Candace Newmaker’s Experience
“Manipulation involves particularly devious or indirect methods to induce someone to do something, or behave in a certain manner.”—Stanlee Phelps and Nancy Austin, The Assertive Woman, © 1975
“Nature has produced [the intellect] for the service of an individual will; therefore it is destined to know things only in so far as they serve as the motives of such a will, not to fathom them or comprehend their true inner essence.”—Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
“God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it; Trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next—Amen.”—REINHOLD NIEBUHR
Here’s an example of some very extreme victim correction as a panacea. In its extremity, the following might seem not to represent what we’d normally encounter in our lives, whether this be from psychotherapists, or from anyone else. At the same time, in its extremity, it’s also pretty clear how those who’d do this would be very uneasy bucking the trends to an extreme degree, but would feel comfortable enough following the trends but to an extreme degree.
While many things could be said about the case of Candace Newmaker, one is relevant to basically everyone in both Western society, and the countries that, with Globalism, are becoming Westernized. That is, this strange tendency to treat manipulation as if it’s the ultimate moral hazard, which could be very powerful, very forceful and compelling, and one can’t defend himself against it without looking as if he’s re-victimizing victims. Americans could have noticed that along with the Reagan Legacy, is a tendency to anathematize “victimology,” “victimhood,” etc. What better way would there possibly be to make those on welfare, those suing big companies, those claiming that when they tried to get jobs they’d been discriminated against, etc., look as if they’re the problems? If only such people fought their own battles, self-reliantly made the best of the cards that life had dealt them, then problems would get solved through self-help.
It could also seem logical not only to treat manipulation as the ultimate moral hazard, but also to suspect it where it can’t be proven. Sure, those who are suspected of committing “sinful” behavior are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Yet if we presumed everybody who could seem responsible for a problem, innocent until proven guilty, then some problems would have no one taking responsibility for them. Not only that, manipulation is insidious, so if we presumed those suspected of manipulation, innocent until proven guilty, a lot of manipulation would keep its manipulative power. Also, since even sincere assertiveness reflects the self-will of the assertive person, any statements of, “But you owe me!”, could be called manipulative to some degree.
Sure, this might sound like just a rationale that all psychologists held accountable for malfeasance, would naturally want to use since this rationale would let them evade responsibility. Yet this is very much along the same lines of what psychologists would try to get their clients to believe in. After all, if they all chose to think in a stolid and Stoic fashion, they could cope with a lot more than if they didn’t.
This is all very systematic. As the Philadelphia Grand Jury report on their Archdiocese’s enabling of pedo-priests put it,
Though, as the Learning About Depression webpage on the Zoloft website, says, “If you have depression, this sad mood along with other symptoms can last weeks, months, or even years if not treated. Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or a character flaw. It’s a real medical condition, but there are ways to successfully treat depression.... Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults,” that perspective could ask only whether this consists of 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions, or 34,000,000 rather severe character flaws.
The homepage of the Mental Illness—What a Difference a Friend Makes website, by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, says, “An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older—about one in four adults—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.” As the title suggests, this website is about getting the friends of the 26.2% of the American adult population, to support these people rather than stigmatizing them. The ways in which one friend treats another, is one of the few sociological factors of this huge social problem, that we could honorably take seriously. If we take the other sociological factors seriously, we could seem to be trying to manipulate like untermenschen, and/or to restrict the übermenschen. It’s as if the magnitude of this social problem could just be brushed aside.
The April, 2001 issue of Psychology Today magazine, says in an article about how people could better manage the psychiatric disorders of family members, regardless of the causes, “More than 100 million Americans have a close family member who suffers from a major mental illness. Of the 10 leading causes of disability, half are psychiatric. By the year 2020, the major cause of disability in the world may be major depression.”
The Secret Life of the Brain, by neurologist Richard Restak, says, “Over the next century, depression will be the number one cause of disability in the developing world and the number four cause of death worldwide. Currently it afflicts 17 percent of people in the United States—12 to 13 percent of men and over twice as many women (about 25 percent). That breaks down into somewhere between 15 and 25 million Americans with a depressive episode in a given year.”
Raising Depression-Free Children, by Kathleen Panuna Hockey, says in its introduction, “The problem is so serious that the World Health Organization has predicted that by the year 2020, when today’s children reach adulthood, depression will rank as the second leading cause of ‘lost years of healthy life’—behind only ischemic heart disease. In 1990, depression ranked fourth.” On the same page, this goes on to say, “The fact that a child is at risk for depression by being born into a family with a history of depression, being raised in poverty, or having health problems doesn’t mean that child is destined to become depressed,” and that this means prevention through “resiliency parenting.” And of course, the point of this book isn’t to address a social problem.
When you’ve seen ads and other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? This not only is a social problem, but it’s one of world history’s most grievous. Yet it seems only natural to see such statistics, including those which tell of Globalism increasing the rate of depression in Eastern countries, and think, ‘OK, so how do I treat my problem, or my family member’s problem, as pragmatically and resiliently as possible?’ Everyone knows that what’s at fault, is inside the millions of victims. Of course, if someone treated that as a spreading social problem, as it deserves to be treated, he could very easily be labeled a ‘victimologist,’ a manipulative mollycoddle, etc. According to the neo-Buddhist Serenity Prayer school of psychology, the fact that the person who has the problem, would simply be held response-able for dealing with it by courageously changing what he could and serenely accepting what he couldn’t, would be a fait accompli.”
It seems that we must fear the untermenschen and their victim-power, and mustn’t fear the übermenschen and their freedoms. Victim correction as a panacea tends to look a lot like German conceptions of: human nature, what each person has a right to expect of others, and how respectable are the strong or the weak. While we tend to associate this simply with the acceptance if not respect given to aggression, some, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, realized that this acceptance of aggression requires that weak simply deal with the aggression that impacts their own lives. The basic idea of The Serenity Prayer, which is the basic idea of much modern psychology, is that if you’re strong then naturally you’d courageously change reality, and if you’re weak then naturally you’d serenely accept reality. Schopenhauer was a main inspiration of such stereotypical Krauts as Nietzsche and Wagner, so one could call both of them Schopenhauerian.
At the very least, the pretense under which the invasion of Iraq was started, was manipulative. Frank Rich’s The Greatest Story Ever Sold, The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America, also tells of other Machiavellian manipulative tactics to sell the Iraq war, i.e., “Walter Pincus and Dana Priest of The Washington Post then filled in some specific details, reporting that Dick Cheney and his most senior aide, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, had frequently visited the CIA in the year before the invasion, pressuring intelligence analysts for assessments that backed up administration claims of Saddam WMDs and of an Iraq-Qaeda connection.” If someone on the untermensch-mollycoddle side of the dichotomy pulled a stunt like that, it would have seemed unambiguously manipulative, perfidious. The heart of all ignominiously cunning manipulation, is emotionally moving claims of victimhood. Yet when someone on the übermensch-redblood side of the dichotomy does that, excuses seem very plausible.
A webpage about Hitler, A Born Soldier, says, “Hitler’s favorite writer during the war was the early 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.... Hitler, like Thomas Mann, was greatly impressed by Schopenhauer’s book: The World as Will and Idea. Hitler read the book over and over again during the war and was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer’s teaching.”
Schopenhauer’s magnum opus was a two-book set, published in 1819, titled The World as Will and Representation. That title alone is a good summary of modern victim correction in psychology, including the interplay between psychoanalytic ideas and ideas from cognitive therapy, though neither of these existed when The World as Will and Representation was published. Another way of saying “The World as Will and Representation,” is, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.” This tends to have four basic aspects:
The aggressive, sinful will is treated as psychoanalysis would treat it. It seems ineradicable so we must take it as a given, attempts to get it under control seem controlling and repressive so they’ll only have bad consequences in the long term, etc. Since strength is so respectable, people should show strong resolve in self-reliantly taking care of their own problems, “strength of character” means a stolid of character, etc.
Therefore, we’ll simply have to deal with such realities, by representing what happens to ourselves in a Stoic fashion, a la cognitive therapy. Since cognitive therapy arose in the 1960s based on the then-popular Eastern transcendence, this could be called “Calcutta survival skills.” What Schopenhauer called “representation,” how one represents his experiences to himself, is the same thing as what cognitive therapists would now call his “outlook.” Schopenhauer admitted that he was a pessimist, and on Majikthise’s Philosophers’ Theme Songs webpage, the theme song assigned to him is “Desolation Row,” but the ideas that Schopenhauer-style self-discipline would put into one’s head would, in all circumstances, be optimistic. For example, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” or anything that implies this, is pessimistic, but that transcendence would lead to a positive outlook in even desperate circumstances. While aggressive and sinful feelings seem ineradicable, hurt feelings seem very eradicable.
If they don’t adopt a sublime serenity, that would seem to be their shameful expecting the world to be as they’d have it. Impugning the weak is pretty much the norm. Since their intellects are destined to know things only in so far as they serve as the motives of their , even their sincere opinions could seem to serve ulterior motives. Even if a cognitive therapist believes that aggressive and sinful feelings are just as eradicable as are hurt feelings, someone who refuses to have his own aggressive thoughts reformed and re-engineered would seem excusably übermensch, while someone who refuses to have his own hurt thoughts reformed and re-engineered would seem inexcusably untermensch.
This, explicitly, is the world as will and representation, since this is to constitute one’s entire worldview. The whole point is to deal with your own problems as effectively and serenely as possible. The only legitimate question that one may ask about them, is, “Can I change this?” The only difference that the answer to that question, would make, is whether one is to deal with his own problem by courageously changing it, or serenely accepting it. As long as he’s not powerless to change it, the of his objections to it wouldn’t be condemned as “resentful,” “whiny,” etc., so he wouldn’t have to represent it to himself in a contrived, nice, fashion.
The following, from The World as Will and Representation, pretty much sums up this stereotypically German attitude: “Wrong through violence is not so ignominious for the perpetrator as wrong through cunning, because the former is evidence of physical strength, which in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race. The latter, on the other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays weakness, and at the same time degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral being.” Also, “The concept of good is divided into two subspecies, that of the directly present satisfaction of the will in each case, and that of its merely indirect satisfaction concerning the future, in other words, the agreeable and the useful. The concept of the opposite, so long as we are speaking of beings without knowledge, is expressed by the word bad, more rarely and abstractly by the word evil, which therefore denotes everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case.” Since seeing something as bad or evil, could seem to result from the striving of the will, sincere objections could be treated as cunning, as wanting the world to be as one would have it. Hitler saw Jews in general as manipulative “parasites,” so he clearly was extremely obsessed with the idea of fighting manipulative parasites.
Replace “violence” with “toughness,” and you’d have the American version of this. As William James, Henry’s brother, wrote a century ago, Americans tend to classify people as either redbloods or mollycoddles. Those who are tough powerfully impress the human race in all circumstances, while those who are weak seem ignominiously cunning, manipulative. Also, though the old German version of this idea said that those who seem ignominiously cunning are more dishonorable than are those who are tough, the new version stresses that the supposedly mercenary “mollycoddles” are more dangerous since you can’t defend yourself against tears and other “victim power.” Manipulation seems to be a major moral hazard. The Fine Art of Propaganda, by Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee, from 1939, tells of the “World Service, a leaflet circulated by the Nazis to ‘reveal’ the ‘machinations of the Jewish under-world’...”, which expressed this fear that intellectual ideas are actually manipulative.
To say that your feelings that something was bad or evil reflect a striving of your , is to say that that they’re manipulative, reflecting a self-serving hidden agenda that even you probably aren’t aware of. All you know is that you’re right. A central concept to Nazism is that even the most sincere fights for what’s morally right, reflect the aggressive but insidious of those who fight for this, but to see even such sincerity as self-serving is usually tenable, and much more likely to get productive results than would be holding the morally responsible people, morally accountable.
Of course, the bad or evil person’s bad or evil choices, his belief that excusing or forgiving them is what’s right, etc., certainly reflect the striving of his , but it would seem that we simply must accept that that’s the way that human nature is.
Pat Buchanan, in a syndicated column in 1977, wrote, “...despite Hitler’s anti-Semitic and genocidal tendencies, he was an individual of great courage... Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.” The “defects of character” stressed by AA’s Big Book, resentment anger and fear in general, are the same as what Buchanan and Hitler meant by “character flaws,” i.e. not handling one’s own problems (whatever they may be) with enough stolid and self-reliant backbone. “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” as well as, “Whatever your problem is, courageously change what you can and serenely accept what you can’t,” also define “character flaws” as supposed weakness masquerading as morality. And weakness masquerading as morality is the essence of untermensch manipulation. Sure, other kinds of manipulation exist, but they’re not the kind we’re afraid of.
Agent Orange has a webpage on how shocked Reinhold Niebuhr was about the fact that Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group (now called “Moral Re-Armament”; “Oxford” must have sounded too dreadfully intellectual), the conservative Christian group that AA grew out of, had similar attitudes toward Hitler. Niebuhr was a hell-raiser, before Stalinism made him fatalistic about human nature. Yet if any organization preaches the Serenity Prayer at people, the final result would be the same, that self-reliant seems good, and weakness that tries to get persuasive strength from emotion and/or abstractions seems intolerably bad. As the history of The AA School of Self-Help Psychology shows, Nazism, minus anti-Semitism and committing outrageous aggression, equals taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as you’d have it.
Manic-Depressive Illness, Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin and Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, says, in its chapter on personality differences, “Character has been defined as ‘personality evaluated’—that aspect of an individual which bears a moral stamp and reflects the person’s integrative and organizing functions. The concept of character is employed less frequently in the United States than in Europe, although it is often used interchangeably with that of personality.” Actually, the word character is used plenty in the United States, whether it be in comments on depression or from the likes of Pat Buchanan and Frank Buchman, to pass judgment on how integrated and organized are traumatized people. After all, such judgments aren’t moralistic. Someone absolutely has to provide our society’s homeostasis, since things simply have to remain integrated and organized.
The new version of this Wagnerianism is more Nazified than the original. Sure, to some degree you could see that anywhere in the Globalized economy, as in the Times of India article about the Mumbai subway bombings that said, “Good Samaritans came in every shape and size on Tuesday evening—the much-reviled slum dwellers living near the railway tracks... who without a second thought rushed to the help of victims.” Yet in Western countries is where you’re most likely to see this sort of standard of “personal responsibility” being preached the most firmly.
(Otto Ambros, production chief of I. G. Farben’s Zyklon-B poison gas facilities)
Another very German pattern that this fits, is that of The Big Lie. It seems that the victims are the schemers, and the schemers are the victims. If you disagree with this, you’d hear logic that has the appeal of The Big Lie. That is, that this may seem illogical to those who aren’t in the know, but those who think in the right way could see it. You want to be one of those who are smart enough to “get it,” don’t you? You must ignore any awareness of what’s wrong with what you’re supposed to believe, since your skepticism comes from what’s wrong with mollycoddle human nature and naturally you want to rise above that, etc. With a small lie, skepticism would seem only natural, but with The Big Lie, any skepticism would seem to be missing the point.
The following would be an example of “resiliency parenting”:
uch is Victim Correction as a Panacea~
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. 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. 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. 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, 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, 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, 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.
(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. 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. “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. 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. 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. 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. If those judging you keep hearing 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. 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. 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. Many want to correct victims (who can’t afford intellectualism) because they care about them, more than do the petty bourgeois who say vaingloriously that they care, but aren’t realistic or confident about the individual’s self-reliance. We must stand up for self-reliant freedom. You can’t prove most manipulative, passive-aggressive, codependent, etc., machinations, so “presumed innocent of machinations until proven guilty” is out of the question. Whenever tenable, see problems as the victims’ free choice, eagerly believing that we have self-determination! Before the Reagan/Thatcher Era, caring about the causes of our rampant depression would have seemed only natural, but now, truly caring about most of them would seem to reflect a dangerously untermensch character. Even if it had been proven what normalized helplessness contributes to our rampant depression, those who are well-adjusted would have to respond to it with, “Sure, what’s happening to you is the sort of thing that’s been proven to contribute to our rampant depression, but everyone knows that when that sort of thing happens to you, you’re just going to have to deal with it.” The red-blooded, pro-freedom, and pro-self-reliance cultural norms behind this are sacrosanct, so naturally we accept the consequences. Both the logic and the consequences, are predictable and stereotypical. As “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” says, we mustn’t try to re-engineer aggressive human nature, and must re-engineer passive human nature. Expecting believers to give up victim-blaming, would be like expecting addicts to give it up. Sure, William Styron wrote, “To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists,” but if we were guaranteed safety from what causes our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., we wouldn’t have enough motivation to earn and achieve. Faith in anything would make one happier, including faith in this. People tend to believe what they want to believe. No matter what happens to you, if you didn’t have faith in your opportunities to succeed you’d seem unpatriotic, while, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, is patriotic. (“The weak are at fault,” is the last refuge of both the scoundrel, and the sociopath.) Optimism that you’d succeed if only you were good enough, seems mandatory. Response-ability for one’s own welfare would work for everyone, and keeps everyone self-motivated. All three of these forms of responsible “individualism” would preach the basic ideas of the same self-reliant and self-responsible platitudes over and over again, like a dogma or cult since free thought regarding this would allow untermensch weakness and manipulative strength, and who’d fix the consequences of that? All this mustn’t ever seem repulsive. This could even answer The Big Questions of Life, since well-motivated and objective personal response-ability for one’s own problems, could lead to more peace and productivity than would moral rules. Motivate, motivate, motivate!!! With enough mass hysteria, conformity, compliance, and condemnation of whining, people could think that serious depressive disorders affecting 34,000,000 American adults, consists of either 34,000,000 rather severe character defects, or 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions.
Self-responsibility along the lines of the law of the jungle, works: eventually, if you try hard enough (which is along the same self-motivated lines as, “Greed is good. Greed works.”) As Gordon Gekko said, this must be The American Way, since anything else would rely too much on altruism and/or opinion-based restriction, coddle the whiny losers too much, etc. The law of the jungle protects us from untermensch manipulation, parasitism, quitting, etc. The dangers that are feared, are thoughts, feelings, and actions of the weak, the victims. Social Darwinism destroys, but protects us from failures in fixing destruction, and from whiny “weak characters.” Very little pragmatic victim-blaming would seem undoubtedly bad (especially to those who aren’t intellectualist). If your nephew died young because his priest had molested him, you might even put The Serenity Prayer on the homepage of his memorial website, since that prayer tells you how to cope with literally anything. Endurability might seem very basic to life, but in some situations, expecting endurability would be unrealistic. One depression is a tragedy; millions of depressions is a statistic. Victim-blaming develops a life of its own, since that simply is how things must be taken care of, with plenty of reliable self-motivation. The real world will make its demands! Objectivity, Objectivism, means might makes right, since might and victory are objective, and moral wrongness is both subjective and emotionalistic. Sure, Helen Keller wrote, “I do not want the peace that passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace,” but when we’re in trouble, what we do and don’t want is a bunch of BS. Whatever applies to addicts’ kids, also applies to oppressed minorities, etc., since inadequate adjustment and adaptation to one’s own realities, would cause the same sorts of problems for anyone. When it comes to moral responsibility, the slate is basically wiped clean. The more that you’d care about your own helplessness, the more helpless you’d become. Such realism is tautological, begging the question, “Your dad’s addiction is reality, so if you don’t adjust to it and function with it you’re maladjusted and dysfunctional, since that’s reality.” Everyone must get on with life. As Fleischer, Al-Anon, the beginning of Lee Greenwood’s Reagan-Revolutionary patriotic praise song God Bless the USA, etc., take for granted, victims who don’t do their best to “move on” would seem to be going against basic American expectations for resilient: self-reliance, self-responsibility, maturity, realism, etc. Some things seem to matter, some things don’t, and it soon becomes very obvious that the pragmatic ones do.
As you’d live your life, you’d naturally focus on how you could correct your ineffective reactions, efforts, etc. In the entire world, few could afford not to deal adequately with their own realities, and become losers; problems happen. All three forms of “individualism” would predictably hold that in reality, the ultimate reason for our unnaturally high rates of depression, anxiety disorders, etc., is a whiny and negativist victim culture, and or something else that’s simply mollycoddle. (Anything could be ultimately blamed on the victim not stopping preventing or dealing with it well enough. He’d also have plenty of victim-power.) This offers the hope of unconditional solutions, and in the real world, we can’t afford conditions. This is optimistic that the person who really wants to solve the problem, has self-determination. Satisfying winners’
