The dangerous victimhood narrative

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Friedrich Nietzsche said: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process [they do] not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

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This rings true in our time now where, paradoxically, victimhood has become a rallying cry for violence and hostility perpetuated on others in the name of social justice. Although this is a clear contradiction to an astute observer (that a victim can also be a victimizer whilst retaining their sense of victimhood), it may not appear so contradictory to the person who is emotionally reactive and unable to process this contradiction on a rational level.  

 

The current popular narrative being perpetuated in the collective is that victims should be recognized and protected if they merely identify as victims, and that any challenges to their proclaimed victimhood should be denied or condemned regardless of the validity of those challenges or the probable falsehood of their claim. The narrative goes further by holding that if a person identifies as a victim, any violence or hostility they enact on others is merely “self-defense,” “social justice,” or “just deserts” that those whom they harm had coming or deserved.

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This ability to compartmentalize is itself a threat because it allows the individual claiming victimhood to rationalize behaving like a victimizer as justified by their claimed victimhood. In other words, the person who claims to be a victim can, without conscience, victimize those whom they claim are victimizing them even if this isn’t actually the case.

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For the psychopath, the sadist, the bully, the extremist ideologue, and the vengeful person bent on harming others without consequence, this narrative is both gratifying and enabling. For the law-abiding citizen, this narrative is terrifying because it gives these malevolent actors license to harm others without accountability.   

 

Malevolent actors who weaponize victimhood   

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This begs the question: are all victims legitimately victims or are some “victims” really wolves dressed up like sheep in order to infiltrate the actual sheep and freely prey on them?

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Victimhood is popular to identify with for several reasons: it’s easy because almost anyone can claim they’ve been victimized in some way at some point in their life; it’s protective because people in general are more likely to go the aid of a victim than a victimizer; finally, and most important here, it’s advantageous because claiming to be a victim can provide cover for someone who isn’t actually a victim and who has malicious intent.

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Uncritical acceptance of any claim is dangerous, but uncritically accepting that someone is a victim simply because they claim to be is especially dangerous because anyone can claim to be a victim—even monsters. But alas, the world loves to be deceived. It seems that Mark Twain was on to something when he said: “it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

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For the malevolent actor bent on deceiving and harming other people, this truth is a guiding principle. These nefarious people operationalize on this self-defeating reality that most people fail to grasp and oddly seem to embrace. Consequently, these malevolent actors weaponize victimhood against people.

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Differentiating a monster from a victim

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It’s not that difficult to distinguish a monster pretending to be a victim from an actual victim.

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For this, the individual who wishes to distinguish one from the other will first have to break through the intense and overwhelming social pressure to conform to the popular narrative of believing a person at face value. If the individual can overcome this challenge, they have made it past the most difficult stage in the process of differentiating.   

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This individual must then test a claim of victimhood against objective evidence versus subjective belief. This is both challenging and inconvenient, especially when the individual has been conditioned to jump from one thing to another without evaluatively examining each thing individually. In a time when most people have such a short attention span, stopping to evaluate something requires active effort and resisting the tendency to default to ready-made assumptions.

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Then there’s those pesky but ever-present biases. These can lead to the individual looking only for evidence that confirms their pre-existing beliefs and opinions and overlooking evidence that may challenge or counter these beliefs and opinions. Thus, the individual must remain aware of their own biases that may interfere with objectivity in their examination of evidence. This individual must see what is really there and resist the temptation to read their biases into it.   

  

Another challenge to this differentiation process is that the never-ending flood of information is so torrential now that quantity has overwhelmed our capacity to examine quality. This deluge of information creates cognitive overload which causes most people to either shut down or completely avoid the task that is cognitively overwhelming. And since the greater amount of information circulating around society favors believing victims at their word, it becomes all the more difficult to challenge this ready-made assumption. But it’s nevertheless necessary to do so.

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Not challenging this assumption only ensures that the monster pretending to be a victim will be seen as a victim and not the monster they really are. And this only places the individual at risk because the monster can walk about freely, undetected and undeterred from carrying out their nefarious plans on unsuspecting individuals.

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The unexamined claim is not worth believing

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If, as Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” then surely the unexamined claim is not worth believing.

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To avoid becoming a victim themselves, the individual must critically examine claims of victimhood before believing these claims. Accepting such a claim at face value without first examining its veracity could result in fraud, theft, exploitation, manipulation, or other harm against the accepting [and naïve] individual.

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No matter how intense the social pressure may be to accept someone’s victimhood claim on its face, doing so does nothing to further actual justice and it only makes the one doing so vulnerable to harm by those who pretend to be victims but are really monsters.

  

It doesn’t make a person “good” to believe someone is a victim when they’re not actually a victim; this unfounded belief merely makes that person vulnerable to becoming an actual victim themselves.

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Finally, critically examining someone’s claim of victimhood doesn’t victimize that person more; on the contrary, if a person is actually a victim, an examination will bear this out and confirm this fact. This provides more support to the actual victim by reinforcing their claim as opposed to creating doubt about its truth.

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If the examining individual can overcome their own limitations, and if they’re as objective as possible in the examination, they should be able to distinguish the charlatan victim from the real victim. Throwing caution to the wind here may actually create more victims as opposed to helping those already victimized.