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 title: "The Victim Mentality Versus Individual Responsibility"
 date: 2020-04-10T00:00:00
 draft: false
-makerefs: false
 ---
 This is a compare and contrast of two seemingly opposing ideas. What I hope to show is that actually they are just two ways of talking about the same thing. I hope to find some common ground between left and right ideology. One is often referred to as "the victim mentality" and the other is what I call "individual responsibility fetishism".
 
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 Besides the infinite temporal regression of blaming that can happen leaving no one and nothing ultimately responsible, there is also the possibility of the circularity of blame which also leaves no one ultimately responsible. Imagine a group of ten employees sitting at a round table meeting. The boss asks who is responsible for some financial mishap and everyone points to the person on their left, similar to how computer processes can enter a circular deadlock. Each process can blame the process it's waiting on for being stuck, but the processes are waiting in a circular fashion preventing progress from being made. I like to see these two different scenarios of regression and circularity as part of "the blame game", related to "playing the victim" or "the victim card". It's not my fault, it's someone else's. I'm the victim here. I don't "do" anything. Things simply "happen" to me.
 
-With collective victimhood, entire groups of people feel marginalized, mistreated, underrepresented, or discriminated against. Economic and social inequality and treatment of minorities are a focus of the left. Leftists are concerned about groups of people that are disadvantaged relative to others groups of people. Leftists might be apt to say that marginalized groups are not responsible for what happens to them. For example, black people were historically barred from voting. Black schools weren't given the same resources as white schools. Segregation in public places instilled the idea that black and white people were meant to be separate and that black people were, rightly, second class citizens. It was pointed out that one problem with collective victimhood taken to the extreme is that it takes away all "agency" from the marginalized group. If a group is victimized, they have no responsibility for where they are at and no agency to direct where they want to go. They are powerless. So one criticism of collective victimhood is that seeing yourself as a victim or in a group of victims is disempowering. It basically is saying that you can't "direct your own destiny". Your life is simply completely subject to "fate" as is everyone in your marginalized group. It is up to people not in the marginalized group, those with the agency, to fix things. Talking about agency starts to get into the idea of free will. Free will is an incoherent concept. I recommend Sam Harris' book The Illusion of Free Will[1] on the subject, although I plan on dedicating an entirely separate post to it.
+With collective victimhood, entire groups of people feel marginalized, mistreated, underrepresented, or discriminated against. Economic and social inequality and treatment of minorities are a focus of the left. Leftists are concerned about groups of people that are disadvantaged relative to others groups of people. Leftists might be apt to say that marginalized groups are not responsible for what happens to them. For example, black people were historically barred from voting. Black schools weren't given the same resources as white schools. Segregation in public places instilled the idea that black and white people were meant to be separate and that black people were, rightly, second class citizens. It was pointed out that one problem with collective victimhood taken to the extreme is that it takes away all "agency" from the marginalized group. If a group is victimized, they have no responsibility for where they are at and no agency to direct where they want to go. They are powerless. So one criticism of collective victimhood is that seeing yourself as a victim or in a group of victims is disempowering. It basically is saying that you can't "direct your own destiny". Your life is simply completely subject to "fate" as is everyone in your marginalized group. It is up to people not in the marginalized group, those with the agency, to fix things. Talking about agency starts to get into the idea of free will. Free will is an incoherent concept. I recommend Sam Harris' book [The Illusion of Free Will](https://samharris.org/the-illusion-of-free-will/) on the subject, although I plan on dedicating an entirely separate post to it.
 
 Ultimately, what we have to realize is that the victim mentality is a way of talking about events. To paint a clearer picture of what's going on, I want to iterate through a few things. First, having a victim mentality can be disempowering to the person or group that has it. No doubt about that. It can create a feeling of helplessness, a sense of not having agency and control over your own life. I think that agency and control are complex subjects and loaded words, but I'm just talking about how the victim mentality can make people feel. It can create a feeling that the world or other people owe you something. It can be very devastating I think to the sense of control over your own life. If taken to the extreme, it can get you stuck in a place in life you don't like, and you can keep yourself there for a long time by telling yourself there's nothing you can do to improve your circumstances. And I do think this is a real thought pattern that drives self-pity and keeps people stuck in a bad situation. This is my primary concern with the victim mentality way of talking to yourself about things. And it is just a way of talking to yourself. That's the most important thing to keep in mind, because blame is really an abstraction made up by people to figure out who we need to help or punish. You might say the abstraction of blame comes in useful sometimes to figure out who is responsible for some mistake so that person can be singled out and given whatever treatment they need so that the mistake doesn't reoccur. But oftentimes, time is wasted figuring out who to blame. The desire to place blame can become so strong that you make up a sort of blame calculus and when all the tabulations are over, you realize the whole exercise was pointless. Because after the "blame units" have been tabulated and you know who to assign them to, the tabulation is functionally useless because despite the fact you know who to blame and how much, you did nothing with the tabulation. In that case, the abstraction of blame can become not so useful. A lot of time can be wasted playing the blame game to no useful end. That's also something I see happen in the real world all the time.
 
@@ -30,7 +29,3 @@ I see several dangers of the total individual responsibility way of viewing the
 So what am I really getting at with all this? These two ways of talking to yourself have their respective benefits and pitfalls. If you feel like you're in control, you can make a fetish out of individual responsibility and go around telling people they control their own destiny and it's all up to them and all they have to do is try. If you don't, you can go around saying everyone is powerless and there is nothing they can do to change the way their life is. But I want to make the point that the confusion really does come along from the way we talk to ourselves about things and the abstractions we build. This is obvious because as a matter of physics, there is no confusion about what is going on in the universe, physically. It is our language that gets us all mixed up, not the goings-on of the universe. But with our limited human brains we need abstractions to simplify the goings-on. We need approximations. I am not advocating we get rid of the idea of individual responsibility or victimization. It may be useful to refine the ideas or replace them with better abstractions or reinterpret them. In software development, there is a saying about abstractions. All abstractions are leaky. We make abstractions and then rely on their infallibility. But abstractions aren't perfect representations of what they're abstracting, or else they wouldn't be called abstractions. What that means is we need to recognize when our abstractions begin to break down and where they don't apply.
 
 At the risk of oversimplifying, it doesn't do us any good to play the blame game so much so that we end up feeling like we have no power to create change in our lives and the lives of others. We end up disempowering ourselves that way and wasting mental energy feeling sorry for ourselves. Everyone reading this has probably met someone that has done that at some point in our lives. It also doesn't do any good to fetishize individual responsibility to the point where we become callous and blind to systemic injustice and inequality or insist that existing social hierarchy is inevitable. This is the mistake that PragerU and Jordan Peterson make in my view.
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-Link(s):
-[1: https://samharris.org/the-illusion-of-free-will/](https://samharris.org/the-illusion-of-free-will/)