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July 2, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:51
HOW TO SPOT A FAKE VICTIM!
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Alright, so let's talk late empire and what's going on in the world and what you need to look out for and all that I can do to bring philosophy to your aid, to your help.
So there's a game that plays out in late empire and late democracy and the game goes something like this.
So people claim moral status for purely pragmatic decisions.
I did a video on this many years ago called The Tipping Point.
Welfare's Tipping Point.
I'll put a link to it below.
And in it, I sort of point out that for a woman with two children who's a single mother, for her to be able to justly or morally claim resources, she has to portray herself as a victim.
However, the result of her claiming to be a victim is that she gets probably close to $100,000 now in value because it's not taxed, right?
The welfare benefits and free health care, free dental care and rent subsidies and SNAP and all that.
So, she claims to be a victim, but the end result of her claiming to be a victim is that she triumphs.
She gains far more resources.
Like, you'd have to have a job making $100,000 to get the benefits that are available to a single mom with two kids through the welfare state.
So, in other words, to put it another way, she'd have to have a pretty high-end, middle-class job that would be taxed at 100% in order to gain the same benefits.
So, there's a game that's played And the game is, I'm a victim.
But any time someone says, I'm a victim, but the outcome of that victimhood claim is a benefit, the victimhood claim can always be dismissed.
So, somebody claims to be a victim, and the end result of them claiming to be a victim is that they gain more resources than if they had not said that.
Then we can discount The claim of victimhood.
In other words, victimhood, which is a moral category, is used to achieve a practical gain.
And this can't come out.
This can't come out.
So if people say, I'm a victim, and then gain $100,000 a year worth of resources by claiming that they're a victim, that $100,000 of resources It's only transferred to them if the victimhood is believed.
Right? If the victimhood is believed, then they gain the resources.
So, it must be the case that people pretend to be victims or create a victimhood narrative in order to gain practical resources.
And that's kind of the game that's being played out At the moment, which is, well, are you a victim?
So, in the animal kingdom, You will often see creatures pretend to be something that they're not to camouflage in order to gain the benefit without the cost, right? This is a very pragmatic and practical thing that occurs in the animal kingdom.
I mean, you see it all the time.
Of course, you will see often poisonous creatures, poisonous frogs and so on, are very brightly colored.
And other creatures will assume that bright color in order to ward off the predators who won't eat the frogs because of the poison, but without the evolutionary or biological cost of actually having to produce the poison, which is difficult and hazardous and you have to adapt so that it doesn't affect you and so on.
So, imitation of others.
And, you know, if you take it to a certain degree, you can say that imitation of the background in terms of camouflage is another form of this.
The chameleons or, you know, the leaf insects and so on.
So, camouflage and pretending to be something that you're not is a foundational way of gaining resources or avoiding attack.
Now, in the free market of charity, one of the most challenging things in the realm of charity, and, you know, sort of the basic belief that I have, which I've gained a half century of empirical evidence in these things, so it doesn't mean I'm right.
I'm just saying that I've satisfied myself beyond a reasonable doubt.
So one of the things that free markets do in terms of charity is to try and figure out who is pretending to be a victim to gain material rewards and who is genuinely a victim.
Because being a victim is so profitable, right?
It's ridiculous. Being a victim is so profitable because if you genuinely believe that someone is a victim, you will open your wallet, you will open your home, you will open your heart, you will help that person because, boy, there but for the grace of God go I. So, victimhood is enormously profitable.
If you can pull it off.
Now, a genuine victim, it's not profitable, right?
That's how you know a genuine victim from a fake victim, is that for a genuine victim, it's not profitable.
So let's take a silly example.
So when I was a kid, I don't know why they did this, but they did.
I guess maybe they were paid off.
But they used to hand out these forms.
And in the forms, it was various kinds of mutilation and how much you would be paid if said mutilation occurred.
So for a thumb, it was like $5,000.
For an arm, it was $20,000.
For a leg, it was $40,000.
I'm just making these things up.
But these were the numbers that were put forward.
It was very interesting. I mean, they were trying to sell insurance to kids, which is, to me, not particularly ethical, but...
So, and of course, all the kids, we didn't, you know, oh, would I give up my thumb for $5,000?
Boy, $5,000 could buy me a car.
Would I give up a thumb for a car?
You know, there was this kind of thing, right?
Now, someone who would take the insurance policy and would voluntarily cut off his thumb and pretend it was an accident would be doing so because he wanted the $5,000, which I guess would be about, what, $20,000 now or something like that, right?
So that's not a victim. He is harming himself, but he expects to be net better off for harming himself, right?
This is the challenge that insurance companies always have.
You know, if you have insurance, fire insurance, and then your store mysteriously burns down when it's losing money and so on, okay, then they have the challenge just trying to figure out whether this was an accident or whether you said it to yourself.
Insurance scams are legion and really, really tough to figure out.
Well, arson, you can have accelerants and so on.
So somebody who expects a net material gain is almost always faking the victimhood in order to gain the net material gain.
The challenge with private charity is to say, okay, who's really a victim and who's pretending to be a victim in order to gain resources?
Well, I mean, it's hard.
I mean, the people who say, well, the welfare state just solves the problem of poverty, it's one thing I know about them.
One thing I know about people who trust the government to solve the problem of poverty is that they have never once put their own money on the line to help an individual in need.
Because it's tough. I've handed out a lot of money over the course of the show to listeners who need stuff and You know, I'm a fairly discerning guy.
Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't.
But it's hard. It's hard.
Now, sometimes people will take the money with every intention of doing the right thing, but then they get distracted or something happens, so it could be a change in circumstances.
Some people fake being in need just so they can get resources.
And, of course, other people are genuinely in need.
They get the resources.
They turn their lives around.
They do better. All of this wonderful stuff happens.
But finding those can sometimes feel like You know, a coup de ville hiding at the bottom of a crackerjack box.
It's a needle in a haystack.
It can be. It can be.
And of course, when private charities try to figure out who's genuinely in need, who's a genuine victim versus a fake victim, that's the whole thing.
Right? That's the whole thing. And this is why in charities, private charities, charities for, say, poverty, what they We'll publicize, or at least what they used to publicize in the past when they were more of a thing, when there was less of a welfare state, what they will publicize if they say, 80% of the people we give money to end up with jobs not on charity.
80% or 90% or 40%, whatever number would be good.
I don't know. So that's the cure, right?
It's the cure that counts.
It's the cure that counts. The number of people who get on welfare and stay on welfare, the number of, you know, and this happens of course among the wealthy with subsidies and military industrial complex and so on.
But the number of people who get on government, quote, charity and stay on it is the number of people who are pretend victiming for a benefit.
And This game of victimhood is really foundational to late empire.
And so what it does is people say, I'm a genuine victim, I need resources, and then they don't change whatever decisions have them end up in that bad state to begin with, right?
This is in the Victorian age, a single mother might get resources for her first child, but if she had another child out of wedlock, then that would be it.
And Then, of course, because that would be it, women wouldn't generally have a second child out of wedlock, right?
So there's this thing where, oh, a woman got pregnant, let's give her extra money for her child.
Okay, but did she get pregnant to get that extra money?
It's a big question. Because if you got pregnant to get that extra money, you now have two or three victims for the price of one.
Because she's not a victim, she's having kids to get money.
But the kids are victims because she's having kids to get money.
Those kids aren't going to be taken care of in the same way.
It's the same thing with adoption.
Paying people to take on troubled children or hard to adopt children, that's one thing.
But are they doing it for the money?
In other words, is neglect going to come out once they get the money?
These are very, very tough questions.
Helping people. is enormously difficult and challenging because of the chameleon problem, because of the pretend victim problem.
So what happens, of course, is people will claim to be victims because they recognize the sympathy that is generated by genuine victimhood.
The sympathy that is generated by genuine victimhood.
So they understand morality But they lie to achieve an immoral goal by manipulating and using other people's sense of morality.
Now, the other way that you can...
Oh, a pretty important way that's been very helpful in my personal life.
This is the last thing I'll tip across to you.
Something that's been enormously helpful to me in my private life is here's the test, right?
Here's the test. Here's how you know whether someone's a real victim or a pretend victim.
So, a real victim, if you tell them ways to escape their victimhood, they will be unbelievably grateful.
Right? Let's say a blind guy has fallen down a well, and he's shouting for help, and you say, hey man, there are rungs on the side of the well, you can climb out.
He'll be like, oh, thank God.
That is fantastic.
If somebody says, I was a victim of a robbery because my phone is missing.
I took it with me and it's gone now.
Somebody must have pickpocketed me.
Somebody must have stolen it.
Somebody must have taken it. I never used it.
And then you hold up their phone.
You say, hey man, your phone is right here.
Are they relieved? Of course they are.
Because they thought they were a victim.
It turns out they're not a victim.
They thought they had no way to solve the issue.
Now they have a way to solve an issue.
And... And if you've ever been in the situation, like the Seinfeld situation, where you're running out of gas, right?
You're running out of gas. I've had it once where I was driving, I was running out of gas.
But it's like, oh, okay, there's a gas station 10 miles away, and...
The map took us to the gas station, which turned out to be a convenience store, and he said, oh man, we haven't had gas here for like 10 years.
We keep telling them, take us off the gas list because, you know, look at those outlines on the ground.
That's where the gas pumps were 10 years ago.
Okay, that's a big problem because they're going to run out of gas, right?
So then it turned out that he said, oh, there's a guy who will sell you some gas or whatever, right?
And so we went to get gas.
It was a proper gas station, but it wasn't on the map or whatever.
I can't remember the thing, right? So I thought I was going to run out of gas, and as it turns out, I didn't run out of gas.
I was relieved. Woof!
Look at that. Dodged a bullet, right?
So if somebody is a genuine victim or believes that they're a genuine victim, and you point out ways that they can overcome being a victim, and they thank you and grab at those things and work hard at them and so on, like if somebody is...
It constantly has issues with, they pull their back, they do this, they do that, and they keep pulling tendons.
And so when you say, listen, stretching and weights will probably help that to some degree.
And you sort of explain it to them and they're like, oh, thank God, I'm going nuts, pulling my muscles all the time.
If I do strength and weight training and so on, that's probably going to help.
Fantastic. Thank you.
And then they pour themselves into that and they try.
Then they're like, wow, I was a victim, but boy, you've given me a solution.
Here's a way out. That is most likely a genuine victim.
And it can be the case with money as well, right?
Somebody can say, my God, I owe $5,000 to a crime gang because I'm a gambling addict, right?
Please help me, please help me.
Now, it can be that you say, okay, I'll pay the $5,000 because you're a friend, you're a relative or whatever, I care about you, but you have to go to Gamblers Anonymous, you have to do therapy, you have to, like, whatever you have to do, but you can't ever gamble again.
Okay, so you could try that, right?
I mean, certainly it might be better than having their legs broken or whatever they do, right?
So you could try that. And you give them the resources.
And then if they genuinely are like, oh my God, you just saved my bacon, man.
You totally saved me.
I'll do anything. You know, obviously I'll pay you the money back and I will go to Gamblers Anonymous and I will make sure I never gamble again and I'll delete all the apps and I'll get rid of all the cards in my...
In my house and so on, okay, then you've had a good investment and you've shown somebody a way out of victimhood that they take.
On the other hand, if they take the money, pay off the criminal gang, and then lie about going to Gamblers Anonymous and end up gambling again and get in more trouble, then it's okay.
Well, fool me once, right?
Shame on you. Fool me twice.
Shame on me. So this has been an incredibly helpful thing in my life.
Which is, somebody complains about an issue, you give them a solution, a genuine victim will be thrilled that you've given that person a solution and they have a way out of being a victim.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Hosanna, Hosanna, praise be, right?
Now, somebody who's a pretend victim, though, if you tell them a way out of their victimhood and they get angry, Fake victim.
Boom. 101. Fake victim.
Give someone a solution to their victimhood if they get angry.
It's a fake victim. Now, the anger could be, you don't understand.
You don't get it. You're not in my situation.
What if this has happened to you?
It's not that simple. It's not that easy.
Okay. That's one aspect.
But the other aspect is the yes-but phenomenon.
And this is a game that you play.
You can play with victims until the day you die.
And if you keep playing this game with victims the day you die, it can't come fast enough because you'll lose your mind over time.
So it's the yes-but phenomenon.
So the yes-but phenomenon is, I'm a victim.
Oh, well, have you tried this?
Yeah, but... Well, you could do that.
Yeah, but...
Yes, but... Yes, but...
Yes, but... So what they're doing is they want their victimhood to continue for the sake of gaining resources.
And therefore, the solution to their victimhood doesn't exist.
There is no solution to their victimhood because the victimhood is there to gain resources.
And if you're providing them a solution which has to not be a victim and therefore not gain resources, then they don't want that.
Now, they can't say, but this is the problem, right?
This is why there's so much falseness in the world these days.
Because if you say to someone, oh, you're a victim, well, here's what you could do, right?
If they get angry, what they're saying is, I'm sorry, I get too many...
They're called secondary gains, right?
You've got this upfront thing which you say is a problem, but you get a secondary gain.
So somebody who claims to be a victim gets lots of money from the government or charities.
The secondary gain is the money from the government.
And it could be not just money.
It could be if somebody is overweight, significantly overweight.
They have a whole community of people who enable and support each other.
I don't think in a particularly healthy way, but they have a whole community.
And the secondary gain is the community.
It is the sense of self-righteousness.
It is their ability to attack people who, quote, fat shame and so on, right?
There's a lot of secondary gains to being a victim.
And one of them is aggression, right?
It's considered to be justified aggression.
Because somebody who's really mean to a genuine victim, yes, people are going to give that person they're talking to and quite a stern one as well, right?
I mean, if there's some kid, a little kid who gets beaten up by...
Some big mean teenager, well, that kid is a genuine victim.
And anybody who shames and bullies that kid and says, well, you should have fought back or you're so clumsy or why didn't you train or it's your fault.
I mean, the little kid's a genuine victim of bullying.
You don't say that to the little kid, right?
That's mean. So genuine victims...
Do have the right to be angry at people who blame them for their victimhood.
So fake victims who want to get angry and bully others can do this fake victimhood thing in order to feel justified in blasting other people.
In other words, fake victimhood is carte blanche for verbal abuse.
And you can see this all the time.
On social media, it's everywhere all the time.
Somebody claims to be a victim or represent a victim's group.
Somebody points out that there's an empowering way to end the victimhood and the torrents of verbal abuse come out.
So the secondary gain is feeling morally justified in verbally abusing others.
Because, you know, if you're a verbal abuser, well, you're just kind of a piece of crap, right?
But if you're defending the helpless and the downtrodden and the victims and so on, then you can, either for yourself or on behalf of others, you can unleash a torrent of verbal abuse and feel like a very good and moral person.
And thus you get the sadistic happiness of verbal abuse and the endorphins of feeling like you are doing a good thing by doing a bad thing to a bad person.
It's a bad thing to the bad person.
Cancels out. Double plus.
Good. So that's the way that you solve it, right?
Somebody says, I'm broke. Say, get a job.
Well, I keep applying and nothing happens.
Well, I don't have the right skills.
Well, employers don't like me.
Well, I'm the wrong race.
I'm the wrong gender. They're bigoted.
They're prejudiced. They're sexist.
Okay, well maybe you can start a business to your own.
Well, I don't have any capital, I don't have any skills, I don't have any training.
Well, there's lots of training on the internet that you can get on how to start your own business.
Yes, but it's not right targeted at me and it's not in the field that I want and I've looked at these things and trust me, I've really tried, man, I've tried.
Stop putting this on me. I've really tried.
You're getting mad at me for like the system being stacked against me, right?
Or somebody who says, you know, I don't have enough money for X, Y, and Z, but they have, let's say, a marijuana problem.
Okay, well, why don't you take the money that you're currently spending on marijuana and shift it to this other thing that you want to get?
Well, I don't have enough money to go and pursue a technical certificate in programming.
Well, you know, you could take the money that you're spending on drugs or alcohol or tattoos or whatever it is, and you could take that money, you could put it in as your solution, right?
But if somebody gets angry at you, then they're a fake victim, chameleon victim, right?
So let me give you sort of an example, right, to tie in to what we talked about before.
So a woman says, I got robbed.
Somebody pickpocketed my cell phone, right?
Now, let's say there was something incriminating on that cell phone and they wanted to get rid of it, right?
So they grabbed a cell phone and they threw it out, right?
And then they say it was stolen.
And maybe, okay, let's real work this scenario so you understand it, right?
So let's say a woman's been having an affair on her husband and the evidence is on her cell phone and she knows he's suspicious and she thinks he's going to demand evidence from the cell phone.
So she grabs the phone, she goes out, she throws the phone into the lake and then says, I got robbed of my phone, blah, blah, blah, right?
I'm a victim, I'm a victim. How dare they steal from me?
She works up the tears and so on, right?
And then her husband says, no, your cell phone is right here.
You must have taken my cell phone or one of the kids' cell phones.
Now, is the woman going to be happy and relieved that the cell phone, with evidence of her affair, is being picked up by her husband, who's now going to want her to unlock it and look at the cell phone and find, like, no, she's angry.
She's going to get angry at him.
She's going to turn on the waterworks because she's not a genuine victim, right?
Because she wanted to get rid of her cell phone.
She got rid of somebody else's cell phone.
The cell phone is right there, and so she's angry because she's a pretend victim, right?
On the other hand, if she genuinely thought that she lost her cell phone and you say, oh no, your cell phone's right here, then she's going to be happy, right?
So genuine victim who's happy that it didn't happen.
Fake victim is unhappy that it didn't happen, right?
Getting rid of the cell phone. So that's how you know.
So, my particular rule, could be anything for anyone, my particular rule is three strikes and you're out.
Somebody in my life, and look, the people in my life who are left now in my 50s, they're functional people, right?
They're people who, you know, I'll give them advice, they'll give me advice, but they don't need to get their lives going.
They don't need to figure out what they want to do with themselves.
They don't need any of that, right? But in the past, for me, it was three strikes and you're out.
And I sort of hand this out to you for anyone in your life.
So if somebody says, I have a recurring problem, and you can give them three solutions and then you're out.
If after three solutions they haven't taken any and they haven't come up with any of their own, it could be the case that you don't, that someone doesn't like your solutions or they genuinely don't work, but at least you got their mind going and now they're going to go and work on some other solution.
So three strikes and you're out. I give you three solutions that I think are valid and good and reasonable.
And if you don't want any of those, fake victim, sorry, good luck with all of that.
But I'm not going to have you pursue an amoral end through pretend moral means.
I'm not going to allow my sympathy for the victim and my sympathy for the underdog to be manipulated into a form of spiritual and material theft by pretend victims.
Because, of course, What happens is pretend victims create real victims.
This is what's so predatory and awful, absolutely awful about the entire situation.
Pretend victims create real victims, right?
A woman who lies about being raped is creating real victims, which is doubt on the women who are genuinely raped and talk about it.
Somebody who says, I'm a victim because X, Y, and Z, and they're not really a victim of X, Y, and Z, but they're doing it to get resources, what they're doing is they're creating genuine victims, which is now people are much more skeptical when it comes to helping people who claim to be a victim of X, Y, or Z. That is really the awful thing.
If victimhood was bad, victimhood is bad, being a victim is bad, but you create victims in pursuit of material resources, that's an absolutely terrible thing.
And I won't enable that.
Like, I won't enable that in my life.
I won't have that anywhere within a thousand miles of me if I can help it.
Because real victims genuinely need and deserve our sympathy and our help.
But the people who discredit the real victims by having the fake victimhood, they're absolute predators and kind of monsters.
And I deal with an amoral situation.
This is actually immoral because they recognize morality.
But they recognize morality only as something that other people hold and can be exploited through lying.
This is why falsehood has become such a thing.
You don't see lions pretending to be injured so that a sympathetic zebra walks over and then they eat the zebra, right?
They don't do that. They just chase the zebra.
The zebra runs away. Either they catch it or they don't.
It's a fair fight. But the people who recognize the morality and the empathy and the sympathy that exists in others and then strip mine that for resources and money, that's creating real victims out of the people, additional victimhood, right?
It's one thing to be a victim. It's another thing to not be believed about being a genuine victim.
And the people who prey upon others with fake victimhood are double victimizing because there are the genuine victims who are no longer believed because of the predation and that's unbelievably immoral.
So yeah. Just wanted to point that out.
Three Strikes on Your Out can be very helpful for me.
I hope it will be for you.
If you find these chats interesting and helpful, please, please, please help me out at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
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