https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/09/survivor-creep/
“It is not necessary to have suffered personally to claim the moral authority of suffering and sufferers. It is only necessary that you should belong to a group that, historically, has been wronged and suffered as a result. The glory of this, apart from the status victimhood is taken to confer, is that you can claim to have suffered enormously while leading a very privileged existence.”
The use of words tells us much about the temper of the times, and the use to which the word survivor is now frequently put tells us much about our modern scale of values.
At one time, survivors were those who escaped death from such events as shipwrecks, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and battles in war. To be counted, or count oneself, a survivor, it was necessary to have encountered death close-up. Now, however, it is necessary only to have had an unpleasant experience to be given, or to award oneself, the title of survivor, for example of sexual abuse.
What lies behind this semantic fungation? I suspect that there is a certain competitive envy of suffering at play. This is not to deny that survivors in the modern sense may really have suffered, but it is not enough merely to have suffered: one must have suffered mightily, if possible as much as anyone has ever suffered. This is because suffering by itself now confers moral authority like nothing else, certainly not knowledge or good behaviour.
Of course, there is no indisputable yardstick by which suffering, or for that matter pleasure, can be measured, which is why the felicific calculus is so fatuous an idea. On the other hand, to compare one’s suffering caused by, say, the late arrival of a train with that of a victim of Pol Pot would be not only absurd, but unseemly and even disgusting. This is not to say (as I know from experience) that the lateness of a train may not fill one’s mind with chagrin and rage, but even when they are at their height one knows, or ought to know, that what one is suffering is inconvenience rather than tragedy. This was once very forcibly brought home to me in a literal sense when once I was waiting for a delayed train in a state of considerable irritation, only later to learn that the train had crashed and the only person to be killed on it was the literary editor of a publication for which I sometimes reviewed books. I then felt ashamed of my exaggerated emotional state on the platform. Delay and death are not to be equated.