THE TYRANNY OF THE WEAK
Is This an Omen of Things to Come?
9-1-26
There are many people who have a low self-worth and operate from a fear of inadequate performance. As a result, they generally assume that everyone else also operates from the same motivation feeling that they too haven’t the confidence to know that they can succeed at “survival” without an embarrassing exposure of their believed inadequacy. As a consequence of that assumption, they then would also assert that those who willingly offer encouragement are just as weak and manipulable as they are making them willful and fearful capitulators. However, this perspective is more often than not unconsciously rooted.
When someone feels that they have neither the strength nor the confidence to compete for what they want or need and that the risk of exposing this inadequacy is not an option, they must find another way. These people often opt to use social coercion instead. The recently expanded perception of viewing people as being oppressed or an oppressor has created a ripe atmosphere for using tacit if not overt coercion. It is usually based on using some form of guilt or “political correctness” geared toward pressuring others into acquiescing to their preferences. The bottom line is that it displaces their accountability for their poor choices onto others.
One of the most common scenarios is encountering someone who is handicapped or elderly. The situation usually presents itself where the person is somehow helpless and in need of some “assistance.” Some truly do need assistance. However, there are many others who see our kindness as an opportunity to gain advantage over those of us who might appear to be doing better than they are and attempt to convince us that it is our responsibility to take care of their responsibilities and ineffective choices. They often overplay their helplessness for effect. This type of ploy is often referred to as the tyranny of the weak. But again, we must not simply assume that this ploy is always in play. Very often, the elderly and the handicapped truly do need our assistance but might feel embarrassed for imposing on us or for asking for our help. Here, deference and compassion can be a blessing for both of us.
Over the last two decades, the advantages of being any sort of “minority” has proven itself to be an easy opportunity to make others feel guilty or obligated to “fix” their untenable and irresponsible positions that they may have chosen to put themselves in. The expectation that we should defer to their apparent “disadvantage” has risen exponentially as we have personally lost self-worth, autonomy and self-sustainability through being convinced by the world, our media and our devolving culture that we owe the world our “service,” that it determines our fate and that it alone retains the permission to do so. We see this in hearing demands that we should be “giving back” and “doing our part for the larger good.” The contemporary reasoning for many people, which is more often than not unconscious, seems to be that if the world has the right to determine what we are allowed to have and do, then it should also follow that it is responsible for providing for the “fixing” of whatever uncomfortable situation we may find ourselves in. We can see this in a growing victim mentality professing accusations of racism, Islamophobia, demands for “reparations” and a multitude of requirements of special treatment for the “underprivileged.” This is simply an overt demand for our deference leading to their personal comfort and advantage. In their minds, they’ve been taught that the world determines their advantages and deficits. The rest of us who might have or be what we want are seen as the world owing them what they feel they lack. Our growing sense of entitlement has gone completely off the chain.
These are not the only origins of this perspective toward being opportunistic. There are many other factors and habits that we were indoctrinated with that contribute to this perspective. As a result, no amount of debating or attempted convincing of others to be accountable for themselves is possible. It then would be a futile attempt on our part to short circuit their type of trapped reasoning. These habits have been become embedded since childhood and show no signs or relenting.
Our requirement for compassion and special treatment from others has become twisted into a polarized tool for gaining dominance over others and has gone well beyond its reasonable limits. We have been trained into becoming an entitled and depressed society as a result of our current day political indoctrination attempting to convince us that we are either oppressed or an oppressor. What is truly unfortunate is that this perspective has been and is still being generated as a backdrop for structuring how our children view the world. This will inevitably produce contentious adults who are eminently manipulable and unable to comprehend, let alone recognize, that nature and the world are still, and have always been, a mixture of balancing forces under the umbrella of a wider unifying force of life. Religion has been one of the only forces slowing this transition from occurring but as it is forced to perish in favor of a materialistic view of the world, it remains as one of our only preventative stopgaps against devolving back into our competitive animal nature.
If we look only at the growth of the tyranny of the weak, we will become tunnel visioned into details and miss the larger picture of what is actually occurring in our social structure. We can take a closer look at the Holy Roman Empire to see the implications of what our culture is inevitably moving toward.
The Roman Empire was a pinnacle of success in our Western civilization. Its structure and organization had laws, perspectives and philosophies that benefited the majority of its rulers and its people. Its power, skills and accomplishments were the envy of the world. It flourished for over four hundred years. But after a while something began to change. Greed infected the ruling body and corruption began permeating its ruling class. The state became much more intolerant of personal freedoms and taxation grew to support their avarice. Their sports became much more brutal and lethal. Soon, the people’s morals fell to the level of their corrupt rulers, and acquisition and personal gain replaced their loyalties. Social interaction of the populace deteriorated into competition for dominance and influence. Sensitivity and the arts devolved into selfishness, perversion and the drive for personal recognition.
The empire began to collapse under the weight of increasing civil strife, chaos and cultural gluttony. At the end of the fifth century the empire fell into total collapse which, over time, slipped into what history now calls the Dark Ages.
My drawing attention to history of the Roman Empire is to show a parallel to what is currently, though very slowly, happening within our own culture of which the tyranny of the weak is but a very small part but one of the many effective indicators, nevertheless. If you are old enough to have observed a slow dissolving of qualities like tradition, manners, honesty, integrity, generosity, compassion, altruism and many other fostered attitudes that have kept our interpersonal rapport safe and consistent with knowable and trainable limits, you can see that their absence is no longer preventing us from reverting back to our competitive animal instincts. As unrest and our societal pace increases, we can see those instincts coming more to the surface. Corruption, lack of accountability and poor education are more and more becoming the dominant human demeanors as we sink further into animal survival mode.
Having reached our peak in the 1950s and with sufficient detachment we can see our fate as being similar to that of the Roman Empire. Their collapse took hundreds of years to occur. But with the advent of our lightning-fast communication, our decline is happening much more quickly.
Reversing this trend is much like trying to change the direction of a freight train. To first slow down, change direction and then build up speed with the tremendous weight of what has gone before will, no doubt, be an arduous task but must be done if we are to preserve the specialness of the privileged landscape that we have had the opportunity to grow up in without even understanding why it might be necessary.
The bottom line in being able to do this lies with all of our ability to become accountable for our actions and our choices. We must renege on our tendency to displace our responsibility for ourselves and our actions onto others and incorporate this renewed perspective back into the teaching of our children. If we cannot do this, we will likely reap the same fate as the Roman Empire...
