The Dangers of Victim-worship
By John BeuhlerIn the past few years, I have noticed a trend that I believe to be dangerous to free expression and society, but more importantly—to me professionally.
I’m a standup comedian, and I’m talking about
the explosion of hypersensitivity, fake outrage, and the renaissance of
political correctness.
People are claiming to be offended more and
more by less and less; even seeming to seek out being offended.
Being offended is not the same as having your
feelings hurt. Having your feelings hurt is an involuntary emotional response
to a perceived insult or offense.
Being offended is different. It is the
defensive posture one assumes after having our feelings hurt. We do this in
order to take some power back by drawing attention to the offense, and often
returning fire.
The sneaky part of emotional offenses is that
people can claim to have suffered from them even when their feelings weren’t
actually hurt. They may do this as a kind of social power play.
This strategy is nothing new. It’s a common
practice in sports to embellish an infraction by the opposition in order to be
awarded a game advantage; sometimes actually called a power play.
If someone can feign being a victim without
incurring any actual injury, the experience can be wholly positive—for them.
The victim often receives sympathy and
attention, even praise for their courage. If the outrage is on behalf of
someone else, they can even be considered selfless; thereby garnering even more
sympathy, attention, and praise.
The problem with this empowerment of the
victim is that people have begun to fake being a victim in order to gain power.
We’ve made such an effort to comfort the victim that we’ve made being a victim a comfortable place.
This victimhood movement has adversely
affected the heroism paradigm. A person used to become a hero by having a
positive effect on the world—but is now considered a hero when the world has
had a negative effect on them.
People choose fake outrage as the easiest
route to victimhood because it costs nothing, and no injury need have taken
place—only the appearance of one.
People also use fake outrage as a way of
elevating their own station from that of the group.
You can even see this posturing in how
inmates treat rapists and child molesters; as a last ditch attempt by murderers
to raise their station from dead last
and gain some social dominance.
These are just a few of the motivations for
people to “game” the system of political correctness.
Political correctness began as a way to
socialize people into being more sensitive, but it has devolved into a point
system where the victim wins.
Sharing one’s fake outrage online offers the
same sympathy and praise, but from a vastly larger, interconnected community.
Social media gives people a place to share
their fake outrage in the same way it gives them a place to share their digital
photography.
The media quickly created a demand for
content, and people began to be offended by anything—in
much the same way they began taking pictures of anything; so they could have
something to share.
Fake outrage goes viral very easily because
it contains the controversy and emotional triggers that content needs in order
to compel readers to share it. It’s perfect fodder for a community starved for
the controversy that’s missing from their own mundane lives.
The brass ring of fake outrage is when a
celebrity breaks the rules of political correctness—because a
celebrity-obsessed media will spread those indiscretions even more quickly.
In a culture that has replaced piety with
celebrity, the public likes to see famous people falter. When celebrities
stumble from their pedestals, regular people then feel as if they’re on an
equal level with them; in turn, elevating themselves to the level of what we’ve
put in the place of gods.
Being a direct victim of a celebrity’s
indiscretions offers much attention, and—unlike a sexual assault or paternity
suit—a claim of emotional offence can be launched from the safety of one’s own
computer.
The really sad thing is that instead of using
social media for information sharing, many have used it to join a culture of
tattletales and fake victims.
This new culture of victimhood is not a
result of more emotional offenses, but of a progression of time, technology,
and perceived humanitarianism. Political correctness was simply inevitable.
A decadent society eventually runs out of
real challenges, and therefore problems must be invented. People train their
sights on the perceived evils of their own culture in their search for yet
another realm to conquer.
Like an idle immune system takes the form of
an autoimmune disease, people attack the very culture that has evolved to
support their way of life. Hypersensitivity becomes less the right thing to do, and more just something to do.
The problem is that political correctness
doesn’t work—for several reasons.
It is designed under the false logic that
removing negative speech will somehow force people to act positively towards
one another. As if removing the weapons will end the war—but that doesn’t work.
When a “negative” word is eliminated, its
negative connotation is migrated to the replacement word, and in time, the new
word must then be eliminated.
The only lasting result is the
hyper-sensitizing of a culture which begins to turn out more sensitive people—who
in turn become offended by less and less. Society must then be re-sensitized,
and the cycle self-perpetuates.
The cultural movement accomplishes nothing
but to give work and entertainment to the sanctimonious; busybodies created by
the same movement.
Political correctness now has the exact
opposite result of what was originally intended; removing negative speech
causes people to function worse as a society.
With the elimination of negative speech, we
lose the ability to hold others accountable for their actions, including those
in power. This is because negative speech is an integral part of criticism and
shame.
Shame felt for oneself and from others is
what civilizes a society. No length of legal code or force of military can
control a culture that is, at its core, shameless.
Shame isn’t pleasant, but anyone who conducts
themselves without caring what others think is in essence, acting antisocially.
In the effort to end bad feelings, society
begins to dismantle.
Bad feelings will always persist because
classifying new “bad words” actually causes more hurt feelings because of the
brain’s ability to contextualize pain.
Certain systems of the brain conspire to
create a picture of the pain in order to assign it a level of seriousness.
Think about the difference in pain levels between getting a tattoo, and getting
a tattoo against your will. The
terror that our emotions assign to the latter will cause a measurable somatic
difference.
Soldiers will often require more pain-killing
medications in the hospital than they did on the battlefield. Some will run
miles before realizing that they’ve been shot—and only then, will they fall to
the ground.
A child who falls off of his bike when he is
alone will pick himself up and dust himself off, but will burst into tears if
his mother is watching. Both reactions are genuine, but with the mother’s
presence creating a different context.
A hypersensitive culture acts as your mother
watching.
When we legitimize words as being damaging,
they become damaging. When we overly sensitize society, we cause its members to
be hurt by less and less.
“What worries me is the
acceptance of the importance of feelings without any effort to understand their
complex biological and sociocultural machinery. …to explain bruised feelings by
appealing to surface social causes…”
—Dr. Antonio Damasio
University Professor, David Dornsife Professor
of Neuroscience, Director, Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern
California
Eliminating words should only be done after
very close examination, because language is the brain of a society. As with
brain cells, when you remove words, you simplify the entire organism.
Political correctness removes words while
technology limits the size of the message—to the length of tweets, or the
brevity of texts. This leads to an erosion of discourse and art as a whole.
Which brings me to my problem.
Standup relies on profane speech and
exaggeration for the benefit of shock and emphasis. The line of good taste is
danced upon and often crossed because-- it’s fun and that’s what people pay
for.
Comedy crowds are beginning to shut down and
stay silent if any joke so much as mentions members of the ever-growing
‘protected humans’ list; as if being gay, or black, or female is a birth defect
that must not have any attention drawn to it.
Calling a comedian sexist, racist,
homophobic—or worse—has become an adult game of cooties where you point your
fingers to draw attention away from yourself.
Standup comedy is something that allows us to put the rules of office behind us, to let our
hair down, and to laugh at each other. A good comedian will seem like a funny
friend, and when friends converse they don’t do it by using a political rule
book.
It’s called a comedy ‘club’ because a club is
a group of people who have a common interest. In this case, it’s to laugh, to
have fun, and to be entertained.
If you are someone who just wants to groan,
complain, or clam up in order to prove that you are of a higher class than the
rest of the crowd—or if you want to pull out a phone in order to tattle on the
performer—you’re betraying the nature of my art form.
So. I would like to invite those people to leave, and to go find
something else to do that won’t offend their delicate sensibilities. If that’s
you—you are not a good fit with standup comedy—and you’re out of the club.
