Sufro, luego existo : La víctima como héroe

The French philosopher urges us to break the tendency towards self-pity and victimhood, something that runs counter to the progress that modernity implies, and which is accentuated in new generations. The victorious humanity of modernity has given way today to a victim-playing society. The promise of a better world, freed from fatalism and fanaticism, which inspired the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, has engendered self-pitying and complacent citizens. In this book, Bruckner argues that current civilization identifies greatness with concern for the downtrodden; on the other side of this trend, he places victimization—as blackmail against others—and a pathological obsession with recognition. Paradoxically, suffering is established as a new sacred value in the hedonistic West. The French philosopher explains why everyone, rich and poor, men and women, boasts of their own certificates of suffering, which elevate them above their fellow human beings. And how, to the detriment of the truly unfortunate, "in a curious twist, the happy and the powerful also want to belong to the aristocracy of the margins, to form new castes of the defeated." Finally, he addresses the cult of suffering, which, steeped in bitterness, exalts the figure of the martyr and fuels the two great contemporary passions: resentment and revenge. The pose of exclusion, the narcissism of segregation, and victimhood competition thrive everywhere. And one must ask whether the younger generations, spoiled and raised in fear and sensitivity, will be able to face the chaos of the world in which we live, marked by violence and natural disasters.