WARNING/CONTEXT: This post is another stream of consciousness essay. It’s the result of another impromptu thought I had on a walk a few days ago in Salem, Massachusetts, during a walking tour of the Salem Witch Trials. I wondered how the accused witches must have felt, and that is when an internal discussion on the question of “Why Me” and self-victimization in the face of adversity started (of course, it had to develop quite a bit, as the witch trials were an incredibly different and nuanced topic nearly entirely unrelated to this post). Anyway, read with caution, and don’t take anything too serious as always. Thanks. –Moofy

WHY ME–A statement that we’ve all exclaimed to ourselves at least once before. It’s a natural question to ask: in any moment of significant reflection, both in positive and negative moments, the desire to understand why you find yourself in yourself in is seemingly undoubted important. By no means is it a bad question: in many situations, the exploration of the question can open up a path to understanding through past or pattern recognition.

Take, for example, cases of gratitude. Many who find themselves in positions of extreme success will often find themselves asking “Why Me?,” and if they can come up with a satisfactory answer of clear steps they took to produce their present success (or, if luck was a significant factor, clear steps that they took that maximized the odds of success that they have). Conversely, in poor situations with negative outcomes, the exploration of that question can lead similarly to an understanding of the past to avoid repeating prior mistakes in the future (or similarly, in cases with poor luck as a major contributing factor, minimize their chances of negative outcomes).

However, most who discuss this question (and many who will read this) are not concerned with these two situations. In fact, many will recognize the critial assumptions that I made in both situations that causes it to be inapplicable as a useful question in many situations, that being the presence of a clear, distinct answer and a healthy, self-recognizing mindset. This question continuously finds itself in a hotbed of infamy to people due to its strong relation with two alternative negative implications that can be result from its answering if the two previous assumptions are not met: unwarranted or warranted but entirely useless self-victimization for negative situations and impostor syndrome, survivor’s guilt, or similar success-related guilt in positive situations.

Therefore, in this opinion, I wanted to break down the question to understand its nuance, because I think that there’s a lot more than commonly-claimed traps of self-victimization and success-guilt, and I think that this speaks a lot to the state of self-help advice/ideologies that are common today and even further into the eco-political landscape of the world, on a common thread of potentially toxic self-help and anti-self-victimization between capitalism and the manosphere.

I must preface by extending the scope of this discussion. I’ve somewhat decieved all of you, and for that I apologize. I’m not particularly interested in the individual question of “Why Me?” or similar specific internal conversations, rather, I’m using it as a backdrop for the entirety of the conversation on self help ideologies as a whole.

Now, If we look generally unto the greater discussion of self-help advice, one of the leading mindsets dominating the personal development sphere is, in its absolute simplest, a mindset of emphasizing personal accountability as the most critical skill to success and development. Without a shadow of a doubt, I certainly agree, personal accountability is critical to personal development, but as with any system of logic or ideology, the problems arising here are in the conclusions reached from taking this principle either too far or too literally (or both). The application of this mindset, both in a personal development sense and also historically in a socioeconomic sense (as I will get into shortly) has led to the mindset being taken even further into very strict, potentially unhealthy ideals of completely rejecting any and all perceived “excuses” for failure or weakness, shifting the original intent of purely promoting healthy personal accountability into an avoidance of any level of acknowledgement of oneself as a victim in any way whatsoever like a weakness in and of itself.

In the socioeconomic sense, as I mentioned with capitalism, think of phrases like “picking yourself up by the bootstraps,” mindsets of hard work as a pure function for personal gain, wherein your success is purely a function of your own actions/effort, and any level of acknowledgement of how you may be unfairly set back is self-victimization and therefore easily painted as excuses for simply not working harder. It’s a very attractive ideal under capitalist mindsets because it’s very to believe its underlying assumption, that hard work will yield success, and therefore, from that assumption, one could easily believe that their success is determined solely by their hard work. Most importantly, the biggest reason to follow this mindset is one of pure application: regardless of if you recognize your victimization/setbacks or not, if steps cannot be taken to fix them easily or individually, then it does nothing to help you reach your individual goals simply to just recognize that they are there (thus why many people quickly write off those who point out social inequities as complaining, citing that “life is just unfair for everyone”).

The issue is that the assumption of success purely being determined by hard work or even majority hard work is not one that is easily believable for all cases of all people. Society is not fair, that’s for certain: there are all kinds of inequities present, and this, obviously, isn’t something that anti-self-victimization mindsets deny. In fact, they rightly accept it with phrases such as “playing the hand you’re dealt in life,” however, first and foremost, I believe that an acknowledgement of your circumstances and aiding in coming to terms with your circumstances not only on an individual level (which anti-self-victimization mindsets do support) but also on a societal level is exactly the kind of method for “playing the hand” one is given.

Now, I look to the manosphere for an example. This mindset of “iron-to-steel accountability,” as I choose to refer to it, is wildly popular among alpha male communities and the like, and I think that this is for the largely for the same reason of being the outwardly strongest-appearing mindset for tackling life, because as previously mentioned, the potentially immediately-useless nature of simply recognizing places that you have been wronged or treated unfairly becomes a weakness out of its outward futility, but for that exact reason, its been a particularly dangerous mindset when taken too far.

Think from the perspective of an impressionable teenage boy, staked to enter the world with its complications and treacheries while told to recognize each of his shortcomings as, at best, not being his fault yet certainly his problem. In my honest opinion, I feel like all it does is raise the problem of leading us men to inherently accept a weird hierarchy structure among each other based on insecurity. I imagine the scenario for most men looks like accepting shortcomings beyond personal control as essentially just being issues that are his problem (when, ideally, perhaps they shouldn’t be viewed as problems at all, something I will get into later) and then to cope with such insecurities of his shortcomings in certain areas, building a kind of superiority complex for his positive traits to counteract the inferiority for his negative traits (or perhaps thoughts of superiority over his negative traits when compared to other men that are perceived as even worse in those areas).

Finally, I’d like to present my alternative, how I think things should work instead. What I hope is that we see that understanding your shortcomings is important, but not to actually view them as problems attributed to you. I think that, in a sense, the question of “Why me?” can be rephrased for each person to “Why US?,” a greater question about what we consider as shortcomings and why, and how we as a society can work together to be more equitable and egalitarian. Simply put, many problems we view as being that of the individual are rather problems of the society at large with symptoms at the individual level, and it seems that this iron-to-steel mentality is ironically just as unhelpful as its supposed antithetical mindset of constant self-victimization.

As with anything, all things should be taken in moderation, and the same goes for the mindset of self-accountability. Be accountable for things in your control and be mindful for things that are not. People should not blame themselves for things out of their control, and we should readily work together to produce an equitable society.