Education and the Victimhood Mentality

By Rev. Dr. Joe Renfro - Posted at The Christian Observer:

There is education, and often very much in contemporary American education is being coupled with a victimhood mentality. Various minority groups are crying out particularly from the platforms of academia, our colleges and universities, that they or a group they support are suffering from various forms of what they call adverse discrimination—be it Islamophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, genderism, xenophobia, ageism, socio-economic discrimination, disability prejudice, or whatever. Protest has become for many an accepted, even applauded form of education. Learning is for these, not the only acquisition of knowledge, but cultivation of attitudes under the semblance of education to promote change they desire.

Slavoi Zizek in an article from the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy wrote an article called, “Somewhere over the Rainbow” where he said:

The first thing to note here is that it takes two to fight a culture war: culture is also the dominant ideological topic of the “enlightened” liberals whose politics is focused on the fight against sexism, racism, and fundamentalism, and for multicultural tolerance… The second thing to note is how, while professing their solidarity with the poor, liberals encode culture war with an opposed class message: more often than not, their fight for multicultural tolerance and women’s rights marks the counter-position to the alleged intolerance, fundamentalism, and patriarchal sexism of the “lower classes”…The third thing to take note of is the fundamental difference between feminist/anti-racist/anti-sexist etc. struggle and class struggle: in the first case, the goal is to translate antagonism into difference (“peaceful” coexistence of sexes, religions, ethnic groups), while the goal of the class struggle is precisely the opposite, i.e., to “aggravate” class difference into class antagonism… The entertainment industry is not forcing depravity on an unwilling American public. The demand for decadence is there. That fact does not excuse those who sell such degraded material any more than the demand for crack excuses the crack dealer. But we must be reminded that the fault is in ourselves, in human nature not constrained by external forces.

The victimhood mentality wishes to ignore the total depravity of mankind, and seeks to hit just at the externals, neglecting to define the “heart of man,” that the Bible says is totally wicked. The victimhood mentality is a concept that might point to a reality or a shad of actuality. It might point to a state where one might feel they are suffering adverse discrimination, exclusive of what real situations might prevail. It is a tool to implant societal acceptance or applause on any form or behavior that the liberal mind might condone, or from the other side to condemn what they oppose.

Read more here.