All cultures are Guilt and Forgiveness, Shame and Honour or Fear Pathological. Worryingly, Western cultures are becoming a hybrid of all three. This essay was inspired by The Victims' Race at Quillette. A somewhat misleading title, which has more to do with mental health crises and cultural dysfunction than race.
As soon I began to read the subject matter, my mind brimmed with specific instances of the phenomenon. Imagine my surprise when the author covered almost all of them- there is a cusp of synchronicity with deep intellectual thinkers which really is quite edifying, because it makes us feel as though we are on the right track. Great article. Well-written and thought provoking.
A couple of additions. I don’t think the concepts of dignity versus honour are sufficiently developed, although I understand that this might be case of simplification for the sake of brevity. The dignity culture is better thought of as guilt and forgiveness model, or punishment and forgiveness, in which it possible to sin socially or criminally, but forgiveness can be attained through contrition, voluntary or otherwise.
Honour cultures are more properly thought of as honour and shame cultures. Duelling is one aspect of this, but this is actually an expression of the urge to avoid shame, by any means necessary. In honour and shame cultures there is no road to redemption from shame. Japanese managers can spend an entire career doing nothing all day but stare out of the window, as a result of some past shame. Aokigahara Forest in Japan has the notable distinction of being one of world’s most popular suicide destination spots in the world. It’s history is a cultural adaption for those those who could no longer bear the weight of their shame.
The third type of culture is a fear and grievance/victimhood culture and these are usually deeply pathological in nature. They can be seen in the denunciations of the Soviet era, the Chinese Struggle Sessions of the Cultural Revolution and the ways in which the German population oscillated between meek complicity and the reporting of ‘deviant’ neighbours as both a means of personal advancement and fear-based loyalty affirmation under the Nazi Regime.
I would like the thank the author so much for joining the dots in relation to animal biology and the possible connotations with victimhood culture. I was aware of phenomena such as great ape supplication and the various roles within a wolf pack, but I had failed to make the connection with our current social paradigm. It is an interesting thought which I will have to consider in greater depth.
I would only add that there is one obvious conclusion to all of these considerations is that we are rapidly becoming a hybrid of these three archetypal cultures and this in itself is worrying, even before we consider how destructive and counterproductive to human life fear cultures really are. The various atrocities of war in the Twentieth century pale by comparison to the body count entailed with fear culture running amok through our societies. The ethnonationalists and fascists have had their Disappeared, mass executions and genocides every bit as much as the Ideological Left have had the same, as well as the famines and the gulags.
Of course, the primary modus of this fracturing and hybridisation of cultures is social media. It is worth noting that as intersectionality and victimhood culture began to spread from a few elite East and West coast universities, it was not its teaching within a few obscure and relatively unimportant academic fields which was responsible for transmission and viral acceptance, but social media. The triggering agent was a slew of Police Brutality videos, which although alarming and tragic, were a deeply flawed and misrepresentative depiction of American policing.
Recently, a survey was conducted to gauge public perceptions of the total number of unarmed black men shot by police in 2019- the perceptions were wildly out of kilter with actual numbers in general, but the mistaken beliefs were more heavily focused in the very liberal group- just over 22% of very liberal individuals believed the number to be 10,000 or above. The actual number was 13.
This is not to downplay the tragedy of such appalling displays, but it is easy to see that the social media only compounds the tragedy with terribly misinformative memetic ideas. It is easy to see how young impressionable, impressively smart, yet naive minds might go running to eclectic academic studies for explanations as to these tragedies. And this is not to say that structural racism doesn’t exist in all manner of forms, such as the statistical hegemony of credit ratings, finance and insurance, or that affinity bias in hiring and promotions seems to be made worse, not better by implicit bias or diversity training.
But by far the worst and most pervasive form of structural racism is the soft bigotry of low expectations, once pronounced by George W. Bush. It explains why California spends more money per pupil on K-12 education than a whole slew of lower expenditure States which achieve perennially better academic outcomes, whilst 75% of African American boys fail to meet State basic standards in literacy and reading. Simply put, Black parents are desperate for schools which insist upon high standards of behaviour and educational attainment, and the British State Education system proves it is possible, but ultra-liberals are so committed to walking on eggshells around gritty realities and so afraid of being accused of racism, that they, in effect, become so through low expectations.
It is difficult to see how outcomes can be raised, without pretending that basic literacy and numeracy at graduation doesn’t matter. And this one simple metric of success informs all our other inequalities proliferating outwards. Because if trajectories can be changed, they can be changed most during the earliest and most malleable segments of our lives. It is little wonder then that income levels for white and black British people are the same, on average, if they happen to be aged between 18 and 30, given that their educational performance in exams at 16 is so similar.
And the problem with baleful effects of viral social media metanarratives is that they not only warp our culture into a strange hybrid of guilt, shame and fear, but they also make it more, not less, difficult to solve these thorny problems. We lose the capacity for the virtuous side of these cultures- forgiveness, honour and cultural bravery. And the culture we’ve allowed our young to become victim to, in a real sense, is appalling- through the simple absence of adults at any point in their development to assert their presence and authority.
It’s dystopian. Record levels of suicide and self-harm through cutting. A whole generation of young people who are anxious and depressed, with alarming tendencies towards mental health problems, whose media and social media landscape presents them with apocalyptic problems which are, in reality, serious, but not civilisation threatening- and requires disciplined, diligent and compassionate study to solve, not protests. Scotland has a perfectly good model of public health-based model of proactive policing waiting to go, which has had impressive results in youth reform, cutting crime- and all whilst reducing the total number of people who need to be incarcerated- but you wouldn’t know it given some of the lunatic and ludicrous solutions being proposed, and in some cases implemented.
And I really don’t know what the solution is, other than perhaps amplifying heterodox, moderate and non-establishment partisan voices. I think if every information portal and hub gave users the chance to set their preferences in terms of content, media and users they were exposed to it might go some way to healing the damage- because social media tends to offer us the intellectual equivalent of fast food, rather than the food for thought to which we might otherwise aspire. But it would also require telling the Tech Giants to fundamentally disengage from the method of negative engagement they use to capitalise upon the attention economy, and that would be something they would be loathe to do. Depressing, isn’t it?
Do you get sucked in by social media? Do you fall into rabbit holes, odd conspiracy theories or become really mean towards others? Blaming others for your behavior and choices falls into which cultural category?
I believe that too many adults, never escaping childhood, simply prefer to have others make decisions for them, to tell them what is moral/immoral, legal/illegal, good/bad, safe/unsafe, correct/incorrect, so they can just follow orders, trust authority and not feel responsible for their decisions and taking risks related to the future. Submission and grading start in childhood, in which minds are raised to obey, to regurgitate, to believe "father" knows best for all.
It's all a bit too broad brush. This is not to say that you're not on the right lines but that it's a topic that needs far more space and depth. Each paragraph could of the post could provide enough material for 2 or 3 posts if done in sufficient detail.
I don't think it's too one sided just that too many topics are being covered at once. For example the suicide issue which has different causes in different cultures. What do you think about group cultures and how they treat suicide (as per Japan) as opposed to individualist cultures?
but of course, PTSD is real, and many people claiming victimhood do suffer from ptsd. not really sure that you have a handle on japanese suicide culture. i lived in tokyo for four years, and its not really ‘a cultural adaption for those those who could no longer bear the weight of their shame‘. its more of a conservative culture that believes “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”
Im so exhausted by this partisan warfare. you are the one person advocating conservative ideas - (note how I did not call you conservative) - that I learn from, regularly. but why, why, why are you so unwilling to call out conservatives. to acknowledge anything from progressives.
If i can sum up my thesis, it is this. I dont know anyone who tries to represent both sides. other than me. and i get hate all the time for trying to thread the needle. you dont try to thread the needle - you claim to be reaching conservatives because they are more open minded. which is insane. just as insane, equally insane, as trying to appeal to progressives.
if you think one side of the ideological divide is right, and one side is wrong, you are objectively a dumb ass. you, specificly, are no dumb ass, but you keep acting as if conservatives are the marginalized voice. which is conservative. you cant possibly be the non partisan you claim to be and yet continue to fan the flames of the ideological divide, as you do in EVERY FREAKING POST you make.
sorry bro, but until you stop fanning said flames, you are officially not non partisan.
"And I really don’t know what the solution is, other than perhaps amplifying heterodox, moderate and non-establishment partisan voices. I think if every information portal and hub gave users the chance to set their preferences in terms of content, media and users they were exposed to it might go some way to healing the damage- because social media tends to offer us the intellectual equivalent of fast food, rather than the food for thought to which we might otherwise aspire. But it would also require telling the Tech Giants to fundamentally disengage from the method of negative engagement they use to capitalise upon the attention economy, and that would be something they would be loathe to do. Depressing, isn’t it?" Geary’s quote from his substack.**
Only a heterodox would write such a thing. Lovely balance and perspective and as honest as it is depressingly salient. Scary is the fundamental transformation of western society by numerous factors of which you’ve alluded to and that each segment of direction adds toward the sum of the whole in such a trajectory. We may be of an age to comprehend such a transformative shift as we can compare such a mass capture of societal norms, behaviours and moralities and compare them to our own yesterdays. The fear is that for the young they have no such yesterday and their lived experience is only this new norm and as we flutter away to nirvana the world devolves into a dystopian normalcy the science writers perhaps didn’t ever realise were portents.
Likewise to yourself I’ve always tried to balance out the insanity of polarised thought; that there were two very opposing schools of ideas and causes that I couldn’t quite wholly side with either way; they both held good points. It leads to a form of confusion that in todays new world of partisanship and tribalism marks one as skirting dangerously toward hypocrisy and yet it is not and one must chissel away at pure nuance to express this very thin grey line and put sense to clarity. Arguing it verbally is excessively difficult and one must have that type of brain that spellchecks and autocorrects itself before the wrong combination of words create a “gottya” trap.
Moving back and forth from the countryside to the city and back to the village as a child I was readily aware of the contrast. Time, wisdom and extensive travel made me acutely aware that the same such patterns appeared wherever I travelled. It eventually entered my consciousness that we are instinctively programmed toward threat and safety responses and that visually as we wander or as we drive or as we fall from the air before deploying a chute, that what we’re constantly doing is visually processing metadata and assessing and dismissing in a high energy fashion a constant state of flux in need of superfast survival instinctive responses. A mixture of flight or fight instinctively and a conscious reassertion that society is safe. Walking down that village road the stimulus is low and we have time to take in much more about those around us than by contrast walking down princess street in Edinburgh on a busy day.
The root of what is normal human existence for me lays within that village setting and defines culture globally to myself; the difference being peoples from cities and villagers. they are very very different; like alternate species. I’ll try and explain, but it’s an awareness that I’ve seen wherever I’ve lived and travelled and it’s quite remarkable.
A city family moves to the village and they’ll find themselves suddenly the immediate focal point of village talk and over time they’ll realise that though accepted they will never be one of the villagers. The villager could migrate to the city without this happening. Everybody in that village wants to know about you and what type of character you possess, they can’t fully ever appreciate it of course as they never witnessed your evolution. The village school, perhaps 70-80 pupils taught by three tutors and they’ll know your parents very familiarly. The headmaster will be a highly respected guy and so will the innkeeper and the vicar and the local nurse, the mechanic will serve the whole village and so will the two local builders that all attended that village school. If your car bonnet is raised passers by will stop, call out your name and ask if you need their assistance and an old lady having dropped her groceries will be aided and assisted. The point is that family and a village by extension is a large family is strong in community and in lived and shared experiences. To my mind evolutionarily normal and the interactions are at pace with normal brain processing.
Outside the village there will exist other villages and sometimes the teenage boys and young men will get involved in forms of tribal altercations and I’d imagine this once again as the safety and threat response being played out. Gossip being the messenger and there’s always a ping-ponging of talk surrounding what is happening in these not so far away places. Once upon a time it would be further extended by a far away rider entering the tavern and telling of tales from further afield. Young men will often be a bit more wary of outsiders and of course this once again is to be expected as they’d be the protectors of all. The old and wise are very respected and they are like the village elders who have experienced knowledge on how to act in such matters. But of course without threat there is harmony and that means community get togethers and a sense of togetherness. Family, safety, children. I have the theory regarding male understanding of physical threat responses and knowledge attainment as being a primary reason why forums such as this attracts mostly males of 40 odd years plus. The tribal elders. Community, traditionalism.
I share your mistrust Geary in unsociable media. I see its lure and its addictiveness as hideous and also the way that it takes ownership of a person and atomises him/her. There is also the fact that people acquire knowledge through diversional algorithms that reinforce a direction of thought with little to counter that polarisation. I find this distressing in that people are actually indoctrinating themselves without the ability to comprehend that they’ve deviated by an act of reinforcement of their own making. they’ve simply found information to support their hunches and created definitions of truth. The Covid psychological experiment defines such polarisation. Here we have a situation where most everybody has become his own expert and can readily quote facts and figures at large that are automatic subconscious replies that the owner imagines or intuits as their own. I imagined pulling the first 100 people passing by and herding them toward a stage. Here a speaker could split the crowd like a sheepdog herding sheep. Two tribes polarised by an argument they believe they own. Maybe it’s the freedom discussion, but the passionate one is surely the vax or no vax argument and you can bet there are no virologists or scientists in this crowd and that everyone’s narrative is based upon algorithms.
Just to cheer this post up I’ll tell you a wee tale. One of my labourers can talk for hours about Bill gates, Fauci and nanobytes and the idea that 90 % of the population will be dead in the next 5 years. This was getting out of hand at work and souring the mood. So at breaktime when he brought up the topic for the thousandth time I asked him what discretion would there be in administering the same poison to everybody? He asked me what I meant. " Well Daz what purpose would there actually be to wiping out net positive and net negative people? I mean surely they’d just wipe out the net negative people? He went quiet. Then. “I think you’re actually onto something but you’ve got it back to front.” “What do you mean?” he asked. Well I think the net negatives are all the anti-vax conspiracy theorists that systematically won’t obey for all the wrong reasons and that Covid will eventually wipe them all out." Laughter and for Daz a fair bit of confusion.
Perhaps steps could be taken to take the profits out of the Victim industry? Or should we just wait for the whole thing to blow over, the way moral panics always do?
I don't think this is quite right. There are cultures which are fear/power which you missed, then others which are shame/honour, and guilt/justice(or dignity) as you correctly identified. I think our current cultural move is towards a victim/vengeance morality which is scary. But the thing to remember in the cultural taxonomy is that there must be a carrot and a stick, something to avoid and something to strive for, so fear and grievance do not work as a pair. IMHO.
Do you get sucked in by social media? Do you fall into rabbit holes, odd conspiracy theories or become really mean towards others? Blaming others for your behavior and choices falls into which cultural category?
I believe that too many adults, never escaping childhood, simply prefer to have others make decisions for them, to tell them what is moral/immoral, legal/illegal, good/bad, safe/unsafe, correct/incorrect, so they can just follow orders, trust authority and not feel responsible for their decisions and taking risks related to the future. Submission and grading start in childhood, in which minds are raised to obey, to regurgitate, to believe "father" knows best for all.
It's all a bit too broad brush. This is not to say that you're not on the right lines but that it's a topic that needs far more space and depth. Each paragraph could of the post could provide enough material for 2 or 3 posts if done in sufficient detail.
I don't think it's too one sided just that too many topics are being covered at once. For example the suicide issue which has different causes in different cultures. What do you think about group cultures and how they treat suicide (as per Japan) as opposed to individualist cultures?
but of course, PTSD is real, and many people claiming victimhood do suffer from ptsd. not really sure that you have a handle on japanese suicide culture. i lived in tokyo for four years, and its not really ‘a cultural adaption for those those who could no longer bear the weight of their shame‘. its more of a conservative culture that believes “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”
Im so exhausted by this partisan warfare. you are the one person advocating conservative ideas - (note how I did not call you conservative) - that I learn from, regularly. but why, why, why are you so unwilling to call out conservatives. to acknowledge anything from progressives.
If i can sum up my thesis, it is this. I dont know anyone who tries to represent both sides. other than me. and i get hate all the time for trying to thread the needle. you dont try to thread the needle - you claim to be reaching conservatives because they are more open minded. which is insane. just as insane, equally insane, as trying to appeal to progressives.
if you think one side of the ideological divide is right, and one side is wrong, you are objectively a dumb ass. you, specificly, are no dumb ass, but you keep acting as if conservatives are the marginalized voice. which is conservative. you cant possibly be the non partisan you claim to be and yet continue to fan the flames of the ideological divide, as you do in EVERY FREAKING POST you make.
sorry bro, but until you stop fanning said flames, you are officially not non partisan.
"And I really don’t know what the solution is, other than perhaps amplifying heterodox, moderate and non-establishment partisan voices. I think if every information portal and hub gave users the chance to set their preferences in terms of content, media and users they were exposed to it might go some way to healing the damage- because social media tends to offer us the intellectual equivalent of fast food, rather than the food for thought to which we might otherwise aspire. But it would also require telling the Tech Giants to fundamentally disengage from the method of negative engagement they use to capitalise upon the attention economy, and that would be something they would be loathe to do. Depressing, isn’t it?" Geary’s quote from his substack.**
Only a heterodox would write such a thing. Lovely balance and perspective and as honest as it is depressingly salient. Scary is the fundamental transformation of western society by numerous factors of which you’ve alluded to and that each segment of direction adds toward the sum of the whole in such a trajectory. We may be of an age to comprehend such a transformative shift as we can compare such a mass capture of societal norms, behaviours and moralities and compare them to our own yesterdays. The fear is that for the young they have no such yesterday and their lived experience is only this new norm and as we flutter away to nirvana the world devolves into a dystopian normalcy the science writers perhaps didn’t ever realise were portents.
Likewise to yourself I’ve always tried to balance out the insanity of polarised thought; that there were two very opposing schools of ideas and causes that I couldn’t quite wholly side with either way; they both held good points. It leads to a form of confusion that in todays new world of partisanship and tribalism marks one as skirting dangerously toward hypocrisy and yet it is not and one must chissel away at pure nuance to express this very thin grey line and put sense to clarity. Arguing it verbally is excessively difficult and one must have that type of brain that spellchecks and autocorrects itself before the wrong combination of words create a “gottya” trap.
Moving back and forth from the countryside to the city and back to the village as a child I was readily aware of the contrast. Time, wisdom and extensive travel made me acutely aware that the same such patterns appeared wherever I travelled. It eventually entered my consciousness that we are instinctively programmed toward threat and safety responses and that visually as we wander or as we drive or as we fall from the air before deploying a chute, that what we’re constantly doing is visually processing metadata and assessing and dismissing in a high energy fashion a constant state of flux in need of superfast survival instinctive responses. A mixture of flight or fight instinctively and a conscious reassertion that society is safe. Walking down that village road the stimulus is low and we have time to take in much more about those around us than by contrast walking down princess street in Edinburgh on a busy day.
The root of what is normal human existence for me lays within that village setting and defines culture globally to myself; the difference being peoples from cities and villagers. they are very very different; like alternate species. I’ll try and explain, but it’s an awareness that I’ve seen wherever I’ve lived and travelled and it’s quite remarkable.
A city family moves to the village and they’ll find themselves suddenly the immediate focal point of village talk and over time they’ll realise that though accepted they will never be one of the villagers. The villager could migrate to the city without this happening. Everybody in that village wants to know about you and what type of character you possess, they can’t fully ever appreciate it of course as they never witnessed your evolution. The village school, perhaps 70-80 pupils taught by three tutors and they’ll know your parents very familiarly. The headmaster will be a highly respected guy and so will the innkeeper and the vicar and the local nurse, the mechanic will serve the whole village and so will the two local builders that all attended that village school. If your car bonnet is raised passers by will stop, call out your name and ask if you need their assistance and an old lady having dropped her groceries will be aided and assisted. The point is that family and a village by extension is a large family is strong in community and in lived and shared experiences. To my mind evolutionarily normal and the interactions are at pace with normal brain processing.
Outside the village there will exist other villages and sometimes the teenage boys and young men will get involved in forms of tribal altercations and I’d imagine this once again as the safety and threat response being played out. Gossip being the messenger and there’s always a ping-ponging of talk surrounding what is happening in these not so far away places. Once upon a time it would be further extended by a far away rider entering the tavern and telling of tales from further afield. Young men will often be a bit more wary of outsiders and of course this once again is to be expected as they’d be the protectors of all. The old and wise are very respected and they are like the village elders who have experienced knowledge on how to act in such matters. But of course without threat there is harmony and that means community get togethers and a sense of togetherness. Family, safety, children. I have the theory regarding male understanding of physical threat responses and knowledge attainment as being a primary reason why forums such as this attracts mostly males of 40 odd years plus. The tribal elders. Community, traditionalism.
I share your mistrust Geary in unsociable media. I see its lure and its addictiveness as hideous and also the way that it takes ownership of a person and atomises him/her. There is also the fact that people acquire knowledge through diversional algorithms that reinforce a direction of thought with little to counter that polarisation. I find this distressing in that people are actually indoctrinating themselves without the ability to comprehend that they’ve deviated by an act of reinforcement of their own making. they’ve simply found information to support their hunches and created definitions of truth. The Covid psychological experiment defines such polarisation. Here we have a situation where most everybody has become his own expert and can readily quote facts and figures at large that are automatic subconscious replies that the owner imagines or intuits as their own. I imagined pulling the first 100 people passing by and herding them toward a stage. Here a speaker could split the crowd like a sheepdog herding sheep. Two tribes polarised by an argument they believe they own. Maybe it’s the freedom discussion, but the passionate one is surely the vax or no vax argument and you can bet there are no virologists or scientists in this crowd and that everyone’s narrative is based upon algorithms.
Just to cheer this post up I’ll tell you a wee tale. One of my labourers can talk for hours about Bill gates, Fauci and nanobytes and the idea that 90 % of the population will be dead in the next 5 years. This was getting out of hand at work and souring the mood. So at breaktime when he brought up the topic for the thousandth time I asked him what discretion would there be in administering the same poison to everybody? He asked me what I meant. " Well Daz what purpose would there actually be to wiping out net positive and net negative people? I mean surely they’d just wipe out the net negative people? He went quiet. Then. “I think you’re actually onto something but you’ve got it back to front.” “What do you mean?” he asked. Well I think the net negatives are all the anti-vax conspiracy theorists that systematically won’t obey for all the wrong reasons and that Covid will eventually wipe them all out." Laughter and for Daz a fair bit of confusion.
Perhaps steps could be taken to take the profits out of the Victim industry? Or should we just wait for the whole thing to blow over, the way moral panics always do?
I don't think this is quite right. There are cultures which are fear/power which you missed, then others which are shame/honour, and guilt/justice(or dignity) as you correctly identified. I think our current cultural move is towards a victim/vengeance morality which is scary. But the thing to remember in the cultural taxonomy is that there must be a carrot and a stick, something to avoid and something to strive for, so fear and grievance do not work as a pair. IMHO.