On this week’s episode, Vivek Ramaswamy joins She Thinks podcast to help us explore identity politics, specifically the ever-popular mentality of victimhood. We discuss how hardship and striving for excellence became something to shun instead of something to celebrate and why both the left and the right are guilty of victimhood culture. Finally, we address the question of “what do we do?” Is the American Dream a thing of the past, or can we revive the great American experiment?
Vivek Ramaswamy is a first-generation American entrepreneur, investor, and New York Times bestselling author. Before founding Strive, he founded multibillion-dollar enterprises including Roivant Sciences, which he led as CEO. Vivek graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, and received his law degree from Yale while working as a hedge fund partner.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode, we explore identity politics, specifically the ever-popular mentality of victimhood. We’ll discuss how hardship and striving for excellence became something to shun instead of something to celebrate and why both the left and the right are guilty of victimhood culture. Finally, we’re going to address the ever-present question of what do we do? Is the American dream a thing of the past, or is it something that we can revive? Well, joining us to break that all down is Vivek Ramaswamy. He is a first-generation American entrepreneur, investor, and New York Times bestselling author. Before founding Strive, he founded multi-billion-dollar enterprises, including Roivant Sciences, which he led as CEO. Vivek graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and received his law degree from Yale while working as a hedge fund partner. And it is a pleasure to have you on the program. Vivek, thank you so much for being here.
Vivek Ramaswamy:
Hey, good to be on. Good to talk to you again.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so you have a new book out that talks about victimhood. It is called The Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence. And this is a sequel to your original book called Woke, Inc. First of all, what made you decide to write this second version of what we are seeing in not just business but in society today?
Vivek Ramaswamy:
Well, it’s because I felt like it was a missing link at the end of Woke, Inc. So Woke, Inc. came to explain how corporate America embraced a one-sided cultural and political agenda to advance some of its own objectives. But one of the things I realized by the end of the book is that it really does take two to tango. What I mean by that is, sure, there might be a top-down version of this — I think there really is — a cynical exploitation of progressive values to aggregate power. But at the same time, it only works if there’s a general population, a general populace, consumers who fall for that trick.
And so the question I explore in this book is what is it about the current state of American national identity, about our culture, about our conception of what it even means to be an individual and a citizen that leaves us so vulnerable, so susceptible to these victimhood narratives? They’re only selling it because we’re effective in buying it. And so this book is less about corporate America, but more about the national psyche in America today that makes us fall for the tricks that institutional leads, including in corporate America, play. That was the subject of Woke, Inc. Nation of Victims is what’s going on in our national psyche and, most importantly, what can we do about it?
Beverly Hallberg:
Let’s be honest, companies and corporations are not going to be selling something that people aren’t buying. We even saw the Chamber of Commerce a couple years ago change their whole mission statement to talk about the value proposition that they want to add, pointing to more of an ESG-type of climate. And so like you were saying, we have to look at who is buying this. So let’s break that down. Who likes to be a victim these days?
Vivek Ramaswamy:
Everyone likes to be a victim these days, is the basic thesis of the book. We used to be a nation of underdogs. We have become a nation of victims. In part, that’s because of the cultural conditions we’ve created. It pays to be a victim. Victimhood is like a new currency in the United States. Rather than winning unabashedly, you win more if you describe yourself as a victim. And like most financial bubbles, the victimhood bubble, everyone’s cashing in while it’s still trading at an all-time high before that bubble bursts. And so that’s why we got into this race of the victimhood Olympics. Black victims, white victims, second-generation Asian American victims, liberal victims, conservative victims. It’s victimhood culture everywhere. Now, one of the things I trace in the book is this is actually somewhat predictable, actually. If you look at human history and the arc of the rises and falls of many nations, what happens is even if you begin as a nation of underdogs, you effectively become a nation of incumbents.
Your own success begets a sense of entitlement. Entitlement breeds a new culture of laziness. And one of the arguments I think in the book is that victimhood fits laziness like a glove, because it legitimizes your laziness. It legitimizes your sloth by saying that it’s not just that I’m lazy or don’t want to work or and pursue excellence, it’s that actually I’m also morally superior in so doing, as you see many proponents of the anti-work movement in the United States now say. This is about dismantling the oppression of capitalism. And once you disguise laziness in the veneer of victimhood, it gives you a sense of moral legitimacy. And that’s what we’re seeing in the country today. So in a certain sense, you saw it in the many rises and falls of Rome.
There’s actually a famous quote often attributed to the founder of Dubai, where, what does he say? He says, “My grandfather rode a camel. My father rode a camel. I ride a Mercedes. My son drives a Land Rover. My grandson will drive a Land Rover. But my great grandson will have to ride a camel again. Because hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times, easy times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” In a certain sense, this actually describes a lot of the rises and falls in many nations. That’s where we are in American history. But I hope there’s something we can actually do about it, which is the point of having written the book.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah, we’re not going to end the podcast right there with we’re all going back to camels, buckle up people, this is where we’re headed. You do give hope, which we’ll get to, but I really want to unpack some of what you talked about there. And we will get into even the fact that white people, those on the right, play into victimhood as well. But I want to start with somebody who I think epitomizes victimhood, and maybe this is because I have followed her storyline very much, but Meghan Markle.
And the reason why I want to ask you about Meghan Markle, who of course married Prince Harry of England, of Wales, is that she is somebody who has a lot of money. Now, she was not born with a lot of money. But she has seemed to be able to take victimhood, whether it is her own and how she was supposedly treated with the royal family, also her husband, where he talked about how he was treated as well, and get sympathy even though they make millions of dollars. How is that playing for them? I kind of saw a little bit of a role reversal with the death of the Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, where they didn’t seem as sympathetic during that time. What do you make of that whole issue?
Vivek Ramaswamy:
This is the classic case of incumbency breeding victimhood, right? At the end of the day, you have to apologize for your inheritance. So Meghan Markle is actually… It’s just a good emblem of what we’re seeing generationally. We are right now in America, by the way, in the middle of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history. And one of the points that actually one of my favorite Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises, said a century ago, is that somehow capitalism and the success of capitalism breeds the psychological need for anti-capitalism, for apologist capitalism. So if you’re the son of a great man, as he argued, there’s two ways to exceed your father, and this directly applies to Meghan Markle versus her prior generation. But what he said is either you can exceed your father on his own terms, which is by definition hard to do if your father was a great man. Or you can do it through achieving moral superiority, which is the easier path because moral morality is subjectively often defined by the self.
So in a certain sense, the psychological need for victimhood is created by actually the success of a prior generation. And that’s what you’re seeing in a generational scale writ large in the United States. You have an intergenerational wealth transfer that’s the largest in human history from baby boomers to millennials. That’s what’s going on in the U.S. And then if you want to just take a micro case study of that, it’s exactly the Meghan Markle case, where she had to use this victimhood narrative to effectively justify her walking into a situation of possible great inheritance. Now, did they give up their formal inheritance from the crown? Sure.
They still ended up really wealthy as a consequence of it. But then now we’re able to cash in on a new currency of victimhood to not just cash in on the dollars, though I believe they’re doing that too. But more importantly, you have a marginal utility of money that declines. Once you have a lot of money, every added unit of dollars you have matters less. What you care more about is social esteem, social sympathy, popularity in the circles in which you run. That becomes even a more valuable currency. That’s what she’s basically cashing in on, back to that chain we talked about earlier. Incumbency leads to entitlement. Entitlement leads to laziness. Laziness leads to victimhood. That’s the Meghan Markle story.
Beverly Hallberg:
And what I think is fascinating about the whole thing is that victimhood has become her business plan. And so far, would you say it’s at least working for her? I’m not sure it’s working for her in the happiness factor, but as far as the social capital, the notoriety. She’s not doing so well on all her business ventures, Netflix and even her podcast. But is there an element where victimhood initially does pay off?
Vivek Ramaswamy:
Victimhood absolutely pays off. And I’m not studying her balance sheet and her finances or her business’s finances, but at the end of the day, it becomes a brand, a cultural currency that you can trade in. And whether it’s Megan Markle, whether it’s Kamala Harris in the victimhood politics that effectively got one of the worst candidates in the Democratic primary her seat as vice president of the United States, it pays to be a victim in today’s culture. Now, I think that we can sit around… I don’t want to sit around here and be victimized by the victimhood culture and claim to be a victim of it. I think the point of writing the book is, okay, how do we recognize that problem for what it is, but restore our path back to excellence?
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah.
Vivek Ramaswamy:
Restore a national identity, not based on these shared competing victimhood tales. As I sort of joke around sometimes, we’ve entered the victimhood Olympics, where everyone is competing to be the bigger victim. You know who wins the gold medal in the victimhood Olympics in America? It’s actually China. China wins the gold medal. America loses in the end. There is no winner in the oppression Olympics. But the question is how do we revive that shared national identity, not of victimhood, which is what our national identity has become today, but rather a shared national identity built around the unapologetic pursuit of excellence? That’s part of what it used to mean to be an American, and I’d like to revive that identity, to say that’s what it means to be an American once again.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. And before we get to just the merit-based system, working hard, American dream, I think an important point that you make that I want to just talk about a little bit is often maybe it’s people on the right view people on the left as being the only people who claim victimhood status. But plenty of people on the right, plenty of white people who live in America, feel victimized as well. Is this why we’re seeing the word polarized used so often? Is polarization or tribal just other ways to describe how each person is feeling offended and feeling like they are the victim of whatever society has brought to them?
Vivek Ramaswamy:
And I think polarization or tribalism is the result of this victimhood culture, largely the result of this victimhood culture. I have a chapter in the book called “Conservative Victimhood,” and one of the things I do in that chapter… And the chapter right before it is a chapter on Black Victimhood. And in both chapters, actually, I explore the ways in which there are legitimate reasons to feel victimized. If you’re a black American in the United States, certainly if you’re rewinding 60 years ago or more, to be a Black American in the United States, there were legitimate claims to grievance or victimhood. I think many people in the Rust Belt in the United States, many people in Donald Trump’s voting base, had legitimate claims on victimhood. I’ll just maybe take a minute to even talk about some of the economic policies that have been adopted in the United States, which might have been good for America as a whole. The dollar being the reserve currency of the world, that’s great, I think, on net for the U.S.
However, it’s not so great if you’re in the export business, if you’re in the manufacturing business, where there’s an artificial market pressure that makes your goods and services more expensive compared to that of international manufacturers due to no fault of your own, other than the dollar being the reserve currency of the world. It’s a kind of complicated economic argument, I make it in the book, but I think it’s absolutely true. I think the same goes for the intellectual property system. My industry, my old industry of biotech, benefits immensely from that. Knowledge-based industries benefit at the expense of many manufacturing-based industries. And so I go through a litany of policies that are probably good for America as a whole but leaves the same group of people still holding the bag. And there are legitimate reasons for grievance in the white working-class Rust Belt as there are potentially legitimate reasons for grievance over the course of the last 250 years of history for many black Americans.
But at the end of the day, the case I make is we don’t benefit from describing ourselves as victims and then merely harvesting grievance from that reality. But to then instead ask ourselves, how could we each be strengthened by our hardship? And if you go across the board 360 degrees, almost everyone has a legitimate claim of why they were a victim of someone else’s behavior. At the end of the day, though, we’re going to have to lay down our victimhood swords and ask ourselves, what’s our path to mutual forgiveness? And then how do we actually move forward as a people who can share our pursuit of excellence as our shared national identity? And so I think the point of pointing out conservative victimhood or even black victimhood… And by the way, those are the two chapters that everyone told me to leave out of this; they said that actually you’re a conservative, your people aren’t going to want to hear you critiquing them.
I said that’s actually what makes it more important to hear at the end. And then they say, you’re not black. You can’t criticize black victimhood. I don’t believe that the color of your skin governs what you’re allowed to say if your goal is to actually speak truth. But in both cases, my goal was not to reject the premise for why different individuals might feel like they’re victims. But the question is, how does that actually make you better off? It might make you better off in the short run because today we’ve created the victimhood Olympics that causes you to literally pay at times to be a victim. But that’s over the short run. Over the long run, we all lose in the end. And so the case I make in the book is that there’s actually a deep vacuum, a hunger for purpose and meaning and identity in our entire generation that’s been filled by the equivalent of fast food, by these victimhood narratives.
And what we really need to do is to fill that vacuum, that hunger for purpose, with something more rich and more meaningful. And look, I don’t have the end-all, be-all, every answer to this question. These are deep questions. But the case I make in this book is that the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, the reason why most immigrants come to this country legally, the reason my parents came to this country through the front door, is to come to a place where they can unapologetically pursue excellence, live in a meritocratic, colorblind society that rewards people who make contributions according to the contributions they make, rather than according to their victimhood narratives or their skin color or their genetically-inherited characteristics. That’s what we need to restore is the heart of American national identity that I think can dilute these victimhood narratives to irrelevance rather than just stamping them out with a hammer.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I’d like to take a brief moment to talk to you, our listeners. You may know that Independent Women’s Forum is the leading national women’s organization dedicated to enhancing people’s freedom, opportunities, and wellbeing. But did you know we are also here to bring you, women and men on the go, the news. You can listen to our High Noon podcast, an intellectual download featuring conversations that make a free society possible, hear guests like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin discuss the most controversial subjects of the day.
Or join us for happy hour with At the Bar, where host Inez Stepman and Jennifer Braceras chat on the latest issues at the intersection of law, politics, and culture. You can listen to past episodes at iwf.org or search for High Noon or At the Bar in your favorite podcast app.
Now, Vivek, let’s get to what we do about this. You talked about the psychology of victimhood. What does it take for Americans to overcome the victimhood mentality when they think that they themselves are a victim? Or let’s say we look at younger generations. How do we encourage them to not look at themselves as being oppressed, but actually people who can work hard and strive for excellence?
Vivek Ramaswamy:
So look, the end state I call for is the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, the revival of meritocracy. But it’s not going to happen automatically. There’s a big bridge to go from a national identity defined around victimhood to a national identity that’s defined around the pursuit of excellence. And one of the cases I make in the book is the path from victimhood to excellence runs through forgiveness. But what does that actually mean? I think it involves reviving the idea of civic duty, the idea of what it means to be a citizen of a nation. I think it’s one of those ideas that we’ve lost. Citizenship has almost become a bad word in our society. Now, I think a lot of the pro-individualist crowd… And I’m a member of that crowd, by the way. I love the idea of pursuing the American dream and your individual dreams as [a] rugged individual unapologetically.
Resists the idea of civic duty resists the idea of duties and responsibilities that come with the rights of citizenship. But I don’t actually. I think act… The counterintuitive part of this is once we revive the idea of citizens’ duty, the citizens’ responsibility, the duties, civic duties of citizenship, I think that that lets us go of some of the psychological insecurities that we have as a society right now that cause us to want to apologize for the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, to apologize for success, to apologize for success in the system of free market capitalism or success in life in general. You’ll notice we live in a moment where you can’t succeed without apologizing for it in some way. We lose that apologist instinct if we actually feel like we’ve carried out our duties as co-equal citizens in a democratic republican form of government and in a shared society of co-equal citizens.
So that’s part of the case I make in the book in a chapter entitled “A Theory of Duty.” It’s a play on John Rawls’s famous book, A Theory of Justice, which was the north star for the late-20th-century left-wing movement and the liberal movement of late 20th century. What I say in the chapter entitled “The Theory of Duty,” I hope offers the beginning of a north star for 21st-century conservatism that’s founded not just on liberty or the pursuit of excellence — things I love but are familiar notions that we talk about all the time — but the revival of civic duty as part of a counterintuitive path to actually get back to freely pursuing excellence through capitalism and otherwise.
Beverly Hallberg:
And this idea of civic duty, being involved in your community, giving back to others, do you find that, due to the virtual nature of so many things these days, that is hard? So obviously COVID led to a lot of isolation, but this is a trend that we were already headed towards, even pre-COVID. So have we as a society, as we embrace technology, has that made us less connected in person and in the category you talk about, which is the civic duty aspect?
Vivek Ramaswamy:
Yeah. So I do think technology plays a role in this, and I don’t even… It’s interesting to even think about conversing in the language we use. I don’t even use the word “giving back” because that implies that you took something that wasn’t yours by succeeding in the first place. So I used to say that. I don’t even say the word “giving back.” But the idea of living out your duty as a citizen, what does it mean to be a citizen? Part of being a citizen means having a duty. That was the Roman idea of citizenship. I think it’s part of the American idea of citizenship too. You’re right that I think modern technology has in some cases eroded that idea of civic duty and civic identity.
Let’s give you an example of what I mean, just to make it tangible. There was this debate, I don’t know if you remember this, but last year about there was Wall Street Journal reporting on Facebook, investigatory reporting that said that what Facebook knew that young teen girls were suffering from body image issues as a consequence of using Instagram, and shouldn’t Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg be doing something about that? And so conservative media, etc., called me because I had been a critic of a lot of censorship on social media and expected me to sort of bash them for this. And I didn’t actually think… That actually wasn’t my reaction.
I think that we would be making a mistake by tasking the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Dorseys of the world to take responsibility for the psychic fortitude of teen girls. To the contrary, we should be doing a better job of that in the offline world through the actual civic institutions, the institution of the family, of religious institutions, of civic institutions, of community institutions. Don’t leave young girls, young boys, anyone else vulnerable to the psychic exploitation that I think is the business model of modern social media, to use your frailties, your deepest human insecurities to cause you to click on something more quickly than you otherwise would, opening up a window into your soul that someone has on the outside that you don’t even have to your own soul. That’s effectively the edifice on which modern social media is built. The job shouldn’t be to expect modern social media to operate differently, but to instead fill that void of psychic fortitude with something more meaningful, starting in the offline world, such that when you’re a fully formed adult in the online world, you don’t really find yourself susceptible to those same forces in the same way.
Something I often say about capitalism is that capitalism is the least worst system for allocating a system of rewards, that’s for sure. I think it would be the best system for operating all of human activity if our wants actually match our needs. And I think that, to the extent that there’s ever a failure of capitalism, I think it could almost entirely be explained by the way in which our needs diverge from our wants. And the delta between the two might be something that we call virtue. And I think that virtue is not a product of capitalism. It is a precondition for capitalism. And in a certain sense, that’s a direct parallel to the point I was making earlier, that civic duty and the living out of civic duty as a citizen is a precondition for the pursuit of excellence.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, final question I have for you, so writing about a book that deals with victimhood and identity politics and, of course, your previous book Woke, Inc., which dealt with the corporate world, what has the response been? This is an honest discussion about what’s going on, but obviously not everybody’s going to love what they hear.
Vivek Ramaswamy:
Yeah. Look, I think that people are processing it, which is exactly what I wanted to do with this book. Woke, Inc. had a… I mean hope people took a lot away from that book. I’m very proud of its contributions to the discourse. But it had a pretty simple thesis, drove a lot of personal stories, called out a lot of hypocrisy in corporate America. That was in some ways an easier book both to write and to digest. And I think this one goes to the deeper identity crisis of the nation and offers, I think, reflections that make it… The easy part of pointing the finger at somebody else, that’s the easy part. I did a lot of that in Woke, Inc. This book is about looking in the mirror. And I think that’s a harder thing to do.
And I think that’s something that each of us as citizens…. You want to talk about civic duty, I think it starts at home, is to think about the victimhood narratives that we pin to someone else. Let’s take a long hard look in the mirror and see whether we don’t start by leading by example in the first place. And that’s a harder thing to do. I think it’s easy to point out the hypocrisy of an opponent. It’s harder to offer an affirmative vision that fills the void instead. I’m not saying I do a perfect job of that in this book, but I at least take a stab at it. And I think more of us need to start taking a stab at it, be it the conservative movement or the American movement more broadly. And I think once we do, that might be an important step in our path back to excellence.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah, I think it’s an important read because so many people are asking the question “is the American dream gone? What do we do? Where is America headed?” And I think this book does a good job to talk about how we got here and what we can do. It is called Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence. And before you go, I just want to mention I will be seeing you next week in Washington DC, Vivek, because you’re receiving the IWF Gentleman of Distinction Award. So your work has gone noticed, and we are very thankful that you’re going to be coming to that event. And we’re thankful you’re here with us today. Vivek Ramaswamy, thank you so much for being here.
Vivek Ramaswamy:
I’m honored. Thank you.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you all for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosities of supporters like you. Investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. So please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That is iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or a review, it does help, and we’d love it if you shared this episode so your friends know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for watching.
