Nietzsche - Beware of People Playing the Victim

In /On the Genealogy of Morals/, Nietzsche searches through history for the origins of morality. And in it, he talks about how some people use morality like a dog-leash to control others. They use morality to get people to do what they want. It’s an interesting idea with lots of implications, but I’m interested in exploring one particular version of this idea: /playing the victim/. Someone who plays the victim is an example of someone who uses morality to gain power, and that’s what I wanna explore in this essay.

But before we can understand what it means to /play the victim/, we need to understand what it means to be a victim. For this essay, we can define a /victim/ as /someone who is taken advantage of by another person/. And we can call /the act of taking advantage of someone/ a /crime/. And typically, what we want for all victims is /justice/. And /justice/, as discussed by Nietzsche, can be thought of as /giving back to the victim what was lost when the crime was committed/. In other words, you can think of justice as /the repaying of debts/: the criminal must repay the debt they acquired by taking advantage of the victim.

I’m not saying this is what justice means, but this is a way many people understand justice, and this definition is important in the context of this video. So what does it mean to play the victim? What separates a genuine victim from someone playing the victim? A genuine victim was actually taken advantage of, but someone playing the victim wasn’t. And how do you determine whether someone was actually taken advantage of? It comes down to /consent/. Someone is taken advantage of when their presence is used in a way they didn’t agree to.

And so a true victim did not give consent or was not in a position to give consent, such as in the case of a child or someone who was severely intoxicated. But someone who plays the victim gives legitimate consent and then claims they didn’t. Or they claim /you/ consented to things which you didn’t consent to or were not in a position to consent to. I’ll explore what both cases look like a little later on.

So why would someone play the victim? To put it simply, they play victim so someone will save them from their problems. They’re looking for a rescuer. And how do they get people to save them? Someone who plays the victim has two main weapons: obligation and guilt, and pity and disgust. Let’s take a look at the first weapon: obligation and guilt. Here, the person playing the victim claims that /you/ consented to things that you didn’t consent to or were not in a position to consent to.

They impose an obligation on you and make you feel guilty for not living up to the obligation. They try to coerce you into paying a debt that you did not consent to taking on. Let’s look at an example. At the age of 22, Jane’s husband left her with their two sons: Jamie and Michael. Jane told herself that she would dedicate her life to her sons, and that in return they would take care of her. /I will take care of them,/ she thought, /and in return, they can never leave me/.

So keep that in mind: Jane is imposing an obligation on her sons. She’s binding them into a covert contract. But they’re children. They’re not in a position to consent to such a contract. So how does this play out? Jane will do anything for them as long as they don’t leave her alone. But as they start growing up, naturally, they start wanting to live their own lives. They want to spend time with their friends and lovers.

And anytime they want to leave the house, anytime they want to do something without her, anytime she feels them creating some distance from her, their mom uses guilt and obligation to make them stay. She says, “after everything I’ve done for you, after all the time, energy, and money I’ve spent on you, you’re just going to leave me?! You are terrible sons! You should be ashamed!” But is this fair of Jane to do? She imposed this contract on her kids—/I will take care of you as long as you never leave me/—when they were not in a position to consent to such a contract.

And whenever they seem to threaten her contract, she uses guilt and obligation to force them to comply again. Instead of handling the problem of loneliness in a mature and healthy way, she emotionally blackmails her sons into rescuing her. Now let’s look at the second weapon someone uses when playing the victim: pity and disgust. Here, the person playing the victim claims that they did not give /you/ legitimate consent when they actually did.

They’re trying to claim they didn’t give you legitimate consent so that others feel pity for them and disgust for you. If people feel pity for them, they get people on their side and increase the chances that someone will come and rescue them. If people feel disgust for you, the person playing the victim turns people against you, which will increase the chances that you submit to their demands.

Let’s return to our example. So Jane’s attempt to use guilt and obligation works on one of her sons, Jamie, but they fail to work on Michael. Michael tells his mom that he’s moving away to go to a good college. So what does Jane do when guilt and obligation fail? She uses pity and disgust. She says to Jamie, the son who feels obligated to her, “can you believe Michael would do that to his own mother? He took all of my money and then left me all alone!”

She makes Jamie feel pity towards her, increasing the chances he’ll rescue her, and makes him feel disgust towards his brother Michael, increasing the chances Jamie will abandon Michael or coerce him into submitting to his mother’s demands. But is it fair for Jane to claim that Michael took all of her money and left? Remember, Jane’s contract is /I will take care of you as long as you never leave me./ Jane was an adult when she chose to enter that contract for Michael, but Michael was just a baby.

Jane was capable of giving legitimate consent and did, but she expected a mutual consent from Michael that he wasn’t in a position to give as a child. And even if Michael was able to give consent, he might not have wanted to enter into that contract with his mother—one where she supports him in exchange for him never leaving her alone. So she gave him legitimate consent to receive her support as a child, but now that he’s not meeting her demands, she’s trying to claim that she never gave him consent and that he took advantage of her.

That’s just one example of someone playing the victim, but it can happen in many different types of relationships: between lovers, family, friends, or co-workers. But everyone who plays the victim has one thing in common: covert contracts. What’s that? It’s a hidden expectation of someone else. Remember, I said that a person can play the victim in two ways.

The first way is that they can give you legitimate consent and then claim they never gave it to you. But why would they claim they didn’t give it to you? Usually because they had a hidden expectation, a covert contract, which you didn’t live up to. And so now they want to claim they never gave you consent to punish you or to make you fulfill the hidden expectation they have. The second way someone can play the victim is that they can claim /you/ gave consent when you didn’t or were not in a position to.

In our previous example with Jane, the mother, she might say to her son Michael, “you were never supposed to leave me!” But that was a hidden expectation, a covert contract, that Michael’s mother had for him. Michael never gave legitimate consent to that expectation. So how do we stop playing the victim or being manipulated by other people playing the victim?

The answer comes back to /mutual consent between people who are in a position to give legitimate consent/. We need to be clear about what we want from others and what they want in return, and then we have to mutually consent to give one another those things. And in cases where the other party can’t give us consent, such as our children, we are only free to give our consent to them, but we can’t demand things of them that they aren’t in a position to give us consent for.

As always, this is just my opinion, understanding, and interpretation of some of Nietzsche’s ideas, not advice. If you liked the video, please consider liking the video. And if you’re looking for another Nietzsche video to watch after this one, I recommend watching my video “Nietzsche - Overcome Shame, Become Who You Are.” I’ll put a link to it in the description below and in the top right of the screen right now.