Hacker News Reader

Comment by tech_ken | Hacker News Reader

> He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well, every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something, and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.

Feeling like a victim is not the same as wallowing in self-pity. Recognizing that you have been victimized in some way could easily be the first step towards taking ownership of your own circumstances and pushing for their improvement. Moreover, if you are being actively victimized it's probably not healthy in the long-term to pretend like it's "your fault", you're just going to make yourself crazy that way. Taking a clear view of the causes of your current circumstances is the only way you can act effectively, even if those causes are outside your locus of control. Playing these weird heuristic games to avoid "victim mentality" is just as deluded as drowning in "poor me".

View on HN

> it's probably not healthy in the long-term to pretend like it's "your fault" ... Tak[e] a clear view of the causes of your current circumstances

There's always things in your control and things out of your control, but the notion of "victim" does zilch to clarify which is which. It's a pointless distraction, a snare for the mind.

Heavily disagree. It is very clear when you are a victim of child abuse that no part of your abuse was in your control, because you were a child. It's also super fucked up to say the notion of, say, a rape victim is a pointless distraction. I think a "what was in your control about you being raped" is just about the least productive way to go about the scenario of being victimized.

Even if the child abuse was not in your control, how you react to it might be. For example, there is a nasty cycle of violence where people who have been abused in the past are at severe risk of abusing others in turn. That's the kind of thing that one would very much have control over, even as a victim of such grievous acts.

Yes, it generally always starts with acknowledging one being a victim of abuse first and foremost.

That’s not really what I’m saying. Understanding the causes of your circumstances obviously doesn’t necessarily entail what is in your control or not. However focusing only on the levers you control, while remaining blind to the causes of the problem is just as useless as the other way around. Only by bringing together a clear model of the problem with a rigorous analysis of possible interventions can you really make forward progress in your life.

Heres an example that I think is likely similar to what OP is imagining when they think of “victim mentality”: say I’m a woman in a technical field who is experiencing misogyny in my workplace. I have several levers available to me: I can quit and seek a new job, I can work harder, I can contact HR, I can confront the misogynist directly, I can request a transfer to another team, etc. But if I simply pretend “it’s my fault” I will likely only recognize the first two as viable options, even if they’re not globally optimal (ex. if the misogynist is in charge of promotions simply working harder will likely not result in the rewards I’m seeking). Observe that in this example I am still keeping the control, and I am emphatically not saying “oh well I guess I’ll never get promoted” and accepting mediocrity. But an honest stock-take of the things within my control, and their likely efficacy at addressing the problem I’m facing, 100% requires the realization that I am being victimized by someone.

This is a welcomed addition of nuance, but I think it thematically fits with the general narrative. If your current situation is not optimal, and we pose a dichotomy of choosing to take control of your situation or self pity, then taking control is better.

I guess it’s some combination of feeling like a victim with a fatalist attitude that’s the real issue.

> I guess it’s some combination of feeling like a victim with a fatalist attitude that’s the real issue.

Yes I 100% think this is the case. Simply creating “awareness” of a social problem, for example, is useless IMO because it leads to fatalism. It needs to be matched with a push to create change. I see this as a major failing of the internet activism of the 2010s, although I support its broad aims. IMO it leaned too hard on classifying and describing various structural inequalities, without really advancing a concrete theory of change. This ultimately squandered the energy it created, leading to this weird situation where much of its sharpest criticisms got swallowed the system and converted into HR platitudes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com