Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
We live in the age of self-aggrandizing victimhood. Why take responsibility for your own actions when you can blame outside forces? The election was rigged. The media is out to get me. My neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard no longer want me shilling my books at the local library.
And while there are certainly cases where bad things happen through outside forces, over the past few years this kind of performative victimhood (as a way to avoid responsibility) has taken on a life of its own through a different kind of moral panic: one in which people who are simply facing reasonable consequences for their own speech or actions try to tie themselves awkwardly to actual unfair scenarios of opprobrium, in order to frame the criticism as unfair.
We saw this a few years ago in the infamously milquetoast Harper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate, in which a bunch of mostly uncontroversial claims were made regarding the importance of “the free exchange of ideas,” while implying that “cancel culture,” was somehow a grave threat. The letter gave vague descriptions of a few scenarios that seemed unfair, without exploring the details and nuances. But, even worse, it lumped together scenarios where there were likely reasonable arguments for why someone might face the consequences of their own actions, with the relatively rare scenarios in which public ridicule or humiliation was perhaps unwarranted.