#3-10
ictim Correctors Only Want Addicts’ Kids, Etc., to Be More Self-Efficacious, Serene, Etc.
“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. Even when serene acceptance gets Kafkaesque, if that’s reality, then that’s reality.)
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“Living or being associated with a compulsive gambler creates its own kind of hell. For most people, it is a devastating experience: family relationships become unbearably strained and the home is filled with bitterness, frustration and resentment. Emotionally, the stress takes its toll as the life of the Gam-Anon member seems to crumble and become unmanageable; tensions are aggravated because life, in material terms, is unstable. At any moment the house might be lost or the furniture repossessed. There may not be enough money to put food on the table or clothe the children.... Gam-Anon meetings provide an opportunity for a strong bond to form between those affected by the problem of compulsive gambling. The meeting is opened with a moment of silent meditation and closed with the Serenity Prayer....
“The moving spirit in Gam-Anon, as in Gamblers Anonymous, is a profound devotion of men and women who have themselves suffered to other men and women going through the same ordeal.”—When Luck Runs Out, Help for Compulsive Gamblers and Their Families, by Robert L. Custer, MD and Harry Milt,. So the above from the Gam-Anon chapter is supposed to be more profound than is a realization of what such moral bankruptcy would lead to, in a society with rampant depression. As you could hear in any discussion about codependency in general, the reason why all of these women are to accept that that’s just how their problem husbands are, isn’t that they all are simply passive victims of any addictions, but that all the women absolutely can change themselves and absolutely can’t change anyone else.
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When he was out of the house and the children were asleep, I would come down into the kitchen and scream and curse him for what a rotten person he was, wishing a car would hit him and he would die. I would take the pots and pans and bang them on the counter. I would pick up dishes and cups and smash them on the floor. I would pace the living room and dining room and scream. I would talk to my poodle and say, ‘1 hate him. He’s a bastard. 1 hope he dies.’ I didn’t have the serenity to sit down and watch television or read.”—from a statement of a pathological gambler’s wife, in When Luck Runs Out, Help for Compulsive Gamblers and Their Families, in a chapter that ends, “...she may attempt suicide; this last is the way out chosen by at least 1 out of every 10 women married to a compulsive gambler.
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“God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it; Trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next—Amen.”—the entire, unredacted Serenity Prayer as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr
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“Gambling isn’t an economic policy that could be turned on and off, at least not easily.”—Robert Goodman, The Luck Business, The Devastating Consequences and Broken Promises of America’s Gambling Explosion
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his is put in very uplifting terms. All victim-blaming that isn’t totally illogical, could benefit the victims, by telling them how they could take care of themselves better in the future. As the Conoco slogan says, “Where others see obstacles, we see a chance to elevate.” That’s the positive attitude that victim correction as a panacea, says that you should have. Where others see victim-blaming, positive people would see a chance to improve the only person who really cares about the outcome of a problem. The big difference between the two, is that the obstacles that that slogan refers to, are morally neutral. Naturally, engineers and geologists would simply try to overcome these. If victim-power looks scary, then solving your own problem instead of using victim-power would make you seem cooperative instead.
When self-help tells people in trouble to deal with their own problems by helping themselves, one could say that where others see obstacles, they see a chance to elevate. Even if this involves the moral bankruptcy of, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” this would seem to be seeing a chance to elevate, rather than obstacles. Neo-Buddhism means failsafe coping skills. It should be obvious how beloved the moral bankruptcy of The Serenity Prayer is. Gam-Anon says that for pathological gamblers’ spouses, in general, to have an attitude toward them of la belle indifference, constitutes maturity, and since this is belle, beautiful, it seems ideal. Ann Jones, in Next Time She’ll be Dead, summarized the victim-blaming of battered wives as, “Without the wife-beater’s wife there would be no wife beating.” One could say about those who literally hold to that, that where others see obstacles, they see a chance to elevate, that where others see the problem of wife-beating, they see the uplifting, self-empowered solution of the women courageously doing whatever it takes to live independently.
The Your Life is Waiting webpage from the GlaxoSmithKline company, had said, “Stop waiting. Hope is here. Join a FREE support program designed to help millions of people like you who are still waiting for relief from social anxiety disorder, depression, or panic disorder.” Now this website includes a sample of the webpages available to members, “How to Talk to Friends and Family,” which says, “Print out some of the materials from this Web site that you think might help others to better understand your condition. Myth: Disorders such as depression and social anxiety disorder are signs of personal weakness is a good one.”
Regarding how many millions, is the following from Antidepressant Treatment—the Essentials, by John H. Greist, MD and Thomas H. Greist, MD, “According to National Institutes of Mental Health figures, 20,000,000 people or approximately 15% of the U.S. adult population suffers from a serious depressive disorder in any given year.” 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.
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? Despite the magnitude of the social problem, 20,000,000 Americans are supposed to see medication as hope. And with this tendency to attribute problems to something inside the victims, naturally those around us would tend to define ‘personal weakness’ as actual weakness, rather than the aggressive behavior that triggers a lot of the depressions. Yet attempts to correct the aggressive seem naïve mollycoddle and judgmental, while attempts to correct the victims seem pragmatic red-blooded and forgiving, in other words, uplifting. Some might even object to the frilly-Prozac design in the margin of this webpage, since antidepressants saved their lives. They’d never address the question of whether it was only natural that they’d become suicidal in the first place, only that antidepressants were uplifting for them. No problem could really be a problem if the victim prevented solved or dealt with it well enough, so victims who don’t take care of their own problems well enough seem omni-responsible. If one rationale for victim correction doesn’t work, it’s replaced by another! Though it might feel very good to think that if we give the responsibility for a problem to whoever’s problem it is, that’s self-help, self-empowerment, independence, etc., your natural common sense should tell you that this would lead to the problems of minimizing moral responsibility and magnifying response-ability for one’s own success or failure.”
The same goes for self-help psychology, which is supposed to be the natural version of antidepressants, though contrived optimism and the like are hardly natural. The Serenity Prayer is a favorite of this, which means that we’re supposed to use the same formula for coping, as do the ladies’ auxiliaries of Twelve-Step groups. Even if that level of hardship and sinfulness would impact your life, you’d still be expected to serenely accept whatever you can’t change, and courageously change whatever you can and must. Yet despite this moral bankruptcy being treated as if of course normal people would accept it, you’d also be expected to have an optimistic outlook, since that’s pragmatic.
Sometimes, what seems to mean “free,” would actually require some artificial intervention. It’s a lot easier to lose a certain amount of money through gambling than it is to earn that same amount. The Great Wall Street Bailout of 2008 involved having to earn some of the money that Wall Street gambled away as if that’s what they were in the business to do. Yet if that’s what had to happen in order for society to function, then that’s what had to happen. Bush’s Saturday morning address of September 27, 2008, about the planned bailout, included, “We must free up the flow of credit to consumers and businesses by reducing the risk posed by troubled assets.” While this use of the word free might not have been intended to imply freedom, still, the use of the word free to mean bankers having others take care of them enough that they feel safe from the consequences of their own choices, is a rather strange conception of what it means to be free. Yet freeing up of the loan markets would mean freeing up the availability of money for everyone, so bailing out what they did would mean freedom for us. And those who live with addicts would probably have to do a lot to make up for what they do, in order to be free. Since this would constitute the family members taking care of themselves, this might not seem to be intervention. Yet they certainly didn’t choose to create the problems that they’d be taking response-ability for. They’d have to keep freeing up elements of their own lives, and that would mean freedom for them. And this would seem to have the usual connotations of freedom: if they took response-ability for their own welfare, they could have self-determination, so this is what self-responsibility means. (Of course, if the bailout didn’t pass quickly enough to prevent a Wall Street meltdown, then chances are that those who were reluctant to give up the money would have been treated as if they unrealistically put everyone in jeopardy.)
Later on that day, as the bailout was becoming finalized, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, “We’re very pleased with the progress tonight and appreciate the extraordinary bipartisan efforts being made to stabilize our financial markets and protect our economy.” Of course, the investors were being protected from themselves and their colleagues. Yet whatever needs to be done to provide stability, needs to be done to provide stability. And chances are that most of the times that addicts’ spouses seem to be enabling them by protecting them, what the spouses are actually trying to do is protect the entire family. Whatever provides stability and protection, provides stability and protection, no matter who was responsible for the instability.
The Phases of Gambling webpage on the website of pathological gambling treatment center Harbour Pointe, ends a paragraph in its description of the “Desperation” phase, when things start to get really bad, with, “[The gambler’s wife] is even frequently convinced that it is somehow her fault.” Obviously, this is the sort of self-blame that counseling for addicts’ family members tries to talk them out of.
At the same time, the self-blame for failure that accompanies depression, anxiety, or just plain failure, in the West, didn’t just happen through spontaneous combustion. Our cultural norms tell us that if those in trouble stop blaming others and look at themselves, then they’d have a better chance in resourcefully finding solutions for their own problems, fit in with the dynamics of market discipline, be optimistic that they have self-determination, etc. A lot of the self-blame that this leads to is irrational, but such unconditionally self-reliant conceptions of personal responsibility are necessary to make sure that everyone deal with reality as pragmatically as they could. The webpage Are You Living With A Compulsive Gambler? on the website of the Montana Council on Problem Gambling, says at the top, “If there is a gambling problem in your home, the GamAnon family groups may be able to help you cope with it.”
This moral bankruptcy isn’t a policy that could be turned on and off, at least not easily. If social norms do take seriously people’s response-ability to take care of their own problems stolidly, and don’t take even basic moral responsibility seriously, then you’d seem counterproductively deviant if you deviate from this. Once casinos open, their rights and their employees’ rights for the businesses to keep operating, seem sacred. Once our culture accepts moral bankruptcy, agreement with it would seem to mean freedom from judgmentalism, repression, negativism, defeatism, etc. Yet it seems so positive to say that as the victims are having their minds re-engineered to deal with this, what they’re learning is inner happiness, serenity, maturity, hope, strength, confidence, strength of character, etc.
In fact, this is based on the same sort of zeitgeist, that Robert Goodman describes in When Luck Runs Out. The supposed benefits of legalized gambling tend to be public, while the chaos that results from legalized gambling tends to be private. Those who advocate the legalization of more casinos aren’t grass-roots groups who want opportunities to have fun gambling, but campaigns financed by casino corporations, which promise jobs and tax revenue to desperate people. As William Ryan wrote in Blaming the Victim, published in 1971, “The ‘multiproblem’ poor, it is claimed, suffer the psychological effects of impoverishment, the ‘culture of poverty,’ and the deviant value system of the lower classes; consequently, though unwittingly, they cause their own troubles,” but nowadays we realize that what the poor are lacking, is economic opportunities.
Yet the March/April issue of The Angolite magazine quotes Kimberly Hunter-Reed, the Louisiana governor’s deputy chief of staff and director of policy and research for health issues, economic development, and child welfare, as telling a graduation ceremony in the Angola prison, “Education is poverty’s mortal enemy.... People can accomplish and achieve anything. All they have to do is push themselves and those around them to do more, to do better.” You’d think that if the poor got enough education, we could stop the trend that started in 1980, of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
State lotteries have many peoples’ basic needs depending on them, and, as When Luck Runs Out says, “it is relying on an unstable source of funds, since it is dependent on how much people can be persuaded to gamble.” Some internal memos of these campaigns admit that they’re trying to re-engineer some pretty profound and well-founded beliefs, and that whether they treat gambling as harmful or harmless depends on whether they’re trying to legalize their own casinos or stop their competitors’. The more competitors that a states’ casinos have at any moment, the more that they could demand and get, in order to remain prosperous. That’s realism. The Reagan Administration treated Native American casinos as if they were a good, self-reliant source of capital that the tribes could then use to build productive businesses, and they’re among the main competitors of the commercial casinos. Those who oppose more legalized gambling seem to be the villains, expressing their own personal feelings or moral hang-ups about gambling, exaggerating the problem of pathological gambling since then groups that deal with it would seem more necessary, etc. Once the casinos are already built and many people already have their jobs there, then those who’d want to close them would seem even more villainous.
Victim correction as a panacea includes these same themes: minimization of chaos in people’s private lives, desperate efforts to take care of oneself, conservatives financing mass-media that promote their ideology, a re-engineering of profound and well-founded beliefs, that could change radically from situation to situation depending on what’s pragmatic, and the villainization of those who Nietzsche would have villainized. Yet this could be put in uplifting terms. One could always ignore the desperation, and focus on how self-empowering it is to fight one’s own battles to take care of oneself. Getting control over 20,000,000 depressions in any given year, most of which shouldn’t have existed in the first place, constitutes hope. Minimizing the chaos that occurs in private could be a good coping skill, to cope with the facts that people aren’t perfect and boys will be boys. Also, such banalities are extremely uninteresting. However the mass-media or public relations campaigns shape our cultural norms, fitting in with them means fitting in. Also, that good ol’ boy emotionalist radio and TV, seem a lot more interesting.
Gamblers Anonymous has its own video and DVD, Even Up the Odds, about three pathological gamblers, Benjamin, a seemingly upper-middle-class man who’s actually gambled all his liquid assets away in the stock market, Kim, a lower-middle-class woman whose husband almost divorced her when she engaged in higher-stakes glitzy gambling but now she limits herself to the lottery and bingo, and Mark, a lower-middle-class man who tends to win but his wife left him since he’d go out gambling with The Boys and tell her that he was working. Nothing here about situations where the wife puts up with a great deal of losses in gambling since that’s the best option available to her. Nothing is said about Benjamin’s family, but if he had a wife and kids, they certainly would be living in serious financial straits.
As In The Shadow of Chance: The Pathological Gambler, by Julian Taber, PhD, says, “Pathological gambling, the invisible mental disorder, is more common than many better-known diseases and mental disorders, and it is far more costly.... Keeping in mind that we are only making estimates, if we multiply the conservative yearly minimum loss figure of $10,000 per gambler by the conservative estimate of 5 million pathological gamblers nationwide, we get a figure of $50 billion lost annually,” much of which wasn’t earned, but was conned or pilfered from others. Simply treating the victims of this as if they should choose not to let their problems bother them should seem different than would treating like this, someone dealing with inconveniences. Yet it doesn’t seem different. No matter how severe a problem is, it’s reality, and self-empowerment means dealing with one’s own realities as self-efficaciously as possible.
If these norms are pragmatic, and villainize those who Nietzsche would have villainized, then they seem constructive anyway: pro-freedom, stouthearted, optimistic, and protecting us from self-indulgent and manipulative whining. That’s realism, so pragmatists could say that if you chose to deviate from it, then, though unwittingly, you and your weakness cause your own troubles. You’re free to change what you choose to believe. Since those in the ladies’ auxiliaries of Twelve-Step groups, such as Gam-Anon, choose to build on their own inner cores of spiritual strength and maturity in that the only real happiness that one can be sure of comes from within, you could choose to think in a self-reliant, self-empowering way, too. The Luck Business quotes a poster put up by some casinos supposedly to discourage underage gambling, as saying, “Casino gambling is a lot like life. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.” Maturity means that you accept life on life’s terms, even when those losses are great. Even pathological gamblers’ spouses would benefit if they simply took care of their own problems, though the recent legalization of an unusual amount of casino gambling, certainly makes its effects a social problem.
Sure, as The Luck Business says, “In a 1960s survey, nearly 60 percent of Americans believed ‘hard work pays off.’ By the 1980s only one in three people considered this to be true. Pessimism about the lack of payoffs for work is confirmed by reality.” Yet those who continue to believe that both working hard and working smart, pays off, would be most likely to succeed. Optimism about this, even though it wouldn’t be confirmed by reality, would be the realistic attitude for you to have. In the 60s it was Big Brother AND the Holding Company, but now it’s Big Brother OR the Holding Company, since it seems that either we accept Wall Street excesses or we’ll have Big Brother.
Before the Reagan Revolution, if you had a sense that deferred gratification, building a career, etc., entitled you to something, that would have seemed “mature.”
The above is an illustration from an introductory sociology textbook from the early 1970s, illustrating a section that was favorable of the sociological theories that William Ryan wrote about in Blaming the Victim. As Ryan wrote, “The pattern of behavior characterized by ability to delay need-gratification—what has been called the Deferred Gratification Pattern (D.G.P.)—is supposedly characteristic of the middle classes. Members of the lower classes, in contrast, are usually rumored to display the Non-deferred Gratification Pattern (N.G.P.)”
Yet after the Reagan Revolution, taking seriously that sense of entitlement would seem immature. After all, with deferred gratification and building a career, what you do to earn something, always occurs before you’re to get it. In today’s risky economy, it’s simply accepted that in life sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. That would mean that if at any time in the past, you sacrificed or worked to build something that you should be enjoying now, but someone or something else destroyed it, you could seem immature if you don’t simply accept this. Caring about what you sacrificed in the past, is crying over spilled milk. The following would be the modern version of that cartoon:
One could say that the old definition of maturity said that if you were willing to let your efforts take whatever time they need, that’s maturity. The new definition would stress that if you let your efforts take whatever time they need, and because of that delay something that someone else did destroyed what you did, maturity would mean realizing that time waits for no one. The new definition has a gutsy, adventurous, appeal to it. It’s also more likely to contribute to our rampant depression and anxiety disorders, but the current definition of maturity would say that if you care then you’re not mature enough: manipulative, or not sturdy enough.
Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society, says, “The use of man by man is expressive of the system of values underlying the capitalistic system. Capital, the dead past, employs labor—the living vitality and power of the present,” which sounds like what Marxist dogma started out as, when it was still extremely utopian. Capital could seem to be “the dead past,” for reasons that could have involved deferred gratification. Yet the more anti-Marxist an American is, the more likely he is to use a logic having that same conception of the past, when someone who, in economic terms, is weak, had invested something in his own future, and someone else, who, in economic terms, is strong, had ruined it in some way. The weak victim would be treated as if:
What he invested is past history, the dead past, so if he cares about it, that’s his futile resentment. Even if it required deferred gratification, past history would still be past history.
The strong person who caused the problem, is actually the helpless one, since he’s absolutely powerless to turn back the clock and undo what he did.
This is a system of values, in that it determines who is, and isn’t, seriously condemned as bad.
Marxism would say that what really underlies the system of values that expresses the use of man by man, is really power dynamics, that the weak simply have to adjust to whatever realities the strong create for them. As Erich Fromm put it, “This does not mean that the drive for material gain is the only or even the most powerful motivating force in man. It does mean that the individual and society are primarily concerned with the task of survival, and that only when survival is secured can they proceed to the satisfaction of other imperative human needs.” Self-help pragmatism’s system of values is also based on power dynamics, that the weak simply have to adjust to whatever realities the strong create for them. “Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” virtually says, “If I’m overpowered or otherwise helpless, I therefore must serenely accept.” Self-help philosophy, also, would stress that if you’re in trouble, you must be primarily concerned with getting yourself out of trouble, and only when this is concerned could you care about other imperative human needs, such as matters of who is morally responsible for your trouble. Of course, if you had the power to change your problem, you’d be free to draw your own conclusion about it, care about who’s morally responsible, etc. Of course you’re not expected to take as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as you’d have it, unless this is the most pragmatic option available to you.
This system of values would insist that the resentful loser who’s hung up on the dead past, instead shrug off what the winner who’s now powerless to turn back the clock, did.
Naturally this system of values could make the more powerless people pessimistic. It’s pretty predictable that as long as a more powerful person ruins what they’d invested in their own futures, the fact that invested would be in past tense, would mean that what they did was past history. The more time in which the powerful person was in default, the more that that would constitute past history.
Yet it would seem bad for him to be pessimistic, good for him to be optimistic. If he chooses to be “bad,” he’d seem to be choosing to be an irresponsible loser. One would have to figure that he’s personally responsible for changing or accepting whatever he must. 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 this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, he’d seem to be a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent.
Sure, Marxism was originally afraid of that objectification of workers leading to a system that makes them alienated, but the truth is that no one could be alienated if he chooses not to let the material world bother him, the real world requires accepting imperfections and the only objective standard for what someone is to accept is “what is reality” for him, and manipulators would feel alienated even if they’re treated fairly.
From this, the “uplifting” comes. If, instead, he gave up caring about the dead past, did care about the living vitality and power of the present and future, stopped holding people responsible for solving problems that they either can’t or won’t solve, cared that this would determine whether others respected or disrespected him, etc., he’d benefit.
This has the same vibrant emotional appeal that the original Marxism had in stressing, in Victorian times, “the living vitality and power of the present.”
According to this system of values, to treat the sacrifices that winners made in the past for the sake of the present, as the dead past, would be , but to refuse to treat the sacrifices that losers made in the past for the sake of the present, as the dead past, would be . The stronger that one is, the more likely he is to be a winner. And this seems uplifting, self-empowering, since if the losers are held responsible, this would motivate them to do their best to empower themselves. No matter how bad the rate of depression in a society gets, then as long as the helplessness that caused it didn’t come from a dictatorship, trying to fix the depression by fixing one or more inadequacies inside of the millions of victims, would seem . (And let me just make a prediction here: those who see the above and find it too deviant, radical, etc., likely would find it only natural to tell any one of those millions of Americans suffering a serious depressive disorder, in essence, “Just get some anti-depressant medication, cognitive therapy, and/or a more stolid character, and then you’ll be complete!”)
More of this on Victim Correction Webpage 7
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
