#3-18
Something Very Vital is Missing.
“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
“Accepting that you are responsible for what you choose to feel or think.”—first on the list of Coping.org Tools for Coping with Life’s Stressors, Tools for Personal Growth, Accepting Personal Responsibility, and of course, you should choose to think feel and act the most productively and perseveringly.
“Assertive Right #1: I have the right to judge my own behavior, thoughts, and emotions and to take the responsibility for their initiation and consequence. The behavior of others may have an impact upon me, but I determine how I choose to react and/or deal with each situation. I alone have the power to judge and modify my thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Others may influence my decision, but the final choice is mine.”—Coping.org, Improving Assertive Behavior, and note that “I determine how I choose to react and/or deal with each situation,” doesn’t mean only that if you take revenge you’re responsible for that choice, but also that you’d seem guilty of a sin of omission if you don’t deal with your problem adequately. And the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines the word “assert” as “to state positively,” not to hold yourself responsible in an all-or-nothing overgeneralized fashion.
oth how victims think and how they act, could be planned by this. No matter what one’s reality is, optimism is usually pragmatic and awareness of victimization is usually unpragmatic (and the worse that a problem is the less that the victim can afford such discouragement, and the more that he’d seem to have a scary amount of victim-power). He’d also have to be ready to do whatever his reality requires of him (and the worse that a problem is the less that the victim can afford a lack of such steadfastness, so it could be said to re-victimize them).
Your Mental Health, which says in its introduction, “One in five people has a psychiatric problem at any given moment, and half will have one in a lifetime,” also says as it begins its chapter on depression, “In one particularly telling experiment, two animals [mammals] are yoked together so that they will receive exactly the same mildly unpleasant shock, but one of the two can take steps that will improve or worsen the outcome for both. Even though both animals receive exactly the same total amount of discomfort, the active animal who can exert some influence experiences much less depression than the totally passive victim.”
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? If animals respond to this lack of control in this way, then this response is only natural. A large enough fraction of the animals respond like this, that it doesn’t constitute an illness or other attitude problem. Treating the victims as if they’re the ones who need fixing, might seem pragmatic, honorably self-reliant, and forgiving. Yet my natural common sense tells me that this must lead to a pretty distorted view of how responsible each participant really is, which includes both moral bankruptcy and victim-self-blaming.”
If, to a degree and with a persistence that would be worthy of this social problem, you cared that one in five people has a psychiatric problem at any given moment and half will have one in a lifetime, then what you’d be supposed to do is NOT CARE. If you do, then you’d be pretty certain to have untermensch attributes attributed to you, such as: weak, passive, whiny, bitter, resentful, manipulative, insidiously self-interested, counterproductive, troublemaking, controlling, restrictive, blaming, excuse-making, anti-freedom, intellectualist, self-righteous, self-pitying, subjective, unrealistic, immature, negativist, defeatist, melodramatic, emotionalist, and judgmental. When, on October 1, 2008, John McCain said about the Great Wall Street Bailout, “...if we fail to act, the gears of our economy will grind to a halt,” but this wouldn’t qualify as whining, though when it’s time to hold Wall Street responsible, talking in such fearful language about what they almost caused could seem whiny. Sure, on October 3, just after the bailout passed, R. Bruce Josten, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s executive vice president of government affairs, said, “With the American economy on life support, Congress took the necessary step to stop the bleeding,” but that didn’t seem whiny, either.
Cognitive therapy that corrected a human victim in a similar passive situation, would ask the more productive question in regard to human beings and their vicissitudes, so would tell him:
- to focus his attention on how mild the shocks are
- that whether or not he was helpless wouldn’t have made any objective difference in the outcome, so it would be silly and maybe manipulative for him to care about this
- that he should do a searching and fearless moral inventory with its columns headed, “I’m resentful at,” “The cause,” and “Affects my”
- that no situation in the real world involves absolute evil that’s absolutely permanent that affects absolutely everything, so one could always focus his attention on sophistry regarding how mild or non-malevolent or limited or temporary the situation is
- that “This, too, shall pass”
- that, sure, animals in such circumstances would suffer like that, but animals’ minds are held captive by The Flesh, while humans in any circumstances could instead choose to have an attitude of gratitude; that’s the most vital “human dignity”
- that “free thinking” means aiming for, not drawing his own conclusions, but optimizing his adjustment, which would give him greater opportunities
- that “realism” in his perceptions means aiming for, not accuracy, but pragmatic utility in that no matter what realities others create, those are the reality that he’d have to handle the most effectively
- that “scientific verification” means proving not that the victims are the problem, that their tribulations come from a definable mental disorder inside of themselves, but that the victims are the solution, that if they got rid of their discouraging thoughts they’d be more likely to succeed
- that he should face his problems with true grit as a real American would, and not have the attitude that Dubya regards as his anathema, “We are all victims of forces beyond our control,” and “assigning blame”
- that the victim should see how self-defeating his discouragement is, that he can’t afford the luxury of a negative thought
- that if he cares about whether he can exert control, then he wants this sinful world to be as he’d have it, so he should choose to stop the self-centered resentment
- that “That’s life, and you’ve got to accept life on life’s terms”
- that he should choose to have as his role model, the one who didn’t suffer depression because he could exert control
- that he should get inspired by motivational books or motivational speakers, and
- that, as some AA slogans say, “Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm,” “Attitude creates reality,” “It’s not what happens; it’s how we interpret what happens,” “Change what you can, and change your mind about what you can’t,” “Optimism is an intellectual choice,” “The longer that we think about the bad stuff, the greater is its power to harm us,” “Embracing your disappointments will help you to heal faster,” etc.
(The Current stationery and mail-order company, which has an extremely square image, sells these T-shirts. Though you might think that this looks too trashy for a nice Midwesterner to wear, the stouthearted and perseverant “and deal with it!”, might make up for that.)
All that is modern Western culture’s version of rising above the animalistic. Yes, depression as a response to certain things is only natural for all mammals, but if we choose to transcend the flesh by disciplining our emotions, we could become more noble and unobtrusive than unpragmatic animals. L’individu gets the advantages of positive thinking and “If something bothers you, lower your standards,” but the individual must wash his own brain of his honest conclusions, and replace them with what he’s supposed to believe.
Here we have that comic that’s Al-Anon approved literature, for Alateen. For an exemplary alkie’s kid who looks like Archie, to preach, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, should seem like wryly Kafkaesque theater of the absurd, but instead it seems very pragmatic and honorable. No matter what any problem parent might do that could traumatize his kid, he absolutely could change himself, and absolutely can’t change anyone else including the parent, which is all that the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer cares about. Our culture tells us that such unconditional self-reliance and self-improvement, is our only real protection from: excuses, subjective judgments that one deserves more than he has, manipulative tactics based on pity, defeatism and similar passivity, negative outlooks, etc. The above approach would be the only way to make our coping with reality, fail-safe and unconditional. If you didn’t accept an approach that’s that unconditional, then what would you do if a close family member became alcoholic, so now that’s a reality that you couldn’t change? What if someone in your family became a pathological gambler, blowing the money of his immediate family, and you couldn’t change that? What if the sort of trauma that contributes to our rampant depression happened to you, and you couldn’t change that? You’d improve your chances of succeeding resiliently resourcefully and independently, if you faced your problem with an attitude of, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”
After all, when you’re overpowered, you’re most likely to succeed, or at the very least adjust to reality so you’d feel more serene now and succeed more confidently later, if you proceed as if his greater power doesn’t really matter. Sure, it’s most pragmatic to think as if these power differences don’t really matter, but in reality:
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
