Definition.
Victimhood: the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer, especially when you want people to feel sorry for you because of this or use it as an excuse for something.
The truth is, victimology is a lazy play on morality. People think they can use it as a cheat-code to attain righteousness.
If the mantle of victimhood is granted to you gratis, you don’t feel like you have to be persecuted for telling the truth, or doing what is right. Persecution is often imagined, or cooked up. You imagine that you are just born into it. And so, no moral effort has to be made, because a coat of righteousness is already yours, and it was free to claim.
What is really appealing about this racial victimology that we see in play today is that you don’t have to DO ANYTHING in order to suffer persecution. Rather, you are crowned and initiated into a false sense of moral goodness by just being yourself, by just having the wrong skin color or the wrong last name.
Your goodness, and your special place in the moral hierarchy comes directly from something apart from your own moral choices and behaviors. It is almost as if goodness becomes a grace, something that does not have to be earned by actively BEING GOOD.
This is the danger of victimhood. You take the apple in hand, and it is shiny and it looks good for eating. But if you eat it, it becomes part of who you are, and you lose your moral status, exiled from the grace that you assumed was yours all along.
The victim has special rights.
You do not have to be charitable. You do not have to feed the poor.
You do not have to take care of the widowed. No. You are special and unique, and inherit your goodness based on forces you cannot control.
This is a false moral system, much like a religious meme, that is spreading widely in our culture. Victimhood is the lazy person’s path to righteousness. One does not need to be just, because everybody around you is unjust, and your victimhood is a kind of shield that protects and defends you from moral responsibility.
This is really about persecution, and you should know it.
Persecution that is earned by a commitment to goodness, rightness and truth is legitimate persecution. It is true persecution, because one knows in advance that in a world of liars, a truth-teller will never escape suffering. But in a world of liars, the lies we tell ourselves are just as important as the truths we should be committed to.
And we should distinguish one from the other. Too many groups and nationalities and cultures today are erecting worlds of persecution around themselves, in order to shield themselves from moral responsibility. And THAT is a big problem.
That is a moral failing.