Debunking Nostalgic Victim Narratives

Last week, Christina Buttons told me our culture is "deeply biased against agency." She's right. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

The left has spent two decades teaching young people that they are prisoners of systemic forces too large to fight. The populist right has spent the last few years teaching the same people that they are victims of a stolen inheritance, robbed by enemies who must be named and

destroyed. The packaging is different. The product is the same — the relief of not being responsible, and the warm, addictive feeling of having someone to blame.

It is poison — for individuals, and for republics.

In this monologue Jeremy gets into what agency actually means, why Tucker

Carlson's recent attack on Ben Shapiro is a perfect window into what the populist right is selling, and why the data on human flourishing — from the Harvard Study of Adult Development to Raj Chetty's mobility

research to Viktor Frankl's observations from the concentration camps — all points the same direction: the belief that your choices matter is one of the strongest predictors of whether your life goes well.

Jeremy also gets into René Girard's scapegoat mechanism, why the rising

antisemitism on both the left and the right has the exact shape Girard predicted, why every revolution premised on perfecting man has produced mass graves, and why Jordan Peterson's most-mocked piece of advice — clean your room — is the operational definition of agency.

And Jeremy tells us what we actually do about it. Marry the right person. Go to church. Serve your community. Work hard. Refuse, every single day, to accept the role of the victim.

The country is you and three hundred million other people who are each doing the same calculation about whether their own life is worth taking responsibility for. If enough of us decide it is, the country gets

fixed.

#Agency #TuckerCarlson #BenShapiro #JordanPeterson #Conservatism

00:00 — Agency: the most unfashionable idea in politics

01:14 — The Harvard Study, Raj Chetty, and the Shapiro–Carlson fight

06:35 — Learned helplessness and Viktor Frankl

09:44 — The left's victimhood and the right's victimhood

12:23 — René Girard, scapegoats, and where the playbook always ends

20:38 — The most important thing Jordan Peterson ever said

23:32 — The victim identity is a transfer of power

27:23 — The 1950s myth and "bad policy isn't an excuse for a bad life"

30:00 — Adam, Eve, and the original denial of agency

31:33 — Six rules to rule the world