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Feels like people love to discuss “trauma” these days, even ascribing it to situations that might be traumatic to them — which is valuable to note — but are not traumatic in any type of broader sense that we’ve accepted the term to mean. New York Times ran something about three days ago entitled “If everything is trauma, is anything?” The whole article is pretty good, but this part (longer) pops out:
We know, at this point, that algorithms reward outrage and public shaming online — and that, as the Yale psychologist Molly Crockett explained, those algorithms can’t distinguish between language that is proportionate or disproportionate to the original transgression.
We also know that victims of wrongdoing tend to be perceived as more “moral” or “virtuous” than others, and that using medical language tends to give a speaker authority, each of which are likely to result in more positive feedback.
It is not a huge leap, then, to imagine that deploying the language of trauma, or of harm, or even of personal struggle, carries cultural capital.
Trauma as cultural capital. Indeed. This has been argued for years, by people much smarter than me. In fact, I’m leading a Book Club on Wednesday night near my house, and the book is Tribe by Sebastian Junger. Here’s a screenshot from said book:
“Victimhood” is the big word that pops here. You see this become a political flashpoint of late, whereby the right says the left are snowflakes and victims, and the left says the right are bullies and create victims, and in reality both the left and the right (a) play the victim and (b) are snowflakes about different topics. It’s all bullshit, in all honesty.
But we do have some “trauma creep” in the same way we have “semantic creep,” i.e. a lot of people just define something as trauma, and again IT WAS TO THEM AND THAT’S IMPORTANT TO NOTE, but within the commonly-accepted idea of trauma, it becomes confusing.
Think about it like a quadrant. The top right would be things we can all agree are significant trauma, i.e. rape, felonious assault, war, your house getting robbed/burned…
