Glimpse Into the Soul of Victim Correction...

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  “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.”—the entire, unredacted Serenity Prayer, as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr

 

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ere are the excerpts from Al-Anon’s guidebook ...In All Our Affairs: Making Crises Work For You, which Al-Anon’s webpage selling this book describes as, “Al-Anon members’ personal stories reveal how applying specific Al-Anon principles helped them through life’s difficult situations.  It includes stories dealing with abuse, death, divorce, violence, infidelity, and more.”  According to Al-Anon’s much-emulated principles, for some people, mostly female, these are just a matter of, “That’s life,” “That’s life on life’s terms.”

When you consider that, as Antidepressant Treatment—the Essentials, by John H. Greist, MD and Thomas H. Greist, MD, says, “According to National Institutes of Mental Health figures, 20,000,000 people or approximately 15% of the U.S. adult population suffers from a serious depressive disorder in any given year,” it becomes obvious why the AA zeitgeist which Al-Anon was set up to apply to alkies’ family members, has so influenced our self-help for anyone in trouble.  Any society with that much devastation, has got to have some way to keep things functioning.  Since you’re the one who has the most reliable motivation to take care of your problems, you’re the one who’s responsible for them.

This could seem pro-freedom, since:

Since helpless isn’t tyranny, expecting people to serenely accept whatever they can’t change, even in a society with rampant depression, could still seem very pro-freedom.  In fact, this could seem necessary for freedom, since the only other alternative would be not to take care of your own problems well enough, to try to control others (including those who’d qualify as “sinful”), etc.

The following are straight from the horse’s mouth, markedly totalist rather than just immoderate, whether they be the pre-existing cognitive distortions that came from our culture’s precepts on pragmatically dealing with one’s own problems, or beliefs which members are supposed to adopt since they’d let them pragmatically deal with their own problems.  About all of these that actually blame the victim, one would have to ask, “What would it take for each of these to seem to ring hollow for that person?”  For example, regarding the first quote, what if she did a lot to protect herself?  And the Deco swirls are from the front cover of Al-Anon’s first handbook, The Al-Anon Family Groups:

1. “Though I once thought I was wronged in my life, I know now that I wronged myself.  I took my own rights away from me.”
2. “I felt terrible remorse at seeing my darling mixed-up son condemned to three years hard labor.”
3. “Anger, bitterness, fear, rejection, and inadequacy were the feelings I fought so hard to deny throughout the twenty-six years of my marriage to an active alcoholic who had numerous affairs.”
4. “I first needed to believe that my husband’s behavior was not a reflection on me.”
5. “But the biggest problem has been my anger at myself because there had been warning signs that I hadn’t heeded.”
6. “My shame was enormous [when her daughter told of being sexually abused by her brother].  I am a religious professional and a counselor, and these things weren’t supposed to happen in my family.”
7. “I have been able to deal with teachers without being overcome with shame.”
8. “I continue to struggle with my shame.”
9. “New-found courage and honesty have helped me see the role I played in the break-up of my marriage [with an alcoholic].”
10. “I had this particular hang-up some years back when I had a paralyzing depression.  I was afraid that if less-experienced Al-Anon members knew about it, they would think that Al-Anon didn’t work or that I was some kind of failure.”
11. “I chose people who would emotionally abuse me to confirm my poor self-esteem, and reject me so I could feel sorry for myself (poor me, I always get hurt).  If someone tried to get too close I shut down.  I turned cold.  I was afraid of getting too close or being loved because deep inside I didn’t feel worthy.”
12. “I had lots of choices and I hadn’t been taking responsibility for them.  Things didn’t just happen to me [any of them?]; I let them happen by not being an active participant.”
13. “I began to understand that his being involved with anyone else really had nothing to do with me.  I stopped feeling like such an undesirable loser.”
14. “The only entry in our One Day at a Time in Al-Anon (ODAT) book that deals with forgiveness says that we can only forgive ourselves for judging someone in the first place.  Even though I thought that my [adulterous alcoholic] husband’s behavior was wrong, I had not walked in his shoes.”
15. “I had little self-worth or belief in myself after growing up in an alcoholic home...”
16. “I was not at fault for what my husband did.”
17. “At the time [in a family with alcoholics], I thought I was the only liar in the bunch.  I felt deeply shamed and inadequate.”
18. “I knew that if I were ever to have any peace I must forgive [her husband who she left after he was sent to prison for molesting a child, but now she’s eagerly awaiting his release from prison].”
19. “My mother still believes I want to break up the family because I chose to seek help for the hurt [of her brother having had molested her on a weekly basis].”
20. “Recurring bouts of depression and an over-all nagging feeling of worthlessness and self-doubt had doggedly followed me in my adult life, largely from carrying the burden of the ‘secret’ [being molested] that I had been too terrified to tell.”
21. “Over time my husband’s abusive behavior and constant put-downs pounded the tiny bit of self-worth I had pulled together into the ground.  I saw myself as a victim [and she certainly was one, rather than someone who deserved the abuse.].”
22. “I tried every method, read every book and then some, and still could not pick up the pieces of my damaged self-worth.”
23. “Worse are my inner suspicions that I ‘asked for it’ in some way, inviting my father’s inappropriate and unwanted sexual advances.  Having grown up around the disease of alcoholism, I am only too ready to believe that I am an evil, worthless person.”
24. “After years of living with alcoholism, I had plenty of feelings of guilt, anger, jealousy.  Al-Anon meetings and a supportive sponsor helped me to look at them and to accept and forgive myself.”
25. “If my son turned to alcohol and drugs, then I felt I had failed as a parent; if he had an uncontrollable compulsion to drink, then I had not given him a firm enough foundation; when I covered his bad checks or believed what he told me, then I had enabled him to continue feeding his disease.  So no matter which way I turned, I felt guilty.”
26. “Although I had accepted responsibility for myself in the early days of Al-Anon, the actual owning of my feelings came two years later, after much patience on the part of my Higher Power.  I have concluded that to change the way I live, I first have to change the way I think about it, then change the way I speak about it!  Therefore I can no longer say, ‘You, he, she, it makes me... anything.’  [anything?]”
27. “When a friend of my husband’s in AA told me that my husband had not taken up with another woman because I was bad in bed, I was stunned.”
28. “I had to take responsibility for my choices, no matter what my husband did.”
29. “When violence first occurred in my marriage, I truly thought it was my fault and that I should never say or do anything to anger my alcoholic husband.”
30. “I no longer have to blame myself for another person’s actions.”
31. “At the same time I felt responsible [for his father molesting his older sister], as though I could somehow have exercised control over events that occurred before my conception.”
32. “I was helped by another Al-Anon member who had also felt guilty about incest between his father and sisters.  I came to recognize the same feeling that I had about other facets of the cunning, baffling, and powerful disease of alcoholism: the feeling that I am to blame.  I guess that I’d rather blame myself than feel the grief of the devastation of living with this disease.”
33. “I asked [her adulterous alcoholic husband] to please live elsewhere.  My sense of self-worth returned at once.”
34. “I needed to hear, ‘No one can hurt you unless you let them.’”
35. “Eventually physical violence developed, and, looking back, I see that I often provoked it.”
36. “[A victim of child molestation] grew up feeling very bad and very responsible for all this.  The guilt I bore [from being molested] certainly had an effect on the decisions I made in my life.  I had a beautiful daughter, and I swore this would never happen to her.  It did, and again I felt the horrible guilt, both for her and for me.  I left the man, but too late.”
37. “When I couldn’t [interest her husband in sex], I felt like a failure.  I thought I wasn’t sexy enough.  Later, when he left me and became involved with a prostitute, I felt there was really something wrong with me.”
38. “I found that I equated financial security with self-worth [even when the financial insecurity results from someone else’s alcoholism].”
39. “But my guilt said, ‘If you had been a better mother you would have been more alert [about her husband’s sexually abusing their daughter when he was actively alcoholic] and would have divorced him.”
40. “Self-hatred raged in me: ‘How could you be so sick, choosing a man like that!’”
41. “It was shocking to discover my low self-esteem, my inability to communicate honestly, and my incredibly overpowering need for a man in my life.”
42. “Before I found Al-Anon, I used to believe all my alcoholic husband’s critical remarks.”
43. “I was not capable of believing that there would be a new life, that a mature woman might be born of a guilt-ridden, obsessive child.”
44. “In doing the Fourth Step I came to understand that I was not responsible for what he did.  I had accepted it because I had very low self-worth.”
45. “Most of my problems came from low self-esteem.”
46. “Thanks to Al-Anon I can accept where we are and not blame my husband or myself.”
47. “After two weeks I was blaming myself for what I should have done.”
48. “How often I scorn her [meaning this woman’s inner self], belittle her ‘weakness,’ turn my back on her pain.  It’s so easy to intellectualize her hurting and unmercifully judge the validity of her feelings.”
49. “I have only been in Al-Anon eighteen months, and for the last eight months I have not been black-and-blue nor had a broken bone.  My husband is still drinking, worse really, but the bad times are not there anymore because I don’t participate.”
50. “I had little self-esteem and didn’t really think it made any difference what I did, said, or wanted.  Al-Anon gave me the awareness that what I felt did matter.”
51. “I got the picture that if I could provide money for my mother she wouldn’t drink.”
52. “The old me would have taken it very personally.”
53. “Some of us came to Al-Anon so lacking in self-confidence that we thought we couldn’t do anything.”
54. “I felt as if I had no recovery and that I had been ridiculous to even think for a second that I could do anything good for myself.”
55. “When I blame someone else for the way I feel, I am probably avoiding facing my own responsibilities [writing this after she writes of phoning people, telling them that she was suffering from depression, and being told in true unconditionally victim-correcting form, ‘Well, practice what you preach,’ ‘Well, go to meetings and call your sponsor,’ and, ‘You already know how to do depressions. Why don’t you practice on something else?’].”
56. “One day a small voice told me I had to forgive myself for all the bad things I was carrying in my mind about ‘her’ [the alcoholic husband’s lover who he flaunted around their friends and children] and turn them over to Him.”
57. “I always felt that if I could identify a problem, put a label on it, then it was up to me to solve it.”
58. “Had my husband not been violent, I would doubtless have continued in my own destructive fashion.”

 

As Thomas Szasz wrote, “In the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”  The field of mental health treatment is probably where you’d see the most of this.  If a given kind of person is defined as having certain personal responsibilities, and as inadequate if they aren’t adequate to live up to these responsibilities, then it would seem that well-adjusted people would accept these definitions.

Sure, if a mental health professional wants to determine whether a client is addicted to anything, the professional could measure the client with a test, either of the “Twenty Questions” variety to see how many he answers yes, or one with questions that ask how much the person drinks or uses.  Yet if one wants to measure how well-adjusted a non-addicted client is, how would one measure that?  Through questions that ask how serene the person is, irrespective of what it is that he must adjust to?

Also, whether any possible talk-therapy for addiction is “evidence-based,” would depend on whether or not it persuades the clients to do what’s for their own good, though they may not feel motivated to do it.  Whether or not any treatment for their family members is “evidence-based,” would depend on whether or not it gives them sublime outlooks on their own problems, even those that come from others’ egregious behavior.  (Just in case you think that modern psychology regards sublimation as too repressive, just keep in mind that thwarting any untermensch feelings and SELF-WILL doesn’t seem repressive.)

For example, the book that accompanies the Emmy-winning show on HBO, Addiction, Why Can’t They Just Stop?, by John Hoffman and Susan Froemke, says, “Because [addicted] people often leave treatment prematurely, programs should include strategies to engage and keep patients in treatment.”  The treatment would have to capture their imaginations.  They have the power to say “no.”  How a treatment program for addicts’ spouses would engage them and keep them in treatment, would be to tell them that if anyone doesn’t deal with her own problems emotionally and physically, she’d be passive, self-defeating, etc.  Sure, that’s not going to capture anyone’s imagination, but if that’s life, then that’s life.  They don’t have the power to say “no.”

When it’s time for someone to take responsibility, cherchez la femme.  The only reason why the thinking of codependents seems self-defeating, is that some people are so lacking in self-regulation, that the tenderness that tries oh so dedicatedly and desperately to persuade them into stopping that self-destruction, doesn’t work.  Simply because even recovering addicts with this much personal support, pose this much of a danger, those who try to help them seem to want to let themselves in for trouble, that what they really want to do is to go on codependent “rescue missions.”

 

 

Paul Gilbert’s Depression, the Evolution of Powerlessness says that across cultures, “Supportive caring environments with low levels of social threat and which provide a sense of belonging and worth tend to produce happier individuals than environments in which social structures are fragmented and disorganised, cannot provide a sense of belonging and where relationships are marked by suspicion and hostility.”  To socially pressure such unambiguous victims to correct any inadequacies they may have in dealing with their own problems, could qualify as chaotic fragmented disorganized suspicious and hostile, or as supportive caring and uplifting.  Such unconditional self-empowerment would benefit them, and would have enough respect for them not to coddle them.

The only question that one could honorably ask about his own problem, no matter how much hardship, sinfulness, etc., was involved in it, is, “Can I change this?”, over and over and over again to optimistically look for ways in which he could change each aspect of it if he were good enough.  For example, the Gam-Anon chapter of Gamblers Anonymous’ handbook, includes, “The aim of the Gam-Anon program is to aid the individuals involved with a compulsive gambler to find help by changing their own lives....  Living or being associated with a compulsive gambler creates its own kind of hell.  For most people, it is a devastating experience...  At any moment the house might be lost or the furniture repossessed.  There may not be enough money to put food on the table or clothe the children....  The meeting is opened with a moment of silent meditation and closed with the Serenity Prayer.”  And the philosophies of such ladies’ auxiliaries to Twelve-Step groups, including Al-Anon, have inspired a lot of current self-help psychology in general.  If it’s your problem, you’d better just help yourself.

At first, the gambler’s wife would look at the real problem, his gambling, ask herself, “Can I change this?”, and answer, “No.”  Even if someone caused her problems that couldn’t be attributed to a mental disease that made him not guilty by reason of insanity, she still absolutely can’t change others’ actions and can change her own reactions.  Next, she’d think, “No law is forcing me to stay married to him. Can I change this?”  If she can afford to, she’d answer “Yes,” move out, and whenever her new desperate living situation caused her problems, she’d ask about each aspect of each one, “Can I change this?”  If she can’t afford to leave, then she’d have to look at each of the realities that he caused for her, and ask about each aspect of it, “Can I change this?”  In any case, the only choices that she’d have available to her would be this pragmatism, or those big realities making her life very dysfunctional.  Those who face their problems solely along the lines of, “Can I change this?  Can I change this?  Can I change this?  Can I change this?  Can I change this?”, would probably be most likely to succeed.  This is the main idea of all victim correction as a panacea, such as that no matter what caused 34,000,000 Americans to suffer from serious depressive disorders, they can’t change this, but can each change their own brain chemistries through anti-depressants.

The cover story of the August, 2007 issue of Counselor, The Magazine for Addiction Professionals, discusses the Victim Impact Panels that Mothers Against Drunk Driving had pioneered.  Some of those who suffered great losses due to others’ drunk driving, would speak to auditoriums full of offenders, in the hopes that this would deter them from relapsing.  Yet a controlled study found that those who were sent to see Victim Impact Panels after their first offenses were just as likely to re-offend, and those who were sent after subsequent offenses had “significantly higher rates of repeat offense.”  An earlier, uncontrolled, study had found that those who were sent after their first offense were just as likely to re-offend, and women who’d previously offended “were twice as likely to be rearrested for drunk driving, even after controlling for other risk factors.”

Therefore, we could say that, empirically speaking, it has been proven that though we may figure that normal people would respond constructively to Victim Impact Panels, addicts tend to be so impulsive that they’d respond by acting more recklessly (though the Panels certainly didn’t make their brains more biologically addicted).  What the addicts obviously felt was what Fundament Christian psychologists would call “false guilt,” i.e., “What does this say about ME?  I’m such a bad person!”, followed by, “Since I’m so bad, I might as well just give up trying to be responsible,” whereas “true guilt” would be all about those hurt.  Those who support the Panels may feel very offended at their being treated as if they make good morality plays but bad tactics to prevent drunk driving.  This could seem to prove Christian philosophy on forgiveness, that vindictive approaches may both feel good and actually be destructive.

Since those who’d want to drive drunk are the only people who have the power to decide whether any approach to deter drunk driving is a success or failure, it could seem necessary to win them over diplomatically.  On the other hand, when we assess whether or not an approach that would correct the victims of hardship, sinfulness, etc., is a success or failure, diplomacy wouldn’t count for anything.  After all, they should want to correct their own survival and coping skills.  Any empirical measure of this would measure whether their efforts were successful.  In both cases, motivation is everything.

One’s wildest dreams would be that since addiction depends so much on choices made at different time, the addicts whose lives would be in danger don’t really have to die.  Those who’d include a sociological perspective, would say that not so many have to.

 

 

The ladies’ auxiliary Twelve-Step group that this comes the closest to, is Gam-Anon, since one big issue for its members would be suddenly becoming impoverished through no fault of their own.  The chapter for Gam-Anon in the handbook of Gamblers Anonymous, says,

Living or being associated with a compulsive gambler creates its own kind of hell.  For most people, it is a devastating experience: family relationships become unbearably strained and the home is filled with bitterness, frustration and resentment.  Emotionally, the stress takes its toll as the life of the Gam-Anon member seems to crumble and become unmanageable; tensions are aggravated because life, in material terms, is unstable.  At any moment the house might be lost or the furniture repossessed.  There may not be enough money to put food on the table or clothe the children.  [You just should never take for granted what you have because you never know when one day you don’t have it anymore.]...  Gam-Anon meetings provide an opportunity for a strong bond to form between those affected by the problem of compulsive gambling.  The meeting is opened with a moment of silent meditation and closed with the Serenity Prayer....  Members are encouraged to make home life as pleasant as possible for the compulsive gambler.  They are urged to make themselves attractive, both for the favorable effect on the compulsive gambler and for the therapeutic effect on themselves....  Because the only real happiness that one can be sure of comes from within, Gam-Anon encourages the member to build on his or her own inner core of spiritual strength and maturity as the best way to live with the gambling problem, rather than to depend solely on their gambling spouses for happiness....  The Fellowship’s program fosters wisdom, serenity and courage, which leads to a better way of life.  Through the growth that accompanies this understanding, the individual is able to meet old situations with strength and to face new ones with confidence....  When we accept the fact that serenity comes from within, our progress develops.  Exploring further along this line, we gain insight.  We see that with defects of character such as self-pity, self-justification, impatience and resentment, we will never find this peace of mind and serenity we seek.

If the gamblers’ victims were convinced that unhappy domestic affairs were their problem only, that would not only get rid of their self-pity self-justification impatience and resentment, but would also make them and their kids most likely to succeed in material terms.

A book published by Al-Anon for Alateen, Courage To Be Me, Living With Alcoholism, lists the following as slogans that Al-Anon/Alateen uses, slogans that certainly look familiar as AA slogans:

“Let Go And Let God”

“Easy Does It”

“Live and Let Live”

“How Important Is It?”

“Listen and Learn”

“First Things First”

“Together We Can Make It”

“Keep it Simple”

“One Day At a Time”

“Think”
 

These, obviously would mean something very different to addicts, who largely created their own problems and might have always had tendencies to overreact, than they’d mean to addicts’ family members, especially their minor kids.  Yet the reason why Al-Anon, and from there Alateen, adopted AA spirituality, was that this transcendence would benefit them.  Sure, to a recovering addict, “Think” would most likely mean that when he’s tempted to relapse, he should think out what the consequences would be.  To a family member, “Think” would have to mean some sort of toleration of the addict.  If this means, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” then that would seem good, since that would make all the family members more serene.  If a member disagreed with this, then his showing the courage to be himself would seem counterproductive, resentful, etc.

Yet this moral bankruptcy would also apply to anyone else who’d be expected to idealize, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  Sure, Niebuhr wrote in The Nature and Destiny of Man, “Without the principle of interpretation furnished by this [Biblical] ‘special revelation’ the general experience or the general revelation involved in conscience becomes falsified, because it is explained merely as man facing the court of social approval or disapproval or as facing his own ‘best self.’  In that case, whatever the provisional verdict, the final verdict always is, ‘I know nothing against myself’ and the conclusion drawn from this verdict must be and is, ‘I am thereby justified.’”

So it seems morally bankrupt when one finds himself not guilty like this.  “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” is just as morally bankrupt, though it finds others to be not seriously guilty.  About this logic, one could say, “It is explained merely as the victims of hardship, sinfulness, or anything else ad infinitum, thinking in whatever ways would let them deal with their own problems as stolidly as possible.

In that case, whatever the provisional verdict, the final verdict always is, ‘I must forgive, minimize, etc., what they did,’ and the conclusion drawn from this verdict must be and is, ‘They are thereby at least excusable.’”  On one hand, expectations that we be as skeptical as science would say that we should be, would be skeptical of everything that, at the moment, we couldn’t prove, but on the other hand, a lack of this skepticism could lead to us believing in whatever has the most übermensch emotional force.

The Fine Art Of Propaganda; A Study of Father Coughlin’s Speeches (who was eventually defrocked because of his fascism), by The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, edited by Alfred McClung Lee & Elizabeth Briant Lee, and published in 1939, includes the following:

The chief devices used then in popular argument and by professional propagandists are:

Name Calling-giving an idea a bad label-is used to make us reject and condemn the idea without examining the evidence.

Glittering Generality-associating something with a “virtue word”-is used to make us accept and approve the thing without examining the evidence.

Transfer carries the authority, sanction, and prestige of something respected and revered over to something else in order to make the latter acceptable; or it carries authority, sanction, and disapproval to cause us to reject and disapprove something the propagandist would have us reject and disapprove.

Testimonial consists in having some respected or hated person say that a given idea or program or product or person is good or bad.

Plain Folks is the method by which a speaker attempts to convince his audience that he and his ideas are good because they are “of the people,” the “plain folks.”

Card Stacking involves the selection and use of facts or falsehoods, illustrations or distractions, and logical or illogical statements in order to give the best or the worst possible case for an idea, program, person, or product.

Band Wagon has as its theme, “Everybody-at least all of us-is doing it”; with it, the propagandist attempts to convince us that all members of a group to which we belong are accepting his program and that we must therefore follow our crowd and “jump on the band wagon.”

The above statements from Al-Anon either show that the members already have a rather fascistic, untermensch-bashing, tendency toward the weak blaming themselves, or encourage the victims of alcoholics to engage in a humanitarian version of this.  This humanitarian version would say that the reason we’d hold that strong = good and weak = bad isn’t for the same reason that fascists do this, but rather, because this means self-reliance and freedom.  Certainly when Coughlin preached fascistic principles, he, too, didn’t have an entirely fascistic tone.

Therefore, we could go down the list of how victim correction as a panacea fits all seven of these devices.  All of the above statements from Al-Anon which encourage people to simply take response-ability for their own problems even when others are clearly morally responsible for them, treat strength as good and weakness as bad, so implies both name-calling and glittering generalities.  The Fine Art Of Propaganda says, “The Glittering Generality is, in short, Name Calling in reverse.”  When we hear a Glittering Generality, one of the questions that we should ask ourselves is, “Is an idea that does not serve my best interests and the best interests of society, as I see them, being ‘sold’ to me merely through its being given a name that I like?”

The moral bankruptcy of saying that addicts’ spouses should define “took my own rights away from me” as including what the addicts did to them in the marriages that they voluntarily entered, and “see the role I played in the break-up of my marriage [with an alcoholic]” as being something that they’re responsible for, and “I chose people who would emotionally abuse me” as something that they’d never been proven guilty of choosing, and “Things didn’t just happen to me” as being true simply because they let them happen by not being active participants, and that if they “thought that my [adulterous alcoholic] husband’s behavior was wrong” then that’s because they had not walked in his shoes, etc., wouldn’t serve either these members’ best interests, or the best interests of society.

While this doesn’t transfer the respectability of something revered (other than the principle of Christian unconditional forgiveness), that certainly does transfer the stories of these unconditionally well-adjusted Al-Anon members, to the expectations of how each Al-Anon member, and ultimately, each well-adjusted American, is supposed to think.  This also involves their testimonials.  It would seem that since the basic idea of, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” has worked for them, it should also work for you.

This also gets its appeal from coming from plain folks rather than intellectuals.  Al-Anon’s transcendent spirituality is based on that of AA, and two of their slogans, “The only requirement for serenity is a desire to stop thinking,” and, “There’s no one too dumb for this program, but it’s possible to be too smart,” say quite explicitly that you’d better not disagree with the plain folk.  This basic idea is also pretty evident in Al-Anon’s approach, in that they simply carry on as if their conjectures about how therapeutic “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” is, are the way to go, so expectations of anything more sophisticated than that would be analysis paralysis.

What The Fine Art Of Propaganda calls “Card Stacking,” I, decades ago while attending a therapy group for codependents that was based on Al-Anon, thought of as, “sophistry.”  It really is possible to make it look as if things don’t just happen to alkies’ partners, that they let them happen by not being active participants, as long as you stack up enough sophistry to “prove” that their not being careful enough to recognize that certain people are unusually destructive, constitutes choosing to let themselves in for trouble.  Since codependent desires are usually supposed occur on a subconscious level, “proving” that someone “let herself in for trouble,” also, would require sophistry.  As Susan Faludi’s Backlash shows, the presumption that the women are simply supposed to take destructive men’s destructive choices as a given, and focus their own attention on how they could best deal with their own problems, also, would require sophistry.  Self-help aficionados would say that people in trouble should stack up exactly this sort of sophistry, since they absolutely can change themselves and absolutely can’t change anyone else, and this sophistry would let them find ways in which they can correct what they could.

Especially when you consider how much AA’s and Al-Anon’s conceptions of personal response-ability involve unconditional self-reliance along the lines of, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” it might seem very strange that they must do this in groups.  Why can’t they simply choose not to engage in pity-parties, not to attract attention to their own personal melodramas, etc.?  Clearly, the social pressure from the group, that its members get on the bandwagon, is what’s important.  Courageously changing what you can and serenely accepting whatever you can’t, whether or not this involves hardship and/or sinfulness ad infinitum, is something that you could obviously do on your own.  Yet if you have many people pressuring you to do that, whether they be people you know in a local group you meet with, or people in your society holding to your its insistence on self-reliance, then you’d be a lot more likely to.

The Fine Art of Propaganda clearly suggests that the best antidote to propaganda is to ask questions concerning what would be the real, practical effects of what the propaganda is trying to cast in a good light.  For example, telling people that “personal responsibility for one’s own welfare” means courageously changing what one can and serenely accepting whatever one can’t, even when this means, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” could be painted as a failsafe formula for unconditional coping skills.  Yet all you’ve got to do is ask about the effects of that sort of moral bankruptcy, and this could set you free.  Questions are the ultimate form of thinking for yourself.  (However, those who have a stolid definition of manipulation, such as Schopenhauer’s “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,” would have to believe that for the untermenschen to think for themselves sincerely, is manipulative!)

The examples that The Fine Art of Propaganda gives of Father Coughlin’s statements, talk about the injustices that lower-middle-class Americans had to suffer due to the Great Depression, without really giving specific solutions for them.  One could only wonder what Coughlin’s gutsy followers would have thought of those lower middle class people who, because of the Great Depression, suffered from depressive disorders.