The Prison of Victimhood

It is enticing to follow its seductive lure. "It's not your fault. You couldn't help it. There was nothing you could do." These are the beguiling voices we hear.

Victims drive the ratings on daytime TV, after all. Blaming, finger pointing, laying on the guilt - so common, so righteous, so ... convenient.

And so wrong.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, freeing ourselves from the Prison of Victimhood.

Now you who are regular listeners to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head will already have a good idea which side of this theme we're goint to come down on, don't you? Our program, based as it is on the cutting edge psychological research coming out of the Brazilian school of Analytical Trilogy, could do nothing other than focus the discussion inward. Because that's where the trail inevitably leads.

Norberto Keppe, the scientist behind the profound work coming out of Analytical Trilogy these days - and it is formidable indeed, in the areas of education and medicine and economics and physics - Keppe puts forward the idea that we have contact with all the magnificence and glory of Creation through our inner selves, that beautiful atmosphere of universal knowledge and wisdom that resides within each one of us. Plato called it the world of infused knowledge, meaning intelligence and savvy that we are born with. In Keppe's language, these universal knowings within would be divine concepts inside the human mind.

And this opens the door to a staggering thought given all the modern science that points in the opposite direction, and that is that we are not creatures who are evolving to greater intelligence and knowledge at all, but we are instead creations with all possible understanding already infused in us. And coming to re-discover that is an inner journey.

There is already evidence of the presence of this native intelligence and sense of ethics from our very beginning as babies in excellent research coming out of the Infant Cognitive Center at Yale and University of California at Berkley professor, Alison Gopnik's studies into the Philosophical Baby, and they've reached fascinating conclusions about the rich and intelligent inner life of babies from the beginning.

All of this to say that it's by treading the inner path that we really come to know reality, not through our external machinations. Not to say we don't gain substantial wisdom from our experiences - of course we do - but I mean that it's through this outer contact that we come to know ourselves, that self that already exists and is not simply a product of our outer experience.

Which is what Socrates was contending 2500 years ago.

So victimhood, that state of being shaped and fashioned by our outer traumas, can be re-considered, which is exactly what we'll do today. Helena Mellander, a frequent contributor to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, is a Swedish journalist who's been having quite an impact with her new blog in Swedish written with our colleague, educator Sofie Bergqvist. Helena wrote about this recently to interesting discussion from the Swedish community.

If this also stirs your desire to comment, I'm always happy to hear from you. rich@richjonesvoice.com.

Now, freeing ourselves from the Prison of Victimhood.

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