Michael Bedar, Lifesite News, 1/15/25
A documentary, The Coddling of the American Mind, directed by Ted Balaker, is rigorously researched and is starting to rapidly spread ideas among students that we have been made humorless, mentally fragile dependents as a result of teaching systemic victimhood.
In a video produced by John Stossel about The Coddling, the journalist notes that a society whose members are systematically taught to see one another as victims and oppressors is a society that courts curses.
According to interview clips in the movie’s trailer, a sense of enduring victimhood wreaks havoc on the confidence of young adults and spurs adriftness. It can lead to hopelessness and nihilism and, further, even fuel ideas that communities should be burned and a dangerous view towards human beings’ right to exist.
“Social studies” teaching has been based on victimhood status for six decades, including at least twelve years on overdrive. Today, wide calls have arrived for victimhood ideology to be ushered out.
Yet, a serious question arises at this transformative moment: are we in fact prepared mentally and spiritually to fashion society after the victimhood mentality era?
Jettisoning victimhood as a driving model of society will leave a void which it will be humanity’s responsibility to fill. Arduously renewing the mind will be required to part with the counterfeit motivations.
After all, victimhood ideologies gave people a faux sense of order about the way the world worked, which became pervasive in advocacy, activism, philanthropy, charity, and other large aspects of society. Like a counterfeit dollar, you couldn’t purchase value with victimhood narratives, but they made you feel like you had something.
While “God loves a cheerful giver,” “humanitarian” society came to love big giving unconcerned with cheer, often powered by victimhood ideologies that translate into victimhood bucks.
Therefore, if godly fundamental values that ascend above victimhood narratives do exist in our souls, the present mark in history would be an essential time to recognize them and to infuse them into social actions.
The Coddling movie and other efforts have pried open an opportunity for a more constructive, motivating narrative to enter, as systemic victimhood exits.
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I’d begin by discarding the false idea called systemic racism, which was never an American idea but a false Left Wing socio-political ideology largely based on the discredited Darwinism and on atheism.
America always had a Christian character to which Left Wing ideology could never apply anyway. Based on that Christian character, genuine Americans could never be Left Wing ideologues.
Even the Civil War was between Christians, not ideologues. Of course the causes of that war were only superficially racial. They were primarily economic with the Northern industrial states bullying the Southern agrarian states with unfair levies on their products. The slaves were being humanly treated, though it was still unjust to deny them their human and civil rights. The Northern states declared slavery to be the only cause when it was really economic. Incidentally, in freeing the slaves it’s notable how God can create good from evil.
Anyway, Left Wing ideology with its DEI and all the rest is alien to Americans and has no standing in American jurisprudence or in any other civic area. It is anathema to us.
However, Christian morality, which follows from the Constitution, must still apply like before.
We should get it straight that Northerners didn’t care enough to fight to free the slaves because many had their own slaves. What they really fought for was to stop the Southern states from seceding from the Union.