Amerika

Left-wing (a typical NPR story):

Here where children once played, now silence reigns. The impact of poverty can be felt in the lead-based paint peeling from the walls, the faded basketball court with a deflated sack melting in the center, and endless long hallways scrawled with graffiti and plastered in eviction notices. Only a few blocks away, the suburbs of the western part of the city begin, where the calls of children and gentle melodies of ice cream trucks drown out the screams of the dying city just yards away.

Right-wing (a typical NRO article):

Hypocritical Senate Democrats insist on demanding a double standard. Last fall Republicans took endless criticism for expanding military procurement to include necessary bandages at a $300 million cost, but this week’s Minority Assistance Reconstruction Expenditure (M.A.R.X.) bill will total almost eight trillion dollars. At some point, we have to say enough is enough, and we are really angry this time.

Both of these show the pathology of individualism, namely that people want to be victims so that they can claim the world owes them something, simply so that they can stop trying to adapt to it and treat it morally and start treating it like a shopping mall or ashtray.

Humans have not progressed far from the cavemen who learned how to make fire. Most of us see the world as something for us to consume and then excrete upon, and in fact relish this type of destruction, because it affirms our importance over our small place in the universe and our mortality.

Egalitarian times encourage victimhood because in a society dedicated to equality, only those below the magic line of “equal” are owed anything by society, and what is given to them is taken from those above the line. For this reason, everyone wants to be a victim.

In addition, conservatives are accustomed to winning points by being clever, and they think it very clever to catch the Left in contradiction with its own philosophy, forgetting that the Leftist ideology champions hypocrisy when used for a “good” goal of “progress,” or the “scientific” management of humanity and nature for the sake of preserving the ego.

Tags: individualism, victimhood