The Joys of Victimhood
True believers and the politics of moral narcissism.
As a professional loather of youth and its corrosive taste in glorified noise, I’m unqualified to judge what the young call ‘bars.’
But I know a dud when I hear one. Last week, a young Oxford University student produced a rhyme so repulsive that I considered placing a screwdriver into my ear canal and tapping the handle against the wall.
At a pro-Palestinian march in central London, Samuel Williams, 20, did what all youths do: dutifully filmed himself ruining his life for the insatiable god Content.
Police arrested Williams on suspicion of inciting racial hatred, but one assumes the arresting officers, being middle-aged and versed in good rap, took umbrage at Williams’ insult to creativity.
The offending line went: “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud. Put the Zios in the ground.”
Epicene, twinkish, slightly odd. Williams occupies that gauzy hinterland between meek victim and homicidal brute. He reminds me of mimsy, murderous Allie in Single White Female.
Before launching his tirade, Williams name-checks the “steadfast and noble resistance in Gaza,” before promising to “not yap for too long.” He continues to fumble his moment of recognition. “Here’s a chant we’ve been workshopping… that maybe you guys want to join in…”
Study that passage for a moment. The subject is killing human beings. First comes the promise of the perennially frustrated male: I won’t yap too long. Second, comes the throat-clearing, sorry-for-existing passive sentence complete with the presumptuous ‘we’: “Here’s a chant we’ve been workshopping… maybe you guys want to join in…” He talks like a sleepwalking child crying for his blanky. The tonal rupture between cheerleader (make us proud!) and homicidal lunatic sums him up: a Jackrabbit posing as a Jackal.
The video tells us all we need to know. With his limping arousal of universal pity, he hopes to evade predators. Master Williams is no revolutionary. Only after his keffiyah-draped pals join in, does he discover his voice. Hidden in the underpants of the mob are Williams’ testicles. He shifts from Untermensch to Übermensch.
But let’s not play silly buggers. This is a boy whose Instagram page reveals a penchant for playing pretend. Williams, born long after The Troubles, routinely dons the military fatigues of the IRA paramilitary. In another photo, he brandishes a plastic AK-47 as if declaring an Islamic caliphate in his mum’s decidedly middle-class back garden. The toy gun even has a bright orange toggle on the barrel. This is a twenty-year-old boy who still plays dress-up. His glaring unsuitability for violence, though, is irrelevant.
In his famous study on obedience, the psychologist Stanley Milgram found that two-thirds of ordinary people would administer a fatal electric shock if an authority figure pushed them to do so. Later studies revealed that number sank to just 2.5 percent when participants were left unbidden.
Back when social scientists desired not only fruitful study but expressed it in lush, accessible prose, Milgram recounts a certain Bruno Batta, the “thirty-seven-year-old welder” with a “rough-hewn face that conveys a conspicuous lack of alertness.”
It’s worth recounting the Batta story in full, if only to remind us that evil often presents as paperwork.
Batta pays no attention to him. His face remains impassive, as if to dissociate himself from the learner’s disruptive behaviour. When the experimenter instructs him to force the learner’s hand down, he adopts a rigid, mechanical procedure. He tests the generator switch. When it fails to function, he immediately forces the learner’s hand onto the shock plate. All the while he maintains the same rigid mask. The learner, seated alongside him, begs him to stop, but with robotic impassivity he continues the procedure.
What is extraordinary is his apparent total indifference to the learner; he hardly takes cognizance of him as a human being. Meanwhile, he relates to the experimenter in a submissive and courteous fashion.
At the 330-volt level, the learner refuses not only to touch the shock plate but also to provide any answers. Annoyed, Batta turns to him, and chastises him: “You better answer and get it over with. We can’t stay here all night.” These are the only words he directs to the learner in the course of an hour. Never again does he speak to him. The scene is brutal and depressing, his hard, impassive face showing total indifference as he subdues the screaming learner and gives him shocks. He seems to derive no pleasure from the act itself, only quiet satisfaction at doing his job properly.
When he administers 450 volts, he turns to the experimenter and asks, “Where do we go from here, Professor?” His tone is deferential and expresses his willingness to be a cooperative subject, in contrast to the learner’s obstinacy.
At the end of the session, he tells the experimenter how honoured he has been to help him, and in a moment of contrition, remarks, “Sir, sorry it couldn’t have been a full experiment.”
Batta relished punishing those who ‘got the answers wrong’. He is the minor SS guard to the visiting Obergruppenführer—a potent admixture of simpering and sadism.
That toxic combination animates our true believers today. The trembling cowardice of the follower meets the cold fervour of the zealot. For every twenty Williamses playing dress-up, there’s a psychopathic Bruno Batta eager to make fantasy into flesh.
Eric Hoffer dissected this curious species long before the age of short-form video and long-form outrage, in The True Believer. He observed that mass movements do not recruit the self-assured but the self-repulsed. In fractious times such as our own, there’s no shortage of losers willing to dissolve their tiny selves into a grand cause. In 1930s Germany, Nazis and Communists routinely sauntered through the revolving doors of their respective meeting houses.
If Hoffer mapped the psychology of the fanatic, psychologists today have charted its cousin—the Victimhood Mindset, identified by researchers at Tel Aviv University as a syndrome of constant recognition-seeking, lack of empathy, fixation on past injustice, and ‘moral elitism.’ In other words, the modern activist’s mental landscape.
The tragedy of the victimhood mindset is not that it offends reason. But that it entrenches self-pity and dissolves all around it. One striking finding from that study is the victim’s inability to see others in similar straits as deserving victims. Victims ignore all other plights to keep pure their own.
The great sociologist, Emile Durkheim, warned that societies which erode their moral guidelines descend into anomie, a state of normlessness and social chaos. For Durkheim, the “malady of the infinite”—that state where limitless desires go unfulfilled—ushers in frustration, deviance, and decay.
Robert K. Merton, to riot in sociological theory, extended this to ‘strain theory’: When the gap between what society says you should achieve and the means to achieve them is too great, individuals quite literally lose the plot. The modern theorist Peter Turchin furthers both, arguing that societies which produce too many would-be elites for too few positions erupt into precisely what we see today: tribalism, social warfare, decay.
That’s not to excuse Samuel Williams. But when kids at elite universities idolise murderers, maimers and madmen, something isn’t quite right. Indeed, the most virulent shock troops of the Woke decade were just like him: white, affluent, educated, and sociopathically assured of their entitlements.
The worst excesses of that grubby epoch may have passed, but millions like Samuel Williams remain infected with the victimhood parasite. The prognosis, I fear, is terminal.
There's a John Buchan quote I think about sometimes, the protagonist is in a meeting along with a Cambridge professor and anti-war activist.
"I thought I had never seen anyone quite so fluent and so futile, and yet there was a kind of feeble violence in him like a demented sheep. He was engaged in venting some private academic spite against society, and I thought that in a revolution he would be the class of lad I would personally conduct to the nearest lamp-post."
It's stuck in my head for years, I see men like Williams and I just think of the feeble violence of a demented sheep. It isn't that men of this type are incapable of real violence but there's something that just signals the enormous gap between their desires and their abilities. Their real danger is the sort of moral or social rot they spread.
He's the reason I pray my lads don't want to go to uni. Eldest has decided he doesn't - says he doesn't want to be brainwashed and end up in debt. It's a pity because he'd make a great teacher and we need folk like him (normal, sane humans) in the profession....
Is Williams the product of his upbringing, society or his years in our left wing education system? 🤔