#3-4
The Sinners Aren’t Re-Engineered, So Someone Has to Be.
“Oh, well, that’s human nature, so we’re just going to have to accept it.”—(OK, when reading that, what popped into your mind as being unchangeable human nature, aggressive behavior, or someone failing to solve his own problem because he’s not resilient resourceful and independent enough?)
t’s psychoanalysis for the sinners, cognitive therapy for the victims. Those who cause the problems, whether they’d qualify as sinful or as just feckless, would, at the very least, get the sort of understanding that psychoanalysis would give. It would seem that if they felt that they needed to do what they did, we must understand that thwarting these needs would lead to conflicts that we couldn’t just ignore. (Of course, if what they did also hurt themselves, then a self-help holding them responsible for their own welfare, their self-defeating tendencies, wouldn’t be moralistic and controlling.) All are likely to hear themes of interminability, that the sinners can’t simply repress their desires to act like this, and that this is just the way that each of them, human nature, life, and this sinful world, are. It seems only natural to tell someone with a very real problem, “Choose not top have a pity-party about it,” but one dare not tell someone feeling frustration over having to restrain his expansive desires, “So, if you feel bad, you’d better choose not to have a pity-party about your not getting what you want.” It also seems all too easy to treat him as if his victim-power makes him scary, yet fears of him wouldn’t look manipulative.
It would seem uplifting to tell someone with a problem that his living through it would strengthen his character as in James 1:2-3, “Count it all joy, my brethren, when you meet various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness,” but repressive to tell the person expected to deal with frustrated desires that he’d have the power to fulfill, that if he decided not to do it anyway then going through the feelings of frustrations would produce steadfastness of character. Of course, if he doesn’t the power to fulfill his desires, that would be a minor trial, so he’d be expected to grow up and deal with the reality of his powerlessness. In the end, it’s basically a question of power, along with aggressive human nature seeming to be something that we’d better not expect to be as we’d have it, so we must have our brains washed of passive human nature, re-engineer it. It would seem very trendy to expect someone to believe, “My strife is all in my head, and depends on my thinking counterproductive thoughts, so I’ll choose not to feel the strife,” but very un-trendy to expect someone to believe, “My desires that cause others trouble are all in my head, and depend on my thinking counterproductive thoughts, so I’ll choose not to feel those desires,” though both of these are true, for the same reasons.
The webpage EMOTIONAL THOUGHT STOPPING (A Mood Enhancing Exercise), tells all those millions of depressed Americans, “Each year over 17 million people in the United States are depressed. Of those fewer than 30% get help! Each year over 30,000 people in the United States commit suicide.”
When you’ve seen guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? When I or anyone else experiences the sort of traumas that contribute to such an unnaturally high rate of depression, that person is to stop any negative thoughts. No one is to look at the specifics of each situation, to see to what degree it’s naturally traumatizing. Not only that, no matter how unambiguous would be someone else’s responsibility for causing it, that person probably won’t be expected to practice anything like thought-stopping. Sure, if he stopped his thoughts about how much he wanted to do what he did, that would have been just as effective as would the victim stopping his thoughts about how much it hurt him. Yet stopping some thoughts seems to be re-engineering and/or repressing human nature, while stopping others using exactly the same technique, doesn’t. What I’m supposed to fit in with, is that the thoughts that aren’t to be re-engineered or repressed are those that The Serenity Prayer forgives as ‘sinful,’ while if the victims stop their thoughts, that would be considered self-helping, self-empowering, self-efficacious, etc.”
That webpage not only tells of cognitive therapy, but a cognitive therapy technique that works the same, and has the same name, as does a cult brainwashing technique. To those who study cults, “thought stopping” means a cultist being trained to stop doubts about his cult leader, simply by thinking “STOP!”, and to a cognitive therapist, “thought stopping” means someone with negative attitudes being trained to stop his doubts, simply by thinking “STOP!” Of course, those who’d want to do the destructive things that trigger a lot of these depressions, could also get rid of these desires simply by thinking “STOP!” Yet this is done only in certain extreme cases, such as with addictive desires to drink or take drugs. The rest of the time, thought-stopping of aggressive thoughts, would seem repressive, naïve, guilt-tripping, etc. You’d think that all that one would have to do would be to take one look at that figure, that each year over 17 million people in the United States are depressed, and he’d see that something had better get control over the excessive behavior that’s causing such an excessive rate. Yet getting control over the causes would seem out of the question, since it seems that while it’s therapeutic to re-engineer the victims’ human nature, it’s ignominious to try to re-engineer the sinners’. Though your culture might have told you that aggressive human nature is ineradicable but passive human nature can be stopped, as in, “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,” your natural common sense should tell you that this would allow plenty of problems to happen, while giving plenty of response-ability to the victims.
Niebuhr’s favorite theological doctrine was the Doctrine of Original Sin. Reinhold Niebuhr, a biography, by Richard Wightman Fox, says that in the last half of the 1930s Niebuhr had almost a cult following among young Christians in England, giving a student conference at Swanwick. Among his fans (not his detractors) a favorite limerick was:
At Swanwick when Niebuhr had quit it
A young man exclaimed “I have hit it!
Since I cannot do right
I must find out tonight
The right sin to commit—and commit it.”But, of course, if anyone thinks that The Serenity Prayer implies a fatalism about others’ sinfulness, that person would seem to be victim-posturing, whiny, negativist, resentful, etc.
As a favorite book of the Reagan Revolution was Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. This book condemns moral relativism, which might sound reasonable, but it really is necessary to remember that it accompanied Reagan’s moralism. A recent version of this is Richard Viguerie saying about the social conservatives possibly forming a third party if Giuliani is the Republican presidential candidate, “The train has left the station in terms of conservatives feeling that we have to have a strategy for conservatives to govern America. We’ve not locked into one strategy or another strategy, but high on that list is the consideration for a third party.” For them to say that they’re going to govern us sounds a lot scarier than does saying that moral relativism leads to moral bankruptcy. In fact, a need to defend oneself from authoritarians’ plans to govern us, is one of the big appeals that moral relativism has. For example, no doubt most of the self-serving rationales that commitment-phobic men use to justify their cutting out on their girlfriends or wives, is along the lines of accusing them of using authoritarian tactics like trying to guilt-trip them in order to “trap” them. On the other hand, an awareness of what leads to our rampant depression wouldn’t be authoritarian, but wouldn’t be morally relativist, either.
As this book says, the big difference between the original version of the now-popular Wagnerian excitement, and its American version, is that the German culture, before Hitler, was aware of the consequences. “The image of this astonishing Americanization of the German pathos can be seen in the smiling face of Louis Armstrong as he belts out the words of his great hit ‘Mack the Knife.’... The scenario for ‘Mack the Knife’ is the beginning of the supra-moral attitude of expectancy, waiting to see what the volcano of the id will spew forth, which appealed to Weimar and its American admirers. Everything is all right as long as it is not fascism!”
Yet as one could see most plainly in the social norms that arose out of Reaganomics, one who claims to be standing up only for “realism,” could insist that we accept a fatalistic acceptance of destructive behavior that’s not violent, but does contribute to our rampant depression. That really would have to result from Reaganomics. This must reward those who have unconditional coping skills, and punish and condemn firm disapproval of most of the non-violent behavior that contributes to our rampant depression. If you win you’re a winner, and if you lose you’re a loser. Even if the reason why you’re a loser was profoundly wrong, that’s subjective, and wouldn’t matter in the long run if you took care of your own problems well enough. In order to swim with the sharks without being eaten alive, realists must accept the sharks. This wouldn’t be nihilistic, as long as the victims take care of their own problems.
George Bernard Shaw described an Englishman as one who does everything on principle: he fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles. This isn’t the nihilistic zeitgeist. Both patriotic and imperial principles could be said to foster civilization, and business principles could be said to foster achievement in business. Realists realize that force is required to get such things done. Those who’d disagree could always be labeled as untermensch underachievers.
This book also says, “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.”
Since those in every society must accommodate to the imperfections and vicissitudes that affect them, civilizations could survive such aggressive behavior by re-engineering untermensch human nature, such as by having everyone who needed to do this: taking antidepressants, taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as they would have it, etc. The reason for taking this sinful world, is that very little sinfulness would have intolerable permanent effects, as long as the victims courageously changed what they could and serenely accepted what they couldn’t. There are only two ways in which you could set limits to how much sinfulness goes too far: limiting your own behavior when you want to, and changing how others’ sinfulness affects you when you can. Realists must accept übermensch human nature, since it has the power to effect its self-will on others, but not untermensch human nature, since it doesn’t have the power to effect its self-will on others. People are a lot more motivated to choose to replace their own untermensch inadequacies with pragmatic thinking, than they are to choose to replace their own übermensch defects of character with pragmatic thinking. If a society stresses an ethos that says that productive success is good and failure is bad, then the more morally bankrupt that this ethos is, the more that this society’s failures would solve their own problems, rather than making excuses for their own failures, being too cowardly in solving their own problems, and trying to restrict the productive ones.
For example, when the MADD pamphlet Someone You Know Drinks and Drives, says, “If you live with the person who refuses to change, consider asking him or her to leave. Or, you may need to leave yourself. Loving an alcoholic does not require that you stand helplessly by their destructive behaviors. You must be the one strong enough to take action to change the situation. Make a plan with the help of your family and other trusted advisors, and be prepared to follow through with the plan,” this could seem to be what, really, is the most feasible option in situations like this. What this leaves unsaid is that even if a woman’s husband’s impossible behavior has no diseased compulsions backing it up, she still absolutely can’t change his actions and absolutely can change her own reactions. She still must be the one who’s strong enough to take action to change the situation, no matter how much strength, sacrifice, etc., that might entail. His behavior would be serenely accepted, which might not have the same intent as permissivity, but does have the same effects.
The less that you even noticed what causes our rates of depression, anxiety disorders, etc., to be so high, the more likely you’d be to succeed courageously, and, therefore, be praised. In the business world, taking traditional American values seriously would have to seem too untermensch, getting in the way of achievement, and/or giving too much victim-power to those hurt by violations of these ethics. The cultures of the American Bible Belt and Wild West have always been particularly Wagnerian. In order for the forgiving self-responsibility of Reaganomics to keep operating in all circumstances, it has to seem this self-justifying in all circumstances.
This is all very systematic. As the Philadelphia Grand Jury report on their Archdiocese’s enabling of pedo-priests put it,
Avoiding what each of those worldviews considers to be repression, predictably seems all-important, but that seems OK, since those hurt by such behavior are motivated to solve their own problems. In both cases, to accept the supposed repression would mean unending helplessness, while to reject the repression could mean that the victims are helpless for a while, but, if they’re winners, they’ll overcome their own helplessness. An American optimism would say that as long as one’s helplessness didn’t come from restrictions from the guv’mint, he’s free to rebuild, so to try to stop what causes the helplessness would be anti-freedom victimology. When one is expected to serenely deal with the imperfections inherent to life and/or humanity, who’s to say how far goes too far? This sort of fatalism about human nature would therefore have to be treated as good, and not adjusting to it would have to be treated as bad. Those who whine the loudest, could probably be labeled as manipulators. Anyone who accuses one of using “victim-power” would probably sound too amoral, but that wouldn’t change the fact that victims can get a manipulative power from pleading their victimhood. The more revolting was their victimization, the more victim-power they’d have. Who’s to say which choices that harm others, are the id spewing forth, and which are a matter of personal freedom? The sort of magical thinking that was characteristic of the Romantic era doesn’t seem like magical thinking, in that the person who has the problem always has the most reliable motivation to solve it, and who’s to say that this conception of personal response-ability is wrong? The most basic thing that a society needs is homeostasis, so whatever serves it has to seem good, and whatever hinders it has to seem bad. One can only wonder whether what Niebuhr wrote in The Nature and Destiny of Man about what pre-agrarian tribes are really like, “The very strictness with which primitive custom binds the individual to the group and prohibits individual deviations from established norms (however capricious the origin of such norms may be) is the mark of the primitive community’s fear of anarchy. The primitive community has no freedom in its social structure, not because the individual lacks an embryonic sense of freedom but precisely because he does have such a sense; and the community is not imaginative enough to deal with this freedom without suppressing it,” means what Teutonic thinking would regard as strict repression, or what the balanced thinking that cares about the rate of depression, would regard as strict repression.
Sure, The Closing of the American Mind includes, “More serious for us are the arguments of the revolutionaries who accepted our principles of freedom and equality. Many believed that we had not thought through these cherished ideals. Can equality really only mean equal opportunity for unequal talents to acquire property? Should shrewdness at acquisition be better rewarded than moral goodness? Can private property and equality sit so easily together when even Plato required communism among equals?... We had not adequately understood what really setting laws for ourselves required, nor had we gone beyond the merely negative freedom of satisfying brutish impulsion.” Yet Reaganomics has to require that equality means equal opportunity for those who have unequal luck and real opportunities, to acquire property. Both Reaganomics and the German perspective would say that we’ve got to accept that human nature means that the aggressiveness of the übermenschen is ineradicable, and that when the untermenschen assertively stand up for their own rights, this serves their own , what they want to believe they’re entitled to, and/or what they manipulatively try to convince others to give them. The only objective way to determine what someone deserves, is to look at what he earned and won. Of course, seeing aggressiveness in the business world as ineradicable, seems a lot more honorable or at least realistic than does seeing aggressiveness in our private lives as ineradicable (unless you’re a woman who must accept that “boys will be boys”). If our ideals stress productivity far more than they stress moral responsibility, then people are far more likely to care about someone being a loser (even when this is hardly his own fault), then they are to care about sinfulness.
This book goes into how the modern culture has replaced the “virtue” of feminine modesty with feminist insistence that men not objectify women. This doesn’t mention the fact that romantic relationships, especially marriages, have always been the area in which Wagnerian expectations have been the norm. Women are simply supposed to accept that “boys will be boys,” as if the men’s aggressiveness simply is ineradicable. The women are supposed to figure that they can’t change the men, but can change how they react to the men’s behavior, whether this be by staying with the men and enduring it, or leaving and enduring whatever would be the consequences of making it on their own. The usual suppositions that you get what you deserve certainly doesn’t apply to these women, unless one holds that if a woman in this situation tries hard enough to improve her life, she’d therefore deserve more than if she responded passively and timidly. If the husband accuses the wife of “trapping” him though he was the one who pursued her, who’s to say that he’s wrong and, therefore, he’d better act cooperatively toward her?
As can be seen in the audience for self-help ideas, such self-interested gutsy and amoral conceptions of personal responsibility are a lot more marketable than is even the most worldly ethical responsibility. The basic idea of both this sort of self-help and Reaganomics, is that whoever’s welfare is at stake is the one who has the most reliable motivation to solve a problem, so he should want himself to have the response-ability for it, and not to care about what should be in the moral sense, even if this leads to the helplessness that leads to our rampant depression.
In both cases, no matter how right you are, if you’re the only one who has a reliable motivation to change what must be changed, then you’re the only one, and that has to be all-important. Reaganomics is built of each individual succeeding in life, and you could succeed in life only if you deal with your own problems. This would be just as true if you were an addict’s family member. To tell you, “But you must tolerate that!”, sounds practical, whereas telling people in general to be more tolerant of destructive behavior, doesn’t. When the weak tolerate the strong since this would be pragmatic for the weak, that would seem far more acceptable than when moral relativism tolerates aggressive behavior in order to avoid authoritarianism and repression. In all cases, if none of the responsible people have any motivation, nothing is going to move. If none are motivated enough to solve the problem at hand, things won’t move enough to solve the problem at hand. If, instead, we could succeed by proving that we deserved to, then we’d all try to get what we wanted by proving that we’re victims rather than through achieving and winning it. No matter what are the rates of depression, anxiety in one’s own society, then as long as the helplessness that caused it doesn’t come directly from the government, we’d have to be as fatalistic about the devastation as Freud was about aggression. “Oh, well, that’s human nature.”
The chapter “Analyzing the Transaction,” of Dr. Thomas A. Harris’ I’m OK—You’re OK, copyright 1967, has as its quotation at the beginning, Saint Paul’s, “I do not understand my own actions.” That’s from Romans 7:15-23, where Paul described himself as having more impulse-control problems than most people: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.”
Yet the Analyzing the Transaction chapter doesn’t analyze transactions in which the other person acts like that. First the chapter outlines how a person would participate in a transaction when playing the role of a “Parent,” “Child,” or “Adult.” The Parent would act judgmental, and/or authoritarian, and/or blaming and fault-finding. The Child would act passive and/or unsophisticated. The Adult would act sophisticated and considered, looking at everything on a case-by-case basis. Then, this goes into how certain transactions, including headgames, involve the participants playing different combinations of these roles.
Yet modern psychology has very definite ideas about what you, especially if you’re female, should do in transactions with people acting as Romans 7:15-23 describes. That is, that “acting like an adult” would mean simply taking response-ability for your own problems, which would include those that people like Paul would cause. You’re not to consider any question other than, “Can I change this, and if so, how expediently can I do it?” That would be what adult “wisdom” would seem to mean. The only way that looking at each situation on a case-by-case basis could seem adult, would be to notice that in each case the person whose welfare is at stake could change different things. Any expectations of moral responsibility would seem “controlling,” “self-righteous,” etc., too parental. If you showed less stolid self-reliance than that, you’d seem childish. This all sounds very all-American and red-blooded. Paul, and expectations that you simply deal with people like him, hardly seem permissively decadent.
It’s no wonder that soon before that, this book had said, “I’M NOT OK—YOU’RE OK came first and persists for most people throughout life.... Unfortunately, the most common position, shared by ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ people alike, is the I’M NOT OK—YOU’RE OK position.” If the above is how one one defines personal responsibility, then probably often, he’s not going to live up to his own expectations of being strong enough to deal with a society with rampant depression. This is along the same lines of the cognitive distortion of modern Western depression that Dr. David Burns, in Feeling Good, called “Magnification [of what’s wrong with oneself or right with others] or Minimization [of what’s wrong with others or right with oneself].” After all, everyone absolutely can change themselves, absolutely can’t change anyone else, and absolutely must deal with their own problems expediently. Cognitive therapy would then be the key to get such self-reliant strength.
One could sum up the interplay between psychoanalysis and cognitive therapy, in the title of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation. Psychoanalysis tells us that we must accept the aggressive will, cognitive therapy deals with representation, we must forgive sinfulness but mustn’t forgive supposed manipulativeness, and these seem to be everything in the world that well-adjusted people could care about. Though most of this two-book set philosophically ponders the natures of various things, the parts of the book that would constitute a zeitgeist, say that reality is a random product of people’s selfish wills, so to get through life better, we should represent the world to us, as being as innocuous as we could. Two quotes from The World as Will and Representation pretty much sum this up, “This world is the battle-ground of tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other. Therefore, every beast of prey in it is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of torturing deaths,” and, “When this striving after a painless existence, in so far as such an existence might be possible by applying and observing rational deliberation and acquired knowledge of the true nature of life, was carried out with strict consistency and to the utmost extreme, it produced Cynicism, from which Stoicism afterwards followed.” On Majikthise’s Philosophers’ Theme Songs webpage, the theme song assigned to Schopenhauer is “Desolation Row.” Real optimism would be confident that we’d rarely have to contrive optimism. Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace and taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as we would have it, was exactly what Schopenhauer was after.
And those who believe in the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer, had better keep in mind that Niebuhr had the same pessimism about the material world, but optimism about how we could feel serene despite it. Also, the world as will and representation means that we should be aware of how our conceptions of the world could be shaped by our wills, how it suits us to perceive them, so these representations could be called manipulative. “Nature has produced [the intellect] for the service of an individual will; therefore it is destined to know things only in so far as they serve as the motives of such a will, not to fathom them or comprehend their true inner essence.” And this is supposed to be all in the world that we care about. It seems counterproductive to ask about one’s own problem, “Who’s to blame?”, “When did he cause it?”, or “Why did he do it?”, and productive to ask, “What can I do to deal with my problem the best I could?” and “How could I best deal with my problem?” Accepting others’ willfulness and changing one’s own reactions to it including his representations of it, are to make up one’s entire worldview. Schopenhauer was a major inspiration of Richard Wagner, so we could go beyond calling this sort of zeitgeist “Wagnerian,” to say that Wagner was Schopenhauerian.
We tend to associate with Freud, the idea that human desires are made up of a conflict between eros, the life instinct, and thanatos, the death instinct. Yet super-Kraut Schopenhauer was already writing, in The World as Will and Representation, in 1819, “In this way it was intimated that generation and death are essential correlatives which reciprocally neutralize and eliminate each other.” He was writing about how in different ages and cultures, art, gods, and other symbols of profound realities incorporate both symbols of procreation and symbols of death in the same figure. And in the typical German mold, Schopenhauer was into the idea that aggression is an ineradicable part of life, “This universal conflict is to be seen most clearly in the animal kingdom.... But the most glaring example of this kind is afforded by the bulldog ant of Australia, for when it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head attacks the tail with its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head.” If a culture sees humanity as very crazed by their instincts, it would be very likely to see this as a battleground between life instincts and death instincts, each trying to get the upper hand. It only figures that Wagnerian philosophy would be the most likely to engage in psychoanalysis, since Wagnerian philosophy would consider humanity to be passive victims of both sinful human nature and the machinations of the weak, so it would seem that the best that we could do is analyze this.
Also, The World as Will and Representation reflects the Wagnerian suspicion of the weak as pulling manipulative machinations. “The concept of good is divided into two subspecies, that of the directly present satisfaction of the will in each case, and that of its merely indirect satisfaction concerning the future, in other words, the agreeable and the useful. The concept of the opposite, so long as we are speaking of beings without knowledge, is expressed by the word bad, more rarely and abstractly by the word evil, which therefore denotes everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case.” Faith in the Freudian dogma that one’s subconscious strivings made him cause a problem that he didn’t consciously intend to cause, fits traditional German ideas about both aggressive human nature, and passive human nature, meaning hurt feelings. If someone appears to have caused a problem due to his subconscious aggressive desires, that would seem to prove that no matter how much civilization tries to repress them, they’re ineradicable, so we must be very diplomatic in how we get them under control. If someone appears to have caused a problem due to his subconscious passive desires, that would seem to prove that these weak people are actually a lot more duplicitous and mercenary than they might look. Sure, a woman might say that she’s just a victim of her butthead husband, but if you figure that, actually, she subconsciously wanted to “let herself in for trouble,” then she’d seem to have a hidden agenda that relishes in victimhood. Yet if a woman believed that martyrdom for her man is virtuous, why would she hide it?
The dedication of Karl Menninger’s Man Against Himself, copyright 1938,
says, “TO THOSE WHO WOULD USE INTELLIGENCE IN THE BATTLE AGAINST DEATH—TO STRENGTHEN THE WILL TO LIVE AGAINST THE WISH TO DIE, AND TO REPLACE WITH LOVE THE BLIND COMPULSION TO GIVE HOSTAGES TO HATRED AS THE PRICE OF LIVING.” The book also says, “...the militarists and others seem as determined to bring about the destruction of lives as the scientists are to salvage them. But de gustibus non est disputandum [there is no disputing individual taste].” Certainly one could imagine how psychoanalysis would respond to someone who treated the sinners as cognitive therapy would treat victims. He’d tell sinners to pray for serenity that would calm down their aggressive desires, admonish them for feeling resentment about his having to control himself, etc. Yet according to the perspective of both The World as Will and Representation and The Serenity Prayer, the wills of the sinners simply are the way that this world is, but the victims could choose how they represent the chaos to themselves, optimistically or pessimistically.
Man Against Himself also says, in its chapter “Purposive Accidents,” “My dismay was the greater because I knew that she knew that ‘accidents [to quote from a recent insurance advertisement] don’t happen; they are caused.’” So if when someone seems to cause a problem “accidentally on purpose,” it hurts others, that would probably seem to show that his attempts to repress his aggressive desires were futile. If it hurt others in a way that looked like subconscious petty revenge, this could seem to come from the surreptitious of the weak. If the accident hurts himself, he’d seem to be fulfilling his hidden agenda that relishes in victimhood: getting pity, help, etc. Of course, if one agrees with that statement in the insurance ad, in the sense that insurance companies would mean it, that much of what’s called “accidents” or “mistakes” were actually recklessness or negligence, that would seem to be resentful victimhood. Exactly what constitutes recklessness or negligence is a matter of opinion, so those who’d insist that others take moral responsibility for it, could easily seem to be trying to impose their self-serving whiny opinions on others. If one can’t change the results of recklessness or negligence, it would seem that he should serenely accept them, and thinking of them as things that just “happened” would make acceptance easier. AA even has slogans such as, “Things happen. It’s what we do when they happen that’s key,” and, “It’s not what happens; it’s how we interpret what happens,” and these don’t exclude malicious things. Of course, if the victim treats the accident as a “purposive accident,” that would seem even worse, literally paranoid, since a purposive accident would have been done against him.
And this isn’t only a question of emotional coping skills, but physical survival skills as well. Probably the best way to measure how dangerous someone is, is how much potential victims would be blamed if they trusted him and he caused them problems. For example, both Joseph McCarthy, and modern scharf pundits, have talked in an extreme strident sneer. If you regarded their constant biting agitation, as a sign that they’re not going to care whether their beloved ideas would contribute to rampant depression, you’d be told that you’re reading too much guilt into people simply expressing themselves forcefully. (Of course, most cultures wouldn’t regard a consistently rageful demeanor as just another forceful style, though the popularity of Hitler’s stridently angry speeches showed that Germany of that era, also, found that exciting.) Yet if a woman got into a romantic relationship with a guy who had mannerisms like that and he ended up battering her, she’d be told that she should have known that he’s that kind of person. Not just suspected, but known.
And, in fact, no matter how much psychoanalysis might stress the ineradicability of certain desires and/or emotional injuries, it would have to practice some sort of victim correction along the lines of cognitive therapy, since the homeostasis would have to come from somewhere. A later chapter of I’m OK—You’re OK, “P-A-C and Marriage,” which certainly isn’t pro-divorce, includes:
Each partner must be willing to acknowledge his complicity in the difficulties of the marriage. The “It’s All You” [headgame] point of view is exposed as fallacious by Emerson in his observation that “no man can approach me except through my own act.” If the husband has been abusive for ten years and the wife has taken it for ten years, then she, in her way, has participated in the exchange. If either partner refuses to acknowledge this complicity, there is little hope for change.
Arthur Miller in his sensitive story about Maggie in After the Fall (a character who bore a striking resemblance to his wife, Marilyn Monroe) wrote that his play was “about the human animal’s unwillingness or inability to discover in himself the seeds of his own destruction.
It is always and forever the same struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to be borne. [It is] much more reassuring to see the world in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about us. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. But what is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? There people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness.
Sure, in many transactions, others could be said to have an indirect responsibility for what another does. One could always say that if you act as if each person is solely responsible for his own volitional and non-constrained acts, you’re playing the “It’s All You” headgame. Psychoanalysis came from a very Germanic background, and a part of that is a fear of the supposed insidious hidden and duplicitous willfulness of the supposed untermenschen, so it could seem that the weak have at least some response-ability for choosing their own weaknesses. One could also say that, in pragmatic terms, since it would always benefit the victims to take response-ability for their own problems, holding them response-able for their own welfare is good. Since psychologists have to deal with social problems on a microcosmic rather than macrocosmic point of view, they have to look at each separate problem in terms of who has the most reliable motivation to solve it. But, at the same time, that hardly means that the victims of domestic violence are playing headgames if they don’t consider themselves to be complicit in the violence that wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t where they were when they were attacked.
It should also be glaringly obvious that the victims of some of the more subtle abuse go right on enduring it because they think that to blame solely their husbands would be maladjusted, they keep telling their wives, “Don’t act as if our problems are all my fault,” etc. Everyone knows that even addicts refuse to accept their wives telling them, “It’s all you,” and that many of these wives, therefore, continue to put up with too much. And, of course, if any of these wives goes into therapy separately, it would ultimately tell her, “It’s all you,” where “it” would be the response-ability for her welfare, her problems. One could even define the rules of the “It’s All Your Responsibility” headgame, such as that in every situation one could find some reasons why tunnel-vision victim correction could seem morally right, and those who are playing this game would include these and act as if, if you care about the reasons why it isn’t morally right, that would mean that you’re moralistic, whiny, passive, unpragmatic, unserene, uncourageous, negativist, manipulative, etc.
William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim, which is about blaming the poor for the effects of poverty, actually begins,
Twenty years ago, Zero Mostel used to do a sketch in which he impersonated a Dixiecrat Senator conducting an investigation of the origins of World War II. At the climax of the sketch, the Senator boomed out, in an excruciating mixture of triumph and suspicion, “What was Pearl Harbor doing in the Pacific?” This is an extreme example of Blaming the Victim.
While blaming the poor for the effects of poverty doesn’t blame their victimization on where they were when the victimization happened, blaming the victims of domestic violence or other marital abuse, does.
More of this on Victim Correction Webpage 2
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
