Do we have a "victimhood culture" now?

Without sharing any of the emails above, I asked what he thought of the criticism that there’s an asymmetry in comparing honor, virtue, and victimhood cultures, because the first two terms have positive connotations and the last has a negative connotation.

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He responded, “the asymmetry is something I noted in writing the paper over a year go.  Honorable people refer to themselves as such, and recognize it as a kind of social stature. In dignity cultures, dignity is openly proclaimed and valued. Yet as soon as we agreed to use ‘victimhood culture’ I knew that the activist circles who were are prime examples of this culture would object to it, even though I wasn’t sure why.”

After brainstorming other terms, he continued, no alternatives captured the distinctions that he and his co-author want to draw. The term “egalitarian culture” could “apply as well to the fragile, touchy equality between honorable gentlemen or to the moral egalitarianism evident in the concept of inherent human dignity or to the egalitarianism of hunter gatherers,” he wrote. “Social justice culture might work, though that seems to have even more baggage than victimhood and to not apply so well to cases that don’t involve liberals or progressives.”

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