#3-24
Reality & Appearances Don’t Make Allowances
“why do we crucify ourselves every day I crucify myself
nothing I do is good enough for you crucify myself every
day and my HEART is sick of being in chains”—Tori Amos lyric, on the nothing.i.do.is.ever.good.enough webpage.
ll three of these, by definition, are explicitly absolutist. If a victim responds, “On a scale of one to ten, how responsible for this am I, and why?”, this would seem self-defeating, obstructionist, and scaringly manipulative. If it’s your welfare at stake then, automatically, you’d simply be the one who you’d most want to be taking care of it perseveringly, the one who’d look like a mollycoddle if you don’t, and the one who’d be unforgiving. If you asked about anything else, this would seem like a bunch of intellectualisms in the face of something serious, though you might be humored for a while before you’re expected to get serious, if you could afford this. Enron’s corporate culture explicitly aimed for “intellectual purity,” a purity in their Social Darwinism, since it wouldn’t work too well if it allowed for any ideas that would conflict with it. Some of these ideas would be very compelling, which would make them seem all the more dangerous.
A MedicineNet.com webpage on depression says, “Depression is a very common condition that is believed by many experts to be the number one cause of disability in the world. In the U.S., 17% of people will experience depression at some point in their lives. An estimated 19 million people in the U.S. are currently suffering from depression. Depression is more common in women than in men, with 25% of women suffering from depression severe enough to warrant treatment at least once during their lifetime.
“It’s important to remember that depression is an illness that affects both the body and mind. It is not something that we can just wish away or ‘snap out of’, nor is it a sign of a weak character.”When you’ve seen ads and other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? That’s one heck of a social problem, yet it seems to be just something to be remedied in each affected individual separately. As usual, when convention attributes even that many depressions to ‘weak characters,’ this means that somehow all those Americans are supposed to have characters that are that weak, not that those who triggered them must have morally weak characters. Yet it would be pretty hard to go halfway with this, saying that sure, in a society with a natural rate of depression, the issue would be whatever biological or characterological weaknesses are inside the victims, but not in a society with unnatural rates. Victim correctors only want addicts’ kids, etc., to be more self-efficacious, serene, etc. If I simply have to take care of my own problem, then I simply have to take care of my own problem. My natural common sense tells me that the rampant depression that this normalcy leads to, constitutes a social problem. The weak moral characters of those who caused the problems, played a more important part than any possible wimpiness of the victims’ characters.”
Accepting anything short of a complete resolution would also seem unrealistic, since dealing with your problem 90% of the way doesn’t entitle you to an A grade. Dealing with the problem only 90% of the way would mean plenty of breaches in your defenses, resentment, chaos, etc. It’s traditional that Americans classify people as either redbloods or mollycoddles, an all-or-nothing dichotomy, since if any failures could still seem honorable, people could get away with using all sorts of mollycoddle excuses and sophistry.
When Bush said, on October 2, 2008 after a meeting with business leaders, about The Great Wall Street Bailout, “This is an issue that’s affecting hardworking people. They’re worried about their savings, they’re worried about their jobs, they’re worried about their houses, they’re worried about their small businesses. The House of Representatives must listen to these voices and get this bill passed so we can get about the business of restoring confidence,” this might not look like he was talking about a $700,000,000,000 bailout. Yet, because of the magnitude of the problem, that was what the guv’mint had to do to restore all that depended on that confidence.
Though this conception of personal responsibility is usually self-reliant, in this case realism means something different, so that’s what has to happen. Of course the person who has any problem seems to be the one who’s responsible for it, since he has the greatest motivation to solve it as well as possible. He’s simply response-able for his own welfare, and this applies even when others unambiguously caused his problems, i.e. “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 is self-help, and self-help gurus would tell their students, “You wouldn’t want to leave your welfare at anyone else’s mercy, would you?” A self-help guru also couldn’t tell someone, “If you’re mature enough to deal with a society in which depression affects 1 in 4 persons at some point in their lifetimes, that’s plenty of maturity!”, if he lives in a society in which depression affects 1 in 3 persons at some point in their lifetimes.
This is insensitive in the same ways as is equating strength with honorability and weakness with cunning, but both of these are absolutely achievement-oriented, which could seem all-important. Also, once this self-reliance even in the face of hardship, sinfulness, etc., is the norm, those who don’t live up to it could very easily seem to be cunningly trying to shirk it, wanting the world to be as they’d have it. A culture must define “personal responsibility” is some way, and those who’d deviate from it would therefore seem deviantly irresponsible.
Fundament Christians might say that the sort of forgiving spirituality that self-help psychology promotes, is very different from Christian forgiveness, which balances it with an accountability from one’s community. Without this, the forgiveness could prove dangerously permissive. What self-help psychology is very likely to say, is that it’s an unforgiving and judgmental attitude that would be dangerously permissive if not balanced with an accountability from one’s community. Whenever one holds another responsible for harm he did him, he’d be expecting him to do something, or stop doing something. Sure, one could look at statements from Arthur Schopenhauer, Hitler’s main role model, such as, “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,” and think, “Yeah, I could see why he was Hitler’s main role model!” Yet the fact would still remain that whenever anyone holds others morally accountable, at the very least this would reflect his own strivings and desires. To one degree or another, this could even be intentionally manipulative. Even if someone sincerely believes that someone else owes him, one could still say that naturally he wants to believe that, so it could still be called manipulative. Even if you feel totally miserable and scared about what happened, cynics could still call that an attitude of, “But you owe me!” Many think that it’s a lot easier to defend oneself from aggressive tactics, than it would be to defend himself from emotionalist claims that he did something shameful. Therefore, it could seem that the only way that moral accountability would be safe, is if others in a community could see it and make sure that it isn’t self-serving.
Everyone knows that the most basic definition of mental health is that you deal with your own realities whatever they may be. If you aren’t adequate to do this, lose the battle, fail, and come up short with big consequences, you’d seem to be an irresponsible and inadequate, loser and failure with very consequential shortcomings. If you don’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, you’d seem to be a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent. That would make you both self-defeating, and dishonorably weak.
Likewise, an unconditional agape-style forgiveness would eliminate all bitterness, and for pragmatic reasons, those who must deal with their own problems may not be able to afford any feelings which dishearten or distract them. A lack of the Virtue of Forgiveness could seem dishonorable just as supposedly cunning weakness does, whiny and willful, and you don’t want to seem somewhat whiny and willful. Our culture cares far more about the Virtue of Self-Reliance than the Virtue of Forgiveness, and that disheartening and distractive, whiny willfulness, could seem to be going against the Virtue of Self-Reliance.
Matthew 5:43-48 says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Cross Christian forgiveness with pragmatism, and you’d end up with the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression. These would say that your reality is your reality whether good or evil, and we all must unconditionally accept all reality. Also, you’d better surmount your bad realities with perfect success, or you’re going to accumulate a lot of almost-solved and partially-solved problems, and weaknesses.
The cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, as defined by David D. Burns, MD in his book Feeling Good, are: All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filter, Disqualifying the Positive, Jumping to Conclusions, Magnification [of what’s wrong with the depressed or right with others] or Minimization [of what’s right with the depressed or wrong with others], Emotional Reasoning, Should Statements [Dr. Burns says, “ ‘Musts’ and ‘oughts’ are also offenders.”], Labeling and Mislabeling, and Personalization [which Dr. Burns defines as, “You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.”]. This mindset disallows the same realizations that Enron’s “intellectually pure” Social Darwinism disallows, realizing: who’s to blame, what the devastated people did right, how good that was, which expectations are unreasonable, and everything else besides “Did I succeed, or did I fail?”
All-or-Nothing Thinking wouldn’t require James 2:8-13, “If you really fulfill the royal law, according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you do well. But if you show partiality, you commit sin, and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ said also, ‘Do not kill.’ If you do not commit adultery but do kill, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy; yet mercy triumphs over judgment.”
You’ve simply got to figure that since the forgiving law of liberty is good, you’re simply responsible for stabilizing your own life, and either you’ve gotten things back to normal or you haven’t; 90% is a failing grade. That would have to mean a good deal of overgeneralization, mentally filtering out distractions from the problems you must correct, and disqualifying the positive since that’s a distraction. You wouldn’t dare object to not having enough information that you wouldn’t have to jump to conclusions. You’d magnify what you can change, what’s wrong with yourself, and minimize what you can’t change, what’s wrong with anyone else, including any evil. In such a panicky situation, you might not be able to be even as logical as your insufficient information would allow. Besides, red-blooded anti-intellectuals love emotional reasoning. The whole idea is what you should be doing adequately to take care of yourself. Everything would be labeled according to whether they mean success or failure, honorability or dishonor, for you. And if the only question you could legitimately ask is, “Can I change this?”, the ultimate question is how successfully you react to what happened, not whether you actually caused it. We all know all the things that are wrong with those who care about who’s to blame.
Going back to that Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature for Alateen,
as well as what Gambler’s Anonymous’ handbook has to say about how pathological gamblers’ family members simply must deal with their own realities, how the Al-Anon Conference-Approved book ...In All Our Affairs: Making Crises Work for You, says that alkies’ wives are simply supposed to deal with their crises, etc., in this exemplary self-help literature you could see plenty of absolutisms. And if your reality involves what causes our rampant depression, you must deal with that just as stolidly and self-reliantly. If you have an attitude toward that of, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, you’re more likely to succeed resiliently resourcefully and independently. The worse that your problem would be, the more important it would be that you succeed.
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
