A Culture of Grievance

Nothing is quite as self-defeating as grievance culture. That is, defining yourself in terms of your grievances. That is, of all the bad things other people have done to you.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has written a book making the argument against grievance culture. And Pamela Paul offers a commentary around a rather simple concept: just because you have been wronged does not make you right.

Nicely stated.

One should add two points that Paul overlooks. 

First, you gain access to your grievances by introspecting. A grievance culture seems to be an outgrowth of therapy culture. Thereby you define yourself through the traumas that you have suffered. You may have noticed that trauma is all the rage these days. Everyone has one or two; and everyone knows how to overcome them.

Second, grievance culture defies meritocracy. If you define your social value in terms of trauma, you are not defining yourself in terms of your successes. You are complaining about failure. And you are blaming someone else for your failings. One of the best ways to pile failure on failure is to blame someone else for your failures.

Paul explains how pervasive grievance culture is:

If you’re on the left, you have been oppressed, denied, marginalized, silenced, erased, pained, underrepresented, underresourced, traumatized, harmed and hurt. If you’re on the right, you’ve been ignored, overlooked, demeaned, underestimated, shouted down, maligned, caricatured and despised; in Trumpspeak: wronged and betrayed.

One understands that a New York Times columnist must trash people on both the left and the right.

Paul suggests that Bruni sees the therapy culture aspect of it all. And he also sees that introspection is self-defeating, therapeutically, because it removes people from social commerce, and makes them self-importantly self-involved.

Tending to our respective fiefs, Bruni writes, is “to privilege the private over the public, to gaze inward rather than outward, and that’s not a great facilitator of common cause, common ground, compromise.”

Paul suggests that our search for offense teaches us to practice endless stewing-- I would have preferred a better term:

The compulsion to find offense everywhere leaves us endlessly stewing. Whatever your politics, it assumes and feeds a narrative that stretches expansively from the acutely personal to the grandly political — from me and mine to you and the other, from us vs. them to good vs. evil. And as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff warned in their book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the calculus is that if you’re hurt or upset, your feelings must be validated. 

And yet, the more we define ourselves by membership in an oppressed group, the more we will find ourselves competing with other members of other oppressed groups. 

The thought is certainly useful, especially as it shows the futility of defining different people by different forms of subjugation, leaving them to compete against each other to see who is the most oppressed.

Paul writes:

Who is more oppressed, an older disabled white veteran or a young gay Latino man? A transgender woman who lived for five decades as a man or a 16-year-old girl? What does it mean that vying for the top position involves proving how hard off and vulnerable you are?

You end up with the Oppression Olympics:

Instead, as one undergraduate noted in the Harvard Political Review, “In pitting subjugated groups against one another, the Oppression Olympics not only reduce the store of resources to which groups and movements have access, but also breed intersectional bitterness that facilitates further injustice.” Rewarding a victim-centric worldview, which we do from the classroom to the workplace to our political institutions, only sows more divisiveness and fatalism. It seems to satisfy no one, and people are more outraged than ever. 

The end result is a society defined in terms of competing grievances, where no one is held to account for dereliction and where no one believes that he can, of his own volition, overcome his problems:

The acrimony has only intensified in the past few years. The battlefield keeps widening. What begins as a threat often descends into protests, riots and physical violence. It’s difficult for anyone to wade through all of this without feeling wronged in one way or another. But it wrongs us all. And if we continue to mistake grievance for righteousness, we only set ourselves up for more of the same.

So, we should be wanting to see a return to meritocracy. We should rid the world of DEI initiatives. And we should stop complaining about everything. That means, we should overcome the bad habit we have learned from therapy culture.