Western governments have constructed bureaucracies to reward malingering behavior. In return, ordinary people have responded to those incentives in enormous numbers, prostrating themselves before medical authorities, proclaiming all kinds of strange ailments. Doctors and pill-manufacturers invent new ailments as rapidly as old ones fall out of fashion.
The facts are less important than the plausible construction of theories. Syndromes are particularly popular for this, because they can be diagnosed based upon symptoms alone. Many people will happily rewrite the entire story of their lives based upon a syndrome invented in an addled brainstorming session with an ad agency executive, some doctors, and some pill-designers. A pill becomes more than a concentration of substances. It becomes a story, a narrative, an identity, a prescription for how to treat an entire generation of children, with emphasis on the verb ‘to treat.’
Pain in the back, psychological illnesses, obesity-related problems, and migraine headaches are all popular disabilities used to claim free pills, free surgery, food stamps, child support payments, and other pity-benefits.
The wretched people of the earth do what they can to rewrite the narratives of their lives to cast themselves as innocent victims. In return for proclaiming their own victim-hood, the professional left is happy to reward people with all kinds of special benefits. Because the language around sin and responsibility have been blotted out of the public discourse, a bloated, promiscuous glutton can be recast as a victim with all kinds of subjectively-defined ailments with a right to restitution from the public treasury.
The way that conservatives tend to countenance this is by accepting the victim narrative at face value. The demanding system of Christian values becomes replaced with a squishy universal forgiveness that expects no reform from sinners and ignores the expectations of good behavior from anyone.
The problem is that sinning has been recast as a path to grace: the mother of a brood of bastards becomes the moral ideal, deserving of charity and respect, rather than a pitiable creature who must repent and change her ways as a condition of rejoining polite society.
Men who go to work every day will find themselves the target of a show trial at the behest of his wife: either condemned for working too much, or condemned for working too little. Condemned for harsh words, or abandoned because he does not know how to lead his wife.
Whatever fault can be invented can be redefined as ‘abuse’ and used to justify the looting of the family assets. Middle class women with little to complain about can be convinced through sophistry redefined as psychology by lawyers and bureaucrats who earn a living by recasting family life as a tale of unforgivable tortures.
Over time, we have transformed maudlin displays of public pity into the height of respectable behavior. The only creature we place above the sacred victim is that victim’s deliverer. We replay the story of victim-rescued-by-hero-overcome-with-pity so frequently that it has become the only story that we really tell to each other anymore.
In this way, we encourage people to flaunt weakness. Children learn to aspire to wretchedness instead of greatness. People who act become the villains, just because they show that they can act, regardless of the moral content of their actions. The malingerers blame these people, and beg for a deliverance that will bring about equality, usually by destroying their superiors.
Once we revoke unconditional sympathy for the wretched, the entire amoral narrative of pity for the wretched unravels. We develop a moral sense: the ability to discriminate between those who deserve sympathy, and those who don’t.
