The Banality and Normalisation of Victimhood

When the individual story of victimhood is woven around interpersonal relations, the signs of the trauma it causes in the individual are relatively concrete and measurable. As the actors of this relationship become plural subjects (on both sides), its sphere of influence widens and the negative effects it creates in the individual multiply. An extreme example of this is the mistreatment inflicted by the state on a person because of their political, religious, ideological or cultural background.

Mistreatment that takes concrete form against a community, or a group in the sociological sense, raises the degree of victimhood from going hungry to being subjected to genocide or condemned to death. Every time the state tests the administrative apparatus it possesses and the political, legal and administrative mechanisms of power it holds (again in their sociological sense) on individuals and communities, the ground is laid in society for a new rupture, a new victimhood and a new conflict.

“Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly”

We have been seeing examples of this in Türkiye for many years. Religious belief and nationalism built on falsehoods, individual ambitions for advancement channelled in the wrong directions, passions and rights violations that people have grown used to are widening the circle of victimhood as far as it will go and shattering the ground for social consensus. Victims’ individual efforts and their struggles to seek justice can be valuable, and at times effective, in repairing this broken order.

Nevertheless, the primary effort to repair the broken order must be directed at accurately identifying the victimising mechanism that has become routine within the natural workings of the state machinery. Then the most appropriate and most urgent repair efforts must be brought together. More important than individual responsibilities at this point is that the political opposition and civil society initiatives set aside their differences and struggle shoulder to shoulder.

The Victim’s Options

The basic options facing a victim who has overcome the first shock of what they experienced are probably the following:

• Withdrawing into oneself,
• Acting as if nothing had happened,
• Giving in to the desire for revenge,
• Seeking a legal solution.

But very often the victim is so crushed and exhausted under the weight of what they have experienced, and loses so much of their life energy, that they no longer have the strength either to speak once more about what happened or to fight the perpetrators (including by using legal arguments).

On the other hand, as the victim sees or hears of cases graver than their own, they begin to count their blessings, weep for the suffering of others and forget the pain of their own wounds; they turn into someone who has grown used to what happened to them, as if they had suffered nothing at all. This person has made their victimhood ordinary and grown inured to it. The will of such people to fight on political, legal or social ground out of their own motivation has reached the point of vanishing.

Perhaps the first step in escaping victimhood is to shake off this psychology of victimhood. Unless you free yourself from the thoughts constantly whispered into your mind that you are a “victim”, it will not be possible to truly escape victimhood either.

The Banality of Victimhood

In a society where “evil has become banal”, what could be more natural than the spread of victimhood? In a society where human relations are indexed to self-interest and which is under the yoke of the wicked and the idea of evil, security concerns will naturally take priority in individual expectations of well-being. In order to address these concerns, victimhood must never be allowed to become ordinary and to be accepted as normal by the social conscience.

Foremost among the measures needed to sustain the victim’s own motivation, or society’s, to fight victimhood are of course legal methods of struggle. At this point, however demoralising the spreading unlawful actions and decisions of those who dispense justice may be, they must not cause us to give up or lose our will to fight.

It must never be forgotten that fighting victimhood is a kind of fight against lawlessness. We must be aware that the unjust and unlawful treatment inflicted on “the other” today may tomorrow befall us or those we love most. The greatest obstacle to such awareness is the failure to stand up to the ruling power and its elites (whether in action, discourse or wishful thinking) who rain power down on communities one after another like a poisoned arrow, the trivialisation of victimhood, and the resulting state of numbness.

The Loneliness of the Victim

An effective way to prevent banalisation and numbness is to voice the spreading cases of victimhood every time, persistently and in different ways. Every step taken in this direction has value. For there is a large population of different beliefs, views and identities who are unaware of their victimhood or who deliberately want to forget the traumas they have experienced. I suspect that such people need a serious warning or stimulus.

By frequently drawing attention to the exemplary struggles and stories of resistance of historic figures in the fight for rights against victimisation, the broken morale of victimised masses can be partly repaired and their motivation to struggle kept alive. Keeping this motivation alive is very important, because the problem greater than the victimhood the individual is experiencing is the state of having grown used to it. Whether this numbness stems from helplessness or from a baseless or meaningless notion of resignation makes no difference.

Unless a legitimate social ground is created for fighting victimhood within the framework of law, this state of banalisation and numbness will lead to unstoppable social traumas. In a society where individuals whose personalities have been erased, whose freedom of choice has been suppressed and whose will to struggle has been exhausted are multiplying, one cannot speak of democratic values truly being lived, of honour and virtue being brought to life, or of the rule of law being established. It is inevitable that cities and countries in which traumatised individuals multiply will turn into madhouses.