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A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character

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In an era where politically correct shibboleth dogmatically trumps common sense, Charles Sykes volume is a breadth of fresh air. His well-known but rarely spoken thesis is that a shrill cry of victimization has obliterated personal responsibility and this degrading mantra has developed into a fast growing and far-reaching industry.

Unlike other books that limit their scope, Sykes issues a broadside against the entire victimization cult. Harebrained lawsuits, expansive therapeutic whims, diversity nonsense, and sensitivity fads are all targets of his animadversion, and he repeatedly hits bull's eyes.

Of the diversity divisiveness, Sykes shows how a silly trend has grown into a suffocating mania. He points out how the craze has stripped Americans of their uniqueness and put them into classifications pitted against each other. Each division must fight to prove how it has been hurt worse than the others have. Women wounded by sexism: blacks blocked by racism: homosexuals hampered by homophophia. And of course a gay black woman would have three strikes in her favor-four if she can claim some real or imagined handicap! While many corporations are actively engaged in the separatist dross, diversity rituals have reached epidemic levels on college campuses. Sykes sites The University of Arizona where "individual style" constitutes minority status and all the special accommodations it affords. The school assures this measure is necessary to prevent discrimination against "nerds and people who dress differently."

Many of his examples would be hilarious were it not for the tragedy of their reality. As an avatar of this absurdity, the author describes a woman in Miami whose "illness"--bigotry made it impossible for her to work with black people. Worker's Compensation paid her $ 40,000 to compensate her disability. Let's hope that the Ku Klux Klan is not using this mockery as impetus to plan a class action lawsuit comparable to the smokers' frivolity against tobacco companies.

One of the saddest reminders of reality is the book's reference to a suggestion made in 1944 "that traditional American values were the greatest foes of racism because they emphasized equality and liberty---values inherently in contradiction to policies of segregation and exclusion." Wouldn't it be wonderful to hear someone bravely articulate such truthfulness today? Unfortunately the mere implication of such veracity would earn the speaker widespread scorn.

Sykes cleverly uses a great deal of humor in presenting this fabricated crisis. At times, it is essential to laugh at such institutionalized foolishness, but as the book thoroughly substantiates the damage of a rampant victimization mindset is massive. Unless an attitude of self-control and personal responsibility comes back in style, America will become a "true victim" of an arguably well-intentioned but deadly dissent into political correctness

I came across this book six years ago, and I still rank it in the top three books I hve read in the last ten years.
Charles Sykes carefully analyzes the modern culture of victimhood and how it has undermined personal responsibility, the work ethic, and true victims of circumstances beyond their control.
He carefully analyzes how the introduction of psychotherapy, along with the proliferation of lawyers and lawsuits has rendered America into a whining nation instead of one that works hard for success.
Sykes also chronicles how the protestant work ethic at one time considered hardship and troubles as something to deal with. Such troubles make people stronger and more resilient.
He does this by not only looking at history, but also at contemporary society. At full speed, this victim mentality now lets the human spirit be beaten by a ubiquitous society that takes away responsibility.
Ultimately, this trivializes life. Even worse, we lose the true victims who are truly abused. As Sykes said, "in a society where everyone is a victim, no one is a victim."

Charles Sykes presents and exhaustive articulation of what is bothering many rational Americans, the victim mentality that is permeating our nation. He is the voice of all of us who work hard, try our best but do not try to blame anyone else for our shortcomings. This book encapsulates what is wrong today with our nation.

A few years back I would have considered this volume a right-wing screed. However, with experience and presumed "wisdom" I find that persons with opportunities far beyond those of probably 97 percent of the human race label themselves as victims. It's as if their whole identity revolves around that status. If not adequately victimized, I'm valueless.

Indeed, one of my favorite victims now is a woman in her 30s who is independently wealthy enough that she hasn't worked for probably six years. She is a proclaimed radical, with a nightlife rivaling that of a Hollywood "personality." I understand, however, that "she hates it." She's a victim of circumstance, and I should feel sorry for her predicament. Right.

So at this stage in my life, I agree with much of what the author says.

When I began the book, I was a little apprehensive. It seemed to be a document decrying what took place in the 1960s. Mind you, I'm less of an advocate of much of that than I was years ago. But too many of the books doing that decrying are from the religious right which uses whatever didn't work from that era as an excuse to return to a Utopian past which, I remind them, never existed. But the arguments the author used to comment on the 1960s I tend to agree with. We DID tend to disregard "traditional" morality in that era, saying that "ours" was a superior moral code. Indeed, I think "we" were overly moralistic, the mores consisting predominantly of rejection of the morality of our parents which we felt was groundless and insubstantial. And that led to another of the author's arguments that was fairly solid: Much of what "we" demanded in that era was the right to be impulsive, to "do our own thing," to use a cliche of the era. In other words, the author proclaims, it was a culture of YOUTH. Retrospectively, I tend to agree.

I thought I'd coined the phrase "the therapeutic state." But Sykes used it in the book which was published before I ever used the expression. The therapeutic "professions" have used essentially meaningless, multi-syllable expressions to give us things to whine about despite our relative advantage. Issues of race and sex have become comedy: well-to-do persons whining that they're entitled because of the assumed consequences of their race or sex. So a black woman with three Ph.D.s, doubtless obtained with the aid of "affirmative action" who gives speeches coast to coast on the evils of racism; women I know with notable "attributes" who flaunt them, until someone not of their stature shows them too much attention. Then these attributes become impediments simply used by us white patriarchs to our own ends. The stories go on and on.

I'm not a firm advocate of testimonials to make a point. Nor, in fact, is Sykes. So he does use some good arguments to make his point. He wittily describes that silly "Greening of America" which was popular a few decades ago. But he also acknowledges that many of the era didn't condone it, might have "strangled Reich," the author' "with his own bellbottoms," or something to that effect. In that sense, I thought many of Sykes' arguments were pretty well-balanced.

He blames much of the sentimentalism of the 1960s--which extends to today with persons claiming, for example, that the US is in pursuit of the alleged culprit of the September 11 hijacking "because of the color of his skin"--on Rousseau and the Romanticists. I confess a weakness for some of the music of the Romantic period, but the period's literature makes me shiver. So, while I'm hardly a scholar on the era, I am assuming the author's blame is well placed. The Romanticists, according to Sykes, degraded the middle class; they felt oh, so superior to middle class sentiments. In that sense, it became quite fashionable to be "altruistic." Eventually--and I can attest to this as until recently I worked in an organization that was a clear manifestation of the claim--what an organization accomplished was not important. What WAS meaningful was that the staff FEELS good about what it does.

In reasoning not unlike Sykes', I've concluded that much of today's "left" consists predominantly of white persons either talking with each other of how wonderful they are, of how victimized they are, or both.

The book did, however, have its weaknesses. Most of the sources I hadn't heard of before so they didn't LACK credibility. However one I can think of I have heard of, Dinesh D'Souza. He is an extreme ideologue who works for an ideological organization. He should not be a reference for this or any other book, unless the other wants to (1) assume the reader is not familiar with D'Souza or (2) is part of D'Souza's "choir" to whom the author and D'Souza are preaching. I therefore was challenged at a point or two of the text.

What's more, the final conclusions of the text did not follow from the text. And that's my major beef with the book. He led, for example, into how we should endorse voucher programs. Well, I have mixed feelings on them: They MAY actually give opportunities to some people who are poor and wouldn't otherwise have those opportunities. BUT, they also give enormous tax breaks to the likes of George W. AND Al Gore--if you remember that election--who came from extremely wealthy backgrounds.

My point is, there are two sides to that and other conclusions the author came to, and they didn't necessarily follow from what preceded them in the book.

If you ignore the last chapter, though, the author made some observations that I think many formerly of the "left" will blush when recognizing.

I've been looking for a book in this subject for quite a while, but it seems like everybody is so numb no one sees what really
goes on in the american society. This book was a great find!

This book is a desperately needed critique of the victim mentality so prevalent in the USA. At one time you could convict someone just by proving they committed the crime, but that's no longer the case. So many people now say "Yes, I did it, but I'm not responsible".

Yes, the U.S. Constitution includes the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. But the men at the constitutional convention should have balanced the Bill of Rights with a Bill of Responsibilities. Only a fool would bestow rights upon citizens without requiring them to accept responsibility for their actions.

A Nation of Victims: The Decay of American Character by Charles Sykes, is utterly awesome. Sykes puts political correctness in its place by providing a true commentary on society's current condition. HEy, the truth hurts. This book is humorous and profound at the same time. If everyone read this book, our society would definately improve!

Charles J. Sykes digs into American culture with gusto. His book is organized, well-written, and highly intellectual. While the prose is sometimes dry, he spices things up with occasional flashes of mordant humor. "A Nation of Victims" is one of the few entertaining and hard-hitting books of social analysis that you're likely to find these days.

The central thesis is summed up well enough in the title. In modern America, everybody wants to be a victim. Every group out there claims to be the target of massive persecution, and everyone demands some special reward from society to compensate for their suffering. The symptoms of this disease are not difficult to spot. Our country is infested with over a million lawyers, up from fewer than twenty thousand in 1950. A "therapeutic culture" has managed to classify nearly every type of behavior as a psychiatric disease, thereby freeing people from responsibility for their actions. Special interest groups and lobbyists roam Washington, shaking down Congress critters for every penny of taxpayer money they can get.

No one could serious deny the effects, but what is the cause? With a keen eye for sociological trends, Sykes diagnoses the root of the troubles in the 60's, though he acknowledges that some traces of the problem could be found earlier. The 60's began with the Civil Rights movement, a fully justified demand for black equality. But while Martin Luther King and his followers sought to join in with mainstream American culture, the late 60's saw the rise of the Black Power movement and other radical groups that had nothing but contempt for American values. By 1967, revenged had replaced equality as the goal, and the rhetoric was growing more violent by the day.

It is a tribute to Sykes' tenacity and the tremendous range of his intellect that he truly knows his stuff. He has obvious read, analyzed, and digested the works that started the radical movements of the 60's, even though the radicals themselves have long since given up on them. Truly it could be said that Sykes reads Franz Fannon so we don't have to. (Albert Memmi and many others as well.) Once those two had started explaining blacks could not possibly be anything other than victims and while any act of retaliation was justified, it was only a matter of time before writers like Robert Reich took the concept beyond race and started finding victimhood everywhere. Reich pounded on the idea that mainstream American culture was oppressive from top to bottom. Merely by assigning homework, the education system was committing "an act of violence" against helpless children. Fortunately, according to Reich, liberation was on the way in the form of bell-bottoms and marijuana.

Enter the 70's and things get worse as claims of oppression proliferate. Sykes has a lot of fun with Shulamith Firestone, the notorious writer who claimed that suburban housewives in America suffered more than Jews during the Holocaust. Other prominent feminists get tackled as well, including a Women's Studies professor at Kenyon who advocates witchcraft as an alternative to male-dominated medicine. There's lots more in the final sections of the book, but Sykes is not merely about taking cheap shots at the most extreme elements of the academic world. Almost alone among social critics, he actual includes a segment on constructive solutions that might really work, some of which, like welfare reform, have been implemented since the book was written.

A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character (New York: St Martin's Press, c. 1992), by Charles J. Sykes, probes the increasing tendency of all sorts of groups to claim singular standing and privileges on the basis of mistreatment (to their ancestors if not themselves). Sykes is a journalist, and he excels (evident in his earlier portrayal of higher education in America, Profscam) in the arresting illustration, the telling anecdote. He begins this book with the story of a man who stole a car from a parking lot and was killed while driving it. His family then sued the parking lot proprietor for failing to prevent such thefts! That's "victimization" with a vengeance!
Unfortunately, Sykes thinks we're turning into a nation of victims. For every problem we encounter, every setback we suffer, there's surely someone to blame, and doing so makes us feel self-righteous as their victims. To some social scientists, virtually every American family is "dysfunctional," so every child (and probably wife) is the victim of some familial disorder. "The National Anthem," Sykes quips, "has become The Whine." We're told, for example, by Yoko Ono (the late John Lennon's wife) of all persons, that woman is "the nigger of the world" (p. 124). Shulamith Firestone, claiming to speak for fellow feminists, insists the life of suburban housewives resembles that of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust! That's because living in a patriarchal society suffocates women. So Firestone asserts that feminists must "question not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further even the very organization of nature" (p. 181).
Given the fact that neither nature nor culture change simply because angry writers desire it to, feminist intellectuals urge the women of America to feel forever victimized by their sexual situation. To be a woman is to be oppressed. The media capitalizes on such feelings: half of the made-for-television movies two years ago featured women being mistreated in some fashion. Explaining this, one of the producers, Steve Krantz, said: "Though I hate the notion, it's prototypical of women's roles in society to see themselves as victims. So there's a high identification factor" (p. 177). In fact, women have dramatically advanced in American society. Educational and vocational doors have opened to women thus inclined. "One third of the MBAs are earned by women (as are one-half of the nation's law degrees and a quarter of the medical degrees). Fully half of the entry-level management jobs are now filled by women, as are half of the officer and manager spots in the country's top fifty banks" (p. 180).
However, such success has elicited not an increasingly secure sense of achievement but "an increasingly insistent and shrill campaign to regard women as victims, a program that seems particularly urgent to those groups that claim to speak for women and that use the victimization of women as their reason d'etre" (p. 180). Students too have beomce "victims." Many public schools now seek to enhance each student's self-esteem, so low grades and critical evaluations disappear from the educational agenda. Teachers often try to avoid giving too much work or embarrassing them. One of the gurus of the 1960's, Charles Reich, in The Greening of America, insisted that in high schools "an examination or test is a form of violence. Compulsory gym, to one embarrassed or afraid, is a form of violence."
Indeed, "the requirement that a student must get a pass to walk in the hallways is violence" and "compulsory attendance in the classroom, compulsory studying in study hall, is violence." As one might imagine, Reich concluded that "the amount of violence is high school is staggering" (p. 99). One wonders what Reich would say to the real violence which haunts America's schools 30 years later! Still more: churches encourage "growth-groups" and therapy sessions, where no one ever confesses "sin," but everyone targets someone else for causing them grief. To confess sin, of course, is to admit responsibility for wrong, something excluded by therapeutic thinkers. For example, after a woman donned army fatigues and shot a number of people in a shopping mall, killing some of them, a Swarthmore College psychology professor, Kenneth J. Gergen, argued she was not really to blame; the crime "should not be attributed to the individual alone but to the array of relationships in which he or she is a part"--to what he calls "the complicities of daily life" (p. 145).
Schools seek to build self-esteem. Churches encourage self-esteem (what Robert Schuller called the "new reformation"). And popular psychologists amplify the message. Walt Whitman once declared: "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual--namely to You." This quotation graced the frontpiece of Wayne Dyer's Your Erroneous Zones, one of the best-selling manifestoes of the therapeutic culture. If, in fact, you are the most important person in the world, if the universe exists simply to provide you a place in its spotlight, certainly you're entitled to a vast (if not infinite) storehouse of pleasures and privileges. When frustrations ensue, obviously someone's responsible for your pain. And you're free to whine about your misfortunes!
Just as Shelby Steele insists blacks must cease looking for reasons to feel like victims, so Sykes demands that Americans forsake the victimization charade. For he agrees with Steele in arguing that when you label yourself a victim, you relinquish not only responsibility for your life but the sense of dignity which comes with living responsibly. A Nation of Victims must be read and used with care. It is an illustration of a tendency in America which needs attention--something I'm reminded of on a daily basis just by reading the headlines. But its truth could be employed as ammunition to deny there are injustices and blame the truly wounded for their injuries. The book reads easily, has lots of fascinating illustrations, and renders some important observations concerning contemporary culture.

While this book is provocative it does not dive deep enough into the main issues at hand. The book does show that many people do tribalize around their victimhood. In other words they have status because they are a victim of some supposed ill of society. (I'm black, I'm a women, I have gray hair, Or perhaps the most ironic I'm a American Caucasian living in southern California)

Mr. Sykes shows elegantly that the "not my fault" syndrome has become the law of the land. However the book fails in showing that this syndrome seems to be an effective gathering agent of the socialist class. In order to have a more egalitarian society the socialist must employ the tactics that the author puts forward. It is the great equalizer in the left's battle against freedom. For in reality, at least for the socialist, we are all victimized by our capitalistic system. Therefore the only way the underperforming of society can get ahead is by invoking the government to help them. IE become a victim.

This book is groundbreaking in the fact that it challenges many notions that go against the politically correct view. However it does not go far enough in connecting the dots. I do recommend it though it is a easy read that shows eloquently some common sense on the issues of victimization.