Responsibility Is the Antidote to Mental Enslavement

The cure for being stuck in victimhood is to see ourselves as responsible for making our own choices

Looking to our ability to manage our response to the world, rather than focusing on the world's inflictions upon us, is the purview of the man who would escape the mind of victimhood. Dmytro Zinkevych/Shutterstock

Over 2,000 years ago, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “Show me a man who is not a slave.” Seneca was speaking of mental enslavement: “One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear.”

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was also a Stoic philosopher. In Meditations, he wrote, “Alexander and Caesar and Pompey. Compared with Diogenes, Heraclitus, Socrates? The philosophers knew the what, the why, the how. Their minds were their own. The others? Nothing but anxiety and enslavement.”