One of Christianity’s contributions to civilization has been a startling compassion for the victim.(Jesus of Nazareth): The poor, the outcast, the crippled, diseased, blind, and demon-possessed are his prizes. He treasures children and magnifies women. He turns the sacrificial system upside down not only by valuing the victim, but by becoming the victim. He accepts the victim role and willingly becomes “the Lamb of God” who takes away sin of the world. He defeats the sacrificial system by embracing it. He breaks it from the inside. For the last two thousand years, the world has been learning that the victim is the hero.
The problem is that everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. Being a victim is fashionable—ironically, becoming bullied is now the best way to bully others. It works like this: If you want to move forward in the world, make progress for you and your tribe, further your ambitions, justify your immoral actions, grab a bigger piece of the pie, and elbow others away from the trough, simply present yourself and your tribe as victims. Once you successfully portray yourselves as a poor, outcast, persecuted, minority group you instantly gain the sympathy of all.
The first key to success in this campaign is to portray your victim condition as something over which you have no control. This is clear when the victim group is a racial or ethnic minority. The same sense of unjust destiny has to be produced for other groups. So the feminists have exploited the technique to portray all women as downtrodden. Homosexual campaigners have likewise insisted that their condition is something they were born with, and now anyone with a sexual proclivity that is other than heterosexual can be portrayed as a misunderstood and persecuted victim.
People suffering from any kind of illness, disability, or misfortune are victims of some sort of injustice, cruelty, or neglect. Those who suffer from poverty, addiction, broken families, psychological problems, emotional distress, or just plain unhappiness are victims too. The victim mentality is linked with an entitlement culture: Someone must be culpable for the unhappiness of the victims because someone should be responsible for making them happy.
The second step in effective victim-campaigning is to accumulate and disseminate the propaganda. Academic papers must be written. Sociological studies must be undertaken. Groundbreaking books must be published. Stories of the particular minority group being persecuted must make front page news. The whimpers of the persecuted must rise to heaven. The shock at their victimhood must be expressed as “sadness,” “concern,” and “regret.” If one is not sympathetic, if one is reticent to pour balm in the victim’s wounds, then the bullying begins. You must recognize the victim. You must be sympathetic. You must be tolerant. You must join the campaign to help the victim, solve their problems, and make them happy at last. If you do not, you are not only hard-hearted, you are part of the problem.
The third stage of the campaign is the release of anger. Once the victim is identified and the information is widespread, the rage can be released. The anger must be expressed because, without knowing it, a new cycle of tribal scapegoating has developed. As the tribe gathers around the victim in sympathy, they must find the culprit, and their search for the culprit (whether he is guilty or not does not matter) sends them on the same frantic scapegoating quest that created their victim in the first place. The supposed persecutors have now become the persecuted. The unhappiness of the tribe (which presents itself as sympathy for the victim) is now focused on violence against the new victim—and so the cycle of sin and irrational rage continues.
Read more here.
No comments:
Post a Comment