost entirely within the majority community, which shows that there’s absolutely no evidence that discussing real victimization causes a sense of victim hood amongst victims.
In fact, there’s good reason to believe that understanding that the racism they face might be systemic both allows the victims of the racism to not feel like victims anymore, but instead look for ways to succeed despite it, and allows them to not look negatively upon individuals anymore, because they learn that the racism is systemic and endemic, and as a result, is something that is exhibited by them as well.
[+] [-] Cloudef|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|4 years ago|reply
What really makes me nervous is the talk of "white privilege". Although it is not meant as such, it is saying that in the world as is, all things being equal, white people are superior to people of color. For example, if you had to evaluate totally objectively whether you should hire a white CEO or a person of color as CEO, and they were otherwise equal, if you believe in the framework of systemic racism/white privilege, you should hire the white CEO.
Moral persuasion, and aiming for an ideal world, will only be effective so far, and then people will turn to what gives them an advantage.
[+] [-] anoncow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arp242|4 years ago|reply
I can't blame them for making this misdiagnosis though. I grew up in a single-parent household. My mum was essentially a deadbeat mum who could hardly be arsed to take care of her kids (or be arsed to do anything else for that matter, like, say, have a job). While she was only rarely physically abusive, she was very emotionally abusive, as well as just neglecting in her parental role. She always acts like everyone else is wrong; to this day she bitches and moans about how everyone else wrongs her all the time. Everything I did as a child was wrong somehow. Her TIV is high.
Furthermore, I was bullied a lot at school; I was already quite insecure, and this only made it worse. Kids can be very mean, and the insecure shy kid is a good target. This was at a time when it was shrugged off with "boys will be boys" so little was done about this from the school other than send me to Teakwando lessons :-/
For most of my teens and twenties I felt horribly insecure in all sorts of ways. I didn't have the courage to actually apply for a programming job until I was 25. For a very long time I felt like people being nice to me were just humouring me; this was extremely silly and paranoid, and I let many potential friendships pass me by just because I was too insecure to actually ask people if they're keen to have a drink or whatever. At the time though, it was extremely hard to get over this. This didn't really change until I had my first girlfriend at 27.
It's no surprise I was diagnosed with autism, even though it was wrong. My problems mostly weren't inherent to my character, they were just results from my attitude.
This only made it worse; well-intentioned and empathic as the youth care[1] people were, they basically just see you as a victim to be pampered. It certainly didn't help me move forward, as all you feel is "woe is me", and the constant focus on your shortcomings is essentially just an assault on your self-confidence.
If I look at myself from 15 years ago vs. now then in many ways I'm the same person: I still like the same things, my politics are still similar, I have the same sense of humour, etc. But in many ways I couldn't be more different. It was a slow change that took about 4 years; there was never an "aha!" epiphany. This isn't an intellectual thing anyway, it's an emotional thing and overriding emotion with intellect is often very hard. People with depression can't be fixed by telling them there is nothing to be depressed about, and insecure people can't be fixed by telling them there is nothing to be insecure about.
Now, the context and situation is completely different than yours, but the point of the story is that how you see yourself, and see yourself in relation to others is extremely important. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and claim it's one of the major factors determining your success and happiness in life (however you may measure these things), perhaps even the most important factor.
Perhaps I'm applying my own personal experiences a bit too much here, but what worries me especially is the effect is has on self-confidence of these kids. It's fine to have these kind of discussions in politics or academia, but teaching them to kids? I find it worrying. I think a more "deal with it" message along the lines of "yeah, you're gonna encounter racism and it sucks, you're still a great person with a lot of talents, so just deal with it" would be a lot better. It's unfair, but it is what it is, and if the end-goal is to empower black people then we should focus on what is effective, not what is perceived as "fair".
Perhaps this is also partly why both Asians and Latino people tend to do so much better than black people: a more positive empowering attitude in spite of racist obstacles. I think it's unfortunate that questions such as "what do these people do better?" are often explained as victim blaming of black people. In spite of mountains of text being written on this, especially in the last year, I find there's a sore lack of careful analysis on this topic as everything is infused with judgements and morality which clouds everything. Just the other day a HN discussion on the best messaging on these topics netted me a "white supremacy apologist" accusation/insult :-/
In the end, a lot of these questions are empirical questions, and should be answered as such. What you then do with the answers is very much a morality question, but it's an entirely different thing.
[1]: (presumably the US works different, but in the Netherlands kids with these kind of issues are more or less automatically enrolled in our communist Nazi socialist despotic "youth care" service, more or less like CPS except also for every-day normal guidance and counselling, and not just protection).
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
> So when a child is very young, and care is uncertain, perhaps the caregiver, or the male figures in the child’s life, don’t act consistently, sometimes they may act very aggressively without warning, or they don’t notice that the child needs care. That’s when the anxious attachment style or ambivalent attachment style is created.
and followed by the following:
> Yes, normally children internalize the empathetic and soothing reactions of their parents, they learn not to need others from outside to soothe themselves. But people with high TIV cannot soothe themselves.
It is quite odd to take that quote out of context and make it argument about something completely different, as if surrounding context in article supported the other claim.
[+] [-] lsiebert|4 years ago|reply
Seriously, go give money to https://www.feedingamerica.org/ or https://www.savethechildren.org/ or give to a local food bank. Five bucks even.
I think that the idea that discussions of systemic racism or white supremacy are teaching kids to be victims isn't a fair assessment of how such education is structured.
It's just like how kids are taught about climate change, as best I can tell. It's a problem, and they all need to be aware and do their part. Teaching kids about climate change hasn't lead them to all give up since the planet is likely going to be in bad shape from global warming, it's empowered them, at least some of them, to fight for a future in which we change things and make things better.
The thing is, racism doesn't go away if you pretend it doesn't exist. Maybe you didn't experience it, but per the 2000 census, about 1 in five Virginians are Black.
You being one of the few brown kids means you likely grew up very differently from many Black and Brown students in Virginia, and I expect that is likely the result of decades of white Virginians working to end school bussing and other integration efforts, creating new school districts and private schools, shifting school attendance boundaries within districts.
I think you have to remember that racism is not natural, that it's effects and results, which have been normalized, need not exist, and consider how much our country fails to do right by kids who are BIPOC.
That's what systemic racism is. It's structures and institutions and systems which perpetuate unequal outcomes. We know that integration helps Black students (and their kids) succeed, and that studies generally fail to demonstrate any significant negative effect on white students. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/7/1/21121022/did-busing-for-s...
There doesn't have to even be any outright in your face animosity against Black and Brown people, it's just that, places with higher levels of Black and Brown people in Virgnia are more likely to undertake school district or school attendance rezoning, and rezoned areas are more likely to concentrate people who are poor and Black or Brown, or who are middle to upper class and white.
https://cecr.ed.psu.edu/sites/default/files/School_Segregati...
And that's just how it's failing kids with school segregation, do you want to know the stats on childhood hunger? as of March 2020, about 1 in five families surveyed said they didn't have enough food. Just the lack of subsidized school lunch during Covid in many places means kids are going without necessary nutrition. And, surprise, Black and Hispanic kids are twice as likely as non Hispanic white kids to face hunger in America. That is, again, systemic racism.
I imagine that probably doesn't help their personal or professional success, not to mention their mental health.
I linked two places people could donate to help feed hungry kids above, you can ignore me or disagree with what I said, but seriously, if you are doing well, you can spare a few bucks at least.
[+] [-] bingbong70|4 years ago|reply
Learning this history is the first step of "doing something about it".
Brown/black people should know their history too, we can't just paper over the historic criminality of certain groups of people because it feels uncomfortable or somehow may make people unpatriotic. Everyone has a right to their history and black/brown people have been denied it in certain parts of the world, thanks in many cases to censorship and/or propaganda sucking the air out of the room.
I do find it interesting when new immigrants come to the US and "model-minority-explain" to the people (African Americans and others) that built this country for free and are actually the only reason non-white immigrants are even allowed into the country, that they should just move on or not pursue a better understanding of the history it was illegal for them to learn.
Sucking up to the majority for better standing at the expense of the purposely created minority underclass is a huge disservice to the people of this country/planet.
[+] [-] Blikkentrekker|4 years ago|reply
Words said by the man who has no conception of individual variance.
The sexually addicted compulsive rapist would do well to ignore this advice, for instance.
[+] [-] livinginfear|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frankiesardo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] welcome_dragon|4 years ago|reply
During the cold war, we had a common enemy in communism. Sure there were disagreements, arguments, fights, but at the end of the day, most everyone could agree that we had to stand up for America.
Now those common enemies aren't such a threat, so we look across the aisle for our enemy.
It used to be "we just have different visions for America but we all want to succeed" and now it's "OMG you are trampling my right to ___________ you Nazi!".
Your comment says all this much better than I ever could, though.
[+] [-] mockingbirdy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] listless|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Klinky|4 years ago|reply
I hear a lot of "head in the sand" thinking. If we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist and never happened.
[+] [-] bmmayer1|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Gen...
[+] [-] recursivedoubts|4 years ago|reply
All the better if the victimizer can be made a general category, and as amorphous and abstract as possible, thereby allowing your manipulator to direct your anger at whoever they choose from that category.
Note that this does not necessarily mean that you aren't a victim with legitimate complaints.
[+] [-] silicon2401|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|4 years ago|reply
And, in particular, victimhood is often contextual and temporal. The oppressed person today may turn around and oppress someone else tomorrow. (And, in fact, fewer things predict likelihood of abusing more than a history of being abused.)
If our culture's moral system is based on partitioning the graph of interactions into "victim" and "victimizer", then the system is completely unable to handle the reality that there are cycles in that graph. There are homophobic Black people and racist queers. Anti-trans women and trans mysogynists.
It's impossible to reliably take sides in an environment like that if your moral code just says "side with the victim". Which victim? When? Do we side with J.K. Rowling because she was a victim or domestic assault, or vilify her because she's anti-trans?
As our moral culture gets increasingly polarized, it gets increasingly unable to accurately model the world as it is.
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayboise|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmarcos|4 years ago|reply
He should be getting more attention but I guess he runs a bit against mainstream narratives. A taste:
https://twitter.com/davidgoggins/status/1386386177184333829?...
[+] [-] aaron5|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantandroids|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_kufu|4 years ago|reply
PTSD/trauma may be the result of being victimized, but it is not “learned” any more than a bone might “learn” to break under stress.
What happens under extreme trauma is an onslaught of electric signals and chemical reactions in the brain, essentially adrenaline (fight or flight) and cortisol (stress) responses. They help you survive when needed, but terrible for the brain and body in extreme amounts and/or prolonged exposure.
The issue is not that it is “learned” but that in some people the trauma essentially fires otherwise dormant pathways in the brain and instead of these pathways going back to a dormant state the neurons and pathways are potentially strengthened by the single acute episode and remain turned on. It creates an awful feedback loop where these neurons and pathways fire from normal/non traumatic stimulus moving forward because the connections become so strong they become a default pathway. Then regular firing of these pathways just reinforces the connections. You could point to that as “learning” I suppose, but it is involuntary. The associated behaviors are commonly avoidance in order to prevent these misfirings but unable to avoid it the responses will usually be consistent with the original response to the adrenaline and cortisol during the trauma.
Not everyone responds the same, because it really isn’t learned but something I would describe more as a physical “injury” to the brain from the natural biological response to the trauma. The 4 pillar model of the article might encapsulate a decent general framework for trauma victims, but it entirely ignores the very real biological responses and physical effects of trauma, so is on par with saying stress and fight or flight responses are learned. If it were learned we would teach soldiers not to have those responses, instead they are trained to manage their reactions to those responses, and even with training trauma can not be prevented in all individuals in all situations.
[+] [-] SMAAART|4 years ago|reply
When I first heard about "playing the victim" I was truly shocked. But here and here I would find some good piece of writing about "Don't be a victim..." and similar ideas along the same line. It took me a few well written articles, months to digest them, and deep long meditations, writing about a hundred blog posts but I am now grasping the concept and - date to say - it has changed my life.
I don't know about you, but not everything in my life goes as planned, and at times things go wrong despite my best work, and at times things even go terribly wrong.
In those moments, and in the post-mortem analysis, my starting point is that I was at least partly accountable/responsible for the outcome, the only question is the % of accountability/responsibility; and then - most importantly - what measures to take, anything from "doing nothing" to "hurry to stop the ripple effects" and everything else in between.
It's not that before I was constantly playing the victim, but .... observing the world while taking the polar opposite stand from a victim's position opens interesting perspectives and problem-solving algorithms.
There are truly victims out there, victims of terrible actions and behaviors; I am not referring to them, I am actually talking about me and me only.
I am sure we're going to see more of these writing on the same concept and - IMO - it's pure gold!
[+] [-] jokoon|4 years ago|reply
I take social darwinism and competition very personally and seriously. I have the most difficulty accepting social hierarchy because they remind me of people being better than others for arbitrary reasons.
I often rationalize that what happened in germany, also happens to a certain degree between human beings in normal times, and it disgusts me. I feel like eugenics won many battles, just not the war, and that if Nazism happened, it tells a lot about the human nature of people around us.
[+] [-] scandox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] obventio56|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbrodersen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
> testosterone seems to possess the ability to influence such processes; in particular, it appears to confer high motivational drive, low fearfulness, and high stress-resilience, either directly or via interactions with other hormones and neurotransmitter systems
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13646...
[+] [-] motohagiography|4 years ago|reply
We get what we reward, kids do what works for them, and while there is a massive amount of prior art on solutions to mitigating this, I think we're in a spot where we never thought there would be such an acute need to explain to adults what this issue is, and so we've been culturally backfooted in producing critical tools for dealing with it.
[+] [-] throwaway20014|4 years ago|reply
[1] The Drama of Being a Child by Alice Miller (also know by the IMO bad title 'The Drama of the Gifted Child')
[2] For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller
Edit: Also a good comic named 'On a Plate':
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] asiachick|4 years ago|reply
https://colemanhughes.org/
[+] [-] kypro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ohduran|4 years ago|reply
Isn't here the true relationship, rather than a made-up "sickness" called TIV (sounds a lot like untreated depression, but *no expert*) between safetyism and the constant barrage of clickbait-y, outrageous news we can do nothing about?