Monday, May 17, 2004
"Victim."
I have a lot of reservations about this word, mainly because it's overused and attributed to persons in extreme non-victimizational positions.
I offer a snippet from Gregg Easterbrook's latest book, "The Progress Paradox":
"(Martin) Seligman's third cause of depression flows from the second, being the 'postwar teaching of victimology and helplessness.' Intellectuals, politicians, tort lawyers, and the media have in the last few decades become ever more proficient at discovering victims. So many classes of victimhood have been proclaimed that, in cumulative terms, today every person in the United States may be able to call himself or herself a victim of something or other; leaving aside the question of, if we're all victims, then who did the victimizing?
Surveys, Seligman (a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania) notes, show that ever higher percentages of Americans describe themselves as victims. ... The We're-All-Victims worldview only serves to deter men and women from asserting control over their own psyches."
8:32:00 PM
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