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Notes -
The victimization crisis and surrounding issues is something that's been talked about for a while.
https://putanumonit.com/2020/09/12/against-victimhood/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Victimhood_Culture
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f3zeukxj3Kf5byzHi/underdog-bias-rules-everything-around-me
Including as you can see, in other rationalist communities! It's literally one of the main motivators people will bring up for woke culture, an obsession with who is the greatest victim.
The victimhood obsession is what losers and failures use to cope when they don't succeed. "It's not my fault I don't got a smoking hot babe, it's cause society just hates men", "it's not my fault I didn't get that job, they're racist against black people", etc etc. Online discussion has been consumed by whiners, in part cause the whiners don't shut up while us doers spend most of our time doing.
Because in the modern day in first world nations, most victim complaints are not real. I literally went over in several ways how us men are far better off now than almost any other point in history. Even most of the losers are better off in many areas, the poorest and laziest NEET won't die of starvation anymore. I had an aunt go crazy and live on the streets for like a whole decade and she still had food, clean water, access to healthcare, a cellphone, etc.
Something that's funny is that, when you spend a long time in a place like this, you start to get a pretty decent understanding of the psychology of various poaster types. For a lot of people, the arguments are just little props they use to get to the emotion they want to express. Someone wants to find reasons to say "this means civil war!" because he wants to be incandescently angry. Someone wants to write a 2000-word explanation of the Female Mind so that he can feel he understands the species. The anti-victimhood/Elite Human Capital people really wear it on their sleeves, though. "You're a loser, I'm a doer" (as far as I can tell, MKC lives a completely normal and unremarkable life in a completely normal and unremarkable place - not that I'm sneering at raising a family, that's a noble thing, but wildly out of step with some Manichean division of the world into "builders" and "whiners"). That's it, that's the whole post, everything else is a spandrel.
One of the things I dislike about that sort of behavior here is that most discussion about things relating to status/victimhood tends to be completely suppressed in generic discussion settings by use of shaming and other status games. Being concerned about low status people who aren't part of the list that's been pre-approved by high-status people is, in itself, low status, and so the lowest status people who can't get on that list get no honest open discussion about their suffering. I'd prefer that The Motte (and also everywhere, but I place that wish in the same category of wishes I have for curing world hunger through feeding everyone unicorn farts) be one place where there could be some honest open discussion about that. But it inevitably attracts people who ostentatiously dismiss it only as concerns of those LOSERS, and YOU aren't a LOSER, ARE YOU? No, if you were a WINNER like ME, you'd just call the LOSERS LOSERS and move on, so why are you discussing it?
It really depends, irl. I think Scott’s right, it’s all barber pole. If you are at a status level where, by sympathizing with the losers, you could be mistaken for a loser, people will use that to shut you down. Whereas if everyone knows you have a tinder harem, you can sympathize with shut-in incels; if everyone knows you’re fuck-you rich you can sympathize with the rednecks and rust belters; if everybody knows you’re a rarified academic you can sympathize with ghetto criminals. The thing about status games is that there’s always a bigger fish. On the Internet, there’s no obvious social status granted to a an anon poster (though people can make a play for it, and succeed or fail, as you can see in the contrasting examples of Cim and Count). This means that the moves used to shut down the kinds of discussion you’re talking about are actually more effective on the internet than irl, because online someone can always just accuse you of being a loser, and trying to disprove that puts you on the defensive and thus automatically lowers your status.
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Real or not, they are used because they work. You will never convince people to stop whining about being victims as long as rewards - material, social, or political - flow to those who claim victimhood status.
I'm standing by the stairs. What now? Will I get my victimhood rewards?
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