THERE is one way in which artificial intelligence (AI) could be a real boost to education, but no one, so far as I know, has built it. I want a little AI hooked up to a large screen behind the speaker at any kind of academic event. It simply listens to what is said, and, every time someone in the Q and A session uses the word “I”, their cumulative total, or ego score, is incremented on the screen in increasingly alarming colours.

The thought came back to me most recently at the launch at the LSE of a book, Wronged: The weaponization of victimhood (Columbia University Press), by Professor Lilie Chouliaraki, who holds the LSE’s chair in Media and Communications. It was a fascinating insight into the way in which moral arguments are conducted today. Victim status, Professor Chouliaraki argued, is constructed from two modern notions: trauma and rights. The trauma is the emotional suffering caused by the infringement of rights, which happens in a social or political setting. To establish yourself as a victim is then to have a claim on society for better treatment, and, perhaps, for restitution.

“Languages of pain have become key strategic resources for any group,” she said. “It is about claiming domination.”

“Go on!” I thought: this well describes the way in which bullies work inside academia and left-wing journalism, and so much else in the contemporary scene. But I had forgotten where we were: such things still cannot be said by a professor of media studies. It turns out that her point was that the far Right were using these tactics to claim victimhood to which they were not entitled. Specifically, anti-abortion protesters were not victims if they were arrested for practising silent prayer near a clinic. For her, and perhaps for everyone else in the room, women who wanted abortions were the victims when this was denied them. The foetus had no moral status at all.

She had carefully analysed and thought through the ways in which claims of victimhood operate to skew political arguments today, but this thoughtful analysis was applied only to the doings of the bad guys: the “far Right”. The good guys, the people like us, who filled the lecture theatre, could never make false claims of victimhood.

The MAGA movement fills me with fear and loathing. I have nothing original or particularly well-informed to say about the evil nature of Trumpism; so I don’t write about it. But the success of Donald Trump does show up the inadequacy of the kind of liberal utilitarianism that is still taken for granted in most of academia.

A professor of media studies will change neither minds nor votes when she proves that President Trump has no right to present himself as a victim. Within a structure of rights and traumas, there is no way to judge between competing victimhoods: you simply choose the one that suits you best — see the example of abortion above. Your trauma is established when you say that it is, and your pain proves that you have some right that has been violated. No one else could have the standing to judge your claim.

PERHAPS the most successful weaponisation of victimhood in the 20th century was Adolf Hitler’s. Neal Ascherson, in The New York Review of Books, had a wonderful essay on how and why Germany sank into the abyss. “Nazi perpetrators and leaders were not freaks,” he writes, “but they had been brought up in a culture of rancid, self-pitying national paranoia after the defeat of 1918.”

Ascherson was a correspondent in Bonn in the 1960s, when the question became urgent to the generation who had grown up after the war, but remained forbiddingly uninteresting to the people who’d lived through the Nazi era, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm: “For many Germans, the disaster came in the two years following the defeat, when millions suddenly found themselves lacking food, heat, work, and even soap. For this shame, people were disinclined to blame Hitler. The past was seen through selective tunnel vision. I remember being struck speechless when an old lady in Bonn said to me, ‘Say what you like about him, but in Adolf’s time at least there was no crime!’”

And so his conclusion brings us back to the present: “Germans in that period ‘exercised their own individual will when making the decisions they took.’ But one of those decisions was to abandon critical reason. . . The invitation to wide-eyed stupidity, ignoring evidence and common sense, has returned to degrade politics today.”