Validation / Shit Culture
"Welcome to Costco. I love you."
— Idiocracy (2006)
"I reject your reality and substitute my own."
— The Dungeonmaster (1984)
"AAAAAhhhhh AAAAhhhAAAA HAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAA! AAAH! AAAH! AAAH!"
— Midsommar (2019)
In Part 1 I wrote about traditional Honor Culture, whose negative enforcement function is Shame. In Part 2 I wrote about traditional Dignity Culture, whose negative enforcement function is Guilt. In this part, I am writing about Validation Culture, whose negative enforcement function draws from aspects of both, along with scapegoating and lying.
So, I once saw an internet cartoon pointing out that calling thin-skinned people "snowflakes" is an insult to snowflakes, because literal snowflakes manage not to hurt anybody else when they disintegrate.
Researchers who have amplified the idea of "Victimhood Culture" say this is rising in the United States... and it is also a marker of totalitarian regimes. Oops.
In my mind, "Victimhood" doesn't quite capture it — actual victimhood doesn't confer automatic social currency in the present-day authoritarian movement, at all. Whose victimhood is more important. I haven't seen any change, either way, in the approach toward individual-level abuse, crime, and bullying that doesn't fall under any given political narrative, protected class, or oppression axis. And the narrative is notably indifferent, if not downright hostile, to people victimized by woke activists. Small business burned down in a riot or closed due to lockdowns? Minority and a hate crime target, but the perpetrator was also another minority? Fired, canceled, and blacklisted for disagreeing with mask mandates or not adding pronouns to your signature? "Stop weaponizing your trauma!" "Your tears are violence!" "Stop centering yourself even though you just wanted to be left alone and the mob centered you to begin with!"
And as I said before, I think "Validation" is a more comprehensive word for what is psychologically going on.
The young left-ish movement that Wesley Yang calls "The Successor Ideology" is famous for the actions of vulnerable narcissists who have a lot of pity for themselves and cruelty toward others — but also has a lot of believers who are sympathetic in wanting to be seen, and genuine in wanting a society that is more compassionate and validating than the harsh indifference of the old status quo. (The latter group, in their genuine compassion, are particularly vulnerable to the trope that "the left eats its own.")
The phenomenon of "special snowflakes" is also not by any means limited to the left, either — it was Donald Trump, after all, who called his followers "special" for their actions on January 6, describing them as great patriots who had been mistreated — and that was apparently what they wanted to hear. While the Capitol mob was an older crowd in general, the most visible extremists were young. There's something generationally specific going on here, which I'll get to in a later part of this series.
Validation / Shit Culture draws from the very worst aspects of Dignity / Guilt Culture and Honor / Shame Culture and their respective historical forebears. Going back to Albion's Seed again, it combines the smug moral indignation, neuroticism, and witch-hunting of the old Puritans — along with the raw will to power, double standards, and economic Machiavellianism of the Cavaliers.
In Validation Culture, it is not enough to stand up for yourself, or to have a sense of internal dignity, or to be left alone in general. You have to have everyone around you actively reflecting how you want to see yourself. This is impossible to enforce without coercion.
This isn't all from unjustified narcissism. The old status quo invalidates some people more than others — and trust me, I get the impulse to forcibly shut up certain viewpoints. But it is an impulse, and it would create more problems than it would solve.
The coercion part is accomplished by effective appeals to authority and sheer organized numbers, rather than the traditional Honor Culture show of individual strength or the Dignity Culture endurance of calm reason. In his book The True Believer, Eric Hoffer notes that when a critical mass of people experience a felt loss of agency, they turn to group identity and mob actions to get things done.
And with Validation / Shit Culture in particular, people have a funny idea of what "getting things done" looks like. Ruining some internet nobody over an old bad tweet may not improve the material conditions of real victims, but it does serve an emotional need for the mob members' desire for validation as the good guys along with a scapegoat to shit on and be the bad guy.
Validation Culture values symbolic solidarity and emotional blackmail over more practical and reasonable solutions, or the need to accept that sometimes there is no reasonable solution and life isn’t fair. In recent Twitter pandemic discourse, some people will be like “Maybe we should stop masking toddlers” and “Kids shouldn’t have to be ‘resilient’ to protect the feelings of neurotic adults” and then outrage addicts will be like “How dare you! Don’t you care that 800,000 people are dead and people are still dying? If you don’t care, then you’ll kill somebody’s grandma five states away! We can’t go back to normal, everybody needs to be equally miserable unless there is zero COVID!” It doesn’t matter to them the vulnerable adults are already protected by the life-saving vaccines that have been widely available for almost a year now. Or that the vaccinated but still vulnerable are taking their own precautions and generally not asking the rest of society to put their lives on hold in symbolic solidarity.
Validation Culture divides the world into good people who care and bad people who don’t, and is like a wide-scale version of a dysfunctional family with a golden child and a scapegoat.
(And look — sometimes the family scapegoat has legitimate problems! Like a rebellious teenage son who has recently taken up skipping school and talking back and getting into fights. But blaming the whole family's troubles on the teenage son is a convenient way to evade accountability for Asshole Senior, the dad who has been routinely beating his wife and kids and drinking away the family's grocery money for many years. This is a similar dynamic to the COVID-19 pandemic discourse — sure, there are rebellious everyday people whose numbers overwhelm hospital resources because they refuse vaccination, but focusing the outrage on them them distracts from powerful and paternalistic leaders responsible for possibly leaking the virus in the first place, not to mention decades of hospital mergers and acquisitions and downsizing for "efficiency" that left the entire American health care system vulnerable to the slightest stress. For example, there were significantly fewer hospital beds in 2019 than in 1975, despite a higher present-day population that is also older and sicker.)
And because Validation Culture is based on emotional need, cowardice, and disappointment based in unmet unrealistic expectations — along with the goal to excuse the actually powerful from accountability — Validation Culture performatively condemns the outgroup while more often hurting dissidents and imperfect supporters from the in-group. Sort of like a Bond Villain who tries to send a message to James Bond by executing one of the Bond Villain's own henchmen. In the name of "fighting fascism," the partisan left makes public examples of other leftists for not always agreeing with them. The right points and laughs at the left for "eating their own" — but also the right: "Hold my beer! In the name of owning the libs, we're going to harass other Republicans and call for the execution of former Vice President Mike Pence for declining to overturn the 2020 election!"
Validation is a normal and appropriate thing to want from one's family and real friends (up to a point, because even family members and close friends need boundaries and limits). For example, it is perfectly reasonable of Florence Pugh's character in Midsommar to expect comfort and a listening ear from her inattentive boyfriend in the midst of her grief.
Validation goes haywire when it is expected from random strangers on the internet, businesses, government, and society as a whole.
I was trying to decide what Validation Culture's negative enforcement function is, which would be the equivalent of Shame to Honor Culture and Guilt to Dignity Culture... but it's like The Scarlet Letter where the Puritans are like "Why not do both?" .... So you combine shame and guilt together ... SHame and guIlT... [cue Beavis and Butthead laughter...]
But as one of the most versatile profanities in the English language, "shit" is actually very fitting. Validity is truth; if you're validating someone you are affirming their truth. If you're shitting someone you're lying to them. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and the origin of the Chinese idiom “Calling a Deer a Horse” depict situations where people are pressured to participate in a lie to maintain their social status or even to survive at all.
Lying is what people with a totalitarian mindset 1) do to get their own way, 2) pressure others to do in service of the cause, and ironically 3) what they fear their associates are doing to them.
The ultimate goal of Validation / Shit Culture is to change people into what one thinks they ought to be, rather than dealing with and accepting people as they really are. The old 1951 Disney cartoon version of Alice in Wonderland is actually a very good illustration of this. Alice is bored of her civics lesson and would like to live in a fun, nonsense world of her own. But then she finds herself in an actual nonsense world run by the ever-changing whims of one person. Everyone hides what is really on their minds and bends over backwards to please the vindictive and easily-offended Queen of Hearts — and yet the Queen of Hearts is never happy for very long and always suspects that someone is out to undermine her.
Woke culture has a distinct paranoia rooted in the worst applications of postmodernism. Postmodernism and deconstructionism, in a literary context, propose that authors and works can't be taken at their intended face value and have to have their fundamental dishonesty and hegemonic bias unpacked. In its proper context, postmodernism can be fun and imaginative as an inspiration for making one's own new art. But as a way to police other people's taste in art, or as a witch-hunting way to approach real people in general... it is kind of horrible. That Jeopardy guy wasn't just some dude gesturing the number three for three wins... he must be secretly racist and secretly making a racist 4chan symbol!
Woke paranoia has a "heads I win, tails you lose" application to cancel culture. If a mob target happens to be unlikeable or has done something truly problematic, that unlikeability is cited as a justification for the scapegoating and disproportionate retribution. But if the target is nice and kind from what everyone can tell — or at least minds their own business and politely asserts their own boundaries — they are then accused of "complicity" or "playing innocent," or it is rationalized that the target must actually be secretly mean and bigoted behind closed doors. Kind of like the Aesop fable of "The Wolf and the Lamb" — tyrants and bullies will make all sorts of accusations and excuses to justify what they were going to do anyway.
And again, conspiratorial mindsets are not exclusive to the woke left or to people formally trained in a critical postmodern lens. Obviously, QAnon is a thing. And in more mundane settings, school curriculum discourse gets complicated. On one hand, I've seen the actual receipts of public school class material that really do reflect specific control and manipulation tactics priming children for emotional abuse, and using the idea of "social justice" as a Trojan horse for that. On the other hand, conservative activists don't do anyone any favors when they think everything is indoctrination. Such as the factual story of Ruby Bridges, or Art Spiegelman's Maus having a few swear words in it. (Did these people even remember what junior high was like? Kids swore up and down the hallways all the time. Lots of "indoctrination" going on, there. Come on, people. Words mean things.)
As pointed out before, people in traditional Honor Culture are also sensitive to offense — but they do not enjoy drama, and if an offense was not intended, they tend to move on rather than escalate things. This is not the case for people in a conspiratorial mindset — they are obsessed with making baseless accusations that the out-group (and suspected in-group heretics) are fundamentally dishonest and secretly out to get them, and they think of these continuous accusations as proof of their in-group's own special insight and moral sensitivity.
A common narrative regarding moralistic cancel mobs (that I once believed too) is that they are driven by amoral sociopaths who don't give a damn about the social justice issues they claim to champion and enjoy bullying for its own sake.
But in truth, there is a very real combination of pain and self-righteousness, and this causes internal conflict for the abuser. Personalities like this:
1. Obtain loyalty and compliance through coercion
2. Flip on a dime and feel insecure that the loyalty and compliance they have is insincere (because it was obtained through coercion, duh)
3. ???
4. Think "I'm not victimizing them, they are victimizing me with their insincerity! I must unmask their secret evil and punish them further! I just want to be sincerely liked, dammit, is that too much to ask?!"
5. Escalate the cycle.
Totalitarianism is basically like an abusive relationship on a society-wide scale.
Next up: In this internet age when the personal feels political and the political feels personal, building back boundaries would go a long way in ending this.