Everyone who’s a part of our current culture is aware of a very simple fact: it you aren’t a pitiful, put-upon, victim, then you’ll never make it!
The best, the very best way for average people to gain attention and to try to separate themselves from the herd is to claim victim status. This is such a well-known and well-documented phenomenon, that I won’t even bother to defend it. We’ve all seen it. And while it happens in college and grad school and med school applications, it also happens on facebook. Kids are taught that the only way to be successful is to paint yourself as a loser. Privilege actively deprivileges you. From the news cycles to TV and movies and the cesspool that is teen culture, the message is very simple, and very repetitive, that unless you are more victimized than the average teen, you’re certainly never going to get anywhere.
And so the result is predictable: kids make up victimhood status. The transgender craze, and I mean craze literally, is just another step down the line of kids claiming victimhood status or trying to reinvent themselves not as someone MORE rich, from a MORE privileged family – but as less. Po’-mouthin’ white kids of my day wore FUBU and took on a lot of ghetto slang in their attempt to be tough, assertive, and unique. Yet, what’s odd is that the rural and suburban white kids who seemed to so desperately want to be livin’ the thug life lived indescribably better lives than many of the inner-city kids who faced hunger, violence, fatherlessness, and diminished socio-economic outcomes.
Why would a rich (at least by historical and world standards) kid act like someone poor? Why would a normal, healthy kid lie on college entry essays about being abused? Why would kids engage in Munchhausen Syndrome and literally make themselves ill through sickness ideation? Why would kids convince themselves they’re truly another sex or species – and I do believe many of them really do believe it! Why?
Because they have received and decoded the thinly encrypted message that our culture has sent-out: you don’t matter unless you’re a victim; normal is bad; privilege is bad; claim something on the intersectional hierarchy or be a nobody.
I grant, that many, if not most kids don’t consciously realize what they’re doing – just like how most fish don’t realize how wet they are. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t wet and swimming. Now, there are lots of reasons for this phenomenon. One of the most important causes is the insane, again I mean it literally, insane fear we have of being “normal” or “average”. The culture and cult of radical, atomized individualism has created a need for children (often a need for their parents, vicariously) to be special.
Unfortunately, the presence of Gaussian distributions in all human statistical analyses demonstrate the vast majority of people are either normal or subnormal. The Bell Curve is a bitch for those trying to be special, in the good way, because very, very few ever will be. A little over 16% of people will ever be above average in IQ, and even of those who are a standard deviation above mean, most of them aren’t really all that bright in the world of bright people. Being excellent in ANY field, means being in the top 1 percent or above. And being elite is even rarer. Think of a professional basketball player – he’s well into the top 1% but compare those top 1%ers and you’ll see that true excellence and eliteness is rare! Your medical doctor is probably in the top 5% of all people in IQ, and we all know that not all doctors are the same. You have to be very smart to be an MD and even some of them are idiots!
Like Lev Grossman points out in the Magician King, we all want to be heroes, but we can’t. For every hero legions of foot soldiers have to die.
Yet, we all want to be heroes. Why? Why can’t we be satisfied with being normal people? Why can’t we just be happy to be average and have a decent average life? Is it because we bought the Exestentialist lie that being average was cowardly and shameful and inauthentic? Maybe. Is it because we’re so desperate for attention that we need, in the very literal sense of the word, need constant attention and adulation or our fragile egos will crumple like a natty light can under the heavy hand of a good ole boy?
What’s wrong with normal. There’s nothing more normal than normality. And, frankly, I’m bored of all these preachy, semi-literate attempts to “normalize” various perversions and paraphilias and mental illnesses. I don’t want to normalize mental illness. I don’t want to harm anyone, but the fact is that crazy is contagious – at least certain forms are! I don’t want to normalize bad things. Because normalizing a bad thing means getting more of it. And since I’m against bad things (behold my greatness as a theologian!) I’m against normalizing bad things.
We’re all of us normal in at least one domain of human existence and most of us are normal in most or all domains. Only the abnormal are abnormal in one or more domains. And this would seem like the most obvious truth in the world since the word normal means what is average. The very definition of the word means what most people are, so, by definition, it is impossible for all but very few to be anything other than normal.
And again, that’s OK. Apparently it’s good. Apparently the universality of the Bell Curve in all human domains is a feature not a bug of creation. And a friend of mine Pastor Logan Feller has some pretty cool thoughts on why that might be!
But back to the issue at hand. Why this attempt to escape normality and averageness to play the victim-card. Facebook fishing can’t really be satisfying enough to outweigh the degradation of lying and painting oneself as a victim, as the ancillary character in your own biography. People may be kind to someone on whom they take pity, but very rarely is pity a basis for respect or even genuine love. Which is part of the reason why young men constantly throwing pity parties is leading to lower fertility rates – what woman wants to marry and have kids with a loser? But that, alas, is another essay for another day.
But why? Why can’t middle class kids from suburbia be happy that they grew up in privilege and rejoice in it? Material wealth is a good thing. Kids not facing hunger is a good thing. Generational wealth is a good thing. Two healthy, non-abusive parents in the home is a good thing. Why do we have to run from normality and privilege as though it were a curse. Why do we hate privilege so much? Why are we so desperate to be losers?
I think the root might be as simple as it is tragic. I think that our culture has begun to loathe privilege (or at least we’ve tricked ourselves into thinking we hate privilege) because we are dissatisfied with our wealth and blessings.
The Psalmist says, “Better the little that the righteous have than the wealth of many wicked.” Now, again, there are a lot of reasons why this is true, but one of the reasons is that the wicked rarely if EVER actually are able to enjoy and truly be satisfied with the wealth they have. That’s why the miser always wants more, why the criminal empire is never big enough, why sin is so insatiable – sin is insatiable because it cannot be sated. And sin is never satisfied because it never gives thanks.
I think the reason why our culture (either in truth or pretense) is trying to shed the unwanted privilege is because our material blessings are making us miserable. And they’re making us miserable, not because they’re bad – but because good blessings to the thankless become burdens.
For every blessing God gives us, we have an obligation to give thanks. The longer we go in thanklessness the more of a moral debt we create. And as that debt grows, so does the moral and spiritual weight of owing that debt. Refusing to thank God is like being the Little Dutch Boy – all the gratitude is fit to shatter the dyke of our pride, but we have to sit there keeping our fingers stuck in the holes. But it’s worse than that – the boy kept his finger in the dyke because he loved Haarlem and wanted to save something good and beautiful and innocent. Our latter day Niederländer hate the homely houses and detest them because the quiet and calm happiness of average people in average homes, like all blessings, can only be enjoyed when we give thanks to the giver of all good gifts. We don’t want to save Haarlem, we’re trying to blow-up the dyke and destroy it because it’s a constant reminder that we’re neither special nor the creators of our own existence. Material blessing from God: prosperity; privilege; call it what you will, these blessings accrue and the longer we put off the reckoning the more in debt we are – and so we try to sell the assets even though we’re underwater.
All these problems are connected.
But I think there’s hope and the hope is very simple and very doable. In fact, we could begin to reverse these negative trends RIGHT NOW, not by magic or psychobabble but simply by being thankful. If we ourselves are grateful we will be able to enjoy the material blessings we have and not to resent them or dread them. We need to train children to thank God for the good gifts we have. We need to be thankful. And when we’re thankful, not only will we stop seeing our blessings as reminders of our faults, as though we were being silently slapped by the kindness of a jilted lover, but we with gratitude will be content with our station in life, and won’t need to define ourselves by some Quixotic attempt to be great or unique – but will be satisfied with the simple and homely things. We’ll rejoice to be the quiet in the land.
I think that that’s a better model for life than what’s being vomited out of our culture into ourselves and our children like so many baby birds getting wormguts from momma’s beak. And I don’t want my nestlings to be satisfied with vermiform vittles. And neither should you.
Let’s be grateful for ourselves. Let’s be grateful so we can be happy and flourish. Let’s be grateful so our kids can be grateful and happy and flourish. Let’s be grateful so we can be normal.