ESCAPING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY:
A persuasive critique of identity politics: Valorising the victim gives us not a more just world, but a world with less moral and aesthetic content (Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, 2/08/26, The Critic)
The ideology of victimhood operates as an ersatz morality. Once status is conferred by self-appointed “experts”, social, institutional and material advantages often follow. But, as Daouda reiterates throughout her book, there is a high cost to acquiring victim status, namely, the renunciation of one’s personhood as a free-willed agent.
As always, Eric Hoffer described it best:
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden…We join
a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young
Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared
themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves
cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not
joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?