With in the past decade or so a sweeping change has taken place in the political, social, and moral landscape of America: the appearance and growth of the ideology and stance of victimization. This view holds that whatever happens to people--to me--comes about through forces and events outside their control and responsibility, so they are not to be blamed or held accountable. As such, I am a victim.
The victim attitude to stance has roots in facts: Some persons and groups, through no fault of their own, have been mistreated and are genuine victims. Furthermore, the stance of victimization does confer some immediate psychological, moral, and political benefits. Because of America's Christian heritage, which emphasizes compassion and forgiveness, we instinctively and intuitively feel compassion for genuine victims, and feel that it is the task of society or government to come to the aid of such victims. Genuine victims have a rightful claim--moral, financial, social, and political--against the victimizer. So, in the short run, at least, the victim stance confers power on the victim.
The problem, however, arises if I continue in the victim stance over the long term. Then, I somehow lose the ability to be responsible; I forfeit, as it were, any clime or ability to be a human free agent in charge of my own destiny. Victims have things happen to them; moral agents take responsibility for changing things. The two attitudes could not be more different or have more divergent consequences. Victims depend on the victimizer; agents are free to make and create, are responsible and accept responsibility. Agents have power from within; victims have only the power allowed them by their alleged victimizers. When the alleged victimizer rejects the victim's claim, the victim's power is broken, and the consequence is formless and, usually, irrational range at his fate.
The two most thorough and profound recent books on this issue have been Shelby Steel's The Content of Our Character (St.Martin's Press, 1990), on the tragedy of black-white relations, and Charles J. Sykes' A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character (St.Martin's Press, 1992) on the rise and general spread victimization ideology to every conceivable group in America. Victimization ideology, Steele writes, "is a formula that binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his states as a victim." Sykes details the rise of this ideology from its roots in Rousseau's romanticism, showing how it has subverted the older nations of human limitation, responsibility, and fallibility in favor of a no-fault, egoistic, entitlement-based culture. Ultimately,
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