Nobody is Coming to Save Us
This [...] pristine victimhood is appealing, especially to people who truly experience the harms of the authoritarian right in a one dimensional, uncomplicated way.
Whether it is neurodivergent people being convinced that someone bringing them food is an assault to their person, or white environmentalists pretending that animal rights advocacy is the most fundamentally urgent political project of our lifetimes, James Greig is right — everyone needs to grow up.
That infantilization is a tool of the authoritarian right is a fact evident across geographies, in creepy, paternalistic policies and trends in governance at all levels of institutionalization. There is a pervasive trend across Global South authoritarianisms to reject “western” “individualism”, to tell young people that they are incapable of making determinations about their political and personal futures, and to prescribe habits and behaviors that are said to have emerged from an older, more pristine version of their society. Infantilization then serves as a tool to discredit emancipatory movements and discursively disentangle agency from anyone who digresses from the hegemonic, institutional agenda — this is the logic that continues to underpin carceral politics, violent border patrol, and even military interventions. Dislodging a people’s agency from them serves as a justification to appropriate their personal logics and replace them with establishment-mandated constructs of morality.
Male faculty and administrative staff in Indian college hostels have exacted stricter curfews on women students, even alluding to putting up bars on their windows for their ostensible protection. The UK’s NHS details in a disturbing matter-of-fact tone that someone with bipolar disorder could be detained in a hospital against their will if the right people believe that they are incapable of fruitfully exercising their agency. In this event, then, that agency is wrested from them, under the veneer of the claim that they do not possess it in the first place. They are treated as less than human, less than full, capable, complex adults, and deemed acceptable to limit physically and emotionally by placing them within the confines of a hospital under the penalty of… being placed within the confines of a hospital.
The paternalistic extractivism of agency then serves only to allow for the creation (or perception) of a moral dichotomy of victim and perpetrator — a dichotomy that is perpetuated, even rewarded, by some of the most vocal sections of the mainstream online left. This celebration occurs when someone alludes to an interpersonal transgression and everyone in their replies urges them to “name and shame!” the person deemed at fault. It occurs when well-meaning, otherwise intelligent people claim that “cancel culture doesn’t exist”. It occurs when people post innocent, if awkward, exchanges on dating apps to Twitter and rally their followers to eviscerate the character of someone who is, to them, an anonymous speaker of what might be some minorly objectionable text messages.
This celebration of dichotomous morality is then able to morph itself into a tool of carcerality that serves the right in ways that one might refer to as unwitting, if one was being generous. Victims, in every form, are lionized and assigned unchangeable, intrinsic moral clarity and generosity by the left, while perpetrators are discarded as beyond help or beyond interest. This moralistic revisionism of victimhood allows for it to function as a discreet identity, an “axis of oppression”, and serves to create a one-dimensionality to the narrative of victimhood which can be exploited by the left as much as the authoritarian structures it claims to attempt to resist. Once someone is a victim, they are pure, they are empathetic, they are unimpeachable in their character, actions, and beliefs. Not only, then, are they continuously, permanently forgiven, they are also continuously, permanently in danger — of harassment, of discrimination, of having their feelings hurt, of being brought chili by a friendly neighbor.
This sort of pristine victimhood is appealing, especially to people who truly experience the harms of the authoritarian right in a one dimensional, uncomplicated way. That is, people who experience it largely from the outside. It is tempting, then, when you do not have access to narratives of “genuine” victimhood, to attach yourself to it as an unmalleable identity and to scream bloody murder when someone questions you on it. The moral celebration of victimhood leads to people wanting to cultivate a proximity to it — to speak authoritatively about structural oppression and have the trauma-informed credibility to do it, to grasp the moral high ground when someone pisses them off online or calls them annoying, to be safe in the belief that they are so devoid of true, meaningful agency and control over their existence that they have no possible way to better their (or others’!) material conditions. They must wallow in radical misery, and must be rewarded for doing so.
The fact that this one-dimensionality of victimhood so closely resembles the perceived (and constructed) one dimensionality of childhood is a fact that is vital to the authoritarian right’s project(s) of extractivism, capitalism, and empire. Children are an immovably marginalized group — they do not have financial agency or control, they cannot decide where they live, they must go to school, they cannot make their own medical decisions, they are physically smaller and weaker than nearly everyone who surrounds them, they are necessarily dependent on adults in their life in every possible way. This is a dependence that society validates and deems necessary and good, according parents rights of violating children’s liberties in ways that would be deemed unacceptable in any other context.
By behaving like children, and by indicating that that behavior is deserving of subjugation, dehumanization, and marginalization (as we often enact it on ourselves through our adoption of radical misery and its adjacent philosophies), we are doing the right’s work for them. We are validating the exploitation exerted upon children via the heteropatriarchal nuclear family, and we are inviting that same exploitation upon ourselves. Paternalism as a tool of subjugation is not a new phenomenon, but perhaps the eagerness with which the left is replicating its logics is an emergent property of the internet’s tendency to harness supposed morality as a substitute for liberation. Nobody is coming to save us, and it would be cool if we stopped pretending otherwise — nobody likes a whiner.