It’s Time to Abandon the Culture of Victimhood

Commentary

Blind and deaf from her earliest years, Helen Keller certainly had something to complain about. But she didn’t. Instead she told others, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” And she stated, “A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”

Victor Frankl also had it pretty tough. He spent three years in Nazi death camps where his family was murdered. Yet in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Frankl asks for no sympathy. Instead, he tells us we must accept “fate and all the suffering it entails” and by doing so we can “add a deeper meaning” to life. He said, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by the lack of meaning and purpose.”

There are countless other stories about individuals who persevered and turned the worst minus into a plus. And there are many metaphors in literature and history on that subject, such as statements like “The phoenix rises from the ashes” or “The north wind made the Vikings.”

There are also writers like Henry Ward Beecher who said, “It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle; it is defeat that make men invincible.” And not least of all, there are believers in fatalism who inform us that hardship events are really enlightenment, or lessons from on high.

All these sources have a consistent message: we must rise above any ill fortunes in life.

But these former ideas have been cast aside in today’s popular culture. Hardship has taken on a very different purpose.

From microaggressions to alleged pains from long-ago history, there has been a great multiplication of sorrows over the last decade. And this frame of mind now occupies much of Canada’s mainstream media, academia, and government policy. According to two notable books, we are living through “The Rise of Victimhood Culture” and we have become a “Nation of Victims.” The proliferation of grievances is so significant that, according to author Pascal Bruckner, there now exists a “complaint competition, each trying to drown out the other.”

Moreover, the old ideas about hardship have been cast aside and hardly get mentioned. A commentary in The Epoch Times says that, in their place, we have established an “aristocracy of injury” where “suffering is no longer something to endure or overcome, it is deliberately cultivated.” One theory says that our human instinct for compassion has been hijacked onto a bad road.

In this new mindset, adversity has lost its connection to hope. Adversity is a boat anchor rather than a stepping stone. Psychologist Nick Haslam says that adversity is now “virtuous but impotent.”

Many would argue that it is time to abandon victimhood culture and return to those things we always knew: a place of hope and a place where, despite any hardship, we did not forget our blessings.

In 1974, George Foreman lost the “Rumble in the Jungle,” perhaps the most famous boxing match ever. But it didn’t hold him back and he went on to great success, at least partly because of an important understanding. “There’s nothing wrong with getting knocked down in life,” he said in an interview. “It’s about getting up.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to accurately reflect when Helen Keller became blind and deaf. The Epoch Times regrets the error. 

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.