America’s Real Drug Problem

Comedian and social commentator Jimmy Carr observed that Americans’ biggest addiction is attention. He offered three forms:

• Fame

• Infamy

• Victimhood.

Fame is mostly benign. It’s not just the fame of recognition, it’s akin to what actors, musicians, comedians, and other audience-facing people crave: “likes.” They can be laughs, applause, or social media engagements. Fame is what drives the social media influencer industry and the millions of others that create or share digital content.

I’ll explain the “mostly” part at the end of this piece.

Infamy is a problem. It inspires the malevolent and the mentally ill. Unfortunately, we are drawn to it, the way we are drawn to train-wreck voyeurism. Human nature, it’s not going away.

In the past, the first two were dominant. The advent of cable news amplified both fame and infamy, as the 24 hour news cycle made it ever more necessary to elevate less-famous and less-infamous just to fill time.

Social media made fame and infamy even easier, since the gatekeepers have been totally bypassed, but its real power lay in exalting victimhood. “Woe-is-me” sells. It garners likes, “me-too” echoes, and oftentimes a lot of money via crowd funding. When coupled with outrage at purported injustices perpetrated by the other team, victimhood becomes its own sort of armor. “Woe-is-me” becomes “WOE-IS-ME!! HEAR ME ROAR!!!!” righteousness, with the validity of the gripe becoming less an less important. There are clear and substantial rewards in claiming victim status, and whatever you reward, you get more of.

However, since being an actual victim requires things like enduring harm, injustice (which includes bigotry), privation, or the like, we get three forms of “victim-adjacent” behaviors that require none of the above.

• The fake-victims, such as those who complain about subconscious micro-aggressions. The suffering they endure is all in their heads.

• The white knights. Who don’t have to actually be white, but often are. Their greatest concentration seems to be the AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Leftists), but you can find white knights in enough varieties to fill a Benetton ad.

• The grifters, who are overtly dishonest and scheming rather than engaging in self-delusion. For them, victimhood is a tool to be used for self-enrichment, and the rest is just window dressing.

The grifters are the easiest to understand, because they are after money, and chasing Other People’s Money is as old as money itself.

The other two “victim-adjacents” are the worst of the lot. They seek satisfaction by putting others down, and gain reinforcement for their behaviors from the attention they garner. Again, without enduring anything themselves.

Give junkies a near-zero-cost way of getting high, and guess what the junkies will do? Their biggest limit is time, and if they can fill all their time seeking and getting attention, they can ride the high all day, every day.

The other limit is the competition for attention. That is addressed by escalating. Out-do others in the declaration of victimhood. Attention addicts have to be louder or wilder or more creative or more outrageous than their peers in order to avoid being lost in the noise.

Is there a cure for this societal addiction?

I don’t see one, and certainly don’t see one that wouldn’t be worse than the problem itself.

About all we can do is choose not to feed others’ addiction to victim-seeking behavior.

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Now, about the “mostly benign.” Making others laugh or otherwise entertaining them is often a good thing. It’s a win-win exchange, leaving both sides happier and better off. Ditto for offering them things to think about, as is the case with good writers (and is something I hope for in my blogging). However, like any positive feedback, it can prompt addictive behaviors in some people. Share a funny picture and get a lot of laugh emojis? Why not share two the next day. Or ten? Or a hundred? We all know why. It dilutes the experience. Reward-for-effort diminishes, which risks reactions like resentment or dissatisfaction. As with anything else, the answer lies in moderation and in recognizing the pitfalls.