Out Of The Same Mold As Enron

 

 

                                   

“Enron was what I thought epitomized a global ‘American Dream’ of sorts...  The environment was an extreme rush.  Very busy, very progressive and innovative....  We all believed that we were a part of something special....  However, I feel great sadness at the end of what, for all its faults, was a trail-blazing, courageous and dynamic company...  we all know the names of those to blame.  At the end of it all, the truth is that bad things happen....  But let me say this.  I have my memories.  I am not going to ruin them with feelings of resentment or betrayal.”—Enron letters, a webpage of the Houston Chronicle with letters from former Enron employees

                                   

 

“After considerable soul-searching and many Congressional hearings, the current CEO-dominated paradigm, with all its faults, will likely continue to be viewed as the most viable form of governance for today’s world.”—Alan Greenspan, said to an audience of business students in early March 2002, after all knew of Enron’s frauds

“The credit rating agencies, though unhampered by the kind of conflicts faced by securities analysts at major Wall Street firms, similarly failed to warn the public of Enron’s precarious situation until a mere four days before Enron declared bankruptcy...  In short, as Glenn Reynolds, Chief Executive Officer of independent credit research firm CreditSights, Inc., stated in his testimony before the Committee at the March 20 hearing, ‘As we look back at the performance of the rating agencies in the case of Enron, we are hard pressed to recall a situation where the rating agencies held so much sway over a company and had such commanding leverage to extract information, and yet were so ineffective at doing so.’”—Financial Oversight of Enron: The SEC and Private-Sector Watchdogs, U.S. government report

“All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.”—1 Corinthians 6:12
 

“Perhaps there is a better way, we think so.  For we are now on a different basis of trusting and relying upon God.  We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves.  We are in the world to play the role He assigns.  Just to the extent that we do as we think He would have us, and humbly rely on Him, does He enable us to match calamity with serenity.”—AA’s Big Book, Chapter 5,“How It Works,” soon after the model searching and fearless moral inventory, in which what’s really confessed is the resentment that one feels, as if perturbed feelings are what’s the problem.

 

 

 

“I do not want the peace that passeth understanding.  I want the understanding which bringeth peace.”—Helen Keller

 

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Table of Contents
 
 

Very likely, you could very consistently see victim correction as a panacea, being used as a panacea.  Time after time, you could see people who are clearly beleaguered by others, being treated as if, if they only took care of their own problems, that would be the most reliable self-reliant and forgiving way to solve their problems.  You can see an unanimity among those around you, that the average Westerner would associate with authoritarianism.
 
 

Such coping skills that must work in all circumstances, could lead to some strange distortions in our thinking.  What in other circumstances would have to be taken seriously, might have to be trivialized, and the victim’s responsibility magnified.  We mustn’t forget that though now we associate Enron with crimes, once Enron was so beloved that many of those who should have spotted their obfuscation, didn’t.
 
 

My own experience started just after I got my engineering degree, and discovered that in any given year 20,000,000 Americans suffer a serious depressive disorder.  In college I’d known a bunch of chronically depressed guys, so I knew just how serious this is, along the lines of, “One depression is a tragedy; twenty million depressions is a statistic.”
 
 

  Usually, my kind of people are fiery but impulsive, so I’ve seemed to have a codependent attraction to irresponsible people.  This got me involved with a codependency group, etc., where I saw exactly this absolutist victim-blaming.  I saw largely the same victim-blaming that Susan Faludi wrote of in Backlash.
 
 

The big difference between Faludi’s group and mine, was that hers stressed acceptance and mine stressed fighting back.  Yet the fighting back was as purely defensive as is the fight or flight of a prey animal being attacked.  Yet the main thrust of this group’s discussions was how to get self-determination through fight or flight.  After all, if you live with a butthead, fight or flight is self-empowering. Whether you’re a winner or a loser, you’re a success or a failure, you’re adequate or inadequate, etc., would depend on whether your fight-or-flight wins or loses, succeeds or fails, is adequate or inadequate in handling whatever the butthead bring about.  That was out of the same mold as Enron, since both focused on self-responsibility.
 
 

This reminded me of the irrational self-blame that I saw among the chronically depressed guys I knew.  If one who unambiguously is being victimized, assesses the situation in terms of how well he’s emotionally and physically dealing with it, then if he’s devastated, he’ll figure that he must be devastatingly flawed.  And sure enough, soon after I read that the cognitive distortions of depression that are unique for Western and Westernized people, can be boiled down to, “In dealing with my own problem, there’s no room for error, and there’s always room for improvement.”

 

About a year after this, a sincere guy but someone of the type I’m most compatible with, claimed that he’d hire me, though this didn’t have much basis in reality.  People responded to this in a way very similar to the way that that codependency group assigned personal response-ability, that the active one has the rights, the passive one has the response-abilities, and all sorts of destructive behavior could seem like slightly excessively normal human imperfection which is naturally the sinner’s right and the victim’s response-ability.
 

Those people had a conception of what it means not to take a statement literally, as hypocritical and duplicitous as the attitude shown in the old Victorian joke, “If a lady says ‘No,’ she means ‘Maybe.’ If she says ‘Maybe,’ she means ‘Yes.’ And if she says ‘Yes,’ she’s not a lady.”  What I kept hearing was, in essence, “If an assured businessman says ‘Yes,’ he means ‘Maybe.’ If he says ‘Maybe,’ he means ‘No.’ And if he says ‘No,’ he’s not an assured businessman.” 
 
 

During my wait for that boss, more of the same.
 
 

Everything that I heard throughout, was the same as what I heard in that codependency group, the same attitude that if it’s your problem, it’s your problem.  This was also the attitude of Enron, that it’s good to determine what one deserves according to what he wins, bad to determine it according to what Reaganomics would call “victimology.” 
 
 

These are basically the same as the presumptions behind self-help in general, which also arose out of the Reaganomics mold.  Some of those who worked for Enron said that it had a very exciting atmosphere, well, that was also the appeal of Reaganomics and that sort of self-empowerment.
 
 

Here are pertinent excerpts from other notes I took at around that time.
 
 

So here’s a part of those notes, and a brief explanation of some of the terms I used.
 
 

The handwritten notes.
 
 

The notes I electronically saved.
 
 

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hen those around you, trendy advice books that discuss who’s personally responsible for what, etc., all express the same absolutist criteria that remind you of the distorted ways in which you’ve heard depressed people blame and hate themselves, and then you read that intercultural studies have found that depressed people having these cognitive distortions is unique to your sort of culture, that really tells you something.  As The Speed Culture by Lester Grinspoon, MD and Peter Hedbloom, from 1975 and about how many mainstream Americans of that era felt that readily prescribing amphetamines didn’t deserve the stigma that street drugs got since prescribed doses of amphetamines made people more productive, says, “...what a society regards as reasonable is unavoidably (and not irrationally) inseparable from its traditions and self-image.”  Our society is very concerned with people living up to their own personal responsibility.  Since nothing in our lives occurs in a vacuum, who’s responsible for what can often be subjective, especially when you consider all the mitigating factors it would involve.  The entire unredacted Serenity Prayer as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr, one of America’s most beloved, says, “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.”  It’s obviously impossible to have a reductio ad absurdum of this, since all hardship sinfulness and surrender qualifies.

The sort of of expectations that our culture tends to make regarding who is personally responsible for what, can get pretty unbalanced.  If you’re strong then naturally you’d courageously change reality, and if you’re weak then naturally you’d serenely accept reality.  I have a whole webpage full of examples of guides to how we’re to treat our rampant depression, as if personal responsibility tends to go to the untermenschen.

For example, the homepage of the Mental Illness—What a Difference a Friend Makes website, by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, says, “An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older—about one in four adults—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.”  As the title suggests, this website is about getting the friends of the 26.2% of the American adult population, to support these people rather than stigmatizing them.  The ways in which one friend treats another, is one of the few sociological factors of this huge social problem, that we could honorably take seriously.  If we take the other sociological factors seriously, we could seem to be trying to manipulate like untermenschen, and/or to restrict the übermenschen.

Also, the Learning About Depression webpage on the Zoloft website, says, “If you have depression, this sad mood along with other symptoms can last weeks, months, or even years if not treated.  Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or a character flaw.  It’s a real medical condition, but there are ways to successfully treat depression....  Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults.”

When you’ve seen ads and other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this?  It seems only natural to deal with this social problem, as if it’s just another biological disease that’s a part of the natural order.  It seems that the question to ask is whether this consists of 34,000,000 rather severe character flaws, or 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions.  And of course, “character flaw” means the untermensch character flaws that depressed people could seem to have, not the übermensch character flaws of those who traumatize others.  We don’t pass judgment on the übermenschen, only the untermenschen who don’t seem to be taking care of their own problems well enough.  It’s no wonder that what seems only natural under these norms, causes such an unnaturally high rate of depression!  Yet under these norms, the expectations made of you will be based on the presumption that of course the vicissitudes that contribute to the rampant depression are only natural, so of course if you don’t deal with them then you’re the one who has the bad character that people won’t accept as one of life’s inevitable imperfections!  Apropos of that norm, how much lowering of that unnaturally high rate of depression would seem centrist, and how much would seem radical?”

In fact, if an American did care, to a degree and with a persistence that would be worthy of this social problem, that depressive disorders affect about 34,000,000 American adults, you could bet that he’d be treated as if what he’s supposed to do is NOT CARE.  If he does, plenty of untermensch attributes would be attributed to him, such as: weak, passive, whiny, bitter, resentful, manipulative, insidiously self-interested, counterproductive, troublemaking, controlling, restrictive, blaming, excuse-making, anti-freedom, intellectualist, self-righteous, self-pitying, subjective, unrealistic, immature, negativist, defeatist, melodramatic, emotionalist, and judgmental.  It’s pretty safe to say that there’s always an out, in that if the person who has the problem wants to be well-adjusted and non-passive, then she’ll see how what caused the problem is at least excusable, and how much she plays an active role.  Everyone knows that what’s at fault, is inside the millions of victims.

 

Both my experience as described here, and the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer, show that much of what seems excusable when looked at on a case-by-case basis, would no longer seem safe to excuse when one could see all that must be excused along with it.  Minimization of moral responsibility, “blame,” or whatever else you want to call it, might seem like a good, well-adjusted thing to do.  This would be overgeneralized to varying degrees, either praising someone for adjusting well to whatever happens to him, or excusing a somewhat limited class of destructive behavior, such as “It’s all too easy to act recklessly, since it’s all too easy to have an attitude toward the risks of, ‘It won’t happen to me’.”  Whatever overgeneralization is involved, the same lack of standards would have to apply to everything else that would seem excusable for the same reasons.  You’re expected to react serenely because what caused your problem was caused by recklessness, so it could be called an accident or mistake?  Accepting it seems well-adjusted and tolerant, and rejecting it seems resentful and draconian?  That would mean that all other recklessness must get the same response, since that’s only recklessness, too; the people who did those things mistakenly thought that the risks wouldn’t happen to them, etc.  So how do we keep disasters that weren’t caused maliciously, from breaking out all over the place?  Even back then, I realized that the whole idea of victim correction as a panacea is that since the people who have the problems are always the ones who are the most motivated to solve them, unconditionally holding them personally response-able until they succeed, which would include, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” is

Pat Buchanan, in a syndicated column in 1977, wrote, “...despite Hitler’s anti-Semitic and genocidal tendencies, he was an individual of great courage...  Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone.  His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.”  The “defects of character” stressed by AA’s Big Book, resentment anger and fear in general, are the same as what Buchanan and Hitler meant by “character flaws,” i.e. not handling one’s own problems (whatever they may be) with enough stolid and self-reliant backbone.  “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” as well as, “Whatever your problem is, courageously change what you can and serenely accept what you can’t,” also define “character flaws” as supposed weakness masquerading as morality.

Agent Orange has a webpage on how shocked Reinhold Niebuhr was about the fact that Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group (now called “Moral Re-Armament”; “Oxford” must have sounded too dreadfully intellectual), the conservative Christian group that AA grew out of, had similar attitudes toward Hitler.  Niebuhr was a hell-raiser, before Stalinism made him fatalistic about human nature.  Yet if any organization preaches the Serenity Prayer at people, the final result would be the same, that self-reliant STRENGTH seems good, and weakness that tries to get persuasive strength from emotion and/or abstractions seems intolerably bad.  As the history of The AA School of Self-Help Psychology shows, Nazism, minus anti-Semitism and committing outrageous aggression, equals taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as you’d have it.

Manic-Depressive Illness, Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin and Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, says, in its chapter on personality differences, “Character has been defined as ‘personality evaluated’—that aspect of an individual which bears a moral stamp and reflects the person’s integrative and organizing functions.  The concept of character is employed less frequently in the United States than in Europe, although it is often used interchangeably with that of personality.”  Actually, the word character is used plenty in the United States, whether it be in comments on depression or from the likes of Pat Buchanan and Frank Buchman, to pass judgment on how integrated and organized are traumatized people.  After all, such judgments aren’t moralistic.  Someone absolutely has to provide our society’s homeostasis, since things simply have to remain integrated and organized.

And Enron and its problems came very much out of that mold, rather than from random greed.  As The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall Of Enron, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, says about Enron traders, “Maximizing profit was not inconsistent with doing good, they believed, but an inherent part of it, and the judge of good and bad was the immediate consequence of a split-second trade.”  “They believed that free markets made the world a fairer place, one where price dictated deals, rather than relationships or other ‘noneconomic’ factors.”  The book says about Jeff Skilling, “The markets, he believed, were the ultimate judge of right and wrong.  Social policies designed to temper the market’s Darwinian judgments were wrongheaded and counterproductive,” and that he said about one of Enron’s trading programs, “The concept was pure intellectually.  It made all the sense in the world.”  So what the Enron culture considered to be “intellectually pure,” was absolutist Social Darwinism.  Enron traders could get “self-righteous” about this “purity.”  The epilogue says about the logic that all the participants used to act like victims of law enforcement, etc., “To accept these arguments is to embrace the notion that ethical behavior requires nothing more than avoiding the explicitly illegal, that refusing to see the bad things happening in front of you makes you innocent, and that telling the truth is the same thing as making sure that no one can prove you lied.”  Accepting that questionable (and therefore not unquestionably wrong) behavior seems well-adjusted and tolerant, and rejecting it seems resentful and draconian.

At the same time, the Church of Satan says on a webpage with a very grotesque, perverted, diseased-looking depiction of Satan,

that the Church of Satan “holds individualism as one of its main values,” and on another, “As I stated before, the philosophy of the Church of Satan is about individual liberty, resistance to entrenched authority, and an evolutionary state of iconoclasm.”  What keeps genuine individualism, each individual determining his own destiny, from turning into the strong overpowering the weak, is a good sense of others’ personal boundaries.  Darwinian ethos certainly lack that.

And speaking of finding such grotesquery attractive, a biker in prison actually put together this T-Shirt to try to garner support to his being released,

As if gutsy bikers find that attractive and exciting.  Of course, those who cheer for that, wouldn’t second-guess such tendencies.  And you’d be amazed how much this sort of maverick defiance is a part of what our culture, especially certain strains of it aspires to.  CNN did a program, How to Rob a Bank, which told of how common identity theft is in Houston.  CNN anchor Drew Griffin showed Roger Williams, Texas Secretary of State, a notary public stamp that they had made in the name of “I. D. Thief.”  A fraudster could have those stamps made in any name he wants.

GRIFFIN: Getting a notary public stamp in Texas is easy because you don’t have to be a notary public. You just write down how you want it to read, pay the $25 and viola, a notary public is born.

WILLIAMS: Frankly, I don’t think we have a problem in Texas.

GRIFFIN: Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams oversees the state’s notary system. He recommends that anyone who depends on a Texas notary, check with the state to make sure the stamp is valid.

WILLIAMS: To make sure that we’re not dealing with something that’s fraudulent like this.

GRIFFIN (on camera): But shouldn’t there be a law, a rule or something that says, you know what? You can’t make fake stamps for a notary public.

WILLIAMS: I think it’s important that we understand that we also don’t put the burden on small business. Texas is a very pro-business state.

It should be obvious to anyone that giving that much room to fraudsters is hardly “pro-business,” since if those stamps don’t really mean anything, it would be hard for businesses to work with anything that was supposed to have been notarized.  Yet it seems to have a real cowboy appeal to say that letting people do such things, is what’s “pro-business.”  It’s no wonder that Enron was in Houston!  At the very least, it aimed to have the same sort of “pro-business” appeal to it.

The Enron Cult: ‘Groupthink’ caused everyone associated with Enron to contribute to its downfall, by the Hayes, Brunswick corporate consultants, says, “Enron was fertile ground for groupthink to take hold.  The company’s macho ethos was to feed Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for spectacular earnings at all costs.  This led to the creation of ‘killer apps,’ ‘new paradigms’ and a plethora of esoteric financial instruments that few people even understood.  But given Wall Street’s unmitigated support for (and vested interest in) the arcane products, it hardly mattered.  The regulators nodded.  Investors cheered.  And the media trumpeted the innovations.”  Was Enron also a Cult? says, “Enron nurtured a quasi-religious belief in the company’s mission and its leader’s greatness.”  Crash of the cult quotes the Guardian as saying, “Enron was described as an ‘evangelical cult’ for the fervent advocacy of this vision by Enron founder and chairman, Kenneth Lay—a vision from which he personally profited by millions.”  Though Ken Lay said in his press conference, “I know I’ve had very knowledgeable, knowledgeable people in Washington even share with me that if you probably looked at it, through any number of different analysis you’d find that 10 times as much, or 20 times, or maybe 50 times as much was said and written and talked about Enron as any of the other corporate scandals.  And there was a reason for such an intense interest in that particular city particularly,” the Enron scandal was about far more than an executive getting $6,000 for a shower curtain and $2,000,000 for a birthday party.  Enron had far more in common with the attack politicians who started during the Reagan era, who also have self-righteously insisted on that macho ethos, with a cult-like unquestioning absolutism.

Following are discussions that I had about my own previous experience with this sort of self-righteousness, with many diverse people in Tucson.

My discussions were with enough people, yet showed such consistency, that they could be called an informal anthropological survey, reflecting what sort of helplessness our culture normalizes.  If you had the same sort of discussions with those around you, you could clearly see personal responsibility for a problem being given to whoever’s welfare is at stake irrespective of any particularities of the situation, even those that could be called morally and/or materially grievous.

This was in the same sense of something that Will Spade, assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who worked on the Philadelphia District Attorney’s report on the city’s pedo-priests, said to the National Catholic Reporter which included it in the cover story of their issue dated April 28, 2006, “‘We wanted to sit them down like an anthropological experiment and ask them, “What were you thinking when you did this?  What was going through your mind when you said that?”’ recalls Spade.  ‘The experts were telling us that we were crazy, that we’d never get anybody to explain it honestly.’”

Since victim correction as a panacea is unconditional, it could be used in situations far worse than mine, which would warrant the same questions.  For example, one of the main role models for self-help for those in trouble, Al-Anon, says in its current handbook, How Al-Anon Works, for Families and Friends of Alcoholics, “...each of us has been affected by the ravages of another’s alcoholism....  We find that there are simple tools that can change the way that we feel about ourselves and our circumstances, tools that can help us to get more out of living and to find excitement and opportunity where once we found only a struggle to survive.  As we watch those around us in our meetings begin to find greater freedom and greater joy in their lives, most of us realize that, no matter what situation we face or how desperate we feel, there is good reason for hope.”  One could respond to expectations that alkies’ spouses simply deal with their own problems like stout-hearted Americans, by asking, “What were you thinking when you did this?  What was going through your mind when you said that?”.

Victim correction becomes a panacea, in that no matter how morally and/or materially grievous is what happened for you, even if you live with an alkie, for you to take all of the personal responsibility for it would be the most pragmatic, respectably self-reliant, and forgiving solution. This self-motivated and Stoic pragmatism fits our traditions and self-image, and could be called “rational,” especially by the standards of market economics and what market discipline disciplines.  As Justice Potter Stewart said in concurring with the Furman v. Georgia decision regarding the death penalty in 1972, “These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual,” and the same could be said for the punishments that come from market discipline, but whether one physically wins or loses is objective, and whether one is right or wrong is subjective.  (Yet, of course, if the law punishes people based on happenstance, that would seem intolerable, but if the real world punishes people based on happenstance, for you not to accept that that’s the real world would seem intolerable.)

If you’re devastated, it would seem that you really lost the battle so you must be a real loser.  Reaganomics does very much need this logic, since if anyone could get something simply by proving that he deserves it, the camel’s nose would be under the tent, and soon anyone who gives enough victimology concerning their victimhood could get what they want in that way, and we’d be rewarding failure. This sort of character defect involves mollycoddle ignominious cunning, which might be harder to defend oneself against than would be open and honest aggression, and is insidious rather than explicitly willful, so an untermensch-phobia could become popular.  It seems that we must fear the untermenschen and their victim-power, and mustn’t fear the übermenschen and their freedoms.

Schopenhauer as “Archie” succeeded.s The World as Will and Representation, the book that most influenced Hitler, includes, “Taken as a whole, Stoic ethics is in fact a very valuable and estimable attempt to use reason, man’s great prerogative, for an important and salutary purpose, namely to raise him by a precept above the sufferings and pains to which all life is exposed... and in this way to make him partake in the highest degree of the dignity belonging to him as a rational being as distinct from the animal.”.  Pioneering cognitive therapist.  Albert Ellis, in his Guide to Rational Living, also, said that rational (not self-abnegating) Stoicism is a great coping skill that could let one deal with just about any problem of his.

 

Quite literally, it can’t matter how much someone else is responsible for your problem,

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since if people’s response-ability for their own welfare weren’t unconditional, then those in situations for which others are clearly responsible, wouldn’t strive to become better happier people, which they’d probably need to do to deal adequately with their own problems.

This series of comics includes Jane’s husband getting violent at home,

and giving her a black eye.  After she sees their kids getting violent, she thinks, “I just can’t take anymore!”  When she goes to an Al-Anon meeting, one member tells her, “Welcome.  We were lonely and troubled, too.  We can understand as few can,” and another tells her, “You can be happy even if your husband doesn’t stop drinking.”  When she goes home, as she reads a pamphlet titled “Living with an Alcoholic,” and looks very beleaguered, she thinks, “Those women are so happy.  Maybe if I do what they say, I can be like them.”

So this “better, happier person” stuff was inculcated to her, by the heroes of self-help.  I’ve never heard anyone call this sort of inculcation “extremist,” and it really is literally the same as when those around us tell us that no matter what your problem is, you should courageously change what you can and serenely accept what you can’t.  According to the Serenity Prayer school of psychology, the fact that the person who has the problem, would simply be held response-able for dealing with it by courageously changing what he could and serenely accepting what he couldn’t, would be a fait accompli.

And many AA slogans ridicule those who don’t have what Niebuhr (disapprovingly) called “Buddhistic” spirituality like this.  (Yet I could make the following guarantee: The very same all-American types who’d be the first to condemn Buddhistic spirituality as alien, extinguishing people’s autonomy and selfhood, brainwashing, etc., would also be the first to practice what Buddhism calls “mindfulness” when they’re in situations that contribute to our rampant depression.  After all, their chances of coping with them would be a lot higher if they chose to contrive a serene acceptance of whatever they’re helpless to change, than if they drew their own honest conclusions about it.)

Ironically, Niebuhr wrote, in The Nature and Destiny of Man, in the subchapter, “The Sin of Pride,” wrote, “Descartes, Hegel, Kant, and Comte, to mention only a few moderns, were so certain of the finality of their thought that they have become fair sport for any wayfaring cynic.”  The ultimate fair sport for any wayfaring cynic, moral relativist, etc., has got to be our culture’s victim-blaming conception of “personal responsibility,” that so loves the expectation that no matter how much your problem involves hardship, others’ sinfulness, etc., of course you’ll take care of yourself, deal with your own problem, etc., by courageously changing what you can and serenely accepting what you can’t.  If you don’t, you’d seem to be having a “pity party,” playing ignominiously cunning manipulative tricks,

etc.

 

And it’s strange that such people would use the word victimology to mean a sociological study that’s focused on victimization, since the word originally meant a study of how crime victims are to blame for being victimized!  For example, David Finkelhor, in Sexually Victimized Children, copyright 1979, wrote regarding studies on how minors who are sexually abused may tend to collaborate in their own abuse, either actively or passively, “In the field known as ‘victimology,’ there is a tradition of theories like these that try to understand the ways in which victims contribute to their own victimization.”  This sort of thinking comes naturally both to the actual victimologists, and those who use “victimology” as an epithet.

One could see basically the same specifics, in Enron’s “intellectual purity.”  Yet this “purity” would self-righteously insist on that sort of tenable moral bankruptcy, in that we must be very conservative as to when we treat someone as guilty.  If ethical behavior did require more than avoiding the explicitly illegal, just imagine all the manipulators, accusatory people, etc., who could make someone seem guilty because in their opinion he violated the spirit of the ethics.  If refusing to see the bad things happening in front of you didn’t make you innocent, you’d seem to be guilty though you didn’t do anything provably malicious.  Your interpretation of them as innocent could be called just an overly-optimistic mistake, and we all must be protected from being held morally accountable for mistakes.  Sure, telling the truth isn’t the same thing as making sure that no one can prove you lied, but since you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty, shame on anyone who treats you as guilty when he can’t prove it.  Something very vital is missing.

And such logic has to take the form of purity, not a relative leniency, but a self-righteous, absolutist labeling of everything according to the judgments of Social Darwinism.

For example, a recent Houston Chronicle article says about a recent Enron trial, “[Defense lawyers] hope to show that statements in press releases and at a conference were reasonable given developing technologies, mushy definitions and reliance on exuberant underlings’ misrepresentations.”  So of course the public is supposed to accept that assertions intended to tell investors and creditors why they could trust Enron, were based on assumptions about how technologies would develop, mushy definitions, and what some underlings said.  Even regarding statements intended to be relied on, it could still seem that all must simply accept whatever unreliability is reality.  If you care too much about the spirit and intent of such statements, you could seem too literalist.  In a climate of socially-sanctioned moral bankruptcy, it would be very tenable to say that you were taking the statements too literally, interpreting a business’ statement of certainty, as certainty, despite life’s inherent uncertainties and the fact that businesses want to be optimistic about their own futures, some to an extraordinary degree.  According to Social Darwinism, whatever is reality is reality, and your successes or failures in dealing with it are your successes or failures.

Then again, as many have said about the Enron trial, the big reason why its misdeeds are being taken so seriously, is that those hurt are investors and financers, who tend to be rich.  Fortune magazine’s website included an article about Skilling testifying that though he made some very public claims that Enron’s business did relatively little speculative trading, which wasn’t true, he admitted the truth in one obscure statement that only the most thorough researchers would have found and understood.  This article was titled, “Mr. Skilling’s brave new world.”  Yet his assumption that since Enron said something, somewhere about the real quality of its business then it was open to the public, is giving more information that those lower in the food chain than investors, seem entitled to.  If even less information than that is available to them, then they’d simply be expected to use their own survival skills to get through life’s disputes such as these.  If those near the bottom of the food chain expected better, it would be that which would seem to constitute the “brave new world.”

As long as nothing provably malicious occurred, holding it accountable morally and therefore legally, would seem to be someone’s overly-demanding opinion.  And this form of moral relativism seems not only excusable but necessary, since aggressive achievers must be free, all must seem innocent until proven guilty, etc.

And since the moneychangers do nothing but exchange money, it could be very easy to see many of the laws that are supposed to govern them, as just technicalities.  James B. Stewart’s Den of Thieves says about when the Milken-Boesky scandal first broke, “By now, Wall Street was terrified.  Many had been, to put it mildly, indiscreet with confidential information.  Even before the latest rounds of arrests, many arbitrageurs and traders had been afraid of where the investigation might lead.  They were horrified that the criminal provisions of the securities laws—even aspects they had long dismissed as technicalities, like the prohibition against ‘parking’—might actually be enforced.”  It’s very easy to think that if you take such laws literally, you’re too literalist.  Exactly what is or isn’t a technicality could seem to be a matter of opinion.

Also, as that same book says, Drexel had the same anti-authoritarian appeal that Enron had years later.  “[Drexel] had rolled back government challenges.  It had vanquished the establishment.”  It could very easily seem that we certainly don’t want to stifle that sort of free spirit, with literalism!

As you might imagine, Ken Lay had Michael Milken speak to some of his employees, many of whom wondered why Lay was having that crook speak to them.  Yet even before the Enron scandal broke, Lay could see that both he and Milken had a lot in common.  Both, in their heydays, were considered to be heroes of the red-blooded mavericks who were battling the guv’mint to give big corporations more freedom.  Both got their fame through deal-making, a field where extraordinary success could easily be faked.  The extraordinary successes of both were indeed faked.  Yet in the real world of business, one could always say that exactly what is a fraud, could be a matter of opinion.  Those who say that a deal was a fraud could be treated as if this is only their judgmental, restrictive, negativist, unappreciative, unsavvy about how business really works, political, vindictive, victim-posturing, etc., opinions.  And both, along with their supporters, insisted that they really weren’t fraudsters.  Both even hired public relations firms, since manipulating public opinion in that way doesn’t seem manipulative, as in ignominiously cunning.

The gravity of the moral bankruptcy that I saw, would come across even more strongly if you’ve just read, in 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.  Of these, over 20,000 commit suicide every year.”  To say that as doctors treat the million of Americans who suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year, they should know this rate since it would help the doctors treat each individual as if their depressions simply are their problems, completely ignores the fact that this involves an unnaturally high rate of helplessness, happening to millions of people, year in and year out.

Just after I read that, I figured that scientific studies as to why these aren’t simply among the diseases that are parts of the natural order, would do a lot of good.  I figured that these would try to define just what is the threshold of human endurance.  That way, people would know when they could and when they couldn’t reasonably chide and admonish someone to simply muster up enough backbone to deal with his own problem,  Paul Gilbert’s Depression, the Evolution of Powerlessness, says, “When [biological] differences are more clearly understood, debate will continue as to their etiological significance and most theorists now speak in terms of ‘threshold’ rather than some autonomous internal disease.”

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV says that affective disorders affect 20% of the American population, and anxiety disorders affect 25%.  According to that self-motivated and Stoic pragmatism, the causes of this obviously unnatural problem, would seem reasonable.

My situation was a good illustration of how much our conceptions of realism and rationality, tend toward a socially-sanctioned moral bankruptcy.  Particularly, this shows a theme typical of our much-beloved moral bankruptcy, which would apply to any situation in which the opportunity for convenient moral responsibility, comes before the consequences happen.  When they do happen, those who caused them could try to evade moral responsibility, by holding that now they’re absolutely helpless to undo the past, and that it would be unreasonable to expect them to take moral responsibility now that this would require real effort and sacrifice.  I’ve gotten to think of this as “The Chronological Problem,” since as long as this chronology exists, the morally responsible party could evade responsibility by acting helpless and as if one dare not make unreasonable demands of him. It then seems even more natural than usual, to minimize moral responsibility and magnify the victims’ response-ability for their own problems, see the active party as having rights and the passive party as having responsibilities, and see the advantages and ignoring the disadvantages of Christian forgiveness.

All this has the same absolutist tone as do the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, which Dr. David Burns listed as: all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, magnification or minimization, emotional reasoning, should statements, labeling and mislabeling, and personalization, which Dr. Burns defines as, “You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.”  There’s no room for error, and there’s always room for improvement.

And such a perspective of devastation really is unique to modern Western culture.  Intercultural studies have consistently shown that depressed people who’ve lived in developed areas 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.  What market discipline disciplines, is being a loser.  The victims are the ones who are corrected, to make them winners.  Secular Humanist Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim says about pre-Muslim war-making traditions in Arabia, “For the Arab warriors, ‘true’ meant successful and ‘false’ meant unsuccessful,” and market discipline, along with the pragmatic zeitgeist, defines “true” and “false” in the same way.  And for us, this isn’t limited to warriors, but includes everyone who must deal with the realities that cause the rampant depression and anxiety.  “Winner” means winning, and “loser” means losing.

 

Sure, in the “wonder-drug” era just before The Speed Culture was written, Americans took plenty of prescribed amphetamines without stigma, since American culture encourages people to be revved-up.  This book doesn’t mention the fact that, to an even greater degree, in that era Americans took plenty of prescribed tranquilizers without stigma, since American culture encourages people to treat social problems, such as anxiety in the Age of Anxiety, as massive medication deficiencies.  The time capsule buried in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1957 included a purse containing the typical contents of a woman’s purse of that era, and one of these was a bottle of tranquilizers. Since this was in the Midwest in the 1950s, that rampant anxiety couldn’t have been caused by a good deal of the sort of destructive behavior that conventional morality would prohibit.

 

 

  From that same era:

     

 

 

Just before the following happened to me, I knew a bunch of chronically depressed guys, and what struck me as really puzzling about them was their self-hatred and self-blame.  That made as much sense to me as self-hatred being incorporated into fear.

“NEGLIGENCE - The failure to use reasonable care.  The doing of something which a reasonably prudent person would not do, or the failure to do something which a reasonably prudent person would do under like circumstances.  A departure from what an ordinary reasonable member of the community would do in the same community.” This is how the webpage The ’Lectric Law Library’s Lexicon, On *Negligence*, begins.  The Official Report of DEBATES OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY of British Columbia for May 26, 1998, says, “The general common law with respect to negligence calls for individuals to take reasonable care to prevent foreseeable harm.”  This means culpable negligence both civil and criminal; someone could be found guilty of negligent homicide, guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, using this same standard.  The Providence Journal said regarding the Station fire, “Three elements must be established to show [egregious negligence on the part of government employees]: the government created circumstances that forced a reasonably prudent person into a position of extreme peril; officials had actual or constructive knowledge of the dangerous circumstances and they had a reasonable amount of time to eliminate a dangerous situation but failed to do so,” though clearly regarding the Station fire the government didn’t create anything or force anyone to do anything dangerous, and constructive knowledge is very vague.  A webpage of the DuPage Association of Women Lawyers says, “When an employer knows (actual knowledge or reported conduct) or should know (constructive knowledge) that such illegal activity is taking place,” so someone could be found liable for egregious negligence simply because he should have known something.

Yet the differences between this legal standard and the standard by which our standards of moral responsibility gauge culpable negligence, are something like the differences between how our moral standards say that we simply must accept that alcoholics and other addicts are passive victims of their diseases of addiction, and how the law doesn’t treat addicts as not guilty by reason of insanity.  Individuals don’t have the power to change things that the law can change, and must be able to get through life serenely.  It may be that the four most important words in negligence law, are reasonable, care, prudence, and foresee.  The cultural norms for our day-to-day lives, would believe that in the real world some things would naturally get neglected, only a utopian would hold everyone to a standard where they have to be reasonable, it’s un-American to think that someone has a duty to care, expecting reasonable prudence is prude, and it’s Draconian to make someone pay for an omission of foresight.

In the trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, worker-investor Johnnie Nelson testified to how he kept his investments in Enron after its troubles became known, since Lay said, “Enron would rebound.”  In court, that would constitute proof of deception.  Outside court, everyone would figure that of course when anyone makes optimistic predictions about his own business, he couldn’t really know what would happen in the future.  Therefore, anyone’s wrong predictions that things will turn out well, unless when he made them he somehow knew for certain that they were wrong, could be dismissed as just mistakes.  Maybe he was too optimistic, but that wouldn’t make him fraudulent.  It wouldn’t matter that his intent was obviously that others really count on what he was guaranteeing.  Outside of court, therefore, those who wouldn’t just accept that sometimes people get too optimistic, would seem too immature to accept that people aren’t perfect.

Strange as it may seem, super-Kraut Arthur Schopenhauer might be one of the few who truly understood what it’s like to be in a position like mine.  He believed in the stereotypically German conception of human nature as being ineradicably aggressive, and was a big influence of both Wagner and Nietzsche.  A webpage about Hitler, A Born Soldier, says, “Hitler’s favorite writer during the war was the early 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer....  Hitler, like Thomas Mann, was greatly impressed by Schopenhauer’s book: The World as Will and Idea.  Hitler read the book over and over again during the war and was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer’s teaching.”

The title of The World as Will and Representation, is a good summary both of the books, and of the psychology that comes from The Serenity Prayer.  Another way of saying “The World as Will and Representation,” is, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  Both assume that human nature is ineradicably sinful and willful so we must take this as a given, that we can change how Stoically we represent the world to ourselves so we must correct our own outlooks a la cognitive therapy, and that our objections to anything, even sinfulness, are just our SELF-WILLS expecting the world to be as we’d have it.  Since cognitive therapy arose in the 1960s based on the then-popular Eastern transcendence, this could be called “Calcutta survival skills.”  Impugning the weak is pretty much the norm.  Both would say that this should be our entire worldview, since we should ignore anything we can’t change, including anyone else’s sinful behavior.  The stronger you are, the more likely you are to have what’s exciting, pro-freedom, übermensch, red-blooded, self-reliant, etc., on your side.

In two books, though, he sometimes didn’t show this level of moral bankruptcy, and did express disgust at destructively immoral behavior.  One of these concerned broken contracts, “The most complete lie, however, is the broken contract, since all the stipulations mentioned are here found completely and clearly together.  For, by my entering into a contract, the promised performance of the other person is immediately and admittedly the motive for my performance now taking place.  The promises are deliberately and formally exchanged; it is assumed that the truth of the statement made in the contract is in the power of each of the parties.  If the other breaks the contract, he has deceived me, and, by substituting merely fictitious motives in my knowledge, he has directed my will in accordance with his intention, has extended the authority of his will to another individual, and has thus committed a distinct and complete wrong.  On this are based the moral legality and validity of contracts.”

That expresses exactly what’s at stake in these situations, except for two crucial points.  Probably most of the times that someone makes a contract and doesn’t live up to it, he didn’t intentionally lie when he first made it.  He recklessly made a commitment that he couldn’t live up to.  When he made it, he really wanted to believe that he could live up to it, so he really did believe it.  Therefore, since his moral responsibility isn’t absolute, it seems only natural to have the attitude of absolute moral bankruptcy.  Then, one could interpret “he has directed my will in accordance with his intention,” as Schopenhauer normally would, that your objections are just your self-serving WILL objecting to the world not being as you’d have it.  The Chronological Problem would be very evident, since when it’s time for someone to keep his commitment, he could claim that since he made it in the past, he’s now helpless to undo it, possibly the other party already did his part of the bargain so if he cares about the price that he paid in the past that’s resentment, etc.

The second crucial point is that in the future, people must have confidence in the reciprocal agreements they make.  If people’s expectations that commitments be kept, seemed to be their self-indulgent WILLS wanting the world to be as they’d have it, why would they enter into reciprocal agreements?  Our economic infrastructure must be so flexible that it relies on independent commitments.  Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said recently about Enron’s frauds, “I think that it tells us that, because the whole structure of American business is so fundamentally based on trust, that any evident abrogation of that trust creates a real furor, which it should.”  Economics is certainly the least whiny social science, but it must require the reliance in reciprocal interdependencies.

The book Influence, Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini says that one way to influence (i.e. manipulate) people is by giving them something that they didn’t ask for, and then they’d naturally feel obliged to reciprocate by giving you what you ask for, since the functioning of even the most primitive society requires that people be able to count on others to reciprocate. “Cultural anthropologists Lionel Tiger [The fact that this is his pseudonym should let you know just how utopian he is.] and Robin Fox (1971) view this ‘web of indebtedness’ as a unique adaptive mechanism of human beings, allowing for the division of labor, the exchange of diverse forms of goods and different services (making possible the development of experts), and the creation of interdependencies that bind individuals together into highly efficient units.”

Conspiracy of Fools, by Kurt Eichenwald, says about Ken Lay’s indictment, “He was not charged with involvement in or knowledge of the Fastow manipulations; indeed, the case focused on what he said and did in the final weeks before Enron’s bankruptcy.  His statements of confidence in the company and its prospects, the indictment said, had been a lie.”  Yet Lay says on his PR homepage, “I sincerely hope that the Enron Task Force will reign in its prosecutorial zeal and excess and work to convict people for committing actual crimes, not for making mistakes that the Task Force attempts to recast as criminal activity.”  Yet what does it take for unfounded statements intended for buyers to count on, to seem to be more than just mistakes?  Would the person making them, have to be intending to lie?  If he recklessly but sincerely believed what he wanted to believe, would that make his groundless guarantees legal?

Yet this sort of minimization of moral responsibility could easily seem very well-adjusted, since it minimizes feelings of resentment or betrayal.  The report for Enron by William Powers, dean of the University of Texas law school, says, “Mr. Lay fully understood that they were using their own stock to offset losses.  He didn’t understand or appreciate that there was anything wrong with that,” and as long as he sincerely believed that, then he sincerely but mistakenly believed that.

Lay’s attorney, Mike Ramsey said as they were asking for some documents, “Everybody is frightened because there is a grand jury still in session, and many of the lawyers view the task force as being as scary as a monkey with a gun.”  If the lawyer of a blue-collar criminal who did as much damage as Lay should have known he was doing, said the same thing, law-and-order people would be outraged.  Yet when a businessman does this damage, not only does it seem more like the sort of mistake that anyone could make, but others would seem responsible for restoring the order.  Those with the problems would simply have to take responsibility for their own welfare, and then there’ll be order.

When Fastow was sentenced, he testified, “I cannot undo the harm I caused.  I am trying to undo the damage I caused.  I wish I could undo what I did at Enron, but I can’t.”  When someone who’s being held morally or legally responsible for malfeasance in business says, “I wish I could undo what I did, but I can’t,” that would probably be interpreted as remorse, so we’re supposed to be less vindictive.  When someone who’s being held legally responsible for blue-collar crime says, “I wish I could undo what I did, but I can’t,” those who hear that would probably figure that if we accepted it, then anything that couldn’t be undone once it’s done, could therefore be forgiven.

Of course, someone has to take responsibility for every problem, even when unreasonable care would be required.  To expect someone to correct his own serenity courage and wisdom, when faced with hardship sinfulness and surrender in general, could very easily expect unreasonable care.  But, it seems, that’s life on life’s terms, and you’re negligent if you don’t deal with life on life’s terms, even when this requires unreasonable care.  You’d also likely hear all about the victims’ response-abilities:

• that they have the most reliable motivations to solve their own problems successfully,

• that this is exactly what they should want,

• that Americans respect self-reliance and disrespect acting like a victim,

• that if potential victims count on anyone to use reasonable care toward their interests, this is both utopian and mollycoddle, since they’re expecting another to treat their interests with care and to define “care” in the same way that they do (After all, pathological gamblers honestly believe, as they gamble away their families’ money, that the gambling will eventually win them fortunes, so pathological gamblers feel plenty of concern for others.  As former Colts wide receiver Matt Bouza said about pathological gambler ex-quarterback Art Schlichter, who stole his gambling money from all sorts of people, “He wasn’t malicious, and he always figured he would find a way to bail himself out.  But he never did.”),

• that “constructive knowledge” would mean something very different for victims, since even if the reasons why they “should have known” are very tenuous or even intuitive, it would still seem that they should have known,

• that well-adjusted people have to realize that human nature has its imperfections but imperfections in victims’ forgiveness wouldn’t get the same acceptance,

• that we all must accept that in the real world sometimes unreasonable care is required of us, etc.

Legitimate reciprocation isn’t manipulative, and is something that all societies must depend on.  We can’t have faith in deferred gratification, if we don’t have faith in the gratification.  Yet losers who expect gratification fit the definition of “mollycoddle,” perfectly.  Their relying on interdependencies to bind individuals, could very easily be labeled passive-aggressive, “Look at what I gave you [in the past, heaven forfend!], so you owe me!”  It should also go without saying that one can’t have faith in having a work ethic, without also having faith that others’ ethics are good enough that they won’t ruin what the work had created.  William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim says, “...one finds a perfect example in literature about the underdeveloped countries of the Third World, in which the lack of prosperity and technological progress is attributed to some aspect of the national character of the people, such as lack of ‘achievement motivation’,” without any thought given to the fact that those in a poor country can’t have achievement motivation if their efforts don’t achieve much for themselves.  As Criminal Law and Procedure for the Paralegal, by James W. H. and Sandra L. McCord, says about the high crime rate among the American poor, “Is crime so unattractive to those who know in forty years they will be no better off—just older?”, and this would be a far more understandable reason for a lack of achievement motivation of the poor anywhere.  Yet if you talk with those who greatly believe in character strengths such as deferred gratification, the work ethic, and achievement motivation, about how in order to have faith in these one must also have faith in receiving the gratification, others having ethics, eventually achieving the goals, etc., you’d then start hearing that since what these character strengths are supposed to produce is merely material, if in your case they don’t lead to what you were counting on, no one would want to hear you whining about such banal material things.  This, too, shall pass.

Those webs of indebtedness require not only that people not fraudulently make commitments that they intended to break, but also that they not recklessly make commitments that they may or may not be able to keep.  (Before 1937, Federal food and drug law wouldn’t find someone guilty of quackery unless he was proven guilty of a fraudulent intent, a requirement that those who knew the dangers of this, called “the joker” in these laws.)  A society can’t have a web of indebtedness, if one could make a commitment where he’s the one who does his part of the bargain last, and when it’s his turn, would say, “But you must understand that right now I’m completely helpless to undo the commitment I made, and the sacrifices you made for it, in the past.  Now it would take an unreasonable effort for me to make good, and while expecting you to accept unreasonability would seem good since sometimes one must accept his unreasonable realities, expecting me to accept unreasonability would seem bad since this would expect me to do unreasonable things for you.  If you care about what I did and you sacrificed in the past, that would constitute resentment, and may be just your manipulatively playing the victim role.  What I did was just a mistake, and you must understand that everyone makes mistakes.  Sometimes things turn out as they’re supposed to, and sometimes they don’t.”

Therefore, it would seem only natural to see the victims’ role in such situations, along the lines of the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression.  Let’s say that you’re the one who must deal with your own problem through self-help.  All-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, and disqualifying the positive would be involved, since if your steadfastness is lacking in anything, the only particularities you’re allowed to care about would be, “Can I change this, and how could I best deal with it?”, and confidence about what you did right would be smugness about partial protection.  If you expect not to jump to conclusions or use emotional reasoning, you’d seem to be too nerdy and intellectual for the real world.  You’d have to magnify your awareness of what you must change about yourself and why you should accept others, and minimize your awareness of what would make you complacent about yourself and what’s unacceptable about others.  Also, moral responsibility should be minimized since expecting someone to take moral responsibility, especially if what he’d have to do is unreasonable, would seem unpragmatic mollycoddle and unforgiving.  Your response-ability for your own welfare should be magnified, even if what you must do to take care of yourself is unreasonable, since this would be pragmatic red-blooded and forgiving, and sometimes dealing with the real world requires unreasonability.  The whole idea is what you should do better.  Everything should be labeled, even mislabeled, in a goal-oriented fashion, since your perceptions of everything and everyone must be oriented toward how they affect the goal of solving your problem.  If, for example, objecting to sinful behavior is labeled as unfairly self-serving, this would encourage people toward the modern Western ideal of self-help, dealing with one’s own problems in a stolid abstraction-free manner, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”  And sure this is a negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for, but what difference does that make if the goal-oriented approach would size up everything according to, “Can I change this, and how could I best deal with it?”

On my About Us webpage telling of my experience which introduced me to this, I go even more into what I then observed to be the cultural norms which simply assume that we’re all simply response-able for our own welfare, no matter what our problems are or how they came about, which I’ve gotten to think of as “victim correction as a panacea.”  Whoever’s problem it is, simply has to become more self-efficacious in order to deal with it, whatever that takes.

The Smartest Guys In the Room says that when Enron’s claims of its profits really started to look suspicious, “After Chanos saw Jonathan Weil’s story in the fall of 2000, he flipped open Enron’s 1999 10-K.  He read, ‘The market prices used to value these transactions reflect management’s best estimates.’  He thought: ‘A license to print money.’”  The sort of open-ended acceptability that one could see in the moral bankruptcy of accepting whatever you can and changing whatever you can’t, could also be called a license to print money, though that’s purportedly as realistic as are one’s best estimates of something estimated.  An addictive personality’s ideal world, would be one where even the most worldly moral accountability is condemned as resentment and the like, and all assume that if a problem is yours then of course you’re simply going to have to deal with it.  This really does have to mean a blank check for evading responsibility, though it’s supposed to be the best we could manage in an uncertain and otherwise imperfect world.

In 1988 I’d just graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering (which let me get to know a lot of sophisticated achievement-oriented engineering students from Muslim countries, mainly Malaysia and in the Sahara).  Soon afterward, I got that copy of Antidepressant Treatment—the Essentials, which gave me a real epiphany.  In college I knew a bunch of chronically depressed guys, so I knew that this is damn serious.  That’s what really let me know that some of the problems that typical Americans would accept as just the way that life goes sometimes, could be scientifically proven to be outside of the threshold of human endurance, and that the realization of this fact could be called a “New Realism,” both of which I kept referring to in my electronic notes.

Ever since I was a teenager anyone who didn’t have a chronically manic personality, what science calls a “hyperthymic” personality, seemed half dead to me.  Hyperthymic people tend to be very attractive and talented.  They tend to have the same attractive personality traits as do celebrities who attract hordes of groupies, such as charisma intelligence creativity warmth and depth of insight.  Unfortunately, they also tend to have the artistic-temperament-style behavior problems that celebrities who attract hordes of groupies tend to have, such as boozing, doping, irascibility, and intractable eccentricities.  Since I have a hyperthymic personality myself, I have a great tendency to get involved