The authors view the victim cycle and victim culture as threats to organizational and individual achievement, so they spend a lot of time cautioning their readers against it. They also expand this discussion to identify it as a threat at the national and cultural levels. Fundamentally, they believe that the victim cycle represents a flawed worldview. They argue, for instance, that pop culture has encouraged people to focus too much on their traumatic experiences and allow them to define us and therefore hold us back. The authors implicitly recognize that this line of thinking is a controversial one that could leave them open to accusations of victim blaming. To this they counter that there are far fewer true victims than people are often willing to acknowledge, and even in those circumstances, the victim is better off trying to take charge of their life to move forward.

Many of the stories the authors present in which an individual or organization gets Above The Line and out of the victim cycle read like conversion and redemption stories. A company or individual comes to acknowledge the errors of their ways—namely that they haven’t taken ownership for their actions—and through that confession they are redeemed and become capable of getting the results they want. Consequently, these redemption narratives often have religious undertones. As the individual gets Above The Line, they recognize that they were never really a victim. There were ways in which they contributed to their circumstances that they could have seen and done something about. Mike Eagle provides a typical example of this kind of story.

The authors further contend that forces tend to work to drag people Below The Line. They identify six typical kinds of victim cycle thinking in Chapter 2. At the core of all those victim cycle mentalities, the authors imply, people always know exists that a problem exists. The core difference in these mentalities is how people address that problem. In some regards, these approaches exist on a spectrum. At one end, an individual or organization might outright ignore or deny a problem exists, going so far as to hide it even from themselves. At the other extreme, an individual or organization knows full well that a problem exists, and they even know that they are capable of doing something to address it. However, they do not act because they are under the mistaken belief that the issue will simply take care of itself. These are antagonistic forces in the text that, the authors argue, can be overcome via their outlined principles.