Victimhood

Victimhood

I first became aware of how people would exploit their victimhood way back in the 1980s when I had a friend who used to joke about how feminists classified people by their level of oppression; so a woman was oppressed but a black woman was more oppressed, and so on.  Nowadays we have endless spiels on the intersectionality of oppressed classes and feminist analysis.  The fact that our society actually funds this stuff, (and gives the people who spout it moral privilege to abuse and vilify) which no other society in the history of the world, ever, did, seems to be a fact that eludes the people who pursue it, perhaps because it doesn’t support their perpetual cries of their victimhood.

But I get ahead of myself.  The situation I seek to analyse, deconstruct and disarm of its weaponised content is that in which in our contemporary western society a person can amplify their status by claiming some kind of suffering or ‘victimhood’.

The first thing I need to make absolutely clear is that I am not promoting making people suffer, or promoting ‘victimisation’ in any way.  This is absolutely in no way the same thing.

The ‘Victim Mentality’ has several different aspects. 

Firstly, there is the feeling that the subject has that they have been a victim in some way.  That’s not difficult, most people at some stage in their lives have experienced some negative experience.

The next stage is the important one.  You could just get over it, or deal with it constructively if it is a larger issue, which might involve taking countermeasures such as legal recourse.  This may or may not be a good thing or satisfactory.  The real negative downturn occurs when someone decides that in some way this makes them unique, that they have suffered more than others and that this is a mealticket, or at least something which can be used to exploit others. 

This isn’t necessarily a conscious decision, it can easily be an unconscious chip on the shoulder that just gets in the way, a grudge that is borne as if it were natural.

What has happened over the last half century or so is that this has become weaponised through the action of Cultural Marxism.  It is my firm conviction that this must be deliberate, at least in those who seeded and promoted these social attitudes.

This is closely linked with empathy.  If someone finds that by playing on their ‘victimhood’ of whatever form, that they can elicit ‘empathic’ behaviour from those around them, then that playing will be reinforced.  Someone recently suggested to me that they believed that Psychology was ‘no more scientific’ than Politics and Sociology.  And yet neither of these forms of social study have anything approaching the strength of learning theory as far back as a century or more, with Pavlov, Watson or Skinner.  If you associate stimuli together, they will be thought of together, and if a response is reinforced with a pleasurable stimulus, a reward, then its recurrence will be encouraged.  The cultural marxists know all about negative reinforcement, because they employ it all the time in their name calling, which is intended to ‘extinguish’ your behaviour, as the technical term goes.

Feminists and teachers of Gender Studies seem unaware of these basic scientific facts, other than the last.

I am simply pointing out that displays of ‘victimhood’ get rewarded, and so become more frequent, whereas they claim that this is just social justice in action.

At the root of this is ‘empathy’.  We are told it is important to be empathic.  Certainly we as human beings have the capacity for empathy, but if we are empathic with every creature in the entire universe, we would never have the mental attention to deal with our own concerns.

In the summer of 1974, I took a tab of LSD, of which there was plenty around at the time.  I remember walking in some beautiful gardens and it was lovely.  I remember thinking that I seemed to have no boundaries and felt that I was one with it all.  When I came down a bit I realised that I had for a while lost any sense of my ego or identity, and whilst it was an extraordinary experience, was not one which it would be very practical to experience very often, or in less pleasant conditions.

Empathy is like that.  We see images of people suffering on our screens.  Images, which in a world before photography, newsreels, tv or internet we simply would never see.  Now, all of a sudden, millions of people are looking at images of some poor starving child thousands of miles away.

This brings the opportunity for guilt tripping in a big way.  The media manipulators are then on to us all to guilt us into how we should be ‘doing something’ for these people, while they are entirely selective about which suffering children they show to us.  The suffering homeless of our own people are rarely shown to us in such a way, or the children of some state that is out of favour with the power elite.

‘Victimhood’ is paraded before us, and yet, because it is only on a screen, there is nothing we can actually do, but feel bad about it, and perhaps reach for the credit card to make a donation.

Now this weaponised guilt and compassion extraction has been ramped up with ‘white guilt’, ‘privilege’, all manner of vilifications against men and European culture and peoples.  But here we see the point where it diverges from its source.  The suffering of others may be something we can or can’t do something about, should or shouldn’t do something about, but the weaponised form shoots its barbs right into your entrails, because, whatever you do decide, you are guilty!

This is a kind of ‘Original Sin’ which White people especially, and White Men most particularly, are apparently guilty of.  You may belong to an ancestral group which has never had any association with colonisation, slavery or exploitation of other peoples, but the very fact that you live in a prosperous, well ordered and law abiding culture is in itself cause for attack, because you aren’t suffering like the Victims!

It is based on having to give way to someone else’s pain and suffering.  This may have nothing to do with you at all.  Or it may be self inflicted, or the result of living in a culture where these things are commonplace.  The causes are irrelevant.  The only thing of importance is that people are made to feel bad about themselves, so that they give away their power to those who claim to be victims, or more likely, those who falsely claim to act in their interests.

A brief aside here.  I have always thought it strange, perhaps just because I understand the meaning of words, that when a child dies prematurely, you often hear that ‘tributes’ are given.  Tributes, are ‘a sign of respect or admiration, an award to honour a person's accomplishments. A famous director receives a lifetime achievement award as a tribute… etc’

http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/tribute

This displays something of the inappropriate mindset of the victim mentality, which has to give a kind of worship or applause to the sufferer.  To give ‘Tributes’ to a child who has no accomplishments, however much it might be loved, is just an inappropriate concept which places value on someone simply because they have suffered, and for no other reason.

So this valuing of suffering, regardless of how or why it occurs, as some kind of personal achievement which puts the subject above others who have not experienced that suffering, has become a moral right in our society.  Even if someone dies while seeking to illegally enter another country they are lionised as martyrs, though they might have caused the deaths of others at the same time.  It is as if every single person on the planet were somehow deified like Jesus for having suffered in some manner or other.  And meanwhile, this is used to disempower that person who has not suffered, or apparently not.

The conditioning has been going on so long that it is lost in the background.

And as with all Cultural Marxist conditioning, the true values are upside down.  Sure, there are occasions when apologies or reparation might be of some help, but the real triumph is in the hearts of those who can put their past defeats behind them and go forward with neither bitterness nor resentment.  The SPLC earns no plaudits for its endless victim exploitation after forty years of Affirmative Action, and massive black on white crime (I was astonished when I heard the figures).  Muslims in Britain whine about the ‘oppressive’ history of the Crusades, but manage to forget the 1,400 year Jihad against freedom and the civilisation of the West.

These people are cowards who cannot win on the truth, so they have to work on disarming the minds of their opponents.  Although Sun Tzu, the author of the ancient text ‘The Art of War’ might approve, since he recommends that to win without fighting is the goal.

But the proponents of the Victim mentality are essentially sore losers whose only recourse is to shout ‘No fair’ and the trouble is, that we are so fair that we are disarmed and we stop defending ourselves in order to get into self examination and doubt and start questioning whether we had been unfair.

As Stefan Molyneux brilliantly demonstrates in this video, empathy given to someone who does not reciprocate is wilful collaboration with the enemy.  They will suck you dry, as you give your all to convince them how tolerant, open minded and multicultural you are.  They don’t give a flying ****.

I posted this video on a cultural marxist thread I was commenting on, and I got a response which really made me want to throw up, because it was the typical ‘this is how you become empathic and if you don’t you are being inhuman and cruel’.  If you aren’t empathic all the time, you are a bad person.

So we should be empathic with our murderers and enslavers it seems.  If we aren’t then we are racists! We have been led down the path and deceived.

I would suggest that you look up John Woolman, a 17th Century Puritan who felt intense guilt that he cared more for his own children than for some unknown child who might (or might not) be starving on the other side of the world.  This is a kind of neurosis, or perhaps even psychosis which has absolutely no survival adaptive value for the person who it afflicts, and is quite possibly counter adaptive in its distraction..

 

Cases should be judged on their merits and we should not assume that everyone has good intentions.  Even those can lead to hell as the saying goes.  I see memes admonishing us not to judge people.  Equally I wish we would see memes admonishing us to not trust without that trust having been earned.  Stefan’s example of not telling a murderer who wanted to kill your wife where she is demonstrates clearly why we should not feel obliged to tell the truth or be empathic with people who do not have our best interests at heart, or whom we at least have reasonable doubts about.

I always found myself getting twitchy watching episodes of Star Trek in which Picard or Janeaway would trust an unknown alien vessel and drop their shields without any more reason than saying that ‘a truly civilised race would be peaceful’ or asserting that showing trust was a good thing as it encouraged the aliens to do the same thing.  I don’t know if Kirk ever did that, I may be wrong, but I suspect it was a later development.  Frankly, in a real situation that kind of behaviour would be reckless, and probably in direct contravention of standing orders..

I can’t help feeling that there are some manipulated religious concepts and feelings here.  We have the ‘Original Sin’ of the White Privileged, and the sanctification of the sufferers, like Dives and Lazarus in the parable that Jesus gave of the poor man in Heaven and the Rich Man in Hell.  Perhaps the Rich Man deserved to be in Hell, but surely not just for being rich, and perhaps Lazarus deserved Heaven, but surely not just because he was poor.

After having been a Christian for most of my life, off and on at least, a year or so ago I started to realise how these kind of Christian tales and mythology weaken the mind so as to feel guilt over things which are associated with success, and a feeling of somehow being beholden to the ‘Victim’, who becomes sanctified.  I have to reiterate that I am not defending cruelty or bad treatment, but that ‘Victims’ can become so in an infinite variety of ways, and if that involves becoming so in a way that was self caused, then no-one else should feel guilt about it, but rather that person should take responsibility, and not expect someone whom they can exploit to come and rescue them.  Images of Africans on overladen rafts in the Mediterranean come to mind.

In some cases of course, there is not even any suffering or real victimhood.  The endless moaning of feminists about a society in which women are held in higher esteem than any other culture in the history of  world, and in which men endure extreme hardship to secure the safety of their women and children is wearisome.  It is simply embarrassing to hear these people playing the victim while they claim that men are becoming ‘obsolete’.  Meanwhile almost all construction and infrastructure maintenance is done by men, and often in harsh and dangerous conditions.

The cries of ‘Victim’ have become too shrill and hysterical to be taken seriously any more whether they come from feminists, migrants or social justice warriors.  It has become an exploitable meme that must be resisted at all costs as it has become perhaps our prime weakness.  Literally millions of people are attaching themselves to our civilisation with no thought, as John Kennedy said, of ‘ask[ing] what you can do for your country’ but only of how they can exploit it for their own ends, which now are looking much like the conversion of our society into the one that many of them came from.

And this from the exploitation of our compassion for their suffering and victimhood.

What they fail to understand is that there is a psychological process that goes beyond compassion.  When someone realises that their compassion has been played and exploited the emotion is entirely reversed, and that is an absolutely natural instinct for survival.  That which has betrayed you must be eliminated, or it will do it again.

Othering

Othering

The ‘Other’ was coined as a philosophical concept by GFW Hegel some two centuries ago as a counterpoint to the Self. 

In modern sociological and feminist discourse it has become a weaponised term.  It is not, as someone once suggested to me, a typo of 'Mothering'!

Society is built of in-groups who have normative values and behaviours.  This is the way that humans have evolved.  We might see it in early nomadic ice age tribes, or in the guild structures of mediaeval towns.  Ethnic groups have clustered together, just as those of similar trade or economic standing have always done, or children, women and men.

Modern feminist debate often centres around demonising what they describe as ‘Othering’.  To ‘Other’ someone is to see them as ‘Other’ to your social group.  This is considered very bad by feminists.  Since the current moral imperative is to be ‘inclusive’ and as ‘We Are All One’ we must not perceive anyone as ‘Other’ to ourselves, even if they are a stranger. 

As was recognised by Hegel, ‘Otherness’ is a logically necessary concept in describing the world if we are not to resort to solipsism, and yet modern thought seeks to collapse the distinction between Inner and Outer, whether that be psychologically Inner and Outer, or materially.

I have been somewhat incredulous at the ludicrous extent to which this is politicised and used as an attempted weapon of social control.  This amusing little website claims that ‘There are no others’.  None at all.  While it is admitted that ‘there’s a powerful evolutionary drive to identify in some way with a tribe of people who are “like you” ’ it nonetheless argues that this leads to an ‘insidious’ inclination to ‘other’ people.

https://therearenoothers.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/othering-101-what-is-othering/

Really all it is saying is that the writer doesn’t like the fact that the creation of in-groups as an evolutionary strategy exists.  This seems to be based on some kind of assumption that we have moved beyond the need for such survival strategies.  Feminism sees any group which has achieved ‘hegemonic’ stature as essentially ‘oppressive’, despite the fact that these kind of cultures provide stable milieus for complex societies.

This seems to me to be either a catastrophically naïve error or a purposefully intended attempt to undermine what must be a basic survival instinct.  Stay with those who are like yourself.  They share your genes and your culture.  If you stick together you have a better chance of survival.  Allowing strangers into your midst engages unnecessary risk.  The ‘Other’ may in time become friend, but it needs to earn that trust, that friendship.  The feminist wants you to give that trust without it having been earned, and if you don’t you are a bad person.

I imagine my reader will by now have surmised that there is a connection here with the psychology of the migrant invasion in Europe, November 2015.  The feminist sees the traditional protection of territory as ‘Othering’ the outsider, despite the fact that limited resources are a very important factor here.  Since in that ideology ‘There is no Other’ everyone is part of our own Global, Universal Tribe in the Global Village.

And yet simple game theory will inform us that unless the incomer respects the values of the group that it is accepted into, the system will collapse. 

This is a classic Cultural Marxist move in which reality is inverted and the truth turned upside down.  In the long established way of the world, life and evolution, creatures established their territories.  The dominant members of these tribes and clans would be responsible for defending them from ‘Others’;  but now, the alpha males who previously were responsible for maintaining the boundaries and protecting their people are now made to be the enemy, and the enemies who would invade are encouraged to do so and celebrated for it.

What we see taking place with various people in the aftermath of the Paris Bataclan massacre who are urging us to take more refugees to show our compassion is a pathological expression of this refusal to recognise the ‘Other’, or to see beyond the immediate situation at the larger consequences of endless mixing with it.  The Muslims all know that we are each Other to the Other, but too many Europeans delude themselves that this is not so, that ‘There is no other’.  That to ‘Other’ someone is to dehumanise them.

And so the Liberal European population has been brainwashed into laying down their arms, into refusing to stand up for themselves because we have to ‘treat others as ourselves’.  Everyone?  Does that mean we have to give them all our stuff?  House and feed them?  Let them destroy our civilisation?  One refugee, fine.  A million?  You have to think again.  Probably half the population of the world would like to get into Europe and get a Social Security cheque.  We have to defend against this.  It is not evil to seek to survive in the face of millions who would seek to exploit your civilisation. 

This is about boundaries.  One of the most important factors in human development is the establishment of personal boundaries.  To have a sense of responsibility for oneself and not to over rely or intrude on another.  Systems Theory tells us that we need cell walls, osmotic membranes that protect, select and filter what is permitted to come into the cell.  This is interface between Self and Other.  Where the Known meets the Unknown.

It is also about the poor countries who are losing their most energetic young people to a grandiose and false dream of seeking their fortune in the golden paved streets of Europe.  The Pied Piper of Mr Soros is enticing them all away form their own countries to destroy others.  Villages in West Africa have collapsing economies because all the young men are taking ‘the back way’ across the Maghreb to come to Europe and get rich.  There are downsides for others than ourselves.

We are going to see an interesting process in the coming weeks following the Friday 13^th massacre.  The politicians, liberals and general leftists are going to insist that we keep taking more migrants, insisting that we ‘shouldn’t give in to fear’ and that turning migrants away would in some way be ‘giving terrorists what they want’.  And yet we have already seen borders being closed.  Sweden had already, incredibly, closed its border before the atrocity, simply on the basis of there being too many causing a ‘threat to public order’.

A large number of State Governors in the USA have declared they will not be taking Syrian ‘refugees’ following the atrocities, and France has closed its borders.  This is clearly a chaos situation which is not going to improve unless measures are taken to prevent further deterioration of the situation.  It will doubtless continue to slide for a while as the EU leaders prevaricate.  Meanwhile the resolve of the European peoples is rising.  It is quite clear that the Videgrad 4 ~ Poland, Czech/Slovakia and Hungary are taking a firm stand and that is important for Europe as a whole.  These countries, and others in the East, still have ancestral memories of the Ottoman Empire and its depredations over hundreds of years.

They know that all civilisations periodically face the ‘Other’, and that it is in this that they are tested.  A nation, people or civilisation who are unable to distinguish what is ‘Other’ has lost its sense of Self, of Identity, and is vulnerable to being taken by the ‘Other’ as New Orleans was to being flooded by the sea when the levees broke.

Defence against the ‘Other’ is what all civilisation has ever been about, it is the ancient myth of Osiris keeping back the chaos of Set and the desert.  A civilisation or nation that opens its arms to the ‘Other’ has lost the will to live and submits to its own demise. 

The war for the soul of Europe has now begun.  We must find our Self, and repel the Other.  The alternative is for Europe, the jewel of civilisation, to sink into an endless night of oblivion, as chaos rushes in and its light is extinguished.