La société des victimes by Guillaume Erner: When Compassion Becomes a Principle of Government

La société des victimes by Guillaume Erner (éd. La Découverte)

CICNS reading report

In this work, Guillaume Erner analyses the preponderant place that “victims” of every type occupy in our society. According to the sociologist, the “victim” has become, for the worse most of the time, the measure of political action, of the treatment of information in the media, of the reflection of the “compassionate” intellectual.

If Guillaume Erner does not address the question of the “cults” explicitly, the French anti-cult fight would nevertheless be a prime example to illustrate his analysis. French policy in the matter, compassionate and victim-centred to a fault, has been built around the account of the “victims” to the exclusion of any other consideration. In the own words of a former president of the MIVILUDES, Jean-Michel Roulet: “Were there but a single victim, the action undertaken is justified!”

Below, a few extracts from Guillaume Erner’s book:

The best way to understand an era is to take an interest in its obsessions. Ours is obsessed with victims.

(…) But what is a victim? Pain alone is not enough to transform an individual into a victim. A sportsman suffers martyrdom during the effort and yet he remains an athlete. In reality, the victim is above all a social category. The consequence of a system that is built around her and that promotes her. It is useless to look for a biological or psychological norm that would make it possible to distinguish its characteristics: in this exercise, it is the gaze of the other that plays a determining role.

(…) The creation in France of a state secretariat for victims’ rights in March 2004 is the ultimate indication of this propensity to gather within one and the same condition all those who suffer.

(…) In a secular and democratic society such as ours, where each man sees in the other man a fellow, pity no longer has its place. Between equals, such condescension would add to the pain of injustice the suffering of humiliation. Pity has therefore given way to compassion, an emotion provoked by the pain of one’s fellow.

(…) Among the scourges he [Alexis de Tocqueville] feared for times to come, he imagined an immense power, at once far-seeing, mild and omnipresent, reducing “each nation to being no more than a herd of timid and industrious animals whose government is the shepherd”; this power would be so benevolent towards its subjects that it would seek by every means to “remove from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living”*. The spectacle of our “society of victims” gives these words a prophetic echo.

* Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, volume II, Garnier-Flammarion, Paris 1981, p208-210

(…) The victim justifies everything: it is in her name that war is waged in Iraq, or the war against paedophiles. (…) The qualifier of victim confers a new dignity on the one who bears it. The rights of those who suffer may end by endangering human rights. Engendered by humanism, the society of victims leads to victimism. In humanism, it is man who is the measure of all things; in victimism, it is the victim.

(…) Victims are, as one says, innocent. They cannot be held responsible for an evolution that is beyond them and that they undergo in part. Let us specify, even if it goes without saying, that it is not a matter of denying their sufferings, whether these be psychological or physical. However, it matters that we understand how this society of victims reconfigures our social consciousness, the practice of law and the functioning of our institutions. What is at stake is not solely the appearance of a new social category. The compassionate consensus comes to constitute a threat to republican values.

(…) If our society has adopted the religion of victims, it is because it lends to suffering the faculty of sacralising. Our relation to suffering is of the order of the mystical, a secularised version of the virtues formerly attributed to martyrs and saints.

(…) The cause of the victims has become so powerful that it is instrumentalised at the gravest moments in the life of a people, to overthrow a regime or to declare war. For, henceforth, nothing great is done in this world without the sufferings of individuals being invoked to justify the action undertaken. Nothing is better for shaking a public opinion than to exhibit victims. When the sufferings do not seem spectacular enough, the temptation is strong to invent more convincing ones.

(…) What is being constructed is a victim-centred and therefore binary conception of the world. On one side, innocent individuals united in suffering and, on the other, a power that oppresses them.

(…) The dazzling success won by the expression “moral harassment” is likewise revealing of the psychologisation of suffering. In the space of five years, this notion has become familiar to all. Its popularisation is the work of a psychiatrist trained in victimology, Marie-France Hirigoyen, whose work Le Harcèlement moral appeared in 1998.

(…) Moral harassment poses the question of the dignity of man. The psychologisation of the victim rests on the idea that the new forms of suffering are linked to the absence of recognition, to the feeling of being flouted. The problem: how is one to appraise that legally when this sensation is above all subjective? More: from the moment when any loss of autonomy can be experienced as illegitimate or intolerable, how is one to envisage the functioning of a hierarchical organisation without seeing cases of moral harassment multiply? By according such importance to forms of psychic suffering, our society runs the risk of feeding a victim epidemic.

(…) The fact of preventing an individual from carrying out an activity under the pretext that it would be harmful to him, when he himself has decided otherwise, is at best paternalism, at worst an interference in the existence of others that is difficult to defend. That is why, under the pretext of defending victims, it is perhaps a conception of good and evil that is being imposed*. Moreover, by multiplying inconsiderately the number of victims, one also contributes to giving credence to the idea according to which our world would be composed first of all of martyrs and torturers.

* See Ruwen Ogien, La Panique morale, Grasset, Paris, 2004

(…) Television has offered misfortune sound and image: it has transformed the sufferings of others into a prime spectacle. Voyeurism is nothing new. “Let there be a body lying anywhere and people come running”*, Saint Augustine already lamented. The novelty is the existence of a media stage that henceforth makes it possible to satisfy, in a practically unlimited manner, the voyeurism of individuals. (…) The media play a decisive role in the diffusion of the culture of suffering that surrounds us. (…) On the major roads, cars slow down to take in the accidents; but on the information superhighways, the world’s misfortunes reach us in a continuous jet. Every television news bulletin brings with it its quota of victims, going even to fetch them, if need be, in lands that in normal times arouse not the slightest interest.

* Saint Augustine, Confessions, x, 35.

(…) The aim of the operation is simple: to manufacture ratings out of pain, to profit from the distress of victims in order to offer the spectacle of misfortune. What else can a mother who has just lost her child — victim of a bomb or of a criminal — show but her suffering? Drunk with pain, the family at best shows itself dignified, at worst launches appeals for vengeance which, if they are not heard by the population, are perfectly grasped by the politicians.

(…) Beneath compassion, hatred: that is the mechanism made possible by aggressive pity. Beyond the victim, it is the guilty party, or the person responsible, who is targeted. And if the victim is supposedly neutral, the choice of the guilty party betrays a representation of the world.

(…) One no longer governs by jutting one’s chin; compassion has become the ideal form of ruse in politics. (…) Since always, the politician seeks first of all to conquer and to keep power; that is why very few would renounce operating a lever as powerful as that of compassion.

(…) Of course, the Western democracies are not despotic regimes. And yet, each time we make, in the domain of the city, a choice dictated by fear, we find ourselves in the situation of infrapolitical subjects: fear weighs with all its weight on numerous current debates.

(…) Apart from the — real — risks of instrumentalising the victim, to use compassion to govern opinion is to expose oneself to numerous perverse effects. As we know, the occasions for compassion are so numerous that it is difficult for public opinion to mobilise in favour of a cause. From then on, compassion fatigue obliges one to justify the action by the spectacle of ever more spectacular sufferings.

(…) Schematically, consequentialism is a moral doctrine according to which an action must be considered good or bad according to its effects on the world. (…) In these conditions, one understands that the critique of compassion can be conducted in a consequentialist perspective: this sentiment could very well be recognised as good for the individual, while proving harmful on the collective plane. A common morality cannot rest solely on principles. These principles must also be made to undergo the test of reality — in other words, one must ask whether the concern for victims benefits society as a whole.

(…) Compassion is not in its place in the political field. Certainly, in our personal existences, it is a precious mark of humanity. As a principle of government, on the other hand, it is superfluous and even harmful. A great many sentiments indispensable to our existences become dangerous as soon as they enter the state sphere; love or fidelity were venerated by the totalitarian regimes. An individual who did not feel compassion would probably be a monster; a compassionate government is, at best, an imposture. More: the obsession with victims contradicts at once a value essential to the French conception of the Republic — Justice — as well as the principle on which it rests — Reason. Some might be tempted to believe that a form of government forged two centuries ago has had its day. In these conditions, let the partisans of compassion declare publicly their will to change the regime. But who really wants to live under the reign of emotion and of exceptions?