Victimhood Is Not a Virtue

If you get unjustly beat up, that means the attacker is bad, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you are good. Being the victim of oppression doesn’t automatically make any individual, or any group, automatically noble and virtuous. Bad people can be wrongfully injured too, and they don’t like it either. A lot of people being mistreated today would, if given the chance, be mistreating others tomorrow. The sign of being a decent human being is not whether you are being abused; it’s whether, given the opportunity, you would refrain from abusing others.

For example, in this country’s history different minority groups—blacks, homosexuals, American Indians, etc.—have been brutalized. But all those groups are still just made up of mere mortal people, and many of the individuals in those groups would be just as quick to mistreat others if the power was in their hands. If you doubt this, watch any political campaign. When the Democrats are in power, the Republicans rightly complain about being forced to comply with a leftist agenda. But the moment the Republicans are in power, the tables turn, and then the Democrats rightly complain about being forced to comply with a right-wing agenda.

In a sense, you could say that both of them deserve it. If you play a game where you try to forcibly control others, and you lose the game, and then they forcibly control you, that doesn’t make you one bit more virtuous; it just makes you a slightly less successful tyrant. You could say that a sort of side corollary of, “Do unto others as you would have done onto you,” is, “If you do it to others, don’t be shocked and offended when they do it to you.”

In South Africa, for a long time British whites inflicted severe oppression, even murder, upon black Africans. Now some black Africans are doing the same thing in the other direction. And oppressors always have some excuse for why it’s okay, even necessary, when they do it. But it’s still just people wanting power over other people. And being a violent thug doesn’t become noble and righteous just because you’re in a certain demographic category.

Unfortunately, Hollywood movies tend to reinforce the bogus notion that the oppressed people are the good people. And this false impression is why certain groups try so hard to achieve and maintain “victim status” in the eyes of the public, so that their own nastiness gets judged less harshly, or not at all. For example, someone who opposes the violent, terroristic, mass-murdering ruling class of Israel can expect to be called “anti-semitic,” and compared to Hitler. The ultimate and sad irony is that the authoritarian, militaristic state of Israel in many ways resembles the Third Reich. Jews are just people, and they can be oppressors just as much as they can be the oppressed.

Another example is when people declare that black people cannot be racist, which is a profoundly ridiculous assertion, especially when there are quite a few examples of some black individuals committing violence against white people, and openly admitting that it was because those people were white. And the absurd pack-mentality behind that is shared by some whites, who think that violent thugs should be judged and condemned less harshly if they belong to a certain demographic category. (Ironically, that is racism, and exactly what Martin Luther King, Jr. railed against: judging a man by the color of his skin, instead of the content of his character.)

The problem is when people assign virtue or vice, credit or blame, to entire categories of people, rather than to those individuals who choose to commit certain actions. The sad truth is that, because violence begets violence, and being abused often creates new abusers, those who are victimized by authoritarian aggression are often the most eager to grab for the reins of power to become the new authoritarian aggressors. One injustice is often used as the excuse to impose a new injustice.

A fine fictional example is “Escape From Enlightenment,” a story that takes place in a world where those nasty, violent, oppressive heterosexual males have been put in their place, and now the world is ruled by women—lesbian women, to be precise. (I found it rather amusing that some people, either from the description of the plot, or from reading the book, thought the book must be a description of what Tessa was actually advocating.)

http://www.escapefe.com

While getting bullied should earn you sympathy, it does not, in and of itself, make you virtuous. Being weak is not a virtue, either. If you didn’t victimize others, simply because you didn’t have the ability or the chance to, that doesn’t make you noble. When you’ve been given the opportunity to dominate others, and you chose not to, that is what makes you virtuous. Unfortunately, no one who votes for a ruler can claim such a virtue. And in the recent insane spectacle known as a “presidential election,” it could hardly have been a more glaring example of two groups of rabid control freaks, each desperately trying for the chance to forcibly dominate the other.

I want everyone to be free, but I might settle for a world in which only those who choose to fight over the “Ring of Power” could be victimized by that power, while those who choose non-aggression and peaceful coexistence would be beyond its reach. But alas, that’s not the world we live in.

Though this may seem obscure and random, I will leave you with a quote from Emanuel Swedenborg (it doesn’t matter if you know who he is, or anything about the religion based on his writings). This is from a passage where he is describing what Hell is like:

“The subordinations in hell are those of despotic authority, and consequently of severity; for he who commands, rages fiercely against those who do not favor all his commands; for every one regards another as his enemy, although outwardly as a friend for the sake of banding together against the violence of others. This banding together is like that of robbers. They who are subordinate continually aspire to rule, and also frequently break forth in revolt, and then the conditions there are lamentable, for then there are severities and cruelties; and this takes place by alternations.” (Arcana Coelestia, 7773)