Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.

"[V]ictimism is an ideology of the ego. But perhaps ideology is too strong a term; victimism can be seen as a generalized cultural impulse to deny personal responsibility and to obsess on the grievances of the insatiable self. It might even be called a habit of mind, but one with substantial institutional support; a reflex so ingrained that its premises are no longer apparent, nor its radical view of human nature even subject to debate. One need only spend time debating "multiculturalism" on university campuses to realize the truth of Jonathan Swift's remark that it's impossible to reason someone out of something he did not reason himself into in the first place."

Although victimism can trace its lineage to liberalism, it is not itself liberalism. Nor is it updated Christianity. It militates against ideas of equity, fairness, and process; its natural tone is one of assertion of prerogatives, a demand for reparations.

To be a victim is to be forever frozen in amber by that person’s actions at that moment. Victimization only looks backward, never forward, which is why my family was incapable of moving on or redefining themselves. If I allowed myself to be defined by what my father did to me, it would put him at the center of my identity. He would have control over me for the rest of my life, even once he was gone. Yes, I was stuck in a box with a monster, but wallowing in indulgent self-pity wasn’t the solution; the task before me was to survive the monster without becoming the monster. In a way, I was lucky that my father was as awful as he was. He had no good qualities to negate. Had he been a better human being, I would have become a worse one.

Victimhood chic” is in style on both the right and the left today, among both the rich and the poor. In fact, this may be the first time in human history that every single demographic group has felt unfairly victimized simultaneously. And they’re all riding the highs of the moral indignation that comes along with it.

A victim act is a form of passive aggression. It seeks to achieve gratification not by honest work or a contribution made out of one's experience or insight or love, but by the manipulation of others through silent (and not-so-silent) threat. The victim compels others to come to his rescue or to behave as he wishes by holding them hostage to the prospect of his own further illness/meltdown/mental dissolution, or simply by threatening to make their lives so miserable that they do what he wants.

Victim Mentality. Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems, even when they in fact could. Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances.

"Victimspeak is the trigger that permits the unleashing of an emotional and self-righteous response to any perceived slight. Charges of racism and sexism continue to be the nuclear weapons of debate, used to shout down nuanced approaches to complex issues. Victimspeak insists upon moral superiority and moral absolutism and thus tends to put an abrupt end to conversation; the threat of its deployment is usually enough to keep others from even considering raising a controversial subject. Ironically, this style of linguistic bullying often parades under the banner of "sensitivity".

Of course, sensitivity to the needs and concerns of others is the mark of a civil and civilized society. But the victimist demand for sensitivity is more problematic. To be sensitive (in victimspeak) is not to argue or to reason but to <i>feel</i>, to attune one's response to another's sense of aggrievement. This politicized sensitivity (as distinct from decency, civility, and honesty) demands the constant adjustment of one's responses to the shifting and unpredictable demands of the victim. The greater the wounds, the louder the cries of injustice, the greater the demand for sensitivity — no matter how unreasonable. Asking the wrong questions can be perceived as insensitivity, but so can failing to ask the right ones. One can be insensitive without intending to be; only the victim can judge. Inevitably, this changes both the terms and the climate of debate. It is no longer necessary to engage in lengthy and detailed debate over such issues as affirmative action; it is far easier and more effective to simply brand a critic as insensitive."

It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.

"Victims?"
"Whatever you call people who are made to suffer without being given the choice."
"That sounds like an excellent definition of man."

no society before ours has taken aim at sacrificial mechanisms. So, what's revealed by all of this is the tenacity of those mechanisms. If you stamp them out here, they pop up again over there. The value of Foucault's work consists in having shown this. One day, he told me that “we shouldn't invent a philosophy of the victim.” I replied: “No, not a philosophy, I agree — a religion! But it already exists!” Foucault understood the very thing that optimistic rationalism didn't foresee: new forms of “victimization” are constantly emerging from the instruments that were intended to do away with them. It's his pessimism that separates us: unlike him, I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this, or else face utter despair. Today, after the end of ideologies, the only way to embrace this meaning is to rediscover religion. Of course, even as the victimary mechanism keeps being reborn, Christianity is always there to transform and subvert it, like a leavening agent — in the humanist rationalism of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, for example. When Voltaire defended Jean Calas, the persecuted Protestant, he was being more Christian than the Catholic priests who were against him. His mistake was to have had too much faith in his own perfection, to imagine that the correctness of his position was due to his own genius. He couldn't see how much he owed to the past that stretched out behind him. I respect tradition, but I'm not justifying History. MT

A victim is in a position of weakness and subject to the whims of others. Heroes are people who determine their own fate and their own future. A victim had nothing to give and no choice to make. A hero has the strength and ability to be generous and forgiving and the power and freedom that come from being able to make the choice of forgiveness.

He couldn't see her, sitting outside in the darkness, looking in at the light. A pair of actors trapped in a recondite play with no hint of plot or narrative. Stumbiling through their parts nursing someone else’s sorrow. Grieving someone else’s grief. Unable somehow to change plays. Or purchase, for a fee some cheap brand of exorcism from a conveyor with a fancy degree, who would sit them down and say in one of many ways: “ Your not the sinners. You’re the sinned against. You were only children.You had no control. You are the victims, not the perpetrators.” It would of helped if they could of made that crossing. If only they could have worn, even temporarily, the tragic hood of victim hood

"As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones — I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."