“You want power today?
Declare yourself a victim.”
The 64k question is, why does that work?
There is a disturbing thesis that it is due to the Christian heritage of the West. Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, glorify martyrs.
The slightly more complicated answer is that People in general are not only nice but want to be perceived as nice.
You build up nice points by being nice to the downtrodden.
If you declare yourself one of the downtrodden people rush to be nice to you. And they will also rush to defend you from the people who see you clearly as a nasty person who should be kicked soundly.
Now this is a Western Civilization thing. In the east if you are downtrodden they often consider it as punishment for being bad in a past life or that, also in a past life you decided you needed to be downtrodden to learn something. So being nice to you and defending you from others would be to interfere with your journey toward enlightenment. Which would, ironically, not be considered as being nice.
Humans. The lyrics change but the melody lingers.
because the media makes it so?