The Problem With Victim Mentality

Insights from author of 'The Victim Cult' Mark Milke

There is a danger in being handed the story of your life before you have had the chance to live it.

Before you have made your own choices, before you have failed, before you have stood back up, before you have discovered what you are capable of, someone explains you to yourself.

You are disadvantaged.

You are oppressed.

You are the product of history.

You are what Canada did.

There is truth in that story. That is what makes it powerful. But it is also what makes it dangerous.

In my conversation with Mark Milke, founder of the Aristotle Foundation and author of The Victim Cult, we discussed one of the most uncomfortable questions in Canada today: how do we honour real harm without turning harm into an identity?

Milke’s argument is not that victims do not exist. They do. His concern is that when individuals, communities, or even countries begin to organize themselves around victimhood, they can lose sight of agency, responsibility, and the habits that allow people to build a better life.

For Indigenous people, this is not theoretical. It lives in our families and communities. It lives in the addiction rates, the poverty, the courtrooms, the housing shortages, and the languages that now survive in only a few remaining speakers.

My grandmother attended St. Mary’s Indian Residential School. She experienced abuse there. That pain did not simply disappear when she left. It shaped her life. It shaped my mother’s life. It shaped mine.

So when people talk about victimhood, I do not hear it as an abstract political category. I hear it through the lives of people I love.

But I also know this: there is a difference between acknowledging what happened and allowing what happened to become the total explanation for who we are.

When History Becomes a Cage

One of Milke’s central warnings is that modern politics has become too comfortable organizing people around injury, grievance, inherited pain, and identity. Instead of asking what ideas help people flourish, we often begin with what group someone belongs to and how that group has suffered.

At first, this can feel like compassion. After generations of silence and denial, there is power in finally saying: this happened. This mattered. This caused damage.

But recognition can become a cage.

Once a person understands themselves primarily as a victim, every setback can start to confirm the story. Failure becomes evidence. Difficulty becomes proof. Even responsibility can begin to sound like betrayal.

There may be truth in parts of this. But a partial truth can still become a destructive worldview.

Milke argues that the danger of victim mentality is that it weakens agency. It takes the authorship of your life and places it somewhere else — in government, history, institutions, colonization, or other people.

And once your life belongs to someone else, even your healing depends on them.

That is a bleak way to live.

Responsibility Is Not Denial

Canada harmed Indigenous people. Residential schools were real. The Sixties Scoop was real. Dispossession was real. Racism was real. The reserve system continues to shape economic life in ways many Canadians still do not understand.

Milke does not ask us to pretend these things did not happen. His concern is what happens when historical harm becomes the primary lens through which people understand themselves.

If we stop at harm, the conversation becomes incomplete. We can explain the source of pain without giving people a path forward. We can become fluent in the language of trauma, while struggling to speak about discipline, responsibility, work, family, education, sobriety, and the daily habits that actually change a life.

That is where I think Milke’s argument is worth taking seriously, even when it is uncomfortable.

Responsibility is not denial.

It is not pretending the past does not matter. It is not cruelty. It is not telling people to “just get over it.”

Responsibility is the belief that, even after harm, your choices still matter.

That is the part I worry we are losing.

We have become very good at naming systems: colonialism, racism, intergenerational trauma, the Indian Act, the justice system, the child welfare system, the education system.

These systems matter. But sometimes I worry we have become better at naming systems than raising people strong enough to survive them.

A young Indigenous person does not only need to know what Canada did wrong. They need to know how to wake up in the morning and build a life.

They need history, culture, and justice. But they also need habits, discipline, competence, and the belief that their own decisions still matter.

If all we give them is the language of oppression, we should not be surprised when they struggle to imagine freedom.

Remembering Without Being Trapped

None of this requires forgetting. In fact, forgetting would be its own kind of failure.

The harder task is learning how to carry memory without letting it become the whole weight of our identity.

This is where Milke’s critique of victim mentality lands most clearly for me. He is not saying pain is imaginary. He is warning that pain can become politically, culturally, and personally immobilizing when it becomes the centre of identity.

Indigenous people have inherited pain. There is no honest way around that. But we have also inherited strength.

We inherited people who survived residential schools, government policies, poverty, shame, and silence. We inherited people who kept going when giving up would have been understandable.

If we only tell the story of what was done to us, we risk dishonouring the people who survived it.

Because they were not only victims. They were human beings.

They laughed. They worked. They raised children. They made mistakes. They loved. They carried grief. They carried strength. They were more than the worst thing that happened to them.

That is the balance I am trying to find: a way to tell the truth about what happened while still helping people believe they can build something beyond it.

Reconciliation has to do more than name the wound. It has to help people recover their strength.

Milke’s warning is that victim mentality offers people an explanation that can become a prison. It tells them their pain is real, but not always that their power is real too.

If we are serious about reconciliation, we need both.

We need to tell the truth about what happened. Then we need to build people capable of living beyond it.