The Trouble With the Guilt Economy
Even if you win, you lose.
People share the most fascinating stories with me about their experiences in social justice world. There was the black woman who claimed she was harmed by someone saying they didn’t like Beyonce’s music, and who demanded “reparations” for the damage. There’s the wealthy and politically connected individual who lists nine different ways they’re oppressed in their Instagram bio, including their STI. And then there are the tales of my own derangement, such as when I continued to send money to two exes who no longer spoke to me, while I was making the equivalent of minimum wage.
Outsiders to this culture find such behaviour absurd, and, now that I’ve left, so do I. But there is an internal logic that runs through all of these stories, and it is the social commodification of marginality: the more claims you can make that you are oppressed, the more valuable and worth supporting you become to your peers. The series of exchanges, financial and otherwise, that such claims provoke, make up the guilt economy.
Before this all spiralled out of control, at its core there was a pretty simple idea: oppressed groups, such as women and people of colour, have historically experienced powerlessness, and in order to rectify that, they should now be given power. In certain cases, that’s quite reasonable—for example, by extending the vote to women and non-property-holding men.
But when the same logic is applied at the interpersonal level, and it becomes the sole metric by which to decide who is right and who is wrong in any given situation, things are bound to get a little weird.
First of all, it encourages people to identify very strongly with the worst things that have ever happened to them and the most tragic parts of their family history. Social justice warriors feel compelled to comb through their lives and ancestry to try and identify events of victimization, and to place those events at the centre of their identity. For example, writer
has talked about how, when she was in the social justice subculture, she believed that her issues with food stemmed from the Irish potato famine that her ancestors lived through.It has also resulted in group identities being stretched beyond recognition: you’ve got white-passing people of colour, asexuals who love having sex, and non-dysphoric people who dress and identify with their birth sex who consider themselves trans. Disability has become a catch-all term for any physical or mental ailment of any magnitude, and autism may or may not count, depending on who you’re talking to. There are also new categories of marginality being invented: one may suffer from a lack of nice privilege, for example, or oppress through “proximity to whiteness” even if they’re brown.
People in this mindset are often stuck interpreting every uncomfortable, awkward or disappointing experience through the lens of oppression. I once read about a legacy Ivy League student who was working at an internship, and who got offended when she was asked to tidy up a conference room because she was convinced it was due to her race (and because, perhaps more importantly, she had no idea what interns do).
I remember thinking I was having trouble getting hired for being visibly queer until a friend of mine said it was probably actually my blue hair—but the funny thing is, for me at that time, there was no difference between the two. My sexuality and my hair were one and the same: if you disliked my hair, you were clearly a homophobe.
The more skilled you become at building a narrative out of your life and experiences that casts you as the tragic yet noble underdog, the higher you’ll rise in the guilt economy. If someone has a question about your story, tell them they’re harassing a marginalized person. If someone doesn’t understand that, tell them it’s not your job to educate them. If someone comes to your defence, tell them to pay you for the emotional labour of posting about yourself.
I can tell you from experience: this is a miserable life to lead. I do not recommend it. If you experience a lucky break or a piece of good news, you must come up with a story for why, after all your many hardships, you deserve it, because happiness is suspect. So is success, which is why it must be hidden, lest it undermine your marginal reputation.
It would be a mistake to understand my sending money to exes as a purely selfless act. It upheld the image I had of myself as a long-suffering, much-sacrificing Good Person. It made me feel superior. I’m sure that person insisting on Beyonce reparations experienced flashes of righteous mirth. I know that that rich person publicly advertising their STI thinks they’re taking a brave stand against stigma.
By this point, perhaps I sound a bit callous: surely there must be some degree of real suffering underneath these deranged attempts to belong, and yes, there absolutely is. I think that most people with a healthy upbringing, good mental health and a solid understanding of their place in the world would probably back away slowly from a subculture such as this.
It is reasonable to hold compassion for people who are stuck in its grip, but that doesn’t mean we should entertain their theatrics. Nothing good is produced by the guilt economy. It is simply a competition to become the most wretched, the most downtrodden, the most underdogged of them all. It accuses people of egregious indifference while simultaneously exploiting their generosity.
The only way out is to divest. Stop using identity to win arguments. Stop turning compassion into a competition. Stop interpreting every tiny interpersonal conflict through the binary of oppressor and oppressed. Stop trauma dumping on people you’ve just met. Stop sensationalizing pain, your own included.
This will allow each of us to reclaim our dignity, our privacy and our complexity, and to build bonds over common interests and goals. This approach may not present quite as many opportunities for high-flying feats of emotional derring-do, but I’ve got a hunch that most of us would rather not live in a never-ending soap opera.
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While there are parts of your post I don’t agree with, I do resonate with parts of it. Working as a psychotherapist from a narrative therapist lens helped me to notice how often young Western social justice spaces “flatten” people’s narratives. So with the potato famine example you shared, I would prefer to view that as one among many stories and not THE one defining story of an ancestry or a person. I have seen in my therapy office how BOTH intergenerational trauma AND intergenerational values, skills, strengths, and resilience get passed down but so often as you said people center the intergenerational trauma as an identity which can have them justify projecting it onto others and miss on the fullness of their life story.
What I appreciate about older folk who have been part of social justice movements is how they hold their pain and anger in a very very different way from what I have seen in younger social justice spaces. I notice with the former, the pain and anger are not all consuming to the point that there is no room for joy, compassion, solidarity, dialogue, and community building whereas with the latter the anger and pain can often be ruminative and competitive like you said with little to not concrete action being taken.
I have also noticed that as a non-American who used to live in northeast US for a decade before moving back to my country, that I haven’t seen any other culture link everything with an “identity” as tightly as Americans do. Perhaps there is a historical context to this but it’s something I have thought about more than once.
Kier, I unfailingly learn something from your posts. Nobody else (among my personal collection of independent opinion writers) has your perspective. This makes it extremely valuable. Specifically, this time 'round, I've been pondering for some time why the Woke (progressive activist) angle on cultural events like Women's History Month is almost ruthless in its focus on past injustice. (As opposed to, say, celebrating women. Duh.) You've provided me an answer, which is that the unrelenting focus on "harms," whether past or present, protects the identity group's claim to marginalization, powerlessness, or harm *even when, arguably, there is no longer any such significant, wide spread cultural harm or marginalization.* The identity group cannot risk losing the power that it gains in the guilt economy. Thank you for helping me solve that longstanding puzzle!