#3-27
f Addicts Can’t Control Themselves, Don’t Let Them Control You.
“He was hospitalized for recurring breakdowns in 1964 and 1968 and 1996, the last time after a motor vehicle arrest when he argued that red lights were only for others.”—David France, Our Fathers, about the priest who had two children with a married parishioner who was lobotomized because she suffered from serious depression. When she killed herself by taking an overdose, he left the scene rather than being caught with her. He also had a tendency toward pathologically obsessive affairs with teenage single mothers.
“Does s/he have a pervasive ‘the rules don’t apply to me’ attitude?”—The Thorburn Substance Addiction Recognition Indicator, which also asks about other attitudinal problems
“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”—the unredacted Serenity Prayer
“Even though open discussion has become more common through the years, there are still myths and mindsets that seem never to progress. ‘Forgive and forget,’ they say. Offenders are champions. They are champions of denial and rationalization and minimization and intellectualization, all used to make themselves feel better.”—Jacqui Theobald, Forgive and Forget Doesn’t Work, Sexual abusers find ways to justify their actions
ictim correction when abused looks like sociopathy or addictive personalities, which isn’t surprising when you consider that the main influence on modern self-help, were the ex cathedra statements from the founders of AA, as recorded in their Big Book.
Both addictive personalities, and the anti-repression and pro-self-help worldview that’s typical of modern psychology, have the same Wagnerian and morally bankrupt quality to them. Absolute moral bankruptcy is absolute moral bankruptcy is absolute moral bankruptcy, no matter what it came from. A possible symptom of the Antisocial Personality Disorder, listed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV, is “lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.” The intent of this, might seem radically different from the intent of a Stoic self-help guru telling the victim of sinfulness to be serenely indifferent to it, or to rationalize another’s having had hurt, mistreated, or stolen from him since then he’s more likely to adjust to the little misfortune. Yet not only would both lead to moral bankruptcy, but those with selfishly indifferent attitude problems, would be all too likely to treat indifference as the most important good attitude to have. Addictive personalities likely come with Nietzschian attitudes that winning through power is honest while winning through assertively standing up for one’s own rights is insidiously scary. Yet that’s also how post-Reagan self-help tells us how to think, that assertive words don’t serenely accept or courageously change anything.
For example, Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America, the Final Report of the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, says near the beginning of its Executive Summary, “In any given year, about 5% to 7% of adults have a serious mental illness, according to several nationally representative studies. A similar percentage of children — about 5% to 9% — have a serious emotional disturbance. These figures mean that millions of adults and children are disabled by mental illnesses every year. President Bush said, ‘…Americans must understand and send this message: mental disability is not a scandal — it is an illness. And like physical illness, it is treatable, especially when the treatment comes early.’”
When you’ve seen 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 excessive social problem, with some excessively culpable behavior causing it. The sorts of coping skills that we’d need to cope with it, would have to be so unconditional that they’d be morally bankrupt. If we cared about who have the morally responsibility for that much devastation, we couldn’t be well-adjusted in such a society. And that’s exactly how those with addictive personalities would want everyone to see the question of moral responsibility. An addictive personality’s utopia would be one where no one cared about who is morally responsible for what, and instead took care of their own problems, since they didn’t want to be naïve, controlling, manipulative, judgmental, resentful, etc. And that’s exactly the goal of expecting anyone and everyone to idealize, ‘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’! Of course, like any other absolutist utopias, this would leave plenty of unanswered questions, such as how each of us are supposed to just accept that much moral bankruptcy, personal responsibility that’s based largely on whose problem it is, and rampant depression.”
A spirituality based on Christian forgiveness could look amazingly like a sociopathic remorselessness. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article on pedo-priest Franklyn Becker, “Documents detail church coverup,” by Marie Rohde and Mary Zahn, says “In 1983, a psychological report described Becker as a pedophile who was in denial,” and that recently he said, “There is a gospel of forgiveness and redemption, but that apparently doesn’t apply to me.” For him to say that he needs forgiveness and redemption, certainly doesn’t sound like he’s still in denial. At the same time, for him to believe that he’s entitled to them so if he doesn’t get them his rights are being violated, would mean that he’s just as lacking a sense of responsibility as if he was in denial. Unless one doesn’t have a Fundamentalist literalism toward Christian forgiveness (and, in a society with rampant depression, often enough being well-adjusted would have to mean that you can’t decide to take the forgiveness figuratively), this forgiveness could easily coincide with what a sociopath, addictive personality, etc., could believe that he’s entitled to.
The book that accompanies Addiction, by John Hoffman and Susan Froemke, says, “The Twelve Steps discussed in AA meetings and writings involve the steps suggested by the collective experiences of those in recovery that lead to development of an honest, helping, forgiving lifestyle—the kind of life that is inconsistent with addiction.” Actually, the only way in which the extreme forgiveness of, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” or even, “As long as it’s your problem, you’re just going to have to courageously change what you can and serenely accept what you can’t,” would help recovery, is that no matter what addicts’ problems are or what caused them, the more pragmatically that they handle their own problems, the less likely these problems are to drive the addicts to relapse. Other than that, those with addictive personalities certainly would relate to that sort of moral bankruptcy! No doubt those with addictive personalities regularly find themselves in situations where they’ve caused other big problems, and those with the addictive personalities would figure that these others had better not get resentful, passive about solving their own problems, etc.
Addiction has got to be the epitome of irrationality that’s a lot more harmful than malicious, which is just the sort of damage that well-adjusted people would be most willing to forgive.
The latest research on addiction has demonstrated that the brains of even recovering addicts, are impaired in such a way that they could relapse as if they were compelled to do so. Even if they fully realize that a relapse in their addictions could mean horrific consequences, they could still relapse as if they were on autopilot, and do this repeatedly. This is very similar to how many pedophiles, whose brains are also impaired, feel compelled to molest, as if they’re in cars coasting downhill toward children and are incapable of slamming on the brakes. The reason why we need Meagan’s Lists is that the effect of pedophilia on the pedophiles could be called “cunning baffling and powerful.” Both relapses in addiction and pedophilia could involve cognitive distortions, beliefs that what the people are doing isn’t really harmful, not matter how much they’d been taught what harm it does. Of course, this could mean that these recovering addicts and pedophiles have this extreme impulsivity only toward what their pathological desires make them want, but their impulsivity toward everything else is normal. Yet it seems far more likely that the impulsivity that resulted from their diseases, as well as the impulsivity that caused them, would tend to come with a general impulsivity that could affect much of their decision-making. And this impulsivity is exactly what would lead one to adopt a morally bankrupt ethos, that would care about whether one seems to have untermensch defects of character, but insist that übermensch defects of character are at least forgiven.
To hold that since even recovering addicts’ biologies could make them relapse we must therefore take any relapses as a given, really isn’t much different from Niebuhr’s favorite theological premise, the Doctrine of Original Sin. As Dr. Nora Volkow said at the beginning of the HBO special Addiction: Why Can’t They Just Stop, “How can we comprehend the concept of a person that wants to stop doing something and they cannot despite catastrophic consequences? We are not speaking of little consequences, these are catastrophic, and yet they cannot control their behavior.” This includes when recovering addicts relapse. “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” certainly doesn’t imply “unless the consequences are catastrophic,” since Jesus (and millions of his followers throughout history) certainly took some catastrophic sinfulness. If someone’s desires made him do something catastrophic, then that’s reality. As long as someone feels a need to do something, and he has the power to do it, then we’ll just have to take as a given that he’s going to do it. In order to seem realistic, one must be willing to take a lot of frightening realities as givens.
Dr. Volkow is a descendent of Trotsky, about whom, François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, says, he was “never to be outdone in his talent for error.” One could say the same about anyone who thinks that morality could get control over compulsive desires to relapse in an addiction, no matter how catastrophic the consequences of relapse may be. Whatever our brains make us do, is whatever our brains make us do. Both drug abuse and addiction go several steps beyond Niebuhr’s favorite theological doctrine, the Doctrine of Original Sin, since both involve depravity that’s unnaturally added to the brain. Of course, we live in a competitive and self-responsible society, nothing’s guaranteed, and human imperfections are whatever they are, and if addicts are biologically compelled to do what they do, then that’s how human imperfection happens.
The article Toward a Philosophy of Choice: A New Era of Treatment, by William L. White, MA, in the February, 2008 issue of Counselor, the Magazine for Addiction Professionals, says, “In May 2007, Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, presented a historic lecture at the annual American Psychological Association (APA) conference entitled ‘The Neurobiology of Free Will’ that signaled a turning point in the field’s understanding of addiction as a brain disease. Dr. Volkow described the most complex picture to date of how drugs compromise multiple regions of the brain in ways that place continued alcohol and other drugs (AOD) use as a priority over other best interests of the individual, family and society.” Though this is about a radically impaired neurobiology, and the sinfulness in “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it” results from unimpaired neurobiologies, the basic idea is still the same, that if someone’s neurobiology makes him do something destructive, then that’s imperfect reality. This sinfulness would necessarily be a priority over other best interests of the individual, family and society, but we must take this as a given. The same would go for any of the destructive behavior that does contribute to our rampant depression, but isn’t prohibited by one’s favorite holy book. Probably the main idea of the Romantic Era of Central European culture, which followed the Enlightenment and seems to have been a big inspiration of Nazism, was that the faith that The Enlightenment put in intellectual thought was misplaced, since the animalistic, biologically determined, parts of human nature would shape our thoughts more than would a rationality based on free will.
W. H. Auden wrote, “All sin tends to be addictive and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation,” which might sound preachy (unless, of course, “sinful” seems synonymous with “to be forgiven”), but if you replace “sin” with “destructive tendencies,” and “what is called damnation” with “the possibly catastrophic consequences,” you’d have the parallels between Niebuhr’s and Volkow’s realisms. If one is unaware that people’s brains would make them do certain destructive things, that confidence would be just an illusion. Realists serenely accept whatever hardship and/or sinfulness that oneself is helpless to change.
This is exactly the sort of understanding that, currently, is to be given to recovering addicts. Addiction quotes Walter Ling, MD, director of UCLA’s addiction program, as saying about whether addicts’ relapses are their own fault, “Yes it is and no it isn’t. It is not their fault but it is their fault. That is, it’s unanswerable and ultimately it’s irrelevant. The bottom and relevant line is that we—addicts, their families, healthcare professionals, researchers—all have the same goal: keep people sober. Let’s focus on that instead of these circular, unanswerable arguments. They relapse and, if they survive, they then have the opportunity to get sober again.”
Just after this, the same book quotes Richard Rawson , also of the UCLA program, as saying, “The disease makes [addicts] do terrible things, but it doesn’t make them terrible people. At the same time, it doesn’t mean they are not responsible for the bad things they may do.” The book then goes on to say, “These are the contradictions inherent in addiction.” These are also the contradictions inherent in any mental illness that leads to destructive behavior, and that doesn’t impair the person so much that he’d be not guilty by reason of insanity. That would include a lot of Americans.
The same goes for blaming the victim of anything non-violent. Even victim-blaming as extreme 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,” is victim-blaming, but at the same time, it isn’t. We all must deal with the vicissitudes of life, and the whole topic of how morally wrong was what caused your problem, is subjective. Focusing attention on how you could take care of your own problems better, would benefit you. If we set limits to what victim-blaming goes too far, we’d be setting limits on self-reliant problem-solving in problematic situations.
Just before, this book quotes Ling as saying that affordable addiction treatment has to be more available, since, “Addicts need to be treated when they are ready to be treated. If they have to wait a month or two or three, they may change their minds. We can easily lose them. They can die.” In treating no other disease would we have to worry about possible patients dying from changing their minds. Yet since , we’re simply going to have to ignore 18th century Western ideas that people will rationally choose to do what serves their own self-interests. Like victim correction as a panacea, this is done for vitally pragmatic reasons.
The webpage What Addicts Do, on the website of Sober Musicians, is all about how intractable active addicts are, and is obviously addressed to those who are personally close to addicts. This includes, for example, “You cannot make me treat you better, let alone with any respect.
“All I care about, all I think about, is my needs and how to go about fulfilling them.”
Of course, the law doesn’t treat addicts as not guilty by reason of insanity when they commit, for example, driving while intoxicated. Not only that, if someone tried to convince lawmakers that they should be more realistic about, and understanding toward, criminal addicts, and he did this by telling them, “You cannot make them treat society better, let alone with any respect. All they care about, all they think about, is their own needs and how to go about fulfilling them,” that certainly wouldn’t convince any of the lawmakers that these people are not guilty by reason of insanity, and plenty of anti-crime activist groups would be outraged. If a woman’s husband or boyfriend simply is a non-addicted butthead, realists would tell her, too, “All he thinks about is his own needs and how to go about fulfilling them, and you’d better just accept that that’s just the way that he is,” but of course the law would never just accept anyone’s horrendously bad character. The weak, but not the strong, lose respect by getting upset about harm done (including harm done by non-addicted buttheads), etc.
Paul Mankowski, S.J. wrote about pedo-priests, in Pastoral Proposals for the Problem of Clerical Sexual Abuse, in the July 1995 issue of Catholic World Report, “Undeniably the pathology of the abuser must be taken into account, but frequently his turpitude is dealt with as if it were a tragedy striking from outside the realm of human choice, a disease like Alzheimer’s for which no one is responsible and for which ‘healing’ consists in being frank and open with one another.” This is exactly how addiction is usually treated, following the pattern that addicts had originally set. The main idea of psychological therapy for addicts’ friends and loved-ones is that they heal by being frank and open with one another about the addicts simply being victims of their diseases. Of course, if everyone who had a disease were therefore allowed to act however disabled they acted, our society couldn’t function. Also, even if the victims were victims of behavior that couldn’t possibly be attributed to any disease, as long as they can’t change the behavior, their therapists could expect them to “heal” by accepting it serenely; you’d have just as much control over others’ choices as you’d have over others’ Alzheimer’s. The wives of addicts, but not of pedophiles, are encouraged to have that sort of accepting, “healing” attitude:
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~Mankowski has such insight into this question, that I wouldn’t be surprised if he grew up in an alcoholic family, got the usual preachings about how he was supposed to just accept alcoholism as he’d accept Alzheimer’s, and got fed up with them, so became a religious-order priest so that he could spend his life thinking about what’s right and wrong yet not seem resentful! (Frankly, when my aunt with Alzheimer’s lived with my parents, I figured on my own that self-help books on living with an alcoholic family member would be perfect for that situation, since those books are all about accepting the inevitabilities of a disease!)
The bottom line of such self-help has to be the goal, that since you’re the one with the most reliable motivation to take care of your own problem, you do so as pragmatically as possible. Conceptions of personal response-ability that would include “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” would be
As Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind says, the American culture has taken to German ideas about the ineradicability of aggression and other destructive impulses from the id, without also including the German awareness of what the consequences of this are. “Freud was very dubious about the future of civilization and the role of reason in the life of man.... [Max Weber’s] science is was formulated as a doubtful dare against the chaos of things, and values certainly lay beyond its limits.”
That’s the sort of acceptance that addicts’ family members are supposed to have toward the behavior that results from the addiction, even if the addict wasn’t so overwhelmed by the symptoms by his addiction that he was basically not guilty by reason of insanity, his disease. That’s just the way that human nature is, so we’ll just have to accept that that’s reality. Those who realistically accept such realities are more likely to succeed in life, etc. It seems that any accountability, even Situation Ethics when the addicts are sober, would be too preachy, repressive, guilt-based, etc.
As Paul Gilbert’s Depression, the Evolution of Powerlessness says, clinical depression obviously isn’t deviant, and since it’s biologically based, it must be, largely, a natural and warranted biological reaction to the sort of helplessness that would warrant it. As the chapter The Evolution of Social Power and its Role in Depression begins, in a psychobiological sense, “This chapter explores the theory that depression is about not being able to control one’s social place.” At the top is a quote that begins, “Micropolitics, like all politics, has to do with the creation and negotiation of hierarchy: getting and keeping power, rank and standing, or what I call ‘social place’.”
Yet the school of psychology that’s based on “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,” says that if you’re powerless, you can’t control your social place, then that’s one of those facts that you can’t change, so you must serenely accept. There’s a good reason why you’re hard-wired to feel as you naturally feel, but this sort of human nature we do try to re-engineer. Who’s to say that you don’t deserve any inability you have in controlling your own social place, or that your “expecting life to be fair” wouldn’t violate others’ rights? The whole idea of the sort of person who in America and Britain is known as the mollycoddle, and in Germany known as the untermensch, is that if we didn’t treat those with a low social place as if they deserved it, then people could unfairly raise their own social places through manipulative machinations. If only everyone were humble enough, no one would think that his own social place was too low, so we wouldn’t have this cause of depression. Optimists would figure that if only you were smart and determined enough, you control your social place. (This humility and this optimism might look like opposites of each other, but since both are pragmatic, cognitive therapists would very likely try to program you into believing both.) It’s as if your powerlessness, and others’ power in relation to you, don’t matter, only your own state of mind, and the fact that you can’t say for certain that you can’t control your social place.
Not only that, situations that involve not being able to control one’s own social place, tend to be very banal, so naturally others wouldn’t want to be burdened by hearing about them, let alone treating them as public health issues.
Yet we certainly don’t hear about how we simply must take these biologically-based needs as a given. That’s purely because those who have them don’t have the power to get what they feel they need, whereas addicts do have this power. This would include conflicts between addicts and those devastated by them.
he Tragedy of Victim Correction as a Panacea~
Whether or not you live with an addict, etc., whatever you must do to take care of yourself, is whatever you must do to take care of yourself. That’s why self-help in general tends to admire Al-Anon, The Serenity Prayer, etc. The only thing that really matters is what you do and don’t have the power to change. Since Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA who wrote much of their Big Book, was a stockbroker around the time of the Great Depression, one could call this The Great Depression Stockbroker’s Approach to Self-Responsibility. Literally and inevitably, whatever anyone’s life is (including during the Great Depression), is “life on life’s terms,” “reality,” “life’s challenges,” etc., for him. That’s how people in trouble must take care of themselves self-reliantly, so intercultural studies have consistently found that self-blame as a symptom of depression, anxiety, etc., is unique to Western and Westernized people. Depressed people who’ve lived outside of the modern West have tended to feel paranoid, but modern Westerners, whether depressed or not, tend to figure that even if someone did “get you,” that would mean only that you lost the battle so you’re a loser; you must “look at yourself” so you could independently resiliently and resourcefully find a solution to your problem. Self-help means that if it’s your problem then you provide the help, which is why self-help for people in trouble in general has really taken to the AA-Al-Anon approach, so “Archie” is more than just emblematic of self-reliant self-empowerment for people in trouble in a society with rampant depression. What personal problems don’t have to be taken care of this unconditionally, where the only thing that really matters is what oneself can or can’t change? If your back is against the wall, you must serenely accept this fact. Self-reliance is The Great Liberator. The moral bankruptcy is a tragedy in the ancient Greek dramatic sense, meaning that if all that victims could care about is whether or not they can change things, moral bankruptcy and immunity from accountability would inevitably result. As can be seen in Nietzsche, the weak could easily seem to be the dangerously ones, since everyone’s beliefs regarding what they deserve are shaped by their own , and the weak can exercise their supposed only in ways that would seem mollycoddle, “dishonest” and “ignominious,” whereas red-blooded strength is “honest,” proud, and at least forgivable. (We must appreciate all the hidden dangers of unchecked “victim-power.”) “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” could happen to anyone.
Victim-blaming doesn’t require a belief in a just world, and is most important when someone must self-motivatedly take response-ability for injustices. Whatever matters in the real world, matters in the real world. Whatever is reality, is reality. The basic idea is that the weak should become more self-responsible and the strong should be forgiven, and then, realistically speaking, things would keep functioning efficiently. As Dr. Thomas A. Harris wrote in the preface of his I’m OK—You’re OK, “To many people [psychiatry] is like a blind man in dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there,” but Al-Anon-style psychology-psychiatry, neo-Buddhism (which self-disciplines the yin but not the yang, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it”), is productive, does produce contrived serenity courage and self-responsibility, whereas telling addicts’ family members, “You’re OK, even if his addiction really bothers you,” wouldn’t: mindless formula, mindful victims. Resistance could be labeled as ignominious untermensch . This treatment is all-natural. Your feeling bad about anything would hurt only yourself. Everyone must adjust. Blinders bring serenity. For everyone, functioning productively and resiliently is all-important. Any fear could be dangerously problematic.
All problems must be resolved. Attention must be systematically focused on how any victims (who are the most motivated to do this successfully), could most effectively take response-ability for their own welfare, since thoughts about right and wrong would be unpragmatic manipulative and judgmental opinion. Alateen isn’t extremist. Treating victims as victims seems so old-school, mollycoddling. Moral relativism (“Your morality is culturally biased!”) becomes amoral absolutism (“Your morality is biased toward believing that you deserve better! Shame on you!”). Blame the victim, and you’ll get well-motivated self-reliant and anti-judgmental results, solutions. That’s the only thing that really matters (especially for those with big problems). In the real world, some things work and some things don’t, and whenever those who are morally responsible won’t take physical responsibility, cult-like neo-Buddhism would work much better than would moral responsibility. Don’t be pessimistic! In all situations, this is what it takes to win, so everything except “Can I change this?”, should be ignored. This might not look sociopolitical or socioeconomic, but this is just cultural norms and expectations, along with social pressures, determining who is personally responsible for what in certain interactions, and those of the society at large tend to find the same unconditionally self-correcting platitudes inspiring. Very little of what could counter our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., would sound or feel gutsy, so very little of it could sell. (Endurability wouldn’t make good Populism.) Frank Buchman, leader of the Oxford Groups, the club on which AA and then Al-Anon was based and which is now called “Moral Re-Armament,” said, “D’you know Heinrich Himmler?... Say, you ought to know Heinrich. He’s a great lad.... [Hitler] lets us have house-parties whenever we like.” Anyone who’d love the Nazis, couldn’t help but love victim-blaming, targeting weaknesses (as in whiny) of character, etc.
For an exemplary alkie’s kid who looks like Archie, to preach, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, should seem like wryly Kafkaesque theater of the absurd, but instead that seems very pragmatic and honorable. His group’s leaders are just trying to help him take care of himself better, which he really needs, and this would also help anyone else in trouble. No self-responsibility for victims sounds nice, but all victim-blaming that isn’t illogical could help the victims by improving their chances of success in the future. For everyone, not just a-holes’ families, realism means accepting that others won’t do what they’re not motivated to do. The only difference between those who Al-Anon corrects and everyone else, is the situation they’re in, and “self-responsibility” and “self-help” would mean the same things in any other situation where, to the same degree, you can’t change others’ actions but can change your own reactions. No matter what any Al-Anon or Alateen members, or those in equally desperate situations, may whine about, self-help psychology could respond, “But to look at yourself instead of blaming others would benefit you, by changing what you can and accepting what you can’t!” (Being in denial about the unconditionality, could make you more serene and courageous.) That’s reality, not victim-blaming. This doesn’t intend to blame or criticize you or be morally bankrupt, just make you more well-adjusted and spiritual. After all, the more that anyone judging such situations tried to be fair, the more unfair he’d be, since no one would solve the problems. Certain things simply have to get done, by those who are the most motivated to do them. Sometimes in life, the pragmatists must stand up to the weak. As Al-Anon shows, unconditional acceptance and adjustment could always lead to peace and confidence—serenity and courage. (That’s a strong character.)
Those who most believe in this sort of unconditional self-responsibility are good, hard-working people. Unconditional and resilient, “can-do” self-responsibility like “Archie’s,” is what made America great. (Self-blame is the can-do attitude for people in trouble, “If only I can... better, I can succeed!”) If it weren’t unconditional, it would allow cowardice, inadequacy, excuses, faking problems, un entitlement, maladjustment, dysfunctionality, etc., and we mustn’t be naïve about this. In a society with rampant depression, everyone could have an excuse for failure, and such cowardice saps productivity. Self-responsibility along the lines of the law of the jungle works (and worked very productively in the nineteenth century), if you make it work. Losers lose and winners win. The weak can be so unfair. Like any other reductionism, if you listened to many victim correctors’ insistent solutions to peoples’ problems, these solutions would all say basically the same things: change the specifics of one solution to the specifics of any other, and the one could sound just like the other. When reality requires that these expectations go to the point of a reductio ad absurdum (as in “Archie’s” case), then that’s what reality (and self-motivated self-reliance) require. Even if this requires more Stoicism than some Stoic saints had, if that’s what reality requires, then that’s what it requires. (These saints’ self-control shows that it’s possible, and Al-Anon-style self-control isn’t moralistic.) Such unconditional Stoicism can eliminate all misery, the worst of which could have caused big problems. Some ideas sell, some don’t, and this one sells. Which would you rather be, right, or happy? To the uninitiated, victim-blaming would seem bad rather than pragmatic, for 15% of the American adult population to suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year wouldn’t seem to be among the diseases that are parts of the natural order, etc. This is the same sort of logic that led to Phil Gramm calling America a “nation of whiners,” etc., that has the same unconditionally red-blooded, resilient, exhilarating, hard-working and character-building appeal to it!
The alkies aren’t controlling Al-Anon members in the authoritarian, paternalistic, anti-freedom sense; that’s just the way that life sometimes goes. We all must adjust to our realities. That’s inherent to life. To end the description of each and every traumatic experience with, “So now I’m supposed to just shut up and deal with this reality, since doing so would benefit me,” might sound like the punch line of a sick joke, but the bottom line must always be pragmatic and well-adjusted. That’s how victim correctors are supposed to operate, since correction is good, and a lack of it is self-defeating. This is the language of letting go. AA slogans such as “Anger is one letter short of danger,” would apply, but “Easy does it,” wouldn’t. Unless what happened was so extreme that this would sound untenable, trying to correct the person who caused the problem, even assertively, could very easily seem or suggest: unrealistic, unreliable, others-helping, naïve, stupid, conditional, optional, half-hearted, limited, judgmental, troublemaking, “on principle,” moralistic, unattractive, sophistry-rewarding, altruistic, controlling, whiny, mollycoddling, intellectualist, philosophical, pathetic, resentful, maladjusted, negative, blaming, subjective, unproven, emotionalistic, manipulative, passive, etc. Trying to correct the person who has the problem in ways that would help him “take care of himself” better, could very easily seem or suggest: realistic, reliable, self-helping, natural, wise, necessary, vital, steadfast, limitless, forgiving, peace-making, pragmatic, trendy, marketable, achievement-oriented, “getting on with life,” self-empowering, gutsy, achievement-oriented, down-to-earth, material, proud, competitive, well-adjusted, hopeful, solving, objective, self-justifying, practical, self-reliant, active, etc. And if what happened was extreme, then the worse was what he did, the more that expecting him to take moral responsibility for that much could seem draconian, naïve, etc.
Victim-blaming can’t make traumas worse, since victims can’t be counterproductive, dysfunctional, maladjusted, defeatist, negative, whiny, unaccepting, demanding, etc. Those who are trying to defend themselves from this (Defend yourself from personal response-ability for your own welfare? Horrors!), could feel uncomfortable bringing up, talking about, and taking seriously, such banalities, but the end result of the banalities is rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc. Whatever happens that contributes to these gargantuan social problems, “Oh, well, that’s life, and the victims probably could have stopped the damage,” so even conspiracy theorists could feel very safe with this massive devastation. Al-Anon would probably say that the reason why it would expect members to accept whatever alkies do is that their disease of addiction makes them not guilty by reason of insanity (Addiction, a disease of people’s motivations, might as well be as involuntary as Alzheimer’s, and disease might as well equal total helplessness.), but if a non-addict caused a member a big problem, the only things that would really matter would be the victim’s serenity and courage. “That’s just the way that human nature is,” “That’s just the way that this sinful world is,” “Boys will be boys,” “That’s just the way that he is,” etc., imply the same level of fatalism and serene acceptance as does, “That’s just the way that addicts are.” This unconditionality would apply to the self-help and self-responsibility in handling any problem whatsoever, since whatever the real world requires, the real world requires. Coping with reality requires that the realities be interchangeable. What could possibly keep victim correction in check, limiting self-responsibility to what’s reasonable? Just think of all the resentment, self-righteousness, wimpiness, etc., that moral clarity would lead to. As one could see in how domestic violence was once minimized, destruction within the family, especially if from the husband, is considered especially banal, personal, excusable, understandable, natural, inevitable, etc., and these minimizing labels come from the usual “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” social norms. If only the weak took care of themselves better... All that you’d have to do is not care, and primitivism could happen so easily.
(Cartoon generated by “Build Your Own Meat”)
“Archie” was taught to have great confidence in the self-reliance and self-determination of the individual. Instinctively, Americans would tend to be a lot less offended by Al-Anon-style victim correction, than by the whining and the victim-power that it corrects. That self-help formula feels right, helpful, beneficial, self-empowering, resilient, self-efficacious. Victims’ counselors care about them. This empathy requires correcting them, saving them from their own negativity and passivity. After all, “Oh, you poor thing!”, treats people as things. Victim correctors only want addicts’ kids, etc., to be more self-efficacious, serene, etc. The nescient majority has no problem with this level of victim correction, with just expecting people to “get on with life” despite realities this lurid, which seem to be just acceptable losses. The lower middle class approach is about solving problems self-reliantly and realistically, so we should teach the same self-responsible ideas that it does, instead of the petty bourgeois approach, which is palliative. Coping with reality means overlooking some realities, and such pragmatic and red-blooded cultural norms have to be very powerful. As White House press secretary Ari Fleischer unabashedly said after Bush admitted that the Iraq-Niger-uranium documents are fake, “Yes, the president has moved on. And, I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on, as well,” a top-notch professional attempt to get the public to conform to letting go regarding Bush’s Machiavellianism. (Fleischer is rebelling from his petty bourgeois family, who obviously can afford not to adequately appreciate why, in the real world, sometimes when others cause you problems it’s necessary to move on rather than whine and intellectualize.) Caring about social problems is so passé, so 1960s, even caring about our rampant depression. During the Vietnam War, defending it by telling opponents to move on, would have seemed morally bankrupt, rather than unconditionally resilient. As Al-Anon shows, it’s possible for pragmatists to expect someone to move on from, let go of, etc., literally anything that he can’t change.
That’s how all cultural conditioning and social pressures work, including that of all those strange foreigners who can’t think for themselves. (BTW, those who think for themselves wouldn’t conclude that for 15% of the adult population to suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year, is only natural.) Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct.
Nothing that anyone in trouble could possibly say, could possibly counter expectations that are based on what the real world objectively requires. No matter what an alkie or any other problem parent might do that could traumatize his kid, he absolutely could change himself, and absolutely can’t change anyone else including the parent, which is all that the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer cares about. A priori, that’s all that you could care about. That mustn’t seem repulsive. You mustn’t really care about “the elephant in the living room” if you can’t change the elephant. If you think that that’s revolting, then that would be very unserene, discouraging, etc. Obviously, that, like Bontsha the Silent, is far from a natural way to think, though it could be called “cognitive therapy” (“Behavior Therapists and Cognitive Behavior Therapists... concentrate on a person’s views and perceptions about their life, rather than personality traits.”), which has been called, “a natural alternative to anti-depressant medication.” The above is the fully-approved outlook, since it’s very effective in preventing depression. All that you’d need to give self help advice, would be a tape recording that says, “It would really do you a lot of good if you changed what you can and accepted what you can’t! That’s just the way the real world works!”, and you’d play that over and over as the person describes his own trauma. Any reasonable alternatives to victim correction as a panacea, could seem too unrealistic, fallible, subjective, passive, defeatist, untermensch, etc., for the realities that one must deal with. Pragmatism leads to happiness. Victim-correctors, therefore, are the ones who really care about victims.
If one were to apply what On Speculation and Manipulation in Therapy says, “When it works, justice is always very particular. It proceeds on a case-by-case basis with a careful weighing of the facts and an equally careful examination of the underlying logic of key arguments,” certainly the specifics of what addicts’ kids must deal with, would argue for someone else being to blame. Yet blaming others wouldn’t accomplish anything, and would divert attention from solving one’s own problems. It’s your problem, so what are you going to do about it? You’d better just serenely surrender to the inevitable. If we showed an understanding acceptance toward everyone, including the people who have the problems and aren’t dealing with them adequately, nobody would solve them, and the victims would be weakened in the long run. For these people to get on track in taking care of themselves, is the only thing that really matters. If everything must be pragmatic, nothing can be sacred. “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, is inculcated humility, expedient and well-adjusted, without coercion or authoritarian obeisance so this is pro-freedom. Even if the reason for the “negative thoughts” that the victim is washing his own brain of, is that he was unfairly overpowered, that wouldn’t be an authoritarian brainwashing, so his sincere opinion could still seem to be dirt that’s to be washed away and replaced with what he’s supposed to believe. The October, 2007 issue of Counselor, the Magazine for Addiction Professionals includes an article that says, “rigid fidelity may produce an adverse effect,” but for those who must deal with realities like this, rigid fidelity is as necessary as are adequate resiliency and coping skills. Naïveté doesn’t work. Victim-blaming optimistically and determinedly looks for very necessary self-motivated solutions, so, in the words of the Downing Street memo, “the intelligence and the facts” must be “fixed around the policy.”
Reductionism is key. Whenever no pertinent abstractions can matter, reductionism has to. As any self-help counselor would tell you, abstractions are immaterial, and judgmental abstractions are self-serving. Ambrose Bierce defined platitude as, “A moral without the fable,” and the self-reliant, self-responsible, morals of victim correction sound a lot better without the fables, which would have told of what the people had to deal with self-reliantly. The central message of any self-help approach for people in trouble is that to help yourself: No matter what caused your problem, you absolutely must focus your attention on correcting yourself, since you absolutely can change yourself, absolutely can’t change anyone else, and absolutely must make your life productive (whatever that requires). The real world requires certain things. Everyone must play their part. The only choice that you have is either you do whatever it takes to deal with your problem, or it doesn’t get dealt with. The only legit question is, “Can I change this?”, so no injustices could seem profound. As long as they happened in the past, they’re past history. Unendurability happens. Addicts’ friends and loved ones are the ones who are motivated to correct themselves, and they need more motivation to: change, empower themselves, accommodate to reality, be well-adjusted and productive. That’s only natural. Everyone, not just fundamentalists, must take this sort of spirituality literally. Focus on self-responsibility. Only the person who has the problem, is reliably motivated to deal with it as well as possible. We could live without moral responsibility (which we can’t count on), abstract principles like morality, etc., but can’t live without victims taking response-ability for their own welfare. Some things are luxuries; some are necessities. There’s nothing paternalistic here, so you could feel free.
Even addicts’ families, etc., are sustainable like this, since naturally everyone is motivated to be well-adjusted and functional—serene and courageous. Addicts’ kids shouldn’t feel bad about themselves, guilty, etc., but when dealing with what their alcoholic parents do the kids should look at themselves rather than blaming others, so as they do this they should choose not to feel self-blame, and, of course, simply looking at themselves means simply looking at what they should have done better. Their self-help mentors would simply check to see how well they’re doing in following these instructions. (It’s no wonder that Should Statements are one of the single-mindedly self-responsible cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, or that depressed self-blamers have no gauge of how good is good enough other than, “Am I adequate to deal with my [devastating] realities?”!) If one rationale for victim correction doesn’t work, it’s replaced by another. As “Mary Smith” wrote in her suicide note, “All [my psychologist] could do is nitpick about how I need to feel small + helpless,” though Mary obviously had a gutsy personality, which is typical of the self-empowering “thinking” of victim correction: plenty of all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, and disqualifying the positive. To paraphrase British prime minister David Lloyd George, such alkies’ kids cannot conquer the chasms in their own lives by gingerly taking one step at a time. (As you could see in “Archie” and in all the other self-blame you might encounter, that isn’t just a fear of a slippery slope, of what might happen to you if this goes too far. Naturally, the realities that you’re response-able for dealing with, will go however far they’ll go, and with realism, there’s no such thing as going too far.) Samia Labidi’s chapter of Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam, Apostates Speak Out says, “The shackling of women had to be pursued without any letup, otherwise men risked losing control of the situation,” and with victim correction as a panacea, the shackling of untermenschen has to be pursued without any letup, otherwise übermenschen risk losing control of the situation through: untermenschen believing that they’re ENTITLED to better so they’ll stop “looking at themselves,” others pitying them, and these feelings getting more and more compelling since fear, including legitimate fear, is the strongest motivator.
Just imagine how this conception of self-responsibility would look, if people could see how much depression, anxiety disorders, etc., our normalcy creates, including some helplessness that “everyone knows” is just life’s inevitable imperfections that normal people will adjust and adapt to! Much of this is actually beyond the threshold of human endurance, unfit for human consumption!
“FREEDOM—Exemption from the stress of authority in a beggarly half dozen of restraint’s infinite multitude of methods. A political condition that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
We’re to have the same faith in this failsafe sort of self-responsibility, that we’d have in any other cultural norms, as if it’s a universal truth that will work forever.
The Fine Art of Propaganda, by Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee, quotes Hitler’s Mein Kampf as saying, “A lie is believed because of the unconditional and insolent inflexibility with which it is propagated and because it takes advantage of the sentimental and extreme sympathies of the masses.” It should be obvious to anyone that the problems of the victims of alcoholic parents (or anything comparable) aren’t inside of themselves. Yet the sentimental and extreme sympathies of Americans tend to insist that one take personal response-ability for his own welfare. If he doesn’t, he could be insolently and inflexibly accused of having “pity parties” and the like. A stolid self-reliance with self-empowerment simply seems good, while passivity simply seems bad.
As It’s Not Okay to Be a Cannibal, How to Keep Addiction from Eating Your Family Alive, by Andrew T. Wainwright, Robert Poznanovich, and the National Intervention Team at Addiction Intervention Resources, says, “We have heard addicts express this conviction [that their addiction is pro-freedom so those who oppose it are anti-freedom] as if they were constitutional scholars.” Impulsive people would have to be ever vigilant against the resentment, judgmentalism, guilt-based reasoning, etc., that would preach at them, inhibit them, manipulate them, etc. For decades, the ad and public relations campaigns of Big Tobacco have expressed this cowboy “How dare they try to violate our freedoms!” mentality, as if they realize that this is exactly what would appeal to those impulsive enough to start smoking.
On one hand, Twelve-Step groups try to get us to accept that even recovering addicts are not responsible for some of their own disastrous choices, but on the other hand we’re not to regard the addicts’ ethos that come out of such groups, as irresponsible. They can’t control themselves, yet they’re supposed to control you, by formulating the self-help school of psychology that’s to shape your thinking.
The Gamblers Anonymous book Gamblers Anonymous, the First Forty Years, tells of “the saddest moment in GA history,” which they call “Tampa Gate.” They had their 1994 Southern Conference in St. Petersburg, and the chairman of the Conference, Dick D., “had spent the money” that was to pay for the conference, $35,000, “but he planned on returning it.” This says nothing about Dick D. being seized by an urge to gamble with it. He just felt like “borrowing” it. He ended up pleading guilty and being sentenced to 8 years probation and full restitution to GA.
This book includes a letter to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, which says, “When we as a body begin to even consider to ‘bail out’ any individual in this organization, we send out a very negative message. Many of our members will interpret this as saying, ‘Go steal from GA and don’t worry about the consequences. Nobody will prosecute you. Chances are you will have a budget meeting that sets up some kind of repayment plan with no interest involved and take years to pay it back.’ I truly believe these thoughts came into Dick’s thinking when he did this.”
The victim correction as a panacea that the psychology from the Twelve-Step groups loves so much, is supposed to stop addicts’ selfish resentments, and whiny evasions from responsibility by playing the victim role. Yet it should be very obvious that one result of “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” would be an ethos of, “Go ahead and violate others’ rights and don’t worry about the consequences.” If coping skills mean the sort of forgiveness that also constitutes jailhouse religion, then these coping skills would be along the lines of addicts’ aggressive selfishness, where addictive personalities mean doing what one feels like doing. Chances are very good that, either consciously or subconsciously, expectations of such forgiveness would come into the thinking of those who have such a sense of impunity. Anyone who lives in a society with a lot of Christianity and/or Buddhism, could engage in jailhouse religion, but only those with bad characters actually do.
The web page “What Is Alcoholism?: Basic information about alcoholism - what is it, what causes it, and who is at risk,” had said under the heading Personality Traits, “Studies are finding that alcoholism is strongly related to impulsive, excitable, and novelty-seeking behavior, and such patterns are established early on, if not inherited.” The webpage Factors Contributing to the Development of Pathological Gambling, now says basically the same thing about addictions in general, in more depth.
Joseph Califano, Jr.’s High Society, How Substance Abuse Ravages America And What To Do About It, includes,
In many states, there are essentially no standards for individuals who profess to be treatment counselors. Indeed, the chief qualification often appears to be that the counselor is a drug or alcohol addict now in recovery. In no other disease is there an insistence that those who suffer from it are best qualified to treat it. No one makes the claim that cancer or heart attack victims, or those suffering from mental illness, are the best-qualified oncologists, cardiologists, and psychiatrists.
Those who believe in this practice would say that those with addictive personalities have such an aversion to being preached at, that even Situation Ethics, which Fundament Christian don’t like since it measures the wrongness of destructive behavior by its consequences rather than by what any holy book says about it, would seem too draconian. What it all comes down to, is that recovering addicts can be persuaded by other addicts, who understand how addicts’ free will can be only partial, more than recovering addicts can be persuaded by those who think that their free will was just like anyone else’s. Recovering addicts would see how inappropriate anything that looks like preaching, moral responsibility, etc., would be in treating a disease. Yet if addicts’ problem is that, at least at certain times, they didn’t have any free will at all so they’re not guilty by reason of insanity, then persuasion couldn’t have any effect on this at all. The big problem would be changing such a psychological approach into an approach for everyone, under the pretense that emotional repression and guilt-tripping are bad, and serenely and courageously dealing with one’s own problems is good.
Michael Craig, Miller, MD, the Editor in Chief of the Harvard Mental Health Letter, wrote in the February, 2006 issue, “Genes shape temperament: People who are impulsive, take risks, and habitually seek new experiences are more likely to become addicted.” The same article also says that one of the way in which genes “influence the brain’s susceptibility to addiction,” is in “the prefrontal cortex, which organizes our responses to the environment,” and that this is the same obliviousness that constitutes an effect of booze: “Addictive substances may also cause the prefrontal cortex to work at low power—one of the reasons addicted persons often deny that they have a problem.” This is also the reason why booze, which is a depressant, feels like a stimulant. Other genetic effects, such as that drugs feel unusually good to some people, wouldn’t lead to addiction in those who have a strong enough awareness that no matter how good they feel now, overusing them would have the dangers of addiction.
This sort of personality would engage in Magnification and Minimization to an extreme degree, minimizing their own moral responsibility, and magnifying victims’ response-ability to face their own problems with backbone. AA’s Big Book, in its Chapter 5, “How It Works,” gives a sermon anathematizing resentment anger and fear. “Resentment is the ‘number one’ offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick.... If we were to live, we had to be free of anger.... Notice that the word ‘fear’ is bracketed... This short word somehow touches about every aspect of our lives.” Even recovering addicts are unusually likely to have some impulsive excitable and novelty-seeking attitudes toward the world. The emotions that people who have a pervasive “the rules don’t apply to me” attitude, would most like to see eradicated from this planet, are resentment anger and fear. Hurt feelings are the “number one” offenders, the emotions which most offend addictive personalities. Though alkies are more respectable offenders than are pervs, those who cause problems would naturally be champions in denying, rationalizing, minimizing, and intellectualizing about, the effects of these problems.
Bill O’Reilly said, “we should have given the citizens of Baghdad forty-eight hours to ‘get out of Dodge’ by dropping leaflets and going with the AM radios and all that. Forty-eight hours, you’ve got to get out of there, and flatten the place.... Now after we know that the final battle is going to come to Baghdad, that the people who remain in Baghdad, the civilians, bear some kind of responsibility for their own safety. Am I wrong?” This is basically the same idea as his self-empowerment advice for blacks, such as, “Get off the abuse excuse. Get off the pity party and black Americans will prosper.” Yet the first of these ideas could be called an abuse of the second. The first shows the sort of moral bankruptcy that alcoholics, sociopaths, perverts such as those who make obscene phone calls, etc., choose to have. The second could seem to be the tough love that those who believe in productivity would express toward those who don’t seem productive enough, as in Enron International’s Rebecca Mark’s statement defending some extreme public relations machinations in India, “There are always ways to include people, to make them productive when they could be counterproductive. That’s not corruption, that’s economic interest.” Victim-blaming that would make the victims more productive through independent resiliency and perseverance would be self-empowering, irrespective of what they must handle resiliently resourcefully and independently.
Dubya, himself, did have a drinking problem. His lack of caution in invading Iraq, is rather typical of addictive personalities. When he said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” this was in his usual childish voice. Now that all have seen that Saddam didn’t still have WMD, Dubya says in the same childish voice, that the only thing that matters is that now the world is a better place without Saddam. Of course, if this was an adequate reason to invade, then that’s the reason that Dubya should have given beforehand. Now, he’s acting as if, no matter how much he said to rely on the claims of WMD, it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether or not they did recently exist. Of course, he could use the sort of moral bankruptcy that addictive personalities love, and say that whatever anyone said in the past doesn’t matter, that the only thing that does matter is that we deal pragmatically with the consequences in the present, that we move on rather than linger on the past. Yet that, also, would mean that anything that Dubya glibly says in the future, could turn out to be unfounded, in which case anyone who objected would be told to stop his resentment about the past, and get on with life.
The classic sign of sociopathy and similar distortions in thinking, is that they lead to the person not learning from experience. Yet if one truly believes in the sort of American norms that led to Ayn Rand being put on an American postage stamp,
he couldn’t learn from the experiences that would show why this zeitgeist would be very likely to lead to rampant depression with victim-self-blaming. Molly Ivins’ introduction to Robert Bryce’s Pipe Dreams, Greed, Ego and the Death of Enron, ends, “It’s horrifying because even after all we have seen, we are still having to listen to people making patently absurd claims that all that has happened only because of ‘a few rotten apples’; still having to watch exactly the same financial industry lobbyists crawling all over Capitol Hill trying to kill or gut every reform proposal; still standing by as powerful corporations buy the votes of the elected representatives of the people with their huge campaign contributions.
“It’s time to get mad and get even. And that’s where this book leaves us: with a far better understanding of why it is so necessary to make the fixes to our system—or watch it happen again and again and again.”
This is about a failure to learn from experience. The big problem is that to whatever degree we do learn from experiences like this, it would go against certain of our mores: that blaming problems on the big picture would be just judgmental restrictive and whiny opinion, that if we fear lobbyists or anyone else who are trying to limit governmental restriction then we’re anti-freedom, etc. If those on the anti-intellectualist radio talked like this in absolutist terms, that would sound exciting, while if they talked about making sure that the depression-producing consequences don’t happen, then those programs would sound far less “hot” (unless, of course, they angrily blame uppity women). Those with the money, who finance much of the organizations that give information and analysis to the media, aren’t going to compromise as to how vociferously they advocate their own interests. Most Americans would understand that the more that they held to a Randroid zeitgeist, the more likely they’d be to succeed, so in the name of pragmatism they’d try to eliminate any “negative attitudes” or “whiny blame-finding” that might cross their own minds. Even before the Enron scandal became known, it was known that the company treated selfishness as a virtue and that this included keeping certain debts off the books, yet the public tended to cheer Enron as a gutsy, innovative role-model. Is this mentality supposed to stop as soon as we experience enough bad effects from it?
Carl Bernstein said on Larry King Live on February 17, 2006, “There is a disinformation campaign in which words mean almost nothing. It’s almost Orwellian. If you went back and read 1984 that’s not to say that this presidency is 1984 but if you look at 1984 it’s about largely the use of language and the use of language by this president and by Mr. Cheney is disingenuous and I think that is not always disingenuous but on the big questions it has been.” That’s what it looks like when one tries to practice positive thinking in statements made to others. When AA gives its members such positive-thinking slogans as, “The people we hate teach us the most,” “I don’t have a problem unless I think I do,” “Everything is perception,” “Optimism is an intellectual choice,” and, “Forgiveness is relinquishing the role of being the victim,” these would certainly prohibit people from seeing what moral responsibility really means. Expecting anything to mean anything, would seem too literalist and resentful. That’s also the basic idea behind thought reform, brain-washing. Thoughts are to be reformed into what conforms, and honest opinions that disagree are to be washed from the brain.
Elsewhere the Big Book gives passing criticism to the aggressive forms of self-interest, but doesn’t go on and on about them. This could be partially because the Big Book consists of ex cathedra statements that some addicts made and other addicts found persuasive. If AA’s Big Book did sermonize about the aggressive forms of self-interest, it might have said for several pages, “Impulsivity is the ‘number one’ offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick.... If we were to live, we had to be free of thrill-seeking.... Excitability somehow touches about every aspect of our lives. It was an evil and corroding thread....” Yet sermonizing about such moral weaknesses of character would come across as sermonizing, a mollycoddle attempt to control the redbloods. Sermonizing about what seem to be self-help weaknesses of character, would seem to be trying to replace weaknesses with strength.
ymurgy...
More of this on Victim Correction Webpage 22
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
