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he Tragedy of Victim Correction as a Panacea~

People simply have to adjust and adapt to reality.

If you don’t, you could be maladjusted.

As the above says, this is Al-Anon approved literature, for Alateen. You couldn’t make this stuff up! Persuading people 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 (“Everybody knows that The Serenity Prayer is good.”) 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’.” Yet no concerns that would interfere with the victims’ self-responsibility could matter, since in the long run, caring about them would only mollycoddle and weaken the people who’d have to take care of themselves optimally. George Vincent wrote, “To survive growing up in an alcoholic family is second only to surviving the Holocaust,” but the big difference is that despite the fears that addicts’ kids feel, they aren’t really in mortal danger, so Buddhists, etc., could say that these fears are only illusions. Yet though it might seem only natural to want to feel better by practicing Buddhistic self-discipline and self-re-education, and this doesn’t involve any medication, this is hardly natural. In the words of Ayn Rand, “We the Living” could very much object to this sort of de rigueur coping with helplessness, Stoically!

Frank Buchman, leader of the Oxford Groups, the club on which AA and then Al-Anon was based and until recently was called “Moral Re-Armament,” said, “D’you know Heinrich Himmler?... Say, you ought to know Heinrich. He’s a great lad.... [Hitler] lets us have house-parties whenever we like.” Anti-Nazi British travel-writer and journalist Robert Byron, who got a chance to observe Nazism up close, wrote in his diary, “Himmler apparently dotes on the Oxford Group [How cute.] and writes to its English members discussing their troubles with them,” so he was their Dear Abby. This was the same Himmler who said, in his speech on October 4, 1943 to the SS Group Leaders in Poznan, “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard,” but that personal strength concerned one of the Nazi practices that Buchman didn’t like. It’s pretty obvious what the “Dear Abby” version of that would advise those in trouble, who are members of an honored group of people who are working on their own resolute and (probably unconditional and unquestioning) impassively accepting attitudes. Anything less than, “Happiness is an inside job,” (in general), or, “Things happen. It’s what we do when they happen that’s key,” (in general), would have been too weak-spirited and blaming for Himmler, so he was their perfect “Dear Abby.” You must accept that if you win, you win, and if you lose, you lose. Übermensch imperfection such as sinfulness would have to seem at least forgivable, while untermensch supposed imperfection would have to seem to be an insidious (as in “the hidden lie,” and, “We are all victims of victims.”) expression of weak people’s SELF-WILLS.

As far as self-help is concerned, the bottom line is that you’re simply going to have to deal with your own problem whatever it may be, and expectations that one simply deal with normal problems are interchangeable with expectations that one simply deal with an addict in the family. “Personal strength,” “strength of character,” etc., tend to mean literally strength, transcending “weak” but natural and warranted feelings. For anyone in trouble, this would be: self-help, self-responsibility, self-care, self-protection, self-actualization, self-empowerment, etc. As any conservative social analysis would say, you, that teen who looks like Archie, etc. could think productively, or think counterproductively (though if you’re the problem person, then probably we’ll just have to accept your counterproductive thinking, since people aren’t perfect and we mustn’t try to re-engineer human nature). Twisting reality in “positive” ways is realistic, since it increases people’s chances of success. It’s amazing which moral norms could (i.e. must) seem less important than whether or not the person with the problem is doing what’s necessary for him to overcome it successfully. That seems good; “whining” seems bad. This is the sort of Populism that H. G. Wells called “magnificent stupid honesty,” since it tries to prevent self-interested manipulable and manipulative abstractions that would say that you’d deserve more than what you’d won. (This “honesty” often has big unintended consequences, but could seem all-important.)

In fact, though we’re supposed to take addictive behavior as a given since addiction is a disease, the law certainly doesn’t treat addicts as not guilty by reason of insanity, one can’t be brought out of legal insanity through “hitting bottom” or an intervention, and, as the publishers’ notes of Gene M. Heyman’s Addiction: A Disorder of Choice says, “He shows that the causes of addiction, its control, and its potential reduction are the same as the causes, control, and reduction of all voluntary behavior.” (Certainly you could imagine what would result if someone said at an Al-Anon meeting, “But when he relapsed, it was because he got angry and chose to, not because he saw something that triggered a compulsion to drink! That means that my objections are legitimate!”, or even, “But the person who caused this problem, whom I can’t change, isn’t addicted!”) Yet whether or not addiction is involved, you could always find some sophistry to make courageously changing what you can (yourself) and serenely accepting what you can’t (everyone else) seem legitimate, and ignore any facts that would disrupt this pragmatism; form follows function. Both an acceptance of an addiction, and an acceptance of aggressive human nature, are fatalism about unrestrained desires, what the pleasure centers of our brains make us do, etc. And the more that we serenely accept übermensch, active, imperfections, the more that we can’t afford to accept the untermensch, passive, imperfections of those hurt by them, and who, therefore, must deal with them in order not to be maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional. If this wasn’t as simplistic and resolute as Reagan, their awareness that they’re victims would leave them both too weak by feeling helplessness and making unrealistic expectations, and too strong in that they could get certain supposed benefits of victimhood (insidiously and unprovably, of course), and “control of others.”

Your realities are whatever they are, and either you deal with them or you suffer the consequences. NOTHING CAN LIMIT HOW MUCH ALL THIS COULD AFFECT YOU. To paraphrase a Catholic riddle: “What’s the difference between a victim corrector and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist.” As pioneering behaviorist John B. Watson wrote, “The raw fact that you, as a psychologist, if you are to remain scientific, must describe the behavior of man in no other terms than those you use in describing the behavior of the ox you slaughter, drove and still drives many timid souls away from behaviorism,” and the only real difference between behaviorism and cognitive therapy is that it credits humanity with self-control abilities that animals don’t have, such as the ability to choose to serenely accept hardship and sinfulness; training people who are motivated to be trained is a lot easier. (This self-control would benefit the person who serenely accepts the hardship, sinfulness, etc. that he’s helpless to change, whether or not the person who caused the problem is addicted. ) As Paul Krugman wrote, “The truth is that good old-fashioned demand-side macroeconomics has a lot to offer in our current predicament—but its defenders lack all conviction, while its critics are filled with a passionate intensity,” and one could say the same for debates between those who stress personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s own choices, which could usually be called “blaming,” “guilt-based,” “controlling,” etc., and the gutsy people who stress red-blooded personal response-ability for one’s own welfare, which could always be called “self-help,” “self-empowerment,” “realism,” etc. As the Great Crash of 2008 shows, some things will never change.

THE GREATEST RISK IS NOT TAKING ONE, AIG ad from 2001, so if you tried to restrain this you’d seem profoundly: weak, whiny, defeatist, controlling, unrealistic, counterproductive, opinionated, manipulative, negative, moralistic, etc. Sure, post-scandal AIG CEO Edward M. Liddy said, “I have seen the good side of capitalism. But over the past six months, since agreeing to take the reins of AIG and reviewing how it was run in prior years, I have also seen instances of the bad side of capitalism,” but one could also call the gutsiness of AIG in its PIG era, “character-building,” giving plenty of backbone and fortitude.

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Sure, Rush Limbaugh is more unpopular than Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, and conservatives could be afraid that such aggressiveness looks “ugly” to the public. Yet, especially if you’re in big trouble, if you thought like Limbaugh and the other attack politicians then you’d face up to your problems more serenely and courageously, and we dare not care how profoundly ugly is coaching “Archie,” etc., into having attitudes of, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!” If Himmler had sent you some “Dear Abby” letters that didn’t mention the Nazi practices that Buchman didn’t like, the advice that the letters would have given would have helped you become more resilient, courageous, self-responsible, realistic, and abiding by Gelassenheit (a fatalism that teaches that willfulness leads to self-defeating frustration if you’re helpless to get what you want or need), so you would have ended up with a stronger character. With that approach you’d be more likely to succeed, and that’s good, maybe irreplaceable. Your natural objections to this would be counterproductive (though you’re free not to hold others personally responsible by these standards, as long as you hold yourself responsible by them). The same would go for minimizing any “whiny” lessons we might learn from the Great Crash of 2008. If we can’t change wretched excesses on Wall Street but can change victims’ not fixing the consequences adequately, then either we correct the victims or we’ll have a dysfunctional society. Since we simply must solve our problems, our perceptions must be distorted in order to fit in with this; there is no alternative.

As Adrian Furnham’s 50 Psychology Ideas You Really Need to Know says, “People who believe that the events that occur in their lives are the result of their own behaviour and/or ability, personality and effort have less stress than those who believe events in their lives to be a function of luck, chance, fate, God, powerful others or powers beyond their control.” The self-responsible would also have the advantage of resiliently and resourcefully looking for solutions, with plenty of determination, and the worse that their problems are, the more important this would be. Blaming the victim always leads to the most pragmatic, well-motivated, solution, so the necessity of this isn’t partial, relative, or conditional. We must fix those who’d want to be fixed, and they should want to be able to solve their own problems as well as they could. Whether or not the person who’s causing you big problems is addicted, simply holding you response-able for your own welfare would be vitally realistic, since only you have a reliable motivation to solve your problem, and your solving it can always be treated as just a temporary hurdle so this, too, shall pass. Whenever you tell your own story of someone causing you big problems, you could always follow it with, “So how could I have helped myself by reacting better?”, and your advisor could always follow it with, “If you correct what you can change, yourself, you’d benefit.” If you have what those who ran the Soviet psychiatric system called, “inflexibility of convictions,” you’d be thinking as if it’s more important to be right than to be happy (or productive), which of course must stop and it wouldn’t be necessary to lock you up or even do anything unnatural to make your thinking fit in, even to the point of alcoholics’ kids believing, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself, so I’m serene and courageous!” Brainwashing, washing the brain of supposed dirt, could result from re-education camps, or from free-lance re-education that the educated people want since they want to fit in. As Archie’s realities show, the worse that your problem is, the more important it is that you think “right.” African-American street slang for victim-blaming is, “The Flip Game.”

Realism also has a gutsy appeal to it.

(Cartoon generated by “Build Your Own Meat”)

Nothing can drive anyone away from this sort of cognitive therapy, just as nothing can drive Archie away from his unconditional and immoderate, contrived serenity and courage, though Gelassenheit is very unnatural social engineering. In self-help books about codependency, stories in which the problem spouses are addicted are absolutely interchangeable with stories in which the problem spouses simply choose to act like buttheads, since in both cases the victims are equally unable to change the victimizers’ behavior. Whatever you must do to take care of yourself, is whatever you must do to take care of yourself, so you must look at yourself when you’re looking for things that you could correct in order to solve your own problems. Sure, the Financial Times on March 10, 2009 quoted Bernie Sucher, the head of Merrill Lynch operations in Moscow, as saying, “Our world is broken—and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it. The compass by which we steered as Americans has gone. The last time I ever saw anything like this, in terms of the sense of disorientation and loss, was among my friends [in Russia] when the Soviet Union broke up,” but Americans have been culturally conditioned to serenely accept economic difficulties, and not to accept supposedly manipulative whining about them. Those with plenty of “personal strength” would tolerate Wall Street Darwinism and its effects. Archie could “get on with life” since folk wisdom, common sense, says that that’s what everyone must do; everyone could “stick it out.” (On June 19, 2009 [just before the threatened bloodshed began, “On 9/11 we were all Americans, and tonight we’re all Iranians.”], when Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that they were going to crack down on the protests of the election fraud, he said, “If the political elite want to ignore the law or break the law then they are taking wrong measures...,” so dogmatists of all stripes excite their followers by condemning the supposed intellectual elite.) Archie, and others who are powerless, couldn’t afford the dysfunctionality of feeling disoriented or lost. Realism requires that this self-responsibility be the lynchpin, so any concern that would conflict with this must be shrugged off. (Of course, this self-response-ability must include the same self-justifying, fatalistic, conformist, simplistic, “upbeat,” absolutist, unconditional, predictable, illusions that got our economy into such trouble.) We all must adjust to and deal with reality, and others determine what is reality for you, which tends to mean that the strong (whether or not they’re addicted) determine what is reality for the weak. Resiliency is everything.

That’s why self-help in general tends to admire Al-Anon, The Serenity Prayer, etc., and this self-reliant ethos. The only thing that really matters is what you do and don’t have the power to change. This is how the ideal American faces his own problems. Since Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA who wrote much of their Big Book, was a stockbroker around the time of the Great Depression, one could call this The Great Depression Stockbroker’s Approach to Self-Responsibility; we’d have to be firm with those victims and whiners who object to productivity that involves strong character, such as “creative destruction,” and, “Your problem is your problem.” (The economist who, just after the Great Depression, came up with the concept of creative destruction, Joseph Schumpeter, also wrote during the Depression that recovery from it, “is sound only if it [comes] of itself. For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatening business with another [worse] crisis ahead.”) Being morally right isn’t good enough, and might even look like a vainglorious and manipulative evasion of real responsibility. As any cognitive therapist could tell you, those whose thinking is well-trained are those who could best cope with reality in a society with rampant depression, especially just after financial meltdowns. If they don’t adjust to reality, they’d just have to get re-educated. Winning debates that would prove that you’re in the right, isn’t how you win in life; you win by taking personal response-ability for your own welfare, which comes with its own set of ethical values. Degradation is just a state of mind, that could be called egotistical (“I don’t deserve this!”). Literally and inevitably, whatever anyone’s life is (including during the Great Depression), is “life on life’s terms,” “reality,” “life’s challenges,” etc., for him, what he must deal with in order to seem to have a strong character and adequate sense of responsibility. Hardship, others’ sinfulness, etc., build character, just as economic recessions motivate efficiency and give us more “creative destruction.” You’d be amazed how easily such anti-judgmental, anti-moralistic, etc., people have to criticize victims for having characters that aren’t strong enough, since they have to be strong enough to deal with their own problems.

On the CNN Money Summit program of January 30, 2009, Katie Benner, a writer from Fortune magazine, said, “It’s sort of like the moral hazard question and blaming people and feeling betrayed. You have to put that aside and just work together [until, of course, these same financial companies resume their Darwinist approaches]. It’s like you can’t divorce the financial system. It’s not like a spouse you can get rid of because they betrayed you. We’re stuck with one another,” which is what your classic codependent enabling relationship looks like, especially when a Wall Street business carries on as if the more that its recklessness could hurt the financial system, the more that the government must bail it out if it fails, because of the “systemic risk” that would result from the company going bankrupt. (Or, it could just threaten that the economy might melt down irretrievably if the company doesn’t get bailed out, which has been called “the ultimate Roach Motel,” since even if the crisis begins for the most surprising and uncontrollable reason, once you get in you can’t get out.) Those who’d disagree with what she said would seem unrealistic, since such companies would have that power, which isn’t government tyranny, and the government bailouts would seem necessary.y.

internal Lehman Brothers document

“Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it, and if I don’t then I’ll be having a pity-party,” doesn’t seem to be moral relativism. If just about everyone in a society didn’t define “personal responsibility” in the same way and truly believe it, then different people would play by different rules, and plenty of people wouldn’t take the rules to heart when determination would be most necessary. If Al-Anon/Alateen’s norms values definitions and expectations disagreed with those of Western cultures, then new members would feel culture shock and offense about divergent values, and people outside the groups wouldn’t consider those to be character-building. Since you absolutely must focus your attention on what you should do better to solve your own problems whatever they may be, you must think along the lines of the victim-self-blaming of modern Western depression, which Dr. David Burns, in Feeling Good, describes as: All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filter, Disqualifying the Positive, Jumping to Conclusions, Magnification [of what you can change] and Minimization [of what you can’t], Emotional Reasoning, Should Statements, Labeling and Mislabeling, and Personalization, i.e. attributing everything to your own reactions inadequacies and failures since you can change them, i.e. “Things happen. It’s what we do when they happen that’s key,” in general. Archie was trained to face his helplessness caused by someone else, with, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, while it would have been more natural to think, “I’ll try to figure out what was my fault, and to what degree.” Predictably, anyone who’s only partially solved his own problem must focus his attention on the one thing he’s failed to solve. The fix is in (though fixed by untermensch-bashing cultural norms rather than by a conspiracy).

Likewise, you’d simply have to deal with whatever consequences of 2008’s economic meltdown, “Our entire economy is in danger,” would affect you, including the consequences of the government’s strong reluctance to “control” the businesses it should have been regulating adequately and “great, great confidence in our capital markets and in our financial institutions.” That’s how people in trouble must take care of themselves self-reliantly. As Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson said on Larry King Live on March 9, 2009 about a nearby shantytown close to where a Depression-era shantytown once stood, “And I think what’s happening in our city is we have to make sure that we have tough love. We have to find a balance being compassionate on one hand, and then also a zero tolerance.” The most crucial thing in our economy is that people feel motivated to do what they must do, and whatever are the consequences of that, are the consequences. Intercultural studies have consistently found that self-blame as a symptom of depression, anxiety, etc., is unique to Western and Westernized people. Response-ability for your own welfare, means response-ability for how well you’ve faired. Depressed people who’ve lived outside of the modern West have tended to feel paranoid, but modern Westerners, whether depressed or not, tend to figure that even if someone did “get you,” that would mean only that you lost the battle so you’re a loser; you must “look at yourself” so you could independently resiliently and resourcefully find a solution to your problem. In the long run, it would get solved. Once anyone has caused you a problem, he’d be helpless to turn back the clock and undo it and you’d be response-able for yuor own welfare, so he’d be the helpless one and you’d be the responsible one.

Naturally you’d have a zero tolerance toward your own serious problems that you’ve so far failed to solve. We take for granted that this is what “personal responsibility” sometimes has to mean, just as we usually take for granted that most of what causes our rampant depression and anxiety is just life’s normal imperfection. Bill Wilson’s attitude toward losers (however they lost) who don’t just deal with their own problems, was basically the same as Rick Santelli’s is now. Evasions of, and even weakness and failures in, this are the sort of breakdown of personal responsibility that we do seriously try to stop, without seeming naïve about human nature. Self-help means that if it’s your problem then you provide the help, which is why self-help for people in trouble in general has really taken to the AA-Al-Anon approach, so Archie is more than just emblematic of self-reliant self-empowerment for people in trouble in a society with rampant depression. One simply has to do certain things to get through life, and anything that would conflict with them can’t seem more important or pressing. Sure, the government can afford to balance a zero tolerance with (relative) compassion, but you can’t. Even Lehman Brothers’ in-house Introduction to Management course stressed that managers show empathy toward employees (We’ll find out how much greed and stupidity this empathy applied to.), but we mustn’t show empathy toward those who don’t serenely accept whatever they can’t change. Just as “The Greenspan Put” was whatever the economic problem, lower the interest rate, one could say that “The Wilson Put” is whatever your personal problem is, correct you. All this has the simplistic emotionalist and insistent quality of anti-intellectualism. As the Wikipedia webpage on Phil Gramm begins, “Gramm often noted in his political campaigns that he had repeated three grades in school but had overcome his academic deficiencies by hard work.”

(“I only want to help!”)

This realism is something like, as World Bank president Robert Zoellick said on March 13, 2009, “The International Monetary Fund research of some 122 financial and economic crises shows that turnaround can’t happen unless you clean up the bad assets and recapitalize the banks,” it can’t matter what they did to cause such huge problems for everyone or what recapitalizing them would cost, and we’re to fix every big bankers’ crisis like this as well as fixing whatever problems it causes in our own lives. This “clean up the bad assets” means that the government nanny-ism must go beyond bailouts, to actually taking care of the banks by fixing whatever needs to be fixed, enough to save them. If money distributed to middle-class people wouldn’t really fix an economic meltdown, while money distributed to the rich people who caused the problem would work, then the only thing that really matters is what works, not why that’s what works or that they’d likely abuse the moral bankruptcy. The engine of America’s prosperity is that the people whose welfare is at stake have the personal response-ability, since they’re the ones with the most reliable motivation to get the engine moving, irrespective of any “excuses” they may have. If someone who isn’t addicted won’t stop causing you problems, then in taking care of yourself (even if this requires a good deal of effort and sacrifice), the only thing that would really matter is what would work, not why that’s what would work or that he’d likely abuse the moral bankruptcy. As Archie could tell you, there’s very little limit to what realism would unquestionably require, as long as one’s material realities in the real world would make the morally responsible option too unrealistic. This could seem even more natural within families, since we must understand when people act outrageously (maybe even violently) within their own comfort zones. Alcoholics are far more likely to beat up family members than their own bosses, though if the alcoholics really were just passive victims of their diseases and inebriation, they’d be just as likely to beat up anyone who frustrated them.

Since resiliency could make just about anything go away, Bush also talked about faith in our economic “resilience” regarding the Great Crash of 2008. This gutsy and self-responsible moral bankruptcy, “Care only about whether you can change it,” is de rigueur. There can be no exemptions to self-responsibility and self-care. Whenever so much is at stake, there’s no room for debate. As long as there’s no end to what could happen to you in reality, there’s no end to your self-responsibility to deal with reality. If you really cared that depressive disorders affect 34,000,000 American adults, you’d seem to be a maladjusted nutcase. The title of the chapter about Reaganist deregulation, of Charles R. Morris’ The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, is, “Wall Street Finds Religion,” and that’s how this fundamentalist and very demanding religion (“But that’s where a quarter-century of diligent sacrifice to the gods of the free market has brought us.”), must construe who are the sinners with the defects of character, and who are the martyrs. This religion would also say to have faith that, in the long run at least, you get what you deserve and deserve what you get. If Archie doesn’t stop blaming others or look at himself, he’d likely be given

That is, treated as Ayn Rand would have treated someone who said, “But I’m a victim, so you owe me better!” as if he’s: whiny, manipulative, pity-partying, controlling, etc. Objectivism is a philosophy, so it can interpret and label anything as anything, and blame everything on factors that break its rules. Absolutist extremism can be as popular as Reagan. You must believe in certain ideas in order to have “productive attitudes” in all circumstances, which would benefit you, especially in the worst circumstances.

Realistically, in a society with rampant depression, these are the same absolutist labels that would make people in trouble most likely to succeed, magnificently self-reliantly: Self-respecting people with strong characters, accept greed. Serenity means Gelassenheit. If you’re the person in trouble, then caring about you would seem to be along the lines of “social welfare programs that have been proven not to work,” to lead to people getting what they want by “proving” their victimhood. What personal problems don’t have to be taken care of this unconditionally, where the only thing that really matters is what oneself can or can’t change? This is how the ideal American faces his own problems, and with the right philosophical sophistry and popular support, anything could look ideal. Of course everyone must take care of himself, whatever happens to him. This is also how market discipline disciplines; winners are winners, and losers are losers. If anything else seemed to matter, that would be subjective: blaming, excuses, moralism, idealism, manipulative machinations, mollycoddling or victimology that could only weaken the victims, etc. The more that you blame the victims, the more faith that you’d have that we all ultimately have self-determination, and that they could lead happy lives if only they took care of themselves better—very uplifting and necessary. Nothing can drive those who must care about the demands of reality, away from this. Our economy and its norms must sometimes do things that would naturally cause resentment anger and/or fear, and since these could be debilitating (and manipulative) emotions we must get them under control. Form follows function. Needless to say, self-responsibility would help Archie like nothing else could, whether or not his problem parent was addicted. That’s common sense. You don’t have a right to expect better than this; you don’t have a right to expect anything that you can’t earn or achieve. If someone else caused you big problems, you’d be in the same pigeonhole as those who choose to be passive, parasitical, etc.: either you choose to do what it takes to take care of yourself, or you choose not to. The fabric of our society depends on this self-motivated self-responsibility for one’s own welfare; it certainly can’t depend on people acting morally responsible. Weak people suspected of being irresponsible or surreptitiously self-serving, can’t be presumed innocent until proven guilty since one couldn’t prove that. Also, we can’t afford to allow victim-power, so it would be very easy to buy the illusion that the weak are at fault. Any real alternative to what causes our rampant depression, would seem anti-freedom.

What contributes to our rampant depression is as inevitable as Marxism says it is, but if the victims react pragmatically, the long-term effects wouldn’t be so bad. No one’s going to subsidize Archie’s efforts to deal with his own problems. In Atlas Shrugged Rand implied that we aren’t really entitled to anything better than a 19th Century covered-wagon lifestyle, and who’s to say objectively what he’s really entitled to? Controlling others is what’s truly immoral. Übermensch imperfections seem red-blooded, and untermensch supposed imperfections seem ignominiously and manipulatively mollycoddle. Though all this might seem amoral, those who don’t live up to expectations would have to seem bad, with insidiously dangerous “victim-power.” Even Archie must do and believe certain “productive” and “well-adjusted” things, yet this self-responsibility and self-improvement aren’t coercion, or re-engineering human nature. We must accept that Wall Street takes big risks since a market economy is inherently risky, but you must have faith that you get what you deserve, and deserve what you get. If we allowed excuses for the individual not taking personal response-ability for his own welfare, who couldn’t come up with enough excuses, which would only hurt him in the long run even if the excuses were perfectly accurate? It doesn’t matter what caused your problem, what you deserve, etc., only that fairness, money, etc., has to come from somewhere, be provided by someone, and you’re ignominious manipulative and naïve if you think that you’re entitled to have someone provide for you. We must remember why we can’t just forgive, shrug off realistically, etc., the dangers of emotionalistic righteousness, manipulative victim-power, negative attitudes, passivity, etc. Those who think like this wouldn’t learn anything from the Great Crash (other than, “Now Wall Street has learned its lessons about the stupid things it did.”), since what could have been learned would be sardonically condemned as mollycoddling, intellectualist, anti-freedom, not really important, unrealistic about the fact that we must reward winning and punish losing in order to motivate people, etc. This isn’t juvenile, since certain people do take responsibility for the consequences.

We could distinguish between the sort of nihilism and moral relativism that’s as all-American as creative destruction, and the kind that isn’t. Objections to others’ destructive behavior could be disputed vehemently, as if they’re: judgmentalism, controlling, guilt-tripping, victimhood, passivity with hidden agendas, etc. Both Schopenhauer and Reagan/Greenspan would have said that these are usually insidious, so they can’t be proved or disproved but we can’t just let them happen, and we certainly mustn’t reward them! Some of this anti-repression is along the lines of psychoanalysis (very Germanic). Some is along the lines of red-blooded and character-building freedom, self-response-ability, and getting what we deserve as in “creative destruction” (very American). As Christopher Cox said just after the 1994 derivatives crash ($1,500,000,000,000.00 lost), “I’m concerned that now anything called a derivative will be considered inherent evil in Congress. It is sort of like a fire hose: In the wrong hands, it is dangerous,” (Plenty of deregulation followed.) and you can’t defend yourself from a fire hose being abused, without looking as if you’re on the side of evil. For the most part, whatever happens to you would seem to justify or at least excuse itself, since if you’re worthy you’ll prevent or solve your problems, and if you’re not, you won’t. A competitive economy in which whatever results from the power-plays is whatever results, is the epitome of efficiency as our culture defines it. It seems that empathy is for social workers, the sort of people who are ruining our society. It’s no wonder that self-help and its millions of believers love the AA, courageously change what you can and serenely accept whatever you can’t, approach to life!

(That’s life on life’s terms.)

Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct. Sure, it’s now being proven that the severe “stress” that can easily flare up in poor families can cause the poor kids to later have problems with depression, substance abuse, their short-term memory and learning ability, etc., but of course safety from that would have to come from somewhere, be provided by someone, and of course you’re ignominious manipulative and naïve if you think that you’re entitled to have someone provide for you. Our economy promotes moral responsibility through companies being motivated to act responsibly toward certain people, but if the person you’re dealing with isn’t motivated to act responsibly toward you, tough nookies. In the long run, accepting people’s victimhood would teach them to be weak and manipulative. We can afford to forgive sinfulness, but not this. Sure, many who deserve to win will lose, but few who deserve to lose will win and we need this to motivate people to try to win. If we cared about losers who deserve to win, then: this would involve authority deciding “what is good,” what worthy losers would get (which may total up to a lot) would have to come from somewhere, we wouldn’t really know that they wouldn’t end up winning on their own in the long run, and losers who deserve to lose could become entitled winners by “proving” that they deserve to, which, naturally, every loser would want to do. An unconditional faith all in this would mean unconditional faith in self-motivation, self-responsibility, our resiliency, realism, and freedom. (We can’t afford conditions, especially after the economic meltdown.) None of the massive helplessness that Schumpeter approved of came from the government, which means that the helplessness would seem acceptable, which means that you must accept it in order not to seem dysfunctional. 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,” and expecting those victimized by the economic meltdown to just move on would seem even more reasonable, since if they don’t they’ll face their big problems dysfunctionally. Our passively and helplessly waiting for “green shoots” to appear in the economy after spending all that money on the bailouts, means freedom, since the timing of “green shoots” would result from what the individual freely chooses to buy or not to bu

That’s how you can cope with any reality!!!

Archie (and others with very limited options) must think and do certain things, and are helpless, but everyone knows that since no authority figures are decreeing what they must think and do or making them helpless, that’s freedom. In the real world, sometimes fighting for freedom means fighting for things that look painful, morally bankrupt, etc., though with the right adamantly pro-freedom sophistry, this would end up looking good: stolid, realistic, self-responsible, anti-controlling, anti-mollycoddle, anti-untermensch, productive, character-building, optimistic (that in the long run we get what we deserve), patriotic, etc. That’s among our fundamental principles. Everyone knows that if Wall Street greed, directed by regulation, does something bad that wasn’t expected, this would be unintended consequences of the regulation, and if instead you considered it to be consequences of the greed, you’d seem unrealistic (We can change the regulations but we can’t change greed.), mollycoddle, negativist, etc. We want to believe. As Robert Heiner’s Social Problems, an Introduction to Critical Constructionism says, “Contempt for the poor could be considered a form of American patriotism in that it is a reaffirmation of the belief in America as the land of opportunity,” and the same would go for any other adult who’s having economic problems. Those who are in any sort of serious trouble (millions of people) often have to use the same self-responsible sophistry, cognitive distortions, in order to be adequately productive and goal-oriented, and to have faith that Westerners have self-determination. Even if things could keep functioning only if victims simply took care of their own problems, then of course it’s still all-important that things keep functioning; there is no alternative.

Fighting for self-responsibility could feel very exciting. You don’t have a right to fear this, since you don’t have a right to expect better than winning what you win and losing what you lose. That’s justice; if it’s yours, then it’s yours, and if it isn’t, then it isn’t. After all, our economy keeps working and prospering despite all the greed and chaos since everyone feels motivated to take response-ability for whatever problems this causes him, and he has the freedom to do this self-reliantly. Whether or not the person who caused the problem is addicted, etc., the victim taking response-ability for his own welfare is what works, means efficiency, i. e. with the greatest motivation no matter what costs this brings about. (You’d better not whine about costs like these, either in the economy or within your family!) The fear felt by the person who has the problem, would motivate him far more than moral responsibility would motivate the person who caused it. Realism must mean banal and vapid materialism, and profundity that would disagree would be unrealistic. If we let people get what they wanted by proving their victimhood, then that’s exactly what they’d do; who’s to say what hardship, sinfulness, etc., is, and what isn’t, “just the way that life goes sometimes,” a very un-objective question? This must be as uncompromising as Ayn Rand admitted herself to be, since the demands of reality, and of self-reliance, don’t compromise; there is no alternative. Assertiveness seems manipulative, since even the most sincere person would want to believe that he’s entitled to more than what he’d won. As Hitler’s main role model Schopenhauer wrote in the book the most influenced him, The World as Will and Representation, the concepts of bad and evil ignominiously express “everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case,” which might sound stereotypically Nazi, unless you’re in a situation in which you’re legitimately objecting to what someone did to you, and your self-help advisors act as if your objections reflect your resentful, manipulatively desirous, passive-aggressive, pity-partying, self-righteous, unrealistic, victimhood, etc., SELF-WILL.

Realism is also gutsy.

Each major depressive episode (and, probably, what caused it) is temporary, but dictatorships tend to be at least fairly permanent. Paul Krugman (We must all be realistic.) wrote, “There is an old European saying: anyone who is not a socialist before he is 30 has no heart, anyone who is still a socialist after he is 30 has no head. Suitably updated, this applies perfectly to the movement against globalization,” including child labor “in sweatshops” (There is no alternative, other than worse poverty and maybe child prostitution.), and the same could conceivably be said about anyone who wants natural (or even close to natural) rates of depression and anxiety disorders. Sure, as Anne Lamont wrote in Bird by Bird, “Reality is unforgivingly complex,” but whatever your realities are, you’re supposed to simplify them to courageously changing what you can and serenely accepting what you can’t; “bird by bird” won’t accomplish anything for you. We couldn’t afford to care about complexities (other than the complexities in the tactics of how we solve our own problems), since every situation has complexities. If your back is against the wall, you simply must serenely accept this fact. If this wasn’t so consistent predictable dogmatic and automatic, then not everyone would take response-ability for their own welfare. The real world simply has its requirements. Neo-Conservatives would love this folksy “perception management.” Yet as a New York Times op-ed said about the financial meltdown, “When you shout at people ‘be confident,’ you shouldn’t expect them to be anything but terrified.” Endurability isn’t just something that someone preaching on a soapbox would say would be nice. This is the tragedy of victim correction, that realism simply must be oriented around the fact that you absolutely can change what’s tactically wrong with your own reactions, and absolutely can’t change what’s morally wrong with others’ actions; not being realistic would be ridiculous (said sardonically, or maybe to encourage victims to empower themselves in what laissez faire economists would call “tough love,” though the expression “tough love” originally meant the authoritarian and coercive approach that parents could use on their teenagers who have drug problems and the like). Our economy reward$ those who think like this. And even if this sort of thinking leads to a worldwide economic catastrophe, it could always be blamed absolutely on the supposedly mollycoddle weak. (We all know how insidiously dangerous they are!)

This picture, taken in 2003, proudly shows financial regulators from the Bush administration along with lobbyists for the bankers (the guys with the shears), uncompromising in their pro-freedom approach.

Self-reliance and self responsibility where if you win you’re a winner and if you lose you’re loser, seem to be The Great Liberator. As Bush’s Chairman of the SEC (“We ♥ Madoff!”) Christopher Cox testified before Congress on October 23, 2008, “I think it’s vitally important that we never fail to appreciate how powerful a means of wisdom markets can be in allocating scarce resources in a nation of 300 million people and a world of 6 billion people,” and this is how the markets allocate scarce resources. Freedom from government and other “control” is a sacred American tradition, but endurability isn’t. (As Alan Greenspan wrote in an “Objectivist” publication in 1963, “At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.” Private property, also, comes from guns, but our culture labels it and its consequences as freedom that you’d better not disagree with. Recently in his private dining room at the Fed, he told a senior regulator, “We will never agree on the issue of fraud, because I don’t think there is a need for laws against fraud,” since all-important competition is supposed to motivate traders to have reputations for honesty; if you win you win, and if you lose, you lose.) Aggressiveness seems ineradicable, and our objections to it seem eradicable. The only question that really matters is, “Are you dysfunctional?”, since only that must make a big difference in your own life; anything that anyone else does, doesn’t have to.

The moral bankruptcy is a tragedy in the ancient Greek dramatic sense, meaning that if all that victims could respectably care about is whether or not they can change things, moral bankruptcy and immunity from accountability would inevitably result. As can be seen in Nietzsche, the weak could easily seem to be the dangerously WILLFUL ones, since everyone’s beliefs regarding what they deserve are shaped by their own SELF-WILLS, and the weak can exercise their supposed SELF-WILLS only in ways that would seem mollycoddle, “dishonest” and “ignominious,” whereas red-blooded strength is “honest,” proud, and at least forgivable (i.e. must be forgiven). We must appreciate all the hidden dangers of unchecked “victim-power.” As Niebuhr wrote, power, which would include victim-power, “cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest,” over (hidden and surreptitious) SELF-WILL, though we dare not talk in such overgeneralized terms when passing judgment on overt sinful power. The fabric of our society depends on the self-responsibility of, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!” Blaming victims helps them find solutions. We fear fearmongering, but not greed-mongering. “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” could happen to anyone. Economist Steven Landsburg said, “Most of economics can be summarized in four words: ‘People respond to incentives.’ The rest is commentary,” and that’s also how this sort of self-help could be summarized: You’re the only one who has a reliable incentive to solve your problems, and nothing that disagrees with this “natural” pragmatism could matter, no matter what chaos and helplessness result.

Just imagine how this conception of self-responsibility would look, if people could see how much depression, anxiety disorders, etc., our normalcy creates, including some helplessness that “everyone knows” is just life’s inevitable imperfections that normal people will adjust and adapt to! Much of this is actually beyond the threshold of human endurance, unfit for human consumption! The magnitude of this social problem, is a groundswell waiting to happen! As Sacrilege, Sexual Abuse In the Catholic Church, by Leon J. Podles, says, “The long suppression of scandals, like the suppression of forest fires, made the resulting explosion [of people caring about them] all the worse,” and the same could be true about the supposedly whiny, maladjusted, etc., awareness of what causes our rampant depression. Is there really an alternative to caring what the threshold of human endurance really is? We don’t know yet what our past is going to be. (Maybe, “Wow, at one time, we thought that depressive disorders affecting 34,000,000 American adults: were among the diseases that are parts of the natural order, were either 34,000,000 rather severe character flaws or 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions, and were just deficiencies of Vitamin P so if the millions of sufferers used mega-medication or maybe chose to have better attitudes, that would have solved The Problem!”)

~

“...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.”—Pat Buchanan. 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.

“Here’s how our current president felt about the ‘agony’ of war around 10:00 p.m. on the evening of March 19, 2003, minutes before he would address the nation to inform it the Iraq war had begun. As aides were applying makeup before his televised speech, he pumped his fist and told an aide: ‘Feel good.’”—Vincent Bugliosi, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder