Last week’s article discussed what I called the “victim complex,” that is, a person’s persistent feeling of being unlucky - not because of any personal shortcomings, but because other forces, whether visible or hidden, are working to thwart them and sabotage their efforts. One of my colleagues brought to my attention an important distinction: the difference between how this feeling manifests on the personal level versus the public or collective level.
In essence, he said that most people do not interpret their personal failures as the result of being victims, except in a few cases. In most situations, individuals tend to be optimistic, especially when they succeed in their education, careers, or relationships with others.
But that same successful individual might undergo a complete transformation when the topic shifts to broader issues, like those concerning the Arab world, the Islamic nation, or the Global South as a whole. It’s as if the alleged conspiracy doesn’t target individuals but rather entire nations.
Out of caution and curiosity, I asked several people - whom I know to believe in the idea of a global conspiracy - whether they had ever found any evidence that such a conspiracy targeted them personally. Four of them replied that they didn’t even believe the world cared about them as individuals. Instead, they thought the conspiracy focused on symbolically significant targets at the national or religious level, and might involve individuals who are considered part of the symbolic or human capital of the nation, such as scholars, leaders, or others who play influential roles in public life.
To be fair, I had never paid attention to this distinction before, and I think it’s worth pondering, especially for those who, in principle, accept the possibility of a global conspiracy.
This discussion drew my attention to what I believe is a connection between the victim complex and dogmatism in how one views the world and history. The main idea here is that someone afflicted by the victim complex - often a believer in a cosmic conspiracy - possesses a list of unquestionable truths, which they refuse to debate. They may even be shocked if they hear someone denying those “truths” or challenging their validity.
For example, one person, who is considered part of the intellectual elite, wrote to me saying that those who deny the international conspiracy are either deceived or are actually part of the conspiracy, whether knowingly or not.
Similarly, at the start of the war in Gaza, more than one person wrote that Jews are inherently incapable of confronting Arabs, and therefore their defeat is inevitable. I told one of my colleagues that Jews had defeated us before, to which he replied, “It was America that defeated us, not Israel.” I then shared my own opinion: that we, like all people, triumph when we embrace the elements of power and dominance, and we fail when we neglect those elements or when our enemies adopt them. Our ethnicity - just like our religion and history - is not a reason for either victory or defeat. He responded by saying I was short-sighted and incapable of reading history.
Frankly, such debates are fruitless. Whether one accepts or rejects the idea of a conspiracy is not the issue - unless the goal is to free oneself from a state of dogmatism, which we genuinely need to rid ourselves of. In other words, the victim complex and belief in conspiracy may be symptoms of mental closure; a barrier that prevents the mind from considering a range of possibilities, both those aligned with its beliefs and those that challenge them. This is crucial, because the dogmatic person always imagines the truth is already in their pocket, even though their beliefs may be based on imagined or fabricated premises. The truth might lie somewhere entirely different.
I’ve noticed that dogmatism is widespread among those who carry rigid ideologies. This reminds me of an old play by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf titled Walls Within Walls, in which he portrays a dogmatic character who refuses to leave his prison cell, even after the prison gates are thrown open and all the other prisoners and guards have fled. He believes that what is happening is not the deep societal transformation that, according to his worldview, would lead to freedom. Therefore, he considers the prisoners who fled to be deluded, and sees himself as the only one who sees the truth.
