Avoiding the hole of victimhood
There is a long slippery dark hole of victimhood waiting for all who seek it.
To be found in this hole, you will need an enemy and you will need suffering.
You will also need an identity. Without an identity, there is nothing to suffer from. In eastern philosophies, they knew this pretty well:
Gautama found that there was a way to exit this vicious circle. If, when the mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant, it simply understands things as they are, then there is no suffering. If you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you do not suffer from it.
-Yuval Harari
An identity is a form of perspective. And, pain and suffering feel differently depending on your perspective, as Sam Harris tells us:
Many things require extraordinary effort to accomplish, and some of us learn to enjoy the struggle. Any athlete knows that certain kinds of pain can be exquisitely pleasurable. The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it.
Even in the direst circumstances, perspective can be attained. This is no more exemplified than two prisoner-camp-turned authors:
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way. It is spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful. -Viktor Frankl, Nazi Prisoner
Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul. ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Prisoner
We have a strong innate desire to identify with things. It’s the reason our human species is so resilient. Without this innate desire for identification, we would not have survived for so long. Survival required a strong identity with a tribe and a self.
Now, these strong identities persist in the form of egos, genders, races, being a daughter, being a parent, a country, a city, a town, a body, thoughts, emotions, ad infinitum.
These identities fragment indefinitely and if we look hard enough, we are one fragmented identity away from being a victim or a victimizer.
This is what’s so pervasive about victimhood. It’s fundamentally divisive because it requires an identity who is suffering and an opposing identity that is victimizing. It is also very self-limiting, as Social Work Supervisor La’Shea Gibson eloquently explains in a reply to a post called “Pointing fingers will only slow us down”:
I think it empowers people to stop thinking they’re only a product of their innate identity. We’re all guilty of this at one point or another. Yes it affects your trajectory in life to a certain extent but mainly if you limit yourself to that. If you only identify yourself by your socioeconomic status and consistently point your finger at others that don’t share the same experience, then you box yourself in. Create an identity for yourself that propels you forward and/or don’t only see it as negative. Growing up poor at times in life made me grateful, less materialistic, and hardworking. Facing adversity makes you stronger and you’re more likely to improve your circumstances by trying to use that as motivation.
A vivid example of a self-limiting identity is the “millennial” identity. Depending on where you look, they are the cause of all problems or are the victims of brutal circumstances. The millennial jokes and memes are as overplayed as a 2020 exponential graph.
It may or may not surprise you to find out, that there are millennials claiming to have it so difficult (Even though almost every data point points to the millennial generation having it easiest)
Having it easy is exactly why I believe, paradoxically, that recent generations do have it the hardest.
This is because within “easy”, there is a lack of adversity and behind adversity is strength and growth. The immigrants know about harnessing this adversity very well.
But, adversity doesn’t sell and victimhood sells very well, as you can see from 2020 major news outlets: millennial example 1, millennial example 2, millennial example 3, millennial example 4.
Don’t fall down this rabbit hole because it’s a fact that every single person will suffer in their life. Waiting behind this door of suffering is an evolution of our soul and our consciousness but to realize this requires a shift in perspective.
We should seek information about our circumstances to learn and improve but we should be careful succumbing to victimhood because it’s a hole we may never climb out of.
