Everything in Moderation by Daniel Finkelstein

Author:Daniel Finkelstein [Finkelstein, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-07-26T17:00:00+00:00

Nelson Mandela … Rising above victimhood

Mandela understood that saying ‘it’s tough being me’ is self-destructive

Nelson Mandela died on 5 December 2013.

11 December 2013

Bill Clinton has a favourite Nelson Mandela story. Of course he does. The details change a little each time he relates it, but the thrust is the same. In 1998, after a visit to Robben Island, the American asked his fellow president this: ‘When you were walking to freedom, didn’t you hate them again?’

And Mandela replied with what Clinton calls ‘wonderful candour’: ‘Of course I felt old anger rising up again, and fear. After all, I had not been free in twenty-seven years. But I knew that, when I drove away from the gate, if I continued to hate them, they would still have me. I wanted to be free, and so I let it go.’

These last few days have seen plenty of attempts to analyse Mandela, and the dominant points fall into two groups. There are those who stress his resistance, and those that stress his forgiveness. Clinton’s story, I believe, reveals a bigger truth – that Mandela’s forgiveness and resistance belonged together. That his forgiveness was a tool of his resistance.

Nelson Mandela rejected the greatest of human temptations. He refused to see himself as a victim, even though he was one. He realised that this status, the one most of us reach for first in any dispute, was enfeebling.

A consistent feature of his stories of defiance in jail and magnanimity upon release is his determination to be in control of the situation, to engage on his own terms. He did this even when, physically, this was virtually impossible.

It is the emerging science of human cooperation that shows how great Mandela’s achievement is, by explaining why we desire to cast ourselves as the victim.

The work of Robert Trivers and others investigates why we cooperate with those who do not share our genes, and finds the answer in reciprocity – you help other people because you hope they will help you. This makes cooperation a good evolutionary survival strategy.

On one condition. We must be sure that we are not deceived by those who take our favours and do not return them. And we take a lot of trouble to ensure that this doesn’t happen. We have developed all sorts of ways of recording the favours we have done to ensure that they are reciprocated – the importance of reciprocity is a plausible explanation for the origins of counting and writing.

One tool we use to help us to avoid deception is to cast ourselves as the victim, to establish the claim that we have done our bit, but justice has not been done to us. And to make this claim even more potent we become deeply convinced of it; our professions of victimhood seem more genuine because we have allowed it to become part of our identity.

Matthew Taylor of the Royal Society of Arts suggests convincingly that inside almost all of us is the thought that ‘it’s really tough being me’ and we use this to excuse ourselves for lapses of behaviour.

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