Bullies Love to Wear Their Victim Costumes
A Look at the Most Preposterous Form of Gaslighting
Years ago I was crossing a street when a car speeding through a red light nearly struck me. The driver slammed on her brakes and her horn, rolled down her window and screamed at me for being in her way.
That’s right, the woman blamed me for impeding her right to commit a traffic violation.
I reflect on that incident as I watch the numerous QAnoners, Proud Boys and a recently departed president himself whine about their mistreatment. Like the woman who almost ran me over, they’re bullies playing victims. I call them bictims.
Examples of bictims abound. They’re white supremacists who riot and charge on synagogues and Black churches, then cry on YouTube over their impending arrest.
They’re the Karens who charge that their rights are being violated by face-mask mandates at WalMart. Some even have the audacity to claim the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — a law targeted primarily at banning Jim Crow laws — gives them the right to spew their droplets, aerosols and bullshit onto others.
Many of them peddle hate and disinformation, then accuse social media sites of violating their First Amendment rights by flagging their defamatory posts as bogus.
If you’re having difficulty grasping typical bictim behavior, just imagine Hannibal Lecter murdering and eating you, then griping that you gave him indigestion.
The world’s most notorious bictim is the pumpkin-colored brute who — after tweeting endless insults and threats, letting a pandemic sap the country, and inciting an invasion of the Capitol building — insists that conspirators robbed him of his second-term entitlement.
Bictimhood represents the most offensive form of gaslighting. It’s simply repugnant to shame a dutiful store clerk enforcing a mask mandate, and it’s especially horrendous to do so while invoking a law that bars racial, religious, and sex discrimination. Sorry, Karen and Ken, but the Civil Rights Act provides no protections for wretchedness.
Granted, this type of bullying emanates from a sense of victimhood — of economic insecurity and declining job opportunities. But those insecurities simmer in a pot of racism and xenophobia, according to a wealth of psychological research. MacArthur Fellow Jennifer Richeson of Yale University and her colleagues have shown White Americans’ racial bias is piqued when they hear projections about minorities collectively becoming the majority by mid-century. Hearing about these forecasts also spurs people to support conservative political candidates and policies that stifle diversity.
What’s more, a recent study reported in the Journal of Personality suggests a tendency for bictims to embrace conspiracy theories, exemplified by the widespread belief that the November election was rigged against Donald Trump. Emory University researchers administered several standard psychological tests to nearly 2,000 people. They rated respondents on their penchant for conspiracy theories. The findings draw a tight link between bictimhood and personality disorders. In their analysis, they linked conspiracy beliefs to traits such as entitlement, anxiousness, impulsivity, narcissism and even psychoticism — a mild form of psychosis characterized by bizarre thinking and paranoia.
Sound like any president you know?
Whether a new Administration can set a new model of citizenship over selfishness, reason over delusion, and kindness over Karenism, is anyone’s guess. Trump emboldened bictims. But his defeat and the emergence of a new administration may usher in an era that neutralizes the whines of the privileged and the prejudiced.
