Culture of Victimization

Posted on December 1, 2003 in Class Morals & Ethics

Culture of victimization is one of those phrases that dribble off the lips of Right Wingers these days. It’s used to condemn poor and working people as a class, particularly when they question affluence. A nice illustration of the philosophy came up in response to my recent post about “True Acts of Kindness“.

The gist of “No One of Consequence’s” remarks can be distilled to “you people don’t appreciate the rich”.

I’ve seen this before. A new tactic of the Right is to blame all kinds of things on the poor and the working class including air pollution, litter, hunger, violence, etc. The rich cannot be held accountable for any part of this, they argue. Their actions, their purchases, and their choices exist entirely independently of any other person. The actions of the poor and the working class burden the rich, goes the subtextual argument, but the rich do only good.

The word for what we see is “projection”: using their money and access to the media, they promote the idea that they are victims.

It is perhaps the wealthy and their defenders who need “True Acts of Kindness” more than the poor. Who else expects a return on every act? Who else prefers layoffs to less profit? Who else defends golden parachutes? Who else must live behind guarded gates? Who else is so afraid of the world that they doublelock the doors and attach burglary alarms to houses located on large estates in the middle of the country?

If the charity of the wealthy is to be taken seriously, there can be no returns on it. I meant “True Acts of Kindness” as a salve for the suffering of everyone*, but methinks it’s the poor little rich people who think they are utterly necessary to civilization who need to heed its lessons the most.

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* My wording was meant to get my working and middle class readers to see the fault where it seemed obvious to them and then ask themselves if they, too, were not sufferers.