A World Without Victims?
I grew up listening to Elvis (I danced with my father to Don’t Be Cruel at my wedding) and I loved Baz Luhrmann’s films Moulin Rouge, so I was first in line when the Australian director’s tribute film to the famous singer was released last week. It told the familiar story heard in countless other biopics, whereby talented heroes are ripped off by unscrupulous and mercenary traitors.
The way we understand our world is often through a lens of victim and perpetrator. In my own personal life, I’ve seen myself as a victim in various ways - none of them serious, but all of them hurtful. Only through a great deal of internal reflection have I been able to question my own stories of victimhood and realize that they are no longer serving me. This self realization has made me see the complexity in the world that my simplistic assessments of good and bad entirely missed. So I had my eyes opened yet again by another show I saw recently, Bad Vegan, a documentary about a successful restaurateur who went from concocting expensive gourmet creations in NYC to ordering Domino’s Pizza from a hideout in a small town in Tennessee. The way the restaurateur was swindled was so preposterous that it made me reconsider my notions of what it means to be cheated.
Articles that describe and critique something called victimhood culture abound but this essay is not one of them. What I’m interested in goes far beyond any specific political ideology. What I am fascinated by is the idea that many of our current limitations and battles could be eliminated if we chose to see the world through a completely different lens, a lens through which we see no villains and victims, but instead obstacles and opportunities. What if we lived in a world where each of us claimed 100% responsibility for everything we experienced - good or bad? And what if we no longer expected the government to protect us from others or ourselves? What if we had only the most limited laws and ran society on a truly everyone for themself basis?
Contrary to popular belief, there is plenty of evidence that shows that humans are in general a kind, co-operative bunch, so without a myriad of laws we are unlikely to descend into a Lord of the Flies type world. However, it is also true that people act in their own self interest (including us). The fact that others’ self interest often lines up with our own is to be grateful for rather than expected. Every kindness we are shown, every act of generosity, is a magnificent gift from the universe. The sidewalk that supports our feet, the supermarket that contains food for us, and the person who takes away our garbage are all doing us an incredible favour.
When we forget that these everyday occurrences are miracles, we begin to expect them as our birthright. Such an expectation causes us to give up our own responsibility to keep ourselves safe, happy and healthy, and assume others should do that for us. But everything that happens to us is a result of decisions we make. We decide whether to go outside, where to put our money, where to go and who to befriend. We get information from the external world to help inform our choice - a price or ingredient list, a dating profile, or a smooth-talking salesperson - but ultimately we are the ones to make it.
What if, instead of trusting and expecting that others would do what we need, we trusted them to do what they need? If I pay someone to do something for me I am welcome to want something in exchange - like a healthy return on investment, a fixed up car, a delicious pizza - but I will be far more at peace if I realize there are no guarantees. All I know is that once that money leaves my hands, it’s gone. What I’ll actually get is up to someone else - if they make me a great pizza, it’s a fantastic gift, and I’ll return for more. If not, I’ll move on and find another place to eat next time. Similarly, once I give someone else access to my body - a friend, a lover, a surgeon - I am giving up my bodily sovereignty until I reclaim it again. I use my past experience and personal judgment to decide who gets that privilege, but ultimately once I hand it over to someone I have no control over what they do with it.
Every person who doesn’t give us what we want in return for our money, our friendship or our bodies, is simply a person whose circumstance or self interest (in the best possible interpretation of that term) prevented them from doing so. To us, they may seem like the villain, but to them, they are the hero. To see ourselves as the victim, or to expect anyone other than ourselves to put our own self interest ahead of theirs, is disempowering at best, and delusional at worst.
To me, a world where we don’t waste energy on blaming and pointing fingers, but instead take full responsibility for ourselves, is a world where things will go our way much more often than not. Self responsibility also gives us the freedom to form communities and exchange goods and services with people who see things the same way we do instead of relying on government to force our values on others. Movies like The Big Short dramatize a reality that many of us feel - that large institutions like business, media and government regularly put their own self interest ahead of the people who rely on them. If, rather than blaming these institutions, we simply recognized they are going to do what’s best for them, rather than us, we could place our money, minds and trust elsewhere. And, if we prefer to stay with these institutions, we could recognize that we are doing so of our own free will. I know that I stayed with a major Canadian bank for many years, years during which I would freely and loudly criticize their fees, their investment policies, the wildly unequal distribution of salaries. I was criticizing them without recognizing that I was giving them my money of my own free will. And I was doing it because they gave me value - ease of transactions, security, return on investment - and because I just couldn’t be bothered to do the work of closing my account. Once I finally took responsibility and stopped blaming them, I was able to switch to a credit union.
Erasing the idea of victimhood does not mean blaming people for their own suffering. If I made a choice that left me in a bad situation, I do not blame myself for that either, nor do I blame others. But the clarity we have when we no longer expect others to do anything other than what is best for them, could mean a world of both beauty and freedom like we have never known. I am grateful I was able to dance at my wedding to Don’t Be Cruel thanks to the talent of Elvis and the marketing acumen of Tom Parker. The story of the relationship between the two makes for a great movie, (and perhaps it’s even true for all that I know)! But in real life, who is the villain and who is the victim is very much in the eye of the beholder, and is either of these a role that anyone wants? Let’s choose instead to be the hero of our own stories, who goes boldly forward, in the expectation that others will be the heroes of their own.