In Buddhist psychology, the realm whose primary flavor is victimhood is referred to as either the hell realm or the demon realm and it is the lowest of the 6 realms. This is both because of how terrible it is for the people who live there and how hard it is to escape. To illustrate this, one of the things said of the hell realm is that none of the gates are actually locked. It’s the way the hell realm shapes attention away from the gates or convinces you that they’re a trick that keeps you in. Trying to help people who are deep in this can be extremely difficult due to this self sealing nature. For more I highly recommend the relevant chapter (4 or 5 IIRC) from Opening the Heart of Compassion (pdf).
On the exactly the same phenomenon, but from a different perspective—C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce goes to explain the Christian Hell as the place that people are stuck in because they choose to wallow in despair/grief/anger/victimhood, instead of just forgiving and letting go.
For example, he talks about a mother that lost her child, and is now stuck on anger of this child being unfairly treated by the word/God. The crucial fact is that she is indulging in that anger as a way of signalling her own self-rightioussness, not for any productive purpose.
Quite interesting, how all these different worldviews converge on that one :)
Quite interesting, how all these different worldviews converge on that one :)
Maybe a religion that wants to appeal to people with modern sense of justice (i.e. those not satisfied with “the ingroup goes to heaven, the outgroup goes to hell, exactly as you would wish, right?”) has no better option than take the just-world hypothesis and dress it up in religious terms.
In Buddhist psychology, the realm whose primary flavor is victimhood is referred to as either the hell realm or the demon realm and it is the lowest of the 6 realms. This is both because of how terrible it is for the people who live there and how hard it is to escape. To illustrate this, one of the things said of the hell realm is that none of the gates are actually locked. It’s the way the hell realm shapes attention away from the gates or convinces you that they’re a trick that keeps you in. Trying to help people who are deep in this can be extremely difficult due to this self sealing nature. For more I highly recommend the relevant chapter (4 or 5 IIRC) from Opening the Heart of Compassion (pdf).
On the exactly the same phenomenon, but from a different perspective—C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce goes to explain the Christian Hell as the place that people are stuck in because they choose to wallow in despair/grief/anger/victimhood, instead of just forgiving and letting go.
For example, he talks about a mother that lost her child, and is now stuck on anger of this child being unfairly treated by the word/God. The crucial fact is that she is indulging in that anger as a way of signalling her own self-rightioussness, not for any productive purpose.
Quite interesting, how all these different worldviews converge on that one :)
Maybe a religion that wants to appeal to people with modern sense of justice (i.e. those not satisfied with “the ingroup goes to heaven, the outgroup goes to hell, exactly as you would wish, right?”) has no better option than take the just-world hypothesis and dress it up in religious terms.