Everyone Is Oppressed, Especially the Powerful

How Victimhood Became the Dominant Language of Modern Governance

Modern public life runs on a strange inversion. Power rarely speaks in the language of power anymore. It speaks in the language of injury. Presidents describe themselves as persecuted outsiders. Billionaires frame themselves as misunderstood underdogs. Institutions with vast budgets and global reach present themselves as embattled guardians barely holding the line against existential threats. The modern elite rarely claims legitimacy by saying, “We are strong, competent, and capable of governing.” Instead, it increasingly claims legitimacy by saying, “We have been wronged.”

Victimhood has become the most potent currency of moral and emotional rhetoric in modern governance. It is not merely a rhetorical flourish or political strategy. It has evolved into a full moral infrastructure, one that shapes policy, public debate, institutional incentives, media narratives, and elite signaling. To understand modern politics, corporate communication, academic discourse, and even cultural production, one must understand how victimhood moved from being a tragic human condition to becoming a strategic necessity.

From Tragedy to Moral Authority: The Historical Shift

For most of human history, suffering did not automatically confer moral authority. It elicited pity, sometimes reverence, but rarely political legitimacy.

In ancient aristocratic cultures, legitimacy flowed from strength, lineage, and achievement. Greek tragedy treated suffering as existential and often meaningless. Oedipus is not morally elevated by his suffering; he is simply destroyed by it. Thucydides’ history presents victims of power as inevitable casualties of political reality. Suffering was tragic, but it was not automatically sanctifying.

The decisive transformation begins with religious moral revolutions, most notably Christianity. Christianity elevated victimhood into a site of ultimate moral authority. The crucifixion established a powerful ethical model: innocence combined with suffering produces transcendental legitimacy. The powerless victim becomes morally superior to worldly rulers. The meek inherit the earth not by force, but by moral inversion.

Over centuries, this theological inversion seeped into secular moral systems. By the Enlightenment, victimhood had become intertwined with the language of rights. The moral center of political thought shifted toward protecting the vulnerable and limiting abuse by authority. Liberal democracies institutionalized this logic by building governance around the protection of individuals from harm.

The twentieth century accelerated this transformation dramatically. The horrors of industrial warfare, genocide, colonial violence, and systemic oppression permanently altered the moral imagination of Western societies.

By the late twentieth century, victimhood was no longer merely a moral status. It had become a source of symbolic capital.

The Infrastructure of Victimhood

Victimhood did not become dominant simply because people became more compassionate. It became dominant because modern societies built institutions that reward it.

Three key infrastructures sustain victimhood as a central organizing principle.

1. Media Amplification

Modern media ecosystems privilege emotionally resonant narratives. Stories of harm and injustice are inherently compelling. They attract attention, generate outrage, and create shareable content. Algorithms reward emotionally charged material because emotional intensity correlates strongly with engagement.

Victim narratives are uniquely optimized for this environment. They combine moral clarity, emotional immediacy, and narrative simplicity. They convert complex structural problems into personal stories of injustice, which are easier to communicate and harder to challenge without appearing cruel.

2. Bureaucratic Incentives

Modern governance structures allocate resources based on demonstrated need and harm. This creates an institutional incentive to frame problems in terms of victimization. Funding streams, regulatory authority, and political mandates often depend on identifying and quantifying suffering.

Over time, this transforms victimhood into a competitive category. Groups and institutions must continually demonstrate their vulnerability to maintain legitimacy and resource flows. The result is an escalation dynamic in which claims of harm must intensify to remain politically salient.

3. Elite Moral Signaling

Elite classes increasingly operate in environments where direct displays of power are morally suspect. Public expressions of dominance or self-interest are seen as ethically crude. Victim signaling solves this legitimacy problem.

By adopting the language of grievance, elites can present themselves as morally aligned with justice while maintaining structural authority. Victimhood becomes a protective cloak that neutralizes accusations of privilege.

Why Victimhood Works

Victimhood is powerful because it leverages deep psychological and evolutionary mechanisms.

Humans possess strong instincts to protect the vulnerable. These instincts evolved in small-group societies where cooperation and protection of weaker members increased group survival. Victim narratives activate these instincts by triggering empathy, outrage, and protective impulses simultaneously.

Victimhood also functions as a rhetorical shield. It is difficult to debate a claim framed as suffering without appearing callous. Once a position is grounded in personal or collective harm, disagreement risks being interpreted as denial of pain rather than intellectual disagreement.

This creates what might be called asymmetric moral warfare. Victim narratives allow participants to claim moral high ground while placing opponents in defensive positions. The argument shifts from “Is this policy effective?” to “Do you care about people who are suffering?”

In this framework, emotional authenticity often outranks empirical evidence.

The Paradox of Power at the Pinnacle

The most revealing feature of modern victim rhetoric is its ubiquity among the powerful.

Historically, elites justified their authority through strength, divine mandate, or technical competence. Today, elites often justify authority by presenting themselves as embattled defenders of vulnerable populations, or as victims of persecution themselves.

This paradox emerges because modern legitimacy requires moral vulnerability. Open displays of power risk accusations of domination or exploitation. Victimhood softens authority by framing power as reluctant responsibility rather than ambition.

Corporations describe themselves as struggling against regulatory hostility or public misunderstanding. Governments describe themselves as fighting existential threats to democracy. Academic institutions frame themselves as besieged defenders of truth. Political leaders across ideological spectrums increasingly present themselves as targets of unfair attacks.

Victimhood has become a universal language because it simultaneously generates sympathy, mobilizes supporters, and discourages criticism.

The Escalation Cycle

Once victimhood becomes the primary source of moral authority, it produces self-reinforcing escalation.

If moral legitimacy flows from suffering, then demonstrating greater suffering produces greater legitimacy. This creates a competitive hierarchy of grievance. Public discourse gradually shifts from evaluating solutions to evaluating injury.

Over time, entire political identities become organized around narratives of historical or ongoing victimization. These narratives often contain genuine injustices. However, once institutionalized, they develop independent incentives to persist and expand.

This dynamic resembles an economic inflation of moral currency. As claims of victimhood become more common, they must become more dramatic to maintain emotional impact. The threshold for outrage rises continuously, leading to rhetorical arms races.

The Suppression of Debate

Perhaps the most significant consequence of victim-centered rhetoric is its impact on deliberation.

Victim narratives tend to replace arguments with moral positioning. Policy discussions become framed as empathy tests rather than problem-solving exercises. Complex trade-offs are flattened into moral binaries between compassion and cruelty.

This produces three structural distortions:

1. Emotional Monopolies

Victim rhetoric centralizes emotional authority in specific narratives. Alternative perspectives are often delegitimized as insensitive or oppressive, even when they address practical constraints or unintended consequences.

2. Fragility of Institutions

Institutions built primarily around harm avoidance often struggle to prioritize resilience, competence, or long-term stability. Decision-making becomes reactive, driven by crisis narratives rather than strategic planning.

3. Moral Exhaustion

Constant exposure to narratives of harm creates compassion fatigue. Societies become simultaneously hyper-sensitive to injustice and increasingly cynical about claims of victimhood. This paradox undermines genuine efforts to address real suffering.

The Emotional Economy of “I Have Been Wronged”

At its core, victim rhetoric functions as an emotional economic system. Suffering becomes a form of symbolic capital that can be converted into attention, legitimacy, funding, or influence.

This economy operates through storytelling. The most effective narratives follow a simple structure: innocence violated by external harm. The emotional clarity of this structure allows it to override competing explanations involving complexity, agency, or systemic trade-offs.

The danger lies in the replacement of plural moral languages with a single emotional grammar. When every conflict is interpreted primarily through the lens of victimization, societies lose the ability to discuss responsibility, competence, or competing goods without triggering moral escalation.

The Long-Term Consequences

The institutionalization of victimhood carries several profound risks.

First, it discourages agency. When identity and legitimacy become tied to injury, individuals and groups may face subtle incentives to maintain narratives of harm rather than narratives of resilience or achievement.

Second, it polarizes societies. Competing victim narratives often produce zero-sum moral conflicts. If multiple groups claim exclusive moral authority through suffering, reconciliation becomes structurally difficult.

Third, it weakens governance. Effective governance requires balancing empathy with pragmatism. Systems dominated by emotional narratives often struggle to implement policies that involve difficult trade-offs.

Finally, it erodes trust. When victimhood becomes a strategic resource, public audiences become increasingly suspicious of moral claims. Genuine injustice risks being dismissed as rhetorical performance.

Beyond the Prestige of Powerlessness

Victimhood is not inherently illegitimate. Many societies have historically ignored or suppressed real suffering. The moral recognition of victims represents genuine ethical progress.

The challenge arises when victimhood becomes the dominant or exclusive language of legitimacy. Healthy societies require multiple moral vocabularies: justice, competence, responsibility, resilience, and solidarity. When one vocabulary overwhelms all others, public discourse becomes distorted.

Modern societies must rediscover the ability to acknowledge suffering without turning it into the sole basis of authority. Otherwise, power will continue to speak through the language of powerlessness, an inversion that is rhetorically potent but politically unstable.

In the end, the prestige of victimhood reflects a profound cultural transformation. It reveals societies deeply committed to moral sensitivity, yet increasingly vulnerable to emotional simplification. The phrase “I have been wronged” has become the most powerful sentence in public life, not because it always describes reality accurately, but because modern moral systems have made it nearly impossible to challenge.

And like all moral currencies, once it becomes the dominant medium of exchange, it reshapes everything it touches, including truth itself.