Current “science” is now synonymous with ideology, religion, or superstition. Lockdowns, mRNA vaccinations, masking, transgenderism, “climate change,” and green power brook no dissent. They are declared scientifically correct in the manner that the sun used to revolve around the earth, and any dissenting Galileo or Copernicus is cancel-cultured, doxxed, and deplatformed.
Victor Davis Hanson, Life Among the Ruins.
Behavior that is objectively wrong, violence, hate, harassment and terrorism, becomes right if the perpetrators are victims who claim to be striving for a society of moral equity. But the truth about victims is that they never want to stop being what they are. If they did, they would become survivors. Victimhood is convenient and comforting. Victims never have to learn to do better. They spend all of their time telling others to do better so that xer’s feelings aren’t hurt again.
Victimhood views failure as a conspiracy, rather than a choice, and nations and societies that embrace victimhood quickly turn into failed states. America used to get things done. Now we no longer win wars or can even stock supermarkets. There are a thousand points of failure and they begin with a culture that is hostile to achievement and supportive of victimhood.
Daniel Greenfield, A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail.
Victimhood grants a moral superiority that liberates the victim from moral responsibility.
If you’re an official victim, you can rampage around cities, looting, beating and burning, with few legal and certainly no moral consequences. Beyond economics, replacing ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ takes us from an equality of moral obligations to an equity of moral outcomes. And race riots, canceling people, and rigging college admissions are just ways of achieving ‘moral equity’.
Daniel Greenfield, A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail.
Victims are driven by hate. Their pain is performance. It’s what makes them special and the only purpose left to them. The more they feel, the angrier they get. And they want to be angry. There are victims who have actually suffered, but the majority in our culture are ‘identity victims’ or ‘therapy victims’ whose victimhood is based on the terminology of academic Marxism or shrink sessions: who have suffered nothing except a lack of emotional fulfillment.
These creatures, who once handed out radical fliers at campus cafes and poisoned family reunions, went ‘viral’ through social media and generated legions of sympathetic followers. Their perpetual outrage at being victims drives our culture and our politics. Incapable of talking about anything other than themselves, they have ‘built their brand’ into the model for our society.
America went from a nation of courage, allegiance and responsibility where people made commitments to something larger than themselves, used their pain to build better things, to a society of wallowers competing over who has the biggest pain and the least responsibility.
Daniel Greenfield, A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail.
We are all the descendants of survivors. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought in wars, persisted through economic turmoil and didn’t give up. Whatever happened to them, they didn’t see themselves as the victims. They were strong, not because they postured on social media, but because they got up whenever they were knocked down. They had their grievances and resentments, but they didn’t build their lives around them.
Survivors are motivated by love and duty. They understand that there is more to life than their own pain. They redeem their suffering by making their lives matter. That is the essence of the human ideal. It’s how nations and families are built. …
Daniel Greenfield, A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail.
Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else.
After the slaves were freed, some made long journeys to major cities, others built families and worked hard to provide for them. They persevered despite lynchings and racism. Over 150 years later, some of their descendants claim that nothing can be expected from them because they’re suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome even though the only place they’ve seen slavery is on television. That’s the difference between survivors and victims.
Daniel Greenfield, A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail.
Many of our educators, our intelligentsia and our media—not to mention our politicians—promote an attitude that other people’s achievements are grievances, rather than examples. When black school children who are working hard in school and succeeding academically are attacked and beaten up by black classmates for “acting white,” why is it surprising that similar hostility is turned against Asian Americans, who are often achieving academically more so than whites?…
The same phenomenon is found among lower-class whites in Britain, where academically achieving white students have been beaten up badly enough by their white classmates to require hospital treatment
These are poisonous and self-destructive consequences of a steady drumbeat of ideological hype about differences that are translated into “disparities” and “inequities,” provoking envy and resentments under their more prettied-up name of “social justice.”
Thomas Sowell, Race and Resentment
[I]t is necessary to understand that every modern theory of social justice is ideological. No matter how reasonable or national it may be, every modern theory of social justice is the rationalization of the interests of a particular group or class.
William E. Murnion, “The Ideology of Social Justice in Economic Justice For All,” Journal of Business Ethics, 1989, p.848
No one understood the political vulnerabilities of the [Emancipation] Proclamation better than Lincoln. Following his September announcement, the Democratic Party declared political war on emancipation and spoke of the Proclamation as the death knell of the Republican Party. On the other side, the radical Republicans were furious that Lincoln hadn’t made emancipation universal and immediate, and they threatened to cut off funding for the war.
Christopher Flannery, American Christmas, American New Year, Imprimis, 12/22
Language determines the realities we attend to. If certain words fall into desuetude, it means that certain realities have dropped from our attention as well. Words, for example, such as valor, nobility, honor, sanctity, chastity, and purity hang on to life but seem to be written in the past tense, as though the realities they refer to are remnants of some dim history. Such words appear rarely, if at all, in the vocabulary of social scientists or in the popular media. Other, more “relevant” words have edged them aside. For every purity that gets to print, there are a hundred needs, naturals, and sexuals to crowd them out.
What is perhaps most effective about such a technique is that it requires no confrontation. It does not deny the other realities. It by-passes them the way a superhighway bypasses a village so that after a while people forget that the village is there.
William Kirk Kilpatrick, Psychological Seduction: The Failure of Modern Psychology, pg.127-128
