How the cult
of victimhood poisoned the West
Philosopher Pascal
Bruckner calls for the rejection of self-pity and imagined guilt
Pascal Bruckner is
one of France’s, and the West’s, foremost philosophers; his work is less
well-known in Britain than it should be. He has made a formidable reputation for
attacking contemporary mindsets, notably the self-hating, anti-Westernism of the Left, the
masochism of Western guilt, and the obsession with noxious and illogical
identity politics. All those themes converge in his masterful book I
Suffer Therefore I Am, which dissects victimhood, perhaps the most toxic
feature of current discourse – a confidence trick played by people, even whole
nations, on useful idiots who long to punish themselves for their own imagined
guilt.
So much of this is
about posturing. Bruckner suggests that, for many, “the ultimate dream would be
to become a martyr without ever having suffered anything other than the
misfortune of having been born… Today’s citizens can wake up one morning and
exclaim, as if struck with a revelation, ‘I too am a victim.’” Their “executioners”, he
says, include “capitalism, my family, the bourgeoisie, patriarchy, the system”
– a list that is likely to “change and accumulate”. Seeking bogus victimhood
has become an equal-opportunity delusion, with many examples on the Right
– Donald Trump is cited – but many more on
the Left. After all, the Left’s great invention, welfarism, thrives not least
because of unchallenged victimhood.
Bruckner sets out
how the advance of “woke” began with Leftists seeking to radicalise discourse
through reducing minorities to the status of victims. He mentions the
discipline, coined by a fellow philosopher, of “offensology” – “today, we are
all oversensitive, lashing out at the slightest shock, the slightest remark” –
and the idiotic concept of “microaggressions”. For example, he cites a
former French minister, a black woman, calling it a “microaggression” whenever
she walked past a statue of Colbert, who under the ancien régime drew
up the code of how masters should treat their slaves. Some are so resolute in
their search for victimhood that they claim it even in success: Bruckner quotes
a French singer who, on winning a major televised award, nonetheless informed
the audience watching that “they don’t want to let us overweight black people
rise to the top” – whoever “they” are.
Bruckner is right to question the position that the
descendants of slaves and other oppressed or exterminated people should receive
special treatment, beyond the right we all enjoy, equally, to be spared any
further oppression. He denounces the notion of “indulgence credit for
eternity”, and the idea that such people are “born with a portfolio of
grievances to build on”. This is ahistorical: “Each of us could go back into
our family tree and find a slave, a serf or a hanged man to explain our present
misery.”
He exposes the
absurdity of white people publicly “taking the knee” after the killing of George
Floyd, when practically none of those kneelers had ever done a
disservice to a person of colour in his or her life. There are millions who
feel better for professing guilt by recognising the victimhood of others; that
this victimhood is largely confected does not appear to occur to them, nor that
they are often being exploited by political extremists who manipulate
victimhood for their own ends.
A loose definition
of oppression will inevitably expand the ranks of the oppressed. “Even studying
is sometimes equated with oppression,” Bruckner writes. “Any teaching of a new
subject… is violence inflicted on a child who is being torn from the soft
cocoon of ignorance.” The resultant dilution of school curricula does not just
spare students the arduousness of learning, for example, foreign languages or
(especially) the classics. It also relieves them of reading texts that make
them experience “the retrograde representation of women or minorities, so as
not to wound their fragile souls. As a result, standards are falling,
illiteracy is on the rise and private schools that still focus on excellence
and competition are flourishing.” (That, of course, is not least why the Labour
Government seeks to destroy them by putting VAT on their fees.)
Bruckner argues
that victimhood is not merely a problem with individuals who don’t grasp how
self-destructive and pathetic their self-pity is; when states follow suit, it
becomes a problem on a vast scale. Putin’s Russia is his key example, and an
example too of what he terms the reductio ad Hitlerum, by which
alleged victims enlist Nazism as their opponents’ creed – as Vladimir Putin
does, absurdly, with Ukraine, even though Volodymyr Zelensky himself is Jewish.
Even Hamas can be victims, though Bruckner, in illustrating the imagined
hierarchies of suffering, wonders why nobody seems to know much or care about
Arab-on-Arab violence any more than they highlight the long global history of
non-white people engaging in slavery. But then victim reversal is a familiar
human trait, used to conceal the wickedness of those portraying themselves
falsely as victims, such as when senior Nazis consoled those who murdered Jews
for the distress this taking of innocent lives might have caused them.
Similarly, Bruckner asks why the suffering in the
Gulag, under the Stalinist regime, or in China under Mao, is rarely placed in
the same category as that inflicted by Hitler. Some victims, even if they have
suffered identical fates, seem to be more important than others, especially
those whose misery was inflicted by fascists and not communists. The idea that
men are uniquely violent is countered by depressing lists of names of the
bestial women who did the Third Reich’s dirty work in the camps – and did it
with pleasure – not to mention the thousands of teenage girls who, Bruckner
says, went to Syria to engage in jihad and assist in the enslavement and
maltreatment of other women.
Bruckner is
unequivocal in his belief that some seek victim status in order to attract
attention: “There are people whose only identity is to be ill… these little
bundles of misfortune recite their litanies to anyone who will listen.” In the
West, millions have embraced a culture of whining. “How,” he asks, “did we
pass from the heroic figure of Rosa Parks fighting discrimination in America to
that of Greta Thunberg weeping over the fate of
the planet? That’s the story of the past half-century.”
Although he
concedes that there are still real heroes, performing acts of genuine heroism
in saving the lives of others at the cost of their own, too many people prefer
to be cast as victims, exploiting the status either out of narcissism or for wider
political ends. And heaven help any political leader who does not emote
excessively at anyone else’s misfortune: George
W Bush never recovered from showing insufficient empathy after
Hurricane Katrina.
Bruckner asks
whether we might, at last, shed “the robes of martyrdom to enter the orders of
the free”. One woman he praises for doing just that is Samantha Geimer, who
was sexually assaulted by Roman Polanski when
she was 13, but has had enough of being a victim. Others lack Geimer’s courage,
and lack of ulterior motive. Leaving aside the personal and political gains to
be made by those who present themselves as victims, there is also a whole
grief-maintenance industry that earns a handsome living from encouraging this
toxic mentality.
Bruckner’s thesis is underlined by this thought:
stuff happens, it’s a pretty horrible world out there, and we had better get
used to it. “Cruelty kills but does not break us,” he writes. “Composure is one
of the faces of heroism.” If we did face up to our fate, perhaps we would be
better prepared, when manipulative politicians such as Putin, Trump and Erdogan
try to present themselves as victims, to treat them with the contempt they
merit. Too many people have been terrorised by fashion into a permanent state
of guilt that forces them into a permanent state of compassion for individuals
and institutions who don’t need it or deserve it, but milk it for all it’s
worth. Enough is enough.
★★★★★
I Suffer Therefore
I Am is published by Policy at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0330
173 5030 or visit Telegraph Books
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/5789d728673c0ade
