Victimology bites
<p>Dr. Richard Friedman&#8217;s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/health/23mind.html?ref=health">Sabotaging Success, but to What End?</a>, published 2010-03-22 in the New York Times, is about an instantly recognizable pattern &mdash; people who sabotage themselves so they can feel like martyred victims of an uncaring world.</p>
<p>The piece is insightful and even funny in a bleak sort of way, but as I read through it I felt an increasing sense that there was something missing from this story.  I was nearly at the end before I realized what had been lurking unspoken in Dr. Friedman&#8217;s account.  But the crucial clue had been there from the beginning, when he writes of one patient &#8220;In fact, her status as an injured party afforded her a psychological advantage: she felt morally superior to everyone she felt had mistreated her. This was a role she had no intention of giving up.&#8221;  Where&#8230;now, where had I heard that song before?</p>
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<p>And the answer is: politics!  This is what&#8217;s missing from Friedman&#8217;s account.  He, and his patients, and everyone else nowadays, live in a culture saturated with the lesson that playing the victim card is the fastest route to power over others.  &#8220;Help, help, I&#8217;m being repressed!&#8221; goes up the cry, and legions of professional grievance-mongers materialize more swiftly than the djinn of the lamp.  Indignation is publicly indignated.  One dares not even laugh at such posturing lest one be pilloried for &#8220;insensitivity&#8221;. Laws are passed.  And the victim gets to become the oppressor while still collecting all the bennies of martyrdom. Such a deal!</p>
<p>And where might Friedman&#8217;s patients have learned the tactics of this strategy? By his own account, he has &#8220;intelligent and articulate&#8221; patients. I&#8217;m guessing they all went to college, where the student hours that used to be filled with trivialities like the heritage of western civilization are now increasingly consumed by &#8220;sensitivity&#8221; training, and life outside the lecture halls is regulated by speech and behavior codes so punishing in the hands of designated-victim groups that they&#8217;d be worthy of George Orwell&#8217;s Ministry of Truth.</p>
<p>Full circle; after decades of hearing from the left that the personal is political, Friedman&#8217;s patients are the political become personal with a vengeance.  No surprise that an article in the New York Times would miss that elephant, though; this is the newspaper about which it can be said that the famous parody headline &#8220;World To End Tomorrow; Women, Minorities Most Affected&#8221; was a good spoof mainly because it was nigh-indistinguishable from a lot of what they actually print.  The aptness of Friedman&#8217;s article appearing in the house organ of the limousine left is extreme; the jokes write themselves, and the unintended ironies just don&#8217;t stop.</p>
<p>Perhaps you think I&#8217;m snarking because I feel left out?  No; I could have played the victim card myself, you betcha.  Cerebral palsy, oooh, that&#8217;s &#8220;disabled&#8221;, and for starters it qualifies you for a premium parking space pretty much anywhere; we&#8217;re told to ignore the regulatory taking of the lot owner&#8217;s property and the deadweight drag on the economy because those spaces might as well be unusable most of the time. What does a little thing like costs inflicted on third parties matter when the political class is doing it for the poooor opppresssed viiictiiiims?</p>
<p>For myself, I refuse.  I prefer self-respect to privileged treatment.  Friedman&#8217;s article, despite its blind spot, is valuable because it exhibits the results of making the victim card into an ace.  You get more victims, duh&#8230;and not just in the form of increasingly splintered and contrived identity groups jockeying for sweeteners from the political class, either. Individuals will internalize this strategy, too.  You&#8217;ll get the kind of privileged, &#8220;intelligent and articulate&#8221; losers Friedman sees every day &mdash; useless to themselves and a misery to everyone around them.</p>
<p>The unintended ironies do not end with Friedman&#8217;s article, but continues with <a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/playing-the-victim/">responses to it</a>. The gravamen of which was mainly that Friedman was a bad person for writing about self-sabotagers so disdainfully, and who can blame them for not expecting a meanie like him not to be helpful?</p>
<p>These responses illustrate something else that politicized victimology has done to us; it has eroded the distinction between victims and trash.  Before the welfare state, people used to talk of the &#8220;deserving poor&#8221;, distinguishing those who could succeed on their own character if given a little crucial help from the bone-idle, slothful, and irredeemably irresponsible.  We used to be able to make a parallel distinction between people who&#8217;d failed through bad luck or adverse circumstances and people who have <em>chosen</em> failure and magnify their slights because that&#8217;s a role they have no intention of giving up.  </p>
<p>The former are victims who deserve our help, if they are not too proud to take it (and it&#8217;s usually better for their children if they are too proud).  The latter are trash &mdash;  chronic, self-programmed losers.  They deserve the contempt they work so hard  to earn, and we should give it to them.  Not just because it&#8217;s the appropriate response to them as individuals, but because it&#8217;s a bad thing for society when we reward chronic losers as though they really <em>are</em> morally superior to the rest of us.  That way lies nothing but civilizational suicide on the installment plan.</p>
<p>That is why I congratulate Dr. Friedman on his disdain for these people;.  it&#8217;s entirely healthy and appropriate.  And that is also why I vow to be as nasty as I can to the next person waving the &#8220;I&#8217;m a victim!&#8221; banner in my face.  Black, gay, transgendered, learning-disabled, or whatever the designated victim group of the week is &mdash; being that thing is not necessarily a flaw, but playing the victim card for a position of moral and political superiority definitely is. </p>
<p>For a better future, demand that individuals get respect the old-fashioned way &mdash; by <em>earning</em> it.</p>
