Real Old Lady Ground Controller: This is ground control, you don’t appear to have flight clearance.
Cat: [expecting young hot GC from the CGI] You’re the ground controller?
Real Old Lady Ground Controller: Please state your name and clearance code.
Cat: Reality Sucks!
Red Dwarf Back in the Red Part 3 1999
For quite a while we have seen the phenom of “virtue signaling” whereby a person rather than practicing virtues like temperance, generosity, charity which involve effort, will, time, inconvenience and occasionally expense simply exhibits a ribbon, or a tag on a twitter account or a list of “pronouns” thus signaling to the “right” people that one has “virtue” without all the messy effort of having to practice any such inconvenient things.
We have now seen an increasing amount of another phenom which I like to call “victim envy”.
One of the things about modern life is how, even during a time of hardship, EASY it is.
The dishwasher, clothes washing and the AC alone broke the bonds of heat and water that enslaved millions prior to the 1900, the computer, the ability to work remotely and the common delivery of food and almost any product that we might want in as little as two days means that all the comforts that people spent centuries sweating for and dreaming of are a button push away.
Furthermore higher education which was once the province of the elite (I don’t comment on the quality) is available as is quality medicine ( I don’t comment on the vaccine madness here) is common and regular.
Even more amazing a degree of protections for races creeds and various groups enforced by laws rigorously enforced removes many of the roadblocks that as recently as 50 years ago were in some places were only overcome by the most determined people out there.
Yet even in all of this prosperity and ease we see people, particularly people with every possible advantage considering themselves “oppressed” and “victimized” over things as slight as “pronouns” or “misgendering”, we even have people of color who fifty years ago were fighting for integration demanding “safe spaces” and “segregation” and suggesting that the lack of such conditions is a cause for at best distraction and at worst failure.
In short, we have a generation of people who are more determined to be victims then their forebears were to avoid such indignities.
But the question is why? Why would someone wish to be a “victim”? Why would anyone want to feel oppressed.
The answer is quite simple: Victimhood provides a perfect excuse for failure.
Given all the advantages I had outlined and all the successes that our forebears had managed in the face of real hardship there is little excuse for failure. But after a generation of trophies for showing up and informing people how special they are, the realities of the world where effort must be exerted to achieve goals proves to be too much for those so coddled their failures need to be justified, particularly in a world comparably as easy as ours.
But if one is a “victim” it all changes.
- Suddenly it’s not YOUR fault if you didn’t become a movie, or music or artistic star
- Suddenly it’s not YOUR fault if you have tens of thousands of college debt and no job prospects
- Suddenly it’s not YOUR fault that you’re still living with your parents and unable to make it on your own
- Suddenly its not YOUR fault if you don’t have the aptitude for work that an employer needs.
None of your problems are YOUR fault, you’re a victim so every failure in your life can be the province of someone or something else.
There are few things more dangerous than an excuse, and the excuse for failure that victimhood provides is the most dangerous of all, both for society and for those who claim its mantle and cling to it for dear life.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 