Another very appropriate slogan would be “Year in and year
out,” as in that statistic from Antidepressant Treatment—the Essentials,
by John H. Greist, MD and Thomas H. Greist, MD, “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.” Year in and year out, these people are each simply to get
treatment for their own problems, including cognitive therapy that would wash
their brains of passive thoughts.
Here we once again have the parallels to what
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, said:
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 slogans all encourage a basically
fascistic attitude, that strong = good and weak = bad. In fact, these tend
to attribute to the weak basically the same attributes that Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche attributed to them, as in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and
Representation,
“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,” and, “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.” It seems
that hurt feelings are synonymous with ignominious self-obsession,
self-indulgence, self-justification, etc.
This 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?”
On the first
webpage of this series, I have a comic from Al-Anon/Alateen, which includes
a teen child of one or more alcoholics, saying, “I’ve stopped blaming others and
I’m looking at myself!” Under this I have the following: The Fine Art
of Propaganda, by Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth
Briant Lee, quotes Hitler’s Mein Kampf as saying, “A lie is believed
because of the unconditional and insolent inflexibility with which it is
propagated and because it takes advantage of the sentimental and extreme
sympathies of the masses.” It should be obvious to anyone that the
problems of the victims of alcoholic parents (or anything comparable) aren’t
inside of themselves. Yet the sentimental and extreme sympathies of
Americans tend to insist that one take personal response-ability for his own
welfare. If he doesn’t, he could be insolently and inflexibly accused of
having “pity parties” and the like.
By looking at all of the above slogans, you could see just
how insolent and inflexible this would be! A stolid self-reliance with
self-empowerment simply seems good, while passivity simply seems bad.
Just imagine the response that one would get if he said at an
AA meeting, “Those slogans that minimize others’ moral responsibility and
magnify our own response-ability for our our own problems, are so
overgeneralized that it really wouldn’t serve either my or my society’s best
interests to accept them in the name of ‘self-reliance’ or, ‘not controlling
others.’ I mean, ‘We are all victims of victims,’ might seem to protect us
from mollycoddle manipulation, ignominious cunning, but don’t you think that
this sort of moral bankruptcy could be dangerous? Also, the victim-blaming
that you see in all those other slogans that treat hurt feelings in general as
if they’re insidiously untermensch, might seem to encourage those in
trouble to buck up and deal with their own problems, but here, again, is the
same moral bankruptcy. Such concepts as self-reliance, self-empowerment,
and not controlling others, might also sound very pro-freedom, but aren’t there
very definite dangers in defining them in such a morally bankrupt fashion,
where others’ moral responsibility matters absolutely nothing and the only thing
that seems to matter is the victims’ resiliency, realism, etc.?”
Since that gets so much of its appeal from the Plain Folks
approach, both the transfer, and the testimonials, would come from plain folks
(other than the transfer of the appeal of Christian unconditional forgiveness).
Yet we’d keep hearing from all those plain folks who say that an approach of
courageously changing what they can and serenely accepting whatever they can’t,
even when this meant hardship and/or sinfulness ad infinitum, worked for
them. As you could see from looking at world history, people have been
culturally conditioned into feeling comfortable with all sorts of burdens, and
each of them could say that thinking serene thoughts, made them feel serene.
The 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. When you consider how this theme has also been
preached in the USA in general at least since Coughlin’s era, you could see how
difficult it would be to say, “No, I’m going to ask more questions than your
populism would accept.”
The only way in which one could hold to such a conception of
what “defects of character” means, is by Card
Stacking, stacking sophistry. How else could one make the following even
seem tenable?:
“We are all victims of victims,” “There are no victims, just volunteers,” “The people we hate teach us the most,” “I don’t have a problem unless I think I do,” “Everything is perception,” “Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm,” “Embracing your disappointments will help you to heal faster,”
and, “Optimism is an intellectual choice.” Even if one is to hold that
such teachings aren’t to be taken literally, how else could one make even
a figurative interpretation of them seem tenable?
The basic idea of these slogans is an 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.”
Each individual member is very capable of simply deciding on his own that
whenever he has a problem, he’s simply going to courageously change what he
could, and serenely accept whatever he couldn’t. Yet a group would enforce
such self-reliance, through a get-on-the-bandwagon dynamic.
elieve it or not, the fairly short
Association for
Addiction Professionals Code of Ethics, includes, “I shall refrain from
using any methods that could be considered coercive such as threats, negative
labeling, and attempts to provoke shame or humiliation.” Then again, this
might have in mind how mental health professionals would deal with addicts’ übermensch character flaws, the ones that hurt others. We want to be
careful about repressing, restricting, passing judgment on, whining about, etc., those. Yet
untermensch-phobia seems very understandable, that
we should fear weak feelings and attitudes, since getting rid of those
seems like a realistic, even necessary, thing to expect. Market discipline works best with this sort of unconditional
self-responsibility.
Likewise, Psychotherapy of Addicted Persons, by Edward
Kaufman, says, “Forrest (1982) emphasizes the importance of the therapist’s
genuine warmth, and empathy in developing a therapeutic alliance. Forrest
states that these qualities are developed by the therapist’s ability to (1)
offer unconditional acceptance, (2) be affectively and cognitively attuned to
the patient’s feelings, (3) communicate this attunement to the patient, and (4)
be a real person who is present and able to express his/her own feelings about
what is going on.”
Sure, this is how one would be diplomatic to addicts, since
one must persuade them. Yet any therapy for addicts’ spouses and
those faced with similar helplessness, wouldn’t be effective enough if it did
that. To encourage an alkie’s kid to resolve, “I’ve stopped blaming
others, and I’m looking at myself!”, might seem radically lacking in the
acceptance of even strong natural feelings, but alkie’s kids who are trained to
think like that would probably be more likely to succeed then those who aren’t.
Effective therapy couldn’t offer an unconditional acceptance of attitudes and
choices that would impair their abilities to adjust to their realities.
The counselors also couldn’t be attuned to such counterproductive feelings.
They also couldn’t have natural attitudes toward the helplessness.
For example, when giving specifics of how a therapy group for
recovering junkies on methadone therapy should be set up, this same book
advises, “Time groups to coincide with methadone dispensing. (Most
patients are not motivated to return a second time in a day, or on a day they do
not receive methadone.)” Oh heavens, they aren’t motivated to
inconvenience themselves! The only reason why Alateen members would
possibly be motivated to learn to think in ways such as, “I’ve stopped blaming
others [including the alkie parents] and I’m looking at myself!”, is that if
these teens don’t control their own outlooks like this, the alkie parents would
make them feel a lot more helpless than if they did control their own outlooks!
Developing outlooks such as, “We are all victims of victims,” and, “Life is like
wrestling a gorilla. You don’t stop when you get tried, you stop when the
gorilla gets tired,” is far more than an inconvenience, especially if you’re a
kid living with an alkie parent so that’s what “life on life’s terms” would be
for you. Yet most of those receiving methadone therapy wouldn’t be
motivated to inconvenience themselves to go to therapy, while alkies’ family
members are motivated to get the serenity they’d get from simply choosing to
accept their own “life on life’s terms”!
The US News and World Report
web page “For Heroin Addicts a Bizarre Remedy” had said, “And about 30 percent
of methadone users relapse within 12 months of beginning therapy.” This
relapse isn’t to stop inexorable cravings, which the methadone would control.
Heroin usage does mean having cravings, since the average junkie spends half of
his time on dope and half of his time crashing until he could buy another fix.
Junkies also must endure the problems that come from living an addict’s life.
Yet what’s most important to the junkies who relapse while on methadone, is that
they get the thrills from heroin. It’s no wonder that we can’t count on
them to inconvenience themselves!
Glimpse Into the Soul of Victim Correction...“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
f course, no matter how grievous are your
realities, or the part that others played in causing them, they’re still
reality, and being “well-adjusted” means adjusting well to your realities.
epression affects the lives of millions of
Americans and costs billions of dollars. In the United States, nearly 10
million people experience a depressive illness during any 6-month period.
Depressive illnesses cause grief and pain, interfere with people’s ability to
function, may disrupt the family’s functioning, and may contribute to premature
death. Although it is impossible to apply a price tag to human suffering,
the economic costs of depression have been estimated at $16 billion annually, of
which $10 billion is due to time lost from work. Of all the mental
disorders, depressive illnesses are the most treatable. With appropriate
intervention, approximately 80 percent of even serious depressions can be
alleviated (Sargent, 1989).
