The Intellectual Condescension of "Sufferers"

By Sadhika on

In situations of chaos, there will be some people who will step in to try to further exploit either of the parties involved in the situation. These are the people who rob the wallet of a person who might by lying on the roadside after an accident. In the context of a social gathering, we call these people anti-social elements. There is also a second kind of people - those who will step in to partake in the victimhood of a suffering party, or to eke out their own victim identity in the situation. 

It gets tricky to identify this type. Their acts are justified by many in the society out of the reassigned guilt of having possibly assumed the perpetrator role in our individual or any of our group identities at any given point of time in the history of mankind, out of general compassion for the suffering, or to the play the game of "I'm more virtuous than you." But we must be careful. As soon as there is a victim we rush to protect, there is also a culprit whom we rush to prosecute. And in the light of the victim's tears, the requirement to substantiate the culpability of the alleged perpetrator is often given second place. 

“The intellectual haughtiness and loathing of every man who has suffered deeply—it almost determines the order of rank HOW deeply men can suffer—the chilling certainty, with which he is thoroughly imbued and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he KNOWS MORE than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know, that he has been familiar with, and "at home" in, many distant, dreadful worlds of which "YOU know nothing"!—this silent intellectual haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the "initiated," of the almost sacrificed, finds all forms of disguise necessary to protect itself from contact with officious and sympathizing hands, and in general from all that is not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble: it separates.”
                    - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.

“Equality before law”, “innocent until proven guilty” and “right to a fair trial” are legal principles now in place, in most every democratic society. At least one of the influences behind these principles would have been the Christian idea that God made us in His own image. In other words, there is a spark of divinity to each person, and it is for this reason that we are not killed by the members of our community the minute we commit a transgression, actual or perceived. We would do well not to let that principle die.

“How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force! These pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones—always become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers, not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour has left him.”
                            - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.


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1. Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Thomas Common)

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