Unearned Power Over Others: Using The Victim Card For Personal Gain
Victimhood is the new hustle. I've described it as a way to have unearned power over others.
Accordingly, Joseph Mussomeli writes at TIC about how weakness has been turned into a strength -- to the detriment of all of us:
One must have a closed heart not to see that some minorities still are mistreated, that some women are still abused, that some of the overweight are still bullied, that some handicapped continue to be neglected, and that some members of the gay community are harassed. But one must have closed eyes not to see how some have used the victim card for personal gain. In our earnest efforts to redress monstrous problems, we consistently create new monsters. Perpetual victimhood is too great a price for temporary protection. Those victim shackles are nearly unbreakable.We are, I fear, living in a new age of tyranny, and one as sinister as many that have gone before because these modern tyrants are weak and earnest and have had legitimate complaints. The tyranny is a tyranny mostly of the mind. To use another Blakean metaphor--our own "mind-forged manacles" hold us captive and few find escape from a ruthlessly self-imposed victimhood. And the so-called privileged must cultivate a strong streak of masochism in order to cope with this modern liberal view of political reality. And perhaps we are reaching victim overload. No longer just minorities and women and Muslims and gays and the handicapped, but also the overweight and the underfed, and the homeless, the gluten-adverse, the peanut phobic, the emotionally distraught, and so forth ad infinitum. Who will be left to blame? Who will be left to carry the guilt for all these victims of society and nature?
But it is on a still deeper level that victimhood is truly disturbing for a victim is never an equal. A victim is always defined not by who they are, but by what has been done to them. While treating a group as victims is in many ways preferable to denigrating them, it has this same impact: They are not equal. They are like pets, well treated, even pampered, but not their masters equal. Victimhood is little more than a subtler, but equally pernicious, form of enslavement. The liberal enablers of this pretense should be ashamed. They would do well to remember a much less quoted warning my Dr. King: "A shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." Liberals have made entire segments of society more dependent and eternally adolescent. They are never truly free because they are always defined by their limitations and pain.
Those victim shackles are nearly unbreakable.
It would estimate their unbreakability being north of 99%. There's nothing like being shackled with things of our own design. They fit, and are comfortable, and weigh next to nothing.
It is when someone else lays chains upon you that one howls righteously.
I R A Darth Aggie at March 7, 2018 6:27 AM
"There's nothing like being shackled with things of our own design. They fit, and are comfortable, and weigh next to nothing."
They end up whining that their chains are silver, not gold.
iowaan at March 7, 2018 7:58 AM
In many ways, it's a self-imposed enslavement, the proverbial gilded cage. The minute you buy into the proposition that the patriarchy or whitey is responsible for all your problems, you shackle yourself.
"So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains / And we never even know we have the key" ~ The Eagles ("Already Gone")
I was reading an article on the psychology of pet ownership. The author said that we keep our pets as adolescents, dependent upon us, even though their bodies tell them that they're adults and should be living in the wild, hunting their own food. It frustrates them and that is why they sometimes act out.
We've done the same to our pet minorities. They should be out earning their own way, overcoming hardships, and even discrimination, but we've kept them in the kitchen dependent upon society for kibble. And, kept as adolescents despite their physical adulthood, they sometimes act out.
Conan the Grammarian at March 7, 2018 8:30 AM
This stuff is not merely an abstraction. Those filing excessive ADA lawsuits (claiming to be victims) have shut down many businesses (mostly small) and now threaten the internet. This is the fault of legislatures.
While there is no doubt some discrimination going on, there is always choice in how one responds to it. I have an immigrant Persian friend who is short, has a strong accent and says yes he has probably lost some job opportunities, but nevertheless he has a very high position now. He did not choose to be a victim and shrugs off the discrimination. My black friend was so successful he retired at 57--he always laughed about some of the bigots he had to deal with--none of them of European descent. He said they had a problem, not that he was a victim.
When I started college, I had terrible study skills, preferred to party, and wasn't clear on my goals. My grades stunk of course. Since I had no one to blame, I had to face the fact that it was my own fault, and then I did just fine. Today it is too easy to claim things are just unfair, that you need more time on tests, that testing at all is oppression. It is a terrible trap that enables people to remain children.
cc at March 7, 2018 9:11 AM
Been thinking all day, in the back of my mind, what I was going to write here. I will warn you in advance that it may not be pretty, and it may offend some of you.
To put it bluntly: A lot of people assume is racism, sexism, or some other ism is nothing of the sort specifically -- it's simply base cruelty. People who have that desire to be cruel to others look for a weakness, a distinguishable difference of any kind, at which they can drive in the knife. This may take the form of some identified identity group, and it may not. If there isn't a readily observed identity difference or such, they will simply look for something else that they can point out to the mob. Anything will do.
Thus, absolutely anyone can suffer this treatment, whether you be minority or majority. Think of school kids and the number of things that they find to tease and ostracize each other over. And often the teasing comes from others of their own identity group. It can be anything. The short kid. The pudgy kid. the gangly kid. The kid who is considered a bookworm and blows the curve for everyone else. The dark-skinned kid. The light-skinned kid. The new kid. The redhead. The blond(e). The one who wears glasses. The one with a birthmark. The one who plays chess instead of sports. The one who dances ballet. The one whose parents don't have money. The one whose parents do have money. The one who is mistreated at home. The one with a funny accent. The talkative kid. The quiet kid. And a million other things. None of which have anything to do with race or sex.
So anyone who makes a claim that their suffering is more significant than someone else's suffering, based on the identity group of the sufferer, is doing nothing noble. Rather, they are making a claim to privilege. Their suffering is a fundamental injustice, for which they must be compensated. Your suffering is immaterial, because you aren't of their tribe. It's a dehumanization of people who are different, and a claim that the ones of the preferred tribe have a claim to control the lives of others based on those others being less than human.
I'm sick and tired of it. When I was in school, for four years straight, I went to a different school each year. Each time, the habits and behaviors I had learned to try to fit in at the previous school marked me as a weirdo at the new school. The last of the four was a school where the bulk of the student body had been going to school together since the first grade. I was the new kid when I started there in the eighth grade, and I was still pretty much the new kid when I graduated.
I know there are lots of people who have suffered more than me. Those people all have my sympathy. But there are also many who have suffered less. And some of them are making claims to privilege and control over me, based on me being a straight white guy. Those people can go fuck themselves.
Cousin Dave at March 7, 2018 1:33 PM
Second paragraph: "A lot of what people assume is racism"... Sigh. Long day.
Cousin Dave at March 7, 2018 1:36 PM
When in Junior High, I was beaten on a daily basis by aspiring thugs who merely had to suspect someone was gay before they gave themselves the green light to start pummeling people. Guys I'd never even met and had no classes with would be attacking me in the halls. I used to make myself sick so I could avoid going to school on certain days.
My mother, concerned about all the problems I was facing from bullies (she was notified by my guidance counselor; I didn't tell her anything) pulled me out of school and sent me to an Episcopalian Boarding School. We wore school ties, blue blazers and penny loafers. My situation improved somewhat.
Have I said enough to qualify for a Victim Card? Can I now start guilting and coercing people into creating special accommodations for me?
However, that's not the point. And I certainly hope that any accommodation I'm given is not a result of my ethereal victim status.
I found a place that makes me comfortable and allows me to feel accepted. I have a performance this weekend and next weekend (already having performed our first two weekends) of the Jekyll & Hyde musical in Tampa.
While I was in the Army, hating gays was considered acceptable, even virtuous. And unsurprisingly the most vehement homophobes were often caught in... well, you can guess. If their wives only knew.
However, if someone were to walk into the men's dressing room at the theatre while we're making up for our performance and announced, "I hate faggots," the entire dressing room would bristle, and I can think of one or two straight guys that would light into him for saying that.
You could say I found a "safe space." But the difference, it was incumbent on me to find a space where I felt safe. I don't leverage my victim status demand that the VA, or any other organizations I belong to create a safe space for me. I found my own. The VA has meetings and special events for gay vets, but I've never been to any. Never felt the interest. Basically, all you do is walk around to booths put out by local businesses where they hand out complimentary pens and stress balls with their business's logo on them.
Also, unlike college campuses, I don't live at the theatre. It's just a place I go to in the evening. When I'm done, I still return to the homophobic world I live in. The difference is, the homophobia of the world at large doesn't bother me so much.
Having a place that I can go to where I am accepted and those that despise me are shunned is a huge help. I would urge everyone else to find such a place. However, I object to the idea that the whole college campus has to be terraformed to accommodate you and you need a permanent "No White Man's Land."
Patrick at March 7, 2018 3:28 PM
"I have a performance this weekend and next weekend (already having performed our first two weekends) of the Jekyll & Hyde musical in Tampa."
Cool. I've always wanted to do theater. Unfortunately, there's this one little problem, which is that I have no talent for it. But other than that...
Cousin Dave at March 8, 2018 6:48 AM
cousin dave makes a great point. I could tell stories myself but the point is that people are jerks, striving to be the top dog when the world is so big no one gets to be the top dog. In a barn yard the chickens can work it out or the apes in a troop and things settle down, but in a world of 7 billion establishing a dominance hierarchy is impossible, so people squabble all the time. The internet makes it worse, with mobs descending on people but without it making any difference to the mob.
To sort of finish cousin Dave's point: all this SJW stuff ignores the suffering of anyone but those in designated groups, and even then only for the designated "systemic" oppression, which is pretty vague and unobserved. No one gets sympathy for being lonely, for their kids not calling, for being divorced, for being sick, and these things happen to everyone.
cc at March 8, 2018 7:35 AM
This is a good point.
An African-American friend of mine and I had a similar discussion a while back - that when times are tough, it's easier to blame them, the people who are different. And it provides some relief to abuse them and that abuse helps the insecure to establish their place in the pecking order. South Africa is going through something similar with it's "throw whitey off the farm" movement.
Poor whites were near the bottom of the social order in the antebellum South, ranking below some household slaves in deportment and manners. So, they were especially abusive toward free blacks and field slaves. That abuse helped them re-establish their own place in the pecking order - to wit, "I may be near the bottom, but I'm still above you."
That attitude carried over past the 14th Amendment and left poor blacks in the South at the mercy of a brutal system of social ordering.
Later, it would keep blacks in the North down as well, as unions gave working class Northern whites the same illusion of superiority the Klan had given post-war Southern whites. Unions restricted membership to whites and insisted companies hire only union employees.
The second incarnation of the Klan (1915-1944) would add Catholics, Jews, and Communists to the list of enemies of all that is good and holy.
Catholic, Al Smith, would lose the 1928 presidential election in a landslide, mostly due to fears he would be answerable to the Pope and not to the Constitution.
Even when times aren't tough, people want to make sure everyone knows there is still someone beneath them in the pecking order. And if abuse of someone weaker is what it takes to point that out, they'll use it.
Conan the Grammarian at March 8, 2018 9:57 AM
To reinforce Conan's post a bit, that period in the South where racism really became institutionalized was during that post-bellum period when the South was economically and culturally lagging behind the rest of the U.S., and indeed all of the West. World War II was the kick in the ass that the South needed to get back in the game. Richard Petty, of all people, said it best: "Those boys who got drafted... after they'd seen London and Paris, hanging around the patch didn't seem so great anymore."
Cousin Dave at March 8, 2018 10:28 AM
Cousin Dave: Cool. I've always wanted to do theater. Unfortunately, there's this one little problem, which is that I have no talent for it. But other than that...
Go to your local community theatre and audition anyway. You may surprise yourself and learn that you do have talent.
And trust me, they'll love you for it. Community theatres have a hard time getting enough men for their productions. Most of their performers are women. Probably because women are generally less career-oriented and have more time to do these things.
Also, it's been my observation that women tend to have better attitudes. We had more than enough men to fill all the male role requirements in the show. However the men tend to be more prima donna-ish. Too many of them decided that if they can't play Jeckyll in our show, they weren't going to be in it at all.
As a result, we have a woman newsboy and Lord Savage is played by a woman.
Jeckyll & Hyde has great music and inspired lyrics. However, the show never won an Antoinette Perry Award (aka the Tony Award). I'm not on the Tony Award committee obviously, but I would guess that the reason it was snubbed is because the plot is as bad as anything I've ever seen.
Since everyone knows the premise of the original novel of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was all about discovering that Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde, the writers attempted to create an original tragedy with the same premise. And failed miserably.
Jekyll believes he can excise the evil out of humanity with an elixir he has invented, and save his ailing father (who, apparently, suffers from catatonia). He appeals to the Board of Governors at St. Jude's Hospital to give him a living human being to test this out on. The Board of Governors vehemently denies him.
Without a test subject, Jekyll decides to administer it to himself. (I think you can guess what happens next.)
Mr. Hyde goes on a rampage and murders the Board of Governors.
He struggles to find a cure and apparently does. However, weeks later, Mr. Hyde asserts himself again at Jekyll's wedding. Utterson, Jekyll's lawyer and best friend, draws a swordstick as Jekyll threatens to kill his incipient wife Emma.
Emma appeals to Jekyll and causes Jekyll to assert himself again. Jekyll, seeing no other way to save himself, impales himself on Utterson's swordstick and dies.
The problems with the script is that a tragic hero is supposed to be morally good. Jekyll is morally sketchy, even without the Hyde persona.
First, he wants to test his formula on a helpless mental patient who obviously cannot give consent. That's not what moral people do.
Also, Jekyll doesn't seem to be terribly bothered by the long trail of dead bodies Mr. Hyde has left in his wake. Apparently, he doesn't hold himself in any way responsible. And even if he does exonerate himself by separating Hyde's actions from his own, the fact remains, he's the one who unleashed Hyde in the first place. One way or another, he is responsible.
And what's up with Mr. Utterson, Jekyll's best friend who learns that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person, and is also aware of the murders Hyde committed? He doesn't seem to have any legal or moral issue with Jekyll not being held responsible for Hyde's actions, either.
Oh, well. He's a lawyer.
As I said, the music is exquisite. The plot leaves a lot to be desired.
Patrick at March 8, 2018 3:18 PM
Interesting writeup, Patrick. Thanks. As far as the plot problem, I guess you could say that, in a work of fiction, the protagonist needs to be either a hero or an anti-hero, in order to have a comprehensible motivation. A lot of writers these days seem to want to have it both ways.
Cousin Dave at March 9, 2018 6:21 AM
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