Posted on 01/17/2023 7:12:38 AM PST by grundle
The obsession with victimhood is destroying our future.
America has become a nation of ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’. Everyone is getting over a ‘trauma’ or ‘processing’. They demand special privileges because of the suffering of their ancestors. They trot out studies which prove that they are somehow disadvantaged. They gorge on self-help books and deploy therapy terminology to accuse everyone else of mistreating them.
Our society has turned into a cross between a Marxist academic conference and therapy session where Marxist terminology like “systemic racism” and therapy talk like “gaslighting narcissist” form key parts of the grammar of perpetual victimhood.
Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it.
Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else.
After the slaves were freed, some made long journeys to major cities, others built families and worked hard to provide for them. They perserved despite lynchings and racism. Over 150 years later, some of their descendants claim that nothing can be expected from them because they’re suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome even though the only place they’ve seen slavery is on television. That’s the difference between survivors and victims.
After the Holocaust, Jewish people who had seen their entire families killed in front of them remarried, had children and started their lives again. Often they didn’t even talk about what they had experienced until decades had passed. Others helped build a nation out of the desert sands. Now some of their great-grandchildren claim they’re so fragile they need safe spaces.
The same is true of all Americans. We are all the descendants of survivors. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought in wars, persisted through economic turmoil and didn’t give up. Whatever happened to them, they didn’t see themselves as the victims. They were strong, not because they postured on social media, but because they got up whenever they were knocked down. They had their grievances and resentments, but they didn’t build their lives around them.
Survivors are motivated by love and duty. They understand that there is more to life than their own pain. They redeem their suffering by making their lives matter. That is the essence of the human ideal. It’s how nations and families are built. And it’s how our nation is coming apart.
Victims are driven by hate. Their pain is performance. It’s what makes them special and the only purpose left to them. The more they feel, the angrier they get. And they want to be angry. There are victims who have actually suffered, but the majority in our culture are ‘identity victims’ or ‘therapy victims’ whose victimhood is based on the terminology of academic Marxism or shrink sessions: who have suffered nothing except a lack of emotional fulfillment.
These creatures, who once handed out radical fliers at campus cafes and poisoned family reunions, went ‘viral’ through social media and generated legions of sympathetic followers. Their perpetual outrage at being victims drives our culture and our politics. Incapable of talking about anything other than themselves, they have ‘built their brand’ into the model for our society.
America went from a nation of courage, allegiance and responsibility where people made commitments to something larger than themselves, used their pain to build better things, to a society of wallowers competing over who has the biggest pain and the least responsibility.
The difference between survivors and victims is that survivors have a larger purpose, while victims have made victimhood into their purpose. And they want it to be our purpose.
Politics has become a dysfunctional therapy session, an intersectional debate over whose pain is superior, and who is just faking it, as if nations are defined by individual pain rather than cultures of aspiration. New victimhood causes proliferate every day while the old ones fight it out. Whose pain is superior, feminists or transgender men? Trauma is our national resource now and there’s only so much of it to go around. Those who have the most are at the top.
Victimhood grants a moral superiority that liberates the victim from moral responsibility.
If you’re an official victim, you can rampage around cities, looting, beating and burning, with few legal and certainly no moral consequences. Beyond economics, replacing ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ takes us from an equality of moral obligations to an equity of moral outcomes. And race riots, canceling people, and rigging college admissions are just ways of achieving ‘moral equity’.
Behavior that is objectively wrong, violence, hate, harassment and terrorism, becomes right if the perpetrators are victims who claim to be striving for a society of moral equity. But the truth about victims is that they never want to stop being what they are. If they did, they would become survivors. Victimhood is convenient and comforting. Victims never have to learn to do better. They spend all of their time telling others to do better so that xer’s feelings aren’t hurt again.
Victimhood views failure as a conspiracy, rather than a choice, and nations and societies that embrace victimhood quickly turn into failed states. America used to get things done. Now we no longer win wars or can even stock supermarkets. There are a thousand points of failure and they begin with a culture that is hostile to achievement and supportive of victimhood.
Our educational system promotes those who refuse to learn, government subsidizes professional victimhood and corporations overlook those who work in favor of those who don’t, but are more likely to sue or throw a public tantrum. Trillions are spent with no return and nothing gets done because the real product is the virtue signaling of victimhood.
Victimhood is an excuse for failure and so we’ve become an unserious society. Victims are incapable of thinking about anything except themselves and our culture has become stuck in the same narcissistic loop of personalities. Everyone wants to be a celebrity, to feel special, and to play the victim when the social media collective fails to give them the due that they deserve.
The loudest voices are those who complain rather than inspire, who give up rather than get ahead, who explain that the game is rigged so everyone should join them in staying home.
Victims make a fetish of their pain. They are ‘in touch with their emotions’ because they inhabit them all the time. They are so busy selfishly feeling their feelings that they can’t be bothered to care about the impact on anyone else. Just as eskimos have many words for ‘snow’, victims have many ways to describe their pain. Their unhappiness is ‘trauma’, talking to people is ‘unpaid emotional labor’ and they spend all their time ‘processing’ or feeling their feelings.. Watching Netflix is ‘self-care’ to recover from all the ‘trauma’ of all their ‘unpaid emotional labor’.
Even their most ordinary activities are part of the fantastic drama that is their existence. Every breath they take is a labored ‘resistance’ to a vast systemic conspiracy out to destroy them.
And while such woke performative antics are more common among social media millennials than in everyday life, the underlying conviction that our emotions matter more than our responsibilities, that anger exempts us from morality, and truth takes a backseat to ‘my truth’ has spread throughout our culture with disastrous results on our functioning and our future.
A society is inspired by its leading figures and its culture is shaped by its stories. Victimhood has become our story. It pervades our classrooms, our fiction, our new myths and our discourse. It has left us in a state of arrested development because we have become incapable of moving forward. Instead of building new things, we rehash past history, purge ‘problematic’ figures and assign blame for the failures of the present to the dead history of the past.
Victimhood is obsessed with the past. Unlike survivors, victims never want to move forward. They want to remain tethered to the moments that defined them. America was always a nation that looked forward, that imagined the impossible and then realized it. Now, like many backward societies, it has become stuck in the past, rewriting its history to make its founding more evil, churning out excuses for today’s failures in the endless root causes for infinite victimhood.
No wonder most Americans, for the first time in history, no longer believe in a better future.
America was a nation of survivors. It can only endure as a nation that looks to the future. A nation of victims is doomed to fail. It fails because that is the only way its victims can succeed.
I’m a victim of white privilege.
Women and minorities hit hardest.
Sorry Mr Greenfield, but the US is now a failed post Constitutional oligarchy.
I do not see any way back at this point.
Very good article.
A video out discussing why socialism must always fail, talks about this very thing.
The hard working work their butts off so,that the lazy can sit on a porch all day drinking and doing drugs (while their kids go without)
The hard workers get upset, and say “why should I work my tail off for deadbeats?”
Pretty soon, The hard worker then starts to become lazy too, an sit around drinking all day tqhinking that what is good for the goose is good for,the gander.
Soon enough, there aren’t enouhg hard workers to keep,the cash flowing equally to all, and the whole bitter thing collapses, and food,becomes scarce as tqe lazy rob stores blind try8ng to get a piece oc the pie before the pie runs out, everyone gets less money, the drugs run out because noone can afford them anymore, and people turn on each other- blaming others for the collapse.
Truth be told, EVERYONE involved in the whole asinine socialist utopian agenda are to blame- money doesn’t grow on trees, and when the money runs out, the project collapses, as it must, under He weight of jealousy, irresponsibility, and everyone playing the “oh poor me Victim card”
Obozo and Biden have tried to make Americans second class citizens of the World.
A nation of victims is a nation that has already failed.
Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else.
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from the article
More precisely, a nation of fake victims is doomed to be a nation of real victims.
But but victimhood keeps lawyers fat and happy and some get a fame plaque.
Not hard to find out what something is after following the money trail.
“Pity the nation whose people are sheep”
Greenfield is brilliant.
We were at a school board meeting last night, in central Texas. Saw that near 50% are not performing to grade level. Many who are ‘lost’ are just put in special education. Lots of ESL who remain there for years in elementary school!!
Each child cost us about $5,600/year to educate. What we are getting for our tax dollars is quite frankly pathetic. They make it sound promising since we are a few percentages above the state average in most categories. We are barely more ‘white’ than hispanic and who knows cause they cannot tell us how many are illegals or have illegal parent(s)- who don’t care as school here in the USA is kid sitting vs. learning.
Seeing the letters to Santa in the paper, getting printed thank you notes, getting sometimes copier thank you notes, etc. these children in middle and high school rank what we did in elementary school in the 60’s.
A lot of good insight in that article. Hope the left learns from it.
Amen!
I’m not going to get my hopes up, but it would be nice.
Wait for the Big War. I mean by that a war we can lose, face occupation and dismemberment of the union and our wealth. How will Americans feel when our leaders are tried for “War Crimes” and shot? We must learn new languages and the American flag is banned like the Confederate Flag? Is Biden’s fixed woke nation worth fighting for? NO! Men and women shouldn’t sign up for any future wars. Let them Hire “Hero-Ukrainian” Mercenaries to fight. The left has won—let them try to keep their gains on the battlefields of WW III
Bump for saving - excellent article
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