#3-26
(which implies that)
“● Linda C. Thomsen, deputy director of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission: ‘[T]he President’s Corporate Task Force, which celebrates its second anniversary tomorrow... [has demonstrated that] just the mention of the name Enron evokes images of duplicity and greed.’
“● Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Mark W. Everson: ‘[T]he corporate culture of Enron guided by Mr. Lay is now synonymous with corporate fraud and greed at its worst. And Enron’s crooked “E” logo depicts the corporate management team at Enron—crooked.’
“Are these signs of a dispassionate prosecution of crime? To me they look more like part of a political campaign.”—Ken Lay, on his PR website
rwellianisms are typical. Afro-American street slang for victim-blaming is “The Flip Game,” in that aggressors seem to be victims and vice versa. The more powerless a person is, the more that his powerlessness would seem to reflect what he really wants (though he may deny it), though since he’s powerless, it was pretty hard to make anything reflect his wants. Nietzsche defined evil as, “whatever springs from weakness,” and though it might be hard to think of the weak as evil-doers, you’d be amazed how the weak could seem to be playing an active part in their own weakness, maybe diabolically, since conceivably they could get what they want manipulatively.
As Pfizer’s Learning About Depression webpage says, “If you have depression, this sad mood along with other symptoms can last weeks, months, or even years if not treated. Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or a character flaw. It’s a real medical condition, but there are ways to successfully treat depression.... Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults.” You’d think that a lot of people would want, even need, to ask questions about that, other than whether it consists of 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions, or 34,000,000 rather severe character flaws.
Anti-Stigma: Do You Know the Facts?, a webpage of the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, says, “An estimated 22 to 23 percent of the U.S. population experience a mental disorder in any given year, but almost half of these individuals do not seek treatment... Do you know that an estimated 44 million Americans experience a mental disorder in any given year?”
Also, The American Pharmaceutical Association’s Highlights newsletter for July, 1999, says, “Depression is so prevalent it has been called ‘the common cold’ of mental health disorders. But this serious disease is nothing to sneeze at: Depression leads to more deaths every year than AIDS, costs the nation as much as coronary heart disease, and causes incalculable misery for people of all ages, races and ethnic groups.... Myth #1: Depression is a sign of moral weakness or personal failure. ‘Depression is a disease that results from biochemical disturbances in the brain,’ said Dr. Stokes. ‘It is not a character flaw and not something you can get over by pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.’ Patients also should know that depression is not their fault.”
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? The sufferers are the ones who could be stigmatized. They seem to have the moral weaknesses, personal failures, and character flaws that are the problems. It should be obvious that the best way to get rid of this stigma, would be to show how much this is a social problem. Anything that’s this common, isn’t aberrant. Each depression and other mental illness is so serious, that any untermensch attitude problems that could cause depression in those who have them, would therefore have to be very severe. If that many Americans have such serious moral weaknesses, personal failures, and character flaws, then that would have to make one wonder about why the American culture is so enfeebling. If I decided to compromise, and treat this very serious social problem as if it’s only a moderately serious social problem, I’d still be seeming to care too much. By caring somewhat, that would make me somewhat discouraged, maladjusted, thinking like a victim, etc.
“Not only that, for a culture that preaches free thought, this certainly requires people to believe some strange things. If you don’t treat all that depression, anxiety, etc., as if the problem is, in one way or another, inside of each of the victims, you’d have all the disadvantages of that much skepticism of your society’s norms. Yet, ‘If you care, you’re bad,’ can only go so far! It really is only natural to care if your society has that rate of depression, and that isn’t only a natural weakness of character, desire to blame your own problems on others or ‘play the victim role,’ etc.!”
Yet believing that the moral weaknesses personal failures and character flaws that cause so much depression, are the victims’ supposed weaknesses failures and flaws, fits our cultural presumptions that the strong and the self-reliant are redbloods, and the weak who don’t just take care of their own problems are mollycoddles. What those sufferers seem to be suffering from, is a lack of treatment. Though it might seem only natural to figure that holding those who have the problems response-able for taking care of their own problems, is realistic self-reliant and forgiving, while holding the morally responsible people responsible is naďve manipulative and judgmental, and the worse is what he did the more that holding him responsible would seem naďve manipulative and judgmental, your natural common sense should tell you that this would lead to The Big Lie, where the worse that someone was victimized, the more that he’s response-able for.
Such logic actually turns on its head, our usual conception of good and bad, and you’d be expected to abide by the norms and social sanctions that are behind our rampant depression. That’s why if you care about what causes depressive to disorders affect about 34 million American adults, you’d seem bad. It could seem that, given whatever your realities are in such a society, you’re personally responsible for changing or accepting whatever you must. Therefore, 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. If you care about the 34,000,000 rather than just assuming that all are response-able for their own problems, you could seem to be: controlling, restrictive, manipulative, anti-freedom, opinionated, judgmental, blaming, making excuses for your own failures, giving support to dictators and/or terrorists who’d trump such American problems as reasons why they should have power, whiny, self-defeatingly pessimistic, passive, untermensch, intellectualist, spineless, practicing “victimology” “victimhood” or a “victim culture,” etc. Regarding the Great Wall Street Bailout of 2008, Bush said in his speech of September 24, “Investment banks, such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, found themselves saddled with large amounts of assets they could not sell.... Other banks found themselves in severe financial trouble,” so treating them as passively finding themselves in trouble, didn’t seem to be coddling weak manipulators.
(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.)
Those who’d treat you as bad, must think that a society with that rate of depression could just go on like this forever, that as long as no one researches this social problem to find out the specifics of what causes it, people will just go on feeling compelled to adjust to these realities, since they don’t want to seem bad.
“Might makes right” might seem to be the opposite of magical thinking, though actually, it involves a good deal of magical thinking, since it requires believing that power equals rightness. Winners must seem deserving, intrepid, motivated, proud, pro-freedom, excusable, etc., while losers who don’t take response-ability for their own problems must seem undeserving, manipulative, , egotistical, controlling, evasive, etc.
How any society maintains homeostasis, or self-stability, would have to make a big difference in what it does or doesn’t socially sanction. If a society puts a great deal of emphasis on response-ability for one’s own welfare, then naturally it would sanction, “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.” That’s what would be necessary for this society to maintain homeostasis, so if you don’t accept that morally bankrupt conception of “personal responsibility,” you’d seem bad. No matter what your problem is, including hardship and/or others’ sinfulness ad infinitum, you’re simply supposed to deal with it, by courageously changing what you can, and serenely accepting what you can’t. It seems only natural that the strong would courageously change reality, and the weak would serenely accept reality.
After all, this is the sort of personal responsibility that has self-interest motivating people to solve problems. Personal responsibility that’s gauged by whose problem it is, is a lot more objective than is any moral responsibility, especially when you consider all the mitigating factors it would involve. Response-ability for one’s own problems couldn’t inhibit the redbloods. Moral responsibility could seem mollycoddle. Response-ability for one’s own welfare is also forgiving, so would seem both virtuous and well-adjusted. And if this is how any society gets its homeostasis, then this society must make sure that it gets it, by pressuring those who don’t live up to these expectations.
Under this zeitgeist, moral responsibility could easily seem to be a moral hazard, the sort of moral hazard that could be very powerful, very forceful and compelling, and one can’t defend himself against it without looking as if he’s re-victimizing victims. After all, most moral responsibility is at least somewhat subjective. Naturally we can expect that, in the real world, people will take care of their own problems instead of caring about who’s morally responsible for them. 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 Don’t Try to Pull Machinations,” so all that even kids have to do to seem manipulative, is not handle their own problems resiliently resourcefully and independently enough. Therefore, when someone insists that someone besides himself take moral responsibility, that could seem to be his opinion. Therefore, his judgmental and manipulative opinion.
Sure, Schopenhauer’s statements, “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 “Wrong through violence is not so ignominious for the perpetrator as wrong through cunning, because the former is evidence of physical strength, which in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race. The latter, on the other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays weakness, and at the same time degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral being,” might look like good reasons why he was Hitler’s idol. Yet, except for the physical violence, this really isn’t any different from what William James described when he wrote that Americans tend to classify people as either redbloods or mollycoddles. The redbloods are those who, because of their toughness, in all circumstances powerfully impress the human race. The mollycoddles are those who are weak, and, therefore, seem ignominiously cunning. To say that your feelings that something was bad or evil reflect a striving of your , is to say that that they’re manipulative, reflecting a self-serving hidden agenda that even you probably aren’t aware of. All you know is that you’re right. Of course, the bad or evil person’s bad or evil choices, his belief that excusing or forgiving them is what’s right, etc., certainly reflect the striving of his , but it would seem that we simply must accept that that’s the way that human nature is.
The only question that one could honorably ask about his own problem, no matter how much hardship, sinfulness, etc., was involved in it, is, “Can I change this?”, over and over and over again to optimistically look for ways in which he could change each aspect of it if he were good enough. For example, the Gam-Anon chapter of Gamblers Anonymous’ handbook, includes, “The aim of the Gam-Anon program is to aid the individuals involved with a compulsive gambler to find help by changing their own lives.... Living or being associated with a compulsive gambler creates its own kind of hell. For most people, it is a devastating experience... At any moment the house might be lost or the furniture repossessed. There may not be enough money to put food on the table or clothe the children.... The meeting is opened with a moment of silent meditation and closed with the Serenity Prayer.” And the philosophies of such ladies’ auxiliaries to Twelve-Step groups, have inspired a lot of current self-help psychology in general. If it’s your problem, you’d better just help yourself.
Being punitive could seem bad. For example, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr., whom the New York Times described as a “hard-charging former Wall Street deal maker,” responded to the virtual economic meltdown of 2008 by saying, “This is a humbling experience to see so much fragility in our capital markets,” but he also said that the proposed bailout program shouldn’t deal with reforming excessive executive compensation since, “In order to have this program work, we don’t want to make it punitive.” No matter how shocked he might be about this crisis and fragility it shows, caring and doing something about blame would concern punishment, and to a hard-charging former Wall Street deal maker, that would seem bad.
At first, the gambler’s wife would look at the real problem, his gambling, ask herself, “Can I change this?”, and answer, “No.” Even if someone caused her problems that couldn’t be attributed to a mental disease that made him not guilty by reason of insanity, she still absolutely can’t change others’ actions and can change her own reactions. Next, she’d think, “No law is forcing me to stay married to him. Can I change this?” If she can afford to, she’d answer “Yes,” move out, and whenever her new desperate living situation caused her problems, she’d ask about each aspect of each one, “Can I change this?” If she can’t afford to leave, then she’d have to look at each of the realities that he caused for her, and ask about each aspect of it, “Can I change this?” In any case, the only choices that she’d have available to her would be this pragmatism, or those big realities making her life very dysfunctional. Those who face their problems solely along the lines of, “Can I change this? Can I change this? Can I change this? Can I change this? Can I change this?”, would probably be most likely to succeed. This is the main idea of all victim correction as a panacea, such as that no matter what caused 34,000,000 Americans to suffer from serious depressive disorders, they can’t change this, but can each change their own brain chemistries through anti-depressants.
Other than in the most unambiguous cases, when one person holds another morally responsible, this would have to reflect his own , his own sense of, “But you owe me!” To whatever degree this would reflect his own , it could be called ignominiously cunning, and repressing those whose strength would powerfully impress the human race in all circumstances, or as modern self-help would call it, manipulative and controlling. This would be the moral hazard we must protect ourselves from. How do we really distinguish between situations where the person with the problem really should just take care of himself, and situations where moral responsibility would be warranted? This has plenty of ramifications that would basically treat fairness as if it was unfairness, since fairness doesn’t accomplish anything, isn’t the sort of thing that in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race, is subjective and opinionated, is relative, is abstract, etc. After all, unconditional personal response-ability for one’s own welfare, is
As Leston L. Havens, M.D., began the chapter Psychiatric Ideals, in his book Approaches to the Mind, “THE APPARENTLY PHILOSOPHICAL matter of ideals is in fact practical first and last.” The expectations made of each person involved in any conflict, regarding the ideals that each is truly expected to live up to, are extremely practical. The virtue of forgiveness might seem to be just another idealized abstraction, until you’re expected to forgive too much, are condemned if you don’t, but of course the forgiven person wouldn’t be told that he must replace his problematic attitudes with serene ones.
“Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” means that when you come up against a sinner, you’ll likely be the one who ends up seeming to be up to no good. As Schopenhauer wrote, “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.” Even if you object to unambiguous sinfulness, if you’re insistent enough, that could seem to be just abstractions expressing your SELF-WILL that the world be as you’d have it. You could seem self-righteous, resentful, etc., and since the weak person seems the least impressive, it could be very easy to slap such labels on you. Even if you didn’t intend to manipulate, you could still seem cunning, since what you sincerely believe you’re entitled to, is also what you want to believe you’re entitled to.
Dr. Joseph Healy, in Let Them Eat Prozac, says near the beginning, “The story takes in the network of ‘friends’ that makes the psychopharmacology and other scientific worlds go around, worlds in which the good guys could easily be the bad guys,” and, near the end, “This story has everything conspiracy buffs could want: smoking-gun memos that reach into the heart of the FDA; a perfect set of motives; and sets of mirrors that make it difficult to work out who are the good guys and who the bad.” In those particular worlds, what could confuse good and bad is that manufacturers have so much power to shape what’s reality, what would constitute success-oriented thinking, etc., that their interests could very easily be reflected in what seems to constitute goodness. Yet when it comes to the sort of problem-solving that self-help, clinical mental health care, etc., do, the same dynamic is at work, but covering a much greater world. This is the world of “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.” As long as anyone else has the power to shape what’s reality for you, then what he did would determine what would constitute success-oriented thinking for you.
For you to become well-adjusted in the face of that, is what would seem good, and for you not to is what would seem bad. Any attention given to the moral responsible person’s moral responsibility, would, if you take it seriously enough, seem bad: as if you expected the world to be as you’d have it, possibly cunningly, or maybe as naďve and pointless, or maybe as resentful and judgmental, etc. And, of course, this moral bankruptcy is what seems good, since if you take as Jesus did this sinful world, you’d ALWAYS get all the benefits of being well-adjusted. The same would go for if you got rid of depression for which someone else was unambiguously morally responsible, by taking antidepressants as if it was simply your disease. One wouldn’t need a conspiracy to have sets of mirrors that make it difficult to work out who are the good guys and who the bad, or even smoking-gun memos that reach into the heart of the FDA. Simply prioritizing pragmatism over immaterial abstractions like moral responsibility, is enough to make good seem bad and bad seem good, and that includes the FDA being pragmatic like this. The practices of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, that they say are currently business as usual, aren’t from a conspiracy, either, just everyone acting in concert since that’s what constitutes fitting in, succeeding, and being realistic red-blooded and non-judgmental.
Joe Hunt, the leader of the typically 1980s “Billionaire Boys’ Club,” who’s now in prison for murder, called his own moral bankruptcy the “Paradox Philosophy.” Richard Wightman Fox’s book Reinhold Niebuhr says, “True happiness, he repeated in one sermon after another, was akin to what the world called unhappiness.... Niebuhr proposed what he considered Jesus’ final, unsurpassable ‘revelation of life’: ‘Who seeks his life will lose it. Who loses it will find it.’ Again and again he returned to that paradox—the one he had chosen in 1913 for the sermon in Lincoln that followed his father’s death. ‘A paradox is always foolish,’ he said in October, 1923, ‘until you begin to analyze it and then you see that it is fundamental and irresistible. Those who seek their life do lose happiness, and those who forget their happiness in some great cause do achieve life.’” Of course, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” is about managing banalities rather than working for a great cause, unless you figure that such unconditional response-ability for one’s own welfare is what our conceptions of freedom depend on.
This could look a lot like The Big Lie. Modern Western psychology’s two biggest influences, Freud and Niebuhr, had very Wagnerian ideas about what each person does or doesn’t have a right to expect from those who he lives with. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation zeitgeist has four main elements: Aggressive sinful willfulness is ineradicable, and you shouldn’t repress it, restrict it, pass judgment on it, etc. This is also a main theme of psychoanalysis.
Therefore, to cope, we must Stoically represent our own experiences to ourselves as being as innocuous as possible, a la cognitive therapy. Though cognitive therapy would be just as effective in re-engineering aggressive human nature as it would be in re-engineering hurt feelings, cognitive therapy is far more likely to be used on those who have the problems, than on those who cause them.
The willfulness of the weak who don’t do this, seems both eradicable and ignominious. Impugning the weak is pretty much the norm. Even if when they assertively stand up for their own rights, this didn’t involve any cunning, what they sincerely believe are their rights was no doubt affected by what they want to believe they’re entitled to, so this could still seem manipulative. And while sinfulness must be forgiven, supposed manipulativeness mustn’t be.
This is it be the world as will and representation, not just some situations, such as those in which people are overreacting so the goal is to make their representations of their experience, more accurate. A self-help slogan says, “Which would you rather be, right, or happy?”, and some AA slogans say, “Everything is perception,” “Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm,” “Embracing your disappointments will help you to heal faster,” and, “Optimism is an intellectual choice.” Even though an estimated 22 to 23 percent of the U.S. population experience a mental disorder in any given year, and an estimated 44 million Americans experience a mental disorder in any given year, it still seems unpragmatic to treat this as a social problem, pragmatic to make use of how much choice each victim has.
In this Big Lie, it seems that the victims are the schemers, and the schemers are the victims. If you disagree with this, you’d hear logic that has the appeal of The Big Lie. That is, that this may seem illogical to those who aren’t the initiated, but those who think in the right way could see it. You want to be one of those who are smart enough to “get it,” don’t you? You must ignore any awareness of what’s wrong with what you’re supposed to believe, since your skepticism comes from what’s wrong with mollycoddle human nature and naturally you want to rise above that, etc. With a small lie, skepticism would seem only natural, but with The Big Lie, any skepticism would seem to be missing the point.
At the beginning of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Response to Stanley Williams’ petition for Executive Clemency, November 16, 2005, is quoted the following, from The Killing of Bonnie Garland, by Willard Gaylin,
When one person kills another, there is immediate revulsion at the nature of the crime. But in a time so short as to seem indecent to the members of the personal family, the dead person ceases to exist as an identifiable figure. To those individuals in the community of good will and empathy, warmth and compassion, only one of the key actors in the drama remains with whom to commiserate—and that is always the criminal. The dead person ceases to be a part of everyday reality, ceases to exist. She is only a figure in a historic event. We inevitably turn away from the past, toward the ongoing reality. And the ongoing reality is the criminal; trapped, anxious, now helpless, isolated, often badgered and bewildered. He usurps the compassion that is justly his victim’s due. He will steal his victim’s moral constituency along with her life.
In the case of genuinely punitive decisions, especially serious ones like the death penalty, naturally many would want to make sure that the criminal’s intent was or is evil enough to warrant the punishment. Yet the above would be true even in situations where the moral responsibility would be limited to expecting someone to fix the damages that he caused. When it’s time to take moral responsibility for anything, it would be bygone history, which the morally responsible person would be helpless to undo. In pragmatic terms, one could tell the victim that caring about what was morally responsible won’t do him any good, but caring about what he will do in the future, would deal with his ongoing reality. In terms of what seems honorable, the morally responsible one would likely be classified as the redblood so we’d care about his being trapped anxious helpless isolated badgered and bewildered in the name of morality, while the victim would seem mollycoddle if he cared about such moral concerns. And in terms of what seems spiritually virtuous, forgiving him would seem good, and passing judgment on him would seem bad. “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” certainly indicates a passing revulsion at the destructive sinfulness, but what really gets corrected in the end, is the victims’ supposed willful judgmentalism. And rather than just wanting to make sure that the morally responsible one isn’t greatly punished, he genuinely would get compassion.
It might seem like just philosophy to say: What powerfully impresses the human race, are the strong people who now are trapped anxious helpless isolated badgered and bewildered. If the victims simply faced their own problems by single-mindedly and self-reliantly fixing the ongoing realities, that would make them look as impressive as they could. What would seem ignominiously cunning, would be for the weak to make the strong, trapped anxious helpless isolated badgered and bewildered, over something that’s now bygone history so they’re helpless to undo it.
Yet if you’re in such a situation, such expectations certainly don’t seem to be just Schopenhauerian philosophy pondering what is good and what is bad.
The only assertive statement that one could respectably hold firm on, would be to say, “No, I won’t do your bidding.” Other assertive statements, such as, “Stop violating my rights,” and “Take responsibility for the consequences of the free choices that you made,” would reflect the concept that’s “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.” One could always ask to what degree even the most sincere assertive complaints, would constitute cunning guilt-tripping, the aggrieved sincerely believing what they want to believe, etc.
These Orwellianisms include:
“Candidness is manipulation.” (If victims talk candidly of what happened to them, with no conniving but also no minimizing, they’d be trying to resolve their problems through persuasive words rather than self-reliant action, and different people have different conceptualizations for what constitutes manipulation.)
“Self-determination is dealing with what others caused.” (Reacting effectively and making the best of hardship even if it resulted from others’ sinfulness, benefits oneself.)
“Freedom of the mind is directing your thought however would keep this hardship sinfulness and surrender from bothering you.” (This benefits oneself.)
“Distortion is realism.” (If the goal of the distortion is pragmatic, it would serves\ realistic goals and possibly realistic necessities.)
“Moral clarity clouds the issue.”
“Dysfunctional families are the hellacious source of most psychological problems, one of our society’s most burdensome afflictions, but if you try to ‘control’ someone by deterring him from doing something that’s making his family dysfunctional, that would indicate that you want to control people, that you have ‘control issues’, that you want this sinful world to be as you’d have it.”
“Victimizers are victims,” of those who hold them accountable.
“Victims are victimizers,” when the victims seem to be trying to pull some passive-aggressive manipulations, such as by being candid or otherwise unforgiving. (All of the synonyms that the thesaurus in Microsoft Word gives for “unforgiving” are: revengeful, relentless, shameful, awful, terrible, hurting, avenging, ruthless and cruel, and all the synonyms that the Roget’s Thesaurus gives are: pitiless, unpitying, unpitiful, unsympathetic, unsympathizing, uncompassionate, uncompassioned, merciless, unmerciful, without mercy, ruthless, dog-eat-dog, unfeeling, bowelless, inclement, relentless, inexorable, unyielding, heartless, hard, flinty, harsh, cruel, remorseless, and unremorseful.) “Spirituality is determined by what problems you must transcend in the material world.”
The sardonic, aggressively angry der stürmers like Rush Limbaugh, pundits with big audiences, saying in sardonic, aggressively angry voices, “How dare you say that you’re being barraged by aggressive people! You must be just trying to play the victim role!” Clearly this Wagnerian appeal turns their fans on, yet if you act as if that’s the sort of mentality that would get turned on by this, you’d seem to be playing the victim.
More of this on Victim Correction Webpage 26
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
