You haven't worked out. That's because you're a victim.
You are being punished for past choices and decisions and behaviors.
You're probably being victimized by someone, somewhere.
We organize our lives around victimhood. It's fun. It's easy. It's profitable.
And the problem is it is entirely our decision.
If you feel hurt, probably you're a victim.
If you've been harmed or wronged, you're definitely a victim.
If someone disagrees with you or mocks you or ridicules you or tramples on your self-imputed sensitivities, you can declare yourself a victim.
Proclaim yourself. Promulgate your victimhood. And everyone will be bound to accept it.
Victimhood is self-determination. It's a subjective declaration, or rather a declaration about a subjective state.
If your interests conflict with other people's interests, you're a victim.
If your life hasn't turned out the way you wanted it or the way you have imagined it, you're a victim.
If you're not as rich as someone else, you're probably his victim.
If you're not as intelligent or clever or astute or learned or educated as someone else, that's because you're a victim. Victimhood is handy. It's a badge of honor. It's a perfect excuse. It's an exit strategy.
And right now, as the sociologist Bradley Campbell stated, we have transitioned from the age of dignity and reputation to the age of victimhood.
And this is the topic of today's video.
There are three types of victimhood, not one.
Like a menu, choose the right dish for you.
In the moral calculus of the postmodern world, victimhood is a subjective state, not an objective reality.
In other words, it's a state of mind, not a state of affairs.
And there are three types of victimhood.
The traditional one, the identity one, and the vigilante one.
Traditional victimhood is when the victim accepts that this is the way of the world.
There are people who are more powerful, more intelligent, more well-connected. People who are maybe evil or maybe just self-interested and exploitative, whichever the case may be, there are always people at the bottom of the social ladder.
And these people are trampled upon, taken advantage of, exploited, and ultimately abused.
Victimhood is therefore the way the world operates. It's an organizing principle. It makes sense of existence. It imbues actions with meaning.
And therefore, while the victim is totally entitled to complain, he or she is not entitled to anything further than that.
Victimhood is to be expected, and it's an integral part of life and the way it's been structured since the dawn of homo sapiens.
That's the traditional victimhood.
The identity victimhood.
Identity victimhood started more or less 300 years ago, remember?
And then French Revolution and other revolutions and so on and so forth.
Identity victimhood is a form of identity politics. It's when victimhood becomes a determinant of who you are. It captures your essence and quiddity as a victim.
Victimhood serves to organize your life around a central purpose or goal afforded with direction, imbue it with meaning, and make sense of it.
Identity politics, of which identity victimhood is one branch, leads to activism.
Similarly, there are activist victims. Victims who propagate and perpetuate victimhood is a way to secure benefits from the environment, from society at large, and definitely from their former abusers.
So victimhood politics or victimhood identity is two facets.
One is the public statement, the political dimension of identity victimhood.
And the second one is the materialistic one, or the beneficial one, the self-efficacy aspect of identity victimhood, where victimhood serves to obtain or to secure certain favorable outcomes from the environment.
This is identity victimhood.
Now, there's a very pernicious and dangerous brand of identity victimhood, which is essentially the third type of victimhood, and I call it vigilante victimhood.
It is when victims, and especially self-styled victims, because we have many studies that show that many victims are not victims. They use victimhood signaling, and they use competitive victimhood to manipulate other people. They're actually dark personalities, they're narcissists and psychopaths.
So vigilante victimhood is when these people typically, or in more rare cases, real victims, actually break the law. They break the law, they ignore social norms, and they bypass institutions in order to accomplish three goals.
Number one, grandiose self-idealization.
And anyone wants to understand what that is, just join or visit a forum of empaths, supernova empaths, and other such nonsense. These are self-aggrandizing, probably covert narcissists, self-styled victims, or real victims who have just become highly narcissistic in the throes of reactive abuse.
But that's a major incentive or major motivation for vigilante victimhood.
Breaking the law, committing crimes, bypassing institutions, ignoring social norms and mores leads to a self-aggrandizing stance, self-aggrandizing position.
And this position is self-idealizing.
The victim is angelic, blemishless, blameless, perfect and ideal.
Now the second reason is to exact revenge.
As simple as that.
Victims, some victims, vigilante victims, feel that they have a right to implement their own law.
They are a law unto themselves, highly psychopathic.
And they think they can take the law in their hands and afflict the abuser with retribution and retaliation.
This third reason is to secure entitlement, entitlement to rights and to benefits.
Victimhood confers rights on the victim and imposes commensurate obligations on people around the victim and on society at large.
And these obligations and rights, they bring benefits to the victim.
Victimhood pays. Victimhood highly pays, sometimes monetarily, status-wise, recognition-wise.
At the minimum, the victim gets attention.
So victimhood is highly addictive and highly enticing.
And the victimhood stance is a highly beneficial, strategically speaking, survival strategy.
So some of these vigilante victims misbehave, actually behave as narcissists do or psychopaths do, in order to accomplish these three goals.
Self-aggrandizement, retribution and revenge and benefits, simply benefits.
Now, I want to talk about the cancel culture, another facet of identity victimhood.
This came up with a cover story, July 2016.
And the cover story said, "Parents, teach your children to be narcissists." Hmm. Yeah.
That's where we are.
Well, I mean, yeah, I was going to ask you about that, this helicopter parenting stuff.
For children not being exposed to any challenges.
There was another thing I was reading this morning. I was actually watching. It was about cancel culture.
And over 200 professors have been counseled in the United States in the last 20 years.
A colleague of Jonathan Heights was talking about this phenomenon.
And it's a greater number of professors that have been counseled than all that were counseled during McCarthyism in the 1950s.
What's your perspective on dark triad, cancel culture?
What's happening in society?
Do you think there's elements of narcissism there?
The sociologist Bradley Campbell said that we have transitioned from the age of dignity to the age of victimhood.
Victimhood has become not only an organizing principle and a hermeneutic principle, that explains life, makes sense of life, but also an identity determinant and consequently part of identity politics.
The problem with victimhood is this.
If everyone is a victim, there's a problem to find who is victimized.
Yeah.
When you're a victim, you're compelled to find a victimizer.
Even if there's no victimizer, even if your victimhood is self-imputed, you would still work very hard to find a victimizer because the narrative would be incomplete and ridiculous.
You're right. If you don't find a victimizer soon.
So the studies in Israel in 2020, four studies in Israel in 2020, other studies in British Columbia and recent studies in China and elsewhere, they're beginning to demonstrate, I think convincingly, that victimhood movements are infiltrated by narcissists and psychopaths who then take over and leverage victimhood movements in two ways.
Yeah.
To obtain attention.
It's a power grab.
And it's a power grab to penalize, to statistically use the power to penalize.
To coerce, not necessarily with a goal orientation, but to coerce as a performative action as a demonstration.
To coerce or stentatiously.
It's like a deterrent, if you wish.
So many, many victimhood movements have been taken over by narcissists and psychopaths.
Online we have the empaths movement.
There's no such thing as empaths.
It's clinical nonsense.
These people are grandiose. Many of them are covert narcissists, I have no doubt.
And yet they pose as these angelic, blemishless, faultless victims who have been passively victimized by narcissists through an awful contribution of their own.
It's a classic splitting defense.
I'm all good.
The narcissist is all bad.
I'm an angel.
He's a demon.
And many of them go to that extent.
They say that narcissists have been possessed by demons, not us.
Or so it's an example of a victimhood movement which started off by me, by the way, started off by me when I established support groups of victims of narcissistic abuse and then metastasized and mutated into a narcissism controlled environment of ostentatious, declared competitive victimhood thereby demonizing the alleged abuser.
It is an example in narcissism, but you have the same example in race, same example in now.
When you've spotted the abuser, you need to demonstrate your power.
It's part of the narcissistic psychopathic matrix rulebook.
You need to demonstrate your power, deterrence in international affairs.
And you did mention the vindictiveness aspect of it as well, that there is a vindictive quality to the destruction of somebody's reputation and very often their career for the most minor sometimes offense.
Yes, it accomplishes several goals.
You demonstrate your power, intimidate others.
You punish vindictively and visibly and conspicuously.
So you have restored your grandiosity.
This is a grandiosity restoring mechanism.
And you may even have converted people to the cause by doing this.
So there's a missionary aspect to this.
And this is true, for example, with Me Too as well, because you're mentioning cancel culture.
That's one of them.
But the Me Too movement, in my view, has mutated the metastasized.
And today it's a vindictive, narcissistic, I would say psychopathic movement, absolutely, which is hell-bent on transforming or reversing the power matrix or parallel bump between men and women.
So a chauvinistic movement that is the equivalent of the alleged patriarchy.
It's a bad situation because these movements start off in the academy.
They started, they were meant, the ideas that were meant to stay within the academy, places for discussion.
It's legitimate for an idea to exit academy.
All these movements, almost without a single exception, started off with good intentions, they were authentic, they represented real grievances.
And women have been abused in corporate settings in the entertainment industry.
No one is disputing this.
So they started off well.
But then they've been hijacked by Nazis and psychopaths.
And Nazis and psychopaths couldn't care less who is a victim and who is not, as long as they are their abusers.
Now these movements are abusive.
Victimhood movements and victimhood identity politics are absolutely abusive, coercive, psychopathic, anti-social and narcissistic.
Period.
That's not Sam Vachnin.
These are the recent academic studies.
Hello, everyone.
That's a short clip from an episode with Professor Sam Vachnin, where we talk about everything to do with narcissism.
If you want to watch the full episode, it should be right about here.
And the subscribe button should be right about somewhere down here.
A big shout out and a big thanks to everybody that has subscribed so far.
I really appreciate each and every one of you.
Have a great Christmas.
Happy New Year.
And I'll see you all in January.
Thank you so much.