Victim? No. You Have A Choice.

“We all have it coming, kid.” – Unforgiven

There’s a serial killer who is strangling victims with t-shirts and he keeps using smaller and smaller sizes of shirt.  Police say he’s still at large.

There comes a point in everyone’s life where they look at Carrie Fisher and say, “I ran out of gas.  I got a flat tire.  I didn’t have change for cab fare.  I lost my tux at the cleaners.  I locked my keys in the car.  An old friend came in from out of town.  Someone stole my car.  There was an earthquake!  A terrible flood!  Locusts!  It wasn’t my fault!”

That might even be true:  100% true.  A meteor might have fallen on your house, and you might have unknowingly chosen the slightly cheaper “meteor-exempt” policy from Allstate®, and the Helping Hands™ people would then be justified in giving you the Flying Fragment Finger™.

Everyone on Earth could legitimately claim to be a victim at this point.  This, my friends, is the biggest trap in the world.

Why?

It’s against everything that is virtuous and good.  Victimhood is the poison that destroys lives and civilizations with all of the wanton carelessness of a feminist wine aunt trying to “find herself” on a booze cruise through the Caribbean.

When alcohol says to you, “You can dance,” this is what it means.

Victimhood says there is something wrong with the situation.  Let me clarify something:  there isn’t anything wrong with any situation.  Reality is real.  The situation is the situation.  The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

Fairness is a lie.  Expecting things to be different because we want them to be is, perhaps, the most insidious poison that we dose ourselves with on a regular basis.  And that is the basis of being a victim.

Being a victim is like being in a prison, but it’s a prison that is especially strong.  Why?  Victims willingly build their own prison.

What is the essence of victimhood?

  • Like France, a victim is at the mercy of outside forces.
  • Like Sweden, a victim takes no responsibility for their current position.
  • Like Mongo, victim merely pawn in game of life.
  • Like the Italian Army, victims are weak.

Why do people choose to be victims?

Well, I said they are weak.  But they use that same weakness to control others around them.

“I can’t do this.  Can you help me?”

Never play chess with an Islamic terrorist – it’s always “pawn to C4.”

Victims are horrible to be around.  They’re constantly complaining, but take no action to make their lives better.  Honestly, they don’t want their lives to be better, since they’ve begun to use their victimhood as a weird superpower – as if Superman® won because Lex Luthor™ got embarrassed from beating him up.

Victims don’t expect anything from themselves, so they can’t fail.  The world is against them, so why even try?  They have a world where everyone is responsible for everything.

Except for them.

Like I said at the beginning of this piece, the corollary is that sometimes we really didn’t have anything to do with the fate that happened to us.  It just happened.

So?

Just like there have been times when I haven’t had money, but I’ve never been poor, there are times when the breaks didn’t go my way, but I try never to be the victim.

See, this man may be broke, but he’s not poor. 

The stunning truth that many people go through life is that, even when the meteor hits their house they still don’t have to give up control.  There’s no real reason to be a victim.

  • Cold? Good!  You can make it through that, and won’t that make the hot coffee taste great?
  • Tired? Wonderful!  You can rest later, and sleep like a king.
  • Hungry? Excellent!  The next meal may be the best you’ve ever tasted.
  • Someone make fun of you? Fantastic!  An opportunity to get better and get tougher.

When I was in high school, Ma Wilder had a stroke.

Now, say what you want about Ma Wilder, but that woman had a willpower streak as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon.  This might explain some of our epic fights when neither one of us would back down.  Sometimes our fights would last for days, until the voice of reason, Pa Wilder, intervened.

Strangely, I think Ma Wilder would have liked Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

Pa wasn’t interested so much in justice as in watching Monday Night Football® in peace, and knew that a fight between a determined third grader and his 50+ year old wife (I’m adopted, but within the family – Ma Wilder was my biological grandma) would interfere.

Anyway we Wilders don’t do anything small.  Ma’s stroke was a big one, which paralyzed half of her body.  It left her in a wheelchair, an eloquent woman cut down and left unable to speak except for “yes” and, more often, “no.”

But the one thing her stroke didn’t impact was her will.

One day she wanted a Coke®.  She wheeled over to me with the Coke™ in her one good hand.  I loosened the top of the Coke© bottle so it was finger-tight but left it on for her to finish.

Pa Wilder was a little bit mad.  “John, take that off for her.”

Ma Wilder jumped in.  “No!”  She took it from me, wheeled over to the table, unscrewed the top with one hand, and poured herself her drink.  As much as that woman could do for herself, she was resolved to do for herself.

The opposite of victimhood is:

  • Strength
  • Will
  • Determination
  • Perseverance
  • Purpose

Okay, maybe it won’t regrow your hair.

Fortune may determine your circumstance.  You determine how you act and what you make of your circumstance.

And, win or lose?

It really was a fair fight.  Honestly, we really do all have it coming.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

40 thoughts on “Victim? No. You Have A Choice.”

  2. I didn’t get the Carrie Fisher joke. Why am I making excuses to Carrie Fisher?

    1. A scene from the original Blues Brothers. Jake (John Belushi) explains to Carrie Fisher’s character why he didn’t make it to their wedding.

      1. Ah. I thought it was because you were trying to one-up Miss Fisher ‘cos you have it worse than dying, and then having your corpse reanimated and put into The Last Jedi.

  3. And this is one of the many reasons why I like this blog. The only place I know of where eyes are wide open about what’s happening and at the same time funny and inspiring. Just thinking about Dom DeLuise as American Caesar from that post a while back cracks me up.

    Hopefully if I’m having a bad hour and I find myself in front of this screen, I can remember to look to the non-CW2 posts to get myself back on track.

    1. Speaking of rejecting victimhood…

      I watched a valuable movie tonight named “the social dilemma”. The theme is social media is pushing us to extremes.

      The film makes a good point: Getting away from social media and turning our app notifications off keeps us from being the victim, from being the work product.

      A former director of monetization somewhere with lots of social media senior level employment background was asked in the film what the downside of this is and he asked “In the short term?”. Then said “Civil war.” Insightful.

      Explains a lot about what we’re seeing.

      1. Agreed. It may be the push for clicks and the “A. I. hugbox” that’s driving us to war. Wonder what the A.I. gets out of this?

    2. We have to, and I mean have to, not become demoralized. We have such strength, and we can do so much. My faith is that we are far, far from finished.

  4. I know an Amish man born in October 1924 so he is a week from turning 96. His wife is deep in dementia. He can’t really get around without a walker. He still goes out and works in the garden, hobbling a few feet, stopping, slowly lowering himself to the ground to pick a couple of weeds and then slowly pulling himself upright in his walker to move a few more feet.

    If he can still work…

    1. Letting victimhood defeat you is worse than the event that led to your circumstance.

    2. Yup. I saw an old couple here, the man was bent at a 90 degree angle, but would shuffle out of his car to get his wife’s walker so they could go shopping together.

      Never give up.

      1. It’s one our Dad used on me and my brothers quite often when we wanted a snack between meals or we were on vacation and wanted Dad to stop at a store beside the highway in our travels.

        1. It really is one of the great pleasures of being Dad. That and making them learn how to drive a stick shift.

      1. Ah.
        Another taut in Ricky’s .pdf:
        “…political extremists…”

        I probably need to preface my above opinion.
        I am the least political person you could meet.
        I have zero-zero-zero interest in politics or politicians… or government.
        To me [my ‘self’, personally], any politician is an extremist.
        I see the phrase ‘political extremists’ as repeatedly redundant.

        This’s the reason [why] I love tautology!
        Far be it for me to point out the reasons [why] I do, suffice [it] to say I do.

      2. Yup. Dovetails with other polls I’ve seen. It’s becoming obvious that we’re unravelling . . . and no one weaving to keep us in together.

        1. I have seen no convincing case that we should remain together.
          The Left has been working at destroying us from within for a century.

          1. That is objectively true – this is what 100 years of cultural destruction looks like, deciding it’s okay to give kids drugs to change their sex when they’re not old enough to decide to get an earring in most states.

            Dark days are coming. Which might be the good news?

  7. Somehow, I suspect that when the childless drunken wine aunt intersects Karen from HR, division by zero is the result, and the whole universe spontaneously implodes. Cripples walk, liberals vote ‘R’, and Jimmy Hoffa rises from the dead and wants to know who stole his pants.

    Victimhood? Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat.

    In the oddest of coincidences, I think I actually met Ma Wilder once in the ER, where she was moonlighting as a receptionist. I’d just broken my leg in a skiing accident, and she looked at me with contempt, and sneered, “What are you whining for, boy? You got TWO of them, don’t you?”

    1. Okay, that’s totally something that Ma Wilder would have said. She was loving, but the kind of loving that made you aware every moment that you were responsible for your own actions.

      Ohhh, a world without victimhood, and all we have to sacrifice is a Karen and a Wine Aunt?

      Count me in.

  8. Fairness is a lie.

    Close!

    I think read it first (or something close to it)’in C.S. Lewis, but justice, and truth, and loveliness and joy are the reality, and we know it. Deep down we know death is an outrage. It’s only when we’ve Grown Up, and been taught nihilism, and how to rationalize our vices, that we deny it.

    What gets us is what you’re pointing out: Victimhood. The notion that one is uniquely undeserving of all the wrongness. That it’s not just that the world is bent, and so are we, and that is *not* what we and it were made for; but that it is a particular outrage that *I*, so special and so very much the center of the universe, should have to struggle and suffer.

    Because if Virtue is a lie, then we are just naked apes shivering and alone in a dangerous and indifferent universe.

    And I know *that* is Fake News.

    1. Great comment, and I agree in all particulars.

      Virtue is no lie. I see so many people more virtuous than I will ever be. They inspire me.

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