This is a question I’ve been pondering for a while now, and there’s no simple answer, none that come to my mind at least.
The tricky part is that I want to define it in a way that excludes simply acknowledging to one’s self that one is a victim if that is indeed the case. After all, victimhood is a real thing. If you are the victim of abuse, of oppression, of crime, then acknowledging your victim status is simply to acknowledge a fact, and indeed it could be said that it is necessary in order to take the next step of doing something about it. In other words, acknowledging that you are a victim is important for getting yourself out of your victim status, but at the same time, a “victim mentality” is typically understood as a self-defeating attitude and psychologically damaging.
So what’s the difference?
Right now, I’m working with this: a “victim mentality” is when you choose to complain about your situation as a substitute to solving it–as though the complaining is the solution; but if you acknowledge your victim status as a means to solving your problem, that is not a “victim mentality”. This goes hand-in-hand with the shirking of responsibility, which is a prerequisite for solving your own problems, for as long as you convince yourself that there’s nothing you can do about the position you’re in, you have no responsibility, and it is therefore pointless to try and bring yourself out of it. Therefore, complaining is all you can do and the best solution you have given your perceived predicament.
I would like to know if others have a different take on what a “victim mentality” is.
What I have surmised as what people are referring to when they use the term “victim mentality” is the mentality of accepting that one is a victim to the point that it has become a thoughtless habit. It is very similar to defeatism and fatalism, presuming ones defeat and thereby ensuring ones defeat.
There is of course the social strategy of playing the victim to inspire sympathy (very common among minority groups even when they are far from being the minority). That is more of a “serpent mentality” hiding in the grass of victimization and plausible deniability.
gib, I think you have the gist of what it means to most people.
My attempt at an explanation: In society, a victim of crime is often granted recompense or something from a court or other authority - also, for example, a child who felt s/he was wronged would look to his parent. Victim mentality is being stuck in the mindset of feeling like a victim until somehow acknowledged or compensated by someone or some group of people. Sometimes there is no compensation that can sate the “woe is me” mentality. By contrast, one could acknowledge that something bad happened to them, they were wronged in some way, and take direct action oneself to improve one’s situation. It’s about your mindset and response to a bad situation.
I thought this post by Wobbly from a while ago was relevant:
Most humans (over 99%) are slaves, genetically, and so would never understand a master morality, or authoritative mentality, even if you nurture them to have one. You can’t change a person’s biology, their hardware. So you can never make a victim into an authoritarian. Being a victim is easy. Everybody is “victims” of the world, just by being born. You will suffer, since life and death entails suffering. But it is the rare master who rises above life, death, and suffering. A master truly takes the weight of the world upon his own shoulders. He is not a victim, because he refuses anybody else to have power over him. To victimize somebody is similar to criminalizing somebody. A criminal is a master. A master never allows others to have more power than himself. Slaves blame the master, but never themselves, for being pathetic weaklings.
It takes a true strength, a very rare type, to blame oneself, and never blame others. To blame others is to attribute to them a moral agency above oneself. So being a victim, is by definition, a weakness. It is a lack of moral agency.
Humans are victims of god’s divine will, for better or worse, for good or evil. Humans are slaves to god. Eternal, whiny, pathetic, victims.
A master, an authoritarian, will spit in the face of the pitiful. A master will die for his pride. A master has pride. Slaves have none.
Hmmm… that could explain a lot. It’s almost as if actually being a victim of real oppression or abuse becomes internalized, thus becoming a habit, and survives long after the oppressor or abuse is gone. If that’s all you’ve known for so long, it will continue to be all you know indefinitely.
That’s a great quote by Wobbly
Indeed. And you can see this even when the slave becomes master (for there is a difference between a master and a master-mentality). The slave who finds himself in the position of master becomes the most terrible tyrant. He acts in the way he surmises the master is supposed to act because to him, being cruel, being tyrannical, was all he knew of the master. He inferred cruelty and tyranny as the guiding principle that determined the master’s conduct. But the reality is that the master never thought of the slave–he was only ever interested in his own personal ambitions–he disregarded the slave, was insensitive to his needs and his plight–but never had as a primary goal to be tyrannical and cruel to him. But that’s all the slave sees, and so once he, by some fortunate turn of events, becomes the master, he adopts the mentality of the cruel oppressor since he knows that that’s what kept him down this whole while. But he has not achieved the master’s state of mind–he is still a slave inside–because he has not shed himself of his older slave mentality; it is the same set of roles: the cruel master, the victimized slave–only now he sees that his position is changed. Victim mentality is all too similar.
I have always seen the victim mentality as putting the blame for the lousy things in your life on others or things.
Like: Instead of ever admitting you forgot a thing to do, you blame something else for putting it out of your mind.
Or Your boss stressed you out so much you drank too much and did the bad thing.
Etc etc.
It allows you to never take responsibility.
This seem like a good distinction, and it is not quite agreed with by Wizard, it seems to me, where one is never to blame others but rather blame oneself. The irony being that some of the people with the greatest victim mentality and some of the ones truly victimized by others - say, children who are being sexually abused by a parent - do blame themselves as a rule.
I tend to evaluate the use of a rule by imagining what happens in terms of behavior - interpersonally and on one’s own - and then also intrapsychically if that rule becomes superego or an ego ideal.
To never blame others seems like demanding one never sneeze or burp or turn to the left. Why bother limiting the range of one’s responses that one moves through day to day? Someone runs a stop sign and hits my car, I will blame them. If, a year later I am saying that guy ruined my marriage since the crash led to X…I have a problem, because a natural reaction is being used as a hardened fixture in the universe. As an excuse, as something handy.
It doesn’t give the other driver greater moral agency than me to react that he is to blame for the accident - assuming no critical other factors in my scenario. I mention burping, turning to the left and sneezing, to give a sense that the act of blaming is a natural reaction, and certain a useful one in many situations. It can also be a problem. If you always turn to the left or always turn to the left when you feel stress, this is going to cause accidents and likely often not address the problem or get you anywhere but moving in a circle. Also one can always blame the other AND look for solutions that are not dependent on the other changing.
If you create an ontology of blame and the act of blame becomes a stance and there are other options, which for most of us posting here is the case (at least in most situations), then if blaming is getting in the way of improving things, it is aproblem. If it is simply a part of a flow of emotions and thoughts it need not be at all. (I suppose part of my reaction to the thread is that people I have known who ascribed to blanket anti-victim stances, tended to have huge undercurrent blame, and also tended not to notice how much they blamed other people. It would come out in crises, but it was also there all the time as a kind of tangible but unstated goo. Since to openly blame would be to be a hypocrite, their superego rule or ideal forced their blame into the shadows, where, god bless the bugger, it kept on blaming)
So Gib, can you bring this down to concrete instances - with wives, employers, employees, neighbors - in your own life, say, and explain how your understanding of victim mentality might shift your behavior and way of thinking in the future?
If any has watched US news within the past day or so a prime variety of victim mentality has been shown.
The football player named Rice has his wife defending him. If you watch her interview her face and movements display fear and shame while she defends.
I wish I could pity her but, I just can’t.
True, but you would never fall prey to the victim mentality in that case.
And they are the ones most desperately seeking to get out of the situation they’re in.
I agree. It’s like eating a bag of chips or getting drunk. You know it’s unhealthy for you but so long as you do it only in moderation and you take care of your health at all other times, it isn’t damaging. It’s only when you fall into the habit of doing it all the time and become obese or a drunkard, and you completely disregard your health, that it becomes a problem.
That would be acknowledging your victim status as a means to finding a solution.
Well, if you’re asking what I’m relating this to, it would be traced to the Reforming Democracy thread in which I’ve been prompted to think about Marxism and its impact on liberal thinking. Marxism is almost catered to inducing the victim mentality–it speaks to those who see themselves as members of an oppressed class: the working poor chiefly, but also blacks, women, homosexuals, etc. (Uccisore tells me that Marxist thought, through the years, has been overtly linked to these groups). Yet at the same time, I cannot bring myself to fully embrace this–that is, in the sense that I can point my finger at a rape victim, for example, and tell her that her attitudes stem merely from a victim mentality that was instilled in her from a source that can be traced back to Marxist philosophy. I have no appreciation for what it’s like to be raped, and I have no doubt the experience is that of actual victimhood. Thus, my dwelling over the question of when it is a victim mentality and when it is true victimhood.
If you’re asking for examples of my own life in which I can say I had a victim mentality or I was able to rise above it despite acknowledging that I was a victim in this or that circumstance, I’d have to say moreso in the past than right now. I remember several years ago being miserable about having to get up for work every morning–wanting just half an hour more of sleep–and blaming it on capitalist culture. I also sometimes, in my more miserable moments (this is the present now), wail up to the sky (metaphorically, in my head) about how my life sucks and that next life time I won’t screw things up so badly–and in these cases I blame the universe or some shit like that (very metaphysical ). But I think these are the occasional moments–like eating chips or getting drunk–and I recognize the victim mentality in my head in the same moment when it’s arisen, and I laugh at myself. I think one can sometimes take a rest from a marathon–you still get there in the end eventually–it’s the one’s who give up entirely saying the arduousness of the task is keeping them from moving at all that have fallen prey to real victim mentality.
I don’t think that is true. Often they cannot conceive of an option - thinking especially of the sexually abused child.
I don’t think it’s unhealthy. I think sitting on it or pretending it is not (part of) one’s reaction, is likely to be more unhealthy. It’s a bit like saying anger is unhealthy but if you get angry in moderation it’s ok.
But the blaming is not doing that. The blaming may be part of the means or it may not be, but my point was that reacting that way is not mutually exclusive with looking for a solution. You could blame your landlord for making several months of you life less enjoyable since he never got around to fixing the oil heater AND look for a new apartment - or sue him or withhold rent, etc. The blaming might be a part of your own process of dealing with the situation and thus proactive or it might simply be a natural reaction that neither inhibits nor helps you find a solution. But in the end an asshole did do some damage and that damage, at least some of it, was not under your control.
Marxism is a complicated phenomenon, and I don’t want to take us off on a tangent, but it seems to me it also led to a great did of people taking action, changing things to the way they wanted or the way they thought they wanted. Also there is Marxism as critique and then there is Marxism as ‘here’s the solution’. I think the former is pretty spot on while the latter has not gone well at all, especially on the large scale where it was intended to work.
To me these kinds of things have to be looked at in a case to case way - which would be hard for me here trying to evaluate your reactions there. AGain, they could simply be natural reactions that come and go and who cares. They could also be first reactions to coming to a solution. Consciousness that you do not like the way things are is the first step to making changes - another way is via desire and these are not mutually exclusive. So first you hate waking up for a job and not knowing a way out you bitch and moan. I mean, that seems just peachy to me. Not saying YOU SHOULD react this way, just that is seems fine. This could lead, when the dislike gets strong enough and you begin to accept it enough, to you rethinking, perhaps consulting others, to see if there is some way to get out of the 9-5 grind. So even in a ‘you should always solve you own problems’ outlook, this could be part of something proactive.
It’s a bit like my reaction to when people say you should not complain if you don’t have a solution. (here interpersonal and political situations) That’s just silly. If people begin to realize that other people also dislike the situation, more information will come out about the negative and now there is motivation to find something better. People who realize there is a problem may not be the best solvers, but they may be canary in the coal mines.
So with an individual. Part of you hates what is happening. Not knowing a solution it blames the universe or God. That’s just natural. How long it is OK to stay in this state regarding a specific issue, who knows?
If I was a slave, you know, Southern US style, had children at the plantation - iow a problem finding a good escape - my blame the universe stage might last a long time. Sounds natural to me.
If we continue to find all sorts of spiritual and philosophical reasons not to react or alwasy to react like computers analyzing for solutions, society will ignore what is natural in us and will fit some other kind of citizen. Robots for example.
Again: this is not to say that one should do this, or that one should avoid looking for solutions. I think solution seeking is a good part of any reaction to being shit on or at.
It’s easier to ignore all the external and environmental problems of the world especially when you force all individuals living within it to internalize them all instead.
You don’t think they’d be desperate to avoid the situation? You don’t think they’d be thinking “What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?”
Looking for a way out doesn’t mean knowing the way out.
Well, sure it’s OK. You don’t expect healthy people to never get angry, do you?
And I agree. It may be a combination of acknowledging victim status as a means of solving a problem coupled with the interspersed natural reactions of blaming, which I agreed above isn’t always unhealthy. I suppose you’re separating the blaming from the acknowledgement of victim status: I’ve been the victim of abuse, so what do I do? + The abuser’s an asshole! But the two can be one and the same: The abuser’s an asshole, therefore I ought to report him (or leave, or beat the shit out of him, whatever). Recall my definition of a victim mentality in the OP: complaining/blaming as a substitute for problem solving.
You don’t have to take responsibility for the victimization, just for how you react to it.
Yeah, I wouldn’t say Lenin had a victim mentality at all.
True, but attempting a solution doesn’t guarantee that the solution will work.
The way I see it, Marxism (the philosophy) works its way into a victim-like mentality if one uses it that way. This could be said of any philosophy, of course, but Marxism makes it so easy: you’re less well off economically than that guy? You’re a victim!
It’s not really about how long you stay in that state of mind, it’s about why you’re in it–remember: as a substitute for problem solving, a preference for complaining–taken to extremes this can go so far as to reject solutions when they’re offered to you because, well, then you’d have to stop complaining and blaming. It can go to such extremes as to make up problems in order to affirm your victim status–there’s a reason why they call it a victim mentality ← the “mentality” there is often meant to connote that your victimhood is only in your head–you make up some rationalization about why someone else is to blame because that makes you feel like the victim who deserves sympathy, coddling, and all the advantages others are willing to give you.
The key is to know what you are doing–to know your motives, the ones that lie behind the clutter your filling your mind with by your rationalizations, complaining, and blaming. If you think you’re playing the victim so that you get sympathy, for example, knowing that could help to figure out the best strategy to get that sympathy, or it could help in informing you that you’re most likely not going to get sympathy so best to drop the victim act all together. There’s no “have to” here. Simply knowing your motives helps you become more informed and that’s useful for getting a better handle on how you want to behave.
…was just looking for a a couple of examples. I thought about your statement a bit and just realized I don’t really know what you’re talking about. I mean, maybe I do, but I couldn’t be sure because it was a little too vague.
Are the people in power really ignoring the external and environmental problems or are they actually taking a more conscious and calculated approach? Specifics would help flesh the thought out.
Psychology and psychiatry are tools of social control used by the state.
It is much easier to ignore and not fix external environmental problems that creates conflict by internalizing them and then blaming individuals for the direct causes of them.
It’s easier to drug whole entire populatios then to reform society as a whole.
). But I think these are the occasional moments–like eating chips or getting drunk–and I recognize the victim mentality in my head in the same moment when it’s arisen, and I laugh at myself. I think one can sometimes take a rest from a marathon–you still get there in the end eventually–it’s the one’s who give up entirely saying the arduousness of the task is