Benefits of Victim Status

Getting Ahead By Not Getting Ahead

If one spends any significant amount of time following the news and the roiling boil of American culture, it's impossible not to notice that various groups as well as individuals are continuing to jockey for the prize of being the most victimized. It seems that with high level victim status comes fame, fortune and special protection from the consequences of their acts of evil. Why on Earth would an organization of fascist thugs, bent on destroying lives and property throughout the land name itself Antifa rather than Protifa? Why name your organization Black Lives Matter if not to inculcate victim status?

Of course, there are those who go through life with a victim mentality. From the left leaning Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_mentality

A Scientific American article talks about it here. This article explains victim mentality occurring in individuals, and discusses how people are thought to develop a victim mentality.:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unraveling-the-mindset-of-victimhood/

These are people who truly feel like they are victims, not those who who are cynically using victim hood to gain things. They have a lack of empathy for others due to being focused on their own pains, they have a sense of moral superiority and they ruminate over past wrongs. This is something to break yourself of if you feel like you are going in that direction.

But enough of the personality disorders, that's really a different topic. Our topic is the use of victim status as a lever for attaining political power.

In the present time victim status brings benefits to your cause. Preferential treatment on hiring, political clout and a sense of moral superiority all come with the badge, and intellectual superiority may be claimed by those making the arguments. The attraction of the Left generally is that anyone who joins them is promised to be accorded the status of moral and intellectual superiority. It's attractive to those who suffer from victim mentality, giving the Left a large source of potential recruits.

An interesting aspect is that it is intended to be invisible, that is you must really feel sorry for the poor blighters and not recognize the ploy. Whenever there is a congressional budget battle leading to a partial government shutdown we are regaled with stories of the poor, victimized government workers shivering in the cold. (We don't hear stories about those who have lost their jobs due to excess government spending.)

The problem all of us face is; how do we recognize the victim card being played?

Whenever you listen to news, talking heads or political blather in general, ask yourself if the victim card is being played. It's a form of using peoples inherent decency against them. You will usually hear talk that makes it sound like it's already a given, that everyone knows that said group are victims, and only the simple minded think otherwise. Once you know to look for it it becomes apparent.

Always take as a given that any arguments you hear promoting some group will have a built in bias claiming victim hood. All lives matter, including of course black lives.

"You know, I had a new kind of thought on Black Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter thing. And the best way to explain it is if we're all sitting around at a table having dinner, and everybody gets pie except for you and you say, my pie matters, I don't have pie, and everybody at the table looks at you and says, I know, all pie matters, it shows that the people at the table aren't really listening." ~ Glenn Beck

I don't think most people buy into the victim status thing in their own lives, it's a convenient tool for the graspers for power.

"I belong to a bowling team with black and Latino coworkers. And when we get together and we talk about politics - I'm almost quoting him - he said, we don't talk about Black Lives Matters. We talk about what matters to our families. We talk about jobs, and we talk about the fate of the country. That is America, and you can reach those people." ~ Steve Inskeep

We can do our part to make America a better place simply by recognizing the usage of victim status in politics.

A short essay, but there's no need to prolong the agony.

Stay Brave, Stay Free