#3-21
e must motivate people to win, not whine.
“Greed is good. Greed works, greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all its forms, greed for life, money, love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. . .”—the character Gordon Gekko, in Wall Street
“...each of us has been affected by the ravages of another’s alcoholism.... We find that there are simple tools that can change the way that we feel about ourselves and our circumstances, tools that can help us to get more out of living and to find excitement and opportunity where once we found only a struggle to survive. As we watch those around us in our meetings begin to find greater freedom and greater joy in their lives, most of us realize that, no matter what situation we face or how desperate we feel, there is good reason for hope.”—Al-Anon’s current handbook, How Al-Anon Works, for Families and Friends of Alcoholics
“The problem-solving and coping techniques you learn will encompass every crisis in modern life, from minor irritations to major emotional collapse. These will include realistic problems, such as divorce, death, or failure [or the effects of alcoholism in your family], as well as those vague, chronic problems that seem to have no obvious external cause, such as low self-confidence, frustration, guilt, or apathy.”— Feeling Good, David D. Burns, MD, “The Clinically-Proven Drug-free Treatment for Depression”
“Taken as a whole, Stoic ethics is in fact a very valuable and estimable attempt to use reason, man’s great prerogative, for an important and salutary purpose, namely to raise him by a precept above the sufferings and pains to which all life is exposed... and in this way to make him partake in the highest degree of the dignity belonging to him as a rational being as distinct from the animal.”—Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
“...they had ‘engineered the response.’
“Was that another way of saying ‘covering up’?”—Woodward and Bernstein, All The President’s Men
uch allocation of responsibility is then backed up in basically three ways. The first is that for the victim to take response-ability for his own welfare is pragmatic and objective, since he’s the one with the most reliable motivation to do what it takes to succeed at solving the problem, which, objectively, is his. The above approach to cognitive therapy, wouldn’t even care what your current bad experiences are, since you could always choose to perceive them differently. If you’re currently dealing one of the more serious problems that The Serenity Prayer is supposed to deal with, even if others are morally responsible for it, you’d probably be told to accept it serenely. John Haynes Holmes, who’d been friends with Niebuhr, wrote to him describing his “recent writings... as a tragic instance of intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy,” and when sinful behavior is treated along the lines of The Serenity Prayer, that would constitute beloved moral bankruptcy. Yet you’d also be told that you should be optimistic that those in your society have moral standards that are high enough to make sure that something like your current bad experience, won’t happen to you again. The central question of this pragmatism, is, “What’s more important, that he’s morally responsible, or that you solve your problem as well as you can? Which would you rather be, right, or happy?” You mustn’t really care about “the elephant in the living room” if you can’t change the elephant. That’s living in the real world. You do what you can. Beat the hardcore blues. No self-care could seem onerous. Whatever happens is, therefore, “life on life’s terms,” “reality,” etc. Maturity means accepting reality. Of course, we live in a competitive and self-responsible society, nothing’s guaranteed, and human imperfections are whatever they are. Those who have Nietzsche’s values would be both most likely to succeed, and most likely to seem to have good, well-adjusted backbone. Response-ability for one’s own welfare, one’s own problems: serves the greater good, maximizes efficiency, is a moral obligation that we can’t afford to forgive. Where would our economy be if people weren’t truly motivated to take response-ability for their own welfare? There are no guarantees in life, and if there were, plenty of people wouldn’t be productive enough. Emotionalism such as whining, victimology, and victimhood, wouldn’t be fair play in the contest for success. Fighting for what is good could actually turn out to be bad, since people: are naturally motivated to do what they want and to take response-ability for their own problems, aren’t reliably motivated to take moral responsibility, must be motivated to get what they want by winning and earning it, and mustn’t be motivated to get it by acting like victims or their allies. Asymmetrical warfare means that the strong fight fair and the weak fight unfair. If everyone were to get what they deserved, where would it come from? After the Great Wall Street Bailout of 2008 was completed, John McCain said, “The option of doing nothing is simply not an option,” and all pragmatism looks something like this: no matter how much others caused your problem, you’ve got to do whatever it takes to get it under control.
Since this is as self-motivated as greed is, this works just as reliably as greed does. Self-responsibility for one’s own welfare, is good. Self-responsibility works, self-responsibility is right. Self-responsibility clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Addictions and Substance Abuse, Strategies for Advanced Practice Nursing, by Madeline A. Naegle and Carolyn Erickson D’Avanzo, gives the following facts, in a chapter titled “NURSING’S CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES”:
Mental illnesses are more common than cancer, diabetes, or heart disease.
More than 5 million Americans suffer an acute episode of mental illness each year.
Depression has been on the rise since 1960. According to one study, 718 million Americans will be diagnosed with depression at a cost of $50 billion a year (Rochefort and Goering, 1998).
Heavy alcohol consumption has continued to be high since the late 1960s, with a current prevalence of 18 percent of the general population (National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 1998).
Alcohol and substance abuse are key factors in the development of biomedical problems such as heart disease and cancer.
Psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and manic depression fill 21 percent of all hospital beds, more than any single physical illness such as cancer or heart disease (Blount, 1998).
Substance-related problems are evident in 35 percent to 50 percent of clients hospitalized under another diagnosis (Blount, 1998).
What immediately follows this, is, “Many of disease problems have their roots in psychosocial origins that are not in concert with the approach of the medical model.” But really is the difference between that, and treating the problems with nursing? Nursing certainly isn’t going to solve psychosocial problems. Yet the more important question would be, “What’s more important, that these are psychosocial problems, or that some sort of professional fixing can get these problems under control, and that those who’d get fixed are those who are the most motivated to solve the problems?”.
A webpage of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, which includes their letter to the editor supporting the option of giving SSRI medication to teens since in some cases they’d decrease rather than increase their suicidality, “Suicide is the third leading cause of death among people aged 10 to 24. In 2002, nearly 125,000 young people attempted suicide, according to reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ninety percent of youths who commit suicide have some type of psychiatric diagnosis. This tragedy is a public health crisis in the United States.”
When you’ve seen ads guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? That’s quite a social problem. The person who has each of the microcosmic problems that contribute to this, has the most reliable motivation to solve it. Giving him the response-ability for taking care of himself would be the most pragmatic. Yet my natural common sense tells me that the moral bankruptcy that this entails, has consequences. Another pragmatic question here would be, ‘What’s more important, the sociological benefits of moral responsibility, or the pragmatic benefits of holding people response-able for their own welfare, their own problems?’ If one rationale for victim correction doesn’t work, it’s replaced by another, since the person who’s the most motivated to take care of any problem, simply has to take care of it. Yet for me to ask any questions about practical sociological consequences, would be unpragmatic for me, since asking such questions wouldn’t do me any good!”
Very little pragmatic victim-blaming would seem undoubtedly bad, especially to those who aren’t intellectualist. Sure, some victim-blaming would be irrational, blaming victims for things that they really couldn’t have prevented. Yet as long as the victims are blamed for things they could have prevented, then this would teach them how, in the future, they could watch out to make sure that something like that doesn’t happen again. Sure, David D. Burns, MD’s cognitive therapy self-help book Feeling Good defines personalization, the juggernaut of the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, as, “You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.” Yet if our conceptions of personal responsibility were limited to negative events that we were primarily responsible for, we’d have plenty of problems that we could have prevented or solved if we’d tried hard enough. Any time that correcting the victim could hopefully lead to his taking better care of himself, protecting himself better, etc., this victim-blaming could be called pragmatic. It could do him a lot of good, helping him take better care of himself. Sure, both pragmatism, and blaming the victim, could imply a dangerous moral bankruptcy. Yet those who aren’t intellectualist, who live in the real world, could very likely see that victims of anything can’t change others’ actions but can change their own reactions, so they’d need to serenely accept the destructive choices of others, and courageously change their own shortcomings in dealing with their own realities. Even in situations where the moral bankruptcy would be pretty high, the victim-blaming still wouldn’t seem undoubtedly bad, in that the benefits of response-ability for one’s own welfare, would still be there. Condemnations of that victim-blaming could seem to be just opinion, and, therefore, whiny resentful cowardly impractical manipulative and controlling opinion. In a society with rampant depression, sometimes the real world could be extremely morally bankrupt.
(Cartoon generated by “Build Your Own Meat”)
One event that really showed how important motivation is, though not in a self-reliant way, was the bailout regarding the 2008 financial crisis. Those who first wrote the bailout program figured that the only things that really mattered were that the banks in trouble be motivated to sell their assets to the program, and that the rest of Wall Street be motivated to get back to normal. It didn’t matter that none of the financiers to be bailed out were entitled to it, or that plenty of them contributed to the problem. The only thing that seemed to matter was that they not be dissuaded from being rescued, such as by having to make executives’ pay contingent on success rather than on quantity of sales. If the bailout motivated the rich to make out economy work, then it would seem good, and if it didn’t then it would seem bad, even though this very much goes against the usual linking of realism with self-reliance.
Even the topic of the book Blaming the Victim by William Ryan, would be pragmatic victim-blaming if it were treated as personal problems rather than as a social problem. That is, the causes of poverty, and the idea that it’s perpetuated by a “culture of poverty,” in which poor people’s bad experiences have so discouraged them that they figure that acting responsibly won’t do them any good. 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.” Teaching poor people to give up the sort of thinking that could be called a culture of poverty, wouldn’t create any jobs with living wages, so addressing this social problem with victim blaming would be irrational.
Yet for the psychologist of one particular poor person, teaching him to give up that sort of thinking, would make it more likely that he’d get a job with a living wage. Exactly how much that would increase his chances would depend on what’s going on outside of him at the moment, but one could then give the rationale that, of course, in the real world nothing is guaranteed, so he’d better just accept whatever uncertainty exists in the real world. If he doesn’t, then he’d seem too immature, unrealistic, victim-posturing, etc., to deal with the real world. Since this victim-blaming would encourage him to try to better his own chances, it could be said to benefit him, make him self-empowered and self-efficacious. Even if the reason why he doesn’t have a job with a living wage would constitute unambiguous victimization, that, also, would be the real world, and he can’t change others’ actions but can change his own reactions. It could also seem that if we didn’t have this victim-blaming conception of personal responsibility, people could get free rides by giving enough reasons why they’re helpless victims, especially since it’s very easy to honestly believe that oneself is entitled to more than what he’d won. We must all be motivated to deal with our own problems independently resiliently and resourcefully. We mustn’t reward failure, victimhood, etc., or the weak could get what they wanted without earning it and the strong might not be motivated to achieve, so we must assume that the weak wanted to fail. This is the same sort of “thinking” that would say that even if counseling women how to avoid abusive or exploitive men wouldn’t make any men normal, this would lower the chances that any particular woman would be victimized by one of them, though blaming women victimized by aggressive men, exactly fits the mold of we now think of as “blaming the victim.” Just as the women who try to stop the real cause of their own problems would be treated as manipulatively controlling, so would the poor who try to stop the real cause of their own problems. As Blaming the Victim says, “All of this happens so smoothly that it seems downright rational.”
One reason why,
is that, unless the person who caused the problem is the same as the person who has it, then the person who caused the problem doesn’t have a reliable motivation to solve it. No matter how high our rates of depression, anxiety disorders, etc., might get, caring about what causes it would seem naïve, pointless, unrealistic, which is scary in its own way, as scary as any other dysfunctionality. Since ethical responsibility could be called subjective and immaterial, caring about that could also seem to be just philosophisizing.
Pragmatism requires that we motivate winning, not whining. Otherwise, people could get what they wanted by proving that they’re victims, rather than by trying to achieve it. Of course, when one loses, it’s probably not because he chose to, he chose not to try hard enough, etc. Despite the fact that Personalization is a cognitive distortion of depression, in general it would be very unpragmatic for you to figure that if you’re not primarily responsible for your problem, then your success or failure isn’t your own personal response-ability. You must be motivated to win. Sure, whether you win or lose would depend on good or bad luck, to one degree or another that would be pretty random, but if the bottom line of our judgments of you weren’t based on whether you won or lost, everybody would have their excuses and rationales for manipulative guilt-tripping. The question of what constitutes real responsibility is subjective, but the question of how well you took care of yourself is objective.
The subchapter on codependency therapy, in Susan Faludi’s Backlash, is about the insane degree to which this pragmatism must blame, or at least single-mindedly correct, the victim. After all, this arose out of the culture of Al-Anon, which was set up specifically for the purpose of using the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy of AA, for those who must deal with addicts, to be able to deal with them more productively. Since the epitome of this Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy that our culture in general has taken a liking to, is The Serenity Prayer, and since the entire unredacted Serenity Prayer as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr says, “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,” this would apply the pragmatism of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy even to situations where the “patient” has absolutely nothing wrong with him, other than that if only he dealt with his bad realities more stolidly, he’d succeed in life.
As Niebuhr wrote in The Nature and Destiny of Man, “[Professor Alfred N. Whitehead] distinguishes between ‘speculative reason’ and ‘pragmatic reason’ and regards the former as the source of virtue and the latter as the root of evil. This distinction is reminiscent of Aristotle’s distinction between the active and the passive nous. According to Whitehead, the former is the reason ‘which Plato shares with God,’ while the latter is the reason which ‘Ulysses shares with the foxes’.” Sure, “speculative reason” is certainly more principled than “pragmatic reason,” but realists realize that, in practical terms, if you’re the one who has the problem, then if you address it expediently that’s , while if you care about principles, and speculative philosophizing, that’s . A beloved formula for coping that expects people to cope with their problems by, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” couldn’t stand up to “speculative reasoning,” but could be very necessary for “pragmatic reasoning.”
The CARL SAGAN’S BALONEY DETECTION KIT webpage includes, in its list of “Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric,” “Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an ‘unfavourable’ decision).” That’s pretty much the entire logic behind expecting everyone, including addicts’ friends and loved ones, to simply courageously changing what they can and serenely accept what they can’t, including hardship and/or others’ sinfulness ad infinitum. After all, if addicts’ friends and loved ones don’t do this, then their inadequate serenity and courage would be very self-defeating, dysfunctional.
This list also includes, “Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the ‘other side’ look worse than it really is).” Just imagine the response that Jane would get from proponents of the Serenity Prayer school of psychology, if she told them, “I realize the overreacting isn’t a good idea, so I’ll try to find out what constitutes a normal and natural reaction to an alcoholic husband, and limit myself to that,” or, “Sure, I’ll have to accept normal human imperfection, but not alcoholic imperfection,” or even, “Let’s compromise as to what you’ll simply expect me to deal with. I’ll have to deal with less than what you’d expect, that I deal with whatever realities the alkie caused that I’m helpless to change, but more than I’d like to deal with.” That would be very unpragmatic and unrealistic for her.
At the top of that webpage is a list of basic rules of scientific inquiry, such as, “Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view,” and, “Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.” Just imagine the response that Jane would get if she said, “Niebuhr’s magnum opus was a two-book set titled The Nature and Destiny of Man. A main topic of these books is that naturally everyone wants to believe that what he believes is right, and that plenty of major belief systems consist of what people self-righteously want to believe is right. Sure, you truly believe that I have a have weak character, am resentful, manipulative, etc., yet you, like everyone else, believe what you want to. Those with addictive personalities, especially, would want to believe in this sort of amoralism, that’s actually pretty self-righteous, since it treats those who disagree as if they have untermensch defects of character. Therefore, you really should include points of view that are different from what you want to believe, and tell the addictive personalities who came up with this school of psychology, not to get overly attached to it just because it’s theirs. At the very least, let’s compromise, between what they’d want us to believe, and what I’d want to believe.”
Backlash says about the psychologist who led the codependency group that Faludi attended, “Of herself, she says, ‘I am definitely a Woman Who Loves Too Much.’ She was a full-time housewife, she relates, until her husband ran off with her best friend after twenty-three years of marriage. Then she went back to school at forty and became a therapist. Now she’s ‘in recovery,’ having figured out what went wrong in her marriage. ‘I let myself go. I don’t blame him. He’s a man just like any other man. If I had done all this work on me before, maybe he would have stuck around.’”
In pragmatic terms, the basic ethos of self-help would say that she had the productive attitude, for the following reasons:
The only person she could change is herself, so no matter what are others’ moral responsibilities, she shouldn’t lose focus on changing what she can, herself.
For a woman to seem independent seems good, dependent seems bad. If she resiliently resourcefully and independently built a new life no matter how much this cost her, that would seem good. If she insisted on her husband staying as if she couldn’t live without him, that would seem bad.
Maybe he would have stuck around, or maybe he wouldn’t have. Yet even though in situations like this, all the wisdom in the world couldn’t let her know what she could change, for her to believe that she could change a lot would be good, optimistic. The more that she blames herself, the more that she’d be optimistic that she could change what needs to be changed.
It really would at least sound feasible that men are more likely to want to cut out on their marriages than women are. If that’s the case, then pragmatic women would simply take as a given that that’s what their human nature sometimes makes them do.
At the same time, women should also treat these feelings as legitimate, even if the women did absolutely nothing to deserve the ending of their marriages. We’re to assume, in a pretty absolutist fashion, that simply because someone insists that his marriage is no longer right for him, then expecting him to stay in it would be akin to slavery. If a woman expects a man to stay in such a marriage, then she, especially, could be given such cunningly untermensch labels as “trying to trap him,” “trying to manipulate him,” and “trying to control him.” It would be assumed that women simply are manipulative, yet this wouldn’t be accepted along the lines of, “She’s a woman just like any other woman, so we’ll just have to accept her manipulative machinations.”
Commentators on the Iraq War have talked about “asymmetrical warfare,” that sure, the terrorists have much less financing than do the Western armies in Iraq, but since the terrorists only have to disrupt civilization by bombing civilians, make themselves look like victims of Western countries’ power, etc., the terrorists still have a chance. Likewise, in moral terms, situations like that psychologist’s divorce could be called “asymmetrical warfare.” You might think that in moral terms she’s clearly right, but once her ex-husband has given his arguments for why we should accept his leaving, such as, “Expecting me to stay in a marriage where I feel very wrong, would be expecting me to be a slave!”, and, “I’m not maliciously trying to hurt anyone. I’m only doing what I have to! I can’t turn back the clock and undo my first marriage,” he might end up looking like the helpless victim.
It would seem that our society could live with failings like his, since human nature will always have imperfections like that, we could count on the victims to solve the resulting problems with plenty of self-motivation, etc. On the other hand, our society couldn’t afford to just accept her failings in taking response-ability for her own welfare, since she’d be expected to correct her own inadequacies through self-improvement, no one else would solve the remaining problems if she didn’t, etc. The perfectionism of, “There’s always room for improvement,” doesn’t seem utopian when applied to the self-responsible victims rather than the sinful.
Despite the sexist presumptions that are involved here, the women hurt by it shouldn’t consider themselves to be victims of sexism. This is not the sort of situation where they could honorably “make the personal political,” since when husbands leave their wives for other women, alcoholic husbands cause their wives egregious problems that they simply must deal with resiliently resourcefully and independently, etc., these simply are personal problems.
One could call this a “responsibility drift,” where, gradually, step by step, one’s responsibility for the problems he causes, drifts into the victim’s responsibility for his own welfare. At first it might be admitted that holding people response-able for their own problems even when this means alkies’ family members dealing with the consequences of their alcoholism, isn’t the ideal, but eventually this self-responsibility would be treated as the ideal, since it’s by far the most reliable. Naturally it would be the victim of a problem who we’d expect to solve it, since he’s the one who’s most motivated to solve it, if he does solve it that would be honorable self-reliance, if he doesn’t that could be called , and we pray that we become forgiving and non-judgmental. The chapter of Feeling Good about anger management, says, “You are certainly right that plenty of genuinely negative events do go on every day, but your feelings about them are still created by the interpretations you place on them. Take a careful look at these interpretations because anger can be a two-edged sword. The consequences of an impulsive outburst will frequently defeat you in the long run. Even if you are being genuinely wronged, it may not be to your advantage to feel angry about it.” Since this book is “The Clinically-Proven Drug-Free Treatment for Depression,” managing anger like this isn’t just a matter of managing trivial upsets.
As Blaming the Victim put it, “But the stigma, the defect, the fatal difference... is still located within the victim, inside his skin.” But one could ask, “What’s more important, that your problem is a part of a social problem, or that both you and everyone else, absolutely can correct what’s inside one’s own skin, and absolutely can’t correct anything inside of anyone else’s skin?”
As Blaming the Victim says, treating the individual deviance of the special unusual groups of persons who have the problems, is the opposite of the public health approach, “This has been the dominant style in American social welfare and health activities, then: to treat what we call social problems, such as poverty, disease, and mental illness, in terms of the individual deviance of the special, unusual groups of persons who had those problems. There has also been a competing style, however... [Public health practitioners] set out to prevent disease, not in individuals, but in the total population, through improved sanitation, inoculation against communicable disease, and the policing of housing conditions.” Yet one could always respond to objections to victim-blaming, by asking, “What’s more important, that we not blame victims, or that we not leave any problems unsolved?”
It could be clinically proven that blaming the victim, if done in a diplomatic manner that doesn’t really look like blame, would be the most effective solution to a problem. No matter how bad are the problems outside of a person, he’s the one who’s the most motivated to get them under control. The more that what goes on inside of him is what’s corrected, the more effective this would be. The worse that his problems are, the more important that getting them under control like this, would be.
The book about the very successful damage control over the warship Samuel B. Roberts while in battle, No Higher Honor, by Bradley Peniston, says that when its captain, Paul Rinn, was in college, he took a course in the philosophy of early American pragmatism, which originated in the later 1800’s, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. He expressed skepticism of whether it could possibly be of value. Later though, when he was leading a small group of American and Thai soldiers in Vietnam, and fighting erupted quickly in the area.
Everyone in Cambodia probably knows where we are, Rinn thought. Our chances of getting out of here alive are slim to none.
His men were shaken as well, so Rinn said what he could to buck them up. He started along the lines of You can’t worry about what you can’t control, and as his men began to perk up, he realized his words had a familiar ring. Elements of pragmatist philosophy, long dissolved into some nether region of his brain, began to crystallize. To Rinn’s utter surprise, the ideas he had dismissed in a Hudson Valley classroom were surfacing along the Mekong River. If you worry about what you can’t control, you lose focus. You make bad decisions.
“I found myself talking to my men, explaining to them a pragmatic viewpoint of what had happened to us and why we needed to pick ourselves up and go on and do what we needed to do,” he said later. “Why we had to go on and make things better if we could.”
This is exactly the sort of philosophy that would naturally come from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian Era. Each worker would have to figure that he’s personally responsible for changing or accepting whatever he must. If he isn’t adequate to do this, loses the battle, fails, and comes up short with big consequences, he’d seem to be an irresponsible and inadequate, loser and failure with very consequential shortcomings. If he doesn’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, he’d seem to be a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent. The word breadwinner arose from the fact that if you won you got your bread, and if you didn’t, you didn’t. And people simply had to adjust and adapt to such realities.
To “go on and make things better if we could,” wouldn’t include pragmatically finding out why, for example, as Dr. Morris Fishbein’s Fads and Quackery in Healing, copyright 1932, said of his era, “Conspicuous among American beverages are food drinks claimed to control nervous breakdowns....” Studying social problems such as the commonality of the nervous breakdowns, even in the most practical and worldly terms, wouldn’t tell those who are most motivated to change the problems how they could do this the most effectively and efficiently.
Yet this is exactly the same as the spirituality of, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.” The unusual word that Niebuhr used the most in his magnum opus, The Nature and Destiny of Man, would very likely be transcend, and, “You can’t worry about what you can’t control... If you worry about what you can’t control, you lose focus. You make bad decisions,” says to choose to transcend any realities that you can’t change. When you’re faced with hardship and/or others’ sinfulness, is when you could least afford to lose focus. This is also the sort of Buddhist mindfulness that self-help psychology loves, the kind that’s mindful only about our controlling our own unhappy emotional reactions, not about controlling our own desires to do destructive things. And though cognitive therapy is supposed to be a modern development originating from such things as the pioneering cognitive therapists practicing transcendence by taking LSD in the 1960s, to say, “You can’t worry about what you can’t control,” is cognitive therapy.
A section from the self-help book The Swan Curriculum, by Nely Galán, from that TV show that feminists hated since it treated plastic surgery for women as if it’s normal, is headed,
and then begins by saying, “Destiny is the belief that every occurrence in life was meant to happen. The idea is that our experiences are our teachers,” and if you don’t buy this, “I urge you—for the duration of your journey as a Swan—to suspend disbelief.” Self-help logic would call such an attitude self-empowering, since it would boost the confidence and optimism of even those faced with tragedies. This would include tragedies for which others are to blame, since everyone knows how cowardly is finding blame. Of course, this book is just as pragmatic about plastic surgery, “For example, you may have always believed that plastic surgery was an exercise in superficiality, although you have often complained about the bags under your eyes. Looking closely at your beliefs will enable you to reaffirm the ones that work and alter those that are causing you difficulty.”
The Dilemma of Psychology, by Lawrence LeShan, PhD, begins by saying that psychology, in the ways that it operates today, can’t deal with the most crucial problems that humanity must face today:
how to stop killing each other
how to stop poisoning our only planet
how to limit our population growth
Yet psychology can’t deal with these, since it’s trying too hard to operate like the hard sciences, so is too mechanistic to reflect the complexities and depth of human interactions. Both psychologists and common sense would interpret someone seeing the world in a one-dimensional fashion, as a sign of a pathology, yet psychologists currently tend to miss a good deal of the complexities of interactions.
But problems like those in LeShan’s list, can’t be changed through psychotherapy, since those who cause them aren’t motivated to change this tendency. Some violent people who’ve suffered enough consequences, have enough of a motivation to change that they would. Yet for the most part, the only people who are motivated to prevent or deal with problems like these, are their victims or potential victims.
Their psychologists not only must handle their conflicts in a one-dimensional fashion, but it must consist of one-dimensional victim-blaming. Sure, the psychologists wouldn’t blame the victims in the sense of condemning them, but in the same sense that the poor people discussed in Blaming the Victim, were fixed as if the cause of their poverty was inside of them. This was supposed to give them self-empowerment, which is good. Blaming the Victim says, “As a result, there is a terrifying sameness in the programs that arise from this kind of analysis,” but anything besides this dogma would seem unpragmatic.
Ann Jones satirically summarized the victim-blaming of battered wives as, “Without the wife-beater’s wife there would be no wife beating,” which has that sameness to it, though it’s literally true, and tells of the most reliable solution to the problem of domestic violence.
We’re to practice such spirituality as, “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,” since this self-discipline would give us more confident outlooks.
The most prominent form of victim-blaming today is blaming abused women for “letting themselves in for” the abuse. In this, we hear quite explicitly that no matter how great is the men’s moral responsibility, psychologists’ attempts to change them would at least be dangerously unreliable, and might be interpreted as the women’s codependent attempts to “fix” their men. “What’s more important, that the men are morally responsible, or that the women are motivated to solve their own problems?” So no matter how non-mechanistic psychologists want to make their own worldview, there’s no way that it could fix the killers, the poisoners, the over-populators, etc.
That was the thinking behind Dr. Frederick Goodwin’s comment during his speech infamous for his remark that violent teenage boys in the ghetto are like monkeys running around in the jungle, about curing the problem of the high crime rates in ghettoes by fixing the more ornery individuals from age five, “you are going to leverage it through individuals, not through large social engineering of society.” This may be even worse, since it says that no matter how many people prove that the high crime rates in bad neighborhoods don’t come from the residents’ biologies being unusually monkey-like, their biologies are still what should be corrected since doing so is what would give the most leverage. The financial crisis of 2008 showed how dangerous a reliance on inadequately limited leverage could be. Sure, now leverage seems to be “the L word,” but at one time leverage seemed to be a great way to get a free ride in the name of pragmatism. (As Henry Paulson testified in 2000 before the Security and Exchange Commission, about allowing investment houses to use more leverage, “[W]e and other global firms have, for many years, urged the SEC to reform its net capital rule to allow for more efficient use of capital.”) Both leverage in the investment world, and the leverage that comes from re-engineering victims, mean that those who pay the costs aren’t the ones who make the real decisions, which is where the dangers come from.
Not only that, if you simply talked about the complexities of what contributed to the violent tendencies, that would seem counterproductive, unless these are complexities in how each child could be handled the most pragmatically. Here’s where you could really see how form follows function, that you simply have to have a life which is functional to a certain degree, so your conceptions of yourself and your relationships with others, must follow from these necessities. “What’s more important, that the problems didn’t come from inside those who are to be fixed, or that fixing them would have the most leverage?”
Near the beginning of an article in the August, 2005 issue of Psychology Today magazine, The Lion Tamer by Cecelia Capuzzi Simon, it says, “Most anger management programs are based on cognitive-behavioral therapy and the premise that our rational thoughts shape our emotional responses.... But research has shown that conventional anger management doesn’t work very well. Domestic violence treatment is even less effective. These programs can help the highly motivated—but most people with problem anger don’t think they have a problem and don’t seek out treatment.” This article tells of an approach that tries to encourage those with problem anger, to let their better natures come forward to subdue the anger.
So not only is “Without the wife-beater’s wife there would be no wife beating,” true, but it also points to the approach that’s most promising, according to the logic of, “These programs can help the highly motivated—but most people with problem anger don’t,” that operates in the day-to-day operation of cognitive therapy. It seems very promising to say that if only those who are the most motivated to stop wife-beating did certain things differently, they could self-efficaciously get wife-beating out of their own lives. Correcting the victims could be called the action-oriented practical and rational approach that helps people gain independence and effectiveness in dealing with real-life issues, while attempts to correct the beaters could seem naïve.
This victim-blaming would especially go for using medications with big risks. As the Zoloft homepage says, “Depression is a serious medical condition, which can lead to the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior. A combined analysis of studies involving 9 antidepressants showed that in people under 18 this risk was 4% for those taking antidepressants compared to 2% for those taking a sugar pill. This risk must be balanced with the medical need,” so if medication is the only alternative to depression, it’s a risky one for teens. Yet if the only choices available to the parents of a suicidal teen are to use medication that might increase but also might decrease the odds of suicide, or accepting the suicidality, then the risky medication could be the most pragmatic choice. What caused suicide to be the third leading cause of death among people aged 10 to 24, would seem completely immaterial. As Henry Ford put it, “Don’t find blame. Find a solution.” One could also ask, “What’s more important, that many of these people shouldn’t have had to use this medication in the first place, or that once they do need it, if you handle the medication right, the benefits could outweigh the risks?”
Dr. David Healy’s Let Them Eat Prozac, says that when Dr. Joseph Glenmullen’s Prozac Backlash came out, the Eli Lilly Company’s PR firms sent out plenty of messages, such as, “The book preys on the fear of people with clinical depression, and may prompt some people to abandon their medication and seek medically unproven alternatives for a debilitating disease with potentially life-threatening consequences.”
Certainly you could imagine the response that someone would get, if he talked of how behavior that caused depression in others, had debilitating and potentially life-threatening consequences. Many would respond, “How that idealist prey upon us by being so guilt-tripping, manipulative, restrictive, quixotic, and judgmental!”
Ironically, Lilly had just applied for a patent on an element of Prozac, since this was proven to be the safest part. So a reporter from the Boston Globe looked up the patent for this element, recently written by the Lilly company, and saw that they included in it, “Furthermore, [Prozac] produces a state of inner restlessness (akathisia), which is one of its more significant side effects,” “The adverse affects which are decreased by administering the [new element of Prozac] include but are not limited to headaches, nervousness, anxiety, insomnia, inner restlessness (akathisia), suicidal thoughts and self mutilation.” The fact that the Lilly company wrote that Prozac has these dangers and that the new drug would only “decrease” them, were simple truths. Yet, as Let Them Eat Prozac put it, “Replying for Lilly in the Boston Globe, Gary Tollefson took a familiar tack, arguing that sufferers from the debilitating disease that was depression were being unwarrantedly stigmatized, and the result of this would be that they would fail to seek treatment and lives would be lost.” One would think that what really would stigmatize the 20,000,000 Americans who have a serious depressive disorder in any given year, would be to hold that their biologies are inherently deficient without newly-invented medication, so the only options that they have are depression with a risky medication, and depression without it.
Yet even though this was self-serving on the part of Lilly, it could possibly be that for people to be unaware of the risks of SSRI antidepressants, is pragmatic. Even if the number of suicides that the medication induces are less than the number of suicides that it prevents, one could say that the benefits outweigh the costs, so not only should people accept the medication, but if they don’t, they’re choosing the option that would lead to relatively more suicides. Of course, if we didn’t stigmatize those with depression as having biologies that are inherently like that, we could see that except for the depression that really is only natural, they shouldn’t have had depression in the first place. Then again, one could also hold that even in the preventable cases of depression, each individual does have only two options available, with medication, or without. He couldn’t change those who triggered the depression, and could change himself, including his own brain chemistry through medication. Therefore, for 20,000,000 Americans in any given year to take whatever antidepressant seems the most effective, even one that only prevents more suicides than it induces, could be called the most pragmatic option available to them.
That’s the central point, that people are a lot more motivated to wash their brains of depressed thoughts, than of angry thoughts. Both controlling anger that one wants to control, and controlling passive unhappiness, could be described as an action-oriented practical and rational approach helps the patient gain independence and effectiveness in dealing with real-life issues. Yet as long as the angry person doesn’t want to change his anger, trying to get him to wouldn’t seem action-oriented practical and rational, and the whiny (or even assertive) complaints wouldn’t seem very independent or realistically effective. People are a lot more likely to choose to think serene thoughts when they’re faced with problems they can’t change, than when they’re tempted to do aggressive things. Cognitive therapy, therefore, would probably be a lot less successful in stopping unwarranted anger, than in treating warranted unhappiness. One could conceivably treat unhappy feelings by letting the unhappy people’s better natures come forward to control them, if one defines “strong character” as Enron’s ethos would, as anathematizing any thoughts statements actions and omissions, that could possibly be called “manipulative.” Yet that would have to seem convincing, and why bother convincing someone of the moral justice of something that he’s already motivated to do? If the anger to be controlled is making one dysfunctional, on the other hand (so he’s in a more passive position than are the angry “lions”), he would be motivated to change that, so he’d be expected to choose to think serene thoughts rather than be convinced to think more civilized thoughts.
More of this on Victim Correction Webpage 15
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
