What's Often Nauseating About Humanity

Near the end of Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder's historical account of the state-directed massacres in Eastern Europe between 1933-1945 or so, he writes: "The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence" (399-400).  Amen.  Perhaps this ability is connected to evolution--perceived victimization leads to agression that allows a particular group to successfully pass on its genes.  And it operates on a more mundane, everyday level as well.  It's hard for people, virtually all people, to take responsiblity for their actions: both moral crimes and simple failures of planning.  It's easier to believe that failure was caused by someone else.  For Stalin, it was anyone he believed was undermining his efforts at forced collectivization; for Hitler, it was the Jews who somehow undermined his attack on the Soviet Union.  Since, by their own definition, they couldn't be wrong, someone else must be at fault--with murderous results.  This occurs so often in everyday life with, for the most part, obviously less violent conquences, and so I can understand the Catholic idea of the confession.  Yet there, immoral deeds--not necessarily errors of judgment or analysis--are waved away much too easily.  Pray to God--of course he forgives you.  But I don't want to suggest that victimization does not exist.  It plainly does.  But often people who have not truly been victimized of anything--or not victimized to any great degree--claim the mantle of victimization--and thus justify greater cruelty and violence.  It is at those moments when humanity most fully nauseates me.