A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail. By Daniel Greenfield.
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. …
Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it.
Are you a survivor or a victim?
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. …
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. …
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. …
Victimhood is ruining society:
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. …
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. … 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. …
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. …
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. …
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.
But you already knew that.
