Avoid the Victim Trap

I’ve spent the last several years of my life living, working, and spinning plates in a former USSR country. A lot of my posts relate to this fact because it has been a very integral part of my red pill awakening. A lot of the things that I’ve realized about TRP I partly realized because I spent so much time looking at shit from a near opposite perspective.

One of the things that is opposite about this world, and that I have come to realize about us in the west, is the way that people relate to victimhood. I would like to share with you this realization because I think that it will be useful to some people in their path. That realization, and that piece of advice, is to avoid the victim trap.

We in the West try to be, or at least think of ourselves as, kind and gentle and humanitarian. We like to help people who are in need, and we try to, or at least pretend that we try to, prevent the oppression of the weak. This has led to a general philosophy which we believe to be humanitarian in that we take very seriously peoples' grievances. If someone has been wronged, or victimized, we take this seriously. This goes both for "oppressed" groups (like women), but also for individuals.

Watch two friends argue some time. Especially two women. What you will often see is a competition to see who can describe themselves as more victimized by the other. "I was hurt by this thing you did!" "Well I was MORE hurt by THIS thing you did or said! Therefore I win."

What I noticed living in a culture which was many ways opposite was that, simply put, they don't do this. I see a lot of people who suffer injustices and indignities far greater than most Americans have to face on a daily basis, in ways that frustrate their lives in a far more complicated way, and it simply does not occur to them to complain about it in the way that we complain about things.

Sure, it affects them, it hurts them too. And sure, they get frustrated also, albeit with a different threshold of frustration. But the fundamental difference is that there is no idea in their culture which suggests to them that they get some kind of advantage, some kind of special status, or some kind of honor from defining themselves as a victim.

The reason why is simple. Victim veneration is artificial. In the real world, being victimized just means you lose out. It means your life is more shitty than it could be, and then you die. And if you ARE a victim, there is no pride in drawing attention to it, there is no honor in drawing attention to the fact that you are more downtrodden than other people. And there is no one (outside of your immediate family and kin group) who is going to care or stick their neck out to help you.

There is no pride to be found in advertising our shame. A lot of people know this instinctively and somehow we have forgotten it.

What does this have to do with us on TRP?

The answer is this: we are so deeply embedded in a culture that diefies the status of victim that we, often, without intending to or realizing it, revel in the status because we unconsciously have internalized the idea that being wronged earns us special points. What I would like to say to you all is that will benefit us greatly to be aware of this tendency and to make a conscious effort to negate it.

Because the reality is that while it might appeal to our innate sense of justice to want to feel that those wrongs against us will be righted, and it might appeal to our innate sense of fairness. But I am sure I do not need to tell any of you that the world is not fair, and the world is not just. A great many people in the world are born with good hearts and good souls, and then get shit on, used up, and left to die. Especially men. And that's just how the world is. Look at animals and see if the wounded animal gets special privileges for being a victim.

We might, without realizing it, hope that someone will see our plight and help us. Or that people will have sympathy for us. Or maybe pity us. The reality is that no one will do any of those things. If you're fat and it interrupts your life, no one cares. If you have a disease you were born with that shortens your life expectancy, no one cares. If you're Asian and you think girls don't want you, no one cares. If you're black and you think your problems in life are because of historical injustice, no one cares. If you're short and people don't take you seriously, no one cares. If you were raped by your elementary school teacher and now can't trust women, no one cares. If you fell into alcoholism because your ex-wife stole everything in your life from you, no one cares. If you were taught you whole life by your single mother that the way to get women is by being a pushover and now no women want you, no one cares. The most you can hope for is sympathy from those closest to you but I can guarantee you that sympathy for weak men dries up faster than a drop of water in the desert. The only thing to do is to find a way to cope and to find our own strength and adaptation. Society will not give you any benefit for suffering from injustice and it is a mistake, no matter tempting and no matter how subtle, to think that it will.

Mind you - I'm not suggesting that your difficulties are irrelevant or unimportant. Of course they are, to you. What I am saying is that it's a mistake to assume that something good must follow from them.

This tendency creeps into TRP sometimes. I think this is especially a trap of the anger phase. I see a lot of posts talking about various anecdotes about the darker side of female nature or stories of women wronging men. These stories are useful for reminding us that female nature is not as we have been told, this is true. And that it is very dangerous to underestimate the harmful things of which women can be capable if you are not prudent.

However, it is folly to think that being wronged gets you anything. It doesn't. Nobody cares about men, nobody cares about you, there is no honor in shame. Being a victim gets you nothing. Do not get caught up in the trap which suggests that you are due something because you have been wronged. You get nothing for having been wronged, and injustice which you've suffered at the hands of society will never be rectified. Never.

And it's a fool's errand to worry about this. There are many, many people who have suffered injustices far, far worse than you have and paid far less thought to them. I've seen a lot of people who don't necessarily want to improve a problem in their life because they believe, unknowingly and unconsciously, that there is some advantage to weakness, some privilege to victimhood. There isn't, this is a a fantasy. Look at women - the more loudly they've managed to place themselves in to the role of automatic victim by virtue of identity, and the more privileges they've managed to get for it, have they gotten happier? It is a recorded fact that they have not.

The more time we spend worrying about this the less time we have to think about how we will build the life for ourselves that we want. And that is the ultimate goal: to build yourself a life that you can be happy in before you die.

Don't fall into the victim trap.