Excellent piece here. Does a great job of demonstrating "concept creep" from both liberal and conservative ideologies, and of describing how we got to this situation in the first place. The bullet points towards the end summarize the article perfectly:
>“by applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective elements into them, concept creep may release a flood of unjustified accusations and litigation, as well as excessive and disproportionate enforcement regimes.”
>“...concept creep can produce a kind of semantic dilution. If a concept expands to encompass less extreme phenomena... then its prototypical meaning is likely to shift... If trauma, for example, ceases to refer exclusively to terrifying events that are outside normal human experience, and is applied to less severe and more prevalent stresses, it will come to be seen in a more benign light.”
>“...by increasing the range of people who are defined as moral patients—people worthy of moral concern, based on their perceived capacity to suffer and be harmed—it risks reducing the range of people who see themselves as capable of moral agency.” There is a tendency “for more and more people to see themselves as victims who are defined by their suffering, vulnerability, and innocence...The flip-side of this expanding sense of victimhood would be a typecast assortment of moral villains: abusers, bullies, bigots, and traumatizers.”
>Expanding mental disorder “can pathologize normal experiences, generate over-diagnosis and over-treatment, and engender a sense of diminished agency.”
Of all these, I find the tendency towards victimhood particularly troubling. We're seeing a generation of kids growing up blaming everyone but themselves for their problems, and demanding that someone else change to solve their problems instead of learning the resiliency needed to survive and thrive. Couple that with the tribalism of said victims setting one group against the other, and we're setting ourselves up for civil unrest in the near future.