#3-2
“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.”—Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior.... Every situation also possesses a kind of ideology, which we call the ‘definition of the situation,’ and which is the interpretation of the meaning of a social occasion. It provides the perspective through which the elements of a situation gain coherence. An act viewed in one perspective may seem heinous; the same action viewed in another perspective seems fully warranted.”—Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, about his psychological experiment which got normal Americans to obey orders to pull switches that they thought were giving someone else severe, maybe even lethal, electrical shocks.
“Piece by piece, the nation’s credit structure was becoming paralyzed. Crisis was in the air, but it was a strange, numbing crisis.... It was worse than an invading army; it was everywhere and nowhere, for it was in the minds of men. It was fear.”—James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox
“In the field known as ‘victimology,’ there is a tradition of theories like these that try to understand the ways in which victims contribute to their own victimization.”—David Finkelhor, Sexually Victimized Children, copyright 1979, regarding studies on how minors who are sexually abused may tend to collaborate in their own abuse, either actively or passively
“I have had guests come on the set of my show and ask, before we begin how much fighting I want.”—Catherine Crier, The Case Against Lawyers
hat would have seemed unacceptable before the Reagan/Thatcher era, seems acceptable now, as is reflected in Enron’s proud Visions and Values. Many of our cultural norms that we now take for granted, that we even insist that people accept as defining what their personal responsibilities are, would have seemed radical before the Reagan era. These would have basically the same conception of what the are an individual’s rights and responsibilities in an adversarial economy, as Jeff Skilling would. While this is both very patriarchal and demanding, it could also be called “pro-freedom,” and, therefore, the cultural conditioning we’d get on whether or not you’re adequately self-reliant, would look something like Jeff Skilling’s opinion. Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct.
Just after Reagan died, many commented that he beat the odds, since before he became President, many thought that he’d seem as radical as Goldwater, yet the emotional appeal of Reagan’s personality won them over. One could say the same about the self-responsible ideas that became popular with Reagan, that previously, they would have come across as too absolutist, too morally bankrupt. Yet when they have the vociferous emotional appeal of Populism, they come across as simply getting firm about exactly the allocations of personal responsibility that the Cognitive Distortions of modern Western depression reflect. These are based on such an avowedly amoral “realism,” that normally one wouldn’t insist on them explicitly. This is just as one who wouldn’t pray explicitly for the literal unconditional acceptance of, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. 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,” could still feel comfortable praying the inexplicit first sentence, though both of these are equally unlimited in their “realism” and avowed amoralism.
Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America, the Final Report of the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, says near the beginning of its Executive Summary, “In any given year, about 5% to 7% of adults have a serious mental illness, according to several nationally representative studies. A similar percentage of children — about 5% to 9% — have a serious emotional disturbance. These figures mean that millions of adults and children are disabled by mental illnesses every year. President Bush said, ‘…Americans must understand and send this message: mental disability is not a scandal — it is an illness. And like physical illness, it is treatable, especially when the treatment comes early.’”
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’m supposed to respond to such obviously unnaturally high rates of mental illness, as if this is simply among the diseases that sometimes happen. At least that doesn’t scandalize the sufferers. But isn’t there really more about this, that we’d better understand, and send the message about? Sure, the zeitgeist of The Reagan Legacy might think that that message is whiny victimology, but maybe it’s a part of the problem! Reaganomics in a society with rampant depression would pretty much have to hold that helplessness isn’t tyranny, so we shouldn’t be outraged at the helplessness. Not only that, helplessness could seem to serve freedom, since that’s the price that we must pay for the redbloods, the übermenschen, to exercise their own rights!”
If anyone wrote something about this rampant depression in 1965-1975, then it would seem only natural to treat this as a social problem. Yet since 1980, it seems only natural to attribute the problems to something inside the victims, and therefore, “achieving the promise” means simply fixing them. That attitude would tacitly approve of what makes these rates unnaturally high, for all the same reasons why treating anything as a social problem would seem bad. Setting out to fix the victims seems realistic, red-blooded, and forgiving, while setting out to fix the causes of this obviously unnatural problem, would seem naïve, mollycoddle, and judgmental. An article on Fortune Magazine’s website, dated September 28, 2008, Main Street Turns Against Wall Street, says, “Union leaders like the AFL-CIO’s John Sweeney suddenly sound as if they’re in the mainstream of public opinion with statements like this: ‘One thing is certain. No one—no politician, no investment banker, no television commentator, no economist—should be able to say again with a straight face that here in the United States we just let markets do whatever markets do and everything works out for the best,’” though before 1980 (and especially just after 1929), those who said that wouldn’t have seemed quite mainstream. This was just as, before 1980, Creationism didn’t seem mainstream, but all of a sudden, one could have been surprised that someone who believed that no one should be able to advocate Creationism with a straight face, could seem mainstream.
Some recent examples of the sort of optimism that could have been called good at the time but turned out to be wrong were:
“What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.”—Alan Greenspan, July 16, 2003
“Not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient.”—Greenspan, October 5, 2004
“That’s [the global economy] as strong as I’ve seen it than at any time during my business career.”—Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, March 2, 2007
“We did not expect significant spillovers in the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.”—Ben Bernanke, May 17, 2007
“This is happening against a backdrop in an economy in which in other respects is very solid. So far, there’s very little evidence it’s bleeding over into other areas.”—Paulson, August 16, 2007
“There are definite storm clouds and concern, but the underpinning is good. We’ll work our way through this period.”—President Bush, December 18, 2007
“In other words, this is a resilient economy, because we rely on the free enterprise system. Our economy is flexible, it motivates people to take risks.”—Bush, January 7, 2008
“What did you say? You’re predicting $4 a gallon [for gas]. That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.”—Bush, February 29, 2008
“We’re in challenging times and another thing is for certain, that we take strong and decisive action.”—Bush, March, 2008
“I have great, great confidence in our capital markets and in our financial institutions. Our financial institutions, banks and investment banks, are strong. Our capital markets are resilient. They’re efficient. They’re flexible.”—Paulson, March 16, 2008
“Our policy in this administration—laws shouldn’t bail out lenders, laws shouldn’t help speculators.”—Bush, May 19, 2008
“Our economy has continued growing, consumers are spending, business are investing, exports continue increasing and American productivity remains strong. We can have confidence in the long-term foundation of our economy... I think the system basically is sound. I truly do.”—President Bush, July 15, 2008
“Our economy, I think, still the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”—John McCain, September 15, 2008, two days before the run on the bank
“Some said we should just stick capital in the banks, take preferred stock in the banks. That’s what you do when you have failure. This is about success.”—Paulson, September 23, 2008
Those were inspiring, without seeming unrealistic at the time. Not only that, it is true that even if most of what needs to go right is going right, all that it takes is for one thing to go wrong, and that could make everything go wrong. The whole reason for the economic meltdown was the panics of those on Wall Street. If our economy was doing so fine, then those panics must have been irrational, and Wall Street would be to blame. But, of course, the attitude that found the above statements inspiring, would never hold that Wall Street should have been more appreciative and confident about the great opportunities it had been given. Of course, so many Americans were skeptical when this optimism suddenly turned into statements of dire reality, that maybe next time, people will see the value of realism from the beginning. Yet even these skeptics could have been told that they shouldn’t have taken such statements of optimism literally, that that’s how laissez faire leaders talk simply because, as Ken Lay put it, they want to act as cheerleaders. ♦♦♦♦♦
On October 3, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said, “Each [financial] institution has its own unique benefits, and their collective strength makes our financial system more resilient, and more innovative. The challenges our institutions face are just as varied—from holding illiquid mortgage-backed securities, to illiquid whole loans, to raising needed capital, to simply facing a crisis of confidence.” Of course, in many cases these “challenges” that were so bad that they needed to be bailed-out, resulted from their own choices that were excessive if not criminal. No doubt we’ll soon be finding out about plenty of this. No doubt the regulators could have done something about it, but regulating the “innovation” seemed bad. Yet it could still seem that the good, productive, positive attitude would be to make excuses for Wall Street.
One really would have to ask what is the difference between all this, and the overly-optimistic guarantees that Ken Lay was convicted for. For example, Joseph J. Cassano, a recent former A.I.G. executive and onetime executive of Drexel Burnham Lambert, said in August, 2007, “It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions.” Since this was a company that was trying to have a positive attitude about its own chances of success, statements such as this could be called comparable to Lay’s. Yet one probably couldn’t say that Lay’s over-optimism was unambiguously cynical. Maybe, to some degree, he wanted to believe what he said so much that, to some degree, he didn’t really know that what he was saying was more questionable than the usual positive thinking would be. Obviously, when an executive makes guarantees that others are supposed to count on, he’d have to be more careful than would be just believing what one wants to. The same would go for the above politicians’ guarantees about the economy, that even if they sincerely believed the optimism that they chose to have, since the public is counting on their guarantees, that wouldn’t mean that they didn’t have to make sure.
The attractiveness of anti-intellectualism, and how it could be used to manipulate people, could very clearly be seen in the following, from Frank Rich’s The Greatest Story Ever Sold, The Decline and Fall of Bush’s America:
In what might have been the single most revealing paragraph anyone has reported about the Bush administration, the author Ron Suskind, writing in The New York Times Magazine two weeks before the 2004 election, recounted a conversation with a presidential aide who spoke sarcastically called a “reality-based community.” 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.”
Here we have all the features that made anti-intellectualism become popular during the Reagan-Thatcher era: Judiciousness sounds square. Only nerds think that the most important realities are discernable. Realists realize that how the world works is more important than what is the truth. The old way cared about that intellectual stuff, but the new way cares about who can make things happen. That’s how things sort out in the real world of action, sort out as in, “Greed is good. Greed works, greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” Those who act are a lot more important than those who think. Action is so much more attractive than is thinking.
This book also says that Ari Fleisher said, “[Finding weapons of mass destruction] is what this war was about,” and that Paul Wolfowitz said that WMD were “the one issue that everyone could agree upon.” Yet after Joseph Wilson made it well-known how obviously fraudulent are the documents about Iraq supposedly seeking uranium from Niger, Robert Novak said, “Weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger are little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” And if they’d been manipulated enough into believing that they were elitist issues, they wouldn’t have cared.
Reaganomics couldn’t function without the sort of personal response-ability that you’d see in, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.” After all, the question of what is excusable so the person who suffers its consequences is simply responsible for his own welfare, is subjective. Naturally, everyone wants to believe that he’s entitled to more than he has, and this could make him honestly believe that he’d been wronged. Also, if people could get what they wanted by manipulatively playing the victim role, plenty would, and you probably couldn’t tell that they are (though you may not care if the person honestly believes, “But you owe me!”, or is just pretending that he honestly believes it). As any Al-Anon meeting, or meeting for codependents in general, would tell you, no matter how strongly you could prove that someone else is responsible for your problem, what you should care about instead is that you’re far more motivated to solve it than he is. Taking care of it yourself is honorably self-reliant. If you assertively stood up for your own rights, even if everything you said was objectively true, you could still seem unforgivingly suppressive, so you could look scary in your victim-power. This also reflects the principles of Christian forgiveness. Under these rules, society would function as Reaganomics would say it should function. Without these rules, the door is opened to victimology victimhood and whining. If we accepted a less absolutist version of these rules, the victimologists would simply have to be craftier and/or more determined, or, maybe, instead of demanding that everything have repercussions, they’d focus on the most inexcusable things that happened to them. In a society with rampant depression and anxiety disorders, they’d probably have plenty of supposed “opportunities to get what they want by making a good case that what was done to them was clearly and vividly wrong.”
Though you might think that the Reaganomics zeitgeist has plenty of gutsy excitement to it, your natural common sense should tell you that anything that leads to rampant depression in the long run, isn’t really exciting. The Reagan era had all the excitement of the German Romantic era. To be so gutsy, seemed so healthy. The big problem was that Reaganomics would blame the victims in basically the same ways that Rand’s philosophy would. Supposed manipulative tactics, such as “victimology” and “victimhood,” would have to be fought vigorously as a moral hazard, since everyone would have to accept that the “personal responsibility” that we really take seriously, is response-ability for one’s own welfare. Before 1980, the sardonic guy on the Zantac commercials would have seemed strange, maybe even frightening. And the self-help philosophy from that day forward, fits this same pattern. Some victims (mainly women), seemed to want to feel miserable.
It really is amazing to what degree modern Western expectations could seem more important than anything else. On March 1, 2008, the Ottawa Sun ran an article, ‘Writing the missing chapter’, Commission sets out to remember Canada’s cultural genocide, by Donna Casey, about the Canadian government formerly sending Indian children to special residence schools, to teach them to assimilate to Caucasian culture. Canadian law enforcement would soon initiate the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to take this as seriously as the new South Africa took its history of Apartheid. David MacDonald, special advisor for the United Church on residential schools and former Conservative cabinet minister, said, “We have to face the fact that we had a very aggressive assimilation program that failed terribly. It failed in the sense of being a positive contribution.”
“It really just boggles the imagination.”
Yet this same article also says,
In 1992, a three-day school reunion led to an OPP investigation into alleged abuses at the school. After interviewing close to 1,000 witnesses, police charged seven employees of the school. Former students recounted whippings and severe beatings, homosexual and heterosexual rape, sexual fondling and forced masturbation...
Obviously, whoever decided to have this reunion thought that these kids’ living in this residential school was a positive experience, so they’d want to remember the past in a reunion. Even the planners who didn’t know about the abuse, did know about the coercive assimilation. Yet this could still seem to be the same sort of tough love as can be seen in the quote from a residential school survivor, at the end of the article, that many ordinary Canadians still don’t believe that the abuse really happened, “Everyday Canadians don’t know anything about it. They just think, ‘There are natives getting money again.’” Both the tough love of forced assimilation, and the tough love of treating natives like parasites even after they’d been through something like this, might seem rather savage, but if they have their intended effects, then those who got the tough love would be more productive and fit in better. That would make them happier in the long run. Sure, this would be very naïve and victim-blaming about why they might not now be as productive as they could be, but one could call both the naiveté and the victim-blaming optimistic, and it seems good to be optimistic about what people could achieve if only they used their opportunities wisely. Even optimism serves the greater good, and could encourage the victims of anything to make the best of what they’ve got. Chances are that many Native Americans and other minorities who’d read this would be offended by it, but that’s how optimistic pragmatism must work for anyone in trouble.
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 attack-politician-style pundits.
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!)
Very typical for victim correction as a panacea, including the fact that correcting victims probably intends to benefit them, is the essay “Racism and Victimology,” by Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman sent to me by him years ago. He’s known for discovering learned helplessness, i.e. learned through experience, but he wrote a book titled Learned Optimism, i.e. learned by contriving it. That should give you a good idea of what he’d see as the relationship between racism and victimology, not that we should oppose unwarranted feelings of being victimized by such things as racism, but that we should also oppose warranted feelings like this, too. This would have all the pragmatic advantages of, “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.” “Racism and Victimology” includes,
Overarching and global claims of where problems come from—unlike specific and changeable causes—are doubly pessimistic because they place the solution out of any individual’s reach. Such talk has its gravest impact on just those people facing the biggest difficulties in their day-to-day lives. This situation is a genuine “devil’s circle”—always spiraling downward—with any new setback or frustration getting attributed to the same gloomy, pervasive, and unanswerable set of causes.
So no matter how likely it is that someone’s problem came from bigotry, attributing it to bigotry would be a negative attribution, since it would discourage him. This would have the greatest impact among those who must face problems along the lines of, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” since they’re the ones who could least afford discouragement.
Yet “Racism and Victimology” says near the beginning,
The language we use to describe the causes of our troubles ends up defining our “explanatory style.” Just as individuals develop explanatory style, so do entire cultures, and our culture is highly influenced by what comes into fashion among assorted opinion-makers, the educational elite, and the media. Shifting blame as an explanatory style has become a fashion and it has a glorious past. AA made the lives of millions of alcoholics more bearable by giving them the dignity of a “disease” to replace the ignominy of “failure” or “immorality” or “evil”.
Here we have your classic Populist labeling intellectuals who have a concern for the weak, as “elite.” Also, though it might sound respectable for someone to say that to call alcoholism a disease is just another “explanatory style,” if the goal is to encourage us to be more gutsy, if a woman who attended an Al-Anon meeting responded to their telling her that she should understand that her husband’s alcoholism is a disease,
responded by saying, “Well, that’s your explanatory style, but mine is to hold him at least somewhat morally responsible, just as the law doesn’t treat addicts as absolutely not guilty by reason by reason of insanity,” that would make her outlook less stolid, so that would seem to be victimology.
(Yes, that pamphlet that she’s reading, which she got from her first Al-Anon meeting, is titled “Living with an Alcoholic.” Learning how to live happily with an alcoholic, is what would constitute self-help for her, since that’s the reality that she must deal with.)
Also, “Racism and Victimology” says, “Politicians—both black and white—preachers, the media, and liberal academics from the humanities and social sciences have led the way. The kid in the street has followed.” Sure, the central element of the brainwashing process is what Dr. Robert Jay Lifton called “Doctrine over Person,” in which if what the person is supposed to believe disagrees with his own honest interpretations of his own experiences, he’s to wash his brain of his own interpretations, and replace them with what he’s supposed to believe. But it seems that since such beliefs didn’t really originate in the minds of the helpless, telling them to wash their brains of these beliefs and replace them with what seems good for them to believe, isn’t really brainwashing.
“Racism and Victimology” ends with,
But what if it’s true? What if racism, the system, and white people are the overriding causes of the problems. I do not know whether [some hypothetical Blacks who were treated badly by whites, possibly because of racism] are right, and the clerk, the jury, and employers are racist. All I know is that human motives are complex. Inattentive clerks are sometimes racist, but sometimes they are tired, lazy, bored, or self-absorbed. Sometimes the customer is not assertive enough. Injustice is sometimes the result of racism, but sometimes it comes from bad law, from ineffective lawyers, from fear of reprisal, from the abuse of power, or from ignorance.
Rather I want us to rethink something more innocent than the truth—the form of the explanation that first occurs to [those hypothetical Blacks] and its consequences. For we can choose whom and what we habitually blame and what theories we push.
Racism is commonly pushed by centrist civil rights groups and by much of the black middle class. There was a time that this tactic worked as a lever to get some government action that opened the road into the middle class. But the growing problem today is poor blacks. They are not helped by this tactic. In fact, there is only one segment of America that now has a true stake in pushing racism, the system, and White people as the overriding explanation of the problems of African-Americans. Those who want violent revolution. When people believe that the causes of their troubles might well change and do not pervade everything, they can work to address the causes. When people believe that their troubles are caused by external forces that will never change, they give up—or they erupt into violence.Or, as Don Imus said about his own “nappy-headed hos” remark regarding some honor-student university athletes, “...what was my intent? Am I some rabid, racist, vicious person who’s on a rampage, screaming, and got on the radio and turned on the microphone, and said, here’s what I think these women are?
“That’s not what I did.”
What really seems to matter are the pragmatics of the situation, where no matter how true racism is, awareness of it would still seem plainly and simply , in that the only people whose interests would be served are those who have untermensch hidden agendas such as violent revolution, whereas reality-based awareness like this (which would include Jane’s awareness of the problems her alkie husband causes her) would have its gravest impact on just those people facing the biggest difficulties in their day-to-day lives. So as far as the poor are concerned, it seems imperative that they learn (as in contrive) optimism no matter what they learn from experience, since their poverty makes this expedient for them. Since the poor have more problems that they must solve, for them not to wash their brains of their own interpretations of their own experiences, would have its gravest impact on just those people facing the biggest difficulties in their day-to-day lives. And, of course, this logic couldn’t seem legitimate when used to defend the honest opinions of the weak, just as, if a woman at an Al-Anon meeting who doesn’t serenely accept the hardship and sinfulness that she’s helpless to change, is therefore accused of having a “pity-party,” manipulatively trying to control others through victimology, etc., she couldn’t stop these accusations by saying, “At the very least, since human motives are complex, you’d be too whiny, opinionated, accusatory, etc., if you simply accused me of cunningly choosing to play the victim role for ‘fun’ and/or profit!”
(This is the heading of the section of Al-Anon’s workbook Blueprint for Progress, Al-Anon’s Fourth Step Inventory, for those who seem to be codependent to take a fearless moral inventory of behaviors, including helpful ones, that are labeled as “controlling.” Frankly, just about any helpful behavior in a relationship that’s considered codependent, would be considered “controlling,” as in, “Sure, you think that what you’re doing is trying to help, but supposedly trying to help someone is a great way to control him.” This morality-based “control” is in the same sense of what the Mississippi preacher mentioned by Bobby Kennedy’s administrative aide James Symington, meant by tyranny, “One preacher let me into his church, and told me, ‘You represent a tyranny.’ I said, ‘How do you think black people feel living in Mississippi with no rights?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s better to have a lot of little tyrannies than one big one.’” Control based on one person having power over another, is only a little tyranny. Of course, if those driven into depression, anxiety disorders, etc., by such behavior, instead fixed themselves by taking antidepressants, choosing to think positively, eating more omega-3 fatty acids, etc., that wouldn’t seem controlling, anti-freedom, manipulative, resentful, etc. If you object to sinfulness, that’s really your will-to-power.)
In fact, the main reason that many gave for minimizing what was wrong with what Imus did, and magnify what was supposedly wrong with what the victims and their supporters did, wasn’t that he’s unambiguously a racist, but that for them to assertively stand up for their own rights would constitute their playing the victim role, since Imus isn’t really influential enough to cause any increase in the public’s racism. The possible rationales for minimizing what was wrong with the person who caused a problem, and magnifying what was wrong with the supposedly untermensch victims and allies, are pretty infinite. As Reverend Soaries, who counseled the victims, said on Larry King Live, “Three boys from Duke were victims of over zealous prosecution and 10 girls from Rutgers were victims of over zealous shock talk. The boys from victim—the boys from Duke are—are respected as having been victimized. The girls from Rutgers are receiving hate mail. I think that’s a double standard.”
Of course, Rush Limbaugh is very influential, and he’s made quite enough racist comments. While he was still a young unknown radio host, he told a black caller: “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” After he became nationally famous, he said on the radio, “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”, “Spike [Lee], if you’re going to do that, let’s complete the education experience. You should tell them that they should loot the theater, and then blow it up on their way out,” “The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies,” and, “They are 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?” When Carol Moseley-Braun was in the U.S. Senate, Limbaugh would play the “Movin’ On Up” theme song from the The Jeffersons TV show when he mentioned her. When discussing black leaders, he’s sometimes substituted “ax” for “ask.” He referred to the father of Madonna’s first child, a Hispanic, as “a gang-member type guy,” though he had no involvement in gangs.
Obviously, it would be pretty hard to chide the victims of this who care about their victimization, as if Limbaugh has no real influence so their whiny little objections are all in their heads. He also couldn’t use the excuse that the tough elements of black culture were where such language originally came from. Yet since he’s so influential, the pressure to minimize what’s wrong with what he did, and magnify what’s supposedly wrong with the victims’ objections, would be far greater. And since the possible rationales for this are pretty infinite, you’d probably see plenty of it, such as:
“The Duke defendants were victimized by the guv’mint, and it’s a lot more difficult to escape that than it is to escape the effects of an influential man’s bigotry!”
“Whenever bigotry impacts your life, you can’t prove to what degree Limbaugh’s insults were what shaped it! Not only that, you couldn’t even prove that bigotry was what was at fault!”
“Two things that are certain, is that you have a lot more motivation and opportunities to solve your problem than anyone else does, and that this is what’s objective!”
“It would really do you a lot of good if you focused your attention away from the question of who’s to blame, and on the question of how you could better take care of yourself, your own problems! You’d function a lot better, and look a lot more honorable!”
“If you were more optimistic about how little whites’ racism has to hold you back, that would have those same advantages for you, so it’s your attitude that determines your destiny!”
“Whenever anyone has a truly major problem in his life, such as how bigotry has affected him, chances are that all sorts of people had contributed to whatever the outcome is, for all sorts of reasons. Therefore, rather than truly being victimization, this outcome is just a vague and ambiguous mess, and naturally everyone is response-able for the vague and ambiguous messes in their own lives.”
“No matter how high our society’s rate of rate of depression, racism, or anything else, actually is, our society’s norms would still have to protect us from those who’d use facts like this, to manipulatively get more than what they deserve by playing the victim role. We couldn’t afford to treat those suspected of such mercenary attitudes as innocent until proven guilty, since you could rarely prove that someone is using machinations, and even the most sincere belief of, ‘But you owe me!’, could still be called mercenary, since naturally everyone would want to believe that others owe them. Therefore, if you expect to get anything due to your victimhood and victimology, we’d treat you as a threat! In fact, there is only one segment of America that now has a true stake in pushing racism, the system, and White people as the overriding explanation of the problems of African-Americans—those who want violent revolution or to serve some other untermensch hidden agenda.”
This really is the same idea as General David Petraeus’ statement on April 22, 2007, just after some very attention-getting bombings in Iraq, “I don’t think you’re ever going to get rid of all the car bombs. Iraq is going to have to learn—as did, say, Northern Ireland—to live with some degree of sensational attacks,” though the military would still try to prevent bombings that cause “horrific damage.” After all, to whatever degree any attacks are “sensational,” that’s just a state of mind, and we can all choose to have more productive states of mind. If the military is trying to stop the attacks that cause “horrific damage,” then they’re the realists. It seems that those who are scared by the bombs should stop getting emotionally worked-up about the sensationalism, and feel good that the real big problems are, hopefully, being dealt with. To say that Northern Ireland also had to deal with religious mayhem, makes this sound as if such expectations aren’t limited to non-whites. If a “sensational” attack does set off a good deal of revenge killings, the “realists” could always say, “The problem here is that the terrorists got the people’s goats!”
Two of the victim-self-blaming cognitive distortions that Dr. David Burns’ self-help book on cognitive therapy for depression, Feeling Good,
lists, are, “Magnification [of what’s supposedly wrong with the depressed person and right with everyone else] or Minimization [of what’s right with the depressed person and wrong with everyone else]”, and, “All-or-Nothing Thinking.” You might think that such absolutism naturally comes from the fact that these cognitive distortions are a product of a pathology. Yet when the devastated must take response-ability for their own welfare, chances are that either they did succeed at having productive lives, or they didn’t. Also, it seems all too easy to encourage those with the problems to serenely accept them, by telling them how their problems aren’t absolutely bad, and, therefore, their objections are only their subjective, and negative, opinions. One example of this is in the above, just after saying that maybe some of the situations in which the victims are supposed to have a positive attitude, really are racism, “All I know is that human motives are complex.” So if racism and related facts are “the overriding causes of the problems,” are not all of the problem, they might as well be nothing. If the victims don’t treat racism as if it simply doesn’t exist, they’d seem to have negativist, defeatist attitudes. In some cases racism would be 60% of the problem, in others 90%, but that would matter absolutely nothing. All that would matter is that if you had an attitude of, “Either racism is all of the cause, or it might as well be nothing,” then if you lived in a society with rampant depression, your positive attitude would make you less likely to become, or stay, depressed. This could be clinically proven.
Since even genuine victims of bigotry are in the same position as are alkies’ wives, these victims, also, absolutely can change themselves and absolutely can’t change anyone else, and they’d be most likely to succeed if they thought along the lines of the victim-self-blaming cognitive distortions of modern Western depression. As William Ryan wrote in Blaming the Victim, “Victim-blaming is cloaked in kindness and concern, and bears all the trappings and statistical furbelows of scientism; it is obscured by a perfumed haze of humanitarianism. In observing the process of Blaming the Victim, one tends to be confused and disoriented because those who practice this art display a deep concern for the victims that is quite genuine. In this way, the new ideology is very different from the open prejudice and reactionary tactics of the old days. Its adherents include sympathetic social scientists with social consciences in good working order, and liberal politicians with a genuine commitment to reform. They are very careful to dissociate themselves from vulgar Calvinism or crude racism; they indignantly condemn any notions of innate wickedness or genetic defect. ‘The Negro is not born inferior,’ they shout apoplectically. ‘Force of circumstance,’ they explain in reasonable tones, ‘has made him inferior.’”
In this case, in the old days, victims were blamed for supposed laziness and irresponsibility. Typical of the current victim-blaming, is that it sees their honest interpretations of their own experiences, as their negativist and defeatist “explanatory style.” This is blamed on, “what comes into fashion among assorted opinion-makers, the educational elite, and the media,” rather than anything truly inside the victims, or “Force of circumstance.” Most importantly, correcting the victims aims to make them correct, and any efforts to do so would likely be cloaked in kindness and concern, bear all the trappings and statistical furbelows of scientism, and be obscured by a perfumed haze of humanitarianism. The only real difference between the new kind of victim-blaming and the sort that Ryan wrote about, which blamed the poor for not living up to Victorian ideals such as deferred gratification and the work ethic, is that the appeal of the Reagan/Thatcher era was to associate such elitism with a confident pro-freedom gutsiness.
Both in the victim-blaming Ryan described, and in the victim-blaming of today, the ideal victim-blamers are actually psychologists who treat victims individually, but have social scientists’ faith that the parts of people’s human nature that they want to re-engineer, could be re-engineered. Certainly the victim-blaming social scientists who wanted to reduce poverty by making poor people more self-disciplined, realized that no matter how self-disciplined they made the people, that wouldn’t increase the number of jobs that paid living wages. Yet psychologists deal with individuals. If a psychologist has as a client a given poor person without much self-discipline, and this psychologist re-programmed his thinking so that he thought in a self-disciplined fashion, then chances are that it could be empirically proven that his odds of getting one of the living-wage jobs that are available, would go up. One could prove empirically that a poor person could choose to change his own thinking like this. If this psychologist’s social conscience is in good working order, he wouldn’t accept the client thinking for himself in ways that disagree with what he’s supposed to believe, such as by concluding, “Sure, my lack of self-discipline has some of the fault for my poverty, but others’ attitude problems have most of the fault, and I don’t see them working to change their thinking!”, since that would decrease his chances of succeeding in life. And, of course, if a psychologist labels such a person as “counterproductive,” this label would be taken more seriously, as pragmatic rather than preachy, than would anyone else putting this label on those who refuse to adopt the “good” attitudes.
After all, the kid in the Al-Anon comic who learned to stop blaming others and to look at himself, even though he lives with an alcoholic parent,
would certainly look at the problems that this parent causes, along the lines of, “I should courageously change what I can, myself, and serenely accept whatever I can’t, everyone else,” and this truly would be very expedient for him. Also, Jane,
realizes that her psychological induction program would make no difference in the physical realities that she and others with the same misfortunes, must deal with, only in how well each individual will deal with her own problems. An awareness of the very genuine moral bankruptcy of this worldview, would have its gravest impact on just those people facing the biggest difficulties in their day-to-day lives. Kids like these couldn’t afford an awareness of what’s wrong with anything that says or implies, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”
As Imus also said regarding his “nappy-headed hos” remark, “I’ve said I was sorry. I’m going to apologize to these young women and their families and their coach if they’ll see me. If they won’t see me, there isn’t anything I can do about that. I’m going to ask their forgiveness, but it’s like the song I play all the time, you know, God may forgive you, they say, but I won’t. Jesus may love you, but I don’t. Well, you know, if they don’t, then I guess I’m stuck with Jesus and I’ll take my chances there.” Imus also said, “...I don’t have to, for example—I don’t need a ‘come to Jesus’ moment,” so the forgiveness he expected didn’t require repentance. When people approach their own problems which cause them big problems, the more pragmatic people would figure that they had to forgive whoever was responsible. Though, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it” would require that the forgiven people have had “come to Jesus moments,” pragmatists would make no such conditions, so what they’d really be practicing would be, “Taking as The Buddha did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.” As The Buddha said, along with “Life is suffering,” “Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.” Even if you cared about our rampant depression, you could seem to be bad,
i.e. resentful, defeatist, manipulative, blaming, etc. Supposedly favoring violent revolution is just another untermensch attribute attributed to the weak.
Ironically, the best way to get someone’s victimization taken seriously, is to talk about how he supposedly let himself in for it. Taking that seriously would take seriously how he could help himself by protecting himself better. He’s far more reliably motivated to solve his problem than are those who are causing it, for him to take response-ability would be self-empowerment whereas for them to take moral responsibility would seem repressive and controlling, etc. This is in the same sense that many accused Jimmy Carter’s statement that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is akin to apartheid, of anti-Semitism, yet it seemed perfectly fine for Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to say, on November 29, 2007, “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.” No matter how much we insist that caring about certain things is , someone has to care about them. Martin Buber’s concept of a “greater realism” would also apply to going beyond the “realism” that accepts what causes our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., to a realism that realizes that whatever the threshold of human endurance is, that’s what it is, irrespective of what our cultural norms require.
Niebuhr wrote, in The Nature and Destiny of Man, in the subchapter, “The Sin of Pride,” “Descartes, Hegel, Kant, and Comte, to mention only a few moderns, were so certain of the finality of their thought that they have become fair sport for any wayfaring cynic,” and, in the subchapter “Collective Egotism,” “Sinful pride and idolatrous pretension are thus an inevitable concomitant of the cohesion of large political groups.”
As Blaming the Victim said, those who try to re-engineer victims’ human nature are advocating an ideology. On the front cover, is
Of course, the victim-blamers of that era didn’t think that they were advocating an ideology, only trying to benefit the victims by correcting their thinking. It seemed to be just coincidences, both that this blamed poverty on the thinking of the poor rather than the thinking of the rich, and that this aimed to make the thinking of the poor more conformist and accepting. Of course, possibly the reason why that era’s victim-blaming seemed to be a middle-class ideology, was that those who opposed it were those who seemed to be the educational elite, who therefore didn’t realize that a lack of Victorian-style self-discipline would have its gravest impact on just those people facing the biggest difficulties in their day-to-day lives.
Yet those who advocate such ideologies would be very unlikely to care how much they reflect their own egos, or how ridiculous, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” really looks. If, someday, wayfaring cynics looked back to the era of “Racism and Victimology,” by saying, “Why should I have faith in this doctrine that you say is so great? After all, at one time, many people who said that their goal was to make poor non-whites more serene and courageous, did so by insisting that they choose to be in denial about racism! It seemed that ‘there is only one segment of America that now has a true stake in pushing racism, the system, and White people as the overriding explanation of the problems of African-Americans. Those who want violent revolution’! And a part of this whole general trend was The Serenity Prayer, with ‘Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,’ hidden unless the realities that the victim simply must deal with, involved hardship and/or sinfulness ad infinitum! According to that logic, anyone who’s concerned that in any given year about 5% to 7% of adults have a serious mental illness, must want violent revolution, since that concern is otherwise very unpragmatic! Why is your insistence that I believe in your favorite doctrine, any different from their insistence that we not only equate any awareness of racism with victimology, but that we accept the right-wing concept of ‘victimology,’ as if it were some sort of universal truth?! Why is this insistence any different from the faith that many had that if only all poor people developed Victorian ideals, we could eliminate, or at least reduce, poverty?!”, those cynics would likely be treated as self-help ideology would treat those who face their own problems inexpediently.
The same would go for those who now look at the ideology of “Racism and Victimology,” by saying, “Sure, you’re so-o-o-o-o self-certain that poor non-whites should be in denial about racism, that statistics could prove that those who are, are more confident and therefore more likely to succeed, and therefore those who aren’t have a defeatist explanatory style that others put into their heads. But don’t you think that it’s quite a coincidence that this ‘just happens to’ reflect your own self-interests? I’m sure that it feels very right to you, to believe that the reason why they’re poor and you’re not, is that you face your problems with more serenity and courage than they do! Also, I’m sure that it feels very right to you to believe, for example, that they should feel good about whatever jobs they get, confident that someday they’ll get better jobs! A little self-questioning would make your thinking a lot more realistic! Also, I’m sure that it feels very good for you to believe that you’re benefiting poor non-whites by saving them from themselves! Self-questioning is probably the best antidote to any egotistical or other motivations to believe what one wants to, but any self-questioning regarding beliefs along the lines of, ‘God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.... Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,’ would seem to constitute maladjustment, resentment, passivity, anti-freedom restriction, etc.!”
As Blaming the Victim says in its concluding chapter, “For example, in 1940, eight million were out of work, while in 1942, only a little more than one million were out of work. The seven million who went from a jobless status to drawing a weekly paycheck in that two year period were no different in 1940 than in 1942.” At any time, no matter how optimistic poor people choose to be, that wouldn’t make more jobs that pay more than poverty wages, available. In fact, probably at all times, the level of determination to get jobs above the poverty level, is greater than the level of these jobs that are available. The only difference that the “explanatory style” of the poor would make, is that if they were more confident they’d do a better job in whatever jobs they have, exactly the sort of incentive motivation that makes market economies work, though this wouldn’t create more non-poverty-wage jobs. And though the difference between the wealth of the rich and the wealth of the poor is higher than it’s been since before the Great Depression, that doesn’t mean either that the self-discipline, optimism, etc., of the poor has gone down and of the rich has gone up, or that if we increase the self-discipline, optimism, etc., of the poor, this would make that difference go down.
A classic response to Behaviorist psychology is to tell those advocating Behaviorist methods of correcting people’s thinking, “Since you’re saying that people’s thinking is simply a product of the rewards and punishments that he encountered in life, that must include all of your thinking, including all of your beliefs regarding how people’s thinking should be corrected!” Likewise, one could respond to the more academic versions of cognitive therapy, by saying, “So you say that our thinking is a product of culture being highly influenced by what comes into fashion among assorted opinion-makers, the educational elite, and the media? Well, that certainly includes the self-reliant self-help that became popular during the Reagan Era, including the victim correction that you’re advocating now! Your thinking certainly resulted from a combination of what you were inculcated to believe, and which beliefs your society makes the most expedient! Since cognitive therapy arose in the 1960s based on the then-popular Eastern transcendence, this could be called ‘Calcutta survival skills.’”
And one could respond to the more grassroots cognitive therapy, such as that along the lines of insisting that we follow, “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,” by saying, “Sure, one could say that any realization that oneself has been hurt, reflects his own self-interest, and that everyone’s ego is invested in whatever they believe. At the same time, your ego is certainly invested in what you believe, including what you’re now preaching to me. And if you have any sort of ‘anything goes’ attitude such as an addictive personality, or you have above-average wealth and power, then it’s very clear that your beliefs that those who object to the sort of helplessness that contributes to our rampant depression are , poignantly reflect your self-interest!”
Since that’s typical of victim correction as a panacea, the same would go for other forms of victim correction, such as addressing the obvious social problem of our rampant depression, with antidepressant medication. A webpage from Johns Hopkins’ school of public health, Depression Common in Single Mothers Receiving Welfare, says, “The study looks at the factors in these women’s lives that contribute to depressive symptoms, and examines whether these symptoms may prevent the women from gaining employment and becoming independent from welfare.... ‘One challenge facing state welfare agencies is to identify barriers to employment. One such barrier — depression — is high among low-income single mothers,’ says Mary Jo Coiro, PhD, assistant scientist in the department of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.... Forty percent of the women reported symptom levels that would likely indicate a diagnosis of clinical depression, yet very few had received any mental health services.”
The fact that our rampant depression so strongly affects the poor is a big sign that it’s a social problem. Yet the poor are among those who could least afford to care that this is a social problem; the pessimism that would result from awareness of this proven fact would have its gravest impact on just those people facing the biggest difficulties in their day-to-day lives. Anyone who’s suffering from depression, for whatever reason, absolutely can change their own brain chemistries through drugs, and absolutely can’t change the helplessness that devastated them, and couldn’t afford not to address their own problems along these lines.
Those who really are “the educational elite,” probably have no idea that this is what the poor must deal with. The self-reliant resiliency that one could see in both Al-Anon’s material and the unconditional resiliency in the self-help worldview, which it inspired, might not look like the sort of ideology that would say that, “Once I built a railroad, made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad, now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?”, is good. After all, the person was motivated to build the railroad. All of the executives of the companies that contributed to it were motivated to run these companies as productively and efficiently as possible. He was in the job where he naturally ended up in the competitive marketplace.
Plenty of jobs still existed in the Great Depression. If he chose to be self-disciplined and optimistic that would have increased his odds of getting one. If he didn’t simply win or lose depending on whether he won or lost in the marketplace, then he could have manipulated his way into getting what he wanted without having to earn it, or, at the very least, into getting a job that was better than the job that he would have naturally won in the marketplace. After all, it would be only natural to believe that oneself is entitled to more than what he has.
Yet both of these expectations of stolid resiliency, figure that if a problem is yours then it’s yours, even if someone else’s sinfulness caused you hardship. Market discipline’s main selling point is that it gets things done, gets the railroads built and gets problems solved by giving the responsibility for solving them to the people who have the most reliable motivation to solve them, not that market discipline keeps helplessness within a reasonable level or bases personal responsibility on who’s at fault. As Justice Potter Stewart said in concurring with the Furman v. Georgia decision regarding the death penalty in 1972, “These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual,” and the same could be said for the punishments that come from market discipline, but whether one physically wins or loses is objective, and whether one is right or wrong is subjective. (Yet, of course, if the law punishes people based on happenstance, that would seem intolerable, but if the real world punishes people based on happenstance, for you not to accept that that’s the real world would seem intolerable.)
Even when Jane’s husband was sober so he was no longer overwhelmed by addictive cravings, he was a lot less motivated to prevent or deal with the problems that would result from his relapsing, than she’d be, so she was personally responsible. If she tried to get him to stop, she’d seem manipulative.
Even if he caused her the same magnitude of problems due to a bad character rather than any problem that would qualify as a “disease,” if she expected him rather than herself to take responsibility for the outcome, then her naïveté and “control tactics” might as well be those of a utopian.
And potential or actual victims of bigotry are a lot more motivated to prevent any problems that bigotry, or the fear of it, would cause in their own lives. As long as they do what they’re motivated to do, the railroads would get built. They’d also be motivated to get what they wanted by manipulatively “playing the victim role,” so they couldn’t have that option available to them. Sure, few victims of bigotry would do that, just as few of the women in the situation shown in the above comic, would actually have such perky artful and self-satisfied expressions like that on their faces, with their hands clasped like cackling witches.
Yet we’d still have to prevent the possibility of the sort of thinking that Schopenhauer described, in the book that most influenced Hitler, The World as Will and Representation, “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.” Though that might sound like typically Nazi amoralism, self-help psychology would agree with that completely, except that how it would say that would be, “Whenever anyone says, ‘But you owe me!’, naturally I think, ‘Sure, everyone wants to believe that others owe them!’” Most of the time that people say, “But you owe me!”, they don’t look perky, with their eyebrows skewed, like Jane, or want violent revolution, but if we don’t treat them as if they’re just as motivated by their own , the railroads might not get built as well as they could have. Schopenhauer also greatly shaped Nietzsche’s thinking, and one of the topics that he’s most known for is how beleaguered people could be far more intensely self-interested than are those who are perkily manipulative. And AA, including its transcendent psychology, began in the Great Depression, when “productively and self-reliantly dealing with reality” meant exactly that.
Though now we see Enron as corrupt, at one time it seemed to be a role model for this sort of romanticism. The Fortune magazine article that first raised popular skepticism about Enron began, “In Hollywood parlance, the ‘It Girl’ is someone who commands the spotlight at any given moment—you know, like Jennifer Lopez or Kate Hudson. Wall Street is a far less glitzy place, but there’s still such a thing as an ‘It Stock.’ Right now, that title belongs to Enron, the Houston energy giant.”
When, just after Ken Lay was indicted, Larry King asked him “So, why—how do you explain the lack of a lot of anger?”, Lay answered, “...I think, secondly, they remember me over a long number of years when, in fact, I was doing a lot of things to help them and their families and their fellow employees and really bringing together a company that was a very exciting company for them to work at.
“And I think the latter is something that comes up repeatedly—even now, even when I’m traveling abroad, but around this country, where former Enron employees will come up to me and tell me that they continue to try to find a place where they can have even some small part of excitement and fulfillment that they had at Enron.” The whole idea of German Romantic Era culture, such as Wagnerian themes, Strum und Drang literature, even Freudian psychology, is that excitement is the epitome of healthiness and fulfillment. Whatever fulfillment Enron workers got, couldn’t have been very deep and soulful.Houston civil litigator David Berg called Lay’s and Skilling’s defense at trial, “the Peter Pan defense—clap real hard and Enron will reappear, and nothing wrong happened. Well, plenty wrong happened.” Now that many Houstonians and others have suffered because of this magical thinking, and because investors seem more entitled to the truth than are those lower in the economic food chain, this now looks ridiculous. But if at the time that Lay and Skilling made those statements, they’d defended them just as some defended them during their trial, that they were “cheerleading” and making “forward-looking statements,” then, at the very least, they’d seem to be the understandable optimism of men who didn’t know that what they were predicting, wouldn’t happen. Therefore, they couldn’t be fraudulent.
As In the Shadow of Chance: The Pathological Gambler, by Julian Taber, Ph.D., says about why those with personalities prone to pathological gambling aren’t necessarily bad, “Risk-takers who sought a special destiny and somehow managed to beat the odds in defiance of established authority built our country, with all its remarkable institutions and contributions to society.” One could say that Lay’s and Skilling’s Peter Pan statements were just defiant risk-taking, and we don’t want to inhibit and repress the sort of spirit that built our country. In fact, if those hurt by the risk-taking were lower on the economic food chain than Lay and Skilling, it could still seem that those hurt had better just deal with their own problems. While this romanticism wouldn’t be, “clap real hard and the problems will disappear,” all except for the people who have the problems could just sit back and count on it that soon enough, these problems won’t exist anymore. All the victims would naturally take care of their own problems. All would dare not say “stop,” to the spirit that built our country.
Two of the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary’s definitions for the word passive, are “not active : acted upon,” and, “SUBMISSIVE : PATIENT.” If you’re in a situation where you’re passive according to the first of these definitions, and you don’t simply shut up and take care of your own problem, you could seem to be passive in the sense of the second definition, i.e. choosing to be passive. You might also notice that though the official definition of the word victim is along the lines of the first definition of passive, i.e. involuntarily, when self-help uses the word victim, it has the meanings of the second definition, that one identifies as a victim, and, therefore, submits to fulfilling this role. Those who exalt strength as Nietzsche did, would have to see weakness as resulting from the weak people’s ignominious choices, as much as he did.
And this morally bankrupt love of strength and realism could be rather extreme. After all, Reaganomics must simply accept that problems happen, so those with the problems must deal with them, and must avoid passing judgment. An excerpt of the Congressional Record of September 20, 2002, tells of the Reagan Administration, in the early 1980s, arranging for many varieties of deadly germs including anthrax to be exported to Saddam’s Iraq, including some to be shipped to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission! On December 20, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, as an envoy, “conveyed the President’s greetings and expressed his pleasure at being in Baghdad,” according to a note taker, and then talked about how they could improve relations between the countries. At that time, everyone knew about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Israel had already sent airplanes over Iraq to bomb the nuclear reactor they were building, and when the planes flew over Arab countries to get there, they didn’t even warn Iraq. They didn’t want that plant to be built, either. Yet the Reagan Administration was willing to take the risk of shipping Iraq the germs. Dutch chemical merchant Frans Van Anraat was sentenced to 15 years for providing the chemicals that Saddam used to commit the genocide of the Kurds, and the only reason why the Reagan Administration wouldn’t deserve to be treated the same, is that Saddam didn’t choose to use the germs that they provided. (Conceivably, he could have used them against Israel, which the Administration should have known that he was likely to do, so the Reagan Administration could have been guilty of genocide of Jews.)
Many currently think that if you don’t demonize Saddam, you’re lacking a moral compass. If that’s the case, then the Reagan Administration was truly lacking a moral compass! Yet that’s what pragmatism sometimes requires. Anthrax Reagan no doubt didn’t like the El Salvadoran death squads, either, but realism sometimes requires that you don’t get whiny about moral concerns. This sort of moral relativism is so respectable, it usually ends up becoming amoral absolutism, since if you’ve got to do it in order to be realistic, then you’ve got to do it in order to be realistic.
As Barbara Blaine, the founder of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, wrote about the excuses that some in the hierarchy use for forgiving pedo-priests, “As young Catholics, we’re taught to take responsibility for our sins. We aren’t allowed to enter the confessional and say ‘I meant well, but my process was insufficient.’” The same goes for other moral responsibility, including responsibility for recklessness or negligence, which, since it wasn’t malicious, could be called “mistakes” or “accidents.” Yet this same excuse seems to have been used both for trusting Saddam with these germs even when he was known to be building WMD, and invading Iraq because supposedly he still had WMD even though the only indications that he did were very tenuous.
Reaganomics would figure that “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” And if Saddam had bombed anyone with those germs, whether they be Iranians or Israelis, those who knew of how the Reagan administration enabled this, would figure, “Oh, well, we lost this gamble.” What they did wasn’t really malicious, so moral objections would be just the objectors’ opinions, etc. They’d end up unassailable. The Philadelphia Archdiocese’s response to a Grand Jury report that told of the Archdiocese using convoluted sophistry to retain some priests who kept molesting kids, says, “This is not to say that no mistakes were made. The mistakes that were made over the past decades, however, were the result of human error (not criminal intent)...,” and those who approved the export of germs to Saddam could say the same about that. Sure, it was extreme, but that’s what it means to be venturesome and have true grit. This degree of confident magical thinking, came naturally to the Reagan Administration. Added to this is the fact that when the guv’mint causes problems, our culture doesn’t regard them as being merely the inevitable vicissitudes of life, but when people in our day-to-day lives cause the problems that lead to our high rate of depression, our culture would regard those as vicissitudes of life. Which would mean that the Randroids could really insist that those who regard depression as more than just a disease of each affected individual, are manipulators.
As the trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling began, those who support Lay and maybe even Skilling said that we should understand that the Enron story isn’t just another story of opportunistic greed, since what they did wasn’t unambiguously fraudulent, etc. But the truth was that instead, it was something worse, an ethos with a cult following, that, in the name of freedom, had many people cheering it. According to The Smartest Guys In the Room, The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall Of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, “Most companies with trading desks don’t allow the traders’ ethos to trump all other values.” Regarding what this ethos is, the book also says that though Enron traders “cringed when he said things like ‘we’re on the side of the angels’—what an emotion-laden thought!—they agreed whole-heartedly with the underlying sentiment.” The traders’ Objectivism was truly their “ideology,” about which they could get very “self-righteous.”
Those who greedily fleeced Tyco, WorldCom, etc., didn’t have this Reaganist flag-waving cheering them on. And a lot more of the modern West’s depression and victim-self-blaming, has to arise from situations like Enron’s self-righteous pro-freedom dogmatism, than situations where one person simply fleeces another. And since Houston is so outraged at Enron, chances are that most of the good ol’ Texans are angry at the supposed greed, rather than at the pro-freedom self-righteousness.
Deregulation, self-responsibility, and realism became important prerogatives. This normalcy is far more business-as-usual than businesslike. This, after all, is what has to look gutsy and exciting when it comes from attack politicians, “Savage Nation” commentators and media which go for a sardonic excitement, constant stridency, etc. Sure, Glenn Beck signs off by calling his listeners “sick, twisted freaks” as if that were a joke, fun and rebellious, without any awareness that sick twisted freakish anger could get very problematic.
At the beginning, during the Reagan era, pundits like this were called “attack politicians.”
The only real difference was that the Reagan Era was all about “The Sharper Image,” while the current Reaganist cult is all about the anti-elitist, Populist, image. Yet the bottom line of both, along with the adamancy behind it, is the same. The stronger you are, the more likely you are to have what’s exciting, pro-freedom, übermensch, red-blooded, self-reliant, etc., on your side.
A popular complement if Germany is scharf, meaning sharp, which is what the breeder of the Doberman Pinscher said he wanted its temperament to be, and this scharf appeal is what that media aims for. It’s truly astounding how similar are the strident anger of the attack politicians, and the strident anger that Hitler consistently expressed in his speeches, which his audiences, also, found attractive and exciting. Of course, the American exciting aggression is very likely to contribute to the 5% to 7% of American adults having a serious mental illness and 5% to 9% of American children having a serious emotional disturbance in any given year, but once they do, they’d be treated as if of course real Americans won’t mollycoddle their weakness. And, if any pundit tried to stand up for their rights, that person wouldn’t sell, since pleas for the helpless couldn’t have that exciting gonzo appeal. After it became well known that Ann Coulter’s new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, said about some 9/11 survivors, whom she called “Witches of East Brunswick,” “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much,” and that they’re “self-obsessed,” the book’s sales went way up, so this is obviously the sort of godfulness that excites that audience.
As a Zoloft webpage says,
Yet if anyone were to talk about this social problem, that certainly wouldn’t have the gonzo true-grit excitement of the scharf pundits. He couldn’t attract an excited audience excitedly cheering him.
In the theories of psychology, this equating strength with honorability and weakness with cunning, come from two very German-influenced influences, Freud and Reinhold Niebuhr. Both accepted aggressive human nature along the lines of the Doctrine of Original Sin. This, taken to its final outcome, is best shown by the title of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. This was written during the Romantic Era of Central European culture, from the 19th Century until World War I, which, in Germany, looked a lot like the red-blooded romanticism and magical thinking of pre-scandal Enron. If those with a public voice told whiny stories, that would have turned people off, not on.
The The World as Will and Representation zeitgeist, has four basic elements, and this is the same zeitgeist of market discipline. These elements are:
Humanity’s aggressive is ineradicable, so trying to thwart it could only mean trouble, so the of the powerful seems sacrosanct. This is a main theme of psychoanalysis.
Take the above quote from The World as Will and Representation, replace “violence” with “toughness,” and you’d have the American version of this. The American culture has a similar dichotomy, in that about a century ago, William James wrote that Americans tend to classify people as either redbloods or mollycoddles, which also treats the strong as honorable, and the weak who don’t take care of their own problems, as manipulators. In fact, the foreword of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting’s book about Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Aren’t, quotes one of Limbaugh’s fans as saying, “You know, Rush is right: Racism is dead in this country. I don’t know what the niggers have to gripe about now,” as if the weak are cunningly and ignominiously looking for opportunities to get mollycoddled.
That ignominious approach to resolving one’s own problems, could be contrasted with the big patriotic theme song that was emblematic of the Reagan era, Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, in which the first verse begins, “If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life,” goes on to say that the hero would simply take responsibility for his own welfare by rebuilding, and ends “and they can’t take that away,” as if those things were gone because some people took them away. That’s quite literally the ideal of the Reaganomics zeitgeist, which would then satirize the weak who gripe instead of dealing with their own problems like that.
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. Everett C. Hughes wrote in French Canada in Transition, in 1943, “No problem of human behavior is more intriguing than that of discovering why people, when they feel the distress of uncertainty and frustration, lay blame upon one villain rather than another,” and the supposed untermenschen and mollycoddles are our main villains.
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 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.
Also, though the old German version of this idea said that those who seem ignominiously cunning are more dishonorable than are those who are tough, the new version stresses that the “mollycoddles” are more dangerous, pernicious, since you can’t defend yourself against tears and other “victim power” that’s used in a mercenary, manipulative, fashion. As an AA slogan says, “We are all victims of victims.” In this sense, the new version is more Nazified. Coulter responded to criticism of her statements about those 9/11 widows, as if these protests came from ignominiously cunning untermenschen getting strength from victimhood, “That is my objection to what liberals are doing by sending out victims as their spokespeople. I think it’s the ugliest thing liberals have done to dialogue in this country.... I don’t want to hear when I respond, oh, that’s mean, oh, that’s mean.”
Similar to that is, from The Way Things Aren’t, “Confused about the difference between Limbaugh’s (good) insults and his opponents’ (bad) ones? Sam Francis explains that he and Limbaugh are simply misunderstood: ‘When we make fun of poor people or handicapped people, we’re not literally making fun of them. We’re trying to break the icon the Left is trying to create around these types of people.’”
Something that follows this pattern exactly, is what the father of Columbine killer Eric Harris, wrote in his own journal before the massacre, about Brooks Brown, a former friend who, along with his parents, tried to turn Eric in for a webpage making violent threats against him: “We feel victimized. We don’t want to be accused every time something happens. Eric is not of fault. Brooks Brown is out to get Eric. Brooks had problems.... manipulative con artist.” The strong usually can honorably act like victims, since their defensiveness would be defending their own rights against supposed pernicious tactics. If we presumed those accused of manipulative machinations, innocent until proven guilty, then how could we protect ourselves from something that insidious?
Treating aggression as ignominious (not just as “sinful” but forgiven), would seem weak, unhealthy, and insidiously dangerous: repressive judgmental resentful manipulative whiny naïve anti-freedom and inhibited, which in all circumstances are powerfully unimpressive. Rather than “ignominious for the perpetrator,” this would be ignominious for the victim who doesn’t just deal with his own problem stolidly. Since his intellect reflects his , plenty of his honest opinions that don’t stolidly represent the problem as being innocuous, could be deemed “cunning.” If someone in trouble could honorably say, “Sure, you think that I could endure this, or succeed if I tried hard enough, but you can’t assume that in a society with enough helplessness that in any given year, about 5% to 7% of adults have a serious mental illness!”, then plenty of people could manipulatively get others to give them what they wanted. That statement would therefore seem dangerous, though true and important.
Weak people suspected of real cunning won’t be presumed innocent until proven guilty, since real cunning is sneaky and hidden, few thoughts can be proven, and we want to have faith that people deserved whatever they got. And all this applies “in all circumstances” where it could seem tenable. To old-school Germans, “all circumstances” would include violence. Life’s more interesting that way. And though this is usually done in the name of getting rid of guv’mint restrictions, it could determine the outcome of any situation in which moral responsibility could seem to mean the victims using their “victim power” manipulatively, wanting this sinful world to be as they’d have it, etc.
Note: that’s not poor or handicapped people who cunningly choose to play the victim role, just poor or handicapped people in general. According to that logic, any bigotry and other untermensch-bashing could seem to protect society from mollycoddles and harpies. In fact, no matter how much someone unambiguously is a victim, the untermensch-bashers could always say that since this is irrelevant to how well he could do in the future if he was smart and determined enough to succeed, his victimhood is a manipulative tear-jerking distraction from what really matters, his own self-responsibility. Any topic besides how the victims could take care of themselves better, would seem to be just a red herring, or worse. Topics involving moral responsibility, would also have an emotional pull to them.
About Coulter, Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten said, “But, look, for 20 years or more all criminal justice policy in this country has been driven by people who—politicians who pander to victim’s lobbies. So, you can’t say anything about that. I think that, you know, it’s nice to see this argument coming from the right because purging our political debates of, I would not say unwarranted sympathy, but of [INAUDIBLE] to people simply because they’ve had a tragedy in their lives, that would be a positive thing,” but since blue-collar criminals are untermensch, the rules are different for villainizing them. Of course, if übermenschen act like victims of the ignominious connivers, this defensiveness would defend their own rights, so would seem good and red-blooded. And even if all this leads to about 5% to 7% of adults having a serious mental illness, and about 5% to 9% of children having a serious emotional disturbance, they could always get treatment, which would be the least ignominiously mollycoddle way to deal with their problems.
This might sound like a real Götterdämmerung, but market discipline also has to discipline like this. According to market discipline, if you have the buying power then your will means everything, but if you don’t then your will seems contemptible, presumptuous. One is most likely to get rewarded, if he makes his reactions, including his representations of what happened to him, as pragmatic as possible, and makes this his entire worldview. Also, the red-blooded leitmotifs of the the culture of the Romantic Era in Germany, though it shaped the basic might-makes-right ideas on Nazism, could also seem excitingly unrepressed.
The foreword of The Way Things Aren’t, says, “Because satire can be quite a cruel weapon. It has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful. When you use satire as a weapon against powerless people, it is not only cruel, it is profoundly vulgar.” Yet life’s more interesting that way, and that would also encourage achievement. Satire used against the powerless, sounds excitingly gutsy. Good ol’ boy vulgarity sounds respectable, such as the line in Johnny Cash’s classic Folsom Prison Blues, about a good ol’ boy thrill killing, “But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. When I hear that [train] whistle blowin’, I hang my head and cry.”
And if one doesn’t live up to such expectations, he’d be treated as falling short of expectations, choosing to be either too weak, or too manipulatively strong. For example, The Assertive Woman, by Stanlee Phelps and Nancy Austin, says, “Manipulation involves particularly devious or indirect methods to induce someone to do something, or behave in a certain manner.” Yet ever since the Reagan Revolution, plenty of assertive statements could seem manipulative, since they’re just words, and the more adroit (though honest) they are, the more that they could be treated as emotionalist expressions of the assertive person’s . For example, 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,” not, “How to Regain Control and Raise Kids Who Do
