Motus Mentis

There’s an ad on my local news-radio station that’s been playing for years. It’s for one of those personal-injury law-firms. Now I have nothing against such firms, and they surely serve a just and necessary purpose in bringing succor to those wrongfully harmed. But there’s one line in this commercial that jumps out at me every time I hear it:

“Just because you’re a victim doesn’t mean you have to suffer!”

It occurred to me that this, in a nutshell, sums up the ideal status in the contemporary liberal West: a new, post-modern victim-hood, which confers upon the bearer both emancipation from responsibility for one’s circumstances and entitlement to compensation — yet without the burden of actual suffering, which of course has until now been the very essence of victimhood, and what made us pity victims in the first place.