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Comment by livinginfear | Hacker News Reader

I always considered the current culture of cultivated-victimhood to be rooted in the manner Western people fundamentally define themselves by their triumphs against adversity. In the absence of real adversity, people seek and create surrogate adversity for themselves to triumph over. From this process they can rationalise themselves as having the inner-strength to overcome such barriers.

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This is a clever comment and I'm surprised to see no further discussion. In the West, everyone needs to be the hero of their own story. Everyone needs to be an Achilles or a King Arthur, therefore everyone needs a dragon to fight. The bigger the enemy, the more morally entitled your actions feel.

In discussion forums, the best answers are usually those with many upvotes and no replies

This is similar to my belief as to why modern American politics is the way it is. It's so much left vs right, red vs blue, etc.

During the cold war, we had a common enemy in communism. Sure there were disagreements, arguments, fights, but at the end of the day, most everyone could agree that we had to stand up for America.

Now those common enemies aren't such a threat, so we look across the aisle for our enemy.

It used to be "we just have different visions for America but we all want to succeed" and now it's "OMG you are trampling my right to ___________ you Nazi!".

Your comment says all this much better than I ever could, though.

> we had a common enemy in communism

Communism wasn’t a “common enemy”, it was a boogeyman used as a cudgel by the government to strike down inconvenient dissent and ruin innocent peoples’ lives. There were plenty of Americans with Communist ideals, and plenty more who were branded as “communists” for suggesting such outrageous things as poverty reform or labor rights, including Martin Luther King Jr. See COINTELPRO and the Red Scare for examples of the government’s abhorrent treatment of suspected communists.

There were also real Communist agents. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg

There were also real, devastating consequences to Communist ideology. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide

for three examples.

I don't think that people experiencing racism have "surrogate adversity", but I can certainly relate to the general notion. I've "struggled" with this because I too had no "real" adversity in life and people like some greek philosophers and Nietzsche put adversity into their centre of attention. I'm convinced that sometimes, people just get hurt by adversity without any advantages later on. It’s also perverse to think that the pain serves a kind of purpose, it justifies an extremely toxic and abusive mindset. If it happens and you can grow from it - that's wonderful. But it should never be used as an excuse to do harm or to endure abusive situations, especially if the abusers are using this kind of narrative.

This might be the most insightful comment I’ve seen on this issue.

How about the west being founded on slavery, and genocides while sustaining racism and misogyny for hundreds of years.

I hear a lot of "head in the sand" thinking. If we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist and never happened.

That's the history of humanity, not only of the west.

Not exactly, if you want to narrow it down to North American history, compared to some other countries, NA was rather slow at coming to terms with these issues, and compromises were made over the decades which propped and continued institutionalized racism, bigotry, and misogyny, which have had lasting effects to this day.

Also saying it's a universal humanitarian problem doesn't make it "not a problem" or victimless.

Of course there will be localized differences, and scale differences in civilizations that scaled more.

Also, realizing that it is a universal human problem helps with pointing the finger inwards rather than outwards.

Inward to whom? Every human? Isn't that just as "vague" and unfair to blame even the slaves for their slavery?

Blame the slaves themselves? no.

But stating the reality that as a human there are other human beings who have things in common with them(skin color, national origin, culture, ethnicity) who also enslave and mistreat other people; helps people see the bigger picture of predatory behavior that were all potentially capable of.

It's of little help for a victim to know that someone with something in common with them is a victimizer elsewhere in the world.

A better understanding a human nature and what we're all capable of is certainly useful. Much of philosophy and psychology is devoted to this very idea.

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Okay but states, classes and parties are made up of men, and one individual often has limited impact, while groups can have much larger and longer lasting impact. Typically the best and worst of humanity has been achieved through a collective, and not through the individual alone.

> NA was rather slow at coming to terms with these issues

But so were other parts of the world. Many countries in the Middle East continued to have slavery far beyond North America (Saudi Arabia did not outlaw it until 1962) and the Middle East is certainly culturally and historically very different from NA.

This was a critique on American Exceptionalism and its failure to actually apply "all men are created equal" in spite of better examples existing in the world. The US still legally allowed segregation into the 60s.

So many people rushing to use the "other countries were also horrible as well" defense. That's not really a defense.

We're pointing out that the problem is not particularly American, this is not a defense. Trying to make America seem worse then most of the world is warping the reality of the problem.

Enslavement and mistreatment is a problem that many cultures, countries and creeds have struggled with. Not admitting this and factoring this into your explanations shows some bias against America.

I am not trying to make it look worse, I am stating that its factual history is very problematic. There were many victims that came out of that history, and still exist to this day. Again, you sound like you're saying "stop picking on America, other people were bad too". That's little comfort to America's victims.

Believe it or not, slavery is alive and thriving in today's world.

You'll see most of it in developing nations where enforcement is non-existent. Rich nations still occasionally have trafficking busts, but nowhere compared to the scale and industry of some more equatorial countries. It's estimated that there are 38-46 million slaves worldwide.

In absolute numbers there are more enslaved people now than there ever has been in the past.

Is this supposed to excuse the consequences of the past? What is your point exactly?

Even much of global human trafficking leads back to forced labor, exploited by major western corporations through obfuscated supply chains.

In that case, I certainly hope you don’t own an iPhone, don’t buy things on Amazon and only shop local where you check all the labels for “Made in MY country”.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that there isn’t any moral high ground here.

I am not perfect, no one is, but it is worse to blindly accept or ignore these problems. It's not about trying to take a moral high ground, it's the acknowledgement of reality. Does an iPhone need/absolutely require slavery or child labor? Does anything?

100% agree. And I apologize for insinuating that you were trying to grab the high ground. That was probably a cheap shot.

The larger point is that it's easy to judge the past and make sweeping condemnations. I see that in wanting to condemn the West due to it's past. But surely people will condemn us as well for things we know are wrong, but we do anyway. At least I keep doing them. I like my iPhone. I like cheap electronics. I like affordable clothing. And behind all of that is some pretty egregious stuff. Where does that leave me in history?

Let them condemn us, they will likely be absolutely right. Not condemning actions of now or of the past, because we don't want to also be judged for our actions/inaction is basically averting your eyes to try to escape your own responsibility.

You would probably fit in as "feckless cog" within consumerist capitalist machine, a machine that rarely really care about human rights. Relying on the individual consumer to police giant national/multi-national corporations is an unfair and unrealistic burden. Conditioning consumers to believe that iPhones, cheap electronics and cheap clothing require exploitative practices is another shady tactic to maintain an inequitable/unfair wealth/class structure. The $1200 smartphone is built next to the $200 smartphone, the $50 shirt is sewn next to the $5 shirt, chip manufacturing is highly automated, and if cutthroat pricing wasn't "required" and there was teeth behind anti-exploitative regulations, companies might care about auditing their supply chains.

Doesn't it feel somewhat hypocritical to accuse others of having their head in the sand whilst claiming slavery, genocide, racism and misogyny are uniquely western phenomenon?

I think the irony of the self-loathing westerner, is that in believing their history is uniquely evil, are practising a sort of white supremacy. Not only in being completely oblivious to the history of other parts of the world. But by believing that only white people are/were so powerful that the evil they wrought could never be replicated by the much less powerful other races.

No, because "other people did horrible things too" isn't a valid excuse.

Failing to acknowledge the failures of others and focusing on scapegoating problems onto a specific group(when others are guilty as well) is also not a valid position.

You're not scapegoating a problem onto a specific group if that specific group actually perpetrated or benefited from the problematic behavior.

Again, "other people did bad things" isn't a valid excuse for doing bad things.

> west being founded on slavery

The "west" was not founded on slavery, this is incorrect. This is the kind of "woke revisionism" that things like the 1619 tried to push through and were inaccurate.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/24/editorial-1...

https://reason.com/2020/03/06/1619-project-fact-checker-niko...

I don't know if I would consider the early colonies as "the founding" of the modern western powers. If you look at the founding of the USA it absolutely is accurate, many founding fathers were slave owners. Slavery also had influence within Canadian territories until it was outlawed. Both waged genocidal war on First Nations and Native Americans from the beginning.

The USA continued to perpetuate slavery and compromise with slavers for decades/centuries to come, after Canada and Britain had long since moved on.

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