Pascal Bruckner, in his latest work I suffer therefore I am (Grasset) draws attention to a victim ideology with which feminists, colonized, racialized, oppressed, segregated people of all kinds and from all countries identify, in a worrying escalation. The Shoah marks, for the philosopher, the beginning of a modern cult of victims, which the media tribunal continues to stage and which politicians shamelessly exploit.
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In this game, everyone competes in audacity and strategy to capture for their own benefit the advantages linked to this status of martyr, which gives all rights. This new social pathology, which classifies individuals according to their degree of victimization, which inoculates distrust between the sexes, leads us into an unequal society in which the writer asks the question of whether the vulnerable and worried young generations will be capable to act, to resist in the face of the noise of the world.
Marianne : How has the fact of suffering become constitutive of our identity?
Pascal Bruckner : Today we proclaim a superficial hedonism, which goes hand in hand with a panicked fear of misfortune, of adversity, of annoyances that we are no longer capable of enduring; this is the paradox of our society. We like to describe ourselves as victims, overwhelmed by the blows of fate, tested by the misfortunes that make up the ordinary of our lives. This status is valued, even heroic, as part of our identity.
You point out the role of the Christian religion in this tendency towards victimization…
