Victim or Criminal?

“Life is nothing but a competition to be a criminal rather than a victim.” -Bertrand Russell.

Not because people admire ‘criminals,’ but because almost nobody wants to be the ‘victim.’

Life doesn’t always reward the kind person. It often rewards the one who is willing to bend rules or manipulate narratives.

With this view, most of life can be understood as a struggle over who carries the cost.

Every negotiation is a contest over who gives up more.

Every business transaction is an attempt to capture more value than you surrender.

Every war is fought because one nation would rather make another nation bear the destruction than suffer for itself.

The underlying incentive is quite consistent: transfer pain, risk, responsibility, or loss to someone else.

Photo by Piotr Makowski on Unsplash

Consider inflation. Prices rise, purchasing power falls, and someone inevitably bears the cost.

Or Layoffs. A company dismisses thousands of employees just because they made less profit than last quarter.

Someone must lose. The contest is over who?

Even socially, people act the same. When a task fails, they start explaining the circumstances before accepting responsibility.

These people are not criminals in the legal sense. Yet each situation reflects the same pattern: people prefer imposing a cost over bearing one.

Civilization, in modern era, isn’t a competition between good and evil. It’s a competition to avoid becoming the one who gets exploited. In that race, many people slowly become the very thing they feared.