THE SEVEN CHARACTERISTICS OF A VICTONOMY where money is made by being and creating victims An article by Maya Lievegoed & Haim Dror
If in an economy money is the currency, in a victonomy victimhood is, and the haves (victims) are privileged over the have-nots (non-victims). Below you can read how to recognize if you are living in a victonomy and why you shouldn’t want to.
1 It makes you believe suffering is avoidable First, a victonomy makes you believe you can always feel happy. Life should always be fun and that anytime you don’t feel like that, someone owes you. But not only is a life without suffering impossible, we need to suffer. Not all the time, but once a while. To understand the value of what we do have. To see the contrast between joy and pain. To appreciate the good things in life. And as Viktor Frankl would say: to find our meaning[1]. Does that mean there are no victims? Of course there are. In fact, you are more likely to meet a victim today than to not meet one. Everyone knows people who were bullied as a kid or suffered from another childhood trauma, have a chronic disease, had a car accident, lost their children or parents at a young age or crossed someone with bad intentions. I myself suffered from being born in a dysfunctional family with two mentally handicapped parents. We all become victims because we all, in some moment, will suffer to some degree. At the same time, we will all feel joy somewhere in our lives, also when life is tough. Even in wars. But in a victonomy, this is way too nuanced. Which brings us to the second characteristic.
2 There is no space for victim-nuance It would be so nice if there is good and bad, black and white. ‘Unfortunately’, life is more challenging. There are men who became victims of sexual aggression, female perpetrators, children who killed adults. There are people of all colors who have suffered from racism. Are there averages? Of course. But there are exceptions as well and we will never reach a just society by generalizations. However, the victonomy stimulates an ‘us versus them’ mindset, because the more explicit the perpetrator, the bigger victimhood can be claimed. ‘All women suffer from all men’ sounds worse for women than ‘some women suffer from some men in some situations’.
You can see this lack of nuance entwined with the politics of identity. But generalizations, like groupthink, don’t capture the complete truth and division never led to commonwealth (or sense😊).
3 Victimhood becomes political But why does the victonomy eliminate nuance? Because it aims to make suffering political by creating a false hierarchy in suffering. It’s false, because if we start ‘measuring suffering’, people from my generation for example (I was born in the 80’s) could never claim to be a victim. What is our suffering compared to the suffering of our grandparents in the horrific Second World War? But the victonomy prefers false ‘levels’ of groupvictimhood over true suffering. As a result, it became easier to criticize some types of genders more than others, some skin colors more than others, some sexual preferences, some religions, some nationalities and so on. Yet, the hierarchy isn’t straightforward. There are features in the hierarchy (for example skin color), hierarchies within the features (within one skin color) and hierarchies in the combination of features (for example, a specific type of gender, religion and handicap). This hierarchy is also referred to as the ‘oppression Olympics’, where ‘victims’ compete over being more oppressed than others. But such hierarchies won’t help the victims because like joy, suffering and perpetration is personal and should be treated as such. We can’t truly help an individual by defining him or her based on group characteristics. A good therapist, doctor or friend, will always see the individual, before the group, before a color, before a gender, before a religion. Just like a good judge will punish the perpetrator based on his or her individual actions and not on the group he or she (seems to) belong to. But in a victonomy, suffering gets a ‘group-label’ which leads to characteristic number four.
4 It makes it difficult to recognize the real victims The group labels in the victonomy make it difficult to recognize the real victims. If every handshake by a man becomes sexual intimidation of women, the real rape victims might not be believed in the future. If any joke is homophobic, real anti-gay violence might not be reported anymore.