Part 1 of 3 in the series “The Victim Trap: How a Culture of Helplessness Took Hold”
By: Tom Golden
Published: Nov 10, 2025
Part 1 of 3 in the series “The Victim Trap: How a Culture of Helplessness Took Hold”
Something powerful happens when a person begins to see themselves as a victim. It doesn’t just shape how they interpret the world — it shapes who they become.
In therapy, I’ve watched people recover from immense trauma once they reclaimed a sense of agency — the feeling that they could influence their own lives. I’ve also seen others sink deeper into despair when they made victimhood their identity.
The difference isn’t what happened to them. It’s how they understood what happened.
1. The Loss of Agency
The first casualty of victim thinking is agency — the belief that your choices matter.
When someone becomes convinced that their suffering is entirely someone else’s fault, they begin to feel powerless. Over time, that belief solidifies into a mindset. Life starts to feel like something that happens to them rather than something they participate in.
Psychologist Martin Seligman called this learned helplessness: after enough experiences of uncontrollable pain, the mind simply stops trying. Think of an animal that has been shocked in a cage with no escape. Even when the door is later opened, it doesn’t leave — because it has learned that effort is futile.
Humans do the same thing psychologically. Even when their circumstances change, the sense of helplessness remains. People stop acting not because they can’t, but because they’ve learned that trying doesn’t work.
2. The Seduction of the Victim Identity
Victimhood can feel strangely comforting. It offers a simple, satisfying story: “I’m suffering because they wronged me.”
That story brings sympathy and moral clarity — two powerful emotional rewards. It can even give life meaning for a while, especially when pain otherwise feels random or senseless. The problem is that, over time, this identity replaces growth with grievance.
When the victim role becomes part of one’s personality, it begins to demand constant confirmation. Every slight, disappointment, or setback becomes further proof that the world is unjust. In relationships, this can look like chronic mistrust — interpreting neutral behavior as betrayal.
It’s a trap that trades short-term comfort for long-term paralysis. The more we tell the story, the more we become it.
3. Blame as a Refuge from Responsibility
Blame is a refuge. It protects us from guilt, uncertainty, and the anxiety of freedom.
If we can point to someone else as the cause of our pain, we don’t have to face our own part in it. Yet this comes at a heavy price. Without responsibility, there can be no empowerment.
Responsibility doesn’t mean self-blame; it means reclaiming authorship — the power to choose how to respond. In therapy, progress often begins the moment a person stops asking, “Why did this happen to me?” and starts asking, “What can I do with what happened?”
That subtle shift — from passive to active, from blame to authorship — marks the true beginning of healing.
4. The Emotional Cost of Victim Thinking
Living as a victim is emotionally exhausting. It keeps the body in a constant state of alert — scanning for unfairness, injustice, or disrespect.
Each time we perceive ourselves as wronged, the body releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Over time, this constant vigilance wears down the nervous system. Sleep suffers, digestion falters, the immune system weakens.
Psychologically, the effects are just as corrosive. Chronic resentment hardens the heart. Cynicism replaces curiosity. Trust becomes dangerous. Eventually, life starts to feel like a battlefield where every encounter carries the potential for harm.
When that happens, even joy feels suspicious — as if it could be taken away at any moment. Gratitude becomes nearly impossible.
5. Gratitude as the Antidote
Gratitude and victimhood cannot occupy the same space. One looks for what’s been taken; the other notices what remains.
Practicing gratitude doesn’t mean pretending injustice never happened. It means refusing to let it define you. It’s an act of quiet rebellion against despair — a way of saying, “You may have hurt me, but you don’t own my perspective.”
Even small acts of gratitude — writing down three good things each day, thanking someone sincerely, noticing the ordinary kindnesses that surround us — begin to loosen the grip of grievance.
Gratitude shifts the focus from what’s wrong to what’s possible, reminding us that healing begins not with fairness, but with perspective.
6. The Loop of Confirmation Bias
Once victimhood takes root, the mind begins to filter reality to fit the narrative.
Every perceived slight becomes proof. Every kind gesture from “the enemy” is dismissed as insincere.
Psychologists call this confirmation bias: our natural tendency to seek evidence that supports what we already believe. It’s how belief becomes identity — and identity becomes destiny.
This loop can be hard to escape because it feels truthful. The more you look for injustice, the more you’ll find. Eventually, you stop seeing anything else. The mind edits reality until it mirrors the wound.
7. Reclaiming Agency
Freedom begins with the quiet realization: I can choose my response.
That one insight breaks the spell of helplessness. It doesn’t erase the past, but it reclaims the present.
When people rediscover agency, they stop waiting for justice before living again. They stop making peace conditional on apology or fairness. They act from strength instead of grievance.
We cannot rewrite the past, but we can decide what story it tells about us — tragedy or transformation. The choice is ours.
Closing Reflection
We live in a time when victimhood is often rewarded — socially, politically, even financially. It’s praised as awareness, celebrated as moral insight. But the personal cost is enormous.
It steals joy, isolates the heart, and locks people into a story that keeps them small.
The truth is, pain is inevitable; helplessness is optional. And the moment we reclaim our authorship, even suffering can become a source of strength.
In the next part of this series, we’ll explore how this same mindset expands beyond the individual to entire groups and movements — how collective victimhood becomes a kind of moral currency that shapes modern culture.
Part 2 of 3 in the series “The Victim Trap: How a Culture of Helplessness Took Hold”
By: Tom Golden
Published: Nov 13, 2025
Part 2 of 3 in the series “The Victim Trap: How a Culture of Helplessness Took Hold”
When the mindset of victimhood spreads from individuals to entire groups, something powerful — and dangerous — begins to happen.
The sense of personal injury becomes a shared moral identity.
Suffering, once private, becomes political.
At first, this can bring solidarity and even healing. A wounded community finds its voice. People who once suffered in silence finally feel seen. But over time, the same force that unites can also divide. The story that once offered meaning starts to reshape how people see themselves, their nation, and even morality itself.
1. The Birth of a Moral Identity
When groups define themselves by what was done to them, they gain not only empathy but a sense of moral righteousness. The logic is simple — and intoxicating:
“We have suffered, therefore we are good. They have power, therefore they are bad.”
This moral binary simplifies a messy world. It provides clarity and belonging, offering the comfort of a single story where virtue and vice are clearly assigned. But it also freezes both sides into unchanging roles: one forever the victim, the other forever the oppressor.
These roles are psychologically powerful because they remove complexity — and with it, responsibility. Once a group becomes identified with innocence, it no longer needs to question its own motives. Its cause is automatically just.
Modern politics thrives on these fixed roles. They provide ready-made moral drama: heroes and villains, innocence and guilt. But like all drama, they require constant rehearsal to stay alive. Without conflict, the script falls apart.
2. The Emotional Rewards of Group Victimhood
Collective victimhood feels empowering at first. It transforms personal pain into a larger moral purpose. What was once chaos becomes coherence.
Being part of a group that has “suffered together” gives life meaning and creates unity. It offers protection from isolation. There’s comfort in saying, “We’re not crazy; we’ve been wronged.”
In social movements, this dynamic can quickly become a badge of belonging — a way to prove loyalty to the cause. Those who display the most outrage, or carry the most visible wounds, often gain the highest moral status.
Psychologists call this competitive victimhood: when groups begin to compete for recognition as the most wronged. The greater the suffering, the greater the virtue. But moral status can become addictive. Once a group learns that pain equals virtue, it begins to search for more pain — and when real injustices run out, it may start to manufacture offense to sustain its moral authority.
It’s a strange paradox: the more a group celebrates its wounds, the less it can afford to heal them.
3. Biases that Keep the Wound Open
Victim thinking doesn’t just change beliefs — it changes perception itself. It amplifies cognitive biases that keep the wound raw and prevent healing.
Confirmation bias: Interpreting every disagreement or policy change as proof of oppression. The mind filters the world for evidence of persecution.
Attribution bias: Assuming malice rather than misunderstanding — reading intent where there may be none.
Availability bias: Because the media highlights what shocks and wounds, stories of cruelty stay vivid in our minds while quiet acts of goodwill fade from view. We remember every injustice, not because it’s most common, but because it’s most visible.
Moral typecasting: Once a group is labeled “the victim,” society struggles to see it as capable of harm — while the supposed “oppressor” becomes incapable of innocence.
This last bias deserves a closer look.
Social psychologists Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner discovered that people intuitively divide the world into moral types: those who act (moral agents) and those who suffer (moral patients). Once someone is cast in one role, our minds tend to freeze them there.
That means when a group is seen as a victim, their actions are interpreted through a moral filter that excuses wrongdoing. Their pain becomes proof of virtue — and even when they cause harm, observers tend to explain it away as justified or defensive.
Conversely, those seen as oppressors carry a kind of permanent moral stain. Even their good deeds are reinterpreted as self-serving or manipulative.
The tragedy is that this bias prevents genuine empathy in both directions. It denies accountability to those labeled as victims and compassion to those labeled as villains. In the end, everyone’s humanity gets flattened into a single moral role — and the cycle of grievance stays alive.
4. When Empathy Becomes a Weapon
Empathy is one of humanity’s most precious traits. But when victimhood becomes sacred, even empathy can be weaponized.
Claims of harm begin to override discussions of truth. Feelings become the final arbiter of morality. The question shifts from “Is this accurate?” to “Does this offend?”
The result is what might be called moral coercion: when guilt replaces persuasion and compassion becomes a tool of control. People censor themselves not because they’re wrong, but because they fear being seen as cruel.
You can see this dynamic almost anywhere today — in classrooms, offices, or online. A teacher hesitates to discuss a controversial historical event because one student might feel “unsafe.” A coworker swallows an honest disagreement during a diversity training, not because they’ve changed their mind, but because they dread being labeled insensitive. On social media, someone offers a mild counterpoint and is flooded with moral outrage until they apologize for the sin of questioning the narrative.
In each case, guilt or shame becomes a weapon. The emotional threat of being branded heartless silences discussion more effectively than any argument could. And so compassion, meant to connect us, begins to control us.
Ironically, the groups that appear most powerless often become the most influential, because they wield the moral authority of suffering. When pain becomes proof of virtue, disagreement starts to look like aggression.
It’s a subtle but devastating inversion: empathy, meant to heal division, becomes a tool that enforces it.
5. The Emotional Toll on the Group
Living inside a collective grievance feels purposeful, but it’s emotionally draining. Righteous anger brings a surge of meaning — a sense of clarity and mission — but like any stimulant, it requires constant renewal.
A group addicted to outrage cannot rest. It needs a steady supply of offenses, real or imagined, to keep its story alive. When none appear, it begins to see insult in the ordinary and oppression in mere difference.
Without new conflict, the group’s identity weakens. This is why peace, paradoxically, can feel threatening to movements built on pain. Reconciliation robs them of their reason to exist.
The emotional cost is high: anxiety, exhaustion, paranoia, and isolation. The group’s members live in a permanent state of alert, bonded by fear rather than love.
6. How Collective Victimhood Divides Society
The tragedy of group grievance is that it unites within but divides between. Shared suffering bonds members of the in-group, but it hardens their hearts toward outsiders. Empathy becomes conditional — reserved only for those who share the same scar.
Once compassion is limited to “our people,” understanding dies. Dialogue collapses. Each side becomes trapped in its own moral narrative, convinced that it alone is righteous.
The cultural result is polarization — a society where everyone talks about justice while practicing vengeance, and where reconciliation feels like betrayal.
In such a climate, even kindness can be misinterpreted as manipulation. Every gesture is filtered through suspicion. Healing becomes nearly impossible because the wound has become the identity.
7. Toward a Healthier Collective Story
The way out is not to deny injustice but to transcend it. Nations, communities, and movements can honor their suffering without making it their defining story.
That transformation begins with language.
Saying “We have suffered” keeps us anchored in the past.
Saying “We have endured” honors the same pain but adds strength.
The first sentence describes injury; the second describes resilience.
The difference seems small, but psychologically it’s immense — one keeps the wound open, the other begins to heal it.
Healthy cultures, like healthy people, move from grievance to growth. They tell stories not just of what was lost but of how they rose. They stop competing for sympathy and start competing for excellence.
Final Word
Victimhood once served a sacred purpose — to awaken empathy for the mistreated. It was meant to open our hearts, to remind us of our shared humanity and the moral duty to protect the vulnerable. When a culture witnesses suffering and responds with compassion, something profoundly good happens: justice grows, cruelty is restrained, and dignity is restored.
But somewhere along the way, that sacred purpose was replaced by something transactional. When victimhood becomes a currency, empathy turns into a market, and suffering becomes a brand.
You can see it in the way public life now rewards outrage and emotional display. A single personal story of harm, once told for healing, can now become a platform — drawing attention, sympathy, and sometimes even profit.
Organizations compete to showcase their pain as proof of virtue; individuals learn that expressing offense earns social status; corporations adopt slogans of solidarity not from conscience, but because compassion has become good marketing.
Imagine a town square where people once gathered to comfort the wounded. Over time, the square becomes a stage. The wounded are still there, but now they must keep their wounds visible, even open, because the crowd has learned to applaud pain more than recovery. The very empathy that was meant to heal now demands performance.
When compassion becomes currency, its value declines. What once flowed freely from the heart is now rationed, manipulated, and traded for attention or power.
The true mark of strength is not how loudly we proclaim our pain, but how gracefully we move beyond it. Real empathy — the kind that changes lives — begins when we stop spending suffering and start transforming it.
Our challenge now, as individuals and as a culture, is to remember that compassion and accountability must grow together — or both will die apart.
In the next and final part of this series, we’ll explore how modern institutions — academia, media, and politics — have learned to reward and monetize victimhood, and what that means for the future of honest conversation and human resilience.
Our political system cannot endure if millions of Americans genuinely believe that vigilante justice and political violence are justified.
By: Julian Adorney
Published: Apr 10, 2025
A new study suggests that a growing number of Americans are embracing political violence—or at least the idea of it—as a solution to our problems.
The study, published by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), asked participants whether various acts of left-wing political violence, such as the murder of public figures like Donald Trump or Elon Musk, would be justified. Alarmingly, 48 percent of left-of-center respondents said that murdering Musk would be at least “somewhat” justified, with 9.1 percent deeming it “completely” justified. For Trump, the figures were even higher: 55 percent said his murder would be at least “somewhat” justified, and 13.2 percent considered it “completely” justified.
These findings reflect a disturbing trend. In recent months, the glorification of political violence on the left has been on the rise. Luigi Manglione, for example, became a cult hero among segments of the far-left online community after he murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. There has also been a surge in attacks on Tesla dealerships. According to the same NCRI study, 57.6 percent of left-of-center respondents said that destroying Tesla dealerships would be at least “partially acceptable.”
Behind these dry statistics are chilling anecdotes. In one Reddit thread, a user posted: “Rumor is muck”—a likely intentional misspelling of “Musk” to avoid Reddit’s crackdown on calls for political violence—“always has his kid on his shoulders to deter grassy knoll enthusiasts.” Another commenter replied, “If you ask me 1 potential future Musk is a worthy sacrifice for the betterment of the world.” Such comments are so common in certain online spaces that we risk becoming numb to how profoundly dehumanizing they are. As the NCRI report notes, “In these ecosystems, violence is not just justified—it is stylized, gamified, and embedded within a broader ideological narrative.”
What is driving this glorification of political violence? The report identifies several contributing factors. Because the hypothetical violence targets right-wing figures, support for it correlates strongly with activity on platforms like BlueSky—a left-leaning social media site that excludes conservative voices almost as a matter of course. Such homogenous digital environments can serve as an incubator for left-wing extremism where shared fear and outrage can intensify, echoing and amplifying through online communities until they harden into justification for real-world violence.
The second contributing factor the report highlights is an external locus of control, or “the belief that one’s outcomes are shaped by outside forces.” According to the report, individuals who feel powerless or at the mercy of external circumstances are significantly more likely to endorse political violence.
The last major contributor is a high score on measures of left-wing authoritarianism, which is “characterized by moral absolutism, punitive attitudes toward ideological opponents, and a willingness to use coercion for progressive aims.” As psychology professor Luke Conway writes in Liberal Bullies, left-wing authoritarianism, like its right-wing counterpart, is fundamentally driven by fear. He writes:
What turns people into authoritarians? The overwhelming answer from my own field suggests very clearly the primary causal factor that leads to authoritarianism: Fear. When people feel afraid, they turn to authoritarians to help solve their problems. Like a child scared at night, we want an adult to take our fears away.
Thus, it is not surprising that every major theory of the origins of authoritarianism has fear at the center. [Bob] Altemeyer’s RWA [right-wing authoritarianism] Model shows that people who believe the world is dangerous – who live with chronic fear – are more likely to be authoritarian. Feldman’s Social Conformity Model shows that authoritarianism lies at the intersection of threat and social conformity. In probably the most influential model of the origins of authoritarianism, Duckitt’s Dual Process Model, authoritarianism primarily comes from threat.
Taken together, these findings paint a picture of the type of person who supports violence against figures like Donald Trump or Elon Musk. They are fearful. They feel powerless and believe their lives are governed by uncontrollable external forces. They may be overwhelmed by a sense of chaos and grasping for a feeling of control or empowerment. And all of these feelings are magnified within digital echo chambers that intensify fear and anger a thousand fold.
It’s important to note that although the study focused on left-wing political violence, this doesn’t absolve the political right. Most of the research centered on violent attitudes toward right-wing targets, and, unsurprisingly, left-leaning individuals were more likely to justify such violence than conservatives. However, when participants were asked, “How justified or not justified would someone be if they killed a powerful political leader?”, the responses were more mixed. Forty-one percent of Democrats and 29 percent of Republicans indicated that such an act would be at least somewhat justified.
Before Republicans take comfort in their lower number, the report authors offer a crucial caveat:
We caution that current differences in Democratic support for violence may serve as a response to loss of federal power, a claim buttressed by our models which show external locus of control as a key predictor. We also note that support for assassination still shows a concerning, if not as-large, prevalence among Republican respondents.
In other words, while political violence may currently be more prevalent on one side, we are all, as a nation, moving dangerously in the same direction.
Support for political violence poses a clear threat to democracy. A functioning democracy depends on a virtuous and morally grounded citizenry. As John Adams warned:
We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
If millions of Americans across the political spectrum genuinely believe that vigilante justice and political violence are justified, it’s difficult to envision how our political system can endure.
But perhaps more urgently, this glamorization of violence is a danger to ourselves. I’ve lived trapped in fear and anger so intense that I wanted someone to die—and trust me, that is no way to live. For the sake of our republic, and for the sake of our own souls, we must break this cycle.
So how do we begin to break free?
The first step is recognizing that we have a problem. When it comes to politics, many of us are scared. Ahead of the 2024 election, more than 80 percent of partisans on both sides believed that democracy itself would be in jeopardy if the opposing candidate won. And it’s not just elected officials we fear. A 2021 survey found that over three-quarters of both Republicans and of Democrats viewed the opposing party’s supporters as a “clear and present danger to the American way of life.”
When we’re scared, we often turn to anger as our sword and shield—a way to feel powerful and in control. As Dawson McAllister writes, “Ultimately, anger is a reaction to feeling hurt, weak, vulnerable, or belittled in some way by someone or something. We use anger to help us feel strong and in control, and to help mask our feelings of hurt and weakness.”
On some level, that response is understandable. In my own life, I’ve found that feeling powerful and in control beats feeling powerless and at the mercy of external forces. When faced with a choice between fear and anger, many of us choose anger.
But the power that comes from political anger is an illusion. Whatever we tell ourselves, most of us aren’t actually afraid of elected officials in Washington, D.C. We’re afraid of things much closer to home. I’m a little bit scared of Trump, but I’m far more afraid that his tariffs could trigger a recession, causing my clients to fire me and leaving my wife and me struggling to make ends meet. Often, we’re not so much afraid of a distant figure as we are of the effect that person might have on our lives.
Even when we’re truly scared of a politician in D.C., I believe the root of that fear is more personal than we realize. It’s not the politician themselves that terrifies us—it’s what their election might mean for our identity. As political scientist Lilliana Mason explains:
Each election becomes, not just, you know, ‘Well the Democrats lost, so what a bummer, you know, because my party lost'... Instead, it’s like, ‘Well, my party lost, so that means my racial group and my religious group and my cultural group, and all the people that I know and all the people that I watch on TV, everything that I know, everything that makes up who I think I am, it’s all gone. I lost it all. I have nothing left inside of my sense of who I am.
Put another way: our fear isn’t rooted in the election of Trump (or Biden, or any other elected official) so much as in what that election seems to imply about our place in the world and our sense of self.
This also means that our anger at elected officials can function as a kind of psychological smokescreen. As long as we fixate on politicians in Washington instead of addressing the deeper issues in our own lives, our fear—and the anger that stems from it—remains unresolved. No matter how many angry tweets I post or how many relatives I cut off for voting the "wrong" way, the underlying anxiety remains. I could spend all day calling for someone to take Trump out, but none of that would actually make me feel powerful—because what truly frightens me isn’t Trump himself, but the possibility of losing my income in a recession. I could rage against Biden, but that wouldn’t empower me either—because the deeper issue isn’t who holds office, but what I’ve allowed their election to mean for my identity.
In this way, our political anger can become the emotional equivalent of junk food: comforting in the short term, but ultimately hollow and harmful.
Worse still, all this anger is eating us alive. It’s making us miserable. As the old saying goes, resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.
If we want to stop being so consumed by partisan anger that political violence becomes thinkable, the second step is to cultivate an internal locus of control. According to the authors of the NCRI study, a strong external locus of control—believing that we’re at the mercy of outside forces—is closely correlated with support for political violence.
Many of us feel lost and adrift, battered by forces we didn’t choose and can’t control. But that feeling is a lie.
The truth is that we have far more power over our lives than we often realize. And if we’re feeling scared or uncertain, the answer isn’t to direct our time and energy toward railing at the outside world. It’s to redirect that time and energy toward becoming the captain of our own ship. I can’t control whether Trump’s tariffs plunge us into a recession—but I can go out and bring in new clients, so that my business is less exposed and my family has more savings in case the economy takes a hit. I can’t control what Democrats in office do—but I can choose to base my identity on something real, rather than on my political tribe, so that an election loss doesn’t feel like an existential threat. I can’t control what Elon Musk or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweets—but I can decide to log off social media and go to the gym, so I’ll have more energy and feel better in my own skin.
When we take control of the things that are within our power, we become far more resilient to the things that are not.
Along with this, we can take active steps to cultivate genuine human connection. Many of us are starved for a sense of real togetherness. As then–Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy wrote in 2023, we are in the midst of an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” Humans weren’t made to go it alone—and when we lack close relationships with friends and family, every challenge can feel more daunting. We feel lonely, adrift, and overwhelmed by storms we could otherwise manage with just a bit more support. Decades of psychological research support the link between friendship and mental health. As the Mental Health Foundation of Australia notes, “Research shows that genuine adult friendships that offer social support and companionship are a strong predictor of well-being and can protect against mental health conditions like anxiety and depression.”
The good news is that, like everything else we’ve discussed, cultivating human connection is within our control. Each of us can choose to log off X or BlueSky for an hour to call an old friend. We can plan a date with our spouse to reconnect, or cut short our doomscrolling and spend more time being present and active with our children. When we do that, we may find that some of the fear and anger we felt over politics simply melts away in the shared warmth of human intimacy.
Part of this effort involves building—or rebuilding—bridges with the people in our lives who voted for the other side. Many of us resist this step because we’re afraid of what we might encounter if we set foot in what we perceive as enemy territory. As Mónica Guzmán, a Senior Fellow at Braver Angels—a nonprofit dedicated to reducing fear and anger around politics—writes in I Never Thought of It That Way, “When the people I talk to get nervous about crossing the political divide, it’s usually because they fear or loathe what they expect to find there.” But, while the loudest voices on the other side may be extremists, most of our political opponents aren’t monsters; they’re decent, hardworking people who love their country and their children. When we engage with them directly, the imagined “monster” is often replaced by a real, flesh-and-blood person—someone we find far less frightening or infuriating. As Guzmán notes, “Research keeps showing us that the more you mingle with people in your ‘otherized’ out-groups, the less prejudice you’ll feel against them. In fact, a study of 515 other studies found that chatting in person with someone from an out-group cut down prejudice 94 percent of the time.”
Of course, a common objection arises: What if our opponents are literal Nazis or fascists? john powell [sic], director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, addressed this during a talk on depolarization, when a pastor interrupted to ask, “John, are you saying I should bridge with the devil?” Powell’s response, which always gets a laugh, was: “Maybe don’t start there.”
But he goes on to urge: once you begin building bridges with people across the aisle, “you may need to re-question, ‘Who are you calling the devil?’” Many of us avoid these conversations because we believe the people on the other side are behaving so badly that the only moral option is to cut them out of our lives. Following Trump’s reelection, for example, many progressives severed ties with friends or family members in solidarity with immigrants—legal or undocumented—and other minorities they feared would be harmed by the new administration.
But I think this cutting of ties is misguided. If being a moral person involves standing up to prejudice, it must also involve refusing to practice prejudice ourselves. Compassion requires that we give those who see the world differently from us an opportunity to reveal their humanity, rather than dismissing them as a monolithic group of undesirables. If we can recognize that those on the other side of the political divide are not Nazis or fascists, but rather decent human beings, we may find ourselves far less inclined toward political violence.
Those who are tempted to glamorize or justify political violence often place the blame entirely on the opposing side: If only they weren’t so terrible, we tell ourselves, our country wouldn’t be falling apart. But if we truly want to preserve this great nation, we’d be wiser to start by looking in the mirror rather than out the window.
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About the author
Julian is a columnist for Reality’s Last Stand and a member of the Braver Angels media team. He’s also the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement dedicated to combating illiberalism via spiritual formation and rebuilding the American community.
Locus of control is a term used to describe an individual’s belief about what factors control their lives. Those with an internal locus of control have a strong sense of agency and believe that their lives are influenced by their own actions and abilities. Those with an external locus of control feel that they are subject to luck, environmental factors, and other people’s actions.
Most people fall somewhere on the spectrum between an internal and an external locus of control, as this is reflective of life itself. There is a lot that we can control but a lot that we can’t as well. However, regardless of what is objectively true in any given situation, our preference for one view or the other has a major impact on our lives.
Those with an internal locus of control are more resilient, motivated, and independent, have a higher capacity for self-control, are better able to manage stress, and enjoy overall higher levels of mental and physical health. Those with an external locus of control, on the other hand, lack self-confidence and self-efficacy, blame others for their shortcomings, are less likely to take accountability, and experience worse mental and physical health outcomes. They are also more likely to have a mindset of victimhood.
Research abounds expounding the positive associations between an internal locus of control and factors like academic success and favorable work outcomes, as well as between an external locus of control and negative outcomes, like criminal offending. Helping people develop a greater internal locus of control has long been a goal of psychotherapy.
And yet, when it comes to the concept of gender identity, all of this knowledge and research is thrown out the window. After all, what is gender identity but just another term for an external locus of control?
Those who claim to have a gender identity that conflicts with their sex require participation from others. Their gender identity depends entirely on other people’s perceptions and on the way people treat them. They cannot concretize their identity simply by going about their lives, doing their job, practicing their hobbies, and fulfilling their roles as friends and family members—which is what an identity really is.
Instead, trans-identified individuals often try to artificially manifest a fantasy in their heads by forcing others to call them by a different name and pronouns and to pretend they see them as anything other than their sex. Some aren’t even satisfied knowing that others are merely playing along—they go further and demand others actually brainwash themselves into perceiving them as they wish to be perceived.
Furthermore, when someone is trying to manifest a gender identity, their locus of control sits not just in other people but in the rest of the world at large. They rely on external accouterments like clothing and makeup to signal what “gender” they are trying to appear as. They may go as far as to rely on external hormones to try and change how their body looks and even rely on surgeons to physically alter their body parts.
Obviously, all of us rely on the external world. None of us are entirely self-sufficient, and even if we have a strong internal locus of control, there is still much that is out of our control. But this is not the same as relying solely on the external world to recognize and manifest your identity for you.
I should also add that not all trans-identified people are like this. I think the locus of control is one of the main differences people implicitly note between trans-identified people who cause problems and those who don’t. This then gets clumsily translated into speaking about trans people with an internal locus of control as “real” or “actual” or “good” trans people.
I don’t believe there is any such thing as “true” trans. But I do believe there is a big difference between people who decide to transition and consider the onus to be on themselves to pass and be treated as the opposite sex and those who think the onus is on the rest of the world to make them feel like the opposite sex. I think this is the split that people pick up on when differentiating between the trans-identified people who really do just want to live their lives and those who want to tear the world down while paradoxically relying on it for their entire sense of identity.
(It is also my experience that trans-identified people in the former camp are less likely to insist that they have a “gender identity” and more likely to view themselves as having a mental disorder—gender dysphoria—that they are managing as best as they can).
Unfortunately, trans activists, doctors, teachers, counselors, politicians, and “experts” of all stripes are encouraging all trans-identified people to take on the latter mindset. They encourage an entirely external locus of control which then invariably develops into a victimhood mentality. Trans-identified people with an external locus of control come to believe that because they have no power to improve anything for themselves the world owes it to them.
This is what makes it all the more pernicious that this ideology is being pushed on children. Introducing the concept of gender identity to kids is the same as showing approval for an external locus of control. Where children should be taught self-efficacy and resilience, they are instead being taught that their very sense of self requires others to act a certain way and the world to comport itself to their whims. It’s a disaster that isn’t just waiting to happen but that is already well in progress.
There is no way to continue teaching the concept of gender identity to children and spreading it throughout society while encouraging people to develop an internal locus of control at the same time. The two pathways are mutually exclusive. If we want to encourage good health and happy lives, we need to drop the concept of gender identity entirely.
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: if your "gender" can be invalidated by others not participating, like gods, it was never real in the first place. You can't claim "an internal sense of self," and then also claim it requires external validation. That's "I have a personal relationship with Jesus" and "I want to pass laws based on what Jesus wants." It's either a private personal matter, or a matter of public interest. You can't have both.
And in both cases, attempting to do both results in authoritarianism.
"It is one thing to affirm yourself, but to demand affirmation from others, that is the enemy of mental health."
-- Savannah Edwards
If you make your identity, affirmation or mental health contingent upon the behaviors or attitudes of other people, you have no right to get upset when they fail to live up to your expectations or decline the responsibility entirely. You voluntarily gave that power to them, so you get what you get.
You're not entitled to make someone else drive the car, and then tell them how to drive from the back seat. If you want to go a particular way, get your license and drive yourself there.
Outsourcing your wellbeing looks a lot like abusive narcissism. It looks like you making other people rearrange their lives around whether or not you're happy, and carry you gingerly through life as their burden.
If your personal identity becomes invalidated without other people's participation - that is, if you are not you without someone else's agreement and recognition - then that identity couldn't have been real in the first place, just a performance for other people.
Develop an internal locus. Who - not what - who are you when there is no one around to affirm you?
In many social justice circles, especially ones dedicated to racial justice, individualism is considered a negative quality. Those who embra
By: Erec Smith
Published: Jun 13, 2023
In many social justice circles, especially ones dedicated to racial justice, individualism is considered a negative quality. Those who embrace this idea typically understand individualism as diversity, equity and inclusion consultant Tema Okun does: “a toxic denial of our essential interdependence and the reality that we are all in this, literally, together.”
Those who deem race a person’s primary characteristic may, either implicitly or explicitly, embrace and promote race essentialism: the belief that racial groups are monolithic, comprised of people who share the exact same values, beliefs, outlooks, fears and hopes. One’s status as an individual is secondary, tertiary or simply not taken seriously at all.
But Okun’s take on individualism is erroneous. Group identification devoid of true individualism is one of the main obstacles to real social justice because it suggests a dogma that, by definition, does not take into consideration the details and distinctions of an individual life. By extension, such group consciousness hampers our ability, as a society, to have generative conversations across ideological differences.
Fortunately, Okun’s take on this topic is not the only one. Classical liberals also have ideas about individualism. For example, what F.A. Hayek calls “true individualism” also includes the concept of interdependence, or the idea that each individual needs other individuals to some degree. No one can do it all on his or her own. Even a hermit living a reclusive life needs the surrounding ecosystem to survive. However, the fact that one can choose hermetic living over other lifestyles in the first place is a result of individual freedom.
In truth, Okun’s interpretation is the opposite of true individualism. The hyper-individualism she inveighs against is a strawman and not possible, even if people believe, contrary to their lived experience, that it is. Civil society would not work without acknowledging our interdependence.
Importantly, true individualism is not a rejection of group affiliation. It is a rejection of the idea that groups, especially racial groups, are necessarily monolithic and all-encompassing.
The main issue is “group consciousness,” but this concept should not be confused with an all-out dismissal of groups. As Duke University political scientists Paula McClain and her co-authors have written in a 2009 paper, group consciousness “is in-group identification politicized by a set of ideological beliefs about one’s group’s social standing, as well as a view that collective action is the best means by which the group can improve its status and realize interests.”
Most certainly, this is what Nikole Hannah-Jones meant when she tweeted there is a “difference between being politically black and racially black.” Although group consciousness applied to race is often called race consciousness, this is not what is meant by “racially Black.” Specifically, those who are race conscious abide by a particular ideology that involves in-group preference, out-group culpability for the in-group’s problems, and a disapproval of narratives and ideas that do not align with the group’s ideology.
What’s more, group consciousness is so ingrained that anything that happens to an individual in a group has, in effect, also happened to everyone in the group. Slogans like “I am Michael Brown,” for instance, exemplify this.
This is not to say that empathy is a bad thing, but existential identification with someone based on a trait like race is misguided and stifling, leading to what may be the most detrimental and erroneous aspect of group consciousness: linked fate. As McClain et al. explain, linked fate denotes the use of the social standing of a group as a proxy for one’s individual identity, i.e., an individual’s fate is inevitably and intricately linked to that of the group. Any individual that seems to escape this fate is considered an exception.
Sen. Tim Scott recently made headlines when he countered the idea of linked fate during his appearance on the daytime talk show “The View.” When confronted with the idea that successful Black people from downtrodden upbringings are an exception, he stated, “I believe America could do for anyone what she’s done for me: restoring hope, creating opportunities, and defending and protecting the America that we love. It’s such an important combination.” He concluded that the “exception” of Black fulfillment can be made into the norm through education.
“One of the ways that we can restore hope in this country is to focus on our education system. We have too many kids in poor zip codes trapped in failing schools. I want parents to have a choice so kids have a bigger chance.” Scott’s point is that one’s zip code is not one’s life sentence; fates are not existentially linked to such things. Sadly, for having such optimism about the power of individual gumption, he was sardonically labeled “Professor Positive” and someone who “doesn’t get it” by one of the show’s hosts, a well-to-do white woman.
In addition to politicians, like Sen. Scott, who denounce the idea of linked fate, the concept also has been debunked by behavioral science mainly because it relies on the idea that individuals who have the same skin color experience the world in the same ways. Scott’s insistence that Black achievement can be normalized regardless of background, combined with the critique from the behavioral sciences, illuminate the fallacious reasoning behind linked fate and group consciousness in general.
A salient difference between those who do and do not embrace group consciousness is a matter of what psychologists Dolores Albarracin and Amy Mitchell call “defensive confidence.” Individuals who feel they can confidently defend their ideas are less likely to embrace group consciousness strongly, if at all.
Those who do not feel confidence in defending their ideas may see group consciousness as a ready-made shortcut to thinking; the answer to critical inquiry or refutation is always already in some or all of the group’s ideological tenets, maxims and talking points. Those who embrace group consciousness do not have to think of ways to defend their ideas; the group does it for them.
Perhaps most importantly, people with defensive confidence seem more likely to entertain opposing ideas and, therefore, are more likely to understand and even potentially align with those ideas. Perhaps counterintuitively, individuals with the most defensive confidence are more likely to have their minds changed by opposing views simply because they are willing to engage them.
Not surprisingly, individuals who embrace group consciousness and enjoy a kind of group confidence are less likely to entertain opposing viewpoints. This suggests defensive confidence better ensures communication across differences than does group consciousness.
So individualism is not a symptom of a divided society but one of its remedies. It is more conducive to self-actualization (as opposed to group actualization), and it actually fosters communication across differences.
Defensive confidence—aligned with self-efficacy, agency, positive self-regard—is a kind of empowered individualism that, when not beholden to race or some other form of group identity, is more open to exploring possibilities ignored by those who fear scrutiny of their group-oriented outlook.
Such individualism is liberating and empowering, whereas group consciousness—even if it staves off fear and anxiety—is an ideological prison.
"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It is beyond me."
