VT: Victim infantilization and the diffusion of responsibility

Mark Steyn (A Culture of Passivity):

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office.

Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

[...] We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom’s security blanket.

Heck, just bold the whole thing.

Jack M, over at Ace's, continues,

It's about a culture of expected weakness. Where people are taught "don't resist", "do whatever a gunman says", "play dead", "wait for help to arrive".

[...] Our culture has undergone a lot of trends. But perhaps the most harmful is the devaluation in the concept of self-reliance.

When will we realize the "other guy" (be he or she the government, law enforcement, or someone of authority) will not always be able to protect us?

A dangerous illusion --- a conditioned exercise in self-deception, indeed.

Posted by Kyer at April 19, 2007 10:29 AM | TrackBack