What happens when pain stops being a signal of distress and becomes a form of currency?

In many arguments, pain functions like a credential: once it is presented, the room changes. People step back, lower their voice, and stop asking the questions that would normally follow any serious claim. Ofer Zur named the mechanism with unusual precision:

The victim stance is a powerful one. The victim is always morally right, neither responsible nor accountable, and forever entitled to sympathy.

The distinction is vital. A victim is someone to whom an injustice occurred. The stance is the career that can follows.

This position is intoxicating because it rewrites the rules of ordinary judgment. Scrutiny is rebranded as cruelty, accountability as aggression. The goal shifts from justice to exemption. Justice is specific: it demands a wrong be named, repaired, and closed. Exemption has no finish line. The victim stance requires the wound to remain open, because closure ends the special status.

The utility of this leverage is that it is portable. Once injury becomes an identity, it can be carried into rooms far removed from the original harm and deployed against people who had nothing to do with it. Disagree and you are cruel. Ask for clarity and you are invalidating. Withhold sympathy and you become the aggressor, or at least an accomplice. This is how a specific injustice is transmuted into a general instrument of power.

Institutions understand this logic. Sympathy is cheap; justice is expensive. It costs nothing to stage recognition and call it progress. It costs a great deal to change procedures, expose responsibility, or dismantle the machinery that produced the harm. So we get ceremonies instead of corrections, language instead of law. Power prefers victims as a stable role to genuine adversaries. Adversaries demand structural change. Victims can be hosted.

And every theater needs its accomplice. Like a magician who pretends to choose at random, the victim stance finds the person already inclined to confirm the script. A quiet exchange follows: I certify your suffering; you certify my goodness. The victim gains insulation from judgment. The Samaritan gains virtue without cost. The wound stays open because it now feeds two appetites. Crocodile tears are not necessarily fake tears. They can be real tears serving the wrong animal. Justice would end the arrangement, which is why justice is deferred.

This logic does not stay in the senate. It is just as potent at the dinner table. A genuine hurt becomes a lever that reroutes every future dispute back to the original wound. Relationships turn into tribunals where one person is the eternal plaintiff and the other the eternal defendant. Boundaries become violence. Critique becomes betrayal. The stance spreads because it works, and once a person learns that pain grants authority, they will apply it everywhere.

Then comes the question most moral talk avoids. If closure is treated as illegitimate, what happens to redemption? Is there any path back for the one who caused harm, especially when the harm is denied? If the answer is no, guilt becomes permanent and time becomes a prison: the person cannot become more than their worst act. Extend that logic and it gets worse. If the wrongdoer is beyond redemption, what about their descendants? When guilt becomes hereditary, justice stops being justice and becomes lineage. History turns into fate, and equality becomes a slogan recited while moral inheritance is practiced.

None of this denies suffering. It draws a line around it. To be wronged is not a crown. It grants no wisdom, no virtue, no moral immunity. It grants one entitlement only: justice. But justice, if it is to remain justice and not vengeance with better branding, must be able to close a case. Not quickly, not cheaply, not on command, but in principle. Without the possibility of closure, we do not get morality. We get permanent status. And permanent status is how accountability dies, how reform is deferred, and how the future is taxed by the past forever.