Nautilus looks at the left’s obsession: victimhood through the lens of social science.

In a polarized nation, victimhood is a badge of honor. It gives people strength. “The victim has become among the most important identity positions in American politics,” wrote Robert B. Horwitz, a communications professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Horwitz published his study, “Politics as Victimhood, Victimhood as Politics,” in 2018.1 He focused on social currents that drove victimhood to the fore of American political life, arguing it “emerged from the contentious politics of the 1960s, specifically the civil rights movement and its aftermath.” What lodges victimhood in human psychology?

In 2020, researchers in Israel, led by Rahav Gabray, a doctor of psychology at Tel Aviv University, conducted a series of empirical studies to come up with an answer.2 They identify a negative personality trait they call TIV or Tendency toward Interpersonal Victimhood. People who score high on a TIV test have an “enduring feeling that the self is a victim in different kinds of interpersonal relationships,” they write.

The study of TIV is built around four pillars. The first pillar is a relentless need for one’s victimhood to be clearly and unequivocally acknowledged by both the offender and the society at large. The second is “moral elitism,” the conviction that the victim has the moral high ground, an “immaculate morality,” while “the other” is inherently immoral. The third pillar is a lack of empathy, especially an inability to see life from another perspective, with the result that the victim feels entitled to act selfishly in response. The fourth pillar is Rumination—a tendency to dwell on the details of an assault on self-esteem.

You only need to spend only a few minutes watching or reading the news, in any country, to hear and see victimhood raging. We caught up with Gabray to get the science behind the headlines.

Is TIV an aberration in the personality?

Sometimes it may be, if one is high on the TIV scale. But we didn’t research clinical patients. That’s not what interested me. I’m interested in how this tendency appears in normal people, not those with a personality disorder. What we found was that like in a bell curve, most people who experience TIV appear in the middle range.

You found a correlation between TIV and what you referred to as “anxious attachment style”, as opposed to “secure and avoidant” styles. What is the anxious style?

Another way to say it is an “ambivalent attachment style.” So when a child is very young, and care is uncertain, perhaps the caregiver, or the male figures in the child’s life, don’t act consistently, sometimes they may act very aggressively without warning, or they don’t notice that the child needs care. That’s when the anxious attachment style or ambivalent attachment style is created.

So victimhood is a learned behavior after a certain age.

Yes, normally children internalize the empathetic and soothing reactions of their parents, they learn not to need others from outside to soothe themselves. But people with high TIV cannot soothe themselves. This is partly why they experience perceived offenses for long-term periods. They tend to ruminate about the offense. They keep mentioning they are hurt, remembering and reflecting on what happened, and also they keep dwelling on the negative feelings associated with the offense: hopelessness, insult, anger, frustration.

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In a must-read article in Claremont Review, Mike Gonzalez explains how the Marxist Left successfully created a second imaginary racial category of victims and turned White Mexicans brown.

I know a Spanish count, a grandee of Spain and a descendant of the Hapsburgs, who got into Yale as a Hispanic victim of White European Oppression. He thought it was hilarious.

America’s surging politics of victimhood and identitarian division did not emerge organically or inevitably, as many believe. Nor are these practices the result of irrepressible demands by minorities for recognition, or for redress of past wrongs, as we are constantly told. Those explanations are myths, spread by the activists, intellectuals, and philanthropists who set out deliberately, beginning at mid-century, to redefine our country. Their goal was mass mobilization for political ends, and one of their earliest targets was the Mexican-American community. These activists strived purposefully to turn Americans of this community (who mostly resided in the Southwestern states) against their countrymen, teaching them first to see themselves as a racial minority and then to think of themselves as the core of a pan-ethnic victim group of “Hispanics”—a fabricated term with no basis in ethnicity, culture, or race.

This transformation took effort—because many Mexican Americans had traditionally seen themselves as white. When the 1930 Census classified “Mexican American” as a race, leaders of the community protested vehemently and had the classification changed back to white in the very next census. …

They had the law on their side: a federal district court ruled in In Re Ricardo Rodríguez (1896) that Mexican Americans were to be considered white for the purposes of citizenship concerns. …
And so as late as 1947, the judge in another federal case (Mendez v. Westminster) ruled that segregating Mexican-American students in remedial schools in Orange County was unconstitutional because it represented social disadvantage, not racial discrimination. At that time Mexican Americans were as white before the law as they were in their own estimation.

Half a century later, many Mexican Americans had been persuaded of a very different origin story. Among the persuaders-in-chief was Paul Ylvisaker, head of the Public Affairs Program at New York’s wealthy Ford Foundation during the 1950s and ’60s. Though little-known today, he wielded great power and influence to advance a particular vision of social justice inspired partly by socialism and its politics of resentment. Ylvisaker hoped, as he later put it in a 1991 essay, “The Future of Hispanic Nonprofits,” that Mexican Americans could be organized into a “united front.” That concept, formulated in 1922 by the Comintern, implied a union of disparate groups on the Left into what the Comintern’s 4th World Congress called “a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.”

Ylvisaker, who saw philanthropy as “the passing gear” of social change, set off to find out if something similar was possible with Mexican Americans. In 1968, he poured $2.2 million in seed funding into the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a national advocacy conglomerate whose headquarters still buzz with activity in Los Angeles today.

He built on foundations laid by the organizing guru Saul Alinsky, who had begun the effort to consolidate the Mexican-American vote during Ed Roybal’s 1949 L.A. City Council election. Roybal, an army veteran and distant descendant of New Mexico’s Spanish settlers, was one of many Democrats at the time whose success in local politics owed much to Alinsky’s organizing tactics. Alinsky’s groups also trained men like Herman Gallegos, Julian Samora, and Ernesto Galarza—Chicano Movement intellectuals who used Ylvisaker’s Ford Foundation money (starting with a one-year grant of $630,000) to found the interest group La Raza in 1968.

What all these radicals sought—and were quite successful at eventually achieving—was to analogize the experience of black Americans to that of Latinos. The term La Raza, literally “the race,” by itself epitomized this process of racialization. Ylvisaker was direct on this point. In 1964 he handed UCLA researchers the then-goodly sum of $647,999 for a deep survey of Mexican Americans in the Southwest. One of the things he wanted this survey to find out was in what respect the Mexican-American experience was comparable to that of “Negroes today.”

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If you look at any university today, you’ll find that the same bad guys have also got Asian kids brainwashed into signing on as another whiny victim group fighting against White Male Oppression, quite ironically since the only real modern discrimination against Asians consists of college admission quotas created and enforced by the very same Left-Wing Establishment that leads them around by the nose.

Vampires face discrimination… or worse!

Katherine Timpf, in National Review, reports that sociologists have identified a new class of victims with a long history of oppression and discrimination based upon societal intolerance grounded in traditional religious beliefs.

Sociology researchers are now insisting that we as a society start accepting people who choose to “identify as real vampires” — so that they can be open about the fact that they’re vampires without having to worry about facing discrimination from people who might think that that’s weird.

The study, titled “Do We Always Practice What We Preach? Real Vampires’ Fears of Coming out of the Coffin to Social Workers and Helping Professionals” was conducted by researchers from Idaho State University and College of the Canyons and the Center for Positive Sexuality in Los Angeles.

“Most vampires believe they were born that way; they don’t choose this,” said Dr. D. J. Williams, the study’s lead researcher and the director of sociology at Idaho State.

The study is based on the experiences of eleven “real” vampires — which, by the way, are different from “lifestyle vampires.”

“Lifestylers,” the study explains, are people who just do things like wear fangs and sleep in coffins as lifestyle choices, and although “real vampires” may do these things too, they all also have one major thing in common that distinguishes them from the “lifestylers:”

“The essential feature of real vampirism is their belief in the need to take in ‘subtle energy’ (called feeding) from time to time from a willing ‘donor’ in order to maintain physical, psychological and spiritual health,” the study explains.

“Unlike lifestyle vampires, real vampires believe that they do not choose their vampiric condition; they are born with it, somewhat akin to sexual orientation,” it continues.

Read the whole thing.

James Delingpole and I were born knowing we were really English Dukes.

James Delingpole has been suffering all his life from the same affliction as myself.

Today, finally, I have plucked up the courage to speak out in the hope that fellow sufferers of this awful disability might finally be able to talk openly about the misery this tragic condition has brought upon them. Perhaps we could even form a campaign group and demand government compensation.

The problem is this: I was born Trans Class.

Imagine how it feels to stare into your bathroom mirror every day and to see, reflected back, not the extravagantly be-sideburned, gimlet-eyed, red-cheeked aristocrat you know you really are, but just the pallid, gaunt features of a middle-middle-class nobody struggling to make a living, just like all the “little people”.

Imagine waking up, not in the four-poster-bed that has been in the family for generations and which its rumoured Anne Boleyn once slept in, but just a fairly ordinary pocket-sprung number you picked up ten years ago from a boring high street chain with some name like SlumberWorld or DreamLand or Bed-U-Like.

Imagine the stabbing agony you experience every day when you realise that nothing you ever do – NOTHING – is ever going to alter the fact that you will never have a foxhunt bearing your name (like the Duke of Beaufort does), that neither you nor in all likelihood your children, will ever inherit a 52 bedroom Baroque palace with 5,000 acres of parkland landscaped by Capability Brown and swarming with unusual-looking sheep, rare-breed cattle and exotic deer which your ancestor brought back from the Forbidden City in Peking.

Imagine the horror of knowing that instead of having your every whim catered for by a retinue of liveried servants – as is your natural birthright – you instead actually have to put your leaves into your teapot yourself, then pour boiling water on it from an electric kettle, then wait for it to brew for four minutes, then pour it out into a cup which isn’t made from antique finebone china but has Mr Silly on it and came from some unspeakable supermarket like Tesco, not to mention all the other crap that ordinary people have to do because they know no better and weren’t born Trans Class like you and are therefore more dumbly accepting of their lot…stuff like putting out the rubbish once a week for the binmen, and having to floss your teeth rather than getting your cheeky chambermaid Moll to do it and having to watch television rather than having your staff watch it for you and then give you a written summary in copperplate.

Imagine sticking both arms out every morning then remembering, with a shudder, that there is no valet to slip on your frock coat and that in fact all you’ve got is a bunch of Charles Tyrwhitt shirts and the same old pair of jeans which you’re going to have to put on yourself.

Imagine….well there’s really no point because you can’t bloody imagine. Unlike me – unless of course you are a fellow Trans Class victim – you won’t have sufficient intellectual refinement or imagination to imagine, because your proletarian brain won’t let you.

So since you lack the inability to imagine, I’ll just have to tell you.

I was born an 18th century Duke with a vast estate, a stable of two dozen hunters, a bevy of mistresses, a summer “nooky house”, more estates in the West Indies (where I can assure you that the workers are all very happy with their lot and address me cheerfully as “Massa Duke, Sir”), a beautiful if slightly remote wife who is related to the King, lots of paintings (especially of me) by Gainsborough and Reynolds, yet I am trapped in the body of a middle-class, middle-aged journalist in ugly, pointless, 21st century Britain.

And it is HELL, I tell you, hell.

That is why from now on, to help my cope with my disability, I shall expect to be addressed as “Your Grace”, be given the place of honour at those of your miserable dinner parties I deign to attend, and be treated at all times with deference bordering on worship.

Read the whole thing.

HuffPo passed along the rapidly-going-viral photograph of a restaurant check originally posted by PhoenixSongFawkes on Reddit.

Apparently, certain single moms can dine out on a sufficiently lavish scale to run up $138 restaurant tabs, but consider themselves so disadvantaged and worthy of special consideration that they feel no obligation to conform to the general custom of adding a 15-20% gratuity (which actually represents the principal portion of the compensation received by restaurant servers).

This particular woman’s spectacular sense of self-entitlement has won her a well-deserved 15 minutes of fame on the Web.