tandard Rationales for Victim Correction as a Panacea

 

The following is the text on Al-Anon’s “Just for Today” bookmark, affirmations to guide those who are friends and loved ones of alcoholics, mainly women who must deal with alcoholic husbands.  This “PRAYER FOR TODAY” is the much-beloved Prayer of Saint Francis, so this focusing on unconditional forgiveness is rather universal, and is being used just as readily for the (mainly female) people who must live with alkies, as it would be used for those who must deal with life’s inherent imperfections—

 

Just for today I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle all my problems at once.  I can do something for twelve hours that would appall me if I felt that I had to keep it up for a lifetime.

Just for today I will be happy.  This assumes to be true what Abraham Lincoln said, that ‘Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.’  [Lincoln had some serious depressive episodes.]

Just for today I will adjust myself to what is, and not try to adjust everything to my own desires.  I will take my ‘luck’ as it comes, and fit myself to it.

Just for today I will try to strengthen my mind.  I will study.  I will learn something useful. I will not be a mental loafer.  I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration.

Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn, and not get found out; if anybody knows of it, it will not count.  I will do at least two things I don’t want to do — just for exercise.  I will not show anyone that my feelings are hurt; they may be hurt, but today I will not show it.

Just for today I will be agreeable.  I will look as well as I can, dress becomingly, keep my voice low, be courteous, criticize not one bit.  I won’t find fault with anything, nor try to improve or regulate anybody but myself.

Just for today I will have a program.  I may not follow it exactly, but I will have it.  I will save myself from two pests: hurry and indecision.

Just for today I will have a quiet half hour all by myself, and relax.  During this half hour, sometime, I will try to get a better perspective of my life.

Just for today I will be unafraid.  Especially I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful, and to believe that as I give to the world, so the world will give to me.

PRAYER FOR TODAY

Lord make me an instrument of Thy peace.  Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light, and where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

 

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

 

Since victim correction as a panacea is a panacea, its rationales are very predictable, and standard.  In the following each of them are numbered, so that when you hear them applied to a certain situation, you could respond by saying, “Oh, yeah, right, that’s standard rationale #7...”

These rationales have certain things in common.  They all are contingent only on certain tactical specifics of each situation, never on questions of who’s morally responsible for what, unless this moral responsibility is so grave that delegating responsibility to the victims would simply seem untenable.  Unless what happened was so extreme that this would sound untenable, trying to correct the person who caused the problem, even assertively, could very easily seem or suggest: unrealistic, unreliable, stupid, conditional, optional, half-hearted, limited, judgmental, troublemaking, “on principle,” moralistic, unattractive, sophistry-rewarding, altruistic, controlling, whiny, mollycoddling, intellectualist, pathetic, resentful, maladjusted, negative, blaming, subjective, unproven, emotionalistic, manipulative, passive, etc., while trying to correct the person who has the problem in ways that would help him “take care of himself” better, could very easily seem or suggest: realistic, reliable, wise, necessary, vital, steadfast, limitless, forgiving, peace-making, pragmatic, trendy, marketable, success-rewarding, “getting on with life,” self-empowering, gutsy, achievement-oriented, down-to-earth, proud, competitive, well-adjusted, hopeful, solving, objective, self-justifying, practical, self-reliant, active, etc.  Victim correctors only want addicts’ kids, etc., to be more self-efficacious, serene, etc.  Though those held morally responsible for problems would probably be presumed innocent until proven guilty, those held response-able for not taking care of their own problems stolidly enough, wouldn’t, since someone would have to take care of every problem, and with plenty of problems, you couldn’t prove anyone guilty.  Holding people response-able for their own problems is almost always the most pragmatic, objective, honorable, and forgiving option.  Of course, one doesn’t question expectations that he be well-adjusted, self-reliant, non-controlling, etc.  If one rationale for victim correction doesn’t work, it’s replaced by another.  As “Mary Smith” wrote in her suicide note, “All [my psychologist] could do is nitpick about how I need to feel small + helpless,” though Mary obviously had a gutsy personality, which is typical of the self-empowering “thinking” of victim correction: plenty of all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, and disqualifying the positive.  Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct.  NOTHING CAN LIMIT HOW MUCH ALL THIS COULD AFFECT YOU.

Since this is a panacea, it’s done with a tunnel vision; the point of such strategies is to focus on what would be most pragmatic, honorable, and forgiving.  “Self-help” means that if you’re the one who has the problem then yourself is the only one you could rely on to help; even the most worldly ethical responsibility would be others-help.  In order to make certain things work, the person who’s doing it must really want it to succeed, and the person who has the problem would really want it to be solved.  No problem could really be a problem if the victim prevented solved or dealt with it well enough, so victims who don’t take care of their own problems well enough seem omni-responsible.  If all this seems too glib to you, then you should choose to accept it instead, since that would be pragmatic, in that the question of what would solve your own problems is more important than is the question of what is glib, morally bankrupt, reductionist, etc.  A reductio ad absurdum couldn’t be treated as a reductio ad absurdum, since as long as a reality is your reality then you must deal with it, even when that means, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” and/or, “If you’re a teenage child of an alcoholic, you’d be a lot less passive if you stopped blaming others, and instead looked at yourself.”  To paraphrase British prime minister David Lloyd George, such teens cannot conquer the chasms in their own lives by gingerly taking one step at a time.

The untermenschen are the only ones who could legitimately seem scary, and they probably would, since their WILLFULNESS is expressed through manipulative ideas, whereas the WILLFULNESS of the übermenschen is expressed through non-manipulative power.  It seems that we must fear the untermenschen and their victim-power, and mustn’t fear the übermenschen and their freedoms.  Sure, this logic always corrects the victims, but if you try hard enough you won’t always be the victim, so it won’t always correct you.  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.  If people were allowed to set limits as to how much victim correction they’d be willing to accept, then many people would, at least once in their lives, have traumas that would give them responsibilities that would cross their limits, and if they didn’t correct themselves, this would lead to big messes not being rectified.  Though “balance” might seem synonymous with intelligence, maturity, honesty, and the like, if one insisted on balancing victim correction as a panacea with moral concerns, this would seem unrealistic, defeatist, whiny, etc.

What’s the alternative, whining, passivity, giving up, and/or trusting that asshole who caused the problem, to solve it?

This is all very systematic.  As the Philadelphia Grand Jury report on their Archdiocese’s enabling of pedo-priests put it,

Pretty much all of these could be seen in the entire unredacted Serenity Prayer as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr, “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 whole topic of victim correction as a panacea, might seem as banal as are the other everyday matters that social scientists deal with.  Yet when you keep in mind both the rampant depression in the West, and the victim-self-blaming that’s characteristic of depressives in the modern West though you might think that hurt feelings have nothing to do with the hurt person being at fault, you could see that this is both profound and, in real, practical terms, extremely important.  Intercultural studies have consistently found 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, didn’t just happen through spontaneous combustion.  Everything could seem excusable, since very little is unambiguously evil, and if you want to think like a winner, you’d courageously change what you could and serenely accept what you couldn’t.  That’s living in the real world.

 

This is exactly how you’d expect a culture that stresses personal response-ability for one’s own welfare including one’s own problems, to shape how the devastated would see their own devastation, in general.  Taming the Tyrant, Treating Depressed Adults, by Dr. Dean Schuyler, says, “In the 1970s, Roth, et al. found ‘inappropriate guilt’ associated as often with anxiety syndromes as with depression, raising questions about its specificity.”  And everybody knows how those those who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents, those who’d been sexually abused, etc., therefore become characterologically self-blaming about whatever problems come their way throughout their own lives.  We’ll just have to keep ignoring the rampant depression, and judge everyone’s successes and failures as if this didn’t exist.

Sure, to define “personal responsibility” along the lines of, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” when this means dealing with inconveniences for which others aren’t significantly morally responsible, sounds good and reasonable.  Yet to define “personal responsibility” like that in a society with rampant depression, could routinely mean expectations as severe as, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  This, and all that people must do to live up to such conceptions of personal responsibility, really are so banal that they’re extremely profound.

These Rationales Are As Follows:

1. But This Would Benefit You!

2. STRENGTH of Character

3. So, What Are We Supposed to Do, NOT CARE?

4. Some Imperfection Must Be Tolerated; Some Mustn’t Be.

5. Schopenhauer’s Idea of Manipulation

6. Women’s Responsibilities

7. Magnification or Minimization

8. All-or-Nothing Thinking

9. Overgeneralization

10. Mental Filter

11. Disqualifying the Positive

12. Jumping to Conclusions

13. Should Statements

14. Labeling and Mislabeling

15. Personalization

16. This Moral Bankruptcy Is For Your Own Good

17. Micro vs. Macro

18. There’s Always Room for Improvement.

19. That’s Exciting.

20. Every Society Needs Homeostasis.

21. How Market Discipline, Disciplines

22. The Worse Your Problem Is, the Less You Could Afford to Care About Blame.

23. What is “Human Nature”?

24. Victimizers Can Legitimately Play the Helpless Role; Victims Can’t.

25. Open Secrets

26. Marxist Tactics

27. Moral Relativism Becomes Amoral Absolutism.

28. “That’s Analysis Paralysis.”

29. Not Absolutely Provably Evil

---

 

1. But This Would Benefit You!—As you could see in any book on codependency, in situations where one person has caused a problem for another, “personal responsibility” has to mean that the victim takes response-ability for her own welfare, her own problems.  This would constitute self-empowerment, self-help, self-efficaciousness, etc.  She’s certainly far more likely to get them solved as well as possible, than is the person who’s morally responsible for them.  Every person victimized by another, could be told, “But you should correct any defects that you might have in your survival and coping skills, since that would benefit you!  It would really do you a lot of good if you..., and..., and..., and....”

Even if this looks like the law of the jungle, the fact would still remain that this is how you win in life.  When you’re in trouble, you should focus on self-responsibility, how you could most effectively take response-ability for your own welfare.  If you’re lucky, you’ll be in a situation where you could win by proving that you’re morally right.  (Yet these situations would have the moral hazard that if one can win by proving himself morally right, then those who aren’t morally right, but can come up with enough sophistry and emotional pull, could win through manipulation.  Even if they honestly believe they’re right, naturally everyone believes that they’re right, and that they’re entitled to more than what they have.)  In most situations, though, the more outrageous was what one person did at another’s expense, the more important it would be that he’d take care of his own problem, and the less likely it would be that the morally responsible person would take moral responsibility to a degree that he’d be motivated enough to succeed in solving the problem.  Self-empowerment always benefits victims.

 

(Cartoon generated by “Build Your Own Meat”)

If you win, you win, and if you lose, you lose.  That way, you automatically get what you win, which would be very objective.  You’re just going to have to courageously change what you, personally, could, and serenely accept what you couldn’t.

If, instead, you were treated like what Noam Chomsky would call a “worthy victim,” you’d learn from this that you could get what you wanted by whining rather than by showing a fighting spirit, and this would weaken you in life.  In life, worthiness would rarely win you anything, other than the worthiness you have a chance to prove physically.  Treating any victim as an unworthy victim, could give him more backbone in courageously changing and serenely accepting what he must.  For him to treat himself as an unworthy victim, would give himself all the self-correction that results from the victim-self-blaming that’s distinctive of modern Western depression, anxiety, etc.

Probably the main difference between the implications of “victim correction as a panacea,” and, “victim-blaming,” is that victim correction as a panacea attempts to benefit the victims by making their defensive tactics better, while victim-blaming seems to be pot-shots taken at the weak and suffering. 

At the same time, the original definitive book Blaming the Victim by William Ryan, described this as something that was intended to help the poor by giving them more Victorian attitudes.  “Its adherents include sympathetic social scientists with social consciences in good working order, and liberal politicians with a genuine commitment to reform.  They are very careful to dissociate themselves from vulgar Calvinism or crude racism; they indignantly condemn any notions of innate wickedness or genetic defect.  ‘The Negro is not born inferior,’ they shout apoplectically.  ‘Force of circumstance,’ they explain in reasonable tones, ‘has made him inferior.’   And they dismiss with self-righteous contempt any claims that the poor man in America is plainly unworthy or shiftless or enamored of idleness.  No, they say, he is ‘caught in the cycle of poverty.’  He is trained to be poor by his culture and his family life, endowed by his environment (perhaps by his ignorant mother’s outdated style of toilet training) with those unfortunately unpleasant characteristics that make him ineligible for a passport into the affluent society.”

And then there’s what’s probably the most famous line from Blaming the Victim, “All of this happens so smoothly that it seems downright rational.”

Sure, a greater Victorian-style sense of self-responsibility wasn’t going to decrease the rates of unemployment or underemployment, whatsoever.  Yet, since if a given poor adult chose to adopt more Victorian attitudes this would have increased his chances of getting a living-wage job at least somewhat, a cognitive therapy that would have inculcated these Victorian attitudes, could have been called a form of self-empowerment.  Blaming women for problems that their husbands caused them since the women chose to marry them, is the sort of thing that most Americans think of as “blaming the victim,” yet this is exactly what therapy for suspected codependency, treats as self-empowerment.  In all cases where the people who have the problems are to focus their attention on correcting the weaknesses, inefficiencies, etc., in their dealing with their own problems, their own problems would get resolved,  and they’d look more respectable and forgiving.  This reductionism seems good, since the more that such a conflict is reduced to how the person with the problem could most effectively take care of his own problem, the more that the personal responsibility for the problem would go to the person who’s the most motivated to deal with it effectively.  Positive outlooks would give hope to any victims.

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, 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.

Ironically, the introductory textbook Sociology, Fourth Edition, by Paul B. Horton and Chester L. Hunt, copyright 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976,  in the section that agrees with exactly the victim-blaming logic that Blaming the Victim is all about, that poor people’s thinking tends not to follow the “Deferred Gratification Pattern,” says that even if it seems that poor people agree with it, this could be an illusion due to a “value stretch.”  Poor people may say that they agree with the Victorian values (including that those of the middle class supposedly “tend to defer sexual gratification through intercourse,” which is also the topic of a whole chapter of Blaming the Victim, “The Prevalence of Bastards: Illegitimate Views of Illegitimacy”), but that’s only because they define these values rather loosely.  One example of this is, “Likewise, if difficulties arise, the lower-class person is not blamed for failing to attain the ideal even while continuing to give verbal assent.”  So one way in which the victims seemed to be at fault was that, “if difficulties arise,” the poor person doesn’t really blame himself for not winning his own battles, though he hypocritically says that he does believe in the ideal of taking personal response-ability for one’s own problems.  So since victim-self-blaming would make victims more likely to find and reach solutions for their own problems, these victims were naturally blamed for not blaming themselves enough!

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

In other words, “Nothing that could possibly involve their own choices, has made them inferior.  They were born that way!”, is now considered to be the opposite of victim-blaming.  This has the usual assumption that this social problem consists of either 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions, or 34,000,000 rather severe character flaws.  Everyone knows that what’s at fault, is inside the millions of victims.  Caring about social problems is so passé, so 1960s, even caring about our rampant depression.  Blaming the Victim, copyright 1971, says, “Now no one in his right mind would quarrel with the assertion that social problems are present in abundance and are readily identifiable....  The problems are there, and there in great quantities.  They make us uneasy.  Added together, these disturbing signs reflect inequality and a puzzlingly high level of unalleviated distress in America totally inconsistent with our proclaimed ideals...,” “[Social problems] become social problems only by being so considered.  In Seeley’s words, ‘naming it as a problem, after naming it as a problem.’” and, “The social problem of mental disease has been viewed as a collection of individual cases of deviance, persons who—through unusual hereditary taint, or exceptional distortion of character—have become unfit for normal activities.”  Yet when “difficulties arise” for poor people in a society with rampant depression, that probably means something different from when “difficulties arise” for poor people in a society without it.  “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” doesn’t necessarily mean, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” but is necessarily that unconditional, all-or-nothing, and

Also as usual, that defines “weaknesses of character,” as literal weaknesses.  And rather than the four-step process that follows “All of this happens so smoothly that it seems downright rational,” in Blaming the Victim, this is a one-step process, “It’s your problem, so what are you going to do about it?”, which is even smoother.  Yet a true awareness of how unnatural are both this and what causes it, would be the ultimate shock and awe!

The weaknesses of character that could be attributed to those who have the problems and don’t seem to be responding to them STRONGLY enough, are quite varied.  As the Zoloft ad suggests, this could imply that since you’re personally responsible for changing or accepting whatever you must, if you aren’t adequate to do this, lose the battle, fail, and come up short with big consequences, you’d seem to be an irresponsible and inadequate, loser and failure with very consequential shortcomings.  If you don’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, you’d seem to be a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent.  If you live in a society with rampant depression, then for you, whether you seem to have adequate strength, would depend on whether it’s adequate to deal with that.  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.  The Missing Question is, “But what about the fact that these social norms accept helplessness that provably leads to an unnaturally gargantuan rate of depression?”

Of course, there are plenty of permutations of that, such as: traditionally feminine, immature, unrealistic, controlling, and resentful.  And, of course, that means not gutsy enough, mature enough, realistic enough, self-reliant enough, or forgiving enough, to deal with what causes our rampant depression.

Of course, it’s very easy to figure that this rampant depression is just one of many realities that we must deal with, so if we truly do care about this then that’s just our own whiny and deviant opinion, until we remember that:

and that depressive disorders affecting 34,000,000 American adults, is quite a lot of be immersed in!  In the light of this rampant depression, most of our conflicts look different.  This can’t just be brushed aside!  Yet if one proceeded as if one could make different assumptions about the conflicts in such a society, than he could make in a society without rampant depression, he’d seem to be making the assumptions that would give him good excuses for his own failure, let him manipulate others by playing the victim role, and other things that would make him seem to have a weak character.  In order to seem to have an adequate character, he really would have to make the assumptions that one would make about conflicts in a society with a normal rate of depression, such as, “Oh, well, that’s just one of those imperfections that are inherent to life and human nature, so something’s wrong with me if I don’t deal with it well enough.”

Naturally, powerful men would tend to feel comfortable with, if not truly believe in, patriarchal cultural norms.

(This picture of Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, appeared on page 24 of the December, 2007 issue of Psychology Today.)

Yet even those who are powerless would have to go along with them, since they’d be powerless to change the consequences of not going along with them.  And the weak also want to fit in, to live up to whatever their societies’ standards are.  Saudi women who want to fit in don’t want to show “too much skin,” and American women who want to fit in don’t want to seem to be “playing the victim role.”  Sure, all those millions of depressed Americans could seem to have the same supposed defects of character, but one never notices the implausibility that all those people could seem to be that inadequate.

With Dubya being just one of many from the Confederate States of America who’ve become powerful since the Reagan-Thatcher era, the ways in which Confederate soldiers and others loyal to the Confederate States had defined strong vs. weak character, is very worthy of note.  Now we’d consider those who live in the Bible Belt to be just as American as those living anywhere else in the USA.  Yet these loyalties were quite amazing.  The level of harm that the Civil War did is still very worthy of note.  Since it took place as the Western world was just becoming industrialized, if the Civil War had taken place a few decades later it would have been like World War I, yet those soldiers would have been just as willing to fight for the Confederacy.  This, despite the fact that the whole reason for the Civil War was the right to own slaves, which meant, for the most part, rich people owning them.  This certainly went against the interests of average Confederate people, since slave labor lowered their wages.  You might think that only a utopian would think that average people living in the Confederate States would league up in such an arrangement that clearly worked against their own interests.  Yet not only did they do this, but these supposed rebels no doubt saw this self-defeating allegiance as fighting for the sort of red-blooded free spirit that the Bible Belt takes pride in now.  To this day, plenty of non-racist whites living in the Confederate States display Confederate flags, as if this has an exciting appeal to it.  All this would have had to have meant that plenty of Confederate loyalists insisted that, if any of their fellow Confederates didn’t fit this pattern, they had weak characters.  Every society needs something to believe in.

Yes, it would seem that the only legitimate thing that we could do about that rampant depression, and anything connected with it, is NOT CARE.   If you do, plenty of untermensch attributes would be attributed to you, 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.  If instead you compromised, and cared to a degree that’s only a fraction of what our rampant depression deserves, that would still be quite weak-spirited and whiny.  And when this sort of helplessness impacts your life, then you could be certain that if you chose not to care you’d have a more confident outlook so you’d be more likely to succeed, just as, if you were poor, choosing to have more of a Victorian-style self-discipline would make you more likely to succeed.  If you really do care how scary this rate of depression is, it would be you who’d seem scary, because of all the untermensch victim-power you’d have.

And, naturally, this means...

Certainly you could imagine what would happen if you responded to one of those who figured that naturally you’re simply supposed to adjust to the norms that cause our rampant depression, by saying, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.  Sure, for depressive disorders to affect about 34,000,000 American adults is a very serious social problem, but in order to fit in, you’ve got to minimize the problems around you, somewhat.  Therefore, I’ll treat this as if it were just a moderately severe social problem.”  After all, if you could care somewhat, then that would make you somewhat discouraged, maladjusted, thinking like a victim, etc.  Reductionism is key.  You might think that our rate of depression would be the ultimate

but ads for antidepressants talk about our millions of depressions as if they’re either millions of very consequential character defects or millions of very consequential biological defects, and the public just accepts this.  Social Darwinism seems to protect us from untermensch dangers such as manipulation quitting whining and cowardice, and it seems that a society simply can’t afford to do without the “strong characters” that would put things back together again.

This is surprisingly like the logic used by the Philadelphia Archdiocese, regarding the perv priests exposed by the Philadelphia Grand Jury Report.  At first, the Archdiocese responded as if they were basically victims of anti-Catholic bigotry.  But since that wouldn’t work with an unbiased government report that had plenty of Catholics contributing to it, they had to try a rationale that’s more typical of the sort of permissivity that American norms would say that of course well-adjusted people simply accept.  After the Archdiocese banned Fr. Robert L. Brennan from performing any more priestly duties, Donna Farrell, the archdiocese’s spokeswoman, said, “It’s a new day, and we’re trying to do the right thing.”  This is very similar to how, as Michael Harris’ Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount Cashel says, just after some boys at the Mount Cashel orphanage turned its molesters in to the cops, the administrators tried to dissuade the law and media from going after them, by saying that that would lead to strife among all of the boys at the orphanage, but once the law and media finally did go after the molesters fourteen years later, the administrators said that they were guilty of burdening the boys with “history.”  As long as something happened in the past then, plainly and simply, those who could be held accountable could try to evade responsibility by saying, “It’s a new day, so don’t bother me about that history.”  As with Mount Cashel, the more of a delay that the responsible parties can cause, the more that they could plead, “But you’re getting so neurotic resentful and manipulative about that history!”  And as usual, this isn’t in relative terms, gauging how much of a difference the passage of time would make in the entire mix, but a supposed absolute difference, the difference between neurotic resentful and manipulative, and rational.

Probably the main reason for the Virtue of Forgiveness, is the fact that in just about all of the problems that one person causes for another, including those that contribute to our rampant depression, the cause occurs before the problem.  Therefore, once the problem exists, what caused it could be treated as both “past history,” and something that the person who caused it is absolutely helpless to undo.  And, of course, the longer that he stonewalls in refusing to take responsibility, the more that he could then say that what he did is “past history.”  Sure, he could remedy it, but that would very likely require that he make such an effort that expecting him to do it probably wouldn’t work, and would be labeled as an attempt to guilt-trip and control an übermensch.  Therefore, the person who has the problem is simply personally response-able for taking care of himself.

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.

4. Some Imperfection Must Be Tolerated; Some Mustn’t Be—After all, we could live with übermensch human imperfection since the victims would be motivated to fix the consequences, but who’d fix the consequences of untermensch human imperfection, which tends to be far more prolonged?  Somehow, “re-engineering human nature” always means re-engineering aggressive human nature.  The radical changes in human nature that, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” would make, isn’t condemned as “re-engineering human nature.”  Niebuhr’s favorite theological doctrine was the favorite of Wagnerian Germans, the Doctrine of Original Sin.  This is the same sort of thinking that would hold with absolute certainty that people’s aggressive tendencies are ineradicable.

Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, copyright 1943, in the subchapter “The Relation of Christ’s Perfection to History,” says, “There are no forms of remedial justice from which the egoistic element of vindictiveness has been completely purged.  The coming decades of post-war reconstruction will offer us ample proof of this tragic fact.”

So how do you tell the difference between “remedial justice” toward the Nazis, and “egoistic vindictiveness” toward them?  Why care about the possibility of too much stringency toward them, rather than too much forgiveness in order to make Germany look like a success story compared to the Communist countries?  One could always give a very übermensch rationale to make this seem morally right, that after the war no one could turn back the clock and undo what was done during the war so for others to care about it would be vindictive, resentful, etc.

The Nature and Destiny of Man also includes, “There is a peculiar irony in the fact that [Nietzsche’s] doctrine, which was meant as an exposure of the vindictive transvaluation of values engaged in by the inferior classes, should have itself become a vehicle of the pitiful resentments of the lower middle classes of Europe in their fury against more powerful aristocratic and proletarian classes.”  Yet a might-makes-right mentality such as Nietzsche’s, obviously leads to a transvaluation of values.  One aspect of this is that the strong who caused problems could honorably play the helpless role, while the weak victims of these problems couldn’t.  After all, the strong could claim that once they’d already caused the problems, they’d be completely helpless to turn back the clock and undo them.  They’d also have the mystique of the übermensch, so it would seem very honorable for them to insist that all excuse them for exercising their freedoms.  On the other hand, the weak couldn’t honorably play the helpless role, since they wouldn’t be helpless to deal with their own problems stolidly.  If they don’t do that, this very easily could seem to be a product of their own manipulative and insidious SELF-WILLS.  And we all know how sneaky the SELF-WILLS of the untermenschen are supposed to be.  The whole idea of the supposed “transvaluation of values” that Nietzsche claimed to have exposed, is that though these victims claim to be fighting for what’s right, they’re actually fighting for what they want, or, at the very least, what they want to believe.  Sure, the excuses that the strong give also reflect what they want or want to believe, but accepting their übermensch opinions seems pro-freedom, pro-forgiveness, well-adjusted, realistic, etc.

As  the article “Injustice Collecting,” by Nando Pelusi, Ph.D., from the December, 2006 issue of Psychology Today, gave, as reasons why so many “injustice collectors” practice their supposed hobby so avidly, both

and that as human nature evolved, “Remember, we’re the descendants of humans who needed their fair share of resources, rewards, credit, and carcasses.  It therefore behooves us to be hypervigilant in separating the free rider or cheater from someone who deserves the benefit of the doubt.  That’s why injustice collecting errs on the side of suspicion: Natural selection favors the less costly error, and in the ancestral environment it was likely better to rebuff a well-intentioned person than to trust someone who might swindle us out of home and hut.”  So even if these hurt feelings are human nature, doesn’t mean that we should have the same attitude toward re-engineering them, that we have toward re-engineering übermensch human nature.

While this might sound a lot more innocuous than does, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” actually they both say the same thing.  Sure, in prehistoric times, hardship and sinfulness could have easily killed people, and this is why we have such strong feelings about them.  Yet since they can rarely kill us nowadays, and those who are faced with them need all the serenity and courage that they could get, they should choose to transcend their problems in the material world.

You might think that the fact that according to a section of the American Congressional Record, the Reagan Administration had arranged for many varieties of deadly germs to be shipped to Saddam, including anthrax, when everyone knew that he actually was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, and that some of these were to be shipped to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission, is a very extreme example of the sort of thing that would be totally inconsistent with our proclaimed ideals.

Yet chances are that even if Saddam had used these germs in weapons of mass destruction, and the Reagan Administration’s providing them to him became known, his followers would have had all sorts of excuses for that.  After all, no one in the Reagan Administration intended that Saddam use them in whatever way he chose to use them.  Therefore, if you don’t just accept that “mistakes were made,” you could seem to be a judgmental whiner, political manipulator, intellectualist, etc.  Such supposed untermensch willfulness wouldn’t seem so excusable, since if we excused that sort of thing, plenty of people would be getting what they want by either sincerely or insincerely insisting that they deserve it since they’re victims.  And the fact would now remain that the only reason why Reagan doesn’t seem to be one of world history’s worst war criminals, is that it just so happened that Saddam chose not to use those germs in WMD.

This section of the Congressional Record was from just before the Iraq invasion, when the Bushmen wanted to justify the belief that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction, despite all the time that’s passed between Reagan’s era and now.  Obviously neither Rumsfeld, who back then was Reagan’s main liaison with Saddam in getting him these germs, nor any of the other Bushmen, were ashamed enough about what the Reaganites did, that the Bushmen thought that the advantages that they got from making this known, weren’t worth the ignominy.

5. Schopenhauer’s Idea of Manipulation—Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, the two-book set which is probably what most shaped the thinking of Hitler, includes the following, which may indeed sound stereotypically Hitlerian: “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.”

Nietzsche and Wagner, also, were greatly influenced by Schopenhauer.  Nietzsche defined evil as, “whatever springs from weakness,” and saw the weak as getting what they want in dishonest ways.  If human aggression is ineradicable, and the weak can’t get what they want through open and honest power, then the weak could get what they want only through passive-aggressive means.  And since naturally everyone wants to believe that that others owe them something, even acting on sincere beliefs that others owe you something, could be called manipulative, passive-aggressive, etc.  Psychoanalysis is also very Wagnerian, and it also likes the idea of passive-aggression.  Sure, the 1970s, the “me decade,” popularized assertively standing up for one’s own rights, but even the most honest and sincere, assertively standing up for one’s own rights could still seem ignominiously naïvely and manipulatively untermensch.  A central concept to Nazism is that even the most sincere fights for what’s morally right, reflect the aggressive but insidious SELF-WILLS of those who fight for this, but to see even such sincerity as self-serving is usually tenable, and much more likely to get productive results than would be holding the morally responsible people, morally accountable.  If you really take seriously the moral wrongness of what was done to you, this could seem to be the triumph of the manipulative will, your attempt to win something through manipulative victim-power.  One can’t prove most manipulative, passive-aggressive, codependent, etc., machinations, so “presumed innocent of machinations until proven guilty” is out of the question.

The three alternatives to assertiveness were given as aggressive, passive, and manipulative, which The Assertive Woman by Stanlee Phelps and Nancy Austin, defined as being “indirect,” but ever since the Reagan/Thatcher era, even “victimology” and “victimhood” that’s directly based on truth could be treated as manipulative as long as it seems that the victims should simply buck up and deal with their own problems.  Jane in the above Al-Anon Conference-Approved Literature comic, didn’t do anything devious, but she sure does look devious after she got her husband to say that he’ll become normal, since she could be labeled as “playing upon his emotions.”  Schopenhauer was the one who coined the expression, “Homo homini lupus,” man is a wolf to man.  Schopenhauer also wrote of pederasty as if, sure, this is horrific, but it’s seen all over the world, so it, too, would qualify as inevitable human aggressiveness.

The subtitle of the modern self-help book The Manipulative Child, by Drs. E. W. Swihart, E. W. Swihart Jr., and Patrick Cotter, is, “How to Regain Control and Raise Resilient, Resourceful, and Independent Kids.”  If one has the conceptions of ineradicable human aggression that led to the Wagnerian conceptions of this, then he’d also have to believe that those who don’t deal with the problems that result from man being a wolf to man, resiliently resourcefully and independently enough to succeed, are manipulative as sins of omission.  That’s the reason for what Schopenhauer called “representation,” and what we today call “cognitive therapy,” that we can choose how we represent our experiences to ourselves, and both because human aggression is ineradicable, and because the untermenschen naturally want to believe that others owe them, they’ll simply have to choose to represent their experiences to themselves in a Stoic fashion.

The World as Will and Representation 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.

While self-help realists wouldn’t go so far as saying that man is a wolf to man, they’d have to say that whenever anyone chooses to act as a wolf to man, then for the victims, that’s reality.  Anyone who doesn’t deal with their own realities resiliently resourcefully and independently enough to succeed, seem manipulative as sins of omission.  “Ignominious cunning” is another way of saying manipulation.  Those who actually do engage in such cunning wouldn’t be forgiven as would those who engage in sinfulness.  Those suspected of such cunning wouldn’t be presumed innocent until proven guilty, since it would be pretty hard to prove thoughts such as cunning, and a part of the cunning would be to remain undetected.  Übermenschen like the Reaganites, don’t get ignominy.  Schopenhauer also wrote, in On The Fourfold Route of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, “Introspection always shows us to ourselves as willing.  In this willing, however, there are numerous degrees, from faintest wish to passion...,” and while untermensch SELF-WILL seems ignominious and dangerously insidious, übermensch SELF-WILL seems honorable or, at the very least, excusable since we don’t want to risk violating others’ freedoms too much.

Yet even if it could be proven that someone who didn’t respond stolidly to his own problem, didn’t engage in any cunning, he still might as well have, according to the logic of, “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.”  Though this might sound like the epitome of Hitler’s liebestod, or death-love, actually, self-help psychology would have to operate in the same way.  The fact is that whenever anyone tells another that what he did was bad or evil, then this would be followed by either, “...but I forgive you,” or, “...so you’d better give or do the following...,” and control tactics like the latter could seem very un-American.

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.

Just imagine how self-help gurus would respond if you said the following:

• “But you owe me, and here’s why...!”

• “But what he did was wrong (whine, whine, whine), and here’s why...!”

• “But the reason why I have this problem is that he..., and here’s why... so he’s morally responsible for solving it!”

• “But listen to all the behavior problems my husband has...!”

No matter how true are the reasons you give, self-help psychology would probably say that the first and second of these constitute a subjective sense of entitlement and desire to believe that you should get more, the third a sign of a whiny character, and the fourth a sign of codependent melodrama.

Sure, the problems are there, and there in great quantities.  They make us uneasy.  Added together, these disturbing signs reflect inequality and a puzzlingly high level of unalleviated distress in America totally inconsistent with our proclaimed ideals.  Yet those who’d manipulatively use these problems to work on a hidden agenda, are also there.  Those who’d have about this a sincere but self-interested and self-justifying attitude of “But you owe me!”, are also there.  Some of these people would be absolutely correct in attributing their problems to battles between the strong and the weak, but this doesn’t change the fact that these people would benefit if, instead, they focused their attention on how they could make the best of whatever cards life has dealt them.  Though tending to treat the weak as The Problem is totally inconsistent with our proclaimed ideals, the fact is that, as rationale #18 on this webpage goes into, our society simply must have homeostasis.  The most reliable way to achieve it is to hold those who have the problems response-able for their own welfare, since they’re the ones who are the most motivated to solve their problems.  On the other hand, if we gave people the opportunity to serve hidden agendas manipulatively, they’d certainly be motivated to do that!  As an AA slogan says, “We are all victims of victims,” in that it could be pretty hard if not impossible to defend yourself from some manipulative “victim-power.”

This could seem pro-freedom, since: