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Not A Victim – Audio

Hi, this is A.J. and welcome to this month’s VIP Lesson. Our topic this month is interesting, a little different than normal and it’s called Sentimental Drama, that’s what I’m calling it. Let me explain all of this, why I chose this topic, why I think it’s important and how you can think about it and use it in your own life.

I chose this topic because I’ve noticed something over the last several years, happening in the media, the international media culture. It’s a tendency, a trend that I’ve seen getting stronger and stronger that I think is kind of dangerous, especially for us. It’s what you might call a drama queen culture. A drama queen is a little bit of slang and a drama queen is someone who is overly dramatic and emotional about everything.

They make a big thing out of very small things. It’s somewhat of a self indulgent mentality or attitude. To indulge yourself means the opposite of self discipline. If you’re self disciplined than it means you have control of your own mind, emotions and body. If you’re self indulgent than anything you want you just do. If you really want to eat two liters of ice cream everyday then you just do it. You’re indulging yourself.

I’ve noticed that this mentality is being portrayed and shown and even encouraged in the media more and more, movies, TV, news, etc. Along with it as part of this is what we might call a victim cult, a cult of the victim, which means the idea of being a victim in many ways is being shown as something that is noble. We’re being shown in the news, in movies and television, people who have been victimized and identified themselves as victims, as being somehow more noble.

It’s very dangerous this idea. It’s subtle but danger-dangerous-dangerous. I feel that we’re being a bit programmed in this way, that people are being programmed to accept this idea that being a victim is somehow a noble thing and that being overly dramatic about one’s own suffering, challenges or difficulties is also an acceptable and positive thing.

What all this is related and connected to is a mentality or the idea of indulgent emotions, that rather than the ancient idea that emotions are things to be used and tempered with, controlled by, reasoned and self discipline so that they don’t just go crazy on their own, that instead we’re being encouraged in many ways or we’re seeing portrayals of people who just go crazy with whatever they feel and that somehow that’s a good thing. I don’t think it is.

Along with all this wrapped together is the idea of self pity, almost encouraging people to pity themselves, to display self pity, that that is now not such a bad thing. It used to be seen as a very large negative, whereas, now it’s becoming more acceptable or shown on the media to be more acceptable.

Let me give you some examples, because I know this is a bit of an abstract topic this month, but stay with me, I think you’ll find it useful. I see this example with children.

Everywhere I go, certainly in the U.S. but many other places, I’m seeing more and more spoiled indulgent children. Parent have this idea that the best way to raise a child is to indulge them, indulge their emotions. If they want something than give it to them. If they’re unhappy then all the adults have to run around and try to make the child happy all the time, because we can’t tolerate any kind of unhappiness, frustration or anything.

In that way the kids must be indulged and that the idea of training their child, teaching their child or demanding of their child, self discipline and self control. That’s going down.

It’s an old value in almost every culture in the world and yet it’s weakening and instead we’re seeing more and more of this indulging children, where the child becomes the boss, and I’m sure you’ve seen it in your own country, all these spoiled little monsters running around.

It’s a symptom of what I’m talking about and the sad thing is that when those children grow up they’re in for a very tough shock from life, because life will not indulge them.

Other adults will not indulge them, so if they don’t learn that toughness, self discipline and balance between emotion and reason than their future lives are going to be very tough.

Another thing I’ve noticed is adult’s public tantrums. A tantrum is where you just lose control, usually from anger. We usually think of small children as having tantrums and we expect that from small children, but what I’ve seen in many countries of the world, certainly I’ve seen it increasing a lot in the United States are adults having these public tantrums.

In San Francisco for example, I see this all the time now where just the smallest little inconvenience to someone, the smallest little thing and people will lose their temper, go crazy, yell and scream. We have a lot of cyclists, bicycle riders in our city and if any car turns in front of them or anything happens that inconveniences them in any way and/or forces them to stop or change the direction they’re going they scream and yell and act like little two year old children.

I’ve seen this happening more and more, these kinds of public tantrums from adults. We see it in the media a lot, especially from television, comedies and sometimes it’s just for humor, but because I’m seeing it so many places all the time, there is again a social programming happening where we’re being unconsciously taught that this is normal and acceptable, and that’s dangerous, for many reasons we’ll discuss.

Another area and maybe this is the scariest of all to me is in the news. At least the ideal of the news is that it used to be that the news was something that was rational, that we were being presented a rational reporting of events. Of course, in many ways that was propaganda and not really true, but certainly the delivery of the news in the past was more rational and less emotional.

But now, pretty much the news, especially BBC, CNN, Fox and Al Jazeera, all the big ones, it’s really no longer rational but rather emotional manipulation. Now, when CNN runs a story it’s horrible about this, this they don’t really tell stories rationally it’s all about manipulating the emotions of the audience. So if they do a report about some kind of battle, conflict or combat somewhere, if they support it, maybe the U.S. is invading a country and CNN supports that, then they have all this type of theme music and it’s almost like a movie.

It’s all designed to make Americans feel strong and patriotic. It’s very emotional and sentimental without much rational reporting, facts and certainly they never really ask tough questions. If they’re against something than it’s a lot of emotional manipulation in the other direction. This is dangerous and sadly, most people fall for this and are now being programmed to act more and more irrationally and emotionally about things.

The sum of all this is that we’re losing the value of reason and rationality and self discipline. Instead, we’re moving towards indulgent emotions, self pity and ennobling victims, seeing victim-hood as something that’s great. We see this in the news a lot where they’ll do reports about some victim of something and they’re suffering. Of course that’s sad we all compassion about that, but also oftentimes it’s implied that people who have been victimized or who have been victims or who have suffered, that somehow they are more moral.

That because they have suffered now they have some superior moral quality or something and that’s false, it’s not true. Just because someone suffers something terrible doesn’t mean that they themselves are anymore noble or anymore moral. In fact we’ve seen many times in history where a person or group of people have been terrible victims and then have gone on in the future to do horrible terrible things to other people.

So just because they were victims before didn’t make them better people. It didn’t make them more moral. This is a logical, rational fallacy or mistake.

All of this together, what am I talking about and why is it important to you? All of this together adds up to a tendency for all of us maybe, to want to grab onto this self pity of being a victim when bad things happen to us. We do it in small ways and in large ways.

It depends on what’s happening and on the person. Every single time it’s dangerous and it’s dangerous because on one hand that self pity and feeling of being a victim and indulge my emotions, poor me, on one hand it can feel good.

It feels good when other people around you join in, oh yes it’s so terrible and everyone wants to comfort you. That feels like a good thing, all that attention and warmth, which is why it’s dangerous, because on one hand it’s a nice way to get attention and get a little short-term comfort, but long-term it’s super dangerous because it takes away our power, because the victim or self pity mindset. It’s a passivity, it’s surrendering your responsibility for your own life, you’re giving up your own power, giving up the idea that you are responsible for what happens in your life, or at least you’re responsible for how you respond to it.

So even though something might happen to you that you don’t like, you didn’t want it, instead of being a victim and pitying poor me, I’m the victim, everyone feel sorry for me, it makes you feel better but on the other hand it also makes you weak and you can get stuck in the victim mindset. This is the danger. I’ve seen this so many times, in family members, in other people where this victim mentality, the self pity becomes a habit and when that happens, instead of taking responsibility and saying okay, this bad thing happened but I am responsible in how I respond.

I choose how I respond. I can be weak or strong. I can react to this how I want to.

Instead, people get stuck in self pity and they lose that strength, so we have to be careful about that. A positive way of stating all of this is that we need to develop our fortitude and reason to counter all of this, to go against all of these cultural things that are coming into our head or maybe just our own weak tendency to want to be a victim or feel pity for ourselves.

The solution to all that is to develop inside ourselves a feeling of fortitude and to develop our reasoning ability. Reason is a nice balance to emotion. There’s nothing wrong with emotion, but there is something wrong with indulging emotion and just letting emotion control you all the time. I’ve had this happen in my own life, so we all do it, but the way out of that is to balance it with reason. Reason is your rational thinking, that cool clear thinking you can have that’s removed from emotion.

So your emotions might be going crazy but you can step back, calm yourself down and look at things in a very cool, rational way and see them more clearly. Emotion is beneficial, you can use it in a way to give yourself power and confidence and strength, but it can also be dangerous if you let it take control of you.

Develop your reason, your rationality. Any time you find you’re feeling sorry for yourself, complaining about what a terrible life you have and how someone has done something bad to you, this isn’t fair I’m such a victim, than what you have to do to counter that is to step away from that, take some deep breaths and do what you want and just think coldly, coolly and rationally about it. Try to remove all the emotion and try to think logically let’s just look at this as if it was a problem.

Let’s look at this situation and pretend it’s someone else’s problem. Imagine it’s someone you don’t even know, don’t even care about and they have the same problem.

What should they do? What advice would you give to that person? Usually when we’re dealing, and by the way you’ve seen this happen too in your own life when friends, family members or others come to you asking you for advice, you can see clearly what they need to do. They’re complaining, whining and because it’s not your problem you can easily say, you need to do this or this.

You can think rationally about other people’s problems or more rationally, but then when it’s yourself in a similar situation, sometimes it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the emotion and self pity. I just want to be a victim and complain and whine. It’s good to develop the habit of seeing your own problems and pretending they’re removed from you, like not being so tied up to them and pretending they’re someone else’s so you can look at them from a distance.

Develop your reason and rationality, it will give you more strength, more emotional mastery and help you deal with life’s problems much better.

Of course, to do all this you need to exercise some self discipline. That’s what the word fortitude means, it means strength, mental strength, mental self discipline and that’s what I want you to focus on this month. I want you to pay careful attention to yourself and your life as you go along each day this month and notice any time you start thinking like a victim, any time you start thinking poor me.

Any time you whine or complain about something you think is unfair, any situation in your life you don’t like and you have this whining, complaining, pitiful attitude. Don’t criticize because we all do it, so don’t criticize yourself for it just notice it. See how much you do this and then after you do that, imagine you turn that off, push it away in your mind and then imagine you’re sitting way back far from yourself, looking at yourself from a distance, seeing it all happening, all these things and problems you’re worrying about or upset about.

If you’re seeing them from a far distance and just think in a very cool rational way, what should this person do? What should I do? How could I solve these problems and deal with this without all that messy, crazy, weak emotional whining and complaining? Take responsibility for your life this month, notice where you’re a victim and then practice this exercise of removing yourself and looking at problems and situations very coolly from a distance.

Never ever, ever accept victim thinking again. You’re not a victim. You are the master of your life. You decide how you respond to life and how you react to situations. You are responsible.

I’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.