Victimhood comes with great power.

It is the easy way out, the loser’s mentality.

Nothing is simpler than discarding all responsibility and blaming your failure on impossible obstacles.

No longer are you responsible for your failure; now your environment is, and no amount of your blood, sweat and tears can overcome that.

Claiming victimhood is throwing in the towel, pleading for sympathy.

Our kind society grants you that wish and goes a step further: we hold you up on our shoulders as a valiant warrior, a martyr in the struggle of all that is fair and just.

Jihadists seek martyrdom for the same reason anyone seeks victimhood. It defines your legacy. It makes you powerful.

For much of my life, I lay wounded on the cross of stuttering. My failure to overcome my problem was not my fault. I was hard done by in a way the vast majority of society could not understand. I was a martyr, destined for sadness and pain in a fluent man’s world, deserving of your sympathy and reverence for my struggle.

This was my loser mentality. It is the mentality of failure and, it should be obvious, the mentality for failures.

Dropping this worldview took many years and conversations with myself.

Deep down, I knew I was taking the easy way out, but that was so much more seductive than getting back in the ring.

Eventually I had to be honest with myself. My life was no harder than anyone else’s. I had been lying to myself to exhume responsibility and feel better.

The story of Emma Sulkowicz, the university student who carried around a mattress to make a statement about “rape culture” and made a pornographic “art” movie depicting her alleged rape, is classic victim mentality.

Sulkowicz finds power in being a victim. It launched her to international attention. And no one can question your motives when you’re a victim.

As a society, we love victims: black people in white America, native people in colonial Canada, women under the patriarchy, the boom of the mental health industry.

Victims receive all the power from outsiders’ eyes: even murderers and terrorists get the “mental health” defence from society.

But victim culture perpetuates victimhood. It is seductive in its ease to harness, but corrosive to the soul and will of a person.

Society progresses by people moving mountains, not feeling sorry for themselves and each other.

Categories: Opinion

Tags: depression, failure, martyr, mental health, mentality, patriarchy, power, racism, responsibility, sexism, struggle, stuttering, success, sympathy, victim culture, victimhood