#3-3

o matter what your problem is, how serious it is, who or what caused it, how morally wrong was what caused it, what it would take for you to take care of yourself by dealing with your own problem, etc., you’re simply going to have to deal with it by courageously changing what you can and serenely accepting whatever you can’t.  Absolutely, it’s the victim’s welfare that’s at stake, so personal responsibility goes absolutely to the victim; form follows function.  The victims get held responsible for the outcome of what happened.  They have the most reliable motivation to solve the problems.  For them to take responsibility for their own welfare would be honorably self-reliant.  Not to find blame would be forgiving.  Those who refuse to go along with this don’t stand a chance, since they’d seem to be unrealistic, shirking their response-ability to take care of themselves, acting passive, etc.  Pain we obey, and it’s the victim who feels the pain.  Therefore, you’d seem too naïve, passive, risky, etc., if you relied on the fact that the morally responsible parties know that they’re responsible.

The Lexapro medication webpage About Depression says, “It is estimated that 19 million Americans suffer from depression every year.  Depression is not a weakness or a character flaw—it is a real medical illness.  But the good news is that with proper treatment, 4 out of 5 patients will improve.”

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?  Whenever I or anyone I know experiences the sort of trauma that contributes to such an unnaturally high rate of depression, it would seem that each sufferer should simply take care if it by getting his brain chemistry fixed.  He absolutely can change his own brain chemistry, absolutely can’t change the person who caused his problem.  Sure, that’s morally bankrupt, but at least depressed people are motivated to change their own brain chemistries, while those who cause the problems aren’t reliably motivated to stop.”

And not caring is exactly what we’re supposed to do.  If an American did care that 19 million Americans suffer from depression every year, to a degree and with a persistence that would be worthy of this social problem, you could bet that a wide variety of scary untermensch attributes would be attributed to him.  Just like Jane’s efforts to become well-adjusted, he’d be pressured to become a better, happier person by courageously changing what he could and serenely accepting whatever he’s helpless to change.

Though that rate is obviously unnatural, we’re supposed to treat it as these are among the biological diseases that are parts of the natural order.  Yet no matter how much one could conclusively prove that others are morally responsible for his depression, he absolutely couldn’t change them, and absolutely can change his own brain chemistry through drugs.  That’s the sort of logic that we use to decide who is personally responsible for what.  The sort of “character flaw” that we’d take seriously, are those that seem weak, like depression, rather than those that are aggressive.  After all, fixing the victims would lead to a reliably self-motivated, honorably self-reliant, and forgiving, solution.  The function is to get the problem solved as reliably as possible, so the form must be to hold the victim responsible for taking care of himself.  Though it may seem necessary to see your own conflicts in terms of how well you’re dealing with your own problems, your natural common sense should tell you that this minimizes others’ moral responsibility, and magnifies your own response-ability for your own problems.  The shortage of moral responsibility would lead to more depression, and the focus on response-ability for one’s own problems would lead to plenty of victim-self-blaming.

From this, must follow a logic that makes this seem just.  Victim-blaming logic is based on a “but for” reasoning, while moral responsibility is based on a “proximate cause” reasoning.  “But for” reasoning would say, “But for my failures in protecting myself, being lovable, etc., that wouldn’t have happened to me.”  Victim-self-blaming offers the hope that the only person who really needs changing, is the only person whom you can change.  On the other hand, moral responsibility must work along the lines of innocent until proven guilty, so before you hold someone morally responsible, he’d better be directly responsible.  He’d be allowed all sorts of abstract arguments as to why what he did was at least excusable.  Yet for any problem, someone absolutely must be responsible for the outcome, no matter what arguments he could give for why you can’t really prove him responsible.

If one had a depression undoubtedly caused by someone else’s unambiguously sinful behavior, then maybe SSRIs would be the antidepressants that would control it the most effectively, or maybe another antidepressant would.  But, as the entire unredacted Serenity Prayer as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr says, the desired preternatural serenity would be as unlimited 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.  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.”  Whatever reality you must deal with, is whatever reality you must deal with, and the same applies to getting a well-adjusted state of mind through antidepressants no matter what caused the depression.  The reasons that fans of The Serenity Prayer would give for why caring about the complexity of life is unwise (other than the tactical complexities of how one could best deal with each situation), are the same as the reasons that fans of antidepressants would give for why caring about the complexity of life is unwise.  And since form follows function, those who’d object to the risks of SSRI antidepressants, could be accused of causing suicides in the people who wouldn’t have killed themselves if they took antidepressants.  Accusing even sinful people who cause depressions in others, of causing suicides in those who end up killing themselves, would seem guilt-tripping, manipulative, restrictive, judgmental, naïve if we expect it to do any good, quixotic, etc.  This is how all victim-blaming works, by holding not that the victims willfully caused their own problems, but that it doesn’t matter who willfully caused the problem, only who let it happen by acting too weak, whiny, etc.  The sinful probably aren’t motivated to stop the sins, but the whiny could very easily be motivated to stop whining, even if the whining is about the dangers of SSRI antidepressants that Eli Lilly admitted in one of its patents.

Reaganomics, Libertarianism, etc., boast of the fact that though Social Darwinism, moral bankruptcy, etc., might sound scary, they actually protect us in a way that’s very important.  Without these, people could often get what they wanted by playing the victim role, instead of earning and achieving it.  Simply being morally right, has never earned or achieved anything.  What one has or hasn’t physically won is objective, but other than in the most extreme situations, what is or isn’t inexcusably morally wrong is subjective.  People in any society, including one with rampant depression and anxiety, must deal with their own realities.  The real world isn’t conditional, and if you’re not adequate to deal with your own problems, then you’re inadequate.  Any time that we don’t make this absolutist and unconditional, we’d be giving the opportunity for “You owe me!” sophistry, and there’s no telling where that would end, especially since, if too many people are getting what they want by saying “You owe me!”, not enough people would be earning and achieving what is owed, what we need to live, so the victims would be even more helpless.  Sure, Social Darwinism destroys, but it also protects from any inadequate solving of one’s own problems, whiny “weak characters,” etc.  No matter how repulsive or scary this might look, every society absolutely needs homeostasis, and the more that those living in a society are response-able for their own problems, the more that those who are responsible are those who have the most reliable motivation to succeed.  We simply need protection from the consequences of victimology, victimhood, etc.  As the entire unredacted Serenity Prayer implies, we needn’t worry about the consequences of sinfulness since the victims would take care of them self-reliantly, but who’d take care of the consequences of the inadequate solving of one’s own problems?  Then you could add to this the fact that what Social Darwinism protects us from, could also be called bad for the individuals who have those weaknesses.  If only they’d correct themselves as Social Darwinism would correct them, then they’d be self-empowered, handling their own problems serenely and courageously.  Mollycoddling victimhood is bad for everyone.

The form must then follow this function, so the “personal responsibility” that’s really taken seriously is response-ability for one’s own welfare including one’s own problems.  If one isn’t adequate to do this, loses the battle, fails, and comes up short with big consequences, he’d seem to be an irresponsible and inadequate, loser and failure with very consequential shortcomings.  If he doesn’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, he’d seem to be a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent.  William Ryan, in his definitive Blaming the Victim from 1971, wrote, “As a result, there is a terrifying sameness in the programs that arise from this kind of analysis.”  Since then, this sameness has devolved from a five-step process regarding philanthropic or government-financed programs to make up for poor people’s supposed “cultural deprivation,” to a one-step process which says that the function is that the problems which lead to the rampant depression and anxiety, are to be dealt with in the most self-motivated, honorably self-reliant, and peacefully forgiving way possible, so the form of our relevant norms would have to correct any defects in doing this.

Sure, Numbers 32:23 says, “Be sure your sin will find you out.”  Yet, in reality, sins don’t come with their own signs that one is responsible for them.  On the other hand, failures in taking responsibility for your own problems, will find you out.  Your problem will be your problem.  Conceptions of personal responsibility, “weakness of character,” etc., that hold people responsible for what they’re morally responsible for, aren’t self-enforcing.  Conceptions of personal responsibility, “weakness of character,” etc., that hold people responsible for their own welfare, are self-enforcing.

Ads for anti-depressants sometimes refer to the fact that many blame depression on the whiny “weaknesses of character” of the victims.  Naturally, this ignores the moral weaknesses of character of those who actually trigger depressions in others.  People feel a lot more motivated to change their own literal weaknesses that hurt themselves, than to change their own moral weaknesses.  Therefore, the form that follows that function is that our culture condemns literal weaknesses, far more than it condemns moral weaknesses.  And this means that we’d have to condemn even weaknesses that aren’t intentional, but we have faith that people could change them if they really want to.

For someone to consider depression to be a “weakness of character,” would mean that it would seem to be along the lines of the lassitude that old-fashion medicine treated in the following way, from Fads and Quackery in Healing, by Dr. Morris Fishbein, copyright 1932, “The doctors of an earlier day were wont to relieve hysterical complaints and simulated illnesses by what is known as the ‘ice water’ method.  After the young lady had remained in bed several days and announced her inability to be of assistance in household duties on frequent occasions, the old family doctor would be called to the bedside.  His diagnosis would be made promptly.  Then he would go out to the pump, break the ice, and pull up a bucket full of water.  Warily approaching the bed with his armamentarium hidden behind him, he would suddenly empty the bucket of ice water on the recumbent damsel.  She would leap from her couch and would soon be found busily washing the dishes, apparently cured by a single treatment.”

Those who think that depression results from a weak character, obviously realize that you can’t shake people out of a depression as you could shake people out of genuine laziness.  To attribute depression to a weak character, would require assuming that no matter how much depression is out of the control of the depressed person, he’s just going to have to do whatever it takes to get control over it.  Even if someone else caused the depression by behavior that he had complete conscious control over, that behavior likely would be taken as a given, since expecting moral responsibility could seem just plain naïve.  No matter how much of an effort it would take for a depressed person to function normally, expecting him to do that wouldn’t seem naïve, since that would be for his own good.  Therefore, we try to re-engineer the victims, as if they might as well be engaging in lassitude, and ignore the responsible parties’ moral weaknesses of character, as if they might as well be acts of God.

As Dr. David Healy wrote in Let Them Eat Prozac, “The history of the psychotherapies, from psychoanalysis to the recovered memory stories, shows a dynamic similar to the Prozac story.  Treatments or techniques that could do good are overenthusiastically adopted as solutions to the complexity of life, rather than advances that may provide limited benefits if used judiciously.”  He isn’t against the use of SSRI antidepressants, just the practice of prescribing them indiscriminately though different temperaments would have better results, and fewer risks, with other antidepressants, and some people might be helped more with other approaches.

Yet since psychotherapies, psychoactive medications, etc., usually are given to the people who have the problems, the concepts of personal responsibility that this would require, couldn’t be used judiciously.  Self-help means that the self who has the problem, is the one who provides the help.  If you objected to that as simplistic victim-blaming, you’d be told that the person who has the problem absolutely can’t change anyone but himself, absolutely can change himself, and absolutely must get his problem taken care of.  If he responded to this by talking about the complexity of life and the dangers of using approaches injudiciously, he’d be told that caring about anything else would only get in the way of his dealing with his problem.  Sure, in different situations, different approaches would let him take care of his own problem better than others would, so caring about those specifics would seem good.  Caring about moral and ethical complexities, though, could very easily qualify as dysfunctional, getting in the way of dealing with the real, material, world.  Those who are most likely to succeed are those who have a Nietzschian attitude toward the respectability of the strong and the weak.  Even therapists who think that self-help is just pop psychology, would also have to figure that if one has a problem then he’d better just take response-ability for it with as few distractions as possible, and the worse that it is, the more important that would be.

This is the sort of prejudice, pre-judging, that currently seems very acceptable.  Blaming the Victim says, “In this way, the new ideology is very different from the open prejudice and reactionary tactics of the old days.  Its adherents include sympathetic social scientists with social consciences in good working order, and liberal politicians with a genuine commitment to reform.  They are very careful to dissociate themselves from vulgar Calvinism or crude racism; they indignantly condemn any notions of innate wickedness or genetic defect.  ‘The Negro is not born inferior,’ they shout apoplectically.  ‘Force of circumstance,’ they explain in reasonable tones, ‘has made him inferior.’”

The modern version of victim-blaming could be explained thusly: “In this way, the new ideology is very different from the open prejudice and reactionary tactics of the old days.  Its adherents insist that they’re very concerned about what is good for the entire country, and about watching out for selfish human nature in general.  They are very careful to dissociate themselves from those who treat minorities, women, etc., as being genetically pre-determined to cause a greater amount of problems.  ‘That’s human nature, to take a free ride if it’s available, choosing to be a deadbeat!  The weak must be more motivated to play their parts!’, they shout apoplectically.  ‘Our society’s making this available to them,’ they explain in reasonable tones, ‘has taught them to be dependent, which could only hurt them in the long run.  Sure, this pre-judges members of oppressed groups, but suspecting parasites is necessary to protect our society.  If people were presumed innocent of manipulative machinations until proven guilty, we probably couldn’t prove any of them.  Even sincere beliefs that oneself is entitled to more, could be dangerous, since, no matter who is morally responsible, certain things have to be taken care of by those most motivated to do it.’”  This is something like the difference between the way in which the Catholic hierarchy and its supporters responded to concern about pedo-priests before 2002, “But that’s anti-Catholic bigotry!”, and the way they’ve responded since 2002, “But you’ve got to understand that most of the molestations are past history, and that we can’t afford to pay that much money in lawsuits especially since mercenary lawyers would get so much of it!”  The old approach treats whiners as guilty; the new one assumes that moral bankruptcy is realistic mature and well-adjusted so whiners fall short.

And, of course, the only way that the weak could be motivated to play their parts, is through knowing that if they don’t they’ll suffer more consequences, and maybe through choosing to be optimistic that they’ll get what they deserve.  Otherwise, they could be so unfair.  And, of course, the weak wouldn’t have to be genuinely responsible for their own problems, in order to seem responsible for not taking care of them adequately, which is what everyone is most reliably motivated to do.  Blaming the Victim also says, “The generic process of Blaming the Victim is applied to almost every American problem,” and the modern version of Blaming the Victim seems even more desirable as a panacea, since every possible conflict could be seen as an opportunity for the weak to get what they want by playing the victim role, and we must remain ever-vigilant against this insidious and perfidious selfishness.

Many were outraged at Michael Savage’s statement on July 21, 2008,

Now you want me to tell you my opinion on autism, since I’m not talking about autism?  A fraud, a racket.  For a long while, we were hearing that every minority child had asthma.  Why was there an asthma epidemic amongst minority children?  I’ll tell you why; the children got extra welfare if they were disabled and they got extra help in school.  It was a money racket.

Everyone went in and was told, when the nurse looks at you, you go—I don’t know, the dust got me.  Everybody had asthma from the minority community.  That was number one.

Now the illness du jour is autism.  You know what autism is?  I’ll tell you what autism is in 99 percent of the cases.  It’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out.  That’s what autism is.

What do you mean they scream and they’re silent?  They don’t have a father around to tell them, don’t act like a moron.  You’ll get nowhere in life.  Stop acting like a putz.  Straighten up.  Act like a man.  Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.  Autism, everybody has an illness.  If I behave like a fool, my father called me a fool.  He said to me, don’t behave like a fool.  The worse thing he said, don’t behave like a fool.  Don’t be anybody’s dummy.  Don’t sound like an idiot.

Don’t act like a girl.  Don’t cry.  That’s what I was raised with.  That’s what you should raise your children with.  Stop with the sensitivity training.  You’re turning your son into a girl.  You’re turning a nation into a nation of losers and beaten men.  That’s why we have the politicians we have.
 

As Dr. Jay Gordon, associate professor of pediatrics at UCLA Medical Center, said on Larry King Live that night, “Of course, he aimed a lot of his venom at the minority community, accusing them of faking it.  In fact, there are children who have lesser access to medical care who need even more help.  We need to help doctors diagnose autism early, not late.”

It could seem only natural that we try to defend ourselves both from minorities’ supposed manipulative tactics in order to parasitize, and men not acting patriarchal.  If mentally disabled people took self-responsibility, they’d end up benefiting, as well as saving other people problems.  Doctors could possibly fake whiny diagnoses just as intellectuals could possibly fake whiny results of sociological studies, and those optimistic people who want to believe that these are faked, would be pretty hard to convince otherwise.  Holding that the weak are faking it doesn’t usually seem to be hitting the weak below the belt, since they’re the ones who have manipulative victim-power.  On that episode of Larry King Live, Savage referred to opponents making him look like a “monster,” and guest host Glenn Beck responded by saying, “I am a guy who has been called a monster and everything else.”  It could seem that the reason why so many were offended at Savage’s remark, was that the victimologists have managed to con so many parents into believing that their misbehaving kids are actually victims of autism and whatever causes so much of it, whom the guv’mint should pay for their misbehavior.  One could believe in the law of the jungle, yet not seem to be believing in it, as long as he blames the victims, preferably believing that they’re intentionally at fault.  Where could Reaganomics possibly be, if it didn’t: whine about whining, be confident that people could take self-responsibility if only they wanted to and had enough self-discipline, suspect subjective intellectual abstractions, accuse minorities etc. of manipulatively faking their own helplessness and “victimhood” in order to get money, try to stop people from getting rewarded by the guv’mint for disruptively acting like victims, act like a victim of whiners who care about monsters, and make all this sound as exciting as a radio shock jock?  Those supposed enemies are the sort of thing that Social Darwinism would protect us from.  Sure, plenty who wouldn’t be guilty would also be disciplined by market discipline, but that’s life.

This is pretty much the same conception of personal responsibility that’s reflected in:

Sure, statements such as Savage’s seem to be unfair bigotry, but the self-help that’s based on Al-Anon self-help seems to benefit the weaklings whom it tries to correct.  Yet the fact is that both are just as absolutist in blaming the weak, and both are just as optimistic that as long as those who’d be the most motivated to solve a problem would do it as effectively as possible, it could get solved.  Even if a victim-fixer starts out wanting to help those victimized by addicts’ family members, by teaching them more self-empowerment, as long as they don’t seem to be taking enough response-ability for their own welfare to solve their own problems, they could seem to be choosing not to do enough.  The only choice that the victim-fixers have would be either that sort of pre-judging, or, “Since ‘As long as you can’t change it, you must serenely accept it and courageously change what you can,’ is morally bankrupt, you don’t have to do it, especially when this gets especially morally bankrupt.  Whatever consequences you’d then have to suffer, would be whatever consequences you’d then have to suffer.”  The more fair you tried to be, the more unfair you’d be, since fairness would mean not holding responsible the person who’s motivated to solve the problem (but didn’t cause it), so his problem wouldn’t get solved.  When it comes to addicts’ family members, non-whites, poor people, women, etc., they wouldn’t even have to fake helplessness in order to seem not to be doing enough to overcome their own problems, which naturally everyone must do.

As Ann Jones wrote in Next Time She’ll Be Dead, “And this ingenious application of psychiatric diagnosis to social problem leads to social policy more irresponsible than Ryan could have imagined: the ultimate evasion—no policy at all.  If the wife beater’s wife causes the problem, then there’s really nothing the policy makers can do, is there?”  One thing that Jones stressed in her book, is that when Americans hear about a man beating his wife, Americans’ first thought would be far more likely to be “Why doesn’t she just leave?”, than, “Why would he do such a thing?  Is he crazy?”  It also seems all too easy to see domestic violence as something that simply happens when life gets too stressful, as if it were spontaneous combustion.  Just as “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it...” strains at resentment and swallows sinfulness, “Why doesn’t she just leave?”, strains the women’s naïve trust, and swallows the men’s violent tendencies (though violence still should be prevented, by the women avoiding the wife-beaters).  While it may seem ridiculous to figure that wife beaters’ wives cause their own abuse, this is the sort of logic that market discipline would use in its discipline: that if you win you’re a winner, and if you lose you’re a loser.

And one could make the political personal, in ways that are subtler than that.  Steven Carter’s self-help book Men Who Can’t Love, is about commitment-phobic men, those who cut out of committed relationships, sometimes acting abusively toward their partners, because these men feel strong phobias toward committed relationships, though their partners did nothing to provoke them.  This book makes it clear that if a woman is in a relationship where her man treats her like this, then it isn’t her fault, that she neither provoked it nor “let herself in for it” by being attracted to men like this.  This book says explicitly that this is a social problem, “Today, unlike any other period in our history, the fear of commitment is destroying the fabric of society,” and even though commitment-phobic men treat women as their captors, the reason why we have this social problem now is that women are more willing to have pre-marital sex, so commitment-phobic men could afford to treat commitment as a dispensable luxury.  Another reason why this is a social problem, is that our social norms easily expect women to take as a given such “Boys will be boys” tendencies (though the abuse still should be prevented, by the women avoiding the abusive men).  “He couldn’t help himself, so he was a victim of his own feelings, and you’re to be condemned if you don’t accept that.”

Yet on the front cover of the book, above the title is, “WHEN A MAN’S FEAR MAKES HIM RUN FROM COMMITMENT,” and below the title, “And What A Smart Woman Can Do About It.”  So even though this admittedly is a social problem that the women played no part in causing, each woman is simply supposed to do something about her own problem.  Since the men act out of a terror of committing themselves to normal reciprocal relationships, their abusive behavior might as well have just spontaneously happened.  If she’s lucky she could get her man into psychotherapy to stop his painful and dysfunctional attitude problem.  Otherwise, she’s simply going to have to watch out for and avoid men like this, just as women are supposed to watch out for and avoid wife-beaters.  When a husband drives his innocent wife crazy by treating her as his captor, she should give him his way, since she should be independent from any man who’d treat her that badly.  This would then seem to be what would constitute self-care, self-empowerment, self-help, etc., for her.  As usual, this would strain women’s continued trust in untrustworthy men, and swallow abusive tendencies in them, but the victims are more motivated so solve or prevent any problems, so straining and correcting their supposed flaws would be the most productive.

As usual, women seem responsible for how their men affect them. Al-Anon’s handbook, How Al-Anon Works, for Families & Friends of Alcoholics, includes, “We may serve as the enabler, rescuing the alcoholic from unpleasant consequences of his or her own making.  Or we may play the victim, unwillingly stepping in and covering for the alcoholic who is too drunk or hung over to fulfill job or family responsibilities.”

Obviously, most of the times that the spouse rescues the alcoholic from unpleasant consequences of his or her own making, the spouse does this to save the rest of the family from such consequences as poverty.  Doing this is hardly playing the victim, or playing anything else.  In fact, those who actually do want to play the victim would very willingly sit back passively and accept the alcoholics not fulfilling their job or family responsibilities, and when this leads to serious consequences, melodramatically act so-o-o-o-o persecuted and beleaguered.  To call such a person an “enabler” though her intent was to protect the entire family, or “playing the victim” though she was unwillingly doing damage control for the family, really does attribute to her some attributes that she may not have at all.  Yet attributing them to her is what would most encourage her to stolidly take personal response-ability for her own welfare.

This is also Enron’s “intellectual purity,” caring only about what measures, in the given circumstances, would be the most effective and efficient, and regarding moral concerns as potential distortions distractions and negativism.  That’s what gets the job done the most reliably, motivated by plenty of self-motivation.  According to Enron’s intellectual purity, the ultimate ends of this would be both what they consider to be freedom, and protection from the unfairness that could result from manipulative ploys.  As The Smartest Guys in the Room says, “They believed that free markets made the world a fairer place, one where price dictated deals, rather than relationships or other ‘noneconomic’ factors,” and intellectually pure cynics would label all of those “relationships or other ‘noneconomic’ factors” that we need protection from, manipulative.  Eliminating that interpersonal emotionalism, after all, seems to equal fairness.  But as one could see from the realities of Enron, that could mean a considerable lack of freedom for the weak.  Even if 19 million Americans suffer from depression every year, this would be treated as if the problem was inside each of these victims, but as long as this isn’t blamed on a personal weakness or a character flaw, this wouldn’t seem to be blaming the victim.

Tim Belden was the Enron trading chief responsible for the tactics that contributed to California’s power crisis.  The Enron traders themselves named them “Fat Boy,” “Death Star,” “Get Shorty,” and “Ricochet.”  Even after the higher-ups discovered these during California’s electricity crisis, they didn’t stop them immediately.  One of the first Enron lawyers to hear of these suggested, “Is it too late to change the names?  Can’t you just call them Puppy Dog and Momma’s Cooking?”  California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, when a journalist later asked him if he’ll be bringing criminal charges against Enron, answered, “I’d love to personally escort Lay to an eight-by-ten cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’,” so Belden realized that he’d better see a lawyer about his possibly being prosecuted for those tactics.

                       

Some Enron traders were taped as saying such things as, “They’re f------g taking all the money back from you guys?  All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?,” “Yeah, grandma Millie, man,” “Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour.”  Naturally Skilling said about Enron’s role in California, “We’re on the side of the angels.  We’re taking on the entrenched monopolies.  In every business we’ve been in, we’re the good guys.”  The Smartest Guys In the Room, The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall Of Enron, says about Belden, “He was, as they liked to say at Enron, intellectually pure—a trader who believed in the beauty of free markets and had no scruples when it came to exploiting inefficiencies to make money.”  While the logic of victim correction as a panacea is in no position to exploit inefficiencies, it most certainly anathematizes them, irrespective of the moral accountability for the problems that must be faced efficiently.

As Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools describes Enron’s lawyers’ feelings about the traders’ names for the market-manipulation tactics, “Such in-your-face flamboyance would be enough to sway a jury.  Topping it off, they were juvenile.  Sanders couldn’t understand how someone like Belden would tolerate something so sophomoric.”  Yet one who believes in the creative destruction of the free market’s exploiting inefficiencies, probably would accept any uninhibited expression of spontaneity involved in doing this.  If, hypothetically, one showed Belding or Skilling that the contests of power that are the engine of these free markets, have to cause great rates of depression, anxiety, etc., since just because someone lost a competition doesn’t mean that he deserved that, Belding or Skilling would probably think that caring about such people would constitute a restraint on expansive achievement-oriented spirits.  You certainly can’t expect Belding or Skilling to restrain sophomoric words.  Whatever keeps up the uninhibited spirit, keeps up the uninhibited spirit.

Rebecca Mark of Enron International said in 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.”  Everyone knows that productive = good, and counterproductive = bad.   If one opposes any business-as-usual when it’s the only business available to him, that’s counterproductive.  Helping it to produce would be productive.  This would also let him get the benefits of fitting in with the rest of the world.

Paula Kaplan, in They Say You’re Crazy, wrote that in the mid 1980s, the DSM was considering a possible “Self-Defeating Personality Disorder,” a combination of codependency and general masochism, and “Paraphilic Rapism Disorder”: “The masochism and rapism categories, taken together, would have meant excusing rapists for their crimes because their own alleged mental disorder (PR) meant they should not be held responsible for their actions, but their victims were to have been regarded as causing the rape by their alleged mental disorder of masochism, a need to force others to make them suffer.”  Yet according to victim-blaming rationale, the victims wouldn’t have to force anyone to do anything, in order to seem as responsible as if they did.  Kaplan wrote that the diagnosis of SDPD embodied a “victim-blaming, she-brought-it-on-herself attitude,” and that this diagnosis would attribute the sinners’ choices to the victims’ disorder.  Yet this wouldn’t require a belief that the victim forced the sinner to act sinfully.  Ann Jones summarized the real logic, as, “Without the wife-beater’s wife there would be no wife beating.”  As long as anyone puts herself into a position where “she should have known” that she’d get hurt, she’d seem to have chosen to make herself vulnerable.  And one wouldn’t have to prove that she chose to “let herself in for trouble,” since the motivations behind this would be subconscious.  The symptoms of the proposed SDPD weren’t that the person have conscious desires to ask for trouble, only that she have greater-than-average tendencies to get into more problem situations and relationships, trigger more abusive behavior from others, etc.  (Then again, considering that we live in a society with rampant depression and anxiety disorders, yet we’re supposed to be optimistic, likely many would underestimate how much sinfulness the average American must deal with.)

To say that if a woman seems to “let herself in for trouble” with a sinful person then she might as well have forced him to do what he did, might seem as distorted as are the self-blaming cognitive distortions of modern Western depression.  Yet both of these reflect how victim-blaming, including victim-self-blaming, must work.  David D. Burns, MD wrote in his book Feeling Good, that the “Cognitive Distortions” of modern Western depression are: All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filter, Disqualifying the Positive, Jumping to Conclusions, Magnification [of what’s wrong with the depressed or right with others] or Minimization [of what’s right with the depressed or wrong with others], Emotional Reasoning, Should Statements [Dr. Burns says, “ ‘Musts’ and ‘oughts’ are also offenders.”], Labeling and Mislabeling, and Personalization [which Dr. Burns defines as, “You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.”].  The usual attitude toward the absolutisms of these is that naturally someone who’s that biologically impaired won’t have symptoms that are only relative.

Yet intercultural studies have consistently found that depressed people who’ve lived in developed areas 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.  Taming the Tyrant, Treating Depressed Adults, by Dr. Dean Schuyler, says, “In the 1970s, Roth, et al. found ‘inappropriate guilt’ associated as often with anxiety syndromes as with depression, raising questions about its specificity.”  And everyone knows that growing up in abusive homes, alcoholic homes, etc., is very likely to leave people with strong tendencies to blame themselves for their problems.  After all, they absolutely can change themselves, absolutely can’t change themselves, and absolutely must get their own problems taken care of.  This simply is what’s self-reliant.  This is what being “positive,” “solution-oriented,” “optimistic,” “productive,” etc., about one’s own problems, would require.  As Henry Ford said, “Don’t find blame; find a solution,” and attempts to correct others would necessarily constitute “finding blame,” while finding the right ways to correct yourself would constitute “finding a solution.”  If you can relate to, “You’ve got to accentuate the positive, Eliminate the negative, Latch on to the affirmative, Don’t mess with Mister In-Between,” then you’d focus your attention on courageously changing what you can (yourself) and serenely accepting what you can (everyone else), even if this means, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”

And this wouldn’t be somewhere in between “finding blame” and “finding a solution”; half-measures will avail us nothing, and noticing how others truly are to blame certainly doesn’t constitute a measure.  In fact, the worse that your problem is, the more important it would be that you’d deal with it as pragmatically as you could.

When you’re trying to figure out whether or not someone might do something that would really hurt someone else’s life, you might think that that person wouldn’t do it, since only a sociopath would just go ahead and do that, with a sense of impunity.  Yet if he does, you’d be faced with a very different logic, that is, of how easy it is to get away with it.  His intent probably had at least some excusable aspects to it, and those would be stressed.  For example, if what he did was more reckless than malicious, it could be called “only a mistake” or “only an accident.”  Since he’d be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and you couldn’t prove that what he did was bad enough that it would have to be taken seriously as badness, your objections to it could very easily be treated as just your judgmental and manipulative opinion.  The principles that would be at play would be basically the same as the principles of laissez faire economics: moral responsibility is subjective, response-ability for one’s own welfare is objective, people’s opinions that what someone did was morally wrong would have to reflect their own SELF-WILLS to one degree or another, those who minimize their own problems would be most likely to succeed in life, and the person whose welfare is at stake is always the one who has the most reliable motivation to take response-ability for it.  The sense of impunity would have been right, since not only would he not be punished for that, but he wouldn’t have to take any responsibility for it.

Niebuhr’s magnum opus, The Nature and Destiny of Man, came from lectures that gave at the same time as The Moscow Show Trials.  They were probably a big reason why at that time, he was very aware of the fact that no matter how much a political movement might claim to serve the common good, it’s actually run by human beings, which, therefore, must include their SELF-WILLS Yet the ironic thing is that the only self-will that the Show Trials really showed, was Stalin’s.  All of the Old Guard Bolsheviks who were put on trial, confessed to the supposed crimes that they were put on trial for.  Sure, many of the defendants were tortured into confessing, and threatened that family members would be tortured if they didn’t confess.  Others, who refused to confess, were executed without a public trial.  Yet no doubt plenty of the defendants confessed because they thought that this served the common good.  That would mean that if they were more selfish, that would have served The Truth, far better than their self-sacrifice did!  Of course, one could say that the fact that they so believed in their favorite dogma was a narcissistic belief that they’re right, but that’s as simplistic as is the supposed narcissism of, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  Anyone who’d think that what the Show Trials showed was the dangers of SELF-WILL, must have a strange bias against self-interest!  And just as, if the defendants in the Show Trials hadn’t confessed that would have reflected their own SELF-WILLS but would have also served The Truth, if those who are unjustifiably accused of choosing to be weak for “fun” and/or profit, refuse to confess to this, that would reflect their own SELF-WILLS but would also serve The Truth.  The Truth is bound to serve a lot of people’s SELF-WILLS, and democratic and humanistic truths will certainly serve this. If you look at each of them separately, you could always lecture her about how her SELF-WILL expects this sinful world to be as she’d have it, see her as resentful and/or manipulative,