Victimhood is crippling. The victim is unable to effect changes in his environment by virtue of his need to maintain himself in a passive position in relationship to the world. Sometimes the victim actively fights to retain his passivity and victimhood. Patients who take this position in therapy are unaware of how they enslaving themselves and are incapable of truly changing any aspect of their lives until they are able to accept agency and responsibility. Even the language of the pseudo-psychological helpers reveals the essential requirement that the patient never depart from the victim position. Patients are to be empowered by the helpers to take on the system and get the benefits that are due them. The rare patient who endeavors to find his way to independence faces tremendous impediments that make success much more difficult than it needs to be. (Patients lose benefits well before they are able to successfully stand on their own two feet, which makes true independence from the system fraught with risk.)
Throughout the blogosphere, the evidence of the struggle between those who take an active position in the world and those who submit to the world is visible. Submission is a passive act (sorry for the oxymoron) though many people fight actively to continue in passivity.
I wrote about the difficulty in moving a patient toward an active position, with all it implies in the way of personal responsibility, in a post on Contrasts, Edges, and Differences from the early days of this blog:
Often caricatured as non-involvement (and sometimes, some Analysts do a terrific imitation of detachment) the Analyst must remain non-judgmental and curious about all facets of the patient’s mind. Part of the work involves helping the patient develop a curious attitude about himself, and especially about his basic relationship with the world around him. This is not as simple as it sounds. Patients, even patients who are desperately unhappy, who have had disaster after disaster in their work, or their relationships, have a powerful investment in maintaining their dysfunctional perspective. Many patients (and many people in general) would much prefer to see themselves as victims of their hereditary and their Neurochemistry, rather than as agents of their own unhappiness. All victims share some common features. Whether you are a victim of your genetics, of your parents’ inadequate nurturing, or of the greater society, all victimization involves a feeling of helplessness. Victims, by definition, are helpless. It is extraordinarily difficult to make someone aware that their victimhood is all too often an active state, one that they unconsciously create. Certainly, real victims do exist. The victims of the tsunami are real. Children who are being abused by parents or caretakers are truly helpless. However, once the world is divided into victims and victimizers, all discourse ends.
The Judeo-Christian ethic requires that one take an active role in bettering one's circumstance. "God helps those who help themselves." This is not true in Islam, which requires submission to the vicissitudes of fate. "Inshallah", God willing, is sprinkled throughout Arabic conversation. To the Westerner, it sounds like a cliche, a throwaway, a space-filler, yet to many Muslims, it is a literal statement of their position in relation to their deity. The Secular Humanists of Europe and America who spend so much time mocking the religious fail to recognize that they have in effect, created their own Pantheon of Gods to replace the One they have destroyed. Gagdad Bob describes the replacement for God as demons:
But most importantly, radical secularism fails as a religion because it has no God, only demons: George Bush, Christian fundamentalists, Israel, tax cuts for the rich, stolen election, Halliburton, Fox News, Abu Ghraib, Karl Rove, corporate profits, disparities in wealth, strict constructionists, parental notification, talk radio, guns, and so many more. On the other hand, the sort of classical liberalism to which I ascribe--now embodied in the modern American conservative movement--recognizes that politics must aim at something that is not politics, something higher, not lower. The alienation of the world can be healed, but not in the flat and horizontal line of secular history, or in the endlessly recurring cycle of primitive fusion with nature, but in the ascending, evolutionary spiral. The secular world is a value-free flatland of nihilism and urgent nonsense, whereas the vertical world accessed by authentic spirituality is a world of hierarchical values to which we are perpetually drawn, like an attractor at the end of history. It is here where the frontier of psychohistorical evolution lies, for so long as there are free individuals endowed by their Creator with an orientation toward that transtemporal Word that pulls us into its vortex of Truth and Beauty, there will always be frontiers.
I would suggest that both the Islamists, often overtly, and the left, usually covertly, have created, if not Gods, then Demi-Gods, of their enemies. The Islamists believe that the Americans and the Jews can create earthquakes and tsunamis, that they shoot magic bullets that can go around corners (Mohammed Dura), that they can take down skyscrapers on a whim, leaving no traces of involvement. The left believes that George Bush and his henchmen can control the weather and create hurricanes to destroy the poor,black population of New Orleans; they believe that the very words of their enemies are dangerous and can harm the innocent victims of the world. Dr. Sanity contrasts the behavior of the religious right and the secular left in this country:
One thing you can say about the religious right is that their desire to teach "intelligent design" (which I happen to disagree with) is basically a desperate desire to be heard in a system that has deliberately and with malice aforethought been excluding them for years. (You can't even use the word "Christmas" anymore in most schools for fear of offending some sensitive liberal's feelings).
OTOH, on the left, you have women who presume to call themselves "scientists" swooning when a University President suggests the possibility that factors other than sexism might be at work in explaining the state of women in academia.
Which of the above two scenarios has had the most chilling effect on free speech in this country? I submit that it is the latter, which had serious repercussions on that particular University President and effectively warned anyone who might want to explore theories other than sexism that they would be appropriately persecuted.
Crackpot ideas do not hurt science. In fact, a few of them even eventually turn out to have some merit when pursued. What hurts science is when only certain ideas are allowed. When there is a band of elites who determine what is "crackpot" and what isn't. When thinking certain things or exploring certain ideas are considered not politically correct.
Dr. Sanity concluded with this:
In the religious right's case, we have a group who has ideas and who wants to be heard (so what if I think they verge on the "crackpot" side of things--I am not omnipotent. Something valuable might come out of research and study in this area) . In the secular left's case, we have a group that is intent on silencing all opposing viewpoints. They believe implicitly that they are omnipotent, obviously.
Actually, the secular left does not believe they are omnipotent; if anything, they don't even believe they are right. They believe the frightening, distant "other" who is allied with all those who oppose them, is omnipotent. In the Lord of the Rings second book, The Two Towers, the great wizard Gandalf the Grey returns from the dead as Gandalf the White. Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas, expecting to meet the evil, but powerful wizard, Saruman the White know they must attack him before he can open his mouth and speak; his words are so powerful they will be helpless before them. This is the plight of the left in this country and in the West; this is the plight of the Islamists who are so terrified of the WORD that they will not allow the Bible to enter their country. They imbue their enemies with so much power, a power that flows out of their own Utopian ideologies which are based on their powerfully regressive fusion fantasies, that they are terrified of the Demi-Gods they have created. To them, George Bush is not a man; he is belittled as a shrub to make him less frightening, but that is because they see him as the uber-Hitler, the most powerful monster modern man has ever created.
When we lose the capacity to effect our environment, fatalism and passivity are the outcome. The left can snipe but cannot create. The Islamists can blow themselves up, but cannot create. When was the last time the left came up with a new idea? When is the last time Islam created a new idea?
The world of the left and of the Islamists is a world where a dreaded, terrifying "THEY" have the power to create and destroy on a whim, while they remain small, frightened children depending on the largess of a stern, often hostile, at best indifferent Demi-God who exists primarily within their own minds.
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