02/20/2024
Victimhood vs. Victimization from Jamie Wheal
There was a cool study a few years back that identified two traditional cultures and one emerging one that can tell us a lot about the world we're living in these days.
The researchers found that traditionally, most cultures split into one of two types: Honor Cultures, or Dignity Cultures.
Honor cultures, arguably the oldest form of all, are based on rigorous defense of personal and territorial boundaries. It's on each individual (or clan) to take steps to avenge when they've been dishonored.
If you didn't stick up for yourself, no one else would. This is why Sicilian goat herders and Appalachian Hatfield-McCoy hillbillies adapted this outlook.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a bit about it in his book Outliers:
“Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can't farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community.
But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don't have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can't easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He's under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak.”
These days, Honor Cultures have been mostly diluted by civil society, but they do tend to persist in gang and prison life, enlisted military barracks and other hardscrabble, no-referee sort of situations where if you don't stick up for yourself early and decisively, you're gonna get rolled from that point on.
In short, for Honor Culture folks, the smallest slight—looking at someone funny, making a crack about their mother, not getting out of the way in a hallway or a sidewalk—demands an immediate and totalizing response.
Might makes Right. Power rules the day.
Now, Dignity Cultures are the exact opposite.
In a Dignity Culture, taking matters into your own hands is considered a failure, a breach of protocol. You're supposed to escalate to the authorities and let them handle it. That's why when little Susie or Johnny gets called into the principal's office for a playground scrap, they're always asked, "Why didn't you use your words, or tell the playground monitor?"
It's also why David Beckham caught so much s**t for his late kick of an Argentine soccer player during the '98 World Cup that earned him a red card (with England ultimately losing the game in penalties).
He'd been getting hassled on the pitch by the Argentine covering him, and after a particularly hard tackle, kicked the opposing player while he (Beckham) was still on the ground. He was using an Honor Culture response (you mess with me, I'll settle it) to a Dignity Culture situation (a refereed World Cup match).
England barely forgave him.
In Honor Cultures, Right makes Might. The rule of law is supposed to triumph over raw power or vengeance.
(that's also why you often see the trope in Westerns where the sheriff has to beat back a lynch mob to ensure that the outlaw is legally tried and hung).
But lately we've been seeing the emergence of a third culture—Victimhood Culture. Sadly, it contains the worst elements of the prior two and mixes them up in a volatile combo.
In Victimhood Culture, you take the "a small slight against me demands an immediate and totalizing response" from old school Honor Cultures, and combine it with the run-it-up-the-flagpole reliance on authorities of Dignity Cultures.
For these folks, Slight Makes Right(eous).
If I am offended, whether by claiming a feeling of "unsafe" environments, microaggressions, or some other nebulous harm, then I alert the Powers that Be, and expect them to settle all my personal scores and grievances for me.
And this is happening on all sides of our culture wars, whether it's "They're canceling Christmas" tropes that come up every season, to campus speech policing.
Interestingly, additional work by our buddy psychologist Scott Barry Kaufmann and others have shown that folks who orient to the Victimhood mindset tend to be more self absorbed, less empathetic and more righteous than folks who don't.
So if you've been wondering how things have kinda gone a little haywire in the last five years or so, and how otherwise manageable disagreements seem to escalate madly, you might be looking at Victimhood culture in action.
How to fix it, or duck it altogether?
If you're the authority figure getting pressured to adjudicate someone's personal grievances, you can encourage folks to mediate and work things through themselves. Push it back down a level.
If you're getting caught in some crossfire where someone has taken something you've done and is trying to escalate to higher authorities (or social mobs online), you can lift it up a level—to the agreed upon norms and values that hopefully underpin our shared culture.
Things like "hearing both sides, innocent until proven guilty, sanctity of internal experience (meaning, you can share with me the impact of my actions, but can't assert my motive), making amends."
That sort of thing.
Important Note: none of this, apparently, works on Twitter!
But in other places, whether with our own kids and extended families, or in organizations we lead, it's a helpful frame to identify and understand some of the cultural software we're running.
It's definitely possible to have an honorable, dignified culture that doesn't succumb to righteousness, but it's on us to make it the norm.
Hope that helps.
Curious if you've experienced any of that whipsawing between these three cultures?
Jamie and the FGP Team
p.s. if the answer was "absolutely" and you're curious about more in-depth ways to address this and a bunch of other typical leadership challenges, check out our upcoming Leading Through Fire digital training. Six weeks to level up your skills, and master tools you can share with everyone you lead.
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