"Trauma" Is Now Social Capital (Sadly)

Very possible.

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: