Beware of People Playing the Victim

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Visit https://brilliant.org/freedominthought to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription. Watch “Nietzsche – Overcome Shame, Become Who You Are”:    • Nietzsche – Overcome Shame, Become Wh…   WISDOM WEDNESDAY. Every week, you’ll get five powerful quotes from timeless thinkers (combined with some original insight): https://freedominthought.com/newsletter ABOUT THE VIDEO _ In this video, I talk about Friedrich Nietzsche, playing the victim, guilt, obligation, pity, disgust, and shame. But before we can understand what it means to play the victim, we need to understand what it means to be a victim. For this essay, we can define a victim as someone who is taken advantage of by another person. And we can call the act of taking advantage of someone a crime. And typically, what we want for all victims is justice. And justice, as discussed by Nietzsche, can be thought of as giving back to the victim what was lost when the crime was committed. In other words, you can think of justice as the repaying of debts: the criminal must repay the debt they acquired by taking advantage of the victim. I’m not saying this is what justice means, but this is a way many people understand justice, and this definition is important in the context of this video. So what does it mean to play the victim? What separates a genuine victim from someone playing the victim? A genuine victim was actually taken advantage of, but someone playing the victim wasn’t. And how do you determine whether someone was actually taken advantage of? It comes down to consent. Someone is taken advantage of when their presence is used in a way they didn’t agree to. And so a true victim did not give consent or was not in a position to give consent, such as in the case of a child or someone who was severely intoxicated. But someone who plays the victim gives legitimate consent and then claims they didn’t. Or they claim /you/ consented to things which you didn’t consent to or were not in a position to consent to. I’ll explore what both cases look like a little later on. So why would someone play the victim? To put it simply, they play victim so someone will save them from their problems. They’re looking for a rescuer. And how do they get people to save them? Someone who plays the victim has two main weapons: obligation and guilt, and pity and disgust.