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Victimhood = Aseptic Emotions

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“While claims for victimhood used to be in the past not so well-regarded phenomenon, sometimes even viewed as a sign of inadequacy and failure, now they are power tools. . . Victimhood has also been absorbed by an all-encompassing consumer society that is eager to experience safely controlled aseptic “emotions” but that does not have the taste to analyse the implications and contradictions behind them” (45).

Cazorla-Sánchez, Antonio. “From Anti-Fascism to Humanism: The Spanish Civil War as a Crisis of Memory.” Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War: Realms of Oblivion. Ed. Aurora G. Morcillo. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014. 21-50.

This is very interesting. I never looked at the enjoyment of victimhood as a way of experiencing emotions in a controlled and “safe” way, but this analysis makes sense. Remember the idiot we discussed the day before yesterday? The one who thinks his cushy office job is “like slavery”? This is definitely somebody who is terrified of reality and is borrowing the emotions and experiences he saw in some stupid movie to pretend like he is alive.

There are people who think that paying $12 to see a movie about slavery purchases them the right to speak in the name of a slave.

16 responses to “Victimhood = Aseptic Emotions”

  1. titfortat Avatar
    titfortat

    I could point to a whole lot of MRA’s and Feminist’s who fit that bill perfectly.

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  2. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
    J. Otto Pohl

    This has been a long observed phenomenon. In the 1950s Jews in the US wrote almost nothing about the Holocaust and scholars studying Jewish communities such as Bell report that it did not come up in oral interviews. It is really only in the 1960s especially after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that it becomes a theme in the Jewish communities in the US. Robert Novick’s, The Holocaust in American Life, does a good job of showing how it emerged as a central issue in American life then and why. One reason why it does not come up in the 1950s and does in the 1960s is that being seen as victims was viewed in largely negative terms in the years immediately after WWII and the Holocaust. Whereas after Israel’s 1967 victory Jews no longer looked weak and the Holocaust could be discussed both as an historical event and insturmentalized as a way of mobilizing these communities for a variety of purposes ranging from memorializing the victims to promoting ethnic solidarity to lobbying for support of Israel. What Novick stresses is that in the late 1960s in the US that being a member of a historically victimized group was no longer seen as only a liability, but could also be used as an asset. A similar, but less well studied process also occurred with Armenians, Ukrainians, and other groups.

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    1. el Avatar
      el

      In Israel the survivors weren’t initially incouraged to speak either. Then it changed.

      Btw, I stumbled upon this children’s book – “Anastasia, Ask your Analyst” :

      No one understands thirteen-year-old Anastasia Krupnik, least of all her parents and her little brother, Sam, who happens to be a genius. They’re such an embarrassment. Why can’t they be normal, like Anastasia?

      Then presto! Anastasia realizes that she has the problem–not her relatives–and she must find help immediately. There’s not a moment to lose.

      Though her parents insist she’s normal and won’t send her to an analyst, that doesn’t stop Anastasia.

      What will happen if they find out that Anastasia is secretly telling her troubles to the most famous analyst in the world?

      Read it and thought how recent this topic is, how even I can see attitudes to things (here: analysis) changing now. Such a topic wouldn’t appear in books a few years ago.

      I only don’t get where she has money to pay for the service.

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      1. ladyleahjane Avatar
        ladyleahjane

        That book’s actually very old, I read it when I was a little girl, and it was originally published in 1984.
        Spoiler alert: Anastasia doesn’t actually see an analyst, she picks up a plaster bust of Freud at the estate sale of a dead psychoanalyst, and talks to that.

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    2. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      If you haven’t heard it, check out

      http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/197/before-it-had-a-name

      The first story is about the first holocaust researcher (before it was known as the holocaust) whose work was ignored for decades. Amazing stuff.

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    Steve Sailer refers to a long term cultural change in the US from ‘heroes of accomplishment’ to ‘heroes of suffering’.

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/02/heroes-of-accomplishment-v-heroes-of.html

    I’m reminded of traditional American patriotism (like a birthday party) to most European patriotism (more like a memorial service about military defeats and suffering).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      He lost me when he listed the spoiled rich Mamma’s boy Romney as a man of achievement. By any standard, Obama has achieved what Romney can’t even dream of achieving.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        The post was from February 2008 during the primary before Obama was elected (or won the nomination). And at that time he really hadn’t accomplished very much. I had assumed 2008 was a practice run that got out of hand when the press fell in love with him because he wasn’t Hillary….

        Mitt a mamma’s boy? Generic insult or something I missed?

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I don’t know who Romney inherited from. Maybe he’s a Daddy’s boy, what’s the difference?

          And we can’t really overcome hardship once you become a president. Tons of money, zero worries for the future – where is the adversity?

          The ideas in the article are good but the examples are piss-poor.

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        2. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          And as for Obama, the way he’s keeping it together in the face of extreme recalcitrance of the House and during such events as a recent interview with the vulgar guy from Fox News, that’s worthy of admiration. It doesn’t rise to the level of hardship and adversity but it’s something.

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  4. el Avatar
    el

    I read about proposed school reform in US:

    The Common Core itself is little more than two lists — one for Mathematics and one for Language Arts — describing the knowledge and skills that children should be acquiring in various school grades. […] there’s a battle-of-the-billionaires going on. The Gates Foundation is pushing the CC, while the Koch brothers are fighting it. Neither of these big-money interests believes in public schools in anything like their current form, so there’s a third front represented by anti-CC pro-teacher liberals like Diane Ravitch.
    […] You’ve got your conspiracy theory and I’ve got mine. (I think profit-making corporations want public schools labeled as failures so they can get their hands on the billions we spend on education. But that’s a topic for another article.) Common Core is Step #1 in both of them. But I don’t think things get sinister until Step #2.

    9 Things I Think About Education and the Common Core

    What do you think about US schools? How can they be improved? Among proposals is firing teachers and principals, if kids get bad grades, but I don’t believe bad teachers are the main cause of weak schools and the proposal basically ensures cheating.

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  5. musteryou Avatar
    musteryou

    I saw the first episode of this story last night:

    117–118 “Bloodlines” Dudi Appleton, Jim Keeble Dudi Appleton Kata Dobó, Mike Kelly, John Rado, Julian Glover, Lili Bordán 24 January 2011
    25 January 2011 8.32
    7.53
    Harry finds a new case on his hands when his girlfriend of three months, human rights lawyer Anna Sandór, calls him to Budapest to investigate the death of a prostitute. He is warned by British diplomat Duncan McBurney to avoid getting entangled in Anna’s activities, and when Anna is murdered, suspicion falls on his shoulders, and he is forced to go on the run as the police appear to be in league with the Ukrainian gang he believes are responsible for her death. Leo arrives from Britain to find Harry, and soon learns that Anna was pregnant. Assisted by Janos, an ex-Communist, Harry arranges to meet Leo at the ferry terminal, but Anna’s murderer gets there first, shoots Janos dead and corners Harry. Leo arrives to hear gunshots, and finds a burning body on the promenade. Nikki is soon warned of the trouble and flies out to join the team, however, the police soon identify the burning body as Harry’s. However, soon after, Nikki and Leo receive a mysterious phone message inviting them to a rendezvous. There they find Harry, who tells them how his would-be murderer was accidentally killed, and that he planted his own possessions on the burning body to enable him to evade the police. The team continue to investigate Anna’s murder, and question a prostitute, Marina, in the hope of finding the motive and exposing her killers. A scam to steal prostitutes’ babies and sell them to childless couples is finally revealed, and the police who behaved so suspiciously turn out to be undercover officers involved in catching the villains – whose leader and mastermind turns out to be diplomat McBurney.

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  6. musteryou Avatar
    musteryou

    Regarding victimhood, I think a great deal of the mindset that used to be more traditional and normative absolutely cannot be understood now because of the changing meaning of victimhood. I’m so, so old school in this. To me it was the most shocking revelation I have ever had that some people simply cannot avoid being victims. But that is what I learned from studying Marechera. The colonial regime said, “Of course they always can. It is their own fault!” I could go more deeply into the psychology in relation to myself, but that has been done to death, without success, and there isn’t any point. Although the first time I noticed there was something extremely odd afoot was when they broke me down to tears at work, and I was so ashamed. But it was proclaimed that my shame was just a form of manipulation. So first you turn someone into a victim, which they do not want to be at all, and secondly you claim that they are only reacting as one because they are manipulative. I find that really sick. I’m not even sure it is a cultural misunderstanding, rather than a justification for more bullying. Hmmm.

    And then there is the idea that women don’t have anything of substance worth listening to, but are only after emotional consolation:

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  7. Z Avatar
    Z

    This may seem trivial but I think it is indicative: in the past, when you adopted a pet from a shelter, you had adopted a pet from a shelter. It was of course considered a good thing to do, since puppy mills just add to the overpopulation of puppies, but the puppy you adopted was called a puppy. Nowadays it is a “rescue puppy” and you have rescued it. (Which you have done, of course, but it is the emphasis on rescue, almost dying, almost being abandoned, turned into a label and emphasizing suffering ad the possibility thereof, that I find telling.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about!

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  8. musteryou Avatar
    musteryou

    Yankee doodle dandies:

    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/15/george-zimmerman-is-now-a-sad-homeless-veteran-of-the-florida-stand-your-ground-war/

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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