From Accomplishment to Victimhood

In this country we used to value accomplishment.  People strove to do their very best.  Students wanted to excel and be at the top of their class.  People would compete to get the first place (not the participation) trophy. 

Valuing accomplishment means valuing the successful achievement of a task.  It has meant that Individuals were rewarded for doing their best and for doing better than their peers:  they received a promotion or a raise, they were admitted to the top schools, they were recognized as excelling due to ability, talent, skill, or aptitude in a particular area.  Generally, receiving recognition for excellence required individual effort and hard work in order to attain the level necessary for such recognition.

We celebrated accomplishment and as a result this country excelled.  That is, when individuals are striving to do their best they will not only fulfill themselves but will continually improve the areas in which they are working.  As such, their society and their country will also excel and continually improve.

Of course, celebrating and awarding individual accomplishment means that some sort of ranking of individuals will result; not everyone can be number one.  At some point this started to become a problem.  People’s feelings became more important than the accomplishments of others. 

At some point we moved from celebrating accomplishment to being ashamed of and condemning it.  Those who didn’t win the top prize felt bad and, instead of saying “try harder next time” we consoled their hurt feelings with things like participation awards.  We advised winners not to be too proud.  We started removing children’s games that had winners.  We shamed those who tried too hard, who wanted to rise above the mediocre to be the best that they could be.  We made excuses for failure.  And, instead of striving to be the best we began striving for mediocrity.

And, then, we created victims; we began celebrating victimhood.

Below are three charts that show the usage of the words “accomplishment”, “victim”, and “victimhood” between 1800 and 2010.  You will note that “accomplishment” has steadily declined while “victim” began a steady rise in the 1960s and “victimhood” from almost nothing made a steep jump to the highest usage of the three beginning in the early 2000s.

Now, instead of accomplishment we celebrate victimhood.  Perhaps this change started with the over-focus on the belief that by recognizing those who perform better than others we were somehow destroying self-esteem; that is, everyone was supposed to feel good all the time.  

When someone else won and was recognized for it, that became unacceptable because someone else must be feeling bad.  We had a culture of feelings and those feelings were supposed to always be good.  Yet, what this did was also do away with the true self-esteem that comes with accomplishment.

Suddenly, it was the victims who received the attention.  People began to proclaim themselves as victims in order to obtain a variety of benefits attached to victimhood.  

Clever lawyers created defendant-victims; students began to claim one or another hardship as the reason for their lack of academic success.  

While college admissions used to look almost exclusively at academic performance, the entrance personal essay began to take center stage.  The understanding now seems to be that the applicant needs to find some sort of victimhood about which he or she can write.  Even the once objective SAT now has added a very subjective “adversity score.”

Such search for victimhood became fertile ground for those who wanted to create identity groups, groups for which, in the mold of Alinsky, one could find or create a common enemy against a community. 

Saul Alinsky, in 1971, published the book Rules for Radicals about how to successfully run a movement for change.  His book set forth how to unite less fortunate communities for social and political power.  At its core it is a way to divide people into groups of enemies with those that are less fortunate on the attack against those sitting in a better position or a position in which the less fortunate would like to be.

Politicians learned to create a victim class – an identifiable group – whose circumstances they would promise to help and improve if only they were elected.  Once in power, more often than not, they maintain this group as some form of dependent class - dependent on the politician’s retention of power and therefore instrumental in keeping that politician in office.  The politician, determined to retain power, keeps reminding this dependent identity group that it is composed of victims who are in need of the politician; that is, their victimhood becomes of prime importance while any possibility of individual achievement is forgotten.

Since the 1970s, and with the help of identity politics, we have seen groups use their victim hood to claim their entitlement to many things that in the past may have been available to only those who demonstrated superior accomplishment in a particular area.  There is far less incentive for individual achievement and that results in a lack of motivation to do one’s best. 

Now, rather than looking for ways to achieve and succeed we look for ways to be a victim and hence be entitled to something for which we have not really put in a personal effort.  

Victimhood and its celebration creates a major shift in how our society functions.  Indeed, it creates a very different country than when individual accomplishment was celebrated.  

America as we know it cannot survive if we have only victims.