Understanding the Victim Cult
2021-12-13 · Guest: Mark Milke (Author of The Victim Cult) · 52:25
The rise of victim culture and identity politics
Bob Zadek and guest Mark Milke discuss the rise of “victim culture” in modern society, exploring how the focus on historical and perceived grievances has shifted from seeking justice to becoming a political tactic. They examine historical examples like post-WWI Germany and the Palestinian leadership, contrasting them with the resilience of the Asian American community, while critiquing the impact of “microaggressions” and group identity on college campuses and public policy.
Topics: Victimhood, Identity Politics, Reparations, Asian American History, Japanese Internment, Palestinian Conflict, Campus Culture, Individualism, Public Policy
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Mark Milke: Author of “The Victim Cult”
The Rise of the Victim Cult [00:17]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. This Sunday and always, the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for sparing an hour of your time this Sunday morning with me.
Well, I’ve been walking around kind of in a funk. I’ve been feeling very much like a victim these days. I’ve been—I found myself being victimized by victims. I’m surrounded by victims. Everywhere I turn in the media, whenever I read, somebody is either actually or more likely self-identifying themselves as a victim. And I become, and many of us become, victims of this victimization we’re surrounding ourselves with.
And I started asking myself, how did things get so bad? How can there be so many victims in the world, especially on college campuses, but by no means exclusively limited to college campuses? It seemed to me, optimist that I am, that things are constantly getting better and better. How could we be accumulating exponentially so many victims? And now that includes me as a victim of victims.
So I thought I better get to the bottom of this. And that leads me to introducing this morning’s guest. This morning’s guest is Mark Milke. Mark was kind enough to write a book to help me understand what’s going on with the victim culture in America and, at no additional charge, in Canada as well, because this morning’s guest, Mark Milke, is a resident of Canada and a political observer of both life in Canada and in the US. And more to the point of this morning’s show, has written an important book, The Victim Cult: How Culture of Blame Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilization.
So we will now learn: Am I nuts? Am I overstating the problem? Or am I really surrounded by a bunch of grouchy, abused victims and they are right and I have to just suck it up? Mark, welcome to the show this morning.
Mark Milke: Thank you for having me on, Bob.
Bob Zadek: So Mark, The Victim Cult. “Cult” is kind of a strange word to follow the word “victim.” One doesn’t get drawn into a group of other victims, or do they? That’s what we normally think of when we think of a cult—they are seduced by some Svengali-an leader who brings them in and promises them a better life, them being the victims or perceived victims.
So, The Victim Cult. Now, certainly in the world, in society, there are victims. People who have been subjected to mistreatment, wrongdoing, or just been subjected—having been dealt a bad hand. Either they’re subject to natural disasters or to disease or something out of their control. So is “victim” something which happens to people? Is it a tactic to gain a greater end? Or is it simply an identification of one’s status in a certain area? What’s your problem with victims, and why do they not simply have your sympathy and perhaps even your support?
Mark Milke: Well, actual victims do. And a victim—the victim cult, let’s unpack this. The victims you described can be any of the above. They can be real, they can be fake, they can address problems in their lives. The reason I call it a victim cult—let’s look at an historical example. But first, let’s start with the individual. No one disputes that some people, as you mentioned, are victims. I mean, there’s war, natural disasters, and the rest of it. There are over seven billion people in the world, and in the history of the planet, there’s been something like 110 billion of us born and died. So we’re going to bump into each other, even accidentally. That creates victims. There are real victims in history and now. So no one should dispute that, and one should have sympathy for actual real victims.
The question, though, becomes—and this is where the cult comes in—is what happens when even real victimization to a person or a people turns viral? They obsess on it, almost like cult members do. They obsess over, in this case, a grievance, real or imagined.
Historical Precedents: Germany and the Culture of Blame [05:51]
Mark Milke: Let’s take a real one from The Victim Cult. One of the longest chapters in the book is on Germany and how it went from the land of Bach and Beethoven to the land known for Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. Well, most people are probably familiar with the victim narrative of the 1920s onward, where Germans thought themselves a victim of the Versailles Treaty, and Adolf Hitler plays this on this notion of victimhood in the 1930s when he comes to power in 1933 and beyond.
Now, what most people may not know is that Germany was actually a victim of the French. You go back to the late 1700s, German lands, part of Germany was occupied by the French. As happens in occupations and wars, the Germans were victimized by French occupation. They finally kicked them out in the early 1800s, but then the Germans started to search around for their identity. And they excluded almost everyone. It became romantic about German history, and their notion of a true German, of course, was pretty much white and Protestant. So you couldn’t be Catholic, you couldn’t be Jewish, no matter how much you tried to integrate, it wasn’t good enough. And they really became fascinated by this notion of pure German culture and how to make Germany great again.
And it was only later in the 19th century they glom on to the notion of pure race, which most people are familiar with, but that came after this notion of pure culture. But they were actual victims. What they did wrong, among many things, the German people in the 1800s and beyond, was to think of themselves only as a victim and create this really defensive identity that excluded everyone else. And that’s the problem. They literally started to believe they were persecuted by the rest of the world, despite the fact they had their own militaristic problems. So that’s kind of one example of a victim cult that goes viral and destructive and actually leads to part of the subtitle for the book, how this destroys civilizations, because it certainly destroyed German civilization, and it almost destroyed the English-speaking West in World War II.
Bob Zadek: Now, that’s one example in history that most people are aware of. And what happened was the German people, to use your example, started off feeling that they were taken advantage of—I’m not trying to trivialize it—and then what they did is they then went to the “so what? What do you do about it?” So once you achieve or are subjected to the status of victimhood, then the issue is, then what? And it seems to me from your book, and one can read into your book, that therefore, what does a victim—not depriving anybody of the status of victimhood—what does the victim do about it? And Germany is one example of what they did about it: they lashed out and sought revenge and sought to right a wrong, whatever label you want to put on it.
Asian Americans: A Counter-Narrative to Victimhood [08:58]
Bob Zadek: But that was one approach. Now, there are, of course, lots of other approaches. And in your book, you mention and you discuss in drawing various comparisons another class of victims and how they set about to right the wrong of their victimhood. And the class you discussed in the book with great authority and supported by lots of data is the Asian—I’ll say Asian American community, but Asians who migrated, immigrated to this country. And they were also the subject of—they became victims, victims as a result of at first racial bias, which then found its way into the statutes. So private racial bias became governmental racial bias. And how another class of victims, that group, dealt with their victimhood. So tell us the story briefly from your book of just another example of how a group who are clearly victims, as that term is defined, how they dealt with it. Because that’s important to show the comparison. That is to say, there’s more than one way to deal with victimhood once you have that status.
Mark Milke: Early Asian Americans are indeed a great example, Bob, of a counter-narrative, you could put it that way, or counter-approach to actual victimization. I mean, listeners should understand we’ve now dived in the deep end of victim cults. In the book, I describe them in kind of three categories: mild, moderate, and murderous. And we started with the most extreme example, Nazi Germany.
But let’s go to Asian Americans on the moderate side, I’d say in this sense. They were victimized for a century. If you look at the early Chinese immigrants, initially welcomed to the West Coast around the time of the Gold Rush in San Francisco and beyond, but very quickly things turned sour. And there was heavy-handed discrimination, local ordinances against, you know, merchants in Chinatown in San Francisco, for example, and later on in the later 19th century across the United States.
But what they do, what early Asian immigrants and their children and grandchildren do really for a century, is push back, I would say, in four ways. But they don’t simply take it. And I wouldn’t, you know, I don’t argue in the book, The Victim Cult, that anyone should simply take victimization when it’s real. One should push back. So a good example of pushback does come from the early East Asian community.
So let me give you an example from San Francisco in 1894. A gentleman by the name of Wong Kim Ark was actually born in San Francisco but left the country to visit his grandparents, or his parents rather, in China. When the 21-year-old returns a short time later, several months later, he’s denied re-entry because he’s, you know, considered not American because he’s Chinese, even though he’s born in the United States. Well, he fought this all the way to the Supreme Court. It takes four years. And he wins, as he should have, based on the 14th Amendment, that if you’re born in the United States, it doesn’t matter what your ancestry is, you’re a US citizen. So the court rules in his favor in 1898, after four years.
So that’s an example of pushback, and there’s all sorts of great examples in The Victim Cult of pushback from the early East Asian community between 1850 and 1950, really the most discriminatory period in American history against Asian Americans. And it’s around the 1950s that they start to regain full civil rights. So that’s a very different approach than the German one we talked about a moment ago.
It’s also—there’s another element to it briefly, which is the Germans after 1800, they refused to learn from other cultures. There’s a lot of fear about cultural appropriation these days, and on one level, it’s quite silly and counterproductive because what you do is—one of the chapters I—what you do, let me back up, is you want to learn from other cultures and see why people succeed and why they don’t, and take the best of other cultures, even if they’ve been ones that have oppressed you at some point. Why did they succeed and why have I not? So one has to ask that question.
Now, early Asian Americans in that sense took the best of America but also improved it. But they refused to become permanent victims. And what they did is they—their response was to, in the first instance, they simply took advantage of what they could take advantage of, which is education and entrepreneurship as best they could, constantly removing the barriers. But they did so not in—while taking on the system in the courts, they did so in a way that allowed them to achieve ultimately middle-class and upper-middle-class status. And over time, as one would have expected, the discriminatory effects of this litigation and the legislation simply disappeared. And to the point today where today a class action has been brought—I believe it’s a class action—on behalf of Asian American students who are now being alleged to be discriminated against by Harvard and other universities because too many of them are getting into college. And Harvard has determined in their infinite—the phrase usually is infinite wisdom, but I dare say it’s infinite lack of wisdom—that too many Asians make the educational experience not so good anymore. So Harvard, it is alleged, is discriminating against Asians. So they have now gone full circle, having overachieved in the eyes of some, now the discrimination is starting again. But once again, the battle is being fought in the courts.
The Campus Crisis: Microaggressions and Power Dynamics [15:40]
Bob Zadek: Now, in your book and in some of your public appearances when you explain the thesis of your book, you make reference to what’s going on in college campuses, which is now the current—one of several, but certainly an important battleground, if you will, where the victim cult is in full bloom. So tell us how college students perceive themselves to be being victims, victims of what, and how does it achieve almost cult-like status?
Mark Milke: Well, there are a number of great examples. In fact, you can find some almost weekly, can’t you, from college campuses across the country? Some of the examples I give in the book: UCLA in 2013, there’s a student who feels aggrieved, a number of students who feel aggrieved and say the classroom has become hostile and toxic, and they start something called the Students of Color at UCLA campus. And one student, you know, says he’s founded this but to fight, quote, “microaggressions.”
Now, what’s happening here? I mean, has UCLA all of a sudden turned into a bastion for David Duke or something? No. What happened was there’s a professor by the name of Val Rust at the time, who’s 80 years old, who teaches comparative education, and he’s marking essays and insisting that students actually use proper grammar, proper capitalization, insist that they use the Chicago Manual of Style. And one particular student doesn’t like this, doesn’t want to learn the system, so to speak, and comes up with this notion that this is discrimination, this is microaggression. This goes viral, and the university, in essence, eventually takes the student’s side, puts a monitor really in this 80-year-old professor’s classroom, who’s well-loved by most students, by the way.
But this is an example of where, I think, this is more than just a bit of a fake victim claim. It’s an example, though, of where a student gains power vis-à-vis, you know, someone much more informed and worldly than him, who’s lived for many more decades, obviously. But it gives a student a feeling of power vis-à-vis the professor, and the administration gives into this. This is a mistake.
These sorts of examples though are rife, you know. Yale in 2015 over Halloween costumes where the campus erupts because one professor sends around a note saying, “I trust you to wear the right type of costumes, unlike the administration,” I’m paraphrasing now, “who seems to think you don’t have judgment here.” Or Evergreen State College and Bret Weinstein a couple of years back, who’s a left-wing professor, voted against—didn’t like either goal, voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016. Well, the campus erupts against this very left-wing professor when he refuses to leave the campus for a day because his skin color is deemed the wrong skin color and he’s supposed to take off the day to leave it to black students and others. And he refuses based on the notion that this is again an attack on the individual.
And this is what you see in these new victim cults, where they’re creating new victims, actual victims of discrimination: Asian Americans at Harvard because of a preference for other minorities, black Americans in that case. The big problem in all of this is people are forgetting to look at people as individuals. Instead, they’re looking at all of us as only whatever skin color we have, or whatever ethnicity is, or background is. So there’s a loss of the individual and looking at the individual now and in history. And that’s the tragedy, because this is the mistake that movements always make. They want to make you or I or someone else make up for some past wrong against one’s own tribe. But one should forget about the tribe and say, “How do we improve the lot of individuals? How do we look at people as individuals?” The moment you forget that, you get these nascent victim cults on campus and everywhere else in the United States and around the world even, and it’s actual individuals who are sacrificed to this collective. And that is in part at the core of what I call these victim cults.
Reparations: Direct Compensation v. Generational Claims [20:02]
Bob Zadek: Now, is—there is a movement that never seems to go away, seeking reparations for prior wrongs, slavery being the best example. Is the reparations movement, which is still very much—appears to be very much alive in American politics, is that a good example of victimization and a claim of entitlement, in this case economic compensation? And if so, how do you apply the lessons of your book to the issue of reparations?
And Mark, before you answer, compare that, if you will, to a parallel policy issue, which is, as most of us know, during World War II, in one of the very dark moments of recent American history, President Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans, citizens if you will. They were interned in camps in the Western United States simply because they were Japanese. That was their only crime. And that was a shameful period. The Supreme Court found it to be constitutional—shame on them, that decision, the Korematsu decision, was recently reversed just to right that wrong. And our country somewhat quietly paid reparations to those Japanese Americans who were interned in the camps.
So when you apply the lessons of your book to the issue, the very, very bitterly fought—everybody has an opinion on it—issue of reparations, show how the lessons of your book would apply to the parallels of paying reparations to Japanese Americans who were interned in camps in World War II versus the claim for reparations to be paid to black Americans today to compensate for slavery.
Mark Milke: Well, you’re raising a number of excellent questions, Bob, that relate to really this question of how do we look at history and should we compensate, should we offer reparations? And the answer to that is not simple, in that it’s an art more than a science. I mean, some people get the impression from the title of The Victim Cult that maybe the tone is people should just get over things, never mind, move on. Well, in some cases, yes, especially if their victim claim is fake, and even sometimes when it’s real, maybe you can take that approach.
But what I try and do in The Victim Cult is actually say, when is it proper to compensate people? I mean, if you hit me with your car yesterday and you’re at fault, well, then you’re going to have to pay for that and replace my car, at least your insurance company will. So the question is also about the right cause-and-effect link, because the reparations issue is also about something that happens in history and it’s the cause of my income or lack of income today. I mean, in essence, that’s the claim made by some black Americans, for example, that that’s the reason for the disparity in outcomes between black Americans and other Americans today.
So it’s an art more than a science. But let’s look at two clear examples, the ones you raised, of where you compensate and perhaps where you don’t. Right after the war, it makes sense to compensate Japanese Americans for the loss of property and in fact the wrongful internment during the war. And there was some compensation in the 1950s, and I believe a little bit more in the 1980s. I would actually argue it wasn’t sufficient. And that in both cases, they should have been fully compensated for their stolen property and, if you can even ever compensate really for the time lost during the war by being put into an internment camp.
Or the issue of slavery. Let’s go back to the late 1700s when Quakers would release their slaves and give them compensation. And rightly so. They gave them property, they gave them money, because they recognized that they’d committed a great evil against those with a different skin color, black Americans. So there is a case to be made for compensation, for restitution.
The Complexity of Moral Reparations [24:43]
Mark Milke: Now, the question is, when does that end? And this is where the art-more-than-a-science answer comes in. Are we really sure that the cause of, say, the disparities in black incomes, the average black incomes, for example, today vis-à-vis white Americans or Asian Americans is due to slavery, which ended in 1865? I would argue, and I do argue in the book, that the answer to that is no. And as others, such as economist Thomas Sowell, have argued, you have to look at more recent cause-and-effect links to outcomes today. The black American family was mostly together until the 1950s. Educational levels were improving. The standard of living was improving all the way to the 1950s. And then you saw a decline in educational standards in schools. You saw a breakup of the black American family on average. These are more correct cause-and-effect links to outcomes today.
And so should we compensate for even slavery 170 years ago? I would argue no, because I think the waves, the tides of time and successive generations have washed over cause and effect so much that you should always look for the more recent cause to a claimed effect as opposed to something that happened 150 years ago, no matter how horrible and evil, which is what slavery was. So I think it is more an art than a science, but the closer the event to the compensation, I think there’s a stronger justification.
Bob Zadek: And of course, to continue on with the thought you just offered about—you try to get how the wrong close to the person claiming to be entitled to compensation. Of course, the major difference in my opinion between the compensation paid to Japanese Americans is that that compensation was paid to the very individual who was harmed, as opposed to being paid to somebody several generations later who was not harmed but happened to be the grandchild or the great-grandchild of somebody who was harmed. So the art rather than the science, as you aptly put it, applies to: you want to compensate the person who was harmed. And as time interferes with that process, it’s very hard to say that a great-grandchild was directly harmed, and if so, how much, by the evil perpetrated by the government.
So I guess the conclusion is: if the government by its wrongful action harms you, then you are—ought to be entitled to compensation. After all, the government is the only institution that is lawfully permitted to use force and indeed deadly force. With that empowerment to use force and deadly force comes a responsibility to use it properly. And the best example of that, perhaps, or a good example, is when somebody is wrongfully convicted of a crime and incarcerated. Later DNA tests show the person was innocent. They are often compensated, as if money could compensate, but we do the best we can for their time in wrongful incarceration. So compensation for wrongful act of the government seems appropriate, but it’s only appropriate if you’re paying the compensation to the individual who was harmed and not to future generations.
Mark Milke: Now, there’s another angle as well, Bob, which we should also remember, because as you’re aware, Ibram Kendi and others will argue, well, there’s more to this though. It’s kind of a moral reparations, right? That the money is symbolic of a moral reparations to black Americans. But that argument fails for me as well, because the problem with that is you’re not taking into account in that argument the fact that the United States was a nation divided. The Civil War being the most obvious example, where you did have northerners, you had abolitionists from the early 1800s forward trying to fight slavery. To demand compensation two centuries later is to, in fact, to indict all Americans and all of American history, instead of saying, “Look, there were two sides on this, and there was a good chunk of the American public, i.e., the North, that fought against the South and fought to free slaves and paid in treasure and blood to do so.” And so the notion of kind of a moral reparations as exemplified by money, to me seems to miss the mark here as well because it indicts half the country. It indicts people who were in fact fighting against slavery, fighting against discrimination, and says everyone who’s not my skin color might owe me for something that happened to my ancestors. Well, that’s just really too broad, and I think it fails on that account as well.
Victimhood as a Political Tactic [30:59]
Bob Zadek: And of course, what’s happened on the college campuses, as you had mentioned earlier, it seems to me that victimhood has changed from a condition, a status on the one hand—one can be the victim of a storm, a governmental action, or the like. That’s appropriate status. To changing victimhood to nothing other than a tactic, a political strategy to gain an economic or some other tangible benefit. If you have nothing else going for you, then the tactic might be to persuade others that you are a victim. That puts you into a different status and gives you a claim to compensation that otherwise you wouldn’t have. So it’s this conversion, perhaps a, you know, sort of a thick-headed approach to history.
And I mean, American college students, and I would argue even Donald Trump, who appears in the book as an example, I think in many cases, as wrongly claiming victimhood of this or that person. I think in both examples, they’re examples of the milder side of the victim cult spectrum, if I can put it that way. But let’s stick with college students for a moment. I mean, the notion that a Yale college student or someone at Harvard or some at UCLA is somehow a victim of anything. I mean, to me, it shows a lack of historical awareness.
I start The Victim Cult out with an introduction by going through all the actual victims in history: those who fought in World War II who never came back, or who were maimed and came back but forever psychologically or physically hobbled. You know, women in history who lacked rights for much of human history, and yet, and even males in human history who had to go off and fight the wars or were the ones in the coal mines or the victims of industrial accidents because they were much of the workforce because basic biology dictated that in much of human history women would be at home and men would be in the coal mines and in the industrial factories and fighting the wars. So there are actual victims in history.
And you know, I have chapters on Rwanda, I have chapters on Yasser Arafat’s attack on Jewish people and others around the world. And there is no shortage of victims in human history. So for college students in a liberal democracy to talk about victimization and use words like “microaggression,” to me shows an unfortunate lack of awareness in any depth about really the actual tragedies and victimization in human history.
And I think it’s for various reasons, as described some, but I think it shows perhaps a conceit. And part of this, by the way, is also not just college students but others, when they make this claim of victimization, that your tribe beat up my tribe, therefore you owe me something. And Bill Clinton alluded to this when he blamed part of 9/11 on the Crusades a thousand years ago. Well, part of this is looking back and expecting history to be perfect. I mean, I almost titled one of the chapters in The Victim Cult “Everyone’s Ancestors are Bastards,” because if you go back far enough, you’ll find that someone was unkind, to put it mildly, to my tribe, to your tribe, to whoever, and vice versa. There’s no shortage of real victimization in human history. But it’s a mistake to think that somehow we can balance out the billions of human beings and the multiple hundreds of billions of decisions and events and acts that took place in human history by compensation today. Again, except for a tight cause-and-effect link, it’s hubris to think we can sort through all that as if in a modern courtroom and pronounce guilt and innocence on you or me or my group or your group or however one wants to identify. It’s really quite an absurd view of history, and that’s also what’s driving some of these victim cults, as I call them.
Yasser Arafat and the Rejection of Statehood [34:36]
Bob Zadek: In your book, and you alluded to this a second ago and I want to go back to it, you mentioned in a chapter when you discussed the Palestinian conflict in general, but most specifically Yasser Arafat. A name that is fading into distant memory, people don’t recall, I dare say, much about him. But the reason I want to mention this and go back to it for a moment is Yasser Arafat found the political benefit in victimhood to be more valuable than fixing the problem. And he was offered an opportunity to achieve almost everything that he wanted in exchange for peace and some truce in the Middle East. And as you tell in the book, he turned it down, concluding, making the crass political calculation, that he’s better off retaining victimhood status rather than fix the problem. So speak to that a little bit, because that goes to the point I made a bit earlier, I think, in that victimhood is often more valuable as a tactic than it is as something to be fixed.
Mark Milke: Indeed, whether you’re a 19-year-old trying to gain some leverage over your professor or your administration at a university in the United States, or whether you’re Yasser Arafat, really the then-equivalent of today’s Hamas and Hezbollah, as people know. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian, the PLO, and then later the Palestinian Authority, but in essence a terrorist. I mean, that’s his career, that’s who he is.
Well, you know, even like Gerry Adams, who was really a notional leader of the Provisional IRA, despite his denials, he also used terrorism but who eventually did a peace deal with Great Britain about Northern Ireland. Yasser Arafat had multiple opportunities over his lifetime as the de facto or actual elected leader of the Palestinians to bring the Palestinians into peace. And he continually turns down those opportunities, he sabotages them. And I think part of it, he was a revolutionary at heart and he could never make the transition to statesman. And it’s crass power politics, and no one likes having to deal with a terrorist or a former terrorist, but sometimes they do bring their own people, so to speak, over to the peace table, as Gerry Adams did.
And Yasser Arafat did not. But Yasser Arafat, interestingly, has a personal history where his family lost some property 150 years before in Egypt. And I kind of wonder, and I point to this in the book, was this driving him after 1948 where, you know, he is a Palestinian displaced by another nationalist movement, or claims to be in his case? His family’s history is from Egypt. And this is the narrative that he plays out for the rest of his life. And rather than turning the West Bank and Gaza into modern-day versions of Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai even, he continually decides to play the victim card.
And in fact, think about this: it also gives him more power internationally than he would ever have. I mean, what would a small territory like the Gaza Strip or West Bank, if these became their own independent nations, how much attention would be paid to the leaders of those nations? I mean, Yasser Arafat in essence would have become a governor of a very small country with a couple of million people at peace. It might have been corrupt, might have been successful, but no one would have paid attention to him. And for a revolutionary like Arafat, who also had this deep grievance narrative driving him, the sense of victimhood, I mean, this is a step down. I mean, American presidents take your call. What happens if you’ve got to go and become really the mayor of Gaza or the mayor of the West Bank and fix sewers and fix the education system? That’s really boring, isn’t it? So I think even psychologically, Yasser Arafat was so addicted, not only to terror—I think that’s a big part of it, I think he had bloodlust—but also to the power of the victim narrative.
Bob Zadek: So there’s yet another example of the status of victim is more useful as a tactic rather than simply to right a wrong and then close the file. And I mentioned that because it brings us back to the subtitle of the book again, doesn’t it? How it wrecks civilizations. Yasser Arafat wrecks the Palestinian civilization. He was a leader. I put a lot of responsibility in The Victim Cult on leaders. It’s not a Tony Robbins one-two-three book on how to solve your personal problems or get past your own tragedies. It’s really about, in many cases, looking at leaders and how they help or destroy their own societies.
And Yasser Arafat’s a great example. I mean, before he came along in the 1993 peace accords, the West Bank and Gaza were actually doing fairly economically well, albeit under the domination of Israel. And in one sense, so what? They were doing well. And Yasser Arafat took it backwards, took both territories backwards. So I mean, there is an interesting thing here with where leaders matter a lot to these narratives and could do the positive thing, but Yasser Arafat chose not to do that.
Lessons for a Successful Society [40:12]
Bob Zadek: In your book, and you alluded to this a second ago and I want to go back to it, you seem to be addressing—but I’ll invite you to correct me if I’m misreading something—you seem to be addressing to opposite audiences in a very interesting way. You seem to be on the one hand offering advice and useful observations to the non-victims, how to better understand and behave towards somebody else’s claim to victim status. So you’re addressing the non-victim and you’re offering lessons to them. And you’re also addressing the victims themselves and offering observations that maybe their behavior or their perception of themselves as victims also should be the subject of some thought. So what are the lessons that you are suggesting to both the non-victims who read your book and to the perceived or actual victims who read your book? Because they’re very different lessons to each group.
Mark Milke: Sure. So for the non-victims, perhaps the lesson is: be very careful about whose victim tale you accept. And you may want to push back there on occasion because there are a number of damaging things that come from accepting victim narratives on the face without investigating them. In fact, this is true of both groups, right? You can make wrong cause-and-effect links. We talked about lower average black incomes vis-à-vis other Americans. Are we really sure that slavery is the cause of that, or institutional racism is the cause of that, or something else like lousy schools, broken families, and culture?
Or the wrong focus. That’s the second problem that comes from victim cults. How do we get out of the situation we’re in? Well, the example of Asian Americans who were also heavily discriminated against, as were Jewish Americans, as were other minorities throughout American history, not as badly as black Americans in slavery obviously, but Asian Americans show the way forward. And if you get stuck in a victim narrative, you’ll get stuck with the wrong focus.
Or if you accept the wrong narrative as a non-victim. And then the third problem, you know, why does this matter really, is what we’re talking about, is you can accidentally create or intentionally create new victims. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about discrimination against the individual at Harvard and an Asian American who otherwise would be in but doesn’t get in because of a focus on correcting group outcomes, so affirmative action, racial quotas really at the universities. If you’re not careful, you create new victims if you accept a victim narrative that turns out not to be true or is making the wrong cause-and-effect link.
And of course, in the worst-case scenarios, as we’ve talked about, whether it’s Nazi Germany, whether it’s Yasser Arafat, or whether it’s the Rwandans before the genocide, where the majority group says, “We’re victims of you, Tutsi minority,” you, the Tutsi minority—well, you can create actual new victims. So that’s the danger for those who aren’t victims in a society already, and even those who are, that you continue really creating new actual victims when, you know, the solution to that, the remedy to that, is to stop looking at people as part of the collective. And maybe that’s the message for both groups: like, don’t—don’t accept a victim narrative on its face, especially from, I would say, you know, maybe the younger, you know, those who are younger who don’t, you know, have a grasp on history, but also from political leaders who are doing it for less than noble reasons.
So I think that’s, you know, that’s part of the, you know, why does this matter? Well, people make wrong cause-and-effect links, focus on the wrong thing, the past as opposed to the future, and they end up creating new actual victims. And this is all over the spectrum. So that’s kind of a lesson. But it’s hard to talk to those who are actual victims of some tragedy, and again I wouldn’t downplay that. And this really isn’t a psychological self-help book; it’s really about what should leaders do and what should responsible people do.
The Individual v. the Collective [44:28]
Mark Milke: And I think part of the fascinating development in American society right now is so many people claim to be victims or they’re using past victimization, some wrong that happened to their group, to try and extract a favor or privilege in the present, that they forget really what makes America one of the best nations on the face of the earth, which is Harry Truman’s old adage of “the buck stops here.” People taking responsibility, saying, “Yes, a wrong happened, and if it did and if we can correct for it right now, let’s do that. But let’s not spend the next 200 years doing what most civilizations in history have done, which is starting wars over past wrongs.” Stand up for yourself, demand equal rights as an individual to be sure, but don’t try and correct thousands of years of human history. See what you can do now to make America a better place.
Bob Zadek: You used a phrase earlier in the show that I want to come back to, because I always perk up when the phrase is used. You used the phrase in making a point, Mark, you used the phrase “microaggression.” It was only incidental when you were responding to a question that I had. And the reason I want to come back to it is, if ever there are two words that cannot exist side by side, it is “micro” and “aggression.” A microaggression—one neutralizes the other, in my opinion. If it is micro, it can’t be an aggression. It’s impossible. It’s too small. And the fact is, it’s too trivial. And if we are at a stage in our society that college campuses become a battleground to get rid of microaggressions, that tells me that if that’s the level of wrong that has to get our attention, we are in great shape. Because if we’re down to having gotten rid of all of the major aggressions, like putting a bullet in somebody’s head, if we’re rid of all the major aggressions and we’re down to the micro level, victory has been achieved. We’re done with problems on college campuses.
So it seems to me that microaggressions, the only reason it gets discussed is because we have to be led to believe that it is so pervasive that millions of microaggressions equal a major aggression and therefore warrants governmental attention. And the whole issue of microaggressions is by definition not an issue whatsoever. And that’s what seems—that’s the level of victimhood on campuses, which means case closed, there are no more victims.
Mark Milke: Well, and that’s perhaps one of the better ways to set The Victim Cult in a certain context, which is that Americans have come so far—as frankly much of the Western world has—over the last 70 years in the postwar world, on issues of race relations, on much else, that to claim to be a victim today—I mean, one has to—and this happens—say that the absence of smoke must mean that the fire is even more well-hidden, right? And that’s what happens with these microaggressions.
This notion of—at UCLA, which I mentioned a moment ago and this issue of a student complaining of microaggressions from an 80-year-old professor correcting his grammar. There was another example at UCLA where one of the committees there, you know, investigating racism, says really people aren’t aware that they’re victims of racism, so we must inform them that they’re victims of racism. And they come up with all these academic reasons and studies to do so. In essence, people are getting along just fine, they don’t sense that they’re being discriminated against, and yet we must inform them that someone looks at them the wrong way, they must be a victim of something, there must be some hidden racism in that person’s head.
And the bigger context really is that there’s been such progress based on the individual, which was Martin Luther King’s dream, of course: treat people based on their character, not their color. I mean, his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. There’s been such progress on that, I would say the apogee of that was the late 1960s, early 1970s. And then because movements always kind of want to keep going, people keep finding things that they argue is evidence of discrimination, as opposed to saying, “Look, the key goal here is to treat individuals as individuals.” So don’t discriminate against Asian Americans today at Harvard because they’re not the “right” minority, but treat everybody as an individual and look for actual cause-and-effect links. The cause of lower black American incomes today, even though there’s been great improvements there, the average, you have to look at why the average exists. As Thomas Sowell—and I quote Thomas Sowell in The Victim Cult as well—you have to look for again the education, cultural, and family reasons for why there are disparities and why Asian Americans are at the top of the income heap, the Pacific class as I call them in The Victim Cult, and why they succeeded and learn lessons from them.
But yes, I mean, part of the reasons people are obsessing on what they call microaggressions is because the United States has been incredibly successful at moving forward. Now, you can always find a personal bigot, or you can find a cop who does the wrong thing at the wrong time. But that’s no reason to tear one’s society apart. Instead, I think it helps to look at not only the progress but keep getting focused on the individual. That’s always been the goal of a liberal democracy, not correcting for every wrong in history, but correcting for what happened yesterday or five years ago, but not for what happened 200 years ago. That’s unfixable. What’s fixable is today and, again, focusing on the individual as an individual in policy.
Bob Zadek: That’s an important lesson, perhaps one of the most important lessons in your book, which goes us back to the founding principle in our country: that there are no classes, you’re not a member of a group, you’re an individual, and you are looked upon by government and by others as an individual, not as a label. And your book had me think about when these victims complain about being victims, it’s sort of like war on terror, war on drugs, war on this, war on that. Those wars have no end point. Therefore, once you achieve victim status, there will never be a point when you say, “Okay, we fixed it, we are no longer a victim.” It is a permanent claim that you have.
This is Bob Zadek. We’ve been spending an hour speaking with Mark Milke. Mark has written an important book, The Victim Cult: How the Culture of Blame Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilization. Mark’s book is an important read. I hope you’ll seek it out. Mark’s name is spelled M-I-L-K-E. He tells a wonderful story. I invite all of you to read it. I hope you’ve enjoyed the podcast or the live show. If you have, please share with me any comments you might have about the podcast or the content of the show. Thank you so much. Thank you to Mark.
Mark Milke: Thank you, and the easiest way to find the book is victimcult.com. Thanks much.
Bob Zadek: And thank you to my friends out there. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Have a good rest of the weekend.