Victimhood and the call to rise above it

There is a fine line between recognising an instance of genuine oppression of one form or another, and allowing oneself to slide into the convenient status of the ‘indefinitely infirm’.

When Carl Jung was a 12-year-old schoolboy, he was shoved to the ground by a peer, hitting his head on the pavement and nearly losing consciousness. He then made the most of this attack.

In his autobiography Memories, dreams, reflections, Jung writes: “At the moment I felt the blow, the thought flashed through my mind: ‘Now you won’t have to go to school anymore.’ I was only half unconscious, but I remained lying there a few moments longer than was strictly necessary, chiefly in order to avenge myself on my assailant…”

It was at this moment that Jung began having fainting episodes whenever he returned to class or attempted homework. This “picnic” period, as Jung described it, continued for six months, during which he did not attend school or any event that he did not wish to go to. But beneath it all he sensed something was amiss.

“I frittered away my time with loafing, collecting, reading, and playing. But I did not feel any happier for it; I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing from myself.”

Sometime later, Jung forgot how his infirmity – which is to say his sense of feebleness and weakness – had come about. His invalid status was taken for granted and he did not question it or bother to find a solution until he overhead a conversation that shook him back into reality.

He writes: “Then one day a friend called on my father. They were sitting in the garden and I hid behind a shrub, for I was possessed of an insatiable curiosity. I heard the visitor saying to my father, ‘And how is your son?’ ‘Ah, that’s a sad business,’ my father replied. ‘The doctors no longer know what is wrong with him. They think it might be epilepsy. It would be dreadful if he were incurable. I have lost what little I had, and what will become of the boy if he cannot earn his own living?’

“I was thunderstruck. This was the collision with reality.

“Why, then, I must get to work!” I thought suddenly.

It was at this point that Jung decided to become a “serious child.” And to mark his decisiveness, he rushed straight into his father’s study and began intense language work, absorbing his Latin grammar like there was no tomorrow.

He continues: “After ten minutes of this I had the finest of fainting fits. I almost fell off the chair, but after a few minutes, I felt better and went on working. ‘Devil take it, I’m not going to faint,’ I told myself, and persisted on purpose. This time it took about fifteen minutes before the second attack came. That, too, passed like the first. ‘And now you must really get to work!’ I stuck it out, and after an hour came the third attack. Still, I did not give up, and worked for another hour, until I had the feeling that I had overcome the attacks. Suddenly, I felt better than I had in all the months before. And, in fact, the attacks did not recur. From that day on, I worked over my grammar and other school books every day. A few weeks later, I returned to school, and never suffered another attack, even there. The whole bag of tricks was over and done with! That was when I learned what a neurosis is.”

As a young, aggressive and slightly awkward boy, Jung sought to avoid the impending developmental demands of adolescent independence, and faced an impasse which allowed him to cling to his frailties, postponing the process.

A similar tendency exists today, in which cultural trends seize any opportunity to offer unknowing support to young people who claim oppression and illness. Such trends invite both personal and collective attitudes to adapt towards persistent calls to victimhood and infirmity, delaying the process of adulthood indefinitely. While embracing a status of oppression or affliction can summon genuinely needed care, clinging onto it for too long can invite disengagement from life, and an indefinite avoidance of one’s evolving responsibilities over time. This also has negative implications for personal mental health, as it fosters a sense of helplessness, the abdication of responsibility, and an eventual near-total loss of any degree of autonomy and control.

Indeed, thinking of ourselves as victims may unintentionally cultivate what psychologists call an external locus of control (LOC) – a concept first articulated in the 1950s by Julian Rotter. Those with an internal LOC experience themselves as being able to influence outcomes that affect them, while those with an external LOC act with the belief that most of what happens to them is beyond their control.

Though both these loci of control have their advantages and disadvantages, acknowledging and emphasising personal agency appears to be a determining factor of whether one will be psychologically resilient, as developmental psychologist Norman Garmezy’s four decades of research suggests. Added benefits of maintaining this perception include decreased stress and better health in general.

Now it’s important to note that current trends award increased social status to those perceived as victims, which is to say that by mere membership of an “oppressed” group, one can expect to receive social – and even legal – benefits (as exemplified in our very own misguided ‘equality acts’).

Those who haven’t noticed or who pretend this is not the case are either naïve or disingenuous.

In their 2015 scholarly paper ‘Micro aggression and moral cultures’, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning posited that a new moral culture of victimhood is developing on college campuses. In such a culture, they describe how being a victim has benefits, such that one’s standing is raised and confers virtue (among other things), partly because it marshals protection and support from influential third parties. In Malta, we need only look at the vast sea of NGOs who rightly or wrongly, and in a very peculiar way, maintain a majority share in societal, moral authority – and by extension, the policy formation that results from this – while simultaneously latching onto a sense of frailty, weakness and virtue.

As you can imagine, rewarding victimhood by attributing a higher social standing to perceived victims is an incentive to create even more victims. In other words, we have created a positive feedback loop that rewards people for being upset, helpless and weak. This somewhat pathetic cycle encourages individuals to experience themselves as being at the mercy of external forces totally beyond their control, resulting in negative consequences for mental wellbeing as well as a societal rippling effect that one could intuit, manifests itself in relative proportion to the perceived reward.

Similarly, there is also a tendency to encourage individuals to think of themselves as unwell. In a paper titled ‘Turning childhood into a mental illness’ in Spiked Online, the author details the inclination to medicalise childhood behaviour by assigning a diagnosis to ordinary distress, encouraging children to see themselves as ill, while inadvertently playing into the feedback loop of the perpetually infirm.

The same way Carl Jung attained moral and practical gain from his infirmity, some subcultures have given the state of having a mental health diagnosis certain real and perceived advantages. On somewhat pathological websites like Tumblr, among others, there are those who have diagnosed themselves with dissociative identity disorder, going as far as to proudly list their mental health conditions in their profiles, including anxiety, depression, borderline personality disorder, and PTSD. Author Angela Nagle has called this phenomenon “the cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability.”

It need not be said that such behaviour is neither new nor helpful. The tendency towards self-diagnosis on Tumblr and other social media platforms mirrors the current tides in the wider culture, partly demonstrated by the astronomical explosion of mental health disorders and diagnoses since their inception. The first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual contained about 12 diagnostic categories. That number has now grown to 265.

This carries with it a series of unintended consequences, like the sense of absolution a psychiatric diagnosis communicates. It isn’t our fault that we have anxiety or depression. Forces beyond our control have conspired against us, you see. And while practical benefits such as the reduction of stigmas and contextualised distress pave the way to intervention and treatment, a diagnosis should not define an individual.

When a diagnosis becomes part of a person’s identity, it encourages the abdication of responsibility for that person’s predicament. This in turn invites people to think of themselves as blameless, helpless, and adrift on life’s colliding currents with no agency of their own – which is quite plainly, incorrect.

But despite these somewhat grim tidings, I’d invite you to consider an alternative, wherein curious individuals may seek wisdom from the great leaders and heroes of old. During a military campaign against Barbarian invaders, then-Roman emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote the following lines some 2,000 years ago:

“At first day’s light have in readiness, against disinclination to leave your bed, the thought that, ‘I am rising for the work of man.’ Must I grumble at setting out to do what I was born for, and for the sake of which I have been brought into the world? Is this the purpose of my creation, to lie here under the blankets and keep myself warm?”

In a modern Western world that celebrates victimhood, today’s individuals are encouraged to look to their ancestors for wisdom against adversity. As generations of individuals cultivated to assume infirmity reach their apex, the challenges that lie ahead will require the brave to set aside timidity, weakness and victimhood, and reclaim the neglected virtues of agency, strength and boldness, no matter how terrible the odds.