Public Victim No.1
/For about two years I’ve been involved in a frustrating and soul-crushing matter concerning some local authorities and my house. It’s a situation for which the term ‘kafkaesque’ was created as I have never felt so desperate in dealing with regulations and authorities that don’t seem to serve any greater purpose for anyone but act as if they’re existential to society’s survival.
During a meeting where I had to actually face some of the people who force me to deal with all of this administrative nonsense, I was confounded to realize that they don’t feel like they’re in power at all, no, they constantly acted as if they are the real victims.
“You don’t know about the things we have to deal with here!”
“Well, there is nothing we can do!”
“We don’t have the time to look into that!”
Since this moment I see the same pattern almost everywhere. We all know that most people constantly complain but it has helped me a lot to understand them by viewing their complaints as the voices of victims. They might not actually be victims but there is a general sense of victimhood, a feeling of betrayal even, that seems to grow more and more in our culture.
If you take a step back and consider the history of our culture (on the basis of Daniel Quinn’s writing), this makes a lot of sense. Since we decided to stray away from the path of tribal culture and got hooked by the feeling of power that our culture promises and rarely gives (by accumulating more and more and more of everything, food, money, likes, power), we have struggled with this dysfunctional way of life. We came up with organized religion, drugs, social media, competitive sport and billions of other things to distract ourselves from the misery but nothing really satisfies us. And as we are reaching the point where it becomes clearer and clearer that we’ve reached (or maybe crossed) a tipping point for our climate and ecosystems, we are starting to lose the only thing that kept us going for all those years: the promise of something better, a more advanced life where problems disappear and can easily be solved.
Daniel Quinn called this ‘cultural collapse’ and it’s hard to deny that we are seeing more and more signs of it. And what better symptom is there than a universal feeling of being victimized. We elect Trump and the AfD because they emptily promise to give us something back we think we’ve had in the past (we didn’t), we numb ourselves more and more instead of thinking about the problems we face and how to solve them and we bathe ourselves in our shared feeling of misery, nihilism and doom. I’ve observed young people evolve into ‘Generation Shrug’ as they have no idea how to deal with all of this and the older generation is mostly failing them because they don’t provide them with anything besides more distractions. (And, yes, then along comes a movie like Joker that gives all those ‘victims’ even more legitimacy and ideas of a fucked up world).
But we’re only victims of a prison that we have created ourselves and which we perpetuate, mainly because we don’t know about alternatives. And there are alternatives. There is a treasure hidden not just in our past but in the cultures of indigenous people everywhere (as long as they are still allowed to live) who have lived sustainably for thousands of years without ending up in the same apocalyptic circumstances as our culture does. Even just understanding that humans are not the problem, but just our culture makes a big difference. And it’s up to us not to instill our children with these hopeless, pessimistic ideas because if they give up hope, we might actually be doomed.
