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My issue with the notion of a "victim mindset" is that sometimes people are legitimately victimized, and in that context, it's often useful to identify as a vic
by bccdee 1y ago
My issue with the notion of a "victim mindset" is that sometimes people are legitimately victimized, and in that context, it's often useful to identify as a victim. So what if people are susceptible to being upset by things they can't control? If someone assaulted me and stole my belongings, yes, that situation would have been out of my control and it would upset me—and this would be a prosocial response. I would speak up about the problem of violence in my community, and maybe that would contribute to preventing incidents like this in the future.
> A victim mindset is built on [...] an agreement they made with another party which the other party didn't consent to.
I don't see what agreements have to do with it. If I stab you with a knife, it doesn't matter whether I've previously agreed not to stab you—I've victimized you regardless. Perhaps you can say I've implicitly agreed to abide by the laws of my country, but then you'd have to concede that the German Jews were not victimized by Nazis, because Nazis had edited the law such that their own actions were all legal. You could say there's some underlying natural law or social contract which all humans have implicitly agreed to, but at that point we're really stretching the idea of "agreement," aren't we? Certainly no type of lawyer ever sat me down to sign the social contract.
At the end of the day, identifying with victimhood can be prosocial or antisocial, and the only way to distinguish between those categories is based on the specifics of the situation: It's prosocial when they're responding to genuine wrongdoing in pursuit of a real solution, and it's antisocial when they're responding to imagined wrongdoing or bolstering a harmful non-solution. It all depends on whether a the wrongdoing in question is legitimate or not, and I don't think you can dance around that question (bypassing the entire field of ethics) with a few remarks about agreement and consent.
- wredcoll 1y ago> It all depends on whether a the wrongdoing in question is legitimate or not, and I don't think you can dance around that question (bypassing the entire field of ethics) with a few remarks about agreement and consent. Thank you for making this actual point. I find the vast, vast majority of people who use the term "victim mindset" tend to be promoting views that involve not changing the status quo or making legitimate complaints and so on.
- FloorEgg 1y agoFor the record I'm all for changing the status quo. I'm pro people getting involved and doing their part to make their lives and the lives of other people better. What I'm not for, is people not doing those things, and instead putting all their energy into a circle jerk of complaints that doesn't accomplish anything other than distract people from actually making things better.
- bccdee 1y agoEvery productive social movement begins as a circle jerk of complaints. The circle gets bigger, and the jerking gets faster, and suddenly you're in the streets demanding suffrage for women or whatnot.
- FloorEgg 1y agoIt feels like you keep taking a less than respectful interpretation of my comments, and if it happens again I'm not going to respond to you anymore. Is your issue with the way I framed victim mindset or my point that a major risk of AI (and social media) is propagating victim mentality and biasing people to have a victim mindset? Are you advocating that there are cases when having a victim mindset is a good thing? Have you looked up the definition of victim mindset?
- bccdee 1y ago> Is your issue with the way I framed victim mindset or my point that a major risk of AI is propagating victim mentality? The former, I suppose, but the latter is downstream of that. > It feels like you keep taking a less than respectful interpretation of my comments Well that's certainly not my intent. But I think there's a lot implicit in the idea that a "victim mindset" is too common in society, and I want to unpack it. > Have you looked up the definition of victim mindset? Are you advocating that there are cases when having a victim mindset is a good thing? When I searched it, I got directed to the wiki page on victim mentality, which is mostly about the psychological implications of perceiving yourself as a victim. And yes, I do think it's sometimes good, both individually and for society, to perceive yourself as a victim, for reasons I outlined in my post above.
- FloorEgg 1y agoAssuming that the wikipedia article that I see is the same as the wikipedia article that you read, I'm struggling to follow your logic. In your other comment you mentioned women's suffrage. The women who pushed for suffrage did not have a victim mindset. They took personal responsibility for bettering their circumstances. They did the most constructive thing they could muster and it worked. Victim mindset (mentality) is the name for a specific set of traits that are objectively corrosive to and individual and society. Victim mentality doesn't build, and in most cases it destroys things. Victim mentality is distinct from being a victim, or being wronged. After reading that Wikipedia articles and your comment it honestly feels like we are reading two different articles... One of the characteristics of having a victim mentality is a lack of empathy for others. You are saying there are circumstances when it's best to not have empathy for others? If so, then what it sounds like to me is that you are making a conscious choice to value a mentality that lacks empathy for others and denies personal responsibility. Honestly, with curiosity and minimal judgement: How do you justify that? If this doesn't make sense, then what wikipedia article did you read?