Are you a Scapegoat Mama, Papa, Sister, or Brother?  Canceled, backstabbed, vilified, manipulated, extorted, boycotted (or if you have money, alternately pursued), deprived of grandchildren, and generally punished by a family member pushing a fictional narrative of victimhood?  If so, you are a scapegoat stuck with an instrumental victimist.

Let's get you unstuck. Join the Scapegoat Mamas Fun Club!  Membership includes recognizing instrumental victimism; understanding this epoch, rife with victimism and victimhood appropriation resulting from receding loyalty, honor, and gratitude in post-scarcity societies; and understanding the principal purposes of instrumental victimism: 1) the expiation of healthy guilt, 2) malevolent control over others, and 3) revenge.

Instrumental victimism is not a family problem.  It is spiritual and moral failing of the victimist, not the family.  Freedom for the scapegoat lies in radical acceptance, compassionate detachment, and redrawing family boundaries in a more safe and happy way.  Your Fun Club will poke fun at victimists and their machinations and take the bold step of joy and happiness without deferring to or bargaining with the irritant again.

Globalists have finally found the way to unify humanity!  Replay the hideous interviews of Prince Harry and Duchess Chicken-Legs.  (NASA has actually decoded signals from outer space that appear to say, "Shut up, Harry!")  The planet's premier victimism shills, Harry and Meghan, shall be our teaching examples.  They actualize the psychospiritual maladies of disloyalty, dishonor, and ingratitude, which are the bases of victimism adaptation.

Instrumental victimism arises when someone who has never known material deprivation or suffered personal or political persecution, has never worked to survive or sacrificed his own comfort, concocts a narrative of victimhood and propagates self-serving complaints and allegations.  Victimists take no responsibility for their own errors while blame-throwing fireballs on scapegoats.

Victimism is an artifact of affluent modernity.  Poor societies and families rely on loyalty, honor, and gratitude to survive.  They cannot afford the narcissistic entitlements of spurious victimhood.  The shift from conditions of survival to mass affluence means that sustenance and honor no longer have to be earned, but are claimed as a priori entitlements.  Identities, not achievements, are to be honored and protected.  The decline of achievement-based loyalty, honor, and gratitude vanquishes character and has caused the Great American Sadness.  Its apex is guilt-free, infantile adults who feel justified treating other people miserably while demanding sympathy based on delusions of victimhood.

Adroit victimists distribute personal and impersonal lamentations.  Personal involve complaints against family and friends.  Impersonal victimism involves trendy sociopolitical grievances: racio-sexio-homeo-transeo micro-woundings ad nauseam.

Scapegoats have diversity. The heartbroken father who didn't pivot fast enough when his daughter became his imaginary son.  The grandmother barred from her grandchildren because she stopped supporting baby daddy's drug addiction.  Victimism has left millions of parents and grandparents in affluent societies the whipping boys of grown children, including the British royal family.

1. Victimists enjoy guilt-free living despite selfish behavior.  Most theories about this civilizational shift don't recognize that the greatest advantage of instrumental victimism is to pre-empt guilt for bad behavior.  It enables the pseudo-victim to take everything he can get, while sinking teeth into hands that feed him, absolved of responsibility, gratitude, or reciprocation.  Such people are innocents, wrapped in a cocoon of hypocritical virtue and ersatz suffering.

Harry and Meghan swilled millions of pounds in lavish self-aggrandizement, über-luxurious wardrobe, travels, and trappings and repaid the grieving, dying queen, the British people, and now the new king with attacks, demands, and disloyalty.  All they have left to sell to maintain their billionaire lifestyle is filthy laundry, to the highest bidder, without a trace of guilt.

By her affinities, associations, and genetics, Meghan Markle cannot reasonably be identified as a Black.  She preferred Anglo-European-American society throughout her life.  Nevertheless, when crossed, she rambles from her racism rolodex.

When privileged, pseudo-educated people pontificate about historical American slavery, the lecture is for guilt inoculation, to remove the necessity of service to anyone today.  Slavery persists in many places, including deadly human-trafficking in America.  But victimhood-kleptos care nothing about slavery.  They justify their blindness to it by yapping about 160 years ago.

2. The victimist seeks malevolent control of every relationship.

Harry told People Magazine, "She [Meghan] had a father before this and now she doesn't have a father."  This is psychological assassination of Thomas Markle, who is still a father.  Markle's fatherhood and grandfatherhood are given by God, not Harry.  Harry's children are being harmed by their parents' cancelation of family.  Thomas Markle is psychologically exterminated — the ultimate control — because he is not wealthy, so he is of no use to them.  If the scapegoat has money or some other use to the victimist, there will be a dance of vilification and mollification to maintain control.

This is why we hear Harry's preposterous babbling about reconciliation.  Though by all accounts Thomas Markle was a more active father than Harry's, Harry won't say his own father is not his father.  King Charles is enormously wealthy and influential, including over the ducal titles Harry and his wife have dishonored, so the king will be kept with the bit softly in His Majesty's mouth.

3. The psychodynamic of instrumental victimism is revenge.  Harry runs his pie-hole so much that the truth occasionally pops out.  He complained that his brother didn't understand that "[h]e was not content to be a spare."  Harry's rejection of his royal destiny, although one of wealth, adulation, and opportunity for service beyond what most of us can imagine, is the wellspring of his revenge.  Similarly, the spider that sat down beside him, the California mean girl, devoid of true values, saw love and service in the royal family and British people and became a howling harpy of revenge.

Remember, dear scapegoats: in family life, if you do the work, you get the blame.  This is why Meghan Markle began her revenge campaign with Kate Middleton.  The princess of Wales is the Kachina doll of this family, the king and queen consort on her head, husband and children balanced on her arms.  After the "Kate made Meghan cry" farce came "somebody around here is racist!"  Harry, who claimed the virtually impossible achievement of killing 25 Taliban, all combatants, while shooting "indiscriminately" from a helicopter, says, "It was terrifying having my brother scream and shout at me."  Blame-bingeing escalates.  Harry is humiliating himself with wimperings about brother manhandling him, a slap to William's everlasting credit.  Poor Harry fall down, go boom!

Instrumental victimism is not a family problem, not amenable to family therapy or reconciliation.  The victimist's weakness can be cured only by moral honesty, recognition of guilt, repentance, and commensurate amends.  This rarely happens because victimism is the prisoner of hypocrisy.

Finding freedom is not an airplane thing; it's a God thing — a chapter in the life span process of God-surrendered acceptance and gratitude for the totality of life, including pests and relatives.  Then compassionate detachment.  Detachment is the action word.  The scapegoat detaches, restricts access, discontinues paying attention to the victimist.  Withdrawing attention is different from ignoring.  Detachment is a serene mind that permits businesslike communication without emotionality.

Compassion, because the victimist is pitiable.  He destroys relationships with the people who care about him and are left with the company of other users and abusers, which is worse than being alone.

If grandchildren are being used as weapons, communicate your love to them in every available way.  Never give up.  Victimism is weakness.  Love gathers strength.  Time is always on the side of love.

In the Scapegoat Mama Fun Club, nurture yourself and your true friends.  Be active about circling the wagons and asking for the protection you need.  Whether in Windsor Castle or your castle, laugh, let go, and be happy.

Image: Matt Brown via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.