Back in the Dark Ages, when people had a disagreement they couldn't settle, they'd physically attack each other. Their belief was that their deity would grant victory to the person who was right. Interestingly, God tended to favor the view of the large and well armed back in those days.
At some point after that, we decided violence was bad. A couple clever men whose names you would recognize learned to weaponize this idea around the middle of the 20th century. Instead of hitting their opponents, they would just stand there letting their opponents hit them. Then they'd say to the world, "Ow, ow! What a meanie! Look what he did to me!"
The onlookers would gasp and cluck their tongues and wag their fingers disapprovingly at the assailant, ruling that the he was disqualified, and that the person he had hit was the winner of the argument by default.
Thus, victim culture was born.
As this new tactic was widely adopted, combatants would square off and try to goad each other into throwing the first punch. The person who swung first was guilty, and therefore, wrong. We became a culture of whiners, competing to see who could tell the most pitiful sob story.
There were a couple problems with this approach, though. For one thing, your victory depended entirely on your opponent slipping up and losing his temper. If he was able to tune you out, you never got the opportunity to get hit and win the victim contest.
The other problem was that you needed to have witnesses to officiate. This was often inconvenient and led to people slipping back into physical dominance when witnesses were unavailable.
To address both of these problems, a new tactic was devised. If there were no witnesses around, you'd attack your opponent. But you didn't need to have the physical prowess to actually defeat him in an old-fashioned fight. You just needed to provoke a counter-attack. If you hit somebody enough, you either beat them up (old-school victory) or they try to make you stop. When they try to make you stop, that's when you introduce the jury. You can do this by running towards an audience with your opponent in pursuit. Or, these days, you start recording video when the counter-attack begins, and not a moment before. To the audience's eyes, the counter-attack is the first attack, and you win!
