In Wokeism, the Perfect Victim is the Psychopath

When "look what you made me do" makes right

Luzifer, Franz von Stuck (1890)

I think a lot about the oppression hierarchy and how it informs the morality of the woke progressive left. Essentially, right or wrong is not determined by any kind of objective moral truth or by one’s actions but rather by who it is that is doing the acting. This means that a harmful action committed by someone deemed more oppressed than the person they harmed is often excused or even justified. For example, the man who chooses to compete in women's sports—stealing women’s opportunities, dashing their dreams, and sometimes even injuring them physically—is justified in doing so because he is more oppressed than the “cis” women he is competing against.

I've also asked myself the question of who decides where on the oppression ladder a particular identity group sits. And yes, in my view the standings are artificially decided because actual victims are often overlooked while those in positions of power are considered oppressed. The answer I've come to is that it's the cultural elites—the people who have taken over the institutions of education, government, and media. These are the “conditioners” as C.S. Lewis called them when he warned about them in The Abolition of Man.

But then I was left with the question of how they decide where on the oppression ladder different groups sit. For example, how is it that a man puts on a dress and is suddenly more vulnerable and oppressed than a woman who desires a female-only rape shelter? I landed on the answer that the decision is made at least in part based on which party is more psychopathic. Individuals, groups, and movements that display obvious psychopathic traits—like emotional instability, lack of impulse control, narcissism, and sadism—are put forward as victims because the thinking is that some “oppressor” made them that way.

It’s just like when the domestic abuser says, "Look what you made me do."

The abusers, the psychopaths, have painted themselves as the real victims because this is what they do. They lack empathy and are completely self-centered, so anything that they do wrong cannot possibly be their fault and must be blamed on someone else. And the woke left accepts their narrative. Progressives champion people and movements that are destructive to themselves and others but blame their emotional instability and lack of impulse control on being oppressed and victimized. The emotional instability and lack of impulse control are actually seen as proof of the claimed oppression.

If any of this was truly about valuing and helping the oppressed, then identifying the real victims wouldn't be so hard. While nuance exists, in most situations it is easy to see obvious harm being done by one person—or one group or movement—to another. As I have already mentioned, it is obvious that trans-identified men do great harm to women when they destroy our spaces and sports. They do great harm to women when they declare that their human rights are violated because a woman refuses to perform intimate services for them, when they request transfer to women’s prisons and then harass and assault the women inside, and when they send death and rape threats to women for not recognizing them as female. Yet progressives have for years been excusing or handwaving away these antisocial behaviors by appealing to how oppressed these men are and how much pain and trauma they ostensibly carry.

This isn't by any means limited to the trans movement. We see the woke left excusing psychopathic behavior throughout society. One of the most blatant examples was the way that the actions of Hamas on October 7 have been not only rationalized but sometimes even celebrated. Terrorists who relished in killing and rape were lauded as freedom fighters.

This same attitude is carried over to the criminals who terrorize our streets at home. Progressives seem to have endless sympathy for the antisocial underbelly of society who commit the vast majority of crimes. These people, especially in woke progressive havens like Canada, get nothing but a slap on the wrist for repeatedly assaulting the properties and bodies of other citizens. In the same way, playgrounds have been offered up to drug addicts who then return the favor by littering the ground with needles for children to find.

While there can certainly be a time and place to extend sympathy for drug addicts and people who have turned to a life of crime, excusing their antisocial behavior allows them to abuse everyone else with impunity. Further, as I explained above, their antisocial behavior is ushered in as evidence of their oppression and used as a reason to elicit sympathy and leniency. So, you end up with a situation where the law-abiding citizens who are the actual victims of this antisocial behavior are instead told that they are privileged. And if you are privileged, the abuse directed at you by the “oppressed” is justified.

Quite frankly, we’ve come to a place where the woke left does not recognize evil anymore. It has bought into the narrative of the psychopath that atrocious actions are always understandable, justifiable, and deserved, and that there is always someone else to blame.

Unfortunately, it doesn't end there. I initially titled this essay “The Progressive’s Perfect Victim is the Psychopath,” but then I realized that this is not just a progressive problem. This is also evident in what is becoming known as the woke right.

Let me use the depressing example of Jennifer Sheffield, who was recently murdered by her husband, Brandon Sheffield, who then killed himself. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is shockingly common. In my city of Calgary alone, two men last year killed their wives and themselves, each leaving behind three children.

Shockingly enough, some of the discourse around the Sheffield case is that Jennifer had it coming because she was trying to leave. This is, of course, exactly the thought process Brandon would have gone through before he decided to kill her. Many are justifying his actions by saying that women need to take accountability for initiating divorces and driving their husbands to take such extreme actions. It's “Look what you make me do” on steroids.

These men—Brandon, the Calgary men, and too many others who commit this specific and far-too-common type of crime—were narcissistic psychopaths. They suffered such narcissistic injury that they had to kill the woman who caused it and then themselves. This also speaks to their lack of impulse control, lack of empathy, and sadism. Even if we are being generous and say that maybe they weren't psychopaths but instead suffered a psychotic break, their actions were still psychopathic, and the antisocial nature of their actions is used as evidence by the woke right of their victim status.

And let's not kid ourselves, the types of men who commit this specific type of crime have very often already faced charges for their abuse against their wives. Murdering her for her decision to leave only confirms that the decision was correct.

Again, we have a clean-cut case of abusers harming their victims, but the woke—the woke right this time—applies the inverted woke morality to say that the person who acts most like a psychopath must be the true victim because an oppressor must have made them act that way.

Neither side of the political spectrum is immune to woke thinking because woke thinking is essentially collectivist and grievance- and identity-based, and both sides can fall into that trap. Actions are no longer judged according to any objective standard of morality but rather according to the identity of the actor. Just like the trans-identified man can do no wrong in the eyes of the woke progressive, the woman seeking a divorce can do no right in the eyes of the woke right, even if her husband murders her for it.

This is why it is important to remind ourselves not to fall into the tribalism which says, “My side good; other side bad.” Woke thinking can infect any “side.” The real fight is and always will be against the collectivism that stamps out the individual and their moral agency.