A man wants to act, not be acted upon. Self-pity is a pile of bricks on your chest, and your real friends help you heave it off.
Those of us who hate today’s victim culture don’t have it because we are Teddy Roosevelts aiming to build character and toughen people us (not that there is anything wrong with that program); we hate it because it inflicts harm. When you encourage a man to see himself as a victim of anything – crime, poverty, bigotry, bad luck – you are piling bricks on this chest.
How can we logically justify as a nation being in favor of self-pity and against smoking is not clear, but the inconsistency may be yet another symptom of our blindness to all things spiritual. Our fanatic drive to crush and eradicate every threat to our physical well-being has a sad air of compulsive busywork about it – we are the Lady Macbeth society, obsessively washing our hands to cleanse ourselves of sin, perfecting and purifying our bodies, as if that will cure our sick souls.
(emphasis mine)
from
David Gelernter’s book, Drawing Life: surviving the Unabomber – (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 46.
