Of Victimhood
“Associate with wise people and you too will slowly become wise but associate with fools and you are immediately foolish.” – Justin Lloyd.
The non-genuine victim mindset makes victims of us all, either directly through our own attitude or indirectly through somebody else’s.
Know of any non-genuine victims?
Look around your neighbourhood, read the news (if you dare), think about people you know. I am confident you are aware of at least one person who has played the role of a non-genuine victim in a non-emergency situation within the recent past. These non-genuine victims are not true sufferers of natural events or occurrences that we would think of such as a home fire, a violent mugging or vehicular accident but of a generally non-existent situation of their own making.
Victimhood is a poor way to exist in life yet many people in society choose this path for the ready availability of short-term payoffs. You may even be one of the self-professed afflicted though will not readily acknowledge it. A non-genuine victim, yourself or someone else, alters how we act in life. Non-genuine victims alter what plans we make. Non-genuine victims alter how we proceed with our plans. Non-genuine victims alter the results we achieve. Non-genuine victims alter you as well as themselves. Non-genuine victims are self-victimizing.
Believe it or not, self-victimization is heavily practiced by the majority of the population. People have shitty jobs, huge amounts of debt, dead-end relationships, drug habits, out of control spending, live way beyond their means, and keep up appearances with the neighbours without doing enough to make their own lives better and more fulfilled, all the while clucking their tongues at others they perceive to be less than themselves.
Playing the part of the continuous victim at the mercy of life and of other people’s whims feeds constantly on itself by negatively reinforcing the thought patterns with often positive but ultimately short-term rewards. You might be performing poorly at your job and by loudly proclaiming your victim status, you may be able to hang on to it just a little longer. I have had two employees (now ex-employees) at my own company use this very tactic directly on me in the recent past. Instead of fixing the real problem of why you might be in danger of losing your job, for instance due to insufficient training, an inability to communicate or chronic tardiness, you merely apply a temporary Band-Aid to the problem. The deeper underlying problem still exists; you are merely fixing the symptom (the reward) rather than the cause (the non-genuine victimization).
Pretty soon a lot of people are adopting this mentality and doing stupid things, and then suing everyone around them, banking (quite literally) on the fact that someone else will be there to bail them out when they get in too deep.
Control
Some people are so wrapped up in the self-victimisation mindset that they become manipulative and drive others to perform deeds by exerting on them a constant barrage of guilt. Through indirect manipulation of our emotions, an emotion such as guilt, which is one of the strongest negative human sensations and also one of the most crippling, the non-genuine victim coerces others in to acting and thinking in ways that are not to the manipulated person’s benefit.
Non-genuine victims use expressions such as “I have to do drugs, it’s the area I live in, and I’m forced to do them” or even more extremely “I know I cheated on you, I am addicted to sex, but please don’t leave me or I’ll kill myself.” Any of these phrases are driven by people who perceive themselves as victims of the circumstances they live in. Because of the manipulation and control that a non-genuine victim exerts over others, it is very much an anti-social behaviour that should not be tolerated. Not only may you fall prey to the non-genuine victim but their actions of portraying a victim, of being constantly buffeted by the forces of misfortune will influence you and induce you to become a non-genuine victim too.
Opportunity
The self-inflicted victim puts on a front of powerlessness that belies the truth; they are not powerless. They manipulate, they guilt, they shame, they drain your resources – material and emotional – and they feel no real guilt about their borderline sociopathic behaviour. Not all self-professed victims are looking for the most profitable target; the state of being a non-genuine victim is one of short-term profitability and immediate opportunity. Any blame needs to be quickly placed whilst the perceived misdeed is still fresh in everyone’s mind. The actions may not even be to the non-genuine victim’s benefit either but the horizon of opportunity for a victim is short and must be exploited as quickly as possible so elaborate plans are rarely employed.
This is a poor attitude to have towards those members of society who create and deliver real value.
The thrifty versus the spendthrift. The producers versus the consumers.
Producers and creators find themselves having to protect themselves from the “victims.” Soon the producers are so hampered by rules and laws and litigation and the prospect of being victimised themselves they will not pursue endeavours that are either profitable or beneficial to society. All the while, the producers and creators are disappearing from our immediate society giving opportunities to others further away who are not so harried by potential victims. Being a non-genuine victim is a short-term, profiteering centred outlook at the expense of someone else.
Blame
Non-genuine victims are very good at projecting any blame on to others. No matter where the blame should fall or whether the blame is truly merited, they are looking for any suitable target. It is difficult to deflect blame on to another, or to create blame out of nothing at all if people are given the chance to gather evidence and analyze a situation so the non-genuine victim must act quickly to prevent that. What quicker way than using a sleight of hand trick of laying blame on anyone they can? Someone else is always to blame for his or her situation, in extreme cases, the non-genuine victim victimizes those around them and the self-victimized (if they ever were a victim) becomes the persecutor.
Denial & Justification
People who live in constant victimhood are always able and willing to justify their victimization. Either through accident of birth, colour of skin, parentage, upbringing, a perceived inability to control a situation or lack of self-discipline to keep in check their own will, they can justify whatever it may be. Freed of any responsibility to fix their situation or improving their life a non-genuine victim will complain incessantly of the problem but they perform no actions to correct it except for those actions that exploit others.
You can confront the person with their self-inflicted victimization, which rarely works as they will deny their actions and intentions, in fact, “by pointing out my behaviour,” they will say, “are you not just proving my point of being a victim by victimizing me?” making you feel shamefaced and remorseful. No matter what evidence you have when you confront a non-genuine victim they will never acknowledge their own shortcomings or mistakes and will always have a justification of why they act the way that they do.
The thought patterns of non-genuine victimization are very strong and self-defeating. Self-defeating thoughts, those of your own making and those that are given to you by others, always lead to the same result. Defeat. I know that does not sound particularly deep but with that mentality, before you even begin an endeavour, you have overcome any motivation you have built up by deciding on the outcome and deciding that it will be a failure. You automatically assume the worst before you start.
When you employ self-defeating thoughts and activities, you immediately position yourself for failure later. You eat the wrong foods in large portions and suffer massive weight gain. You perform poorly at your workplace and are not promoted or even wind up being fired. Many activities that you should do, getting up early, eating the right foods or performing the right job, you find too hard because the payoff is in the distant future and too indistinct to concern you.
The problem is that self-defeating activities, such as the ones I’ve mentioned, also have a pay off that is too far in the future and too indistinct to concern you. Your self-defeating activities and self-defeating thoughts are poison to your life. The thoughts and actions poison your successes and destroy your confidence.
Like many poisons you can develop a tolerance to it so that you become blind to any actions or thoughts that are self-defeating, you are unable to discern what it is you are doing that is hurting you and unable to prevent yourself from continuing to do it. Your self-defeating thoughts are ever present, always with you, these thoughts play a Jekyll and Hyde game of hide and seek, twisting your mind up but never fully revealing themselves.
The only way to excise this poison from your system and to restore your sight where once you were blinded, is with a good dose of personal development anti-venom. Tools in the form of education of what is possible, and skills gained from continual practice with those tools, can easily prevent you from falling in to the self-defeating, self-victimization trap that you face yourself with every day.
Fixing the problem
Being a victim is poisonous to your well-being but it can also be poisonous to society as a whole. Rejecting self-victimisation in others, and rejecting being victimised by others, allows you to proceed without distraction and without the societal drag of other people pulling you down to their level. Often you are not even aware you are a non-genuine victim until it is too late, if you ever realise it at all.
When you adopt a victim mindset, you live the life that other people want you to have. You can only be a slave if you allow yourself to be enslaved. By shunning the victim mentality, you achieve the life you want. You need to be ever vigilant of the victim mindset and avoid it wherever possible. It is an insidious master than creeps up on you when you are least aware. Self-victimisation is a cycle that can be broken. Many of us are not aware that we are victims of our own minds. You must strive to avoid, at every moment, self-defeating activities and thoughts. These negative emotions and thoughts come at you both internally and externally.
Non-genuine victimisation is not just perpetrated by other people you meet directly; it is also pumped in to your brain via the mass media educating you to be a victim, training you to believe your life is unfulfilled by distracting you with pretty consumer items that life offers. You listen constantly to negative scare stories delivered as “news,” you are manipulated by negative information from the latest study, you are told what to think, when to think it, and chastised for thinking otherwise.
You must consciously reject being a victim and allowing those that are victims in to your life so that you are able to focus on what is important to you and remove the short-term profit and manipulation of being subject to victimisation.
If you constantly go through life setting yourself up to be victimised, especially if you profit short-term from this victimisation by financial gain, e.g. suing someone for your own ineptitude such or assuming more financial risk than you can manage and then asking for special dispensation when the shit finally hits the fan, then others will see your profits, however short-term they may be, and assume the victim mindset as well.
Pretty soon the non-genuine victim whose victimisation is self-inflicted will run in to another of the victim mindset and the outcome is pretty obvious, two non-genuine victims attempting to one up each other on who can victimise the other for the most trivial reason and the greatest short-term profit.
To achieve character growth, to follow the path of personal development and to be greater than what you are today, you must lose the victim mindset.
Resolution
Victimhood is a strong negative behaviour that can be very hard to break, it is a cancer that spreads rapidly through a society, stifling creativity, hampering production, slowing economic growth and dragging down everyone who is trying to grow beyond the life that was given to them.
Self-victimization is an undesirable trait and quality and when encountering a non-genuine victim, you have limited choice. If you are acquainted with someone who portrays themselves as a constant victim you either call the alleged victim on their behaviour, which as I have already stated, rarely works for the reasons given, or you must distance yourself as quickly as possible from the victim so that you aren’t blamed or influenced or controlled by their actions.
As the quote states at the top of this article, you become like those you associate with, so ask yourself this, “do you really want to be a victim?”