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It provides a kind of clarity to remove sympathy from logic. Otherwise you lead yourself into too many conundrums and fallacies.
Sometimes victims are the results of their own self-victimization. Sometimes they strive mightly to be victims in their ignorance, and resist attempt to be taught how to stop victimizing themselves. But when that happens, the person who simply failed to get through to the idiot shouldn't beat himself up saying that *he's* the victimizer. Let the dead bury the dead, as long as it doesn't lead to a huge typhoid outbreak.
In this case, the students *could* stop being victims, but it's a big task for a small person, overcoming the years of mis-training and mis-education and neglect that they've suffered. Even if the only person they have to save is themselves, it's a tall order.
It's a big task for the teacher, too, overcoming years of mis-training and mis-education and neglect that the students have suffered. And they don't get to save just one person--they have what? 6 classes of 25-35 students to save, each year?
We excuse the kids. But we turn on the teachers and ask why they're not perfect. And all the while, we can't bear to ask, Who exactly did the mis-training and mis-education and neglecting? Can't ask that. It's political suicide to raise the question, and in a political system where the politicians, businessmen, and everybody else can't see beyond next minute asking such a long-term question is just painful.
Because while the kids victimize themselves, their primary victimizers are their parents, the people with real power to do good or bad in the kids' lives.
Yet if you say that to most such parents, the response is eerily like yours: Since the parents are also victims, they say, that's blaming the victims. So in our sympathy-induced foolishness we have to conclude that the powerful are weak and beyond reproach. Although, to be fair, many parents have rendered themselves powerless.
All that's left to blame are the non-victims, but they have very little power. And in our foolishness, we say that the weak are powerful and solely in for reproach. And when the relatively powerless fail, we blame them even more.
Then we all genuflect before this situation and say it is very wisdom. That victims cannot self-victimize. That victims cannot also victimize others.
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