Discover how to become the architect of your life and your household in cooperation with God’s will! First, we must shed the burden of victimhood and strive for heroic sainthood.
For the past fifty years or so, we’ve buried heroic courage. We’ve sadly exchanged our role of aspiring to great virtue with self-pity. We’ve become self-made victims in a cruel world. But saddest of all is that this has become an accepted norm for many of us.
Now, what is this self-victimization? The simple definition is self-victimization is the tendency of individuals to perceive themselves as victims, attributing their problems and misfortunes to external factors rather than acknowledging their own responsibility.
Why would someone want to do this? Because they desire sympathy, compassion, and frankly, a free hand out. They want someone to take the blame so they don’t have to take responsibility for working hard, overcoming obstacles, and winning on their own merits. In our super-sensitive world, if you are a victim, others will take care of you. If you are a victim, you are entitled.
This cycle of self-made victims has become a virus within our culture. It’s a psychological parasite that’s spreading rampantly through this modern age. This isn’t completely ridiculous though. In fact, it’s quite understandable that this would happen in a culture filled with spoiled rotten brats. And remember: it doesn’t take money to be spoiled rotten. My kids have grown up with plenty of money, but they are not spoiled in the least. (They have their issues but being spoiled ain’t one of them.) With the number of kids in our family, they have been forced to work things out, to deny self, to help others when it is highly inconvenient. Even if you are poor, you have the ability to spoil your kids rotten by the way you raise them. We aren’t talking money; we are talking how you raise your kids to be accountable for their own actions.
Now, there are many factors and situations that can lead to true, justified victimization. True oppression exists. Real suffering can strike and leave families devastated and ruined. But most people in our culture live with all the modern comforts this century has to offer. Sturdy houses and apartments with running water and electricity; every new piece of technology; all the streaming services; the fastest internet; food that can be delivered at any moment. . . This is an age of instantaneous abundancy. Those that have it are sucked into it; those that don’t have it long for it. It is a spoiled age obsessed with the material. It is a virtual age that despises the virtuous.
It’s easy to imagine this spoiled brat on a micro level. You’ve seen it in movies, read it in novels, known some family that spoils their kids to death. That kid who has been spoiled is destined to see themselves as a victim of their circumstances. This is because they haven’t had to persevere. They haven’t had to fight through difficulty or truly yearn for something more. They simply complain about every meaningless frustration or things not going exactly as they wish.
We get into this mode of playing victim because, on some level, we’re afraid of failure. We’re afraid to stand up and take the reins of our family because what if we screw up? What if something happens and everyone leaves? So, we just let others take the reins and we whine and complain and remain helpless.
But you must recognize this is a false sense of failure. You must see that the culture that you have grown up in has created a self-victimization psychosis, one that is stronger than ever before in human history. If you don’t recognize it, you can’t fight it.
Once you do recognize it, then you’re able to say, “Ok, I’m not a victim. I’m the architect.”
ooo
This article is taken from a chapter in The Architect by Conor Gallagher which is available from TAN Books.
