Its easier to be a victim than a hero even in peoples minds.

Sometimes you get tired of everything being a constant fight from the moment you were born.

Sometimes you are tired of grinding endlessly with little if anything to show for it, all because we threw a bad dice at birth.

It absolutely is tiring! Still there is nothing virtuous or noble about suffering itself.

As Marcus Aurelius once wrote, all men suffer, but not all men pity themselves. Somewhat tangentially: Thomas Aquinas once wrote that if we experience a loss, we may allow ourselves to grieve for a while, and then stop. The danger of sadness is that we may indulge it indefinitely and sink into despair.

A person who wallows in such despair and self-pity would be well served by considering whether he is poisoned by envy, perhaps the envy of egalitarianism. To paraphrase Chesterton, at least the aristocrats of old had the satisfaction of feeling superior than others. The egalitarian man cuts down all those he fears are better than he is (typically by denying the qualities of others)!

The majority of our suffering, especially the spiritual and psychological variety, is our own doing. There are plenty of people born with all sorts of conditions who live happy lives because they've accepted the immutable and made the best of the cards they were dealt. If self-pity deserves anything, it is not compassion, but contempt.

> The egalitarian man cuts down all those he fears are better than he is

Yeah or rather that man sees tbat often those who are better have counter-balanced that better by a marginal worse in other dimensions :)

Having personally struggled with serious depression and feelings of victimhood, I actually disagree.

I can confidently say that it is a lot easier to go through life not feeling like a victim.

It takes extra work and introspection to change states, but it is far easier in the long run.

> It takes extra work and introspection to change states,

If you can't achieve the activation energy needed to change, then staying stuck in that rut is the easiest thing you can do.

If there is actually no choice, it is the easiest, hardest, and only thing you can do.

My personal experience that activation energy comes from knowledge. The process of finding it can be more unpleasant but not necessarily harder

to put it a different way, the decent to rock bottom is painful but easy. Inflection only occurs when and if someone discovers or internalizes something new.

The irony here being that you claim to be a victim to claim the high ground in the debate.

It's like trying to explain water to a fish.

I don't claim moral moral highground based on my personal history.

I claim to be right based on the merits of my argument alone.

Which you claim based on personal history.

My history informs my claim, but I'm not saying that my experience defacto overrides or invalidates any other claim, experiential or otherwise.

Moreover, I specifically don't identify as a victim.

The important thing is that you've figured out a way to be superior to both.

Both what?

Do you not believe that some people are more knowledgeable or can have insights on any topic.

Do you have a point you are trying to make?

Prizes and rewards are given out for being the biggest victim, so it's natural that people want to out-victim one another for additional resources. Anytime there's resources at stake, people will do what they can to gain them. In Canada it's so perverse that it seems like everyday someone is outed, after gaining a prestigious position, for not having any indigenous heritage at all. But, they used that status to rapidly gain resources over competitors.

It's obvious, but apparently people don't want to believe it. This happens in the US too.

34% of white Americans who applied to colleges or universities admit to lying about being a racial minority on their application

48% of people who lied claimed to be Native American

3/4 of people who faked being a racial minority on their applications were accepted by the colleges to which they lied

https://www.intelligent.com/34-of-white-college-students-lie...

This is the problem with favoring equity over equality. Where equality’s aim is to reduce all bias in decision making, equity’s aim is to introduce bias for the benefit of a subset of the population. Naturally, people will vie to be in the population that the equity culture’s bias favors.

This is it; they're still the hero in their narrative, it's just that this hero overcomes massive victimization.

That they use the victimization as power over others may not even be consciously acknowledged by them, or others.

Which is sad because natives were massively victimized by the Canadian government. It's not exactly a prize or reward, more like a few peanuts being thrown at them by the government to shut up and bugger off.

Controversial views aside, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged really nailed the victimhood as cover for corruption narrative. The villains are that much more detestable because they're not competent people, they simply prevent others from out competing them through backroom deals, while claiming that it's to help the poor and downtrodden.

I'd suggest that anybody over 16 who uses Ayn Rand as an explanation (or model) for human behavior should spend a while exploring the humanities.

> The current woke culture in the West is somewhere between the Stalinist show trials and the Maoist struggle sessions.

Not yet. There's not as much murder yet. There are certianly parallels though. Kafka-trapping is mainstream; if you deny a political charge brought against you, that denial is seen as further evidence of your guilt. If you deny you're an -ist, that 'proves' you're so thoroughly -ist that you can't even perceive it about yourself.

Remember, HR has never been your friend. Even in the purest form of HR uninfected with politics, HR exist to protect the company from the workers. But as you have observed, HR are now becoming political officers charged with enforcing correct political thought.

I would have liked to see a substantive criticism or two, instead of this somewhat trite and really quite overused cliche.

There's plenty of areas to criticize Rand over (the fact that her rationality based / think for yourself movement became a cult of personality centered around her for example). That's why I tried the "Controversial views aside." In many ways Rand pioneered an effect that Trump would later turn into a strategy: have opponents who are so single-mindedly hateful and spiteful that they make you look better every time they attack you.

It makes it so very tough when Rand's writing could inform or elevate a topic. There's just no way to do so that won't inspire an attempt at a flame war. That said, this particular portion of Atlas Shrugged is perhaps the best illustration of what I referenced in my earlier post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCmJUobwKQk

Much better resources than Rand are Nietzsche and Scheler (I know Rand draws from the former, per her own admission, but she doesn't have the penetrating intellect of the others). The "slave morality" Nietzsche discusses is precisely this inverted morality founded on ressentiment[0] toward the strong. From the "Genealogy of Morals":

"There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, 'These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever of the opposite of a bird of prey must be good?', there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument - though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, 'We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb."

This particular quote is a bit facetious, I think, because elsewhere Nietzsche is rather disgusted with slave morality as life-denying instead of life-affirming. But even if we disagree with some of Nietzsche's conclusions and characterizations (as fun as he can be to read and as insightful as some of his writings are, he was a bit nuts and some of his criticisms misplaced), we can certainly observe that ressentiment and envy cause people to invert the moral order within themselves, thus paving the way for their own self-destruction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment

I think the idea is that it takes courage / grit to overcome adversity. Some people have faced real adversity. For example, growing up in a gang infested neighborhood, where your social network is mostly criminals and junkies is a serious handicap. Others are just lying to make themselves look better.

I find that victim hood and superiority complex tend to go hand in hand.

This is true (the article talks about some of what follows).

Feelings of weakness, inferiority, and envy, combined with pride, create the temptation to overcompensate (and involve all sorts of mental gymnastics involving denial, false fungibility of qualities, etc). So-called narcissists function this way which is why having their true character revealed causes such intense rage. It makes public what they feel about themselves, but wish to conceal.

Those who employ the victimhood strategy, specifically, lack the confidence or the ability to effectively bluff strength and will instead turn to manipulative and underhanded strategies like being a "nice guy", making others feel guilty, or trying to arouse feelings of pity in others in order to extract some good they could not, or believe they could not, receive otherwise. True victimhood presupposes injustice and injustice implies restitution and the legitimacy of some proportional degree of anger. Thus, by accepting a victim identity, entitled people rationalize (to themselves) their own chutzpah in making unjust claims of other people and demonizing and retaliating against those who refuse to be exploited by their emotional bullying. (This chutzpah is to be distinguished from boldness; fortune favors the bold, and the bold do not act from a dark place of entitlement, but the optimistic pursuit of opportunity.)

If they are winning, then they are the hero in their personal narrative. Victimhood is just another piece on the chess board for these people.

This is the root of my beef with the Beatitudes.

It's good to be hungry, because you will be well fed. It's bad to be well fed, because you will be hungry. Really? To me it seems like the Beatitudes make victimhood into virtue.

Note that it says:

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied." Matthew 5:6

This verse isn't talking about physical hunger caused by lack of food. Apparently if you read it in the original greek righteousness and justice are interchangable here. What it's saying is that people who suffer injustice in this life and hunger and thirst for that injustice to be made right will be satisfied.

And in Luke it says "Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry." So being fortunate in this life will put you off on a bad foot in the next?

Having a bad life is good, having a good life is bad. It's an inversion of common sense to make victimhood a virtue. Of course it plays well to commoners who see themselves as victims in societies with great inequality. It's not surprising to me that Christianity became so popular.

And in James it says: "Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you."

I think in both cases (the verse in Luke you mention which I believe is in Mary's Magnificat and this one in James) the idea is that if you were well fed now at the expense of the poor then woe to you - ie. if you exploited the poor so that you could be rich. You can see this theme in the prophets of the Hebrew bible as well. Also, there are wealthy people mentioned in the new testament (contributors to Paul's missions) who are commended for being generous. Wealth in itself isn't condemned, it's hoarding of wealth that's condemned.

Luke also says "Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets."

So it's bad to be well liked because some of the people who were well liked in the past had wrong beliefs or weren't good people? No sorry, I'd rather be popular. Why can't somebody be popular and good at the same time? Having lots of supportive social connections is good, saying otherwise is serving up cope for people who don't. Of course this plays well for the crowd because most people aren't as well liked as they would wish; Luke says their plight is actually a virtue so they can feel good about not being popular and pity those who are.

Note the part about the false prophets, though (that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets). They would make prophecies about how everything was going to be great so they could be tight with the king at the time. When in fact everything was about to go to shit. So they lied so they could have a good political position.

Being well liked at the expense of truth is often how the world works, but what's being said here is that it doesn't play well in the upside-down kingdom of God where the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

> Being well liked at the expense of truth is kind of how the world works

So there's no way to be well liked unless you tell lies? I don't believe that. I think that's cope for people who aren't well liked to feel morally superior to those who are. It's a form of sour grapes; I didn't want the grapes anyway because they're sour. I didn't want to be popular anyway, because those people are liars.

As an aside from the textual citations, it does seem that there is a theme in the bible which inverts suffering and salvation. This shows up multiple times, with Mortification of the flesh, anchorites, ect.

After all, Jesus dying on the cross is perhaps the most virtuous and aspirational acts.

As it relates to this conversation, it is interesting that the nobility suffering for the sake of others has been simplified to or conflated with simply the nobility of suffering.

It's also interesting to note that in large swaths of modern American Evangelical Christianity suffering is not only to be avoided at all costs, but there's a promise of prosperity (Prosperity Gospel/Charismatic circles - actually a pretty large portion of US Christianity). These teachings seem to be directly at odds with many of these verses.

> Prosperity Gospel [...] These teachings seem to be directly at odds with many of these verses.

Are they? They both follow the form of 'impoverish yourself now to receive rewards later.' Sure, one promises reward in the afterlife and one promises reward in this life, but for those who truly believe the afterlife is just as real as this life, I don't think there's much meaningful difference. To such people, both promised rewards are real and desirable.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had a famous critique of Christianity and modern Western morality that operated along similar lines, spelled out most famously in the book "On the Genealogy of Morals". He contrasts Classical virtue-based morality with the contemporary notion of the inherent virtue of suffering.

> People who suffered from oppression... and who were denied any effective recourse against them by relative powerlessness—developed a persistent, corrosive emotional pattern of resentful hatred against their enemies, which Nietzsche calls ressentiment. [1]

In his view modern society was poisoned by "ressentiment", leaving people unable to find authentic happiness as a result.

[1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/

Interesting idea.

It is hard to tell from the quote, but is he claiming that that modern views infer virtue from holding hatred/ resentment?

I think that for Nietzsche ressentiment is more of a toxic by-product that is generated when traditional aristocratic or virtue-based morality (where "good" equals success, excellence, victory, etc) is inverted into modern morality (where all the things that were previously held as bad like weakness, meekness, victimhood, etc are now "good"). He associated this so-called "slave morality" with Christianity but he also saw it as a coping mechanism that came about as humans learned how to contend with increasingly structured and regimented societies.

In his view this was an obstacle to true human flourishing, and he hoped for some kind of creative renewal where people invented new values that were more authentically life-affirming.

Wikisource has the book online: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Genealogy_of_Morals

Nietzsche is probably one of the most misinterpreted philosophers out there (I definitely consider him a thinker to "handle with care"), and I'm not necessarily advocating for the correctness of his views. But I think it's interesting to see how previous thinkers have anticipated a lot of our current debates and questions.

Those just seek approval from others. It's one of three undesireable lines of growth: by seeking approval from superiors, by desiring to look better than peers and by desiring to invoke fear. All three can be traced to the early childhood of the individual: those who grew up in fear will learn to see the world thru this lens and so on. The three desireable lines of growth are: by compassion to others, by seeking the truth and by action of self sacrifice (not necesserarily in the literal sense).