{"id":1848,"date":"2010-03-23T21:14:24","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T02:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1848"},"modified":"2010-07-18T18:52:53","modified_gmt":"2010-07-18T23:52:53","slug":"victimology-bites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1848","title":{"rendered":"Victimology bites"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dr. Richard Friedman&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/03\/23\/health\/23mind.html?ref=health\">Sabotaging Success, but to What End?<\/a>, published 2010-03-22 in the New York Times, is about an instantly recognizable pattern &mdash; people who sabotage themselves so they can feel like martyred victims of an uncaring world.<\/p>\n<p>The piece is insightful and even funny in a bleak sort of way, but as I read through it I felt an increasing sense that there was something missing from this story.  I was nearly at the end before I realized what had been lurking unspoken in Dr. Friedman&#8217;s account.  But the crucial clue had been there from the beginning, when he writes of one patient &#8220;In fact, her status as an injured party afforded her a psychological advantage: she felt morally superior to everyone she felt had mistreated her. This was a role she had no intention of giving up.&#8221;  Where&#8230;now, where had I heard that song before?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>And the answer is: politics!  This is what&#8217;s missing from Friedman&#8217;s account.  He, and his patients, and everyone else nowadays, live in a culture saturated with the lesson that playing the victim card is the fastest route to power over others.  &#8220;Help, help, I&#8217;m being repressed!&#8221; goes up the cry, and legions of professional grievance-mongers materialize more swiftly than the djinn of the lamp.  Indignation is publicly indignated.  One dares not even laugh at such posturing lest one be pilloried for &#8220;insensitivity&#8221;. Laws are passed.  And the victim gets to become the oppressor while still collecting all the bennies of martyrdom. Such a deal!<\/p>\n<p>And where might Friedman&#8217;s patients have learned the tactics of this strategy? By his own account, he has &#8220;intelligent and articulate&#8221; patients. I&#8217;m guessing they all went to college, where the student hours that used to be filled with trivialities like the heritage of western civilization are now increasingly consumed by &#8220;sensitivity&#8221; training, and life outside the lecture halls is regulated by speech and behavior codes so punishing in the hands of designated-victim groups that they&#8217;d be worthy of George Orwell&#8217;s Ministry of Truth.<\/p>\n<p>Full circle; after decades of hearing from the left that the personal is political, Friedman&#8217;s patients are the political become personal with a vengeance.  No surprise that an article in the New York Times would miss that elephant, though; this is the newspaper about which it can be said that the famous parody headline &#8220;World To End Tomorrow; Women, Minorities Most Affected&#8221; was a good spoof mainly because it was nigh-indistinguishable from a lot of what they actually print.  The aptness of Friedman&#8217;s article appearing in the house organ of the limousine left is extreme; the jokes write themselves, and the unintended ironies just don&#8217;t stop.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps you think I&#8217;m snarking because I feel left out?  No; I could have played the victim card myself, you betcha.  Cerebral palsy, oooh, that&#8217;s &#8220;disabled&#8221;, and for starters it qualifies you for a premium parking space pretty much anywhere; we&#8217;re told to ignore the regulatory taking of the lot owner&#8217;s property and the deadweight drag on the economy because those spaces might as well be unusable most of the time. What does a little thing like costs inflicted on third parties matter when the political class is doing it for the poooor opppresssed viiictiiiims?<\/p>\n<p>For myself, I refuse.  I prefer self-respect to privileged treatment.  Friedman&#8217;s article, despite its blind spot, is valuable because it exhibits the results of making the victim card into an ace.  You get more victims, duh&#8230;and not just in the form of increasingly splintered and contrived identity groups jockeying for sweeteners from the political class, either. Individuals will internalize this strategy, too.  You&#8217;ll get the kind of privileged, &#8220;intelligent and articulate&#8221; losers Friedman sees every day &mdash; useless to themselves and a misery to everyone around them.<\/p>\n<p>The unintended ironies do not end with Friedman&#8217;s article, but continues with <a href=\"http:\/\/well.blogs.nytimes.com\/2010\/03\/22\/playing-the-victim\/\">responses to it<\/a>. The gravamen of which was mainly that Friedman was a bad person for writing about self-sabotagers so disdainfully, and who can blame them for not expecting a meanie like him not to be helpful?<\/p>\n<p>These responses illustrate something else that politicized victimology has done to us; it has eroded the distinction between victims and trash.  Before the welfare state, people used to talk of the &#8220;deserving poor&#8221;, distinguishing those who could succeed on their own character if given a little crucial help from the bone-idle, slothful, and irredeemably irresponsible.  We used to be able to make a parallel distinction between people who&#8217;d failed through bad luck or adverse circumstances and people who have <em>chosen<\/em> failure and magnify their slights because that&#8217;s a role they have no intention of giving up.  <\/p>\n<p>The former are victims who deserve our help, if they are not too proud to take it (and it&#8217;s usually better for their children if they are too proud).  The latter are trash &mdash;  chronic, self-programmed losers.  They deserve the contempt they work so hard  to earn, and we should give it to them.  Not just because it&#8217;s the appropriate response to them as individuals, but because it&#8217;s a bad thing for society when we reward chronic losers as though they really <em>are<\/em> morally superior to the rest of us.  That way lies nothing but civilizational suicide on the installment plan.<\/p>\n<p>That is why I congratulate Dr. Friedman on his disdain for these people;.  it&#8217;s entirely healthy and appropriate.  And that is also why I vow to be as nasty as I can to the next person waving the &#8220;I&#8217;m a victim!&#8221; banner in my face.  Black, gay, transgendered, learning-disabled, or whatever the designated victim group of the week is &mdash; being that thing is not necessarily a flaw, but playing the victim card for a position of moral and political superiority definitely is. <\/p>\n<p>For a better future, demand that individuals get respect the old-fashioned way &mdash; by <em>earning<\/em> it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dr. Richard Friedman&#8217;s Sabotaging Success, but to What End?, published 2010-03-22 in the New York Times, is about an instantly recognizable pattern &mdash; people who sabotage themselves so they can feel like martyred victims of an uncaring world. The piece is insightful and even funny in a bleak sort of way, but as I read&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1848\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Victimology bites<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1848"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2201,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848\/revisions\/2201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}