#3-16
Whatever Deviates Is Deviant
“Accepting personal responsibility includes:
•Accepting that you are responsible for what you choose to feel or think.
•Accepting that you choose the direction for your life.
•Accepting that you cannot blame others for the choices you have made.
•Tearing down the mask of defense or rationale for why others are responsible for who you are, what has happened to you, and what you are bound to become.”—Coping.org Tools for Coping with Life’s Stressors, Tools for Personal Growth, Accepting Personal Responsibility, which makes clear how this defines “choose” and “choice.”
his is then accepted as the norm, and moderation seems heretical. The Secret Life of the Brain, by neurologist Richard Restak, 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.”
When you’ve seen guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? I’d be willing to trust the norms of a culture with depression rates that were more moderate than that, but not a culture with rates that are that excessive. Would I therefore seem acceptable? Would I be told that I’d better just accept whatever my reality is? If instead I lived in one of those societies whose rates of depression are increasing with Globalism, would I be told that I’d better just accept whatever my reality is, and fit in with it? Though it’s only natural for those who live anywhere to accept their culture’s norms, even those that are draconian, my natural common sense tells me that norms that produce rampant depression, are provably dangerous. Yes, this could make me seem as if I have a scary amount of victim-power, but if that’s reality, that’s reality.”
As an example of how acceptable conservative extremism could seem, Sister Helen Prejean’s The Death of Innocents, quotes Justice Scalia as saying, “I look at a text. I take my best shot at getting the fairest meaning of that text and, where it is a constitutional text, understanding what it meant at the time it was adopted.” This is the logic he applies to when he accepts the death penalty, and, presumably, any other punishment that was used in the late 18th century and not prohibited by a later constitutional amendment. When, in the Atkins v. Virginia decision of 2002, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional to execute mentally retarded persons, Justice Scalia adamantly read a summary of his dissent from the bench. He said Court was once again imposing its “personal opinion” on the Constitution, that the Framers, according to “common law,” exempted only “idiots” from criminal responsibility, and defined an idiots as, “cannot account or number twenty pence, nor can tell who was his father or mother, nor how old he is, etc., so as it may appear that he hath no understanding of reason....”
Also, the Framers wouldn’t have considered execution of the mentally retarded as “cruel” or “excessive,” since at that time the only punishments “always and everywhere” considered “cruel” were the “rack and the thumbscrew.” He could accept any punishment like those that were meted out in late 18th Century America, including the death penalty for rape, horse thievery, or arson. Hangings for stealing horses and rustling cattle, are big parts of 19th Century American Wild West folklore. James “Yankee Jim” Robinson was legally hanged in Old Town San Diego on September 18, 1852, for stealing a rowboat. And if the only punishments always and everywhere considered cruel were the rack and the thumbscrew, that wouldn’t include Colonial-era punishments such as the ducking stool, the stocks, the whipping post, having ears cut off or tongues bored, the pillory, the scarlet letter, etc. On April 23, 1771, the Essex Gazette of Newport, Rhode Island, said, “William Carlisle was convicted of passing Counterfeit Dollars, and sentenced to stand One Hour in the Pillory on Little-Rest Hill... to have both ears cropped, to be branded on both cheeks with the Letter R (for Rogue), and to pay a fine of One Hundred Dollars and Cost of Prosecution.” At that time, on continental paper money was printed, “To counterfeit this bill is Death.”
If a liberal judge were that extreme, the public would be horrified, yet a conservative this extreme doesn’t look like a horror. In our day-to-day lives, also, stressing that interpersonal conflicts get resolved along conservative, self-reliant, lines has the familiarity of tradition. Looking at social problems as social problems, could very easily seem dangerously unfamiliar and politically incorrect, riling up the sardonic pundits.
Hazelden even has a book titled Dancing Backwards In High Heels, How Women Master the Art of Resilience, which is a self-help book for how women could do this and take pride in it, not a balanced statement of how unreasonable it is to expect women to simply take this as a given. This book could possibly have a sequel written for Blacks, Dancing As the White Man’s Shadow, How Blacks Master the Art of Resilience, which would also give self-help recommendations for how to do this better and take pride in doing it masterfully. If one responded to that by saying that such problems have to be taken seriously as more than just obstacles to be overcome through self-help, that would seem to be unresilient or negative thinking.
Naturally, since the above “Tools for Personal Growth, Accepting Personal Responsibility” is typical of the overgeneralized parameters of self-help self-responsibility. If you are responsible for what you feel or think and the direction of your life, and you’re deluding yourself if you think that others are responsible for who you are what has happened to you and what you are bound to become, then that means irrespective of everything else. Even the women dancing backwards in high heels, can’t respond by saying that this makes the question of who’s personally responsible for what, at least relatively different.
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.” With the above definition of personal responsibility, any woman in any destructive relationship, whether she “let herself in for trouble” or not, would seem to be responsible for what she’d feel or think, the direction of her life, and deluding herself if she thinks that others are responsible. Given that, she’d probably feel relieved to blame herself for “letting herself in for trouble,” since she’d thereby believe that she has some control over what she’s being held responsible for.
The following is what the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, the source of Hazelden’s worldview and many others’, describes as their model “searching and fearless moral inventory,” and what’s inventoried should give a good idea of what they consider to be mea culpas:
I’m resentful at:
The cause:
Affects my:
Mr. Brown
His attention to my wife.
Told my wife of my mistress.
Brown may get my job at the office.Sex relations
Self-esteem (fear)Mrs. Jones
She’s a nut—she snubbed me.
She committed her husband for drinking.
He’s my friend.
She’s a gossip.Personal relationship.
Self-esteem (fear)My employer
Unreasonable—
Unjust—
Overbearing—
Threatens to fire me for my drinking and
padding my expense account.Self-esteem (fear)
Security.My wife
Misunderstands and nags.
Likes Brown.
Wants house put in her name.Pride
Personal sex relations
Security (fear)I.e., “I’m having an affair and giving my boss a raw deal, but what I’m confessing to is that I feel resentment about the discomfort of the possible consequences. Of course, if they feel resentful about my doing these things to them, then they’ve also committed The Number One Offender.” In the Big Book soon after this inventory, is written, “Perhaps there is a better way, we think so. For we are now on a different basis of trusting and relying upon God. We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves. We are in the world to play the role He assigns. Just to the extent that we do as we think He would have us, and humbly rely on Him, does He enable us to match calamity with serenity.”
Boy, oh, boy. As Leaving Islam, Apostates Speak Out, by Ibn Warraq, says about Sufism, “There was even a group of dervishes, collectively known as the malamatiya, who deliberately committed the most outrageous acts possible to draw upon themselves the contempt of the populace. This in turn enabled them to show their own contempt for the contempt that others had of them.” While the above exercise in getting rid of resentment doesn’t say to instigate others’ contempt, it does say that if you deserve others’ contempt, then you should use transcendent mental self-discipline so that it wouldn’t bother you.
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
