Craig and Frank
Picture a man — call him Craig — thirty-four, a middle school teacher, who posted a thread on Twitter about a colleague who’d made a dismissive comment about his preferred news source. The thread ran fourteen tweets. It detailed how the comment made him feel unsafe. It described a broader pattern of intellectual hostility he experienced from conservatives, and how the school’s administration had failed to address similar incidents. He said he was genuinely uncertain whether he could keep working in an environment this hostile to his values. The thread got 4,200 likes. He received dozens of supportive replies. He posted a follow-up thread the next week about a different slight from a different colleague.
Now picture another man, in the same month, in a different world entirely — call him Frank, fifty-two, a logistics supervisor, posting in a Facebook group for Christian conservatives in a Georgia county. His post described how his company had forced diversity training on him and his team. The training, he said, had made him feel accused of crimes he hadn’t committed. He’d been unable to speak honestly during the session without risking his job. The whole experience, in his telling, proved traditional American values were under systematic attack, and it left him feeling like a second-class citizen in the country his family had built. The post got 340 reactions and 112 comments. He posted several similar items in the weeks that followed.
Craig would find Frank’s worldview reactionary and his grievances manufactured. Frank would find Craig’s worldview weak and his concerns laughably trivial. Both of them would be wrong about the other, and both of them would be missing the most important thing about themselves: they are running the same cognitive and emotional program, and so, quite possibly, are you, right now, in your own life, whether or not you’re ready to hear that yet. Different content, identical structure. Both are framing ordinary social friction as a form of persecution. Both are broadcasting that victimhood to an audience selected to validate it. Both are deriving identity and community from a shared narrative of being wronged. Both are, in ways neither would recognize in himself, addicted to the victim position.
This episode is not going to flatter either side, and I want you to hear that clearly before we go any further. If you’re looking for confirmation that your political tribe’s victims are real and the other tribe’s victims are manufactured, you will not find it here. What you will find is the research: from psychology, sociology, and philosophy. It explains how the victim mentality works, why it’s epidemic across the political spectrum, and what it costs the people who practice it. And it shows you what the alternative actually looks like. The alternative isn’t denial of difficulty. It’s a different relationship to difficulty, one that produces forward motion instead of identity, accountability instead of a community organized around grievance.
Before you decide this episode is about Craig, or about Frank, or about people on the internet who aren’t you, stop and consider that it might be about you specifically. You have a version of this running somewhere in your own life right now, whether you’ve named it yet or not. You are going to hear yourself, specifically you, in at least one of the next twenty minutes. When you do, don’t look away from it. That’s the whole point of you, specifically, listening tonight, not someone else, you.
Martin Seligman and the Architecture of Helplessness
Seligman spent the following decades working out what this meant for human psychology. His theory of explanatory style, how you explain bad events to yourself, identified three dimensions people differ along. Permanence: is this temporary or permanent? Pervasiveness: is this specific, or does it affect everything? Personalization: is this about me, or about circumstances? A pessimistic explanatory style, the one associated with learned helplessness and depression, treats negative events as permanent, pervasive, and personal. A setback becomes “things never go right for me, I can’t do anything right, this always happens.” That’s not merely a cognitive pattern. It produces behavioral consequences: reduced effort, reduced persistence, a reduced ability to use feedback from your environment to adjust your behavior. A man with a pessimistic explanatory style doesn’t just feel worse about his difficulties. He actually does less to address them, because his operating system has already concluded that doing something doesn’t change outcomes.
The connection to victimhood culture is direct, and it’s underappreciated. Victim mentality is precisely a pessimistic explanatory style applied to your social and political experience. If you’re operating from victim mentality, you interpret ordinary friction, disagreement, or adversity as evidence of a systemic pattern of persecution that’s permanent, always happening, pervasive, affecting everything, and personal, directed specifically at people like you. The cognitive structure is identical to the learned helplessness Seligman documented in his clinical populations. The difference is that victim culture provides social validation and community that pure individual helplessness never did. Seligman’s dogs were isolated in their helplessness. Craig has 4,200 likes. Frank has 112 comments. That social validation makes the helplessness sticky in a way isolated helplessness never could be.
Here’s the critical part. The victim position, unlike isolated learned helplessness, gets reinforced. Every time Craig posts about his victimization and gets 4,200 likes, his brain receives a powerful social reward signal. The victimhood narrative isn’t just cognitively available to him. It’s actively incentivized, by social media dynamics, by political community belonging, by the basic human need for group membership and validation. The biology of social reward makes victimhood stickier than any individual cognitive pattern would be on its own. Seligman’s dogs couldn’t seek out other helpless dogs for validation. You, if you’re posting your grievance online right now, can find millions of people willing to validate your specific victimhood narrative within minutes. That accessibility is not a neutral feature of modern communication. It’s the mechanism that turned an individual psychological tendency into an epidemic social pattern, and you are living inside that mechanism right now, every time you open your phone.
Gabay and the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood
- A continuous feeling of being a victim. A chronic orientation toward your own social experience that interprets events through the lens of victimization. Not a response to specific events that are genuinely harmful, but a persistent interpretive frame that scans your social environment for victimization opportunities and finds them reliably.
- Moral elitism. The belief that the victim occupies a morally superior position to the perpetrator, and that this moral superiority is a defining feature of your identity.
- Lack of empathy for the suffering of others. People high in TIV show a reduced ability to take other people’s perspectives and recognize their suffering, because their own victim identity monopolizes the relevant cognitive and emotional resources.
- Rumination. The tendency to replay perceived slights repeatedly, rather than processing them and moving on.
A 2020 study by Rahav Gabay and colleagues at Tel Aviv University introduced a construct that’s significantly advanced our understanding here. It shows how victim mentality functions as a personality trait, not just a situational response. They called it TIV, tendency for interpersonal victimhood, and defined it as a stable disposition to perceive yourself as a victim in interpersonal situations.
What makes Gabay’s research especially useful is the empirical identification of TIV’s four components.
The victim who cannot see others’ suffering is not merely self-centered. He has organized his entire moral universe around his own victimhood, and he genuinely cannot process other people’s experiences from outside that frame. The moral elitism component matters especially for understanding how victim mentality functions across the political spectrum. The victim position isn’t just about claiming to be wronged. It’s about occupying a moral high ground. From there, your claimed victimization justifies a range of behaviors: contempt, political aggression, refusal to engage in good faith, dismissal of contrary evidence. All of it would be harder to justify without the victim status attached. Being a victim licenses behavior. This is why the position gets sought, maintained, and defended so vigorously: it provides you both community and permission. Community, because others who share the narrative become allies and validators. Permission, because you cannot be held fully accountable for behaviors your victimization made necessary.
The research also found that people high in TIV were less likely to forgive perceived transgressors, more likely to seek revenge, and more likely to exhibit what the researchers called immoral behavior in response to perceived mistreatment. The victim position, in other words, does not produce passive withdrawal in you. It produces aggressive behavior that your own victim framework renders morally justified in your own eyes. You don’t experience yourself as the aggressor when you retaliate against a perceived slight with contempt, or exclusion, or hostility. You experience yourself as a victim defending himself, which feels completely different to you even when the behavior itself is indistinguishable from aggression. This is why TIV-driven conflict is so hard to resolve through normal means. Both parties frequently experience themselves as victims defending against aggressors. Neither experiences himself as the aggressor the other one sees. The subjective experiences are genuinely incompatible. Only stepping outside the victimhood frame, which neither party typically wants to do, resolves the incompatibility. Ask yourself right now whether you’ve been inside that frame in your last real argument, the one where you were certain you were the one being wronged. You might have been. You might also have been the other man’s Craig or Frank without ever knowing it.
The Workplace That Became a Grievance Laboratory
Consider a technology company, unnamed, that had been through three rounds of diversity and inclusion initiatives by 2021. Each initiative had been well-designed, well-intentioned, and had produced, in retrospect, the opposite of its intended effect. Not because diversity and inclusion are bad goals, but because the specific implementation had created what organizational psychologists were beginning to recognize as a grievance escalation dynamic.
The pattern was consistent across teams. The initiative created formal channels for reporting experiences of marginalization. Those channels were publicized and encouraged. The social reward for using them, validation, visibility, solidarity, was high. The social cost for not using them, appearing insufficiently committed to the stated values, missing out on community, was also present. Over eighteen months, the volume of formally reported incidents rose 340%, not because the workplace had gotten worse, but because the reporting infrastructure had changed the social incentives around victimhood claims.
The architecture of the intervention had inadvertently created the exact conditions for victimhood culture to thrive.
More troubling was the effect on interpersonal trust. People who’d reported others began to be avoided, not because anyone doubted their claims, but because the risk of inadvertently doing something that might be interpreted as a microaggression and reported felt high. People who’d been reported withdrew further. The actual social environment deteriorated significantly relative to the pre-initiative baseline. A consultant brought in to assess the situation described it as a “grievance equilibrium.” It was a stable but dysfunctional state in which everyone was positioned as both potential victim and potential aggressor. Good-faith ordinary interaction had been replaced by careful performance of the correct signals. Nobody was doing anything. Everyone was performing safety. The performance of safety is not the same thing as safety, and you cannot sustain it under conditions that require genuine collaboration.
This is not an argument against workplace fairness, or against addressing genuine discrimination. It’s an illustration of what happens when institutional design amplifies the social rewards for the victim position without a corresponding amplification of the social rewards for good-faith engagement, resolution, and accountability for actual, rather than perceived, mistreatment. When the victim position becomes socially profitable, it gets occupied. That happens regardless of whether it reflects an actual experience of injustice, because you and everyone around you are social primates. You respond to social incentive structures, not just to your internal states. The incentive structure determines the behavior at population scale, regardless of what any single person chooses. Design an incentive structure that rewards victimhood claims without requiring evidence or resolution, and you are designing an escalating grievance culture. That is exactly what they got. If you work somewhere, or belong to something, that rewards you for claiming harm more than it rewards you for resolving it, you are inside the same machine, whether you’ve clocked it yet or not.
Jonathan Haidt and the Moral Foundations of Victimhood
Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory identifies six universal moral dimensions people vary along: care and harm, fairness and cheating, loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, sanctity and degradation, and liberty and oppression. What matters for the victimhood epidemic is Haidt’s observation about how different political coalitions weight these foundations differently, and what that differential weighting does to how grievance gets processed and expressed.
Progressive communities tend to weight care and harm heavily. The experience of harm gets treated as a particularly weighty moral claim, and identifying a harm produces strong obligation to respond and strong social rewards for whoever identifies it. This creates an incentive structure conducive to Craig’s dynamic: identifying harms becomes a way of participating in the moral community, and the sophistication of your harm-identification becomes a marker of your moral seriousness. If you identify more harms, more subtle harms, harms a less morally sophisticated observer would miss, you’re demonstrating moral virtue inside that framework. The incentive runs toward harm identification, which produces exactly the proliferation of harm claims the workplace case study illustrates.
Conservative communities tend to weight loyalty and betrayal, and authority and subversion, heavily instead. This creates a different but structurally similar dynamic. The experience of being betrayed by institutions, or of having legitimate authority undermined, gets treated as a weighty moral claim, and identifying those betrayals produces strong community validation. If you identify more betrayals, more subtle attacks on traditional values and legitimate authority, you’re demonstrating moral seriousness inside your own community’s framework. The incentive runs toward betrayal identification, which produces exactly the proliferation of persecution claims that Frank’s Facebook post illustrates. Neither community’s victimhood narrative is entirely fabricated. The incentive structure, though, isn’t calibrated to the validity of the claim. It’s calibrated to the demonstration of moral concern. Those are different things, and confusing them is where a lot of you get stuck.
“Microaggression complaints are…a way of gaining status and power, not just addressing genuine slights.”
— Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture
Haidt’s research on victimhood culture, developed with Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, identifies a specific historical transition in how Western societies have handled interpersonal conflict. It’s a shift from dignity culture to victimhood culture. In dignity culture, you were expected to manage interpersonal conflict through direct engagement, and to maintain your sense of self-worth independent of how others treated you. In victimhood culture, the appropriate response to perceived mistreatment is escalation to third-party authorities and public broadcast of the grievance for social validation. The shift has specific causes. Large, anonymous social environments expanded, and traditional face-to-face conflict resolution stopped operating inside them. Third-party enforcement institutions became available: HR departments, social media platforms, administrative bodies. And social rewards emerged for victimhood claims, in environments that treat claimed harm as evidence of actual harm. The result is a culture where the skillful management of grievance claims has become a form of social capital. Managing that capital has become the primary mode of conflict resolution for large parts of the population, you included, whether you’ve noticed it in yourself yet or not. Check your own last month. How many of your conflicts got resolved through direct conversation, and how many got escalated, broadcast, or reported to someone with authority over the other person?
The Physiology of the Victim Orientation
Most of the research on victimhood has stayed psychological and sociological, focused on cognitive patterns, social incentives, and cultural dynamics. But there’s a physiological dimension that rarely enters these discussions, and it matters enormously for understanding why victim mentality is so difficult to exit once it’s established in you. The victim orientation isn’t just a way of thinking. It’s a chronic stress response, and chronic stress responses produce measurable changes in your body and brain that make the cognitive patterns increasingly entrenched over time.
When you perceive yourself as a victim, you interpret your environment as threatening, your agency as limited, your circumstances as the result of forces acting against you. And you activate the same neurobiological threat response that evolved to deal with physical danger. Your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis releases cortisol. Your sympathetic nervous system activates. Your heart rate, blood pressure, and inflammatory markers rise. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for deliberate decision-making, perspective-taking, and long-term planning, becomes less active, because your brain is now prioritizing fast, threat-responsive processing over slow, deliberate processing. That’s adaptive when the threat is a predator. It’s maladaptive when the threat is a colleague’s dismissive comment or a social media post that offended you.
The critical issue is what happens when this threat response goes chronic instead of episodic. Seligman’s research on learned helplessness included a physiological component that gets overlooked constantly: the animals who’d learned helplessness showed physical health deterioration relative to those who hadn’t. They were more susceptible to illness, recovered more slowly from challenges, and showed lower immune function. Seligman subsequently documented the same relationship in humans. A pessimistic explanatory style, the cognitive signature of victim mentality, is associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease, lower immune function, shorter life expectancy, and worse health outcomes across a wide range of conditions.
The mechanism is cortisol. Chronic cortisol elevation suppresses your immune function, promotes inflammatory processes, damages cardiovascular tissue, and disrupts your hippocampus, the brain region central to memory formation, learning, and the regulation of the stress response itself. In other words, chronic victim orientation produces chronic cortisol elevation, which damages the hippocampus, which impairs your brain’s ability to regulate the stress response, which produces more chronic cortisol elevation. The spiral is self-reinforcing at the neurobiological level, not just the social and cognitive ones. If you’ve been in victim mentality for years, you are not just in a bad cognitive habit. You are in a physiological state that makes the shift progressively harder while simultaneously doing real damage to your health.
Gabor Maté is a physician who spent decades working with patients whose histories included chronic stress, trauma, and the specific stress of ongoing powerlessness. He’s documented the physical health consequences of what he calls unsafety: the chronic internal state of someone who perceives their environment as threatening and their own agency as insufficient to address it. His clinical observation, backed by extensive psychoneuroimmunological research, is that your body keeps score in the most literal sense. The stress physiology of perceived victimhood accumulates as actual physical pathology in you, not just psychological distress. Immune dysregulation produces autoimmune conditions. Cardiovascular stress produces heart disease. Hormonal disruption produces metabolic dysfunction.
Victim mentality, maintained long enough, is a chronic disease in you, not metaphorically, biochemically.
This physiological dimension adds an urgency to exiting the victim position that purely psychological or philosophical arguments don’t convey. This is not just about you living better or having a more effective mindset. It’s about the literal degradation of your physical health over time, as a direct consequence of the chronic stress physiology your victim orientation produces. If you spend ten years in victim mentality, you are not just ten years behind where you could have been psychologically and professionally. Your cardiovascular system, your immune system, and your neuroendocrine system have absorbed ten years of chronic stress load, and that load has consequences. Some are reversible. Some are not. The time to change your orientation is before the irreversible ones accumulate, and the physiological research suggests that window is not infinite for you. You don’t get to find out where your own window closes until after it already has. That’s not meant to scare you. It’s meant to move you, tonight, while the window is still open.
How Social Media Engineered the Victimhood Machine
- Eliminate the social media use that’s primarily passive consumption of outrage content. This is your primary input pathway for victimhood framing.
- Notice when content you’re consuming positions you as the victim of an identified threat, and audit honestly whether that framing is producing action from you or just producing engagement.
- Curate deliberately toward people who are building things, solving problems, and reporting on forward motion rather than grievance. This isn’t ideological curation. There are conservatives and progressives doing constructive work and reporting on it, and both sides also have entire media ecosystems devoted to grievance. Choose the former, regardless of the politics attached to it.
- When you notice yourself formulating a post about something that was done to you, ask the ownership question before you post it: what am I going to do about this? If you don’t have an answer, the post won’t produce one. It will produce validation, which will feel like progress and will not be. Try this on your next urge to post. Answer the ownership question first, in your notes app, before you touch the share button. You’ll be surprised how often you never end up posting at all.
The victimhood epidemic is not primarily a cultural shift in values. It is primarily an engineering achievement. Social media platforms were designed, iteratively, through A/B testing and engagement optimization, to maximize the specific emotional states that produce the most engagement: outrage, moral indignation, and the experience of shared threat. Those emotional states are the emotional core of victim culture. The platforms didn’t create the victim orientation. That’s a biological vulnerability that’s always existed in you and in everyone else. What they created was the infrastructure that converts an individual psychological tendency into a mass social phenomenon, by providing the validation loop, the audience, and the community that makes the victim position socially rewarding for you at unprecedented scale.
The mechanics are straightforward. Outrage produces more sharing than satisfaction does. Moral indignation produces more comments than agreement does. The experience of shared threat produces stronger in-group bonding than shared celebration does. Platforms that optimize for engagement, which is revenue, therefore optimize for outrage, moral indignation, and shared threat. The content that performs best in that environment is content that positions you, the reader, as the victim of a clearly identified threat. This is why both conservative and progressive media ecosystems online have converged on victimhood framing despite their completely different values: victimhood framing is the engagement-optimal content type in an environment structured around engagement metrics, regardless of your politics. The algorithm is ideologically neutral. It simply rewards what gets clicks, shares, and comments. Victimhood delivers all three reliably.
Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge studied the rise of anxiety and depression in adolescents following the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media. They established a temporal correlation strong enough that Haidt described it as matching the threshold for establishing causation in epidemiology. The inflection point for adolescent mental health deterioration coincides precisely with the period of widespread smartphone adoption, 2012 to 2015. Part of the mechanism is social comparison, and part of it is the disruption of the face-to-face social interaction normal adolescent development requires. But there’s a third mechanism directly relevant to you here: social media socializes adolescents into the victim position as the dominant mode of handling social conflict, expressing distress, and seeking community belonging. The kids who came of age in this environment didn’t just use social media to perform their victimhood. They learned to interpret their own experience through the victim lens, because the victim lens is what the environment rewarded. Those cognitive structures formed during development. By adulthood, they’re relatively stable, and if you grew up in this window, some of what you’re carrying right now was built exactly this way.
This doesn’t mean you can’t exit it if you were socialized into victimhood culture. It means the socialization is structural, not incidental, and exiting it requires more than individual willpower from you. It requires building an alternative information environment: curating what you consume, choosing communities that don’t reward victimhood performance, limiting or eliminating the platforms specifically designed to maximize your engagement with victimhood content. Digital discipline is not a minor personal hygiene practice. For many of you, it’s the primary practical intervention required to actually exit the victimhood orientation. You cannot consistently resist the cognitive and emotional framing your information environment is optimized to produce. The environment shapes the cognition. Change the environment first. The cognition follows behind it. Look at your own screen time report right now, tonight, and be honest with yourself about what fraction of it is outrage you scrolled past without doing a single thing about.
Here’s what digital discipline actually requires of you, specifically.
Ryan Holiday and the Obstacle That Is Not in the Way
Victim mentality is the systematic inversion of that prescription. It’s the investment of your energy, attention, and identity in what others have done, which is outside your control, instead of in what you will do in response, which is entirely within it. The victim position directs all your cognitive and emotional resources toward documenting, narrating, and broadcasting the wrongs you’ve received, and almost none toward the question of what you will now do. That’s not merely an inefficient use of your resources. It’s the systematic cultivation of the exact psychological state, preoccupation with the uncontrollable, that Stoic philosophy identifies as the primary source of suffering and the primary obstacle to effective action. You are not suffering because of what was done to you. You are suffering because of what you are doing with what was done to you. The first thing is past, and it cannot be changed. The second thing is present, and it is entirely yours.
Holiday’s Stoic framework doesn’t deny that bad things happen, that injustice exists, or that people are genuinely wronged. The Stoics were not naive about the world’s capacity for cruelty. Marcus Aurelius governed a vast empire and survived constant political threat, military conflict, and personal loss. His journals, the Meditations, are not a record of a man for whom nothing went wrong. They are a record of a man who consistently redirected his attention from what had been done to him toward what he would do next. That redirecting was not effortless for him. It was a practice, repeated daily, in the face of real difficulty. The Meditations are the training log of a man who understood that his attention was the resource most worth protecting. He practiced protecting it against the most powerful claim there is: the claim of external events to define his inner life.
Here’s the practical question Holiday asks of you, and the one victim mentality makes structurally impossible for you to ask yourself: given that this happened, what is the most useful thing I can do now? Victim mentality replaces that question with a different one: given that this happened, who is responsible for it, and how can I make that visible? Those are not equivalent questions, and they do not produce equivalent lives. The first question produces action, direction, and the accumulation of capability through the conversion of adversity into forward motion. The second produces understanding, attribution, and the accumulation of grievance through the conversion of adversity into narrative. You can run either one indefinitely. Only one of them produces a life worth having at the end of the running. Which question have you actually been asking yourself about your own hardest situation right now? Say your honest answer to yourself, quietly, before you keep listening. You know it. You just haven’t said it out loud to yourself yet.
For more on the philosophical foundations of resilient thinking, read about how Stoicism applies to modern men’s lives and why it remains the most practical philosophy of adversity ever developed.
The Political Symmetry Problem
The most important structural feature of the victimhood epidemic is its symmetry. Both progressive and conservative communities have developed strong victimhood cultures, and both have enormous difficulty seeing their own patterns while correctly identifying the other side’s. That symmetry is not a coincidence. It’s the product of the same social dynamics operating on different value orientations, with identical mechanics underneath.
The progressive version is more visible in academic, corporate, and media environments, because those are the institutional contexts where progressive values predominate. Its characteristic features include extensive cataloguing of microaggressions, an expanded definition of harm that includes discomfort and ideological disagreement, and the use of institutional authority, HR departments, Title IX offices, social media platforms, as the enforcement mechanism for victimhood claims.
The conservative version is more visible in rural communities, social media political content, and religious institutions, because those are the institutional contexts where conservative values predominate. Its characteristic features include extensive cataloguing of cultural displacement and institutional betrayal. Its definition of persecution has expanded to include policies that don’t directly target conservatives at all. And it uses alternative media and political mobilization as the enforcement mechanism for victimhood claims.
Both communities have media ecosystems financially dependent on victimhood narratives, because victimhood narratives produce engagement, which produces revenue. Both communities have political leaders who use victimhood framing, because it produces mobilization, which produces votes. Both communities have members genuinely experiencing real difficulties, economic, social, cultural, that get channeled into victimhood narratives because the infrastructure for converting those difficulties into action is weaker than the infrastructure for converting them into grievance. The grievance is easier to produce and more immediately rewarding than the action. That asymmetry of reward is the structural cause of the epidemic, and it operates equally across ideological lines, including yours, whichever one that is.
If you want to exit the victimhood epidemic, you have to recognize that you are inside a system that profits from your victimhood orientation. The social reward system, the media environment, the political incentive structure, all of it is built to maintain and amplify the victim position, because the victim position is monetizable and politically useful in ways your agency simply is not. Exiting requires you to swim against a current. It is not just a different personal choice sitting there waiting for you to pick it. You will have to choose it repeatedly, against a system actively working to pull you back, and you should expect that, going in, rather than being surprised by it later.
Daniel and the Man Who Could Not Stop Being Wronged
Picture a man — call him Daniel Ostrowski — forty-three, recently divorced, out of work for seven months, walking into a support group for men facing major life transitions. He had a detailed, internally consistent narrative about his situation. His ex-wife had manipulated him throughout their marriage and orchestrated a divorce settlement designed to financially devastate him. His employer had let him go due to age discrimination, thinly disguised as a performance issue. The economy had systematically disadvantaged men of his demographic and professional background. The legal system had been biased against him from the first moment of his divorce proceedings.
Some of that may well have been true. Divorce settlements are sometimes genuinely unfair. Age discrimination in hiring is documented and real. Economic shifts do create genuine disadvantages for specific groups. The group’s facilitator didn’t dispute a single one of Daniel’s facts. He asked him a different question instead. Here it is.
“How much of your time has gone into documenting what happened to you? How much has gone into deciding what you’ll do next?”
Daniel estimated 80% documentation and communication, 20% action. The facilitator asked what the 20% had produced. Daniel listed two job applications, one attorney consultation, and one phone call with a financial advisor. In seven months. The 80%, the documentation, the conversations with friends and family about how he’d been wronged, the hours spent reviewing legal documents and building his case for the settlement’s unfairness, had produced nothing materially useful. It had kept him engaged, occupied, and socially connected to the people validating his narrative. But it had changed nothing about the facts of his situation. His victimhood orientation was consuming the time and energy his action would have required, and it was preventing the action while producing the feeling of engagement that action normally produces. He was busy. He was not moving.
The facilitator asked Daniel what would change if he inverted the ratio, 80% action, 20% documentation, for the next ninety days. Daniel’s first response came fast:
“That feels wrong. It feels like letting them off the hook.”
That was his honest reaction, before he’d had time to examine it. The facilitator pointed out that none of the people who’d wronged Daniel were even aware he was spending 80% of his energy documenting their wrongs. They weren’t being punished by his attention to his own victimization. He was. His time, his energy, his cognitive resources, and his emotional bandwidth were being consumed by a process producing pain for exactly one person: him.
Daniel inverted the ratio. Within ninety days he had six job interviews, two offers, and a new position. The facts of his situation hadn’t changed. His ex-wife was still his ex-wife. The legal settlement was still what it was. The employer still let him go. What changed was what Daniel was doing with his time and attention, and what that time and attention were now producing for him. His victimhood narrative was accurate. His ownership orientation was useful. Only one of them moved his life forward. Run your own ratio right now. Not Daniel’s. Yours. Pick the situation that’s costing you the most sleep and be honest with yourself about where your hours actually go, because you already suspect the answer.
The Ownership Reclamation Protocol
Here’s a practical framework for applying everything you’ve just heard to your own life. It’s not about denying that difficult things have happened to you. It’s about reclaiming the cognitive and behavioral territory your victim position has occupied, and directing it toward the only domain where it can actually produce anything: your own actions.
- The Accountability Inventory. For any situation where you’re experiencing victimhood, large or small, estimate honestly how much of your time and cognitive energy goes into documenting, narrating, and broadcasting what happened, versus deciding and acting on what you’ll do next.
- The Control Audit. List everything outside your control about the situation. Then list everything within it: your response, your actions, your allocation of time and energy, your decisions about relationships and environments.
- The Narrative Replacement. Build an adversity narrative to replace the victim narrative: this happened, it was hard, it was unfair in some respects, and I am going to build something with it.
Let’s take these one at a time, because each one does something the others cannot. But first, a quick check on yourself before we dig in.
- Do you know your own ratio right now, honestly, without rounding it in your own favor?
- Can you name one thing you’re doing this week that’s action, not documentation?
- Would the people who know you best describe you as busy, or as moving?
Hold your own answers to those while you work through the three steps.
Start with the accountability inventory. Be honest with yourself here. The purpose isn’t to make you feel bad about your own ratio. The purpose is to make the ratio visible, because victim mentality depends on invisibility. It operates as a background cognitive and emotional state that feels like reality to you rather than a choice about where to direct your resources. Making the ratio explicit converts it from reality into choice for you, which is the first necessary step toward changing it. You cannot choose differently about something you haven’t yet identified as a choice in the first place.
Next comes the control audit, which applies Seligman’s distinction directly to your own situation. The purpose isn’t to minimize your first list. It may genuinely be long and genuinely unfair to you. The purpose is to make your second list visible, because victim mentality systematically focuses your attention on the first list and renders the second one invisible to you. The second list is where everything you can actually do lives. It matters more to your actual future than the first list, regardless of how much longer the first list is. Wallowing in the first list produces nothing for you. Working the second one produces everything available to you in your actual situation. The two lists are not equally useful as guides to your own action. Only one of them generates it. Write both lists tonight, on paper, in your own handwriting if you can manage it. Seeing them side by side, in your own hand, does something seeing them only in your head cannot.
Explore how other men have built adversity narratives that became the foundation for something real by reading about resilience built from the hardest experiences.
What Ownership Actually Costs You
There’s something important to say about why ownership is hard that most conversations about accountability skip entirely. Taking ownership is not just a cognitive shift for you. It’s the surrender of specific things your victim position provides: community, moral authority, relief from the burden of agency, and a coherent explanation for your situation that requires nothing further from you.
The community dimension is probably the most significant one you’ll feel. Craig’s Twitter community validates him. Frank’s Facebook group validates him. That validation is real. It produces genuine social warmth, genuine belonging, a genuine sense of being understood. Exiting the victim position means exiting the community built around it for you, or at minimum changing your role inside it. That is a real loss, and it’s disproportionately difficult if you’re a man with few other sources of community, which is a surprisingly large share of American men. If you exit victimhood culture without having built an alternative community first, you’re trading a bad social structure for social isolation, and social isolation is worse than a bad social structure for most people. Your exit from victimhood requires building the alternative before you make the departure. Or, at minimum, simultaneously with it.
The moral authority dimension matters just as much. The victim position is morally clean for you. You were wronged. You are righteous. The people who wronged you are responsible for your condition. Taking ownership means accepting that your condition is, at least in part, a product of your own choices, which means you cannot be entirely righteous, which means your clean moral story gets messier and more uncomfortable. That messiness is not a sign ownership is wrong for you. It’s a sign ownership is honest. Reality is messy. Clean moral stories about yourself are almost always partially false. If you can tolerate the mess of an honest account of your situation, including your own contribution to it, you are operating from a more accurate picture of reality than the man who requires a clean story to function. More accurate pictures produce better decisions. Better decisions produce better outcomes. The mess is worth tolerating for you. What part of your own current situation would get messier and more honest if you actually looked at your contribution to it? Sit with that question longer than feels comfortable.
These costs are real. Ownership is not free for you. The question is whether the cost of ownership is higher or lower than the cost of victimhood. Seligman’s research makes clear what that second cost includes: learned helplessness, reduced motivation, depressive symptoms, and the concrete cost of not doing the things your victimhood orientation is currently consuming the resources to do instead.
What Agency Builds That Victimhood Cannot
There’s a compound interest argument for the ownership orientation that deserves to be made explicitly to you. If you consistently convert adversity into action rather than into narrative, you accumulate something over years that the victim-oriented man does not: a track record of agency. This track record is not primarily about external achievement, though it tends to produce that too. It’s about the internal experience of being someone who does things, who encounters difficulty and moves through it, who is wronged and builds anyway, who faces unfavorable conditions and finds what’s available within them.
That internal experience is the foundation of genuine self-respect, which is different from the moral superiority victimhood provides you. Moral superiority is a comparative judgment: I am better than the person who wronged me. Self-respect is an absolute judgment: I am living up to the standard I have set for myself. One of these depends on others continuing to wrong you, so the comparison stays favorable to you. The other depends only on your own behavior. One is fragile, requiring ongoing victimization to maintain.
The other is self-sustaining, growing stronger with every exercise of agency you make in the face of difficulty.
The men whose stories get told as examples of resilience built through adversity share this pattern without exception. They faced genuine difficulty, not manufactured grievances but actual hardship, and they converted it into something worth having. Not because the difficulty was secretly a gift, not because what happened to them wasn’t unjust in many cases, but because they chose to use it rather than inhabit it. That choice is available to you whether you’ve been genuinely wronged or merely inconvenienced and have made the inconvenience into an identity. The protocol doesn’t distinguish between these cases at the level of the choice itself. Both men make the same choice. Only one of them is being honest with himself about what he’s choosing to leave behind.
The Economics of Grievance
The financial cost of victim mentality is rarely discussed directly, but it’s substantial, and it operates through several distinct mechanisms that touch your actual paycheck. Understanding these makes the case for exiting the victim position in concrete, practical terms the philosophical and psychological arguments sometimes fail to reach you with.
The most direct cost shows up in your employment outcomes. Research in organizational psychology consistently shows something worth knowing. Employees and candidates who attribute failures primarily to external causes, other people, unfair systems, bad luck, receive lower performance evaluations. They get promoted less frequently, and they’re more likely to be let go during organizational contractions. This isn’t primarily about whether their attributions are accurate. Often they’re partially accurate. It’s about what the attribution pattern signals to the people managing you: that you won’t take corrective action when your performance is suboptimal, because you haven’t accepted that your performance is yours to correct in the first place. Managers don’t invest in developing people they believe will attribute any failure to external causes. The rational move for them is to develop people who take ownership, because those people actually change their behavior in response to feedback. If you’re in victim mode and you accurately notice that your manager isn’t investing in your development, you’re correct about the fact and wrong about the cause. The cause isn’t your manager’s bias. The cause is the victim-oriented attribution pattern that’s telling your manager the investment won’t pay off.
The second mechanism shows up in negotiation. Every negotiation, salary, contract, business deal, requires you to make an implicit claim about the value you provide and your confidence in it. Victim orientation systematically undermines that claim two ways. First, it directs your attention toward what others have done rather than what you’ve built, which makes it harder for you to articulate a compelling case for your own value based on demonstrated capability. Second, it produces the chronic cortisol elevation and reduced prefrontal activity you heard about earlier, which impairs exactly the cognitive functions, perspective-taking, strategic thinking, impulse control, reading someone’s signals accurately, that effective negotiation requires. If you’re in chronic victim orientation, you are physiologically disadvantaged in negotiation relative to your own potential. Not because of what others have done to you, but because of what the chronic stress state is doing to your cognitive function right now.
The third mechanism is in entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Building anything of economic value requires you to absorb losses, failures, and setbacks without internalizing them as evidence that the enterprise is doomed or that you’re fundamentally incapable. Victim orientation treats every significant failure as confirmation of the permanent, pervasive persecution it was already predicting. A business that fails due to market conditions becomes evidence that the market is stacked against people like you. A product that underperforms becomes evidence that the game is rigged. The specific attributions may be partially accurate. The economic consequence is that you never adjust, persist, and build through the failures every successful enterprise requires surviving, because you’re processing them through the victim frame instead of the learning frame. The learning frame asks what you’d do differently. The victim frame asks who’s responsible. Only one of those questions produces your next iteration. Only the next iteration produces success. Ask yourself which question you reached for the last time something you tried genuinely failed. Your answer tells you more about your own trajectory than the failure itself ever could.
The fourth mechanism is in your investment behavior. Victimhood culture’s orientation toward present injustice, at the expense of future opportunity, produces systematically short-term financial decision-making in you. If you’re focused on what was taken from you, the failed marriage, the lost job, the legal settlement, you are focused backward. Long-term financial wellbeing requires forward orientation: where am I going, what will I need, what can I build now that serves future me? Victim orientation’s preoccupation with the past and the present is incompatible with the sustained forward orientation wealth accumulation actually requires of you. This isn’t about discipline in any simple sense. It’s about where your attentional and cognitive resources are pointed, and victim orientation points them away from your future by design. That design was adaptive in a social environment where community and moral authority were the primary resources worth accumulating. In an economic environment where capital accumulation is the primary resource for your future security, the design is maladaptive. Update it, or accept the financial consequences of not updating it.
The aggregate of these mechanisms, across employment, negotiation, entrepreneurship, and investment, produces over a working lifetime a real financial gap between the man who’s operated from ownership and the man who’s operated from victimhood. That gap compounds. Every year the ownership-oriented man is promoted, negotiates effectively, takes productive risks, and invests forward adds to a base the next year compounds on top of. Every year the victim-oriented man is passed over for development, undersells himself in negotiation, retreats from risk after failures, and spends his cognitive resources looking backward subtracts from a base the next year builds on a smaller foundation. Twenty years of that difference is a number that’s hard to overstate. Do the rough math on your own last five years honestly, and you will get a preview of which side of that gap you have been building on, you personally, not some average man out there. Victimhood orientation is not just a philosophical or psychological choice with personal consequences for you. It is a financial strategy, and it is one of the most expensive ones a person can adopt.
What You’re Probably Wondering Right Now
You might be asking how you’re supposed to tell genuine victimization apart from victim mentality, since both involve real events and real experiences. The distinction is functional, not factual. It’s in what you do with the events, not in whether they happened. If you’ve been genuinely wronged and you process that wrong in a way that moves toward action, toward legitimate accountability for the person responsible, and toward your own reconstruction, you are not exhibiting victim mentality. You’re responding appropriately to genuine harm. If you’ve experienced a real wrong but you convert it into a permanent, pervasive identity around which your community and moral authority get organized, you’ve crossed into victim mentality territory. The test is whether the wrong is being processed toward resolution, or maintained and amplified because it serves identity and community functions resolution would eliminate. Resolution threatens the victim identity. Most men in victim mentality resist resolution unconsciously, because resolving it would eliminate the social and psychological infrastructure they’ve built around their own victimhood.
You might also be wondering whether telling men to take ownership is just a way of dismissing real systemic injustice. It isn’t, and this conflation is one of the most politically useful errors in current discourse. Systemic injustice and individual ownership are not mutually exclusive. Both can be true simultaneously, and often are. Acknowledging that structural factors affect outcomes doesn’t require you to conclude individual agency is irrelevant. Acknowledging that your agency matters doesn’t require you to conclude structural factors don’t exist. There’s a political incentive to make these mutually exclusive: to insist that recognizing structural factors means denying agency, or that asserting agency means denying structural factors. That incentive serves people who benefit from the polarization. It does not serve you, trying to manage your actual circumstances toward the best possible results. You need both an honest account of your circumstances and the maximum exercise of whatever agency is available to you within them. One without the other is either denial or paralysis. Both together is honest engagement with your own reality.
Maybe you’re sitting there thinking: what if I’m right that I’ve been wronged? Does ownership mean pretending I wasn’t? No. Ownership doesn’t mean revising the facts. It means accepting responsibility for your response regardless of what those facts are. You can be completely right that you were wronged and completely responsible for what you do next. Those are not in conflict with each other. The wrongness of what was done to you does not determine what you do now. Only you determine that, you alone. Ownership is the acceptance of that determination, not a denial of the wrong itself. If you’ve been genuinely wronged and you take ownership of your response, you are not excusing the person who wronged you. You are refusing to let the wrong keep determining your life beyond the moment it actually occurred. That is not weakness in you. It’s the specific form of strength that converts adversity into material for building instead of material for a narrative.
You might be wondering whether any of this is just asking you to suppress your feelings about difficult experiences. It isn’t, and the distinction between feeling and orientation matters here. Nobody’s asking you to suppress anger, or grief, or your sense of injustice. Those are appropriate emotional responses to real experiences you’ve had. What you’re being asked to do is prevent those feelings from calcifying into a fixed orientation toward your situation. Don’t let them become a permanent identity as a man who’s been wronged, one that determines how you interpret every new experience and what you do with your time and energy going forward. You can feel the anger fully and still ask yourself what you’re going to do now. This isn’t about emotional suppression. It’s about not letting a valid emotional response become your excuse for behavioral abdication. The feeling and the action orientation are not competing with each other. The feeling, fully felt and processed, can actually fuel your action. Victimhood culture doesn’t process the feeling, though. It cycles it. Cycling it produces more feeling in you, not less, and channels it away from action and toward narrative instead. The difference between processing your anger and cycling it is the difference between using fuel to move forward and using it to stay warm standing still.
And if you’re wondering how to help someone you care about who’s stuck in it, here’s what actually works. Stop providing the validation the victim position requires to sustain itself in them. That doesn’t mean being dismissive, or telling them their experience wasn’t real. It means shifting the conversation from what happened to you toward what are you going to do. Ask it every time they raise the victimhood narrative: I hear you, what are you going to do about it? Not as a challenge. As a genuine invitation to move forward. Over time, if you consistently redirect the conversation toward their agency, you change the social reward structure around the victimhood narrative inside that relationship. It becomes less rewarding for them to perform victimhood with you, because you stop responding with validation and start responding with forward-facing questions instead. This is uncomfortable to do with people you love. It is also the most useful thing you can do for them. The comfortable option, validating the narrative indefinitely, is the option that keeps them stuck exactly where they are. Think of the man in your own life you’d try this on. Picture the actual conversation. You already know it would be uncomfortable for both of you, and you already know it would help him more than what you’ve been doing instead.
The Demographic Cost of Victimhood Culture at Scale
The individual cost of victim mentality, in psychological wellbeing, physical health, and practical effectiveness, is significant enough on its own. The collective cost, what victimhood culture does at the level of communities, institutions, and societies, is even larger and harder to reverse. Understanding the aggregate dimension matters. It gives you context for why exiting the victim position is not just a personal improvement project for you. It’s a contribution to the functioning of the communities and institutions you actually share with other people.
At the community level, victimhood culture produces what sociologist Robert Putnam calls social capital destruction. The specific mechanism is erosion of generalized trust, the baseline assumption that strangers are more or less benign and that institutions can be used in good faith. Victimhood culture systematically erodes that trust by framing ordinary social interactions as potential sites of persecution, institutional decisions as expressions of power directed against the victim group, and strangers as representatives of a threatening out-group rather than individuals. The workplace case study illustrated this at the organizational level: after three rounds of diversity initiatives structured around victimhood reporting, people stopped interacting normally, because every interaction was potentially a victimhood incident waiting to happen. The trust required for effective collaboration had been consumed by the infrastructure of grievance. At the community level, you can watch the same dynamic play out across neighborhoods, civic organizations, and political institutions, producing the atomization and polarization surveys have been documenting with increasing alarm for three decades now.
At the institutional level, victimhood culture produces what economists call regulatory capture by the grievance industry, the progressive accumulation of administrative processes, policies, and institutional roles organized around managing victimhood claims. Once established, these bureaucracies have the same self-perpetuating dynamics as all bureaucracies. They defend their existence and expand their scope regardless of whether they’re producing their stated outcomes. The result is institutional infrastructure optimized for grievance processing rather than outcome production. It rewards identifying victimhood over resolving actual problems. And it’s structurally resistant to reform, because the people who’d need to implement the reform are the same people whose institutional roles depend on the grievance infrastructure staying exactly as it is.
At the societal level, the most significant cost is the diversion of human agency, the most scarce and valuable resource in any complex social system, from productive uses into performative ones. The energy Craig and Frank are spending on their victimhood narratives is energy not being spent on the problems their communities actually face. That’s not a trivial cost. The victimhood epidemic is, at scale, a massive misallocation of human capacity. Tens of millions of people are directing their intelligence, energy, and creativity toward the sophisticated documentation and performance of their victimhood. That’s instead of building solutions to the real difficulties they and their communities face. The problems are real. The capacity to address them exists. The victimhood orientation is systematically redirecting that capacity toward narrative instead of action. The aggregate consequence, across a whole society, is deterioration in every domain that requires concerted human effort to solve.
If you understand this, you have additional motivation to make the shift. See your own orientation as not just a personal matter, but a choice about how you use a resource that matters beyond yourself, and the motivation individual self-interest alone might not give you shows up on its own. Your community needs people who build things. It needs people who convert anger into action rather than performance. It needs people who model the alternative to victimhood in environments where victimhood is the default, because modeling is how social norms actually change, not through argument but through the demonstrated existence of an alternative that works better. Every man who exits victimhood culture and builds something is a data point against the claim that the difficulties are too large, the injustices too entrenched, and the agency too limited to matter. Those data points accumulate. They change what seems possible to the people watching. That is how cultures actually shift, one man at a time, and you can be one of the data points. Decide right now whether you want to be counted among them, because that decision is genuinely yours, yours alone, to make, and nobody else is going to make it for you.
Identity After Victimhood
One of the most underappreciated obstacles to exiting victimhood culture is the identity vacuum it leaves behind in you. Your victim identity is a complete identity. It answers who am I, why am I in this situation, who are my people, and what am I for, all at once, all in one package. Exiting it requires you to find answers to all four questions from a different source, and those answers are not available to you instantly. If you exit victimhood culture before you’ve built replacement answers to those identity questions, you will find the exit extremely difficult to maintain. It won’t be because the victim position was genuinely compelling. It’ll be because the alternative, no clear identity at all, is more uncomfortable to you than a bad identity is.
This is why sequence matters so much. The narrative replacement step of the protocol is the most important one and the most time-consuming for you. Building an adversity narrative requires having adversity that’s actually produced something. Early in your exit, there’s no production yet. There’s only the decision to redirect your effort. That decision doesn’t immediately produce results that can anchor a new identity for you. There’s a gap between your decision and your results. During that gap, the identity vacuum is at its most acute. The temptation to return to the victim position, where identity is immediately available to you, is at its strongest right there, in the gap.
Men who’ve successfully made this transition report a few practices that help bridge that gap for you. The first is connecting to a community organized around building rather than grievance, before or simultaneously with exiting the victimhood community. The specific community matters less than its organizing principle: does this community reward what you’re doing, or what was done to you? Communities organized around skill development, physical training, creative work, entrepreneurship, or service reward doing. Communities organized around shared political identity, shared grievance narratives, or shared victimhood are structured around being wronged instead. The shift in community matters as much as the shift in your internal orientation, because the community provides the identity validation your internal orientation can’t yet provide from its own results.
The second practice is anchoring your identity to value commitments rather than outcome commitments. During your transition, external results are uncertain for you. Your victimhood identity was built on certainty: the certainty you’d been wronged, the certainty others shared your experience, the certainty of the moral evaluation of your situation. Your adversity identity cannot give you that same certainty about outcomes. What it can give you is certainty about your values: I am someone who acts rather than performs. I am someone who converts difficulty into material for building. I am someone who holds himself accountable for his response regardless of what was done to him. Those commitments are available to you from day one of the transition, before any results exist to validate them. You can claim all three right now, tonight, without asking anyone’s permission, including your own. They give you an identity floor, a minimum self-definition that stays stable and doesn’t require ongoing external validation, because it’s based on your own behavior rather than someone else’s acknowledgment of your suffering.
The third practice is behavioral activation, doing the things your new identity requires of you before you feel fully like that new identity yet. You, specifically, don’t wait until you feel completely ownership-oriented to start acting as if you are. You act as if you are, before the feeling is fully present, because the action produces results that build the feeling in you, not the other way around. Waiting until you feel ready to be accountable before acting accountably is you applying the victimhood structure to the process of exiting victimhood itself. Exit it the same way you exit the original pattern: by acting differently before you feel differently, and trusting that the feeling follows the action, as long as you sustain the action long enough for it to.
Men who’ve done this successfully describe a specific moment, and it comes at a different time for everyone, when they realize they haven’t thought about the original grievance in days or weeks. Not because they’ve suppressed it or denied its reality, but because they’ve been building things that demand their full attention and produce the sense of meaning and forward motion the victimhood narrative used to provide them. The grievance doesn’t disappear for you. It simply becomes less important than what you’re doing now. That’s the sign your transition is complete: not the absence of the memory of what happened to you, but the irrelevance of that memory to what you’re actually working on today. You will get there too, if you do the work, and you will likely be surprised by how ordinary the moment feels when it finally arrives for you.
What Ownership Produces
Craig and Frank are not bad people. They are people who found a way to belong, to feel significant, and to maintain moral clarity in a confusing and genuinely difficult world. The victim position serves real needs for both of them. It just serves those needs at a cost: to their own agency, to their actual outcomes, and to the collective capacity of their communities to address real problems rather than continuously performing the experience of being wronged by them.
The Ownership Reclamation Protocol does not ask you to stop feeling the anger. It asks you to stop letting the anger be your identity. It does not ask you to pretend the injustice didn’t happen. It asks you to stop making the injustice the primary organizing principle of your entire life. It does not ask you to abandon your community. It asks you to find one that challenges you to build something, rather than one that rewards you for documenting how much has been taken from you. Go find that community. It exists, whether you’ve located it yet or not.
You already know the world is full of genuine difficulty. You already know it’s full of genuine injustice. You already know this about yourself, whether you’ve admitted it yet or not: the men who actually do something about those things are not the ones with the most sophisticated victimhood narratives. They’re the ones who converted their anger into action early, and did not stop until the action produced something real. You can be one of them, starting with whatever you, personally, do in the next hour, which is the only part of any of this you actually control right now.
That is what ownership costs you. And that is what it produces for you instead, for you specifically, not for some abstract listener out there. The choice is yours, which is, precisely, the point of everything you’ve just heard. You get to decide, tonight, which ratio you’re going to run tomorrow morning. Nobody else decides that for you, no matter what has been done to you.
For more on the mindset that converts adversity into momentum, read about mental toughness and why discipline outperforms motivation in building a life that is not dependent on favorable circumstances.
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