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.
Our society has turned into a cross between a Marxist academic conference and therapy session where Marxist terminology like “systemic racism” and therapy talk like “gaslighting narcissist” form key parts of the grammar of perpetual victimhood.
Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it.
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.
After the slaves were freed, some made long journeys to major cities, others built families and worked hard to provide for them. They perserved despite lynchings and racism. Over 150 years later, some of their descendants claim that nothing can be expected from them because they’re suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome even though the only place they’ve seen slavery is on television. That’s the difference between survivors and victims.
After the Holocaust, Jewish people who had seen their entire families killed in front of them remarried, had children and started their lives again. Often they didn’t even talk about what they had experienced until decades had passed. Others helped build a nation out of the desert sands. Now some of their great-grandchildren claim they’re so fragile they need safe spaces.
The same is true of all Americans. 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.
Survivors are motivated by love and duty. They understand that there is more to life than their own pain. They redeem their suffering by making their lives matter. That is the essence of the human ideal. It’s how nations and families are built. And it’s how our nation is coming apart.
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.
These creatures, who once handed out radical fliers at campus cafes and poisoned family reunions, went ‘viral’ through social media and generated legions of sympathetic followers. 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.
The difference between survivors and victims is that survivors have a larger purpose, while victims have made victimhood into their purpose. And they want it to be our purpose.
Politics has become a dysfunctional therapy session, an intersectional debate over whose pain is superior, and who is just faking it, as if nations are defined by individual pain rather than cultures of aspiration. New victimhood causes proliferate every day while the old ones fight it out. Whose pain is superior, feminists or transgender men? Trauma is our national resource now and there’s only so much of it to go around. Those who have the most are at the top.
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. Beyond economics, replacing ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ takes us from an equality of moral obligations to an equity of moral outcomes. And 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.
Victimhood views failure as a conspiracy, rather than a choice, and nations and societies that embrace victimhood quickly turn into failed states. America used to get things done. Now we no longer win wars or can even stock supermarkets. There are a thousand points of failure and they begin with a culture that is hostile to achievement and supportive of victimhood.
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.
Victimhood is an excuse for failure and so we’ve become an unserious society. Victims are incapable of thinking about anything except themselves and our culture has become stuck in the same narcissistic loop of personalities. Everyone wants to be a celebrity, to feel special, and to play the victim when the social media collective fails to give them the due that they deserve.
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.
Victims make a fetish of their pain. They are ‘in touch with their emotions’ because they inhabit them all the time. They are so busy selfishly feeling their feelings that they can’t be bothered to care about the impact on anyone else. Just as eskimos have many words for ‘snow’, victims have many ways to describe their pain. Their unhappiness is ‘trauma’, talking to people is ‘unpaid emotional labor’ and they spend all their time ‘processing’ or feeling their feelings.. Watching Netflix is ‘self-care’ to recover from all the ‘trauma’ of all their ‘unpaid emotional labor’.
Even their most ordinary activities are part of the fantastic drama that is their existence. Every breath they take is a labored ‘resistance’ to a vast systemic conspiracy out to destroy them.
And while such woke performative antics are more common among social media millennials than in everyday life, the underlying conviction that our emotions matter more than our responsibilities, that anger exempts us from morality, and truth takes a backseat to ‘my truth’ has spread throughout our culture with disastrous results on our functioning and our future.
A society is inspired by its leading figures and its culture is shaped by its stories. Victimhood has become our story. It pervades our classrooms, our fiction, our new myths and our discourse. It has left us in a state of arrested development because we have become incapable of moving forward. Instead of building new things, we rehash past history, purge ‘problematic’ figures and assign blame for the failures of the present to the dead history of the past.
Victimhood is obsessed with the past. Unlike survivors, victims never want to move forward. They want to remain tethered to the moments that defined them. America was always a nation that looked forward, that imagined the impossible and then realized it. Now, like many backward societies, it has become stuck in the past, rewriting its history to make its founding more evil, churning out excuses for today’s failures in the endless root causes for infinite victimhood.
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.
Excellent points.
One of the commenters recently made the point that a coalition of victims is inherently unstable, because the victims are liable to turn on each other at some point.
They sure do and, importantly, they become the worst bullies, and I think that is at the heart of victim hood, everyone will have seen it in the school playground when a victim of bullying finds someone weaker than themselves they become far worse.
Exactly. America’s “victims” today, just like so many of the foreigners in our country, feel totally entitled to everything without earning or deserving any of it. And many, many of them are leeches on every welfare service living off the earnings of those who work and quite content to do so.
“America was a nation of survivors.”
Respectfully disagree. America was — and will ever be, in the hearts of her true children — a nation of visionaries, of creators, and of heroes. She is and will ever be a nation of giants.
That’s anachronistic thinking as you’re living in a bygone era that is disappearing fast
Can you remember how quickly the Soviet Union collapsed ? Well something like that is going to happen to America and when the dust settles there will be at least two Americas . I wish it wasn’t so but it just is, and no amount of wishful thinking will make it otherwise
While your point is narrowly true, the author’s was more broadly so.
The Californian proposal of reparations is clearly inappropriate. It would only be paid once. That flaw is fatal.
Reparations must be open ended. And lifelong. Any recipient without funds, for any reason, and regardless of previous receipts, should be afforded additional financial infusion to attenuate the discomforture attributed to the unforgivable crimes perpetrated by dead people upon other dead people six generations ago.
Frugality is a White Man’s Burden. And he’ll need a lot of it to pay off this ancestral debt.
A single purple Caddie convertible with white tires and I B PIMP vanity plates won’t cut it. A string of Cadillac dealerships would just be starters.
That was sarcasm right?
I thought so when I wrote it.
“financial infusion to attenuate the discomforture” …………… pure poetry, even if discomfiture was misspelled !
They all want to claim their the victims of a nation they claim was founded on slavery which of course is Big old Lie
“Victimhood grants a moral superiority that liberates the victim from moral responsibility.“ This is why the ‘victim’ can do no wrong … in the eyes of the left.
Excellent essay … thank you, Daniel.
I call it criminal and terrorist take over.
Victimizers pretending to be victims.
Someone correctly observed that if you have the ability to single-handedly cancel another person, simply for daring to state something you didn’t like, you are NOT the victim in that equation.
Excellent points! When you focus on being a victim to the exclusion of everything else in life that is a huge roadblock to doing anything positive on your life .
As this excellent column alludes, it is all very narcissistic, isn’t it. Well, a society gets more of what it subsidizes and we have been subsidizing “victimhood” for more than half a century now. So here we are.
I think the author should have emphasized the fact that to be a victim, one must be weak and helpless. He could have explained that men can no longer be brave or strong, and women must give up their independence and return to being nothing more than wallflowers. That said….
I believe this essay was THE most important one that FP has ever posted. If this website existed for no other reason than to publish the vital truths Greenfield has penned here, it would have been worth it all. This bears periodic repeating. Every American should read and internalized what Daniel has explained so well: A nation of victims IS doomed to fail!
My Mother…. an incredible WOMAN.
Abused by her father
Abused by my father
Abused by a never ending succession of worthless men.
Welfare Mother
5 children
But not once did she claim to be a victim. NOT ONCE!
Her advice to us…
Carry your own water
Help is a hand up not a handout.
If you end up being a janitor you be the best damn broom pusher there ever was.
Her Mommy finger was a weapon of mass destruction. It came out and we moved. Quickly!
LIFE ISN’T FAIR!
She would be rolling over in her grave seeing how “pusssified” we ALL have become.
Truly astonishing what we have surrendered to a microscopic portion of our society.
For me…. It is time to just say NO!
IDEALISM born to despair
PUTNAM: “The idealist is born to despair. Because he has divorced his values from power, from the concrete conditions of interaction. If such a foundation for values were to mean we would in practice lose our great cherished gains of freedom, I too should be suspicious, but quite the opposite is the case. It is people who know how to fight and organize in a practical sense who alone keeps it and those who view “freedom” as a schoolbook wonder based on an abstract argument of the good never quite argue down their masters and turn to hate. ”Formulation of Values. 1957 pg. 7,
This is a powerful — even important — essay by an eloquent and intelligent man. But Mr. Greenfield needs to be on a different platform. It’s hard to accept his pointed denunciation of victimhood at face value on a forum that very recently offered a full-throated defense of Kanye West’s repugnant antisemitic behavior. You lose credibility when you help create victims then turn around and mock them for feeling victimized.
THE REAL DOMESTIC TERRORISTS SUPPORTED AND FUNDED BY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY who were recruited by the CPUSA and the Soviet KGB decades ago and today they are recruiting the NEXT GENERATION OF THE ENEMY WITHIN….. AND…………. GETTING AWAY WITH IT!
What people too often forget is that the Nazis weren’t some bizarre right-wing animal called a “fascist.” That was a canard the socialists came up with after the war to tar their opponents. The Nazis were open socialists whose nickname came from their full identity: National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). ANDREA WIDBURG
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee Introduces Bill Criminalizing ‘Conspiracy to Commit White Supremacy,’ Criticism of Non-White People
The bill would grant the department authority to “prosecute” persons engaged in such actions, with “records of white supremacy inspired hate crimes” maintained and annual reports provided.
“White supremacy” is another term for whites. Rep. Jackson-Lee is a disgrace to Congress. But black voters in her Houston district keep re-electing her. She’s a symptom of a much bigger problem: black pathology.
There are “victims” and there are actual victims of this woke culture, (or anti-culture). One that comes to mind is, Professor Jordon Peterson, soon to be stripped of his professional license to practice Psychology because of his political incorrect views. ( I pray that does not come to pass) !
” Watching Netflix is ‘self-care’…” – No wonder they’re so screwed up, lol.
“It fails because that is the only way its victims can succeed.” – Some people just aren’t ‘happy’ unless they’re unhappy. When I recognize someone like that, I give ’em what they want, fast and hard.
Great article Daniel.
Thanks.
Daniel, do you know the story of this Jew who lost his wife and children, murdered in a gas chamber, and who started a family again, then who lost that family in a fire, and who after that, started another family? I no longer remember his name, there was a film about him, the title of which I no longer remember. This story has always fascinated me, and I often remind it to people who place themselves as victims and get depressed.
Best.
If you think of yourself as a victim, then you are a victim. I am so sick of these chronic malcontents thinking the world owes them something. The world is not fair, you have to go out and fight for what you want. You have to work hard and have a goal.
If you don’t like America, then exercise your freedom and leave. There’s an entire continent of black people beckoning you. Leave and don’t come back.
Wee white ass soy boys from that fascist gang known as antifa need a swift kick up the rear end and black people in America need to learn that success is the best revenge and stop blaming everybody else for the situations they have created for themselves.
Palo Alto a Town in Northern California has the US 101 Freeway which travels north-south, creating Palo Alto and East Palo Alto, on the West Side sits Million Dollar Homes, clean Streets, Smart Shops, Cafes and Restaurants, on the East Side sits boarded up housing apartments, burned out buildings, garbage fills the Streets, Chassis of trashed Cars,no Cafes nor Restaurants, and young men hanging out on the corner with their Pants around their knees dealing Nickel and Dime Bags of Dope, and I need not mention who lives on which side, but I do ask… Why?.
Both sides live in the exact same climate.
As Malcolm X said when he returned from his Haji…” First we have to clean up the neighborhood”.. and look what they did to him….
You have raised the precise point upon which much debate turns. Why the gross difference? To what can it be attributed?
Nature vs. nurture. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Each individual has innate propensities that vary widely from person to person. Natural propensities can be harnessed for good or for evil – by nurture. There is valuable, dignified work for all and all need to work to create a great society.
We no longer have a national consensus upon what values are “good” or “evil,” and this is the fruit of multiculturalism. We no longer value all work, but demean much good and necessary work as unworthy. This creates the increasingly toxic stew in which we live and which we bequeath, to our horror, to our children.
We need to return to the Judeo-Christian culture that built western civilization without apology, recognizing its greatness. It is the ONLY culture that can have multi-ethnic peace. ANYONE can partake – ethnicity is immaterial. But as soon as we lose the faith and reasoning that governed our founding, we also lose the fragile thread and descend into warring tribes fighting over plunder.
Victim-Hood, is most of the time, too profitable for there to be a permanent solution to. Follow the money trail and you’ll discover why most claim to be victims. “The Love of Money, is the “Root” of all evil”