The irresistible allure of victimhood

From royal drama to college essays to suicidal walruses.

Credit: Canva

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I still remember the day one of my college professors walked into the classroom and gave a lecture on the deep fascination people have with tragedy, violence and ugliness. It was an off-the-cuff monologue, inspired by him getting stuck in a traffic jam which had been caused by a wrecked car on the side of the road that morning. There was nothing blocking the road itself, he emphasized, yet every single driver felt compelled to slow down almost to a halt in order to take a good look. I thought the professor had picked a strange example to make his case, but he nonetheless opened my eyes to a whole dimension of human behavior I had overlooked.

Up until that point, my professional training had focused on analyzing how positive emotions compel action, especially in the context of marketing products and services. But suddenly I realized that the promise of happiness and bliss was not the only way to make people reach into their wallets. Negative emotions, such as sadness, fear, distress, guilt, anger, shame and pity are even more powerful mechanisms of persuasion. This is in part due to our hardwired, evolutionary tendency to focus on the things in life that appear threatening and dangerous, otherwise known as negativity bias.

Granted, the power of a gut-wrenching story is nothing new. The Greeks were well versed in it, and so was Shakespeare. The modern enterprise has long ago mastered the art of “sadvertising". What seems to be on the rise, however, is the mass distribution of drama, suffering and outrage as a deliberate strategy for drawing attention to a social cause or personal brand, and thus securing financial support, whether in the form of donations, subscriptions, followers, or multi-million dollar investments. Social media, with its inherently provocative and "amplifying" qualities, is the perfect ecosystem for drama and suffering to thrive.

Once we understand this dynamic as being core to the human experience, then it is hardly surprising to see the Duchess of Sussex - who is also an actress, by the way - attempting to raise her celebrity profile by telling the story of how she was victimized at Buckingham Palace. Perhaps even less surprising is the now widespread requirement of essays about hardship, adversity and marginalization from students applying to Ivy League schools. The irony in this particular case is that the smartest and most affluent candidates are likely to be more adept at crafting tales and anecdotes in ways that please admissions committees than those who are in fact less fortunate. “The emphasis on victimhood backfires, creating more obstacles for truly disadvantaged applicants”, observes Rob Henderson in his analysis.

In 2019, Netflix released a wildlife documentary series called "Our Planet", which focused on how various ecosystems around the world are being affected by climate change. One of the episodes included horrifyingly graphic scenes of dozens of Pacific walruses wandering right off the edge of a high cliff and tumbling brutally to their deaths, with narrator David Attenborough attributing the incident to the animals being forced to rest on overcrowded, tiny beaches as a result of the receding Arctic sea ice.

But there is one small problem. Compelling and heartbreaking as the footage was, the facts hardly added up to a story of climate change. Hauled-out walruses are notorious for dying in mass, mostly as a consequence of stampedes, some of which have been previously recorded in the same region where the documentary was shot. They are also notoriously sensitive to unfamiliar sounds, such as aircraft - including drones, which were used during filming - and get easily spooked by the presence of polar bears (former icons of global warming), which were suspected to be in the area at the time. As discovered later, some initially unaired footage from the same One Planet crew proved this to be the case (see clip below).

So why do we fall for this kind of speculative dramatization of events? Because, as my professor said, we love tragedy, violence and ugliness. Moreover, we get easily hooked on stories that portray someone as the helpless victim and someone else as the villain or perpetrator. And in order for the drama triangle to be complete, there must be a rescuer who steps in to save the day. Documentaries such as “Our Planet” do a superb job in projecting us, the viewers, into this role. For a brief moment, we feel endowed with the necessary powers to save the walruses from committing mass suicide. We take recycling more seriously. We march along with Greta. We instal solar panels. We buy a Tesla.

Then the question is: Does it matter if Sir David embellishes things a bit if, in the end, it helps make us more aware and adjust our consumption patterns? This is not a trivial nor rhetorical question, mind you. It is rather a defining one for our time. Do we have the right to arbitrarily portray someone as victim even if they aren’t? Should distorted apocalyptic visions be justified for the sake of shock value? Is terrorizing a population a valid method to achieve a desired behavior? These can be effective ways of going about the challenges that humanity faces, surely. But do they ultimately make the world a better place? Do they inspire future generations?

A More Hopeful Approach

Staying optimistic amidst the deluge of nonsense, greed, hatred, violence and destruction seems like an impossible mission. But it is precisely the path that long-time scientist and conservationist Jane Goodall has chosen to pursue for more than six decades. She has made hope her platform, continuously meeting and collaborating with people with whom she disagrees, educating children all over the world about personal and environmental resilience, and nurturing her belief in the ‘indomitable human spirit’.

Jane has made it her mission to speak the truth about the problems she has encountered and to encourage us all that solutions are within reach. One of her distinctive traits has been to cultivate an open mind, engage in honest dialogue, and avoid coming across as a self-righteous preacher. In a recent interview with The New York Times, she noted: “I don’t ever want to appear holier than thou. You’ve got to be reasonable. If you tell people, ‘You’ve got to stop doing that’, they immediately don’t want to talk to you. The main thing is to keep a channel open. Young activists, sometimes they’re inexperienced and demand something. They ask my advice, and I say: Talk about how the issue is affecting you. How you feel about it. I think that’s the way forward.”

In sum, hitting people in the gut and manipulating their brains can be extremely useful sometimes. On the other hand, winning their hearts is arguably more difficult, yet more empowering, life-affirming, ethical, and sustainable in the end.

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DIVING DEEPER

BEWARE OF DO-GOODERS : The Drama Triangle was first described by Stephen Karpman in the 1960s. It is a model of dysfunctional social interactions that involves three roles: Victim, Perpetrator and Rescuer, and each role represents a common and ineffective response to power dynamics. What Hitler, Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot had in common was that they effectively classified the perpetrators and the victims, and portrayed themselves as the ultimate rescuers, hence justifying their actions under the banner of “the common good before the individual good”.

This video invites us to examine our own contradictions before we try to fix the world around us. True freedom, it suggests, begins to emerge once we learn to reduce our fixation on external enemies and look within our own hearts with heightened awareness and humility.

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