I think for each of us, what helps is being able to make sense—create coherent meaning—out of our experiences (story-telling is perhaps the most ancient cultural activity of our species). Without meaning, we can’t navigate through the experience of our own existence and we start to loose the ability to function effectively.

When we aren’t able to organize our experience into coherent structures of meaning, two possibilities follow. 1.) we turn to compensatory mechanisms, such as distraction, numbing, escape, addiction, etc..., or 2.) we have a psychotic break and develop psychiatric conditions.

It’s all a bit dizzying when we start to see how elusive “truth” is. After all, we each are constructing systems of meaning to make our existence coherent and therefore bearable. The process is intrinsically subjective, and within the process we generate mirages of objectivity that we defend like life-sustaining oases in the desert.

So we could almost say that all human affairs boil down to the competition of stories, or narratives. Objectivity is a fallacious placebo that protects us from the terrifying reality that no story can be, by definition anything other than subjectively constructed, and further that no story can be heard by anything other than another subject (the listener) that will in turn repeat the process of subjectively organizing what they heard into their structure of meaning. That’s pretty scary, and in a self-referential way, difficult to make sense of.

One of the narratives I have to make sense out of my experience calls on the idea of collective narratives, better known as ideologies. We already know from history that ideologies are powerful as well as dangerous and harmful. Constructing meaning out of our own experiences is a creative act. It takes mental, emotional, and spiritual effort. So when a culture feeds a ready-made narrative to its members we can be lazy, and furthermore we can conform and bathe in the false sense of security of belonging. The price though is loss of self, loss of individuality, loss of creativity, loss of originality, loss of authenticity.

We Americans are the least capable of discerning the ideologies that have powerfully infected our culture over the past 70 years. Writing about them could be the substance of not one, but several theses. But in the context of disempowered immaturity, I note how unbridled we Americans are when it comes to our ideology of victimhood.

I believe that collectively we have neither the awareness, nor the discernment to even be able to consider the ideology(ies) by which we are hijacked. The greatest danger about ideologies is that they eliminate the need for true enquiry. Conclusions are ready-made and passionately applied, with the added safety of majority conformity, which means they carry very low social risk.

So the moment the victim narrative is invoked in our culture, everything falls into prefabricated place: there is the victim, there is the perpetrator, and any curiosity about moral subtlety and complexity is dispensed with. We see this single instrument of instant political power at play every day in our country. At every scale. In homes, schools, the workplace, the court rooms, in relationships, in government, in foreign policy, etc... We see it celebrated in the morally simplistic productions of Disney-Hollywood. We Americans are addicted to the instant gratification of knowing who to blame and who to punish. Victory goes to whoever monopolizes the victim narrative first. The real battle lies in securing victim status before your opponent. It is a form of collective insanity no less significant than the frenzied ideologies that gripped China’s Cultural Revolution, or Russia’s Stalinism. But we cannot see it for what it is from the inside. We mistake it for “truth”.

Humans aspire to rationality, but we are by default highly irrational. As the great men of philosophy, science, and spirituality, and the true illuminists through the ages understood, rationality is a human potential that takes intention and discipline to develop. This seems to have been most widely understood during the Age of Enlightenment. And it cannot be achieved by disowning our irrational nature, but rather by embracing and understanding it. A bit like understanding objectivity as a subset of subjectivity.

One thing I was reminded of by watching an excellent Netflix dramatic series on the O.J. Simpson trial is that truth and justice are not based on rationality as often and as reliably as we would like to think. The human factor cannot be ignored. So in the O.J. Simpson trial, the world saw in the most spectacular way how justice was not reached by the rational weighing of evidence, but came down to which story was presented to the jury that most entertained and appealed to them, and also in this case, conformed most closely to one of the national ideologies, the ideology of racism (which looks a lot like a subset of the ideology of victimhood: all oppressed minorities are victims, in ever-expanding inclusions now of children, women, etc... we are getting close to the absurd end-point where minorities are becoming a majority, and the unintended, emergent minority will be made up of those who are not in a minority, but fewer and fewer are left.)

The irony is that this ideological system produces as many hapless victims as it purports to rescue. But the greatest fallacy of the ideology is that it fails to recognize that it is a social enactment of the Karpman Drama Triangle at a cultural scale of transactional dysfunction.