Self-Victimisation

We see it everywhere and who can lay blame?  It signifies our times and times past, which we thought were dead, but were only coughing up yet more blood.

Recently, we reviewed Pascal Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt and in the present context, it is worth quoting from that eloquent, thoughtful and largely instinctive (rather than empirical) book, in the current context:

But there is also the danger of transforming these groups’ suffering into a kind of sanctuary, if necessary by embodying it in a law, of making it an impenetrable bastion…We no longer create our own lives, we repeat the injuries of former times. What victimist thought resuscitates is the old religious category of the curse. How then can we avoid transforming ourselves into lobbies of professional sufferers, competing with others for market share and the martyr’s crown?…Victimization would be a kind of savage positive discrimination , a way of giving oneself a free pass when all legal and political recourse have been exhausted.  To call oneself a victim is to make oneself a candidate for exception; perhaps that is an indispensable stage that has to be passed through by a minority that is reconstructing itself and reconquering its dignity.  But it is a two-edged blade.