♥ About Us, the Summary ♥

These attributes are not episode-bound and constitute part of the habitual long-term functioning of the individual:

Cheerful and exuberant

Articulate and jocular

Overoptimistic and carefree

Overconfident, boastful, ang grandiose

Extroverted and people seeking

High energy level, full of plans and improvident activities

Versatile with broad interests

Overinvolved and meddlesome

Uninhibited and stimulus seeking

Habitual short sleep (less than 6 hours/night)

uch is Victim Correction as a Panacea~

As the above says, this is Al-Anon approved literature, for Alateen. You couldn’t make this stuff up! Persuasion to think like this works best with Groupthink, but if you, on your own, must deal with a devastating reality in order to fit in and function, then you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do, and our self-responsible cultural norms would provide the Groupthink. As Addiction: Why Can’t They Just Stop?, by John Hoffman and Susan Froemke, says, in a survey of addicts’ family members, “...the words that everyone used were powerfully negative: ‘devastating,’ ‘abusive,’ ‘horrible’.” Serenity, indeed!

Whether or not you live with an addict, etc., whatever you must do to take care of yourself, is whatever you must do to take care of yourself. Self-help means that if it’s your problem, then you provide the help. Victim-blaming doesn’t require a belief in a just world, and is most important when someone must self-motivatedly take response-ability for injustices. As Dr. Thomas A. Harris wrote in the preface of his I’m OK—You’re OK, “To many people [psychiatry] is like a blind man in dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there,” but Al-Anon-style psychology-psychiatry, neo-Buddhism, is productive, does produce contrived serenity and courage, whereas telling addicts’ family members, “You’re OK, even if his addiction really bothers you,” wouldn’t: mindless formula, mindful victims. Attention must be systematically focused on how the victims could most effectively take response-ability for their own welfare, since attention given to anything else would be unpragmatic. For an exemplary alkie’s kid who looks like Archie, to preach, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, should seem like wryly Kafkaesque theater of the absurd, but instead that seems very pragmatic and honorable. They’re just trying to help him take care of himself better, which he really needs. No self-responsibility for victims sounds nice, but all of it would help them. No matter what any Al-Anon or Alateen members may whine about, one could respond, “But to look at yourself instead of blaming others would benefit you, by changing what you can and accepting what you can’t!” That’s reality, not victim-blaming. This doesn’t intend to blame or criticize you or be morally bankrupt, just make you more well-adjusted and spiritual. Even if this requires more Stoicism than some Stoic saints had, if that’s what reality requires, then that’s what it requires. (These saints’ self-control shows that it’s possible, and Al-Anon-style self-control isn’t moralistic.) The alkies aren’t controlling Al-Anon members in the authoritarian, anti-freedom sense; that’s the way that life sometimes goes. We all must adjust to our realities. That’s inherent to life. To end the description of each and every traumatic experience with, “So now I’m supposed to just shut up and deal with this reality, since doing so would benefit me,” might sound like the punch line of a sick joke, but the bottom line must always be pragmatic and well-adjusted. That’s how victim correctors are supposed to operate, since correction is good, and a lack of it is self-defeating. This is the language of letting go. Unless what happened was so extreme that this would sound untenable, trying to correct the person who caused the problem, even assertively, could very easily seem or suggest: unrealistic, unreliable, stupid, conditional, optional, half-hearted, limited, judgmental, troublemaking, “on principle,” moralistic, unattractive, sophistry-rewarding, altruistic, controlling, whiny, mollycoddling, intellectualist, pathetic, resentful, maladjusted, negative, blaming, subjective, unproven, emotionalistic, manipulative, passive, etc., while trying to correct the person who has the problem in ways that would help him “take care of himself” better, could very easily seem or suggest: realistic, reliable, wise, necessary, vital, steadfast, limitless, forgiving, peace-making, pragmatic, trendy, marketable, success-rewarding, “getting on with life,” self-empowering, gutsy, achievement-oriented, down-to-earth, proud, competitive, well-adjusted, hopeful, solving, objective, self-justifying, practical, self-reliant, active, etc. Al-Anon would probably say that the reason why they’d expect members to accept whatever alkies do is that their disease of addiction makes them not guilty by reason of insanity (Addiction might as well be as involuntary as Alzheimer’s.), but if a non-addict caused a member a big problem, the only things that would really matter would be the victim’s serenity and courage, and the same is true for self-help in general. Coping with reality requires that the realities be interchangeable. What could possibly keep victim correction in check, limiting self-responsibility to what’s reasonable?

(Cartoon generated by “Build Your Own Meat”)

“Archie” was taught to have great confidence in the self-reliance and self-determination of the individual. Instinctively, Americans would tend to be a lot less offended by Al-Anon-style victim correction, than by the whining and the victim-power that it corrects. That self-help formula feels right, helpful, beneficial, self-empowering, resilient, self-efficacious. Victims’ counselors care about them. This empathy requires correcting them, saving them from their own negativity and passivity. After all, “Oh, you poor thing!”, treats people as things. Victim correctors only want addicts’ kids, etc., to be more self-efficacious, serene, etc. The nescient majority has no problem with this level of victim correction, with just expecting people to “get on with life” despite realities this lurid, which seem to be just acceptable losses. The middle-class approach is about solving problems self-reliantly and realistically, so we should teach the same self-responsible ideas that it does, instead of the petty bourgeois approach, which is palliative. Coping with reality means overlooking some realities, and such pragmatic and red-blooded cultural norms have to be very powerful. As White House press secretary Ari Fleischer unabashedly said after Bush admitted that the Iraq-Niger-uranium documents are fake, “Yes, the president has moved on. And, I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on, as well,” a top-notch professional attempt to get the public to conform to letting go regarding Bush’s Machiavellianism. (Fleischer is rebelling from his petty bourgeois family, who obviously can afford not to adequately appreciate why, in the real world, sometimes when others cause you problems it’s necessary to move on rather than whine and intellectualize.) Caring about social problems is so passé, so 1960s, even caring about our rampant depression. During the Vietnam War, defending it by telling opponents to move on, would have seemed morally bankrupt, rather than unconditionally resilient. As Al-Anon shows, it’s possible for pragmatists to expect someone to move on from, let go of, etc., literally anything that he can’t change.

That’s how all cultural conditioning and social pressures work, including that of all those strange foreigners who can’t think for themselves. (BTW, those who think for themselves wouldn’t conclude that for 15% of the adult population to suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year, is only natural.) Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct.

Nothing that an Al-Anon or Alateen member could possibly say, could possibly counter expectations that are based on what the real world objectively requires. This moral bankruptcy requires you to toe the line, even when the choices that caused the problems have nothing to do with addiction. No matter what any problem parent might do that could traumatize his kid, he absolutely could change himself, and absolutely can’t change anyone else including the parent, which is all that the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer cares about. A priori, that’s all that you could care about. That mustn’t seem repulsive. You mustn’t really care about “the elephant in the living room” if you can’t change the elephant. If you think that that’s revolting, then that would be very unserene, discouraging, etc. Obviously, that, like Bontsha the Silent, is far from a natural way to think, though it could be called “cognitive therapy” (“Behavior Therapists and Cognitive Behavior Therapists... concentrate on a person’s views and perceptions about their life, rather than personality traits.”), which has been called, “a natural alternative to anti-depressant medication.” The above is the fully-approved outlook, since it’s very effective in preventing depression. All that you’d need to give self help advice, would be a tape recording that says, “It would really do you a lot of good if you changed what you can and accepted what you can’t! That’s just the way the real world works!”, and you’d play that over and over as the person describes his own trauma. Any reasonable alternatives to victim correction as a panacea, could seem too unrealistic, fallible, subjective, passive, defeatist, untermensch, etc., for the realities that one must deal with. Pragmatism leads to happiness. Victim-correctors, therefore, are the ones who really care about victims.

If one were to apply what On Speculation and Manipulation in Therapy says, “When it works, justice is always very particular. It proceeds on a case-by-case basis with a careful weighing of the facts and an equally careful examination of the underlying logic of key arguments,” certainly the specifics of what addicts’ kids must deal with, would argue for someone else being to blame. Yet blaming others wouldn’t accomplish anything, and would divert attention from solving one’s own problems. It’s your problem, so what are you going to do about it? You’d better just serenely surrender to the inevitable. If we showed an understanding acceptance toward everyone, including the people who have the problems and aren’t dealing with them adequately, nobody would solve them, and the victims would be weakened in the long run. For these people to get on track in taking care of themselves, is the only thing that really matters. If everything must be pragmatic, nothing can be sacred. “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, is inculcated humility, expedient and well-adjusted, without coercion or authoritarian obeisance so this is pro-freedom. Even if the reason for the “negative thoughts” that the victim is washing his own brain of, is that he was unfairly overpowered, that wouldn’t be an authoritarian brainwashing, so his sincere opinion could still seem to be dirt that’s to be washed away and replaced with what he’s supposed to believe. The October, 2007 issue of Counselor, the Magazine for Addiction Professionals includes an article that says, “rigid fidelity may produce an adverse effect,” but for those who must deal with realities like this, rigid fidelity is as necessary as are adequate resiliency and coping skills. Naïveté doesn’t work. Victim-blaming optimistically and determinedly looks for very necessary self-motivated solutions, so, in the words of the Downing Street memo, “the intelligence and the facts” must be “fixed around the policy.”

Reductionism is key. Ambrose Bierce defined platitude as, “A moral without the fable,” and the self-reliant, self-responsible, morals of victim correction sound a lot better without the fables, which would have told of what the people had to deal with self-reliantly. The central message of any self-help approach for people in trouble is that to help yourself: No matter what caused your problem, you absolutely must focus your attention on correcting yourself, since you absolutely can change yourself, absolutely can’t change anyone else, and absolutely must make your life productive (whatever that requires). The real world requires certain things. Everyone must play their part. The only choice that you have is either you do whatever it takes to deal with your problem, or it doesn’t get dealt with. The only legit question is, “Can I change this?”, so no injustices could seem profound. As long as they happened in the past, they’re past history. Addicts’ friends and loved ones are the ones who are motivated to correct themselves, and they need more motivation to: change, empower themselves, accommodate to reality, be well-adjusted and productive. That’s only natural. Everyone, not just fundamentalists, must take this sort of spirituality literally. Focus on self-responsibility. Only the person who has the problem, is reliably motivated to deal with it as well as possible. We could live without moral responsibility (which we can’t count on), abstract principles like morality, etc., but can’t live without victims taking response-ability for their own welfare. Some things are luxuries; some are necessities. Addicts’ kids shouldn’t feel bad about themselves, guilty, etc., but when dealing with what their alcoholic parents do the kids should look at themselves rather than blaming others, so as they do this they should choose not to feel self-blame, and, of course, simply looking at themselves means simply looking at what they should have done better. Their self-help mentors would simply check to see how well they’re doing in following these instructions. (It’s no wonder that Should Statements are one of the single-mindedly self-responsible cognitive distortions of modern Western depression!) If one rationale for victim correction doesn’t work, it’s replaced by another. As “Mary Smith” wrote in her suicide note, “All [my psychologist] could do is nitpick about how I need to feel small + helpless,” though Mary obviously had a gutsy personality, which is typical of the self-empowering “thinking” of victim correction: plenty of all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, and disqualifying the positive. To paraphrase British prime minister David Lloyd George, such teens cannot conquer the chasms in their own lives by gingerly taking one step at a time.

And, of course, when they look at themselves to see if they have the “defects of character” that AA’s Big Book really goes into, i.e. resentment anger and/or fear, then alkies’ kids would probably find that they feel plenty of untermensch feelings, but Al-Anon doesn’t consider correcting them to be self-blame. As British author Douglas Adams wrote, “When you blame others, you give up the power to change yourself.” As Susan Faludi wrote in Backlash about writings on codependency, “Norwood’s self-help plan, modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve-step program [through Al-Anon], advises women seeking the source of their pain to refrain from looking beyond themselves, a habit she calls ‘blaming.’” Self-responsibility is necessary for victims. Backlash mentions “puerile serenity,” though contrived serenity is what’s pertinent! And we’d better not have a backlash against this knee-jerk, unconditional absolutist one-dimensional uncompromising and unquestionable (but very self-helping and self-motivated) victim correction! As Bush said in May, 2005, “In my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

Though this conviction and ideology expects people to accept a laissez faire self-responsibility that’s as extremist as the self-responsibility that Enron propounded when it seemed so red-blooded, not only would Al-Anon not seem to be extremist wing-nuts, but if you firmly disagreed you could seem to be an extremist wing-nut. As Enlightenment-era economic philosophers wrote, being productive must override everything else. Most victim-blaming (a.k.a. self-responsibility) can’t seem bad. Those who deviate from these expectations are those who’d seem to be the authoritarians, the judgmental controllers. One can’t say “no” to realism, including, “Like Archie, you should stop blaming others and look at yourself, to improve yourself and your chances!” As Libertarian Ron Paul explained Social Security,“ ...we have taught them to be dependent,” and a single-minded blaming and correction of any victims would have the same unconditional, gutsy and pro-freedom appeal. Social Darwinism protects us from all parasitism, which could only hurt the parasites. No doubt this thrilling philosophy also regards the Americans with Disabilities Act as tyrannical, so either handicapped people get jobs without the ADA, or they’ve been taught to be dependent. Realists can see the dangers that the weak would pose, unless they make great efforts to be self-reliant anyway and succeed. We mustn’t reward failure, victimhood, etc., or the weak could get what they wanted without earning it and the strong might not be motivated to achieve, so we must assume that the weak wanted to fail. This isn’t absolute power; “Archie” and those who are just as helpless can change some significant things. Such “imperfections” don’t seem nearly as scary as do comparable problems from the guv’mint. Helplessness isn’t tyranny.

The Al-Anon formula for self-help, laissez faire Social Darwinist ideology, and what “self-help” must mean in a society with rampant depression, are based on the same ideas, and come with the same frame of reference. You simply must accept whatever you get, that you’re powerless to change. As long as you can’t change what you’re afraid of, the more fear you’d feel, the more self-control you’d need in order to cope with reality. While “Archie’s” situation is certainly atypical, a society that has rampant depression yet stresses response-ability for one’s own welfare would have to make that personal response-ability, that unconditional (though each situation gives opportunities for rationales for this personal response-ability, that victim correctors could focus on). All of the advantages of “the invisible hand,” apply to the lives of “Archie” and everyone else in trouble. (If you weren’t aware of our rampant depression with self-blame, you might think that things just take care of themselves.) All of these supposed forms of individualism must indoctrinate their followers into believing in counterintuitive absolutisms such as the above, the ideal being complying with the Al-Anon “Serenely accept and courageously change” formula applied to any realities. That’s living in the real world. You do what you can. Beat the hardcore blues. No self-care could seem onerous. Whatever happens is, therefore, “life on life’s terms,” “reality,” etc. Self-responsibility serves the greater good, is a moral obligation that we can’t afford to forgive. “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” etc., are, in the end, Social Darwinism that resolutely ignores its own consequences. You get whatever you get.

Things simply have to keep functioning. If you don’t successfully deal with your own problems, who will? We must think realistically, so whatever shapes our realities shapes how we must think. If you don’t go along with the victim correction as a panacea, then that would seem to be your untermensch pathologies, character defects. Pathetic resentment is the ultimate enemy. Whatever is necessary for one to deal with his own realities self-reliantly becomes absolutely necessary, so otherwise he’d be inadequate, dysfunctional, etc. Even if he does plenty, if it’s inadequate to deal with his realities, he’d seem to be inadequate. The weak can be such a drain. Victim-blaming has advantages, such as: conventionality, pragmatism, realism, objectivity, exalting red-blooded strength, avoiding moralism, preventing manipulative and vainglorious machinations, faith that we get what we deserve, and confidence that the person who’s the most motivated to solve a problem is the one who’s in control. All that we’d have to do is treat the weak as a bunch of selfish manipulators, and we could have a de facto law of the jungle without having an official law of the jungle. Everyone must conquer their own doubts, their own “negativity,” for their own good, focusing on correcting themselves. Correcting women, poor people, etc., as if they fit the stereotypes of choosing to be weak for “fun” and/or profit, is intended to benefit them, strengthen them. Normal give-and-take, opinions about rampant depression, etc., seem too prone to manipulation, cowardice, etc. Simple wins.® Success and failure are objective, and questions of, “What’s unacceptably wrong?”, aren’t. (You’re expected to have realistic coping skills, so simply proving that what happened was wrong, isn’t enough.) That’s the real world; sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don’t. It’s astounding what one can get away with, if what we really care about is the supposed whiners, manipulators, etc. Acting pathetic is the old (pre-Reagan) way of doing things. Weakness isn’t competitive, or fun. If those judging you keep hearing from your society, that supposed victims are really manipulators, attention-seekers, whiners, etc., then that would be how those judges would be likely to judge you. (Prejudice acquires a new meaning, like Ron Paul’s: “Sometimes you have to pre-judge, since you can’t prove cunning untermensch machinations, and you should be optimistic that they could have succeeded if they really wanted to.”) Coping with reality must mean overlooking some realities. Even “Archie” doesn’t have to live in fear. You don’t deserve more than what you won. Your attention would be on what you should be doing better, not on the magnitude of the social problem.

Self-help programs like this, even those that apply to situations of unambiguous victimization, are top sellers. The alkies aren’t controlling Al-Anon members in the authoritarian, anti-freedom sense; that’s the way that life sometimes goes. We all must adjust to our realities. That’s inherent to life. This is the exciting self-reliant freedom, can-do courage, and failsafe well-adjusted forgiveness, that we’ve gotten to know and love. If it feels good, believe it. (Fighting and/or caring for the underdog might feel good, though, but we must understand how this would mollycoddle them.) Addictive personalities would feel right at home. Hans Johst said, “When I hear the word culture, I release the safety catch on my revolver,” and intellectualism could cause similar feelings, even when the supposed intellectualism is a concern about the sociology of what leads to our rampant depression. We must all be motivated to deal with our own problems independently resiliently and resourcefully. We’ll get more chances to succeed. That simply is the unconditionally self-responsible role that we must play, to keep our society functioning with plenty of self-motivation, unconditionally. If people could get what they wanted by manipulatively playing the victim role, then that’s what they’d naturally do. Simply being morally right, has never earned or achieved anything. If you’ve “really failed,” you could become a projection screen for others’ beliefs about failures. Conformists firmly believe that certain things are good, so are blinded by ideology. (“Sure, approximately 15% of the U.S. adult population suffers from a serious depressive disorder in any given year, but if you act like what’s causing your problem is what contributes to our rampant depression, that’s just your manipulative ploy!!!”)

Many want to correct victims (who can’t afford intellectualism) because they ♥♥♥ care ♥♥♥ about them, more than d