Object

In a conversation yesterday, the subject of "playing the 'victim card'" came up. I try to stay out of such things, because they're rarely productive, but I was thinking about it this morning, while running errands.

The Just World Hypothesis is alive and well in the United States, and a side effect of this is the tendency to look for ways in which people who have suffered misfortune had brought it on themselves. It's understood that when people attribute agency to others, they are less likely to have sympathy for those others. The "victim card" as it were tends to push back against this, mainly by attempting to avoid the attribution of agency. It is, basically, a way of saying "it wasn't my fault, I wasn't the person with agency."

Which, in all honesty, strikes me as a perfectly rational thing to do. But I think that it has its downsides, in the sense that it means that people cast themselves as being acted upon, rather than being the ones acting. And for a number of people that I've talked to, that tends to lead them to feel that their lives are chaotic, because other people/circumstances are calling all of the shots. I suspect that there is something of a balance to be found there, but I have no idea what it would be.

I try to maintain the idea that being responsible for something and being at fault/blameworthy for that thing are not the same, as I see this as being the antidote to the inverse correlation of agency and sympathy. But that's built upon the idea that sympathy for other people is, basically, free, and I realize that I'm not exactly in the majority with that viewpoint. The first time I encountered the idea that "no man, knowing good, does evil," it struck me as fundamentally true; I don't have any questions about the world where "evil" strikes me as a worthwhile answer. But there are many other people for whom "evil" is the answer to a number of questions.

And I think, bigger picture, that's the real point of "the victim card;" it's a ward against the perception that a person's fate is their punishment for not just wrongdoing, but for being a bad person on top of it. The attribution of agency is a vehicle for moral judgement, and perhaps one of the perceived benefits of the Just World Hypothesis is that those judgements can be made simply by looking at what has happened to a person. Which, perhaps ironically, means the judge doesn't have to accept that they were the agent of the judgement.