Does Focusing on Systemic Issues Create a “Victim Mentality”?

I just turned in the manuscript for my first book. And while no part of writing 100,000 words is easy and breezy, there was one persistently itchy thread that wove itself into the pages of my growing Google Doc, relentlessly stalking me through the paragraphs like the deranged ghost of Clippy.

Call it “the Lean In effect,” or, perhaps more simply, “talking out of both sides of your mouth.” Regardless of the label, acknowledging systemic limitations then proceeding to recommend individual solutions feels a little like taking swimming advice from someone who just finished telling you about the treacherousness of the open ocean.

This duality is literally structured into the book, as each chapter contains two parts: First, we ground ourselves in the reality of the situation. Then, we talk about what you can do to navigate said situation. The latter isn’t meant to be a solution for the former—just an antidote for some of the symptoms. 

I try to be forthcoming about this intellectual discomfort from the jump, admitting that I struggle with the interplay between making a living offering individual solutions while being painfully aware of all the ways they fall short. While I still don’t feel like I’ve totally resolved this cognitive dissonance, I saw a video from Caroline Burke last week that helped me get a little closer.

“Does acknowledging systemic issues mean you have a victim mindset?” she asks, somewhat rhetorically, in response to a commenter who asked her a question I’ve wondered, too: Individual agency within a collective movement is crucial to systemic change. How do you find a solution without making it a personal issue?

These things exist—almost by definition—in a paradoxical relationship with one another. As individuals, we’re inextricably bound by systems, but systems are constructed of and by individuals. So which comes first? The chicken, or the well-versed-in-policy-reform egg?

Last week, we did a Rich Girl Roundup about housing costs—does the “30% rule” still make sense, we asked, in the most unaffordable housing market in 40 years? We reviewed the benchmark’s history (public housing policy in the 1960s) and how it’s changed (ballooned from 25% to 30%), and we enumerated all the different budgetary configurations one could deploy to fit the housing puzzle piece neatly in frame without disturbing the rest of the picture.

We didn’t examine the confluence of reasons that we find ourselves in this “most expensive” housing market, or how the median home used to cost 3x median wages, not nearly six. We didn’t talk about the investors and private equity firms gobbling up millions of single-family homes, or the zoning board meetings where your local community members are voting to block the development of new multifamily housing to artificially restrain supply and shield their property’s value from downward pressure. We didn’t address the decade of underbuilding that followed the collapse of the Wall Street-induced housing bubble in the mid-aughts, or how those bearing the highest levels of responsibility quietly retired with multi-seven figure exit packages. 

Nope. We didn’t address any of that. We just said, “Shoot for 28% of your net income and hope for the best, toots!”

This is the difference between individual advice and “systems thinking” (as Caroline calls it) in personal finance and economics. You can confine your scope of concern to individual advice (or, at least, try to), but you will never be operating outside the bounds of objective reality. The vote at the zoning meeting affects you whether you’re aware of it or not, because we #LiveInASociety.

Caroline points out the way awareness of these issues increases personal autonomy, not the opposite. That is, if you understand why your landlord is permitted to raise your rent by 15% each year and why there’s a shortage of supply in your area, you’re less likely to view your housing strain as reflective of some personal shortcoming. You’re also more likely to recognize that there are probably others—maybe even those in your same building or neighborhood—who are experiencing the same thing.

When individual autonomy meets systems thinking, you are empowered to create collective action.

When tenants in a working class Minneapolis apartment complex were faced with negligent ownership and rising rents in 2019, they started talking to one another about it. They realized that while they were no match for their multimillionaire landlord individually, together, they could financially overpower him. When a single tenant doesn’t pay rent, it’s the tenant’s problem—they get evicted. But when an entire building refuses to pay, it’s the landlord’s problem.

The renters—who called themselves United Renters for Justice—alleged in a class action lawsuit that their landlord had denied timely and reasonable repairs and was hiking rents. (Terrifyingly, the owner of the building had actually been disallowed from renting to others for past offenses.) 

Until the matter was settled, they agreed not to break solidarity: They weren’t going to pay rent. This was a common tactic in the early 20th century and during the Great Depression to protest price gouging and rent hikes, but you rarely hear about collective bargaining from the renter class today. 

Had each tenant privately handled the matter, they likely would’ve been forced to spend the majority of their incomes on rising rents, gotten evicted, or taken on the personal and financial expense of voluntarily moving so someone else could move in and be exploited in their place. 

Instead, they won a landmark settlement: $13 million was distributed to more than 4,400 tenants who had lived in the buildings since 2012. They ended up using some of their funds to purchase the buildings from their landlord, and they turned it into a housing cooperative.

Collective action inspired by an awareness of the systems you’re navigating reclaims and rebalances power. It is the opposite of a victim mentality. It uses all the tools available to you—community, the legal system, democracy, individual willpower—rather than just the blunt object of personal responsibility and “trying harder.”

Who is more empowered to keep their housing costs below 30%? An individual contending with the so-called free market, or tenants in a collectively owned housing cooperative who can exercise more power and control over their outcomes? (Never mind that any market rife with both local and federal government intervention and institutional-scale investors competing with regular people can hardly be considered “free.”) 

Collective action enables greater individual agency, and vice versa. In some ways, my life (and aspirations as a finance writer) was easier before I knew about things like private equity and wage stagnation and the porousness of “trickle down” economics.

The “50/30/20 model” allowed me to tie a much neater bow around best practices than the admission that actually, every other high-income nation on earth subsidizes childcare, so the fact that you have to spend 20% of your take-home pay on it is highly abnormal. 

These realities are frustrating and inconvenient for those who proffer personal financial advice, but that doesn’t make them any less real—and it’s only in acknowledging them fully that we can move forward with true autonomy.