Victimhood Addiction

We live in a society in which addiction to one vice or another is a persistent problem that seems immune to cure. The most dangerous addiction is not drugs or pornography or drugs or sex, but victimhood. The Orwellian disintegration of language has created the impression that there is something ennobling or virtuous in being a victim. Martyrs are virtuous and noble, but victims are just as likely to be bad as good. That is a relatively minor concern. Much more serious is crowning whole classes of people as "victims" and insisting that this notional victimhood entitles them to special consideration from society. The evil this creates dwarfs any imagined harm done to these groups of people. Indeed, every great evil of our time has been done in the name of that horrific monstrosity "social justice" on behalf of presumed groups of victims.

All social justice is, of course, pure injustice, because all justice is individual and personal. So tipping the scales of justice in favor of women or blacks is always wicked and vile, because it encourages immorality by the official "victims," and it punishes the innocent and the guilty in the official "victimizer" groups. No one judged by the standards of the grisly horror of social justice has any incentive to behave properly. Even worse, victimhood addiction reduces the official "victims" to a whimpering puddle of protoplasm that increasingly over time blames all its problems on more and more sinister phantasms of ogres and constructs its arguments into sillier and more pathetic grievances. If tomorrow these official "victims" were told that the problems related to their imagined victimhood had been solved, they would be forced to look in horror at the life they had made for themselves, so utterly dependent upon eternal and immutable victimhood. Just as bad, the crutch of victimhood must be supported by a vast array of well paid cadres whose whole economic livelihood depends upon never permitting the "victims" into confidence, happiness, and self-reliance. These cadres cannot even permit themselves privately to grasp the crippling effects of their "advocacy," and they can never, ever grasp the despicable treatment they insist be meted out to official "victimizer" classes, because the numbers of human lives they destroy this way and the pain they cause by their "advocacy, education, empowerment"...blah, blah, blah, is truly monstrous. This increasingly drives so-called academic research and government statistics, which are generated with no real controls or scrutiny as long as they perpetuate the particular victimhood in question. Does this sound extreme? Consider the political movement most passionately dedicated to protecting official "victims" and punishing official "victimizers": the National Socialist German Workers Party. Hitler and virtually all the Nazi leaders spoke often and passionately about the victimization of the German people by the Allied Powers, by the Bolsheviks, and most of all by the Jews. Hitler was said to have wept for the cause of "social justice." This Nazi victimhood addiction morphed into greater and greater nightmares, culminating in the Holocaust. Mussolini was just as closely tied to social justice as Hitler but with the important difference that Mussolini had only a vague and amorphous "victimizing" class, the "rich," and fascists were not remotely as heinous as the Nazis. Stalin made kulaks the victimizers of less successful farmers, leading to the Holodomor, which claimed an estimated 7 million lives. The more innocents the Nazis and Soviets murdered, the more deeply invested both these totalitarian regimes became in the holiness of their social justice jihads. Indeed, the more innocents are murdered, the more pressing the need to find other groups to fill the role of official "victimizers." Is there a cure for victimhood addiction? Nearly all of us have loved ones consumed by this addiction, so we ought to fondly hope that a real cure exists, but it is hard to see how the petulant and infantile brats raised on the noxious milk of social justice and official victimhood could ever be persuaded to see the radical treatment needed for that cure. This particular emotional and cognitive heroin is a habit harder to break than anything we can imagine. Withdrawal back into the real world, in which men and women, whites and blacks, rich and poor are judged based upon individual worth must be awful, but the soul-destroying addiction of victimhood is worse. Image: Eye-designs via Wikimedia Commons.