Who’s the Real Victim?

What was to be done with the collaborators? In early December, 1945, a man and a woman in their thirties stepped onto a bus in Tel Aviv. Another passenger seemed to recognize the man; he went over to speak with him. “Are you Haim Molchadsky from Będzin?” he asked. The man didn’t answer. The passenger repeated the question. More silence. Then the questioner shouted, in Yiddish, “You killed my family! You are responsible for the death of thousands of Jews!” Other passengers hit the man, and when the bus stopped and the couple fled, a crowd of riders and people from the street chased them, until they were rescued by police.

At the police station, the man confirmed that, yes, he was Haim Molchadsky, and, yes, when the Nazis took over Będzin, a town in Poland, they appointed him head of the “social department” of the Judenrat, or Jewish council. His job required him to select who would be sent to work camps, and, as he told the police, this made him many enemies. He was later promoted to head of the entire Judenrat. Then his luck ran out, and he was sent to Auschwitz.

This episode, recounted in Dan Porat’s book “Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators” (2019), was the kind of confrontation that led Israel to put on trial Jews who were accused of collaborating with the Nazis. As Porat tells it, the process carried its own agony, with heated public debate and shifts in popular opinion. At times, these men were treated as akin to Nazis. At other times, a softer view prevailed, and the collaborators were seen as Jewish victims trying, in extremis, to save themselves and their families.

In a classic essay, the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi explored the motives of these men—often it was self-interest, he argued, and sometimes it was a mimetic identification with their oppressors. Levi was interested in the difficulty of judging intermediate cases, those that lie in what he called the gray zone. He described how we are in the grips of a “Manichean tendency, which shuns half-tints and complexities”: a tendency reflected in Christian invocations of Judgment Day, which places the righteous here, the reprobates there, with no one in between.

That tendency has become the subject of considerable psychological research, most often on the reprobate side. Once someone is categorized as an enemy, their negative traits are exaggerated; they become a villain through and through. The pattern is most apparent in how we think about our political enemies. Surveys show that both Democrats and Republicans believe that sizable proportions of the other side favor wrongful imprisonment, tax fraud, embezzlement, adultery, animal abuse, and child pornography. (Only a few actually do.) In studies of “moral typecasting,” the psychologist Kurt Gray and his colleagues find that villains are seen as less capable of suffering; they become anti-victims of a sort. Villains like Ted Bundy are imagined to be relatively invulnerable to pain, even in a scenario as basic as stepping barefoot on a shard of glass.

There are clearly social forces at work here. Seeing complexity in villains can read as a worrisome softness, a lack of moral principle, or an indifference to victims’ suffering. Among Americans, there is little tolerance for people who talk sympathetically about the motives of the 9/11 hijackers. Likewise, anyone who talks with empathy about incels is liable to be mocked. But don’t incels also suffer? What about abusers who were themselves abused? Villain or victim? The proper response is “Why not both?” Yet such a response can feel unnatural, even repellent.

We’re as uncomfortable with moral ambiguity as with an awkwardly designed chair, and we react the same way—shifting and squirming until we find relief. We struggle to make sense of the Jewish collaborator or the Nazi guard who shows mercy, and so we simplify them reflexively, sorting them into distinct categories.

Much psychological research has focussed on the degradation of villains, but a symmetrical force works to elevate victims. In experimental studies, when we’re told about a character’s past misdeeds, we are later more likely to forget them if the character is described as a victim. When researchers tell stories about people who are victims of crimes—ranging from having an iPad stolen to being raped—such victims are seen as virtuous, more moral and more trustworthy than comparable people who have not been victimized. The researchers Jillian Jordan and Maryam Kouchaki describe this as the “virtuous victim” effect.

Maybe this is a good thing? It’s easy to see how vilifying villains poses a problem—it can motivate violent reprisal, cruel punishment, and cycles of violence—but, by contrast, elevating victims can serve certain social goods. Indeed, Jordan and Kouchaki argue that the main reason we morally elevate victims is to restore justice. We see victims as especially moral because that perception helps motivate both the punishment of perpetrators (we’re more outraged when those being harmed seem particularly innocent) and the aid offered to victims.

Yet there are downsides here, too. Once victims are imagined as near-saints, those who fail to meet the template can start to look suspect. Research on perceptions of victims of sexual assault finds that, even when there is indisputable physical resistance to an attack, people see the victim as less virtuous and less deserving of support if they had previously consented to sexual contact with their attacker, even a kiss. This perception holds even among the young and the politically and socially progressive, who would never consciously think that such acts are morally sullying. The same impulse that lifts some victims up can leave others, the imperfect ones, out in the cold.

If our psychological template of victimhood shapes how we judge and respond to victims, what happens in the heads of victims themselves? Many people have argued that victimhood enlightens, enriches, and improves. It toughens you up (“post-traumatic growth”) and makes you kinder (“altruism born of suffering”). On that view, the virtuous-victim effect becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: victims become virtuous.

This can certainly happen. The woman who founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving did so after losing her teen-age daughter to a drunk driver, and there are countless stories of rape survivors, or people living with spinal-cord injury or stroke, going on to work with organizations devoted to those who have faced similar adversity. Many of us carry narratives in which our own hardships helped make us the people we are today.

But it’s far from the rule. In a new book, “Is There Always Value to Adversity?,” the researcher Eranda Jayawickreme notes that, once you move beyond anecdote, the empirical support for such claims looks shaky. Some research even suggests that being victimized can make people mean. Individuals who were prompted to think about a time they had been victimized were less likely to offer help in an unrelated context. Moreover, people reminded of their own group’s victimization often show less sympathy for the suffering of other groups.

In a set of studies from Michael Wohl and Nyla Branscombe, Jewish Canadians tended to report a sense of collective guilt about the plight of Palestinians, but it diminished when they were reminded of the Holocaust. Another study found that Americans felt less collective guilt about harm done to Iraqis when they were reminded of 9/11—and even when they were reminded of Pearl Harbor. Primo Levi described how, in concentration camps, those who had suffered the longest sometimes met newcomers with something closer to cruelty than solidarity. The newcomers were derided and subjected to malicious pranks, resented for the lives they had led until their detention, for still having “the smell of home.” The logic seems to be: We have suffered, so why should we be obliged to care about anyone else?

Victimhood, then, offers two coveted benefits: moral absolution and moral license. By securing the role of victim in other people’s minds, we are absolved of perceptions of villainy. By securing it in our own minds, we license ourselves to act in ways we would condemn in others. Victimhood becomes a valuable moral currency, and the scramble for this privileged status is visible in debates over immigration and crime, free speech and “cancellation,” diversity policies and #MeToo. As Gray, the psychologist, has long argued, many of our culture-war battles can be read as fights over who counts as the real victim. Research suggests that some people are especially prone to this kind of “competitive victimhood,” including those with a stronger desire for power and less concern for others. In practice, though, it is a game anyone can play. As members of once privileged groups feel their status slipping, it is a short step to claiming victimhood themselves, sometimes to comic effect, as with talk of “white genocide” after a “Star Wars” film failed to cast white men in leading roles.

The inflation of victimhood comes at a cost. When we see victims, we start looking for villains. As we have widened the circle of people we feel bound to defend, we have also, as a consequence, swelled the ranks of those we seek to condemn.

How beholden are we to the pull of a villain-victim dichotomy? One can treat it as an indelible feature of human psychology, an unavoidable by-product of our appetite for simplicity and affiliation. Yet one of the revolutions in psychological research over the past decade or so has been a reluctance to treat localized observations as universal patterns, and a renewed attention to how much our psyche is shaped by cultural and historical context. Our typecasting may have a particular history.

The popular historian Tom Holland, in “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World,” notes how novel it was for Christians to worship someone who suffered a humiliating death on the cross: “That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.” Friedrich Nietzsche blamed Christianity for the modern exaltation of victimhood, part of our “slave morality,” at the expense of what he took to be a more natural moral default: the celebration of mastery and power.

Whether or not Nietzsche was right about Christianity’s influence, the contemporary problem may be less about which moral categories we favor than about how crudely we apply them. In a recent article, the psychologist Joshua Conrad Jackson and his colleagues argue that the coarsening of moral categorization reflects the social dynamics of modern life, in which we deal so often with strangers and near-strangers, and lack the information for fine-grained judgment. In large correlational surveys in the United States, Singapore, Germany, and Brazil, they find that community size correlates with the bluntness of moral evaluation. The researchers also suggest a historical shift. An analysis of books over the past two centuries finds that judgments of moral character become more generalized; even in the course of the past two decades, blanket statements about “good people” and “bad people” have become more common.

Our social networks have expanded throughout history, moving from nomadic bands to agricultural villages to crowded cities to the disembodied multitudes of the internet. With so many people to evaluate—co-workers, politicians, historical figures, influencers, random people on social media—it’s hard to avoid moral shortcuts. Giving three dimensions to that many people asks more of our attention than we can reliably spare. Is it any wonder our moral culture drifts toward black and white, good and bad, victim and villain?

Yet we can push back and grant even strangers the nuance they deserve. Fiction provides one of the best laboratories for seeing how flexible our moral psychology can be. Some stories can harden moral perception, of course, pushing us to dichotomize the purely good and the purely evil, as in the moral pornography of superhero comics and revenge flicks. Writing in Aeon, the critic Catherine Nichols argues that this simplification is common in modern popular culture, which can end up “flattening all the deliberation and imagination of ethical action into a single thumbs up or thumbs down.”

But Nichols also asserts that older oral traditions often did better: Homer’s epics weren’t about good guys and bad guys. Plenty of fiction, across eras, does better, too, pushing us toward complex victims and villains, from the protagonists of Shakespeare’s tragedies to the classic antiheroes of cable TV. The worlds of Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Cersei Lannister become more compelling once we grant them the moral complexity we often refuse to grant the people on our side of the screen.

We should try harder. The truth is that we all live in the gray zone, a psychologically awkward reality in which villainy, victimhood, and heroism can mingle in a single person. In the turbulence of the real world, we will not find perfectly monstrous people or perfectly sympathetic ones. Not among our political enemies, not among our historical heroes, not among our martyrs, not among the incels, and not among the collaborators. They are as messy, as gray, and as imperfect as the people who judge them. ♦

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