Advertisers understand a key concept. The best way to sell something is to take a desire and create the notion in someone's mind that it is a need. This is why big screen TV's sell so well in January; the fallacious notion that a touchdown catch on a 52 inch screen will somehow look more exhilarating than the one on your old, obsolete 32 inch screen (to those who claim that the big screens make them see the plays better, I can only say: buy a pair of binoculars. It's cheaper and better for the environment. But I digress...).

Nowhere has this concept proven itself more true than in the field of psychology. If you visit a psychologist, it is a certainty you will be diagnosed with SOMETHING. The psychologist NEEDS you to be ill, they can't pay the rent otherwise.

That is why the cult of victimhood is so pervasive. It drives our economy and provides a whole new area of industry for enterprising know it alls who usually have been banned from their own family and school reunions because of their obnoxious, overbearing presence. Their patients, however, hang on every word they say because they believe they hold the answer to some esoteric question they have not yet defined.

Part of the problem that fuels this cult is the highly misleading idea that somehow we were not meant to EVER be unhappy, that somehow grief and conflict are abnormal to the human existence. The fact is, if anyone is in such a perpetually blissful state, it's clearly drug induced. Marriages have conflicts. Childrearing has conflicts. As a matter of fact, anytime you get two animate beings together, there will be conflict (hence the whole "pet psychologist craze...but I digress). As the Dread Pirate Roberts says in "The Princess Bride": "Life IS pain, highness. Anyone that says differently is selling something". In the case of Dr. Phil and other priests within the cult of victimhood, that "something" is a whole industry of self help books, videos, and audiotapes, as well as expensive hourly personal therapy.

But the blame for buying into the cult of victimhood does not lie on these wealthy moneychangers, but rather on us. We have the choice of whether or not to buy what they're selling, and so far, we're lined up around the black with cash in hand. We want answers, and we'll pay plenty of money to anyone that's got them.

The answers are much easier to achieve than most people realize, and, interestingly enough, they don't cost a cent. But I'll save THAT for another blog.