“Once victim, always victim -- that's the law!”
- Thomas Hardy
“Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion.”
- Joseph Conrad
The victim mentality is a curious thing.
Oh, I don't mean, as do the various proto-racist idiots do, talk about legitimate grievances experienced by a group of people. For example, Jews or blacks in the USA. There is both legitimate and ongoing discrimination against those groups, for starters. Furthermore, their victim status is a matter of how other's treat them, it is not a label they generally accept willingly, and furthermore they try to rid themselves of the label as much as possible.
No, I'm interested in people who want to be victims, who identify themselves as such, who wish to be seen as oppressed and living in a world that is out to get them. And most often, these people have actually experienced very little to actually warrant that status. In many cases, it seems to be a one-off event that then colours their vision for the rest of their lives.
The most obvious example of this would be Emo 'culture'. Once upon a time, as I'm sure you are all aware, emo was about music and, to a degree, a certain style of clothing. However that is long gone and dead, replaced with music by middle-class white suburbanites whining about how bad their life is. Its so very cliché, yet at the same time almost hilarious. You may think I'm joking, but some deluded emo kids have seen fit to compare themselves to black slaves, or the persecution homosexuals suffer, and yet at the same time consider themselves part of 'social movement' based entirely on this shared, faked identity.
That's the most obvious example, but I believe this is just trickle down from another source – the body politic. For quite a while now, the adoption of victimhood status has been a tool, one used by unscrupulous political organizations in order to promote and further their causes, as well as give their members a sense of grievance and anger any anyone not in their 'in-group'. Hell, it even works on atheists, who you think would be more open to reasoning and trying to understand what makes people operate than most others. The ethnocentric nature of it is useful for any aspiring leader.
Victimhood is a powerful tool, because it draws a group together and creates for them a collective experience which they interpret reality through. Its even more powerful in this modern day and age because of the media, and especially the bottom up media that has been invented by the internet, blogging and Youtube in particular. An individual can pick their media inputs based on their belonging to one social group or another, and if several of those inputs are spreading a victim discourse and memes, then the idea and acceptance of it will spread throughout that particular group.
What is especially dangerous and worrying, however, is when a victim discourse becomes intertwined with a sense of humiliation. Three prime examples of this are the three most powerful countries in the world right now, and their nationalist rhetoric. China believes it has been humiliated by the western powers throughout its modern contact with them, and not without reason. It has been invaded, had its people addicted to opium by Western dealers backed by huge national armies, had foreign powers support civil wars and has been ignored by the international system at large. However, that has very little to do with why it is being criticized now, although most Chinese people would not believe that.
Equally, we have Russia. After the inglorious end to the Cold War, they suffered the chaos of the Yeltsin years, where the government was run by gangsters and thugs of all colours, the assets of the nation were looted, and Russians were left to die in the streets or freeze to death at home – all while Western pundits lauded Boris Yeltsin and took advantage of Russia's weakness to humiliate them in the international sphere. And now they have a stronger leader, one who evokes their Imperial and Soviet past, they again see him being villainized by the West. As far as they are concerned, the West wants them weak and humiliated forever.
And finally, we have America. American popular nationalism has been built very strongly on the events of 9/11, an event stronger than say the Chinese experience, as almost everyone saw the events of that day repeatedly, shared by cable news networks on repeat all day. America had long believed its superpower status had somehow conferred invincibility upon it, and to be shown up by Arabs wielding box-cutters, who nonetheless inflicted incredible levels of damage on the country, was a humiliation unseen since Clinton's retreat from Somalia.
And the mix of victim and humiliation is a very bad one. Because one identifies as the victim, yet at the same time, this identity only serves to remind you of what caused one to think of oneself this way, which brings rise to the feeling of humiliation. Using this kind of victim status as a tool is a very, very dangerous one indeed. Its like wearing a mail shirt to defend yourself from criticism of your actions, only to find that there are spikes on the inside of the amour. It does defend, and help explain the action, but at the same time, it serves as a painful reminder, which only drives those who accept it to even more extreme actions to try and reverse that humiliation.
And therein lies the danger. All the processes are internal, or take place at a vague sociological level where identity and discourse are more tangible than fact or action, yet it is precisely by action that this humiliated victim seeks to redress what they see as those who wronged them. And should they fail even slightly, they go to ever more extreme and bloody ends in search of a cure they can never find.
