Well Being: Victim, Warrior, or something else?
Choose carefully. How you self-define determines what you will become
Self-victimization is one of the most prevalent trends in today’s post-modern society, and is deeply embedded in the psychological and philosophical frame of reference often referred to as “woke”.
James Lindsay’s “Translations from the Wokish” lists three relevant key terms:
- Victim/victimhood. Victimhood is defined as “the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer, especially when you want people to feel sorry for you because of this or use it as an excuse for something.
- Victim blaming. The Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime defines victim blaming as being when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially at fault for the harm that befell them.
- Victimhood culture. According to Campbell and Manning (who coined the term), victimhood culture engenders “competitive victimhood,” incentivizing even privileged people to claim that they are victims.
Victim or warrior
For some reason, our minds like the simplicity of structuring political and philosophical debates and trends as “dielectics” – essentially, that there are two sides to every issue. In my opinion, this often leads to the logical fallacy of a “false dichotomy”, because most important issues are quite complicated with many more than just two “black and white” aspects to the underlying truth.
Dialectics, also known as the dialectical method, is a method of philosophical argument that involves a back-and-forth dialogue or debate between opposing sides. It originated in ancient philosophy and continued to be developed in the Middle Ages.
The concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric. Plato presented his philosophical argument as a back-and-forth dialogue or debate, generally between the character of Socrates, on one side, and some person or group of people to whom Socrates was talking (his interlocutors) on the other.
In other words, western culture (and our minds) has been trained and programmed over centuries to always think in terms of a simplistic and over simplified dialectic.
So what is the dielectical opposing psychological force or trend to woke victimhood? Within society the victim trend exists in oppositional tension with another trope or trend, the warrior mentality.
Writing for Psychology Today, in her article “Are You a Warrior? And If So, What Kind?” Carol S. Pearson, Ph.D., a former provost and professor, examines the Warrior trope.
Warriors generally are associated with two kinds of courage: (1) the ability to fight to protect themselves and (2) setting goals and developing the strength and skills to accomplish them. If we do not have enough access to the Warrior archetype, we may let other people push us around, lack direction, or fail to achieve our goals because we do not persist.
The Warrior Paradigm in Government and Public Policy
The Preamble to the United States Constitution declares that two purposes of our government are to “provide for the common defense” and “promote the general welfare.” The Warrior archetype specializes in the former.
When a problem arises, Warriors identify the threats and then seek to eliminate them. In government, the Warrior generally is hawkish in international affairs, harsh on crime, and cares deeply about protecting national borders—in the extreme, viewing undocumented people essentially as invaders.
Primal Warriors also emphasize the right of citizens to carry guns and argue that the way to maintain peace is through the deterrent of maximizing the nuclear stockpile and other weapons of mass destruction.
In Warrior politics, the goal is to defeat the other party, and, to that end, propaganda may replace truth, leading to the epidemic of fake news. However, the Warrior also can fight for values such as “truth, justice, and the American way.”
The goal can be to preserve the best of the past or to move toward a vision of the future. In such cases, the enemy is not the other party; rather, it is ignorance, and the weapon is truth.
Dr. Pearson also recommends caution:
Warrior Christianity teaches that there is a battle going on between God and Satan, and it is important to be on the winning side lest Hell await, and the Warrior side of all the Abrahamic religions engages in wars against evil on behalf of God.
Whether we are religious or not, if we see ourselves as the moral winners engaged in a contest for the soul of our country against the forces of evil, we may find this a slippery slope into demonizing those we disagree with.
She also discusses other roles which may combine effectively with warriors:
The Warrior with Caregiver cares about threats to the survival, health, and happiness of individual people and groups. In this context, the Warrior/Caregiver develops strength in our citizenry through capacity development—education and job training, healthcare, and mandating safe living and working conditions—as well as caring for all those who cannot care for themselves.
The Warrior/Caregiver, overall, balances self-interest and altruism, thus promoting the Constitution’s goal of “promoting the general welfare” and delivering on the promise of “liberty and justice for all.”
In partnership with the Magician—for example, in the Star Wars movies—the bad guys are the fascist, cruel Warriors and the rebels are energized by the power of The Force (Magician).
Wonder Woman’s magic infuses Warrior superpowers with love; her lasso makes people tell the truth, and her bracelets deflect aggression. In the 2017 Wonder Woman movie, the Amazonian hero is caught up in World War I and becomes determined to kill Ares, the god of war, and thus end forever all the pain and suffering he causes.
Although she does not use archetypal language, she learns that killing Ares does not end war because warlike impulses are embedded within people. In the language of this blog, this means that you cannot kill an archetype, but archetypes can evolve along with human consciousness.
In her identity as Diana Prince, Wonder Woman ends the movie with this statement of her new mission:
“I used to want to save the world. To end war and bring peace to mankind. But then, I glimpsed the darkness that lives within their light. I learned that inside every one of them, there will always be both … Now I know. Only love can save the world. So I stay. I fight, and I give … This is my mission now. And forever.”
The idea of ending war through the power of love isn’t new. Jesus was on to it, as were many other wise spiritual teachers in various traditions. Most of us want peace on earth; the question is how to attain it.
Love has always been present in the Warriors who are willing to die to protect the people they love or even the road warriors who will work so very hard to provide for their families.
The Warrior already has evolved into many new forms that do not involve killing one another, and right now, many are fighting for love as caring for others, along with the right to love who you love, for love of the earth, for love of truth, for love of the Divine and of country, even if we do not always agree with one another about what any of these demand of us.
Cognitive Dissonance and Self-victimization
Marsha M. Linehan, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle and Director of the Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics, is the creator of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a type of psychotherapy that combines cognitive restructuring with acceptance, mindfulness, and shaping.
She defines DBT as facilitating a synthesis or integration of opposites, meaning two opposing things being true at once, which is one way to resolve the inner tension of recognizing that two things can be both believed to be true and also contradict each other at the same time.
Unfortunately, holding two opposing ideas or frames of reference in your mind at the same time is associated with “Cognitive Dissonance”, a major source of psychological stress and pain.
Cognitive dissonance develops when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other. Psychological pain and discomfort is triggered by a person’s current belief clashing with new information that they receive.
You may have encountered cognitive dissonance when either you or others have been confronted by fact-based data concerning the COVIDcrisis that contradict the approved narrative of the time.
When mentally challenged by new information inconsistent with currently held models of “truth” or reality, individuals (and organizations!) will do all in their power to transform the contradiction in ways that will resolve their cognitive dissonance and reduce their discomfort by resolving the inconsistencies.
The most psychologically primitive and immature method for resolving this tension is to deny the inconvenient truth. You know the meme- All scientists agree when you censor the ones that don’t agree.
What makes that one funny is the underlying truth, and the recognition of how immature that all too common behavior is.
In a sense, the definition, labeling, censorship and response to officially defined mis- dis- and malinformation concerning COVID case fatality rates, early treatment protocols, and lack of mRNA vaccine safety and efficacy is a psychologically primitive and dysfunctional attempt by “leaders” of western administrative states (“Leviathans”) and self-anointed “one world government” globalist organizations (WHO, WEF, UN) to resolve the cognitive dissonance and associated psychological pain of encountering the truth of what they have done over the last three years.
These political organizations seek to resolve the dissonant painful truth of how poorly they have managed the COVIDcrisis (which is inconsistent with their self-image of benign competent authority) by not only denying data which demonstrates their gross ineptitude, opportunistic malfeasance and outright fraud, tragic disrespect and damage to both global humanity and individuals, but also by attacking or censoring any who have the temerity to speak of such things.
Damage that has clearly occurred, and is most easily resolved by denying the ability of others to even discuss these inconvenient truths through deployment of advanced propaganda, PsyWar and censorship technologies.
So what options do you have when confronting the awesome power of governments, their militaries, their various domestic enforcers and their intelligence service agencies to deploy advanced PsyWar technologies on you, as they seek to control both all information you are able to access, all speech you may wish to share with others, as well as your own personal thoughts, emotions, beliefs and your very soul?
It is so tempting to play the victim, to go along to get along, to just let them have their way with you.
To allow them to control you, and to control your future and that of your children.
To self-victimize.
See more here substack.com
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“Choose carefully. How you self-define determines what you will become”
Closed box thinking. One cannot choose the interactions, nor the ‘good luck’, or pitfalls that appear in life.
A young child shows traits that will follow them through life, and it is up to that child, who obviously chose nothing at birth, to enhance, or learn to cast them off as required during the lifetime, and become something else. Learn, not choose.
Try telling a man and child on the street that it is all their fault because they chose to do it, instead of owning a nice house to live in.
All very self-creator-like – New age.
I know what, and why I am. I did not choose it, Like others, I have tasks, and reflection using honesty shows the truth of those tasks.
Perhaps there is something in the word, destiny? Or if you prefer, the hand of God?
Christians should be well aware that what I type is the truth according to the good book.
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