On Victimhood

Anyone who has had children and has had their eyes open should have seen through all this victimhood culture in an instant.

I have a child whose entire approach to life is to explain everything she does as either someone else’s fault or an accident. She never claims any kind of agency. And I’ve told her, I could at least respect her even for doing something terrible if at least she said “I did it”. But what truly hurts me is that she’s constantly arguing against her own humanity and existence as a conscious, responsible human.

I love her, and I love her because she’s a person. Able to choose, to learn, to act, to understand. But she’s constantly assaulting that precious identity, which is unique to humans, by claiming that she’s just a pawn, a piano key, a machine, an animal. She’s doesn’t see, doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, doesn’t choose. She doesn’t know why she does things, they just happen, or other things happen to her and make her play the tune she plays. She can’t be held responsible for any of it.

That’s her deepest instinct, to violate her own existence as a human in order to escape responsibility. And I’ve tried to tell her, that’s not a bargain worth making. Responsibility is a dreadful weight, but there’s nothing more precious you could purchase. What it buys you is godlike, your own humanity, moral and intellectual agency. It means that you’re more than just an animal or mechanism. There’s a you there, a true subject.

Even a bad human is a greater thing than a mere mechanism, which can’t even take credit for its own failings. What kind of a life is that? Who would wish that on someone or condemn them to such insignificance? I fight that attitude in my child every time it comes up, because all it does is disempower her. All it does is remove her sense of control and sense of self, her ability to learn and choose and improve, her very soul. It steals my child away. And I want her to grow.

Only a cruel parent who wants a mere possession, a tame and dependent mechanism that exists only as a function of their own power, would wish such a fate on their child. And the compassionate political left 100% treats black people (among many other groups) like children. That’s one reason why it strikes so many people instinctively as a reprehensible attitude. At the very least it’s extremely patronizing. It’s a denial of something essential to the activity of humanity. Even an enemy pays you the respect of treating you like a credible threat.

I don’t want want my daughter to be treated like that, not for any beneficence. And I don’t have any interest in raising an animal or an automaton or a puppet. I want to raise a human, a person, a daughter, a future friend and partner and successor.

So every time she tells me that she’s just a puppet, that it was an accident, that she doesn’t know why she did what she did; her sister did something and that’s why she acted, she’s not responsible for anything she’s done, she’s not responsible for breaking the rules because she played no part in her own actions, she essentially wasn’t there when she broke the rules, I tell her, “At least give yourself the credit of having done the things that you do. I’m not that worried about some little thing you took from your sister or that you shouted at her or hit her. Those can be mended. But at least recognize that it was you that did them and it’s you that’s living your life. Don’t push off your existence into someone else, don’t give it away so easily just to escape a little responsibility. That’s a bad trade.”

The instinct toward victimization is powerful and innate. I had to work hard to grow my older daughter out of it. It wasn’t easy, for me or for her. I want to abdicate responsibility and agency too. It’s such a burden. It would be so much easier to just give it up and be less than I am. It’s a struggle for me every day. And I fear encouraging victimhood in others because I fear what it would do to me. I fear what it would do to my daughters. It would eradicate their future, their potential as humans, for the sake of their comfort.
Animals might rest easier in a world where there is no ‘I’ that must carry the weight of the past and future and individual responsibility. And we feel keenly what tiny, helpless things we are in such a big world. And we want to ascribe godlike qualities to external forces, of whose whims we are mere puppets, like the pagan gods of Greece. And maybe today the nearest thing we can find (and some disgustingly embrace it) is white people, with their apparent command over all the forces of the universe that shape our experience.
It isn’t any surprise that people seek gods to thank or blame in the face of the great and terrible world we live in. It’s no surprise that we should wish to return to the position of mere animals or infants living an unaware and helpless and dependent existence, mere toys of callous divine forces. These are universal temptations. And the world does make good arguments for them.

It is enormous work to daily lift ourselves out of these temptations, or to push someone else out into the terrible world of responsibility and agency. As I’ve made clear, it’s a daily struggle with my own daughter. But I believe in her. I believe she could be more than she is. I believe she has the capacity to take hold of that burden. But she can’t reach its rewards without accepting its judgment, the burden of agency and responsibility.

Only someone who can lift that load has any hope of changing the world around them. Only a demigod has a chance of challenging the gods and changing their fate. That’s why the ancient myths revere them, even when their tales are tragic. The world is big, the world is scary, the world is tragic and complicated and uncaring and unpredictable. It is not set up for our pleasure. It contains many things and many forces that do not care about us or set themselves against us. We are inadequate, we are imperfect, we are misguided, we are ignorant, we are impulsive, we are petty, we are weak, we are resentful, we are naive.

Who can lift the burden of such impediments? Who has the power to struggle against them? Not animals, not puppets, not infants. Only man, humans, realized men and women. People who have seized on the one great power they do have in the face of all that tyranny and chaos: agency. Their selves, their own ability to choose and to be and to learn and know and take responsibility for their part of their selves, their tiny corner of being. They have staked a claim to it, ownership of it. They belong to themselves. They can choose what to do with that possession, and whatever the consequences, they will own it.
And you just can’t solve that problem by pushing it off onto someone else. No one can give you yourself. And no one can take it. That is the deepest lesson of religion and philosophy. Your deepest fate lies in your hands, as the gift of God. The world can take life, freedom, pleasure, wealth, and family from you. But it cannot take you from yourself. Only you can do that. That is the lesson of the book of Job and the Apology of Socrates.

This is a dearly bought truth, and it is one we are in danger of forgetting, surrendering ourselves back to the pagan void of insignificance. Awakening to our own power means awakening to the pain of knowledge and responsibility, including knowledge of our own frailty and insignificance. That all we truly have is ourselves, this one little corner that we can truly possess and control. But that is enough. It is the whole world, in a mote. It is everything, when the alternative is nothingness. We must rage against the idea that we are mere puppets, lest we become them, lest we become as helpless as we imagine ourselves to be.

P.S. On a personal note, from the moment she was born, my daughter was the most lovely thing in the world to me. In a way that I can hardly understand or explain. She’s very different from me, and in ways that I often struggle with. But that’s also why I adore her so much. Learning to love and to help her has been and is a very dramatic and challenging journey for me.

Her older sister was much easier because she’s much more similar to myself. Reaching across that divide was easier; we fought things out and loved one another on the same terms. I knew how to reach her and it was easy to talk things through together. But my younger daughter is an adventure into unknown lands and strange customs. She amuses me, she delights me, she confuses me, she frustrates me. She’s an education. I think she was given to me to help me understand and love the world better. She’s my treasure.