The Fear of Responsibility
Thoughts on Victimhood and Power
Victimhood is how you stay a child. Through competence, the power that competence brings, and using that power responsibly, you become a grown-up.
To make yourself competent and powerful is, of course, a real risk. What if, after gaining that power, ugly sides of your nature are revealed? It’s much easier to continue living in victimhood and resentment. You lose out on the spoils of power, but you get to experience an addictively good intoxicant: feeling like you have the moral high ground.
Why do all lefties share a unreflected identification with people who fit into certain categories of victim? For the same reason so many women love Law and Order: SVU.
Why do all lefties resent those with power? For the same reason teenagers become sullen.
To give up your leftism means giving up your sense of victimhood and taking responsibility for your life. It used to happen when starting a family in your early twenties. Now that most people start families so late in life, victimhood is already too ingrained into their personalities for them to let it go.
The culture of collegiality in offices has changed. Men are wary of being seen as overly friendly and don't dare to, for example, while on a business trip together, have an end-of-day drink in the hotel bar with a female colleague. In colleges, professors have stopped thinking on-the-spot during lectures. They deliver neutral, pre-cleansed information, and get the hell out of the room before they get accused of a microaggression or some neonate form of insensitivity. Female professionals miss out on friendships that could advance their career, students miss out on seeing a knowledgeable mind making spontaneous connections. You play the victim, you won't be treated like an equal.
Dave Chappelle is celebrated by all those tired of woke domination of our culture, but he is still completely caught up in a victim mentality. The central point of his recent special, The Closer, was that black trumps trans in the oppression Olympics. He walked away from a show because he felt he was being pressured to make racially irresponsible jokes. It was his show; he could have resisted that pressure and made whatever jokes he wanted. And then, when the show went up on various streaming platforms without him getting any money for it, he recorded a short special all about how unfair this was. A man with an 8-figure net worth complaining about not getting paid for a show whose contract he broke because he didn’t feel like doing the work anymore. At the same time, he is forever reminding his audiences that he is fabulously wealthy and even claims the title of stand-up comedy’s GOAT. When you’re always looking down, you have to big yourself up. He will never write a joke like Chris Rock’s “N-words” vs Black People.
Despite the huge support Donald Trump got from white supremacists, he still brought into existence an unprecedented movement of black republicans. Black people who were fed up with how woke and Democrat discourse painted them into a corner of victimhood and resentment. In France, Marie le Pen's National Front has had incredible success in winning over Jewish and gay voters — and even winning many over as active members — despite the party's history of antisemitism and homophobia. Victimhood is an easy path, but many refuse to choose it.
Our perception of the world is guided by cognitive metaphors, and they vary between groups. The left sees the state as a nurturing mother; the right sees it as a strict father. The nurturing mother focuses on protection and fairness, the strict father on discipline and responsibility. When Covid hit, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson tried to be strict fathers, but the force behind the nurturing-mother discourse was too strong. Only in Sweden, ironically the archetypal nurturing-mother state, did the strict father stance win over and, typically for the metaphor, was in the end appreciated even by the initial objectors.
From Oliver Stone’s Nixon: “-Excuse me, sir. Are you saying you're going to recognize red China? That would cost us our strongest support.
-No, I can do this because I spent my whole career filling anti-communist credentials. If Kennedy or Johnson had tried it they'd have crucified him, and rightfully so.
-Damn risky Mr. President. Why don't we wait until the second term?
-This'll get me a second term.”
Only in Sweden had they filled enough nurturing-mother credentials to be able to pull off being the strict father at that moment.
From Jordan Peterson, the strict father par excellence: “...One of the things that Maya and I found when we were writing this paper — we were looking at the discourse that precedes genocide in genocidal states — was the enhancement of a sense of victimisation on the part of one of the groups, usually the group that's going to commit the genocide. First of all, their sense of being victims is much heightened by the demagogues who are trying to stir up this sort of hatred. So they basically say, 'look, you've been oppressed in a variety of ways, and these are the people who did it, and they're not going to stop doing it, and this time we're going to get them before they get us.' It's something like that. And so there's something very pathological about the enhancement of victimisation, which is, well... see, the problem as far as I'm concerned with it, is that it's not thought through very well, because there's a point that's being made, and the point is that people have been oppressed and they suffer. And that's true at that point. But then the proper framework from within which to interpret that, I believe, is that that's characteristic of life. You can't take it personally in some sense. And you can't divide the world neatly into perpetrators and victims. And you certainly can't divide the world neatly into perpetrators and victims and then assume that you're only in the victim class and then assume that that gives you certain, like, access to certain forms of redress, let's say. It gets dangerous very rapidly if you do that sort of thing.”