"The rise of 'victim power' coincides, not at all by accident, with the arrival of the first planetary culture. [...] I connect it with modern to underline the paradox of a value whose recent historical arrival in no way prevents it from asserting itself as the immutable and eternal. There were those who told us not long ago that human life existed in an absolute void of meaning. True enough, the old absolutes have collapsed - humanism, rationalism, revolution, science itself. And yet even today this absolute void does not prevail. There is the concern for victims, and it is that value, for better or worse, that dominates the total planetary culture in which we live. The world becoming one culture is the fruit of this concern and not the reverse."
"This new stage of culture has come about due neither to scientific progress nor to the market economy nor to the 'history of metaphysics.' [concern for victims] has directed the evolution of our world behind the scenes. If the concern for victims has fully appeared, it is because all the great expressions of modern thought are exhausted and discredited. After all the ideological collapses, our intellectuals believed they could settle down into the easy life of a nihilism without obligations or sanctions. But our nihilism is a pseudo-nihilism."
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), pp. 177-178.
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