Victimhood is a powerful tool which has long been harnessed by the left, both to garner support and to drive its agenda forward. The victim mentality is an acquired personality trait in which a person tends to recognize or consider him or herself a victim of circumstances caused by others and to behave as if this were the case, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The left wants big government, centralised planning and minimal personal autonomy. Educated, empowered and free-thinking people do not want this. That is why a high percentage of the general populace must first be ‘de-educated’ and then converted to the cult of victimhood if the left’s stratagem is to succeed.
In terms of ‘de-education’, current data shows a major problem in New Zealand’s literacy levels – which doesn’t seem to be an issue for the left. Year 5 primary school students ranked last for reading across English-speaking countries in the most recent Progress in International Literacy Study. New Zealand has continued to slide in almost all international literacy and numeracy rankings since the Tertiary Education Commission’s 2014 finding that 40 percent of teens holding an NCEA Level 2 qualification were functionally innumerate and illiterate.
This has largely been brought about by the ‘feel-good’ and student-led approach to education within our ‘modern learning environments’ in which children never sit still, aren’t disciplined, and are rarely formally taught anything. Having disarmed their target audience by rendering them helpless, the second stage of the left’s approach is to ‘re-educate’, or rather indoctrinate the young by making them woke.
To be ‘woke’ is to be alive to social injustice. Favourite ‘injustices’ are things which we can neither prove nor quantify, let alone do anything about. It is for this reason that one of our government’s first actions of this parliamentary term was to declare a ‘climate emergency’.
An emergency is a serious, unexpected, and dangerous situation requiring immediate action, examples of which might be a burning building or the circumstances arising from the aftermath of an earthquake. Yet as the sun continues to rise and set each day, and we continue to receive a variety of weather, it is difficult to see how current climatic conditions in fact give rise to any sort of ‘emergency’.
It is also difficult to envisage how people of non-white ethnicity or minority sexual orientation are more likely to be adversely affected by the ‘emergency’ than others, although we are assured this is the case. Woke children are now taught that being a (government-sponsored) ‘activist’ is a worthwhile career path. It is certainly a viable one as increasing numbers of people rely upon the state for income. More than half of New Zealand’s population is now on some sort of benefit.
The whole system grows by feeding on itself. The cardinal requirement is that nobody asks questions and the socio-economic machine is fed, as we are plainly seeing at the moment, by monetary expansion (exchanging government bonds for cash at the expense of the taxpayer) in the interests of redistributive ‘wellbeing’. The consequences of this, such as soaring house prices, don’t matter because we are rolling out ‘warm and dry’ state housing and, as the government’s constituency grows, so too does dependency on it by a rapidly filling swamp of left-wing voters.
The doctrine of Universal Victimhood has never been more widely embraced than in the political and media handling of the coronavirus ‘pandemic’. A study from Stockholm University shows that, for most people, the chance of dying from COVID-19 is negligible, and that one would really have to be over 80 and male, and have one or more underlying health conditions, to be at any sort of risk.
With our borders closed for the foreseeable future and the ‘fight’ against COVID still in full flight – at mounting cost to the taxpayer – these figures are sobering. Why are we doing this to ourselves? The various vaccines, it turns out, are being administered overseas whilst still on trial, and disturbing side effects have immediately been reported, especially amongst allergy sufferers. Worth pondering is that a middle-aged female, who dodges death from COVID by a 99.9998 per cent chance, also has a 99.9999991 per cent chance of not being struck by lightning.
Genevieve Briand, a Hopkins University researcher and professor, recently graphed out total deaths from all causes in the United States in 2020 by age group and compared them to previous years.
From her analysis, Briand found that US deaths over the past twelve months were on par with deaths in other years, with no discernible increase. She also discovered that deaths from other causes had been miscategorised as COVID-19 deaths.
This caused an enormous upset as it goes against the official narrative, and also because Briand is not a ‘medical expert’ (for which read: high priest). Whether or not she is wholly correct is somewhat beside the point. For all the fuss, and especially in countries which had a ‘bad war’ against COVID, the numbers haven’t changed much.
What matters the most is that we all accept our lot as victims, and continue to look left for ‘solutions’. African American pastor, and Trump supporter, Jesse Lee Peterson is a frequent commentator on the descent into victimhood of black Americans at the hands of the Democratic Party since the time of Lyndon Johnson. Direct state intervention to subsidise black lives has led, in that country, to a spiralling confederation of dependency in which families no longer function, more than 50 per cent of black children are born out of wedlock, and vast swathes of the population live in a permanent state of bitterness and anger.
What Peterson describes is nothing more than the unintended consequences of centralised planning. But then, the further down this route one is forced to go, the fewer choices one has and the more one is compelled to like it. At the moment in New Zealand, nobody is complaining.
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