I am going to spend more time on the power of the innocent victim (referred to in my last blog) and relate it to post-election reflection. One of the concepts of counseling I studied at Duke was the phenomenon of the power of the innocent victim. The only victims that I knew were people in a bad way because someone with more power than they had made them feel powerless. People with power were never victims.
But after hours of supervision of my counseling of others, I saw how someone could become powerful in a relationship by pleading repeatedly that they were innocent due to being subjected to others with much more power. The more experience I got, I noticed that people who protested that they were not receiving the justice that they deserved in their relationships with others became the drivers in relationships. They used this position of “Oh, woe is me!” as a cudgel in their relationships with others who they themselves wanted to control and there was nothing innocent about their intentions.
Keep in mind that our first ethical statement as a very young child is usually, “That’s not fair!” It is a primordial feeling that must be at the heart of everything that we do. One of the pillars of ethics is justice. When we say that we are the innocent victim, it touches on the most primary emotion that we have so we feel inclined to save the person from this perpetrator of the injustice that the individual is claiming.
In essence, I am right in my actions and someone else is wrong in their treatment of me.
Think of the situation where a boy on the playground strikes another boy first, but the boy who is struck hits back. The first boy who started the fight would say to the teacher, “He started it. I am innocent.” The teacher who doesn’t understand the phenomenon of the innocent victim would immediately take up the plight of the boy who threw the first punch if they didn’t see the whole episode or didn’t know that “there are two sides to every story”.
We want justice for the innocent victims. That is why I can’t stand the TV commercials of little children who are hungry. I know that they are innocent victims, and I want to do something about it. I feel a strong emotion to help. They are truly powerless. But the innocent victim in relationships conjures up this same emotion. Another person isn’t treating them fairly. Once the untrained therapist experiences this, they immediately take sides with the innocent victim and are convinced that the other people involved are the cause of all their trouble. “The innocent victim runs the therapeutic show, so to speak, to create justice in the relationship.” Meanwhile the innocent victim doesn’t have to take RESPONSIBILITY for their actions as they shift the “politics” of the relationship. This is Trump! He is the manifestation of the innocent victim in action.
I treat any power dynamics through a therapeutic lens. What happens in our one-to-one relationships happens in our global or social relationships. R. D. Laing wrote a whole book about this phenomenon, The Politics of Experience.
While the talking heads for the Democratic Party were analyzing the presidential campaign focusing on the factors of inflation, border security, abortion, and threats to democracy, I was concerned more with how Trump’s victim stance was playing out in the soul and psyche of my fellow Americans. Remember justice is our primordial emotion which helped us to evolve to who we are today. We heard too frequently that a good many people still believe that the last election was stolen and that the deep state was still out to get Trump. There was no way to evaluate this on a grid or flow chart just as there is no way to put a conventional measure on it in a relationship between and among people. The talking heads weren’t paying much attention to it as they focused on the more conventional issues mentioned above.
The Democratic Party also focused on the 2025 Document and the erratic behavior of Trump as well as his moral failings. I have been writing about classism as the key issue in America forever and I feel it was the main issue that resulted in the win by the Republicans.
This is my opinion of why Trump won. The Democratic Party ignored the plight of the kitchen table issues so the people struggling ignored the Democratic Party. That didn’t affect the elite class, including me. Having Obama, Oprah, Beyonce, and other stars support Kamala Harris had NO effect on the kitchen table issues that are right in front of families. In fact, it is insulting. Classism TRUMPS (pun intended) all other issues in all the usual groups. I wrote about this in a previous blog. After my father had a crippling stroke when I was in tenth grade there was little money for food, the electric bill and other kitchen table issues. In those circumstances I would have voted for Trump. (Later in life my high school classmates were angry that I never let them know. I was too embarrassed by our neediness.) Now I am in the elite class, having enough money that everyday expenses are easily met, but I keep the feelings of those days still in my soul. In fact, I don’t want them to leave as they have enabled me to help others in need across a wide spectrum of class.
There is a hero in all of this. It is Kamala Harris. Biden stayed too long in the race and with a little over 100 days she redirected the campaign and did her very best. She was blamed for all things under Biden even though the Vice President doesn’t have a platform. Biden’s popularity was very low. 97% of black women voted for her where other groups including the anti-abortion group and white women did not.
The voters made their voice known. It showed who we are and what we value even if it means choosing chaos over a steady hand, but in Harris’ concession speech she did not fail to inspire by contrasting her promise of a peaceful transition of power and she guaranteed the Democrats will continue to fight for what they believe in. I hope she leads that effort! Let’s never forget what she did against all odds of already in a deep hole of an unpopular administration with the shortest time available to her for people to get to know her. She also got caught in the middle of America shifting from the center to the hard right. Think about what she could do with a level playing field focusing on the needs in specific terms of the middle class and their kitchen table needs. She has never played the role of the innocent victim.
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