And What Science Can Do About It

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“A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end.”

—JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

 

“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 much-beloved Serenity Prayer, unredacted, as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr

 

 

 (Even if the only part of this that you know is the famous first sentence, it should still be obvious that no matter what are the problems that one might have to deal with, including hardship and/or others’ sinfulness ad infinitum, everything’s a matter of whether or not he has the power to change the realities that others had the power to create.)

 

“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalities, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

“There is a way of speaking which is... entirely correct and unexceptionable, but which is, nevertheless, a lie....  When an apparently correct statement contains some deliberate ambiguity, or deliberately omits the essential part of the truth... it does not express the real as it exists in God.”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran theologian executed by the Nazis

 

 

“The aide, who sounded uncannily like Karl Rove, informed Suskind with great condescension that a ‘judicious study of discernible reality’ is ‘not the way the world really works anymore.’  The aide explained: ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.  And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”—Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, The Decline and Fall of Bush’s America, regarding the supposed intellectualism of journalists, whom that aide sarcastically called a “reality-based community”

 

 

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.”—Chinese proverb

 

“The difference between a little more and a little less justice in a social system and between a little more and a little less selfishness in the individual may represent differences between sickness and health, between misery and happiness in particular situations.”—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man.  One could only wonder what kind of “sickness and health” this was that he mentioned even before “misery and happiness.”  Certainly the victims’ health other than mental health, would be at stake in very few situations.

 

“Problems are made to be solved, Melody reminds us, and the best thing we can do is take responsibility for our own pain and self-care.”—from the Hazelden webpage for Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go, meaning that those who are considered codependent, which is another way of saying that someone else is outrageously responsible for their problems, should let go of their own resentment

 

“So I need to know how you, John McCormack, could believe that lying to me about what you knew of Birmingham’s career-long pedophilia could benefit me, and help me to ‘put it all behind me.’”—Paul Cultrera, of Hand of God fame, speaking before Bishop John McCormack on January 28, 2003, though, in fact, if Paul did believe that the Catholic hierarchy was unaware of Birmingham’s predations, that would have benefited Paul.  He could have “let go” easier if he believed that Birmingham was his only victimizer.

“At the slaveholding South all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment.  We have no mobs, no trade unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to the law, but little jealousy of the rich by the poor.  We have but few in our jails, and fewer in our poor houses.”—George Fitzhugh, written in the 1850s

 

“What gives hope to Al-Anon/Alateen members?  Many have experienced situations that others would find unbearable, yet they develop strength and hope for the future.  ‘I looked around me at group meetings and saw a few people as hurt and bitter and angry as I was,’ said one member, ‘but most were facing life as it came.  They were able to accept what I thought were outrageous situations.  And I wanted to learn how they did it.’”—The beginning of the preface, of As We Understood, A Collection of Spiritual Insights by Al-Anon and Alateen Members  (“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to God as we understood him,” suggests an open-mindedness concerning one’s higher power.  Yet that spirituality, and how one’s will is to be surrendered, obviously isn’t open-minded as to what constitutes the right outlook concerning outrageous situations.).

 

“I am responsible for my own perceptions of the world.  I accept the fact that the world that I see is largely the world I make.”—The message on one of the Ernie Larsen Change Cards, “52 affirmation cards,” “wise and motivating affirmations,” “These positive messages give us a chance every day to choose the happiness that change brings.”

 

 

(Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a novel about the billionaires going on strike which leads to everyone appreciating how much society needs them, and which includes a hero murdering a state legislator who tried to revoke a charter granted to him, and another hero intentionally makes a passenger train crash which doesn’t seem to matter since all the passengers contributed in some way to the non-Libertarian status quo, is great because it shows how “parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish, as they should.”—Alan Greenspan  (The Wikipedia webpage on her says, “When asked in a 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club what the most influential book in the respondent’s life was, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice, after the Bible.”)

“Now there’s hope.”—a slogan from a commercial for antidepressants

 

“We, too, were lonely and frustrated, but in Al-Anon we discover that no situation is really hopeless, and that it is possible for us to find contentment and even happiness, whether the alcoholic is still drinking or not.  We urge you to try our program.  It has helped many of us find solutions that lead to serenity.  So much depends on our own attitudes...”—in the “Suggested Al-Anon-Alateen Welcome,” from Al-Anon’s current handbook, How Al-Anon Works for Families and Friends of Alcoholics

 

“Regardless of whether we speak of ‘mental health’ or of the ‘mature development’ of the human race, the concept of mental health or of maturity is an objective one, arrived at by the examination of the ‘human situation’ and the human necessities and needs stemming from it.  It follows, as I pointed out in Chapter Two, that mental health cannot be defined in terms of the ‘adjustment’ of the individual to his society, but, on the contrary, that it must be defined in terms of the adjustment of society to the needs of man, of its role in furthering or hindering the development of mental health.”—Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, the foreword of which begins, “This book is a continuation of Escape from Freedom...”

 

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

 

 

 

(a barbecue apron from Lehman Brothers, in which high yield is a euphemism for high risk, but that means high excitement)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ictim correction as a panacea is the self-help problem-solving approach that plays a huge part in the “personal responsibility” that modern Westerners take seriously, response-ability for one’s own welfare.  This is basically goal-oriented victim-blaming, victim-blaming followed by, “and if he and others who had a problem like his dealt with their own problems more effectively, as follows, they’d benefit....”  The goal is solving problems with as much self-motivation, self-reliance, and forgiveness as possible.  In whatever respects one is weak or strong, the weak serenely accept, the strong courageously change, and the stronger don’t have to worry about changing or accepting anything.  In societies with rampant depression, self-blame gives hope, since if the roots of your problems are inside yourself, then you can solve them.

 

The only way to achieve this would be to correct those whose welfare is at stake, so that they could solve their own problems as effectively, stoutheartedly, and free of conflict, as possible.  Even Ayn Rand, in Atlas Shrugged, wrote, “Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man’s hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence [as she would define how people would naturally deal with what existence naturally is]. But the greater his terror, the more fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him [as she would define ‘doctrines’].”  This reductionism to self-reliant self-blame 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.  If one rationale for victim correction doesn’t work, it’s replaced by another.  Neo-Buddhism means failsafe coping skills.  Simply being morally right, has never earned or achieved anything.  As can be seen in Nietzsche, the weak could easily seem to be the dangerously WILLFUL ones, since everyone’s beliefs regarding what they deserve are shaped by their own SELF-WILLS, and the weak can exercise their supposed SELF-WILLS only in ways that would seem mollycoddle, “dishonest” and “ignominious,” whereas red-blooded strength is “honest,” proud, and at least forgivable (i.e. must be forgiven).  We must appreciate all the hidden dangers of unchecked “victim-power.”  As Niebuhr wrote, power, which would include victim-power, “cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest,” over (hidden and surreptitious) SELF-WILL.  When religious Good Americans are trying to talk someone out of violating rules where this would likely cause someone to suffer a depression, they’d probably feel free to take this as seriously as it deserves to be taken, but when looking at depression caused by what our culture says are normal and inevitable imperfections, caring about the risk of depression would seem subversive.  Feeling sure that the weak have hidden agendas, doesn’t seem paranoid.  If this worldview were “with a human face,” just think of all the mollycoddle SELF-WILL, victim-power, and inadequate response-ability for one’s own welfare, that the untermenschen could get away with!  Sure, those skeptical of psychology use as an example of why, the diagnosis of Draepetomania, or a compulsion of slaves to run away, though if a slave’s reality was that if he kept trying to run away he’d suffer more than if he didn’t, his attempts to run away could have been called self-defeating, unrealistic, etc.

Frank Buchman, leader of the Oxford Groups, the club on which AA and then Al-Anon was based and until recently was called “Moral Re-Armament,” said, “D’you know Heinrich Himmler?...  Say, you ought to know Heinrich.  He’s a great lad....  [Hitler] lets us have house-parties whenever we like.”  Anti-Nazi British travel-writer and journalist Robert Byron, who got a chance to observe Nazism up close, wrote in his diary, “Himmler apparently dotes on the Oxford Group [How cute.] and writes to its English members discussing their troubles with them,” so he was their Dear Abby.  Himmler’s advice would have said that when we deal with our own troubles, the strong do get forgiven and the weak don’t.  Sure, this is stereotypically Nazi, but it would also be the most pragmatic (in the microcosmic sense) and well-adjusted approach. These are exactly the benefits that psychologists often get from using the AA approach, or other pragmatic approaches.

 

 

Aggressiveness seems ineradicable, and objections to it seem eradicable.  We simply must accept this, just as we simply must accept the basic principles of economics, and for the same basic reasons: that no matter how unfair this is, it’s the most reliable way to motivate people to do what must get done, and that this, therefore, is the sort of honorability, self-responsibility, etc., that our culture and its sanctions take seriously.  Well-trained people are more well-adjusted.  Sure, Orwell’s 1984 says, “Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain.  Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.  Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain,” but the question of rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., is more complicated than that.  Right now the average American would respond to most of the traumas that contribute to our unnaturally high rates of depression, anxiety, etc., by saying “Oh, well, that’s life,” though if he knew that it contributed to our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., it would be pretty hard for him to say that anything that contributes to an unnaturally high rate of anything, “is life.”  Anathematizing the weak in the simple-minded fashion that’s typical of anti-intellectualism might sound like the ultimate Nazi-esque moral bankruptcy, but this would fit our principles of freedom based on responsibility for our own welfare, would stop manipulative victim-posturing and all other victimhood, would pressure the weak to try to empower themselves which would benefit them, and would get those who are the most reliably motivated to solve the problems, to do it as well as possible. The title of the chapter about Reaganist deregulation, of Charles R. Morris’ The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, is, “Wall Street Finds Religion,” and that’s how this fundamentalist and very demanding religion (“But that’s where a quarter-century of diligent sacrifice to the gods of the free market has brought us.”), must construe who are the sinners with the defects of character, and who are the martyrs.  As Lord Lister said, “Be strange to the familiar,” and if we used that sort of common sense skepticism and objectivism, we could see what our usual conceptions of personal responsibility really lead to.

 

 

Ever since the mid-1970s, organizations advocating for medical doctors have claimed that a lot of cynical manipulators, or at least people who simply want to believe that they’re entitled victims, have been unfairly suing for malpractice and winning.  Plenty of middle-class people who fight for freedom, cheer for these doctors, though those who sue for malpractice tend to be middle-class.  Patients and their families have probably prevented more money being lost through malpractice lawsuits, by noticing dangers in patient treatment and pointing them out to the professionals, than has been lost through frivolous malpractice lawsuits.  We don’t have a pendulum that swings both ways, but rather, consistent claims that many doctors who lose malpractice suits are victims, and lack of concern for those who deserve to file suit and win but can’t afford to.  If one took such widely-accepted claims literally, those unfairly suing for malpractice have been running rampant for at least a third of a century, and nothing has been able to stop them.  Sure, that sounds illogical, but if you take these claims literally, that’s exactly what they’d mean.  Likewise, if one put together all the supposedly pro-freedom claims that many Americans’ internal weaknesses (biological, attitudinal, etc.) are responsible for their own problems, we’d look as if we’re a country of manipulators and those who are evading responsibility, and as if, despite our cowboy heritage, we simply can’t get this to stop.

As one could see in the deregulation leading up to the Great Crash of 2008, the law of the jungle becomes the ultimate source of virtue, since it: holds responsible those who have the most reliable motivation to do what has to be done, does this efficiently (as our cultural norms define this word), serves the greater good, follows natural laws, determines objectively who’s a success and who’s a failure in doing this, settles disputes objectively and with finality, fights mollycoddle SELF-WILL, fights for freedom, etc.  “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” could happen to anyone.  And while this might sound too radical, the fact would still remain that no matter what happens to you, including hardship, sinfulness, etc., ad infinitum, it wouldn’t matter what is or isn’t your fault (which may be subjective anyway, and caring about blame could seem whiny, judgmental, controlling, etc.), only what you could change or deal with (which is objective and self-reliant).  Telling those who are morally responsible how they should fix or prevent problems would be naïve and unreliable, while telling you (or you telling yourself) how you could take care of yourself better, and expecting that to lead to enough physical results, would be realistic and reliable.  A webpage on the Madoff Help website, GRANT ME THE SERENITY: Helpful Words for Challenging Times, begins, “No one wants to hear that loss, change and suffering are inevitable…  No one wants to be reminded that life is a series of losses, small & large, starting from birth & ending in death…  No one wants to realize that we all suffer loss & change in one way or another.  Yet behind every door is someone adjusting to change, adapting to crisis or coping with unsettling loss or tragedies,” so this is just as applicable to any outrage.  (Sure, Madoff’s sentencing judge called his crimes “extraordinarily evil,” and “staggering,” but...)

Victim correction as a panacea is very similar to much of modern Western culture, especially in the economics realm, where the law of the jungle seems necessary in order to motivate people.  Victim correction as a panacea could be called the gold standard of personal responsibility.  Currency that isn’t based on the gold standard is called “fiat money,” and personal responsibility that’s based on anything besides whose problem it is, unless the wrongness of the situation is undeniable, could be called a fiat standard of personal responsibility.  The thinking of the Victorian Era liked the gold standard since it gave money an objective value, whereas governments would determine the value of fiat money, based on abstractions that may sound nice, but in an unstable and unpredictable economy could produce unintended consequences.  Of course, the gold standard has produced unintended consequences, but they could be accepted as “just the way that life goes sometimes,” so “productive” and “realistic” people could seem obligated to accept them like this.  After all, the gold standard is what’s natural, since it developed naturally rather than among a bunch of people who “know what’s best for us.”  Likewise, if “personal responsibility” means response-ability for one’s own welfare, that’s objective, whereas  responsibility that’s based on blame would involve abstractions based on morality, which may sound nice but could have unintended consequences, such as people getting what they want by “proving” that they’re victims rather than through effort, and those who are held responsible not taking responsibility since they’re not motivated to take responsibility for someone else’s problem.  Of course, victim correction as a panacea has produced unintended consequences, but they could be accepted as “just the way that life goes sometimes,” so “productive” and “realistic” people could seem obligated to accept them like this.  After all, victim correction as a panacea is what’s natural, based on who wins and who loses naturally.  Sure, the law of the jungle in the economic sphere obviously produces a great deal of helplessness leading to depression, but without the law of the jungle, why would people bother trying their hardest to be successful and productive?

Typically, 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.”  Sophisticates think that this consists of 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions and is to be solved by mega-medication, as versus those who aren’t sophisticated, who think that this consists of 34,000,000 weak characters, though this could more appropriately be called Sophist-ication!

The following is on the first pages of Michael Lewis’ book Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, from 1990:

What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity.  He said: “[Let’s play] One hand [of Liar’s Poker], one million dollars, no tears.”

...The final two words of his challenge, “no tears,” meant that the loser was expected to suffer a great deal of pain but wasn’t entitled to whine, bitch, or moan about it.  He’d just have to hunker down and keep his poverty to himself.

...And if you wanted to show off, Liar’s Poker was the only way to go.  The game had a powerful meaning for traders.  People like John Meriwether believed that Liar’s Poker had a lot in common with bond trading.  It tested a trader’s character.  It honed a trader’s instincts.  A good player made a good trader, and vice versa.  We all understood it.

It might seem strange to say that anything for liars, tests character.  Yet AA’s Big Book’s exploration of what constitutes: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs,” and, “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character,” focuses very much on, “Resentment is the ‘number one’ offender.  It destroys more alcoholics than anything else....  If we were to live, we had to be free of anger....  [Fear] somehow touches about every aspect of our lives.”  If you define “character” as not whining bitching and moaning, even about losing a million dollars, then Liar’s Poker certainly could test a player’s character.  The test wouldn’t be to see how few lies he tells, but how little resentment anger and fear he shows.  While this might seem to be the sort of strange attitude that the pigs on Wall Street would have, it’s worth remembering that Bill Wilson was a stockbroker.  He wrote the Big Book during the Great Depression, when those who define “strong character” like this would have had to try to stop a lot more whining bitching and moaning, than they would have when the economy was healthy.  To many people, the word character would seem fuddy-duddy, restrictive, judgmental, etc., unless character means this gutsiness, the sort of strong character that those on Wall Street would show off.  Whatever a culture, and the socioeconomic pressures that it produces, labels as “weak character,” “inadequacy,” “personal responsibility,” then that’s what those who were conditioned to believe in that culture, will tend to believe.  Innovation Corrupted, The Origins and Legacy of Enron’s Collapse, by Malcolm S. Salter, says, “Enron’s political and business strategies were forged in an environment in which exploiting regulatory ambiguities and weaknesses were commonly viewed as admirable achievements,” which follows this same pattern.  Both the Enron case, and the Madoff case, are relevant to more than frauds; both show how much whether one succeeds or fails is basically a crapshoot, so it may be very easy to cheer a fraud as if it’s a real success.

African-American street slang for victim-blaming is “The Flip Game.”  You could really see this in how those on Wall Street who caused the problems could now act helpless and realists would accept this, whereas plenty of people who didn’t cause their own helplessness can’t act helpless without looking as if they’re playing the victim role.  The kind of helplessness that much of Wall Street is now pleading, can be called winning helplessness, since it can win people what they want, the right to cause problems and not take responsibility for them.  The very same victim-correctors who’d chide victims for acting as if their victimization should win them something, would probably be willing to accept the claims of helplessness of the honorably gutsy people who caused the problems.  They’d win a free pass from responsibility, since: now they’re completely helpless to turn back the clock and undo what they did so holding them responsible for it would be hitting below the belt, caring about it would be just resentment, their intent was at least somewhat understandable, etc.  The Wall Street version of this is that they’re usually our daring gutsy heroes, and now we must understand their helplessness to undo what they did, in order to deal with reality on reality’s terms.  If it weren’t for the bailout, and the consequences that we’d all have to accept were the huge natural consequences of the economy collapsing, Wall Street’s claims of current helplessness would seem even more acceptable, natural.  You might think that those who really are helpless would deserve more due to their helplessness than would the gutsy people who cause the problems, but the rules of The Flip Game say that the claimed helplessness of the “winners” is winning helplessness since it really would win them a reprieve from responsibility, while the helplessness of those who really are helpless would seem to be the sort of problems that realists realize must be dealt with self-reliantly at whatever cost, and whatever was their intent.  Moral responsibility is never at whatever cost.

You can really see this stigmatization of weakness, in the difference between what both bubbles leading up to the Great Crash, the tech bubble and the housing bubble, can be blamed on.  Both the tech and the housing bubble resulted from investors being told that companies or people who really weren’t credit-worthy, were, since those who sold these investments got more money if they contrived and sold more.  Ever since the housing bubble burst, we’ve heard repeated claims that giving mortgages to those who really couldn’t afford them was just another dangerously unrealistic attempt to give poor people a greater chance—social engineering.  Of course, treating tech companies that are just starting up as if they had a proven track record, had the same intent, but it would be hard to treat start-up companies being treated as if they’re proven, as if they’re insidiously dangerous mollycoddles.  One could always say sardonically that these small investors are at fault for their own problems, since they should have known that at that time, Internet companies had to have been brand new.  And, of course, the reason why we care so much about investors being tricked, is that investors are taken seriously.  When the poor, workers, etc., are tricked, everyone would figure that if they’d better just deal with their own realities, and that if they don’t, they’d be among the insidiously dangerous mollycoddles who are trying to get more than what they’re really entitled to in the real world.  And since this is how the real world works, pragmatic advisors who deal with how to live in the real world, must think like this.  It’s amazing how easy it is to magnify how responsible the victims seem.

Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article of July 9-23, 2009, The Great American Bubble Machine, said that only the high-rolling investors knew about the lowering of the standards for the tech stocks during the tech bubble, quoting a Wall Street insider as saying, “They [Goldman Sachs, and, no doubt, others] built these stocks upon an illegal foundation—manipulated up—and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in,” and since this was illegal these small investors did have some recourse, but if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have the bone-chilling fear of what happened to them that what we have about the supposedly manipulative weak.  The American public does have “pitchfork” moods regarding bailouts provided by the government, but if masses of Americans ever had a “pitchfork” mood about Wall Street’s greed simply ruining out economy, that would seem un-American.  Plenty of people who didn’t invest in such things lost a lot from the bubbles popping, but they have no recourse, and of course we don’t see them as victims except for regarding the money they lost in the guv’mint-sponsored bailouts.  You might think that Wall Street involves everything that Populists hate, in that it involves the intellectual elite engaging in manipulative machinations that involve abstractions, claiming to be aiming for “what is good.”  (As Taibbi’s article says, “Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they [on Wall Street] begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased,” but that sort of SELF-WILL posing as what’s good, is what makes America great.)  Yet chances are that the Populists would get outraged only when this means that the money that the average person loses, is through tax-paid bailouts.  And, of course, now that the public already knows about such tactics, it could seem that this whole issue is just past history, since we’ll never allow this particular abuse again.  It’s amazing how easy it is to minimize the culpability of what’s really responsible.

As one could see now, such a laissez faire concept of personal response-ability could seem good ’n’ gutsy, until you see the consequences of the moral bankruptcy.  (Of course, this self-response-ability must include the same self-justifying, fatalistic, conformist, simplistic, “upbeat,” absolutist, unconditional, predictable, and dogmatically necessary illusions as laissez faire economics has, the very illusions that got our economy into such trouble.)  Victim correction could be a trap, since it’s very easy to fall into its promises of unconditional personal response-ability and proud self-reliance.  If your optimism, brain’s biology, survival skills, independence, resiliency, perseverance, etc., are strong enough that you could adjust and adapt if you lived in a society without rampant depression, but not strong enough to adjust and adapt to a society with it, and you live in a society with it, then YOU’RE TOO WEAK TO DEAL WITH YOUR REALITIES, so you’ve got some HORRIBLY DANGEROUS INADEQUACIES. 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.  NOTHING CAN LIMIT HOW MUCH ALL THIS COULD AFFECT YOU.  “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

Yet when you wish prosperity for someone, you wouldn’t be wishing that he’d develop a better work ethic.

This mentality of victim-blaming, “You get what you deserve,” is very much a part of what caused the Great Crash of 2008.  Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe, by Gillian Tett, quotes Blythe Masters, who’d worked at J.P. Morgan, as saying, “The economic models that Hancock and Merton and others upheld were right in a sense, but the problem is that they did not give enough emphasis to all the human issues, the regulatory structures, and things like that.  The idea was that those issues were just noise in the models—but that is just dead-arsed wrong.   We don’t live in that kind of world of perfect economic models.”  Since these models came from Wall Street, and economists who got their educations in programs that prepare people to work there, they’d have to reflect the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which holds that, as long as the “regulatory structures” don’t interfere, market forces will make sure that everything is fairly priced, and, therefore, everyone will get what they deserve.  This is very similar to the logic of Victim Correction as a Panacea, both the assumption that one somehow deserves his own problems, and the assumption that defining “personal responsibility” largely as response-ability for one’s own welfare is most realistic, since people are motivated to take response-ability for their own problems and to engage in manipulative victimology if we cared about moral responsibility.  As The Origin of Financial Crises, by George Cooper, says,

This second team has a different explanation for why market behaviour fails to fit with the Efficient Market Hypothesis.  One of the conditions for markets to operate efficiently is that they be left alone, free to operate without interference or manipulation.  If market prices are pushed around and manipulated by external forces, for example by government interference, then the markets cannot be expected to behave as efficient markets should.  The “get out of jail free card” for the Efficient Market Hypothesis comes from noting that financial markets are not free markets but are heavily manipulated by government and especially central bank interference.  This leads to an intriguing possibility: that boom-bust asset price cycles and non-normal return distributions are not due to some inherent failure of the markets, but are instead the result of central bank interference.

The book also says, “The [Long Term Capital Management, one of history’s great failed Wall Street companies] fund was staffed by the crème de la crème of those that had been responsible for developing the Efficient Market Hypothesis.”  Robert C. Merton was one of its founders.  A webpage on the Libertarian website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Mr. Moral Hazard, says about LTCM when it wanted the Fed to arrange for it a bailout paid for by private Wall Street companies, “But while its managers liked playing the market, they apparently didn’t like the market playing them,” so it seems that even they were too manipulative when their wealth was at stake, and that the effects that the collapse of LTCM would have had on the world economy wouldn’t matter, only that Wall Street learn its lesson by LTCM collapsing.  This quasi-bailout couldn’t possibly seem to be the markets being “heavily manipulated by government and especially central bank interference.”  Even these believers in the Efficient Market Hypothesis are supposed to be susceptible to moral hazard, taking too many risks confident that the guv’mint would get them a bailout.  The person whom that webpage calls “Mr. Moral Hazard,” is Alan Greenspan, who obviously doesn’t believe in heavy manipulation by government.

In other words, if you’re weak, even if you’re a victim, then if you don’t simply take response-ability for your own problems, you’re among The Enemy.  Whenever anything goes wrong in the economy, it would have to be blamed on those who’d somehow get more than what they’d won.  If you weren’t a victim you’d be a winner, so your getting what you deserved would seem to be what makes our economy work.  Yet since you are a victim, your getting what you deserve would seem to be what would ruin the economy.  While self-help books that talk about problems that are at least partially non-economic might not look like Efficient Market Hypothesis dogmatism, that still involves the mentality of a “get out of jail free card,” which someone must provide, and be held responsible for, just as unconditionally.  “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” or anything that would imply this, is one heck of a get out of jail free card.  It would seem that if you don’t minimize others’ moral responsibility for your problem, then you’re resentful, controlling, judgmental, unrealistic, etc.  If this all-or-nothing absolutism isn’t taken literally, that would leave too much room for manipulative victimology, and too much interference with people doing what they must by winning battles.  Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged includes, “I saw that any man’s desire for money he could not earn was regarded as a righteous wish, but if he earned it, it was damned as greed,” but the modern version of that would be, “I saw that if any man desired money he could not earn, he was regarded as the sort of manipulative parasite who’s to blame for every problem in our economy, but if he had the chance to earn it, he was considered to be what makes our economy great.”

Now, much of the public sees the sort of dangers that pragmatic psychologists could expect us to adjust to.  On CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 of March 4, 2009, Paul Begala said, “So, Democracy Corps, which is a nonprofit that Carville is affiliated with, did a poll.  And they put Limbaugh’s name in there, as well as those—as those two who were central, I think, to some of the Republican attacks on then Senator Obama.  And it turns out that Mr. Limbaugh’s negative was 58 and that Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright were right at about 50.”

The Addiction Process, Effective Social Work Approaches, by Edith M. Freeman, when describing the philosophy of Twelve-Step groups, tells of, “the existential understanding of Gelassenheit, which teaches that willfulness leads to self-defeating frustration.”  In the real world, if one ever tried to apply that sort of understanding to aggressive willfulness and how much it would defeat others, that would seem to be a ridiculously unnatural attempt to re-engineer human nature.  Of course, “Serenely accept whatever you’re helpless to change,” certainly tries to re-engineer human nature, but those who are helpless are motivated to think in such radically unnatural and conformist ways.

The Harvard Public Health webpage Experts Discuss Lifelong Impact of Early Childhood Adversity, says,

Research already has indicated that the more adversity in early life - abuse, neglect, poverty, and other stressors - the greater chance that children will experience depression and substance abuse problems as adults.  In addition, said Shonkoff, epidemiological studies have suggested an association between early-life trauma and later physical diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, obesity, stroke, and some forms of cancer.

“We suggest that the biology of stress [offers] important insights into the roots of how poverty gets under the skin and into the [developing] brain and immune system,” said Shonkoff.  While some stress is normative and character-building [the importance of which would depend on how a culture’s norms define “character”], he noted, excessive and persistent adversity produces sustained elevations of stress hormones such as cortisol that are potentially damaging to the brain, especially in the early childhood period when basic neural circuitry is developing.

And, of course, working- and middle-class people could experience similar stresses, just less of them.  And, of course, though Gary W. Evans, professor of human ecology at Cornell University was quoted in a Washington Post article about more research along these lines, as saying, “We know low socioeconomic status families are under a lot of stress—all kinds of stress.  When you are poor, when it rains it pours,” when this stress happens, our “character”-building cultural norms would simply minimize this as if it’s simply among the normal imperfections of life that everyone deals with.  When you consider that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s definition of the word stress, in this sense, is, “a factor that induces bodily or mental tension,” it might seem only natural to figure that if you’re suffering from depression after experiencing several factors that induced bodily or mental tension, then you’re not really a devastated victim, so you should just take some medication.  Yet now, people seem more willing to treat 34,000,000 American adults suffering from serious depressive disorders, as a social problem rather than as just 34,000,000 American adults needing to take medication.

The threshold of human endurance, is the hidden element.  Right now, if you were in the middle of a traumatic experience of a sort that contributes to our rampant depression, then chances are that if you discussed this with those you know, while they may see the seriousness of it, the bottom line would always be, “That’s just the way life goes sometimes.  You’ll just have to courageously change what you can and serenely accept what you can’t.”  All of our revered and respected institutions, also, would have no idea what actually does contribute to our rampant depression.  Things would look very different if this element were no longer hidden!

The financial meltdown of 2008 would have led to the sort of helplessness that tends to be taken as a given.  On September 17, 2008, we had a run on the bank, with Americans pulling nearly $150,000,000,000 out of their money-market accounts and putting it into treasuries, which paid no interest but were safe.  In an article in the September 19, New York Times, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, was quoted to have said about a meeting that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke (an expert on the Great Depression) and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. (whom another NYT article called a “hard-charging former Wall Street deal maker,” and whom a 2006 BusinessWeek article, “Mr. Risk Goes to Washington,” called, “one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in their pursuit of profits.”) gave for some Congresspeople to warn of what could have happened if the government didn’t bail out the desperate financial institutions, “When you listened to him describe it you gulped.”

Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, said about this meeting, “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

Schumer added, “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.”  When he described the meeting as “somber,” Dodd cut in, “Somber doesn’t begin to justify the words.  We have never heard language like this.”

“What you heard last evening,” he added, “is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together quickly.”

All of this, was the result of a few decision-makers in banks deciding to make unsafe loans, followed by a few people in the financial markets panicking and acting as if the rate of default on home mortgages were a lot higher.  If the federal government hadn’t stepped in, who knows how bad the economy could have gotten?  However bad it got, whoever was hurt by it would simply have had to deal with their own problems.  Any resulting helplessness, after all, would be “just the way that life goes sometimes,” not some authority figure who thinks he knows what’s best for you.  Stupidity on the part of higher-ups in financial companies didn’t constitute victimization, victimhood, and even if it did, that wouldn’t win you anything in the real world.  Only effort leading to success would.  If you held yourself responsible for your own success or failure, you’d be more likely to succeed: more confident that you had the opportunity to succeed if you were good enough, and more resourceful in finding ways in which you could change the only person you can, yourself.  As part of the mentality that led to the market meltdown, Reagan said that “The 10 most dangerous words in the English language” are, “Hi, I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”  One could now say that the 11 most dangerous words in the English language are, “Hi, I want to fix you, and I’m here to help.”  Probably the most effective way for terrorists to attack us would be to get jobs in Wall Street and then screw up the economy.  We’d never dream of torturing them to get evidence, and they could always defend themselves by saying that no one could really prove that their intent was malicious so we should stop acting like their victims.  If they came up with new financial innovations, then we’d have to accept that innovations, along with all the other products of freedom, are sacrosanct.  If we mollycoddled the weak who were hurt by this then we’d be enabling weakness, etc.

A victim who testified at Madoff’s sentencing hearing on June 29, 2009, said about the SEC and FINRA, “They were willing to relax all regulations that would have uncovered his fraud.  The justification for relaxing the regulations was to ease the burdens on Wall Street firms, the very firms that bankrupted the world economy.”  Yet this could be justified with the same pragmatism that would justify, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference....  Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  That is, that people are motivated to do what they’re motivated to do, and realism means accepting this fact.  This could mean not burdening those on Wall Street as they do what they’re motivated to do, or accepting that those impacted by hardship, sinfulness, etc., are far more motivated to resolve the problems than are those who caused them.  There could very easily be no limits to such realism, since as long as those who are powerful enough to cause the problems, cause them, we must arrange things so that they’ll cause fewer of them, and/or those who are motivated to solve the problems, would.

Sure, the judge who sentenced Madoff called what he did “extraordinarily evil,” but even he could find plenty of excuses, such as that his fund wasn’t originally intended to be a scam, that his making it a scam was done out of desperation.  As he testified during his sentencing hearing, “Although I may not have intended any harm, I did a great deal of harm.  I believed when I started this problem, this crime, that it would be something I would be able to work my way out of, but that became impossible.”  Since what he did was a crime, we don’t have to accept that.  Yet when someone causes the sort of helplessness that contributes to our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., but there’s no way to fight back legally, you could bet that the excuses regarding why what he did was understandable, would seem to be an all-important source of serenity for the victims.  The basic idea of psychoanalysis is that it’s very easy to believe what one wants to without consciously choosing to do so, and when one subconsciously makes himself believe what he wants, that really isn’t evil, even if he’s very bad at reality-testing when he really wants to believe something.

 

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.

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.  Both, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” and, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” say that übermensch human nature must be taken as a given, and untermensch human nature is to be feared as insidiously WILLFUL.  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.

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.

Antidepressant Treatment—the Essentials, by John H. Greist, MD and Thomas H. Greist, MD, says, “According to National Institutes of Mental Health figures, 20,000,000 people or approximately 15% of the U.S. adult population suffers from a serious depressive disorder in any given year.”  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.  Millions are at stake.

 

A webpage for Zoloft says, “Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults,” a statistic that seems pretty typical.  Also typical is that this is preceded by, “Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or a character flaw.  It’s a real medical condition,” as if “character flaw” means the literal weakness of devastated people who don’t seem to be trying hard enough rather than the moral character flaws of those who devastated them.  Typical attitudes towards this social problem, are: “Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults, and that’s simply among those biological illnesses that are parts of the natural order,” “Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults, so these 34,000,000 American adults should take antidepressants, or learn to have optimistic outlooks,” “Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults, and the question that we should ask about this is whether it consists of 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions, or 34,000,000 rather severe weaknesses of character,” “Sure, depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults, but everyone knows that we must accept the helplessness that this culture regards as normal, since all must deal with the normal vicissitudes of life,” and, “If you care a lot that depressive disorders affect 34,000,000 American adults, something must be wrong with you.”

 

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?  Such a high rate of depression can’t be only natural!  This can’t just be brushed aside!  If the public knew about this, it would be pretty hard for people to insist that of course everyone accept and deal with what causes it, and that if they don’t, that’s victimology, self-righteousness, resentment, whining, excuses, manipulative machinations, etc.!  We could even say that we hold these truths to be self-evident, in that people would naturally be aware of what’s wrong with what causes rampant depression, if only they weren’t culturally conditioned to believe that these are just life’s inevitable imperfections so something’s wrong with them if they don’t adjust to them!  A true awareness of how unnatural are both this and what causes it, would be the ultimate 

“If I should soon experience the sort of trauma that contributes to this, would the unenlightened be seeing my character as the weak one?  And would the more enlightened people see what happened to me as if it’s just one of those diseases that sometimes happen?  Every society’s culture has norms which determine what its conformists regard as adequate or inadequate.  According to these norms, the level of helplessness that produces that level of depression is what seems normal, which characters seem too weak to deal with that reality, etc.  Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct.  If enough research were done to prove these causes, and enough people knew the results, then it would be hard for anyone, even an all-American military type, to say explicitly, ‘Sure, what’s happening to you is the sort of thing that’s been proven to contribute to our rampant depression, but everyone knows that when that sort of thing happens to you, you’re just going to have to deal with it.’  Victim correctors only want addicts’ kids, etc., to be more self-efficacious, serene, etc.  What’s in question is ENDURABILITY, which couldn’t possibly be called theoretical, utopian, Quixotic, philosophical, eggheaded, cosmic, manipulative, etc., or even expendable.  Naturally, most people tend to believe in ideas that inspire gutsy optimism, and disbelieve in ideas that inspire whiny pessimism, and to believe that the millions of Americans with depression are simply suffering from deficiencies of Vitamin P, feels a lot better than does realizing how this is a social problem!  If I really do care how scary this rate of depression is, it would be me who’d seem scary, because of all the untermensch victim-power I’d have.  Everyone knows that what’s at fault, is inside the millions of victims.  No one has an inalienable right to endurability.  This sounds like just the sort of heroic but vapid belief system that conservatives would think that we’d want to believe in, but faith in what causes rampant depression isn’t the sort of thing that people would naturally want to believe in!

“Apropos of that norm, how much lowering of that unnaturally high rate of depression would seem centrist, and how much would seem radical?”

On one hand you have the psychological advisors and other pragmatists who are very aware of how important fitting in always is, and on the other you have natural human feelings.

All this serves to deter people from getting what they want in “mollycoddle,” rather than “red-blooded,” ways.  This is all very systematic.  As the Philadelphia Grand Jury report on their Archdiocese’s enabling of pedo-priests put it,

The bottom line always seems to be that strong equals good, or at least excusable or defendable, and weak equals bad or at least suspect.  The more powerless that you are, the more that you must serenely accept, and the more courage that you’d need to change what you must, so the more likely it is that you’d seem inadequate, maybe manipulative.  No matter how much the person who caused the problem is acting helpless and evading responsibility about it, the victim is the only one who’d be told seriously, “You’d better stop acting helpless and start taking responsibility,” since for him to take responsibility would be self-help and self-empowerment, while moral responsibility is moral, both preachy and naïve.  It seems that action is good, analysis is bad, so the stronger you are, the better you’ll look.  Of course, what Gandhi called truth-strength, Satyagraha, wouldn’t count, and might even seem scary, since that would seem analytical, abstract, guilt-based, potentially manipulative, etc.  The logic that winning through strength is honorable while winning through assertively standing up for one’s own rights is at least suspect, is basically Nazi, but assertiveness could very easily be labeled as a manifestation of hidden SELF-WILL, resentful and/or manipulative.

 

How could we have possibly just accepted such premises as, “Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults, and this consists of either 34,000,000 rather severe weaknesses of character, or 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions.”?

              

William Ryan, in his definitive Blaming the Victim from 1971, wrote, “As a result, there is a terrifying sameness in the programs that arise from this kind of analysis,” and since this has become even more anti-intellectualist and low-budget, it’s become even more of a panacea—predictable, simplistic and anti-analytical.  Reductionism reduces distractions.  And the Reagan era was proud of this moral bankruptcy; the great patriotic song that arose during the Reagan era begins by saying, “If tomorrow all the things were gone, I worked for all my life,” because “they” took them away, I’d just buck up and deal with this.

 

This is pedophile Dr. George Reardon, while in an ethics hearing in 1993, listening to two of his victims testifying.  He was the one who died in 1998, but in 2007, 50,000 to 60,000 slide photographs and about 100 movies of kiddie porn, was discovered hidden in a wall of a house in which he had lived, most of which he took of kids from when he was in medical school, and working for Hartford’s Saint Francis Hospital.  One could say that in this picture, he showed a great fear of victim-power.  Sure, local police Detective Frank Fallon said, “Reardon has the potential to go down in the history of the United States of America as one of the biggest monsters in this genre,” but that didn’t stop him from feeling afraid.

 

The “seven propaganda devices” that the Institute for Propaganda Analysis observed in the 1930s being used by those such as fascist Father Charles Coughlin, which were then described in The Fine Art of Propaganda in 1939, were: Name Calling, Glittering Generality, Transfer, Testimonial, Plain Folks, Card Stacking, and Band Wagon.  That’s exactly what you’d expect to hear from both attack-politician-style pundits, and the untermensch-phobic victim correction as a panacea.

The Fine Art of Propaganda clearly suggests that the best antidote to propaganda is to ask questions concerning what would be the real, practical effects of what the propaganda is trying to cast in a good light.  For example, telling people that “personal responsibility for one’s own welfare” means courageously changing what one can and serenely accepting whatever one can’t, even when this means, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” could be painted as a failsafe formula for unconditional coping skills.  Yet all you’ve got to do is ask about the effects of that sort of moral bankruptcy, and this could set you free.  Questions are the ultimate form of thinking for yourself.  (However, those who have a stolid definition of manipulation, such as Schopenhauer’s “The concept of good is divided into two subspecies, that of the directly present satisfaction of the will in each case, and that of its merely indirect satisfaction concerning the future, in other words, the agreeable and the useful.  The concept of the opposite, so long as we are speaking of beings without knowledge, is expressed by the word bad, more rarely and abstractly by the word evil, which therefore denotes everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case,” would have to believe that for the untermenschen to think for themselves sincerely, is manipulative!)

Even for those familiar with only the first sentence of The Serenity Prayer, where does it allow people to take seriously any moral issues regarding what happens to them?  Abstractions can’t change anything, so they’d only distract you, and seem subjective and possibly manipulative.  Some telling Bible verses are, Matthew: 5:22, 5:39, 5:43-48, 6:9-15, 7:1-3, 18:21-35, and 25:31-36, Mark 11:25, 26, and Luke: 6:27-29, 6:35-38, 15:1-10, 17:3-4, and 23:34, keeping in mind that this isn’t a discriminating judicious toleration of imperfections, but an undiscriminating anti-judgmental intolerance of objections to possibly very objectionable behaviors, where you could be sent to hell for not forgiving “seventy times seven” times (Matthew 18:21-35).

If you want to make sure that you’d want to have faith in ideas about psychology, that were inspired by A.A’s ex cathedra writings, THE ORANGE PAPERS, One Man’s Analysis of Alcoholics Anonymous, An Online Book, is a good place to look.  One webpage to look at, especially, is The Funny Spirituality of Bill Wilson and A.A.  You really do have to ask, “Is this really what we want to be in lockstep with?”  Victim correction as a panacea really does have to be that absolutist, since either you’re handling your own problem as pragmatically as you can, or you’re not.  For example, it wouldn’t work to say, “Since I’m not the Fundamentalist type, I’m not going to take your transcendent spirituality literally.  I’m going to use a ‘cafeteria Catholic’ approach to it.”

Barry Minkow, head of the ZZZZ Best Carpet Cleaning company, who admittedly pulled a Ponzi scheme that he now regrets, wrote the chapter “The Psychology of Fraud,” in Stephen G. Austin’s book Rise of the New Ethics Class.  Minkow wrote, “The word character once meant ‘someone with moral or ethical standards.’...  However, a starling new philosophy has emerged from the business (and academic) sector....  This new ethic is called ‘right equals forward motion.’  Best summarized in one word, right equals forward motion is about achievement.”

John Haynes Holmes, who’d been friends with Niebuhr, wrote to him describing his “recent writings... as a tragic instance of intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy.”  The Words Universe webpage on the word “bankruptcy” defines it in the sense of “moral bankruptcy,” as, “a state of complete lack of some abstract property; ‘spiritual bankruptcy’; ‘moral bankruptcy’; ‘intellectual bankruptcy’.”  Where is any morality whatsoever, in “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it”?  Niebuhr broke off from Holmes after he wrote this, yet Niebuhr described the ideology of the Oxford Group/Moral Re-Armament with, “In other words, a Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of the whole Oxford group enterprise from the very beginning.  We may be grateful to the leader for revealing so clearly what has been slightly hidden.  Now we can see how unbelievably naïve this movement is in its efforts to save the world,” “The increasingly obvious fascist philosophy which informs the group movement is in other words not only socially vicious but religiously vapid,” along with, “Its religion manages to combine bourgeois complacency with Christian contrition in a manner which makes the former dominant,” as versus, say, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”

Yet if someone being judged by Niebuhr’s standards called them “a tragic instance of spiritual bankruptcy,” this defiance would be labeled a “pity party.”  (And real men love intellectual bankruptcy.)  The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines syndrome as “a group of signs and symptoms that occur together and characterize a particular abnormality,” and in this regard one could call the sort of unconditional self-responsibility that one sees in the self-blame that accompanies modern Western depression, “The Niebuhr Sin-drome.”  Everybody needs a moral compass, and this is our favorite.

 

Only a sociopath would engage in moral bankruptcy for its own sake.  Other moral bankruptcy is supposed to serve a greater purpose, such as, “Catholic theology says that one shouldn’t create scandal regarding Catholic leaders, and influential people who try to hold the Catholic hierarchy morally responsible are bigoted against Catholics,” “Those who are trying to restrain us are anti-freedom manipulators!” and, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as you’d have it, would give you inner peace, and in your situation, serenity courage and tactical wisdom aren’t just luxuries that you could safely choose to live without.”  Though Enron is now a fallen idol, the average American originally associated it with America’s tough-and-tumble, true-grit ideals.  The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall Of Enron, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, 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.”  The ideas and realizations that Social Darwinism would treat as impurities of thought, since they seem disruptive, manipulative, counterproductive, defeatist, passive, resentful, blaming, etc., are the same as those that The Niebuhr Sin-drome would disallow for the same reasons.  It also must be intellectually pure, in absolutist terms, since its ideas on who has to solve what problems, can’t be half-hearted.

Christopher Lasch wrote in his article in the New Republic of August 10, 1992, For Shame, that our culture has,

a cult of the victim in which entitlements are based on the display of accumulated injuries inflicted by an uncaring society.   The politics of “compassion” degrades both the victims, by reducing them to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, the attainment of which would make them respected.  Compassion has become the human face of contempt.

One needn’t be a sociologist to see in this, the crux of Reaganomics, that if only those who keep talking about victimology and victimhood, or sue businesses because their pain and losses (rather than objective achievement) entitle them, or evade their personal response-ability for their own problems, etc., thought like Lee Greenwood instead, that would solve our problems.

Sure, that’s impersonal, but it would make people more respectable, if we consider those who seem to be übermenschen/redbloods to be respectable, and those who seem to be untermenschen/mollycoddles to be contemptible.  Just as in old Wagnerian Germany it was the weak who seemed ignominious, in modern America it’s the weak who get the “contempt.”

If instead we tried to have a balanced approach that differentiated the real victims from the fakes, showed contempt for the victimizers, etc., that would seem too: unpragmatic, abstractly analytical, idealistic, equivocal, iconoclastic (Just look at the unequivocal personality types that were icons during the Reagan/Thatcher era, and that still inspire profound admiration, which would include the pro-freedom and red-blooded, “hold them up to impersonal standards, the attainment of which would make them respected.”), moralistic, opinionated, unrealistic about how much real victims must deal with their own problems, restrictive, unforgiving, potentially manipulative, etc.  Even if all that someone did was set limits as to how much victim-correction or surrealism he’s willing to accept, that could seem to be choosing not to impersonally become adequately correct, and, therefore, respectable.

A society with rampant depression will have plenty of real victims.  In order for it to keep functioning, it must pressure them into simply dealing with their own problems objectively and self-reliantly.  In all societies including those with rampant depression, no one could seem self-reliant enough unless he’s self-reliant enough to succeed with whatever realities and risks he must deal with.  (Of course, if he showed some self-reliant responsibility, but not enough, that loser would get contempt rather than respect.)  Before the Reagan era, these social pressures and cultural conditioning were usually done more subtly than anything that implied, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  Reaganomics couldn’t exist without these unequivocal conceptions of: personal rights, personal responsibilities, supposedly manipulative, mollycoddle victims, why responsibility should (predictably) be projected onto victims, which entitlements seem respectable, which “defects of character” we take seriously, etc.

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.”

(Nazi posters about the WILL, saying “Through military will to military strength,” “One battle, one will, one goal: Victory at any cost!,” and “National Socialism—the organized will of the nation,” along with a poster for the classic Nazi film Triumph of the Will)

That book was Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, the title of which has also been translated as The World as Will and Representation.  The Serenity Prayer could just as easily have been titled The World as Will and Representation.  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.”  The sinful WILL seems ineradicable, so holding it contempt would be counterproductive and/or manipulative, which are also main themes of psychoanalysis.  To deal with this and other strife in the material world, we’re to represent the world to ourselves Stoically, as Buddhist self-discipline does, which is also what cognitive therapy does, mainly to those who have the problems, though it should be just as effective in re-engineering people’s aggressive tendencies.  Schopenhauer wrote that he defined the word translated as “Representation” or “Idea,” Vorstellung, as an “exceedingly complicated physiological process in the brain of an animal, the result of which is the consciousness of a picture there,” what cognitive therapy would call an “outlook.”  The whole idea was to choose to put positive pictures into one’s own mind even in the face of hardship and/or sinfulness.  If the person who has a problem isn’t Stoic about it, then that would seem to be his craven cunning and contemptible SELF-WILL expecting the world to be as he’d have it.  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.  According to the self-help zeitgeist, a powerless person wouldn’t have to be cunning or exploitive, in order to be labeled “manipulative,” and, therefore, seem cunning and exploitive.  And while sinfulness is forgiven, supposed manipulativeness isn’t.  Will and representation would seem to be all that there is to the world, since he can’t care about anything besides whether or not he has the power to change each aspect of his problem.  No problem could seem to be a social problem if it seems to result from the ineradicably aggressive WILLS of those who cause it, and/or the (possibly masochistic) ignominiously cunning WILLS of those who have it.  One could call this global, all-inclusive, approach to problem-solving, “a panacea that consists of acceptance of the aggressive WILL, and rejection of weakness, ineffectiveness, and unhappy representations of the material world.”

The Wikipedia webpage on Nazism says about this era, “Many see strong connections to the values of Nazism and the irrationalist tradition of the romantic movement of the early 19th century.”  Actually, what has more of a connection to Nazism’s values is regarding, as Van Wyck Brooks wrote in Days of the Phoenix, “Wagner as a symbol of his epoch,” a love of strength and fear of manipulative weakness, rather than irrationality (though that love of strength and fear of weakness could easily become irrational, look like The Big Lie, etc.).

              

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.  David D. Burns, MD wrote in his book Feeling Good, that the “Cognitive Distortions” of modern Western depression are: All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filter, Disqualifying the Positive, Jumping to Conclusions, Magnification [of what’s wrong with the depressed or right with others] or Minimization [of what’s right with the depressed or wrong with others], Emotional Reasoning, Should Statements [Dr. Burns says, “ ‘Musts’ and ‘oughts’ are also offenders.”], 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.”].

Rather than “the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression,” these could just as easily be called “our distorted conception of personal responsibility.”  We define “personal responsibility” as response-ability for one’s own welfare, one’s own problems, since that’s more reliable red-blooded and non-judgmental, than is defining it as moral responsibility.  The self-blame of the devastated defines “good” and “bad” as Social Darwinism and market discipline would, in terms of success vs. failure, adequacy vs. inadequacy, stolid vs. gutless, winning vs. losing, adapted vs. maladaptive.  Since the only thing that really matters is how effectively one is dealing with whatever his realities are, you’d be amazed by the degree to which how powerless he is, determines how his actions or inactions are labeled, as successful or failing, etc.

Sacrilege, Sexual Abuse In the Catholic Church says that ravenous pedo-priest James Janssen was able to manipulate his psychologist since Janssen “knew the categories in which the psychologist thought and told his story in such a way that the psychologist concluded that Janssen wanted to be celibate, but needed help, especially the help of a good psychologist,” obviously the sort of skepticism that social conservatives would have toward intellectual social scientists, a skepticism that seems perfectly acceptable.  The category in which typical psychologists would have predictably classified Janssen, would have been, “someone who looks like an aggressor (so if you’re greatly offended that’s whiny resentment), but is actually the helpless one,” helpless since he’s under the sway of his own human nature, and/or at present he’s completely helpless to undo what he did whereas the victim isn’t helpless to solve his own problems, etc., a very German-sounding conception of aggressors’ and weak people’s responsibilities.  Since our usual conceptions of mental health, survival skills, self-responsibility, etc, must be in line with psychologists’, a good way to know that you could get away with something is to know that it fits favorably into psychologists’ categories of forgivable, red-blooded, anti-repression, etc., which have the same categorical, black-and-white qualities that you could see in the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression (of which no realists could be skeptical, since reality’s demands tend to be this absolute).  Of course, that’s also the category in which the bishops who enabled pedo-priests put them, based on the same unconditional, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” traditions.

The gist of these cognitive distortions, is the same as the gist of “Personal responsibility 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 dealing with their physical consequences.”  Just imagine the response you’d get if you responded to the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer, by saying, “But I’m not primarily responsible for all these things that I may or may not be able to change, so when we discuss this situation, let’s logically discuss the whole story, including the specifics and relativities, the long-term consequences of moral bankruptcy being that socially-sanctioned, etc.”

Those cognitive distortions figure that there’s no room for error, and there’s always room for improvement.  If you’ve dealt with a problem only 90%, that wouldn’t mean that you deserve an A grade, but that you’ve dealt with it intolerably inadequately.

Might makes right, since the weak can’t change whatever the strong do so the weak must accept it.  Strength also seems honorable and, when necessary, forgiven.  Since a society’s homeostasis requires that someone take responsibility for everything, it must also seem that weakness makes wrongness.  It seems that aggressive tendencies are ineradicable, so we must eradicate the hurt feelings and other weaknesses that result from aggressive behavior.  An untermensch-phobia seems to make sense.  Attempts to solve problems by correcting the victims, could be proven to be more effective than attempts to solve them by correcting those who are morally responsible.  Correcting them could seem unreliable, naïve, idealistic, whiny, manipulative, opinionated, blame-finding, and unforgiving.  Correcting victims is a tried-and-true approach that reliably works, produces results.  Just look at any self-help book for codependents, who are largely the family members of addicts and their functional equivalents, and you’ll see such principles given unapologetically, as the basic principles of coping skills, self-empowerment, self-reliance, maturity, etc.  No matter what caused your problems, they’re to be solved through the most expedient self-help.  The courage and self-empowerment of, “Buck up and deal with your own problems like a real American!” would make you most likely to succeed, in exactly those situations where you’d most have to succeed.

Our chronically anxious people, adult children of alcoholics, blameless survivors of accidents which killed others, those who were sexually abused, etc., are also very likely to feel absolutist self-blame.  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.”  As I’m OK—You’re OK says, “I’M NOT OK—YOU’RE OK came first and persists for most people throughout life....  Unfortunately, the most common position, shared by ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ people alike, is the I’M NOT OK—YOU’RE OK position.”

The webpage for survivors, of the Stations of Support group that gives psychological support to the families and survivors of the Station Nightclub Fire (and we all know who are morally responsible for this), is headed, “Understanding and Coping With Survivor Guilt,” as if that’s the main thing on the mind of those who’ve been through such a horror, and may have large burn scars.  This webpage says, “Feeling guilty that you survived when others dies is a common experience after traumatic events.... Self-blame is a normal emotional response in the aftermath to feeling powerlessness and helplessness.... Illogically, survivors sometimes feel that by punishing themselves, they can somehow undo the damage that has happened to others, and keep bad things from happening again.”  And heavy metal fans tend to be male and devil-may-care.

Our Fathers by David France, says about a lawyer who represents the male victims of a pedo-priest, “He couldn’t remember how many times he had to say to them, ‘It’s not your fault, what are you feeling so guilty about?’.”

The self-blame for being sexually abused, could have more than one reason why the victim feels at fault.  As Keeping Kids Safe: A Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Manual, by Pnina Tobin and Sue Levinson Kessner, says about the incest victim, “She may feel she causes the problem by her ‘bad’ behavior and may blame herself or worry about being punished.  (Often, the offender takes advantage of this by telling the child that she ‘makes’ him behave this way.)...  Many victims blame themselves for not stopping the abuse, especially when it takes place over a long period of time.”  And, of course, if she does turn him in, she’d feel guilty about tearing the family apart.

And we all know how guilty adult children of alcoholics tend to feel since they failed to make their parents want to sober up.

In practical terms, victim correction as a panacea is victim-blaming followed by, “and the more that you improved your tactics, the more that you’d benefit.”  Unless the person who has the problem also happens to be the one who’s morally responsible for it, self-help would at best ignore even the most worldly moral responsibility, since if the one who’s morally responsible, helped, that wouldn’t be self-help.  It’s arguments about the pragmatism of reliable motivation, the honorable self-reliance, and the Christian forgiveness, though, that make victim correction look like it’s the only real option.  Which means that if his tactic aren’t expedient enough to succeed, he’d naturally want them corrected until they are.  As a Quaker activist pointed out to me, the etymology of the word “correct” is basically co-rectify, to make right together, but victim correction as a panacea tends to be as confrontational and based on the deterrence of bad consequences, as is does a prison system, i.e. a “corrections” system.

For example, Susan Faludi’s feminist classic Backlash says about the thinking on codependency, “First published in 1985, Norwood’s book on female ‘relationship addiction’ became the guiding light to more than 20 million readers....  There plainly were great numbers of women who were locked in destructive relationships and in desperate need of help....  Like so many therapists in the decade, Norwood had an opportunity to observe up close the increasing toll of emotional and sexual violence against women.  She puzzled over the evidence of millions of women suffering verbal and physical abuse from husbands and lovers.  Yet, in the end, she proposed an explanation that entirely ignored the social dimensions of these developments and turned the problem inward.  Women today, she writes, are literally ‘addicted’ to men who hurt them.”  This must be outside the sphere to which moral judgments apply, since the women’s moral sensibilities about what the men do, would seem to be self-defeating attempts to: play the martyr role, create melodramas, be the righteous ones, express resentment, fix and control the men, etc.

 

 

 

                                             

 

Or, as Blaming the Victim put it, “As we might expect, the logical outcome of analyzing social problems in terms of the deficiencies of the victim is the development of programs aimed at correcting those deficiencies.  The formula for action becomes extraordinarily simple: change the victim.”  Except that nowadays, this isn’t done through programs, but by independently telling each victim that if she empowered herself by correcting herself, she’d benefit.

The victim-blaming that William Ryan described, blamed poverty on supposed weaknesses of character (using the old-fashioned definition of this term) that the poor supposedly learned from their underclass status.  The modern version blames the continued existence of just about any problem on supposed weaknesses of character (using the new definition of this term, of being weak-kneed), of those who seem inadequate to solve their problems, since if they were adequate, they’d have solved them adequately.  The old-fashioned, morals-based, approach of achieving homeostasis might seem more intimidating than the modern one.  Yet it’s virtually guaranteed that the old approach will judge each person’s volitional actions rather than reactions, won’t require any wisdom to hopefully figure out what not to do in a given situation, is limited to reasonable expectations, and will forgive shortcomings.

              

Certain dire facts could prove that your suspicions about our culture’s normalcy and frame of reference, the current zeitgeist, are true.  As the ArcaEx logo says,

The rate of depression described in Antidepressant Treatment—the Essentials, certainly isn’t only natural.  Most of these people try to look “normal” and not express negativity, so in our day-to-day lives, this problem doesn’t seem nearly this negative.  If this simply is a genetically-based condition that’s inherent to this percentage of the population, then this condition would constitute a sizable part of what’s inherent to the human condition.

The April, 2001 issue of Psychology Today magazine says, “More than 100 million Americans have a close family member who suffers from a major mental illness.  Of the 10 leading causes of disability, half are psychiatric.  By the year 2020, the major cause of disability in the world may be major depression.”

The Secret Life of the Brain, by neurologist Richard Restak, who obviously has no problem with “the medical model” of psychiatry, says, “Over the next century, depression will be the number one cause of disability in the developing world and the number four cause of death worldwide. Currently it afflicts 17 percent of people in the United States—12 to 13 percent of men and over twice as many women (about 25 percent). That breaks down into somewhere between 15 and 25 million Americans with a depressive episode in a given year.”

Malignant Sadness, the Anatomy of Depression, by Lewis Wolpert, says, “A recent report, Global Burden of Disease, published by the World Health Organisation, states that depression was the fourth most important health problem in the developing world in 1990 (accounting for about 3 per cent of the total burden of illness) and predicts that it will be the number one health problem in the developing world in 2020 (accounting for about 6 per cent of the total burden).  Over the same period the annual number of suicides will increase from 593,000 to 995,000 in the developing world.”

Victoria Secunda’s book When Madness Comes Home, says that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV says that affective disorders affect 20% of the American population, anxiety disorders affect 25%, substance abuse disorders affect 27%, schizophrenia affects 0.7%, and sociopathy affects 3.5%.  (Both When Madness Comes Home, and that article, are guides to the family members of those who are the most severely affected, so one could paraphrase Faludi about these, “All of these Americans, with the rest of the world soon following, are hurt this bad.  Yet, in the end, these writings propose an approach that entirely ignores the social dimensions of these developments and turns the problem inward.  It seems that family members simply must take care of the illnesses in their own families.”)

The webpage Depression Common in Single Mothers Receiving Welfare, on the Johns Hopkins website, says, “Forty percent of the women reported symptom levels that would likely indicate a diagnosis of clinical depression...”  (This study was done to find ways in which these women could get jobs so they could be taken off welfare, so Faludi could be paraphrased, “Such a huge percentage of these obviously greatly disadvantaged, and probably greatly exploited, women are devastated.  Yet, in the end, this research went after an approach that entirely ignores the social dimensions of these developments and turns the problem inward.  If only they got fixed, the problem would get fixed.”)  As W. R. Bett wrote in the late 1940s, when amphetamines were used to treat depression, “a large number of clinical observations both from general practitioners and from specialists testify to [amphetamine’s] immediate, and often dramatic, value in breaking the stranglehold of depression, restoring ‘energy feeling,’ and renewing optimism, self-assurance, increased initiative, appetite for work, and zest for living,” and that’s still the basic idea.

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.”

Another webpage on that same website says, “Social anxiety disorder is a real medical condition.  It affects over 16 million Americans.”

Plenty of similar data are on page 3-17 of this summary,

as well as a webpage from nostigma.org.

Because of the terrifying similarity of all victim correction, one form can be interchanged with another, so one could describe such statements by paraphrasing Faludi, “The scientists who put this together think that 34 million Americans, either some or all of the time, need this medication, to make them complete so they could function properly.  There plainly are plenty of Americans who will feel and function properly if they get such medication, and won’t if they don’t, so they’re in desperate need of chemical help.  Like any mental health professionals, the scientists could see how calamitous this is.  Like any scientists, they could see that, therefore, such rates of such impairments can’t be inherent to life, can’t be parts of the natural order.  They certainly should be puzzling over far more than whether or not this is a sign of the victims’ weaknesses or character flaws.  Yet, in the end, the scientists proposed an explanation that entirely ignored the social dimensions of these developments and turned the problem inward.  These sufferers, those scientists write, are literally chemically dependent on one type of modern medication, so they’d better just go take their daily doses of Vitamin P.”  This must be outside the sphere to which moral judgments apply, since the depressed people’s moral sensibilities about what caused the depressions, would seem subjective and futile.  On the other hand, no matter what caused each of their depressions, if they empowered themselves by correcting their own brain chemistry, that actually would accomplish something.

What is Social Psychology? says, “The Fundamental Attribution Error states that in perceiving other people’s behavior, people tend to focus on personal causes and underestimate situational causes.  Such thinking can lead people to hold on to bad first impressions as well as stereotypes.”  Maybe this is because this is the fundamental way in which modern Western society gets its homeostasis, our fundamental social contract.  Whatever are one’s realities he’s response-able for dealing with them, and if he isn’t adequate to do this, loses the battle, fails, and comes up short with big consequences, he’d seem to be an irresponsible and inadequate, loser and failure with very consequential shortcomings.  If he doesn’t adjust to, adapt to, function with, fit in with, and feel content with, this, he’s a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent.  In our society this is the form of personal responsibility that doesn’t seem forgivable.  Our society can count on this to get its homeostasis, since this is self-motivated, honorably self-reliant, and profoundly forgiving.  Even the most worldly ethical responsibility would be nice, but response-ability for one’s own welfare is the form of personal responsibility that must be socially sanctioned as a social contract.

For example, as Calvin Coolidge wrote, “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.  Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men of talent.  Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.  Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.  Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”  But persist over what?  To say that talent, genius, education, etc., don’t make you good enough but persistence does, really does require that one answer the question, “Exactly what must you persist over?”

Cognitive therapy tends to follow this pattern, too.  The webpage EMOTIONAL THOUGHT STOPPING (A Mood Enhancing Exercise) says, “Each year over 17 million people in the United States are depressed.  Of those fewer than 30% get help!  Each year over 30,000 people in the United States commit suicide,” and tells all those millions of depressed Americans to deal with their problems pragmatically by stopping any thoughts that could make them feel depressed.  One could paraphrase Faludi by saying, “Such thought reform is supposed to be the guiding light to, potentially, more than 17 million Americans.  There plainly are great numbers of people who have experiences eliciting those painful thoughts, and in desperate need of help.  Like so many therapists, cognitive therapists have an opportunity to observe up close the increasing toll of the devastation.  They puzzle over the evidence that these thoughts don’t just happen through spontaneous combustion.  Yet, in the end, they propose an explanation that entirely ignores the social dimensions of these developments and turns the problem inward.  These millions of people seem simply in need of thought reform, where, as long as all of them have their brains washed of these thoughts, that would solve the problems, and it’s better to find solutions than to find blame.  These therapists must figure that each year over 30,000 people in the United States die because they didn’t do enough thought-stopping or similar contrived thinking, and that this is why they really need to get help!”. This must be outside the sphere to which moral judgments apply, since the depressed people’s moral sensibilities about what caused the depressions, would seem to be the passivity defeatism and pessimism that must be thought-stopped.

              

Though this de rigueur amoralism has the appeal of pragmatism self-reliance and anti-judgmentalism, this doesn’t allow for free-thinking for those who are helpless to change anything that’s morally wrong enough to deserve anger.  If they don’t adjust to, adapt to, function with, fit in with, and feel content with, whatever major realities they can’t change, they’d have the problems that come with being maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfits and malcontents.  Self-help authorities could admonish them that these consequences should really deter themselves from the maladjustment.  Since absolutely every problem must be dealt with absolutely, an amoral assignment of personal responsibility to whoever’s welfare is at stake, must be absolutely dogmatic and de rigueur.

Moral relativism becomes amoral absolutism.  The old amoral relativism, “But that’s just your cultural bias!” is pretty reasonable compared to the new amoral absolutism, “But your claim that what was done to you was unforgivably morally wrong, is your bias toward wanting to believe that you’re entitled to better than what you’ve got!  O-o-o-o-o, you’re entitled!”  This could look terrifyingly like dogmatic medieval religion.  Both: are simplistic and cold, treat an unnatural mindset as if it’s The Right Beliefs, paternalistically stigmatize disagreement, don’t take the specifics of each situation into account, treat docility as all-important, have patriarchal rationales for who is or isn’t accountable for what, re-engineer only parts of human nature but they mustn’t deviate from what’s required, etc.  While moral relativism is based on sincere principles, moral-relativism-becomes-amoral-absolutism is a means to an end, to get rid of objections to genuinely destructive behavior since objections can be very pesky.  Even the most worldly moral responsibility doesn’t feel good or inspire dynamic action.

Modern Western culture, especially American, requires both self-reliance and forgiveness.  William James wrote that Americans tend to classify people as either redbloods or mollycoddles.  This tends to mean that the strong get the rights (since redbloods have rights) and the weak get the response-abilities (since if they don’t take care of their own problems they’d seem to be manipulative mollycoddles).  This is along the lines of Schopenhauer, since the redbloods powerfully impress the human race in all circumstances, while those who are weak seem ignominiously cunning to get coddled, manipulative.  The subtitle of the 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.”  When one looks at how readily this sort of mentality sees manipulation in what some weaker people do, one might remember that the root word of “manipulate” means hand or to handle, and psychologists have observed that paranoid people often include in their art, images that look like grasping hands, since grasping hands are out to get you.  Yet it doesn’t seem paranoid to see untermenschen as grasping manipulators who are out to get you.  Since these people don’t act mercenary, you’d think that talking about them as manipulators would ring hollow, but what constitutes “manipulation,” is in the eye of the beholder.

              

At the top of page 8 of my Victim Correction as a Panacea webpage series, is a statement by an unemployed female administrator, aged 27, quoted in Speaking of Sadness: Depression, Disconnection, and the Meaning of Illness, by David A. Karp, “Depression is an insidious vacuum that crawls into your brain and pushes your mind out of the way.  It is the complete absence of rational thought.  It is freezing cold, with a dangerous, horrifying, terrifying fog wafting throughout whatever is left of your mind.”

An Unquiet Mind by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, says, “Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony.  It is a pitiless, unrelenting pain that affords no window of hope, no alternative to a grim and brackish existence, and no respite from the cold undercurrents of thought and feeling that dominate the horribly restless nights of despair.”

William Styron, in Darkness Visible, described the word depression as, “a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness,” though in fact we take our economic depressions more seriously than our emotional depressions.

If we were in economic depression at some time during 15% of our years, we’d treat prevention as a major goal.  The cover letter of the final report from The President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America, dated July 22, 2003, “recommends a fundamental transformation” that “must ensure that the mental health services and supports actively facilitate recovery, and build resiliency to face life’s challenges.”

              

A devastated person who thinks in a self-reliant achievement-oriented fashion, would have to focus his attention on finding and fixing everything that might be wrong with his own tactics, since only that would reliably achieve what’s necessary.  Only this culturally-conditioned depression could seem to be “aggression turned inward.”  The webpage Surprising Risk Factor of Suicide, by Dr. Dean Edell, says about suicide, “It’s the eighth leading cause of death in this country, and in 1997 claimed about 30,000 lives - by comparison, only 19,000 people died as a result of homicide.”  That webpage also says, “the most surprising was that low anxiety levels in childhood were associated with suicide,” though that really isn’t surprising since anxiety externalizes responsibility, sees your problems as caused by things outside of yourself.

The Bible Handbook by atheists W. P. Ball and G. W. Foote, says, “Christ’s absurd reversals of true morality would place the good at the mercy of the bad, and would make an end of civilized society.”

Such cultural norms become so naturally unnatural.  Cross Christian forgiveness with pragmatism, and you’d end up with the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression.  These say that your reality is your reality whether good or evil, and each of us must unconditionally accept all reality that he can’t change.  Also, you must surmount your bad realities with perfect success, or you’re going to accumulate a lot of almost-solved and partially-solved problems, and weaknesses.  If you don’t mentally transcend and physically prevail, you’re the hellion, the unforgivable problem.  In a special framed box, the report of the New Freedom Commission gives its definitions of “recovery” as a control over all dysfunctions, and “resilience” as “the personal and community qualities that enable us to rebound from adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or other stresses—and to go on with life with a sense of mastery, competence, and hope,” the basic ideas of James 1:1-4.

If it’s your problem, it’s your challenge.  Moral responsibility is immaterial.  That’s as mandatorily limitless as “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,” but offers pathways to more advantages.  Of course, this level of moral bankruptcy could leave someone feeling helpless incompetent and hopeless.

 

Moral bankruptcy seems as understandable, understanding, merciful, realistic, necessary, and meaningless, as does financial bankruptcy, and in the event of any bankruptcy, others must be responsible for doing something about it.  In terms of the real, material world, all that’s being defaulted on are are mundane material things; this, too shall pass.  Moral, intellectual, and spiritual principles are also being defaulted on, but realists shy away from doing anything on principle.  One can only wonder what Jung’s spiritual psychology would think of that; what archetype would it fit, the person who’d be the most likely to succeed in Götterdaemmerung?

               

(Nazi poster saying “EUROPAS FREIHEIT,” or “EUROPE’S FREEDOM”)

Which means, of course, that those who have problems and act contrary to self-help expectations, would seem to be the troublemaking parasites.  This is a natural part of the Niebuhr Sin-drome, that if it seems that each is to deal with his own problems stolidly, then if he doesn’t, he’s shirking an important personal responsibility.  Those who blame the victims of racism, or anything else, could say that correcting them aims to make them stronger and more self-reliant.  Attempts to correct the sinners, on the other hand, would be labeled as impractical unforgiving and mollycoddle “attempts to re-engineer human nature,” treading on sacred ground.  It seems that “personal responsibility” must mean response-ability for one’s own problems. 

According to the Doctrine of Original Sin, just about any destructive behavior could seem not to be really the choice of the person who committed it, so all addicts, all impossible people, and everyone on a bad day, seem very interchangeable.  If moral responsibility is minimized, even if this is done in the name of realism, then response-ability for one’s own welfare would have to be magnified, these would have to occur together, and would characterize a particular abnormality. Quite literally, we might as well be letting sociopaths or addictive personalities (who, in this regard, are very similar) determine how we see both sinners’, and their victims’, practical responsibilities.  “If only that victim would..., he’d have no meaningful strife, so don’t blame me if he doesn’t.  That’s all that there is to it.”

 

 

One could define someone with an addictive personality, as someone who, as he’s going through his pre-addiction booze/dope problem and his friends and family members try to talk him out of it, figures that it’s their resentment anger and fear that constitute the character defects, so he goes right on into addiction.  What really seems to matter is the sufferers’ outlooks.

Of course, consistently reproving and chastising victims, would make it seem that Americans’ neurobiologies, outlooks, timidity, survival skills, etc., are disastrously defective enough to lead to 15% of us having a serious depressive disorder in any given year, 25% of us suffering chronic anxiety, etc.  We sure tend to fail to face life’s challenges independently, choose to put our blues on parade, etc.  The wide diversity of reasons why women involved with problem men seem to have “let themselves in for it,” that they wanted to be nurturing or productive or vainglorious or melodramatic or poignant or pitiful or owed something or perseverant or ultimately triumphant or..., shows that we’d seem to have a wide diversity of self-destruction and mollycoddle manipulativeness.  The more people whom the victim-fixing mental health professionals say need to be under their purview because they choose to walk in the shade with their blues on parade, the more that we could show that all those people can’t be that defective.

 

                             

This is from the Age of Anxiety.  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.  And the 1950s were simply the era of Miltown, when Milton Berle called himself “Miltown Berle.”  Valium came out in 1963.

                 

                             

This really does play a part in just about anything that any social scientist would want to research. As Speaking of Sadness: Depression, Disconnection, and the Meanings of Illness says, “If you are going through a divorce, that’s a private trouble.  When half of the marriages in America are failing, that’s a public issue.”  One could also say, for example, that if you feel resentment anger and/or fear, that’s a private trouble, but if you lived during the Great Depression and felt resentment anger and/or fear in the context of it, that would have been a public issue, though it would have seemed all-important that you get your feelings under control in order to cope.  All of us would accept that those in a society, especially one that’s expected to be productive and dynamic, need homeostasis, serenity, confidence, motivation, etc.  The big question would have to be, who’s responsible for these: those who’d cause the problems that could go against them, or the victims?  In what ways would those who’d seem to be shirking this personal responsibility seem bad, scary?

Since these are so basic, social scientists could elucidate them in all sorts of ways.  This isn’t just a slippery slope that could possibly lead to, “...Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good...  You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  That’s where victim correction as a panacea begins.

Niebuhr objected to Protagoras, the first Greek Sophist, writing in the fifth century BC, “Man is the measure of all things,” but if we don’t treat humanity as the measure of all things, what’s to limit the perfectionist expectations that we respond humbly to sinfulness, in any area of our lives?

The absolutist frame of reference and cultural norms, that one could see in the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, might seem to be just too popular for anyone to reject them.  The pedo-priest scandal, also, was allowed to happen due to Christian forgiveness.  As J. Waters’ article about pedo-priests, “Past abuse evident to all with eyes to see,” in the Irish Times of May 18 1999, says, “By definition, power is accountable only to itself, and so it is the whistleblower rather than the abuser who tends to get punished.  This is why whistleblowers who report what happened to them as children can, in the 1980s, be dismissed, and ten years later, when the church is in decline, be met with gasps of horror on relating the same experiences.”  When you consider how absolutist and self-justifying is The Flip Game as is reflected in the cognitive distortions, and how extreme are our normalized depression, anxiety, etc., these could very easily elicit horror once the blind faith is overcome.

              

The Victim Correction As A Panacea series of webpages, goes on to Victim Correction As A Panacea, the Summary, Page 2, which gives the formula for how any problem could be looked at in terms of how pragmatic red-blooded and forgiving it would be for the victim to take response-ability for his own welfare.  Then is Victim Correction As A Panacea, the Summary, Page 3, which summarizes victim correction as a panacea in more detail.  Then is the Victim Correction as a Panacea series, which really explores this in detail.  This also has a Documentation On the Social Problem of Unnaturally Rampant Depression webpage, to mirror some websites telling of scientific research on the social causes of the rampant depression.  The Standard Rationales for Victim Correction as a Panacea webpage gives exactly these rationales, which are as predictable as any panacea.  The Schopenhauer on Predators webpage has an excerpt from The World as Will and Representation which expresses his fatalism about pedophilia, which shows both that the recent “zero tolerance” about it isn’t a recent trend, and that this fatalistic acceptance has to be as extreme as reality is.  The Emphasis on Victim-Self-Blaming webpage gives a section of AA’s Big Book which anathematizes resentment anger and fear (and not just overreactions), which should give a good idea of just what self-help approaches based on AA’s paradigm, really are based on.  My Darwinist Lehman Brothers’ INSIDE Sales Tips webpage gives exactly that, both the sales tips, and the Darwinist attitudes that went behind their sales.  Plus, my Darwinist Lehman Brothers’ INSIDE Introduction to Management Book gives the contents of this book, which seems to want to use exactly the sort of empathetic techniques that might optimize normal businesses, but not one where empathy would mean empathy for recklessness.  The Out of the Same Mold as the Great Crash of 2008 webpage, tells of my two big experiences which really let me see people’s attitudes on how much those around us, value personal response-ability for our own welfare, and devalue even the most worldly moral responsibility.

The About Us webpage about this, has more details on these experiences.  The Message to Intellectuals in the Islamic World, concerns the parallels between expectations that Palestinians and other Arabs should work toward the millions of Palestinian refugees rebuilding their own lives pragmatically wherever they live, and the assumptions that self-help thinking would have that any refugees of anything, such as domestic violence, rebuild their own lives pragmatically wherever they live.  The Candace Newmaker’s Experience webpage, tells of how psychologists put ten-year-old Candace Newmaker into a jerry-rigged contraption that suffocated her, but when she screamed that she was being suffocated, they ignored her because, typical for Reagan-influenced psychologists, they felt absolutely certain that she was just trying to manipulate them.  The Breaking Important Confidences for Your Own Good webpage is about a lawsuit against one marriage counselor telling his clients their spouses’ secrets, which tells of another doing the same, both of whom didn’t benefit by doing this so, like Candace’s therapists, they must have thought that fostering their clients’ stolid strength and self-determination like this was for their own good.  A Glimpse Into the Soul of Victim Correction, gives both statements from Al-Anon’s book In Our Own Affairs: Making Crises Work for You (No, I’m not kidding.) which either expect victims to make crises work for them or address problems with victims’ self-blame, and victim-bashing slogans of Alcoholics Anonymous, along with other information along these lines.  The Cigarette Industry and Victim Correction, tells of how the only way that tobacco companies could have defended themselves all these years, is to act as if they’re red-blooded victims of mollycoddles.  Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, and What It Indicates About What’s Shaping Modern Culture, gives plenty of specifics of the ideology that’s supposed to guide our lives.

              

 

 

 

 

 

 

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