#3-5

Our Natural Opinions Are Too Maladjusted

ur natural senses seem untrustworthy.

The description of a book published by medical publishers BC Decker titled Conquering Depression, says, “Depression is one of the most common illnesses today, affecting one in five people at some time in their lives.  It is potentially a severe and disabling mental illness influencing all aspects of a person’s daily life.  Better skills, medications, and techniques have been developed in the past ten years to successfully treat it.”

The homepage of the Mental Illness—What a Difference a Friend Makes website, by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, says, “An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older—about one in four adults—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.”  As the title suggests, this website is about getting the friends of the 26.2% of the American adult population, to support these people rather than stigmatizing them.  The ways in which one friend treats another, is one of the few sociological factors of this huge social problem, that we could honorably take seriously.

 

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? Some considerable traumas are causing this, traumas which certainly qualify as a social problem.  Yet it seems that what all those people are supposed to do, is get treatment for their illnesses.  On one hand you have the psychological advisors and other pragmatists who are very aware of how important fitting in always is, and on the other you have natural human feelings.  No treatment of a social problem by fixing anything inside the individuals affected, could possibly be natural, even though the victims are naturally the most motivated to solve the problems!  This sounds like just the sort of heroic but vapid belief system that conservatives would think that we’d want to believe in, but faith in what causes rampant depression isn’t the sort of thing that people would naturally want to believe in!”

Conquering Depression requires two very strange perceptions regarding what’s natural.  It seems that that much depression, as self-destructive as what Wurtzel described, is simply among the biological diseases that are parts of the natural order.  Not only that, it seems to result, not over time due to inevitable deterioration as cancer does, but from endogenous problems that either created the depressions themselves, or overreacted to problems that “everyone knows” should be endurable.  Even naturopaths, with a nature-worshiping faith in vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of nature, figure that a high rate of “this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you,” is to be controlled by giving those affected, natural mind-altering substances instead of artificial ones.  According to the Serenity Prayer school of psychology, the fact that the person who has the problem, would simply be held response-able for dealing with it by courageously changing what he could and serenely accepting what he couldn’t, would be a fait accompli.

It also seems that, in a society with rampant depression, many of our natural feelings might as well be mental illness, since they’d make us maladjusted to a society with rampant depression.  All you’ve got to do is take the rampant depression seriously as a social problem, and you’ll likely be treated as scaringly manipulative, defeatist, negativist, idealistic, intellectualist, etc.  After all, those who consider the problems to come from something inside the victims, would be more optimistic, and therefore, more likely to succeed.  You want to be more likely to succeed, don’t you?  We therefore must tacitly accept what causes those unnaturally high rates.  Though your culture might have told you that it’s in line with human nature, your natural common sense should tell you that anything that produces rampant depression not only isn’t natural, but requires an unnatural zeitgeist in order for everyone to fit in with it.

At the time of The Great Wall Street Bailout of 2008, Mitt Romney told Fortune magazine, “Unfortunately, politicians have seized on the politics of envy, and they are stoking it this election year like I’ve never seen in my lifetime.”  Naturally people would be disgusted at the way that the rich had taken advantage before in the name of free markets, and were then taking advantage through the government bailout, in the name of realism, what had to be done to save the economy irrespective of who was morally responsible for what.  Yet caring about this could be labeled not only as “envy,” but, conceivably, as something more diabolically untermensch, such as manipulative victim-posturing and control tactics.  Romney had also never seen in his lifetime the sort of economic crisis and bailout that warranted this outrage, but that fact doesn’t get mentioned, only that the outrage seemed very unusual.

 

 he Tragedy of Victim Correction as a Panacea~

As the above says, this is Al-Anon approved literature, for Alateen.  You couldn’t make this stuff up!  Persuasion to think like this works best with Groupthink, but if you, on your own, must deal with a devastating reality in order to fit in and function, then you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do, and our self-responsible cultural norms (“Everybody knows that The Serenity Prayer is good.”) would provide the Groupthink.  As Addiction: Why Can’t They Just Stop?, by John Hoffman and Susan Froemke, says, in a survey of addicts’ family members, “...the words that everyone used were powerfully negative: ‘devastating,’ ‘abusive,’ ‘horrible’.”  Serenity, indeed!

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., and this self-reliant ethos.  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.  Likewise, you’d simply have to deal with whatever consequences of 2008’s run on the bank, “Our entire economy is in danger,” would affect you, including the consequences of the government’s strong reluctance to “control” the businesses it should have been regulating adequately and “great, great confidence in our capital markets and in our financial institutions.”  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.  Bush also talked about faith in our economic “resilience” regarding the financial crisis of 2008.  This gutsy and self-responsible moral bankruptcy, “Care only about whether you can change it,” is de rigueur.  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.  Neo-Conservatives would love this folksy “perception management.”  Self-reliance seems to be The Great Liberator.  Freedom from government and other “control” is a sacred American tradition, but endurability isn’t.  Aggressiveness seems ineradicable, and our objections to it seem eradicable.  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 WILLFUL ones, since everyone’s beliefs regarding what they deserve are shaped by their own SELF-WILLS, and the weak can exercise their supposed SELF-WILLS 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.

Sure, A Dictionary of Psychology defines blaming the victim as, “A pervasive tendency to assume that a person who has suffered a misfortune must have done something wrong to deserve it.  It is explained by the just world hypothesis.”  Yet it should be obvious from any self-help that victim-blaming is most important when someone must self-motivatedly take response-ability for injustices.  This must be as pervasive as the injustices that must be courageously changed.  Victim-blaming gets things done, since the victims are motivated to do them.  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,” so could also be called Yang Buddhism), 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.  This prevents victimhood.  Defiance of this could be labeled as ignominious uppity untermensch WILLFULNESS, not “maverick” defiance.  This mental health 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.  To function in the real world, you can’t be horrified.  This spirituality is the ultimate radical religion, which you must interpret literally.  If the economy collapsed in 2008 because of a few people in the financial sector making risky loans or panicking during the crisis, all of those who’d have suffered the consequences would have had to have taken care of themselves, too; either they’d keep “looking at themselves,” or they’d fail in life since they wouldn’t recognize their own inadequacies.

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.  The way that the Iraq war resulted so automatically from the whiny claims that Americans were victims of WMD, shows the great danger of manipulative victim-power.  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, is for weaklings.  The ignominious banalities of life, aren’t issues.  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, and self-help for everyone admires, unconditional acceptance and adjustment toward anything that you’re helpless to change, would always lead to peace and confidence—serenity and courage.  (That’s a strong character.)

As Miranda says in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “O brave new world, that hath such people in it.”  Those who most believe in this sort of unconditional self-responsibility are good, hard-working people.  (As the Wikipedia webpage on Phil Gramm begins, “Gramm often noted in his political campaigns that he had repeated three grades in school but had overcome his academic deficiencies by hard work.”  He’s a proven maverick.)

AA is avowedly anti-intellectualist and pro-self-responsibility.  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, unearned 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!  (Of course, the huge financial crisis that followed that, should have indicated that those on Wall Street were much bigger whiners, dangerously so, but they’re übermenschen.)

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 expecting others to take such banalities seriously, 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 insistent and unquestionable.  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.  In the 60s it was Big Brother AND the Holding Company, but now it’s Big Brother OR the Holding Company, since it seems that either we accept Wall Street excesses or we’ll have Big Brother.  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.  In whatever respects one is weak or strong, the weak serenely accept, the strong courageously change, and the stronger don’t have to worry about changing or accepting anything.  As any self-help counselor would tell you, abstractions are immaterial, and judgmental abstractions are self-serving, so conflicts are reduced to the concrete realities.  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.  Homespun fortitude is homespun fortitude.  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.  NOTHING CAN LIMIT HOW MUCH ALL THIS COULD AFFECT YOU.  (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!

 

 

         

 

 “He dare not come in company for fear he should be misused, disgraced, overshoot himself in gesture or speeches, or be sick; he thinks every man observes him, aims at him, derides him, owes him malice.”—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, written in Elizabethan England, before the victim-self-blaming cultural norms replaced this attributing helplessness to others, with attributing it to one’s own supposed inadequacies in taking care of himself.

 

With all cognitive therapy, the more impressionable that one is, the more that he could learn to think pragmatically.  Since cognitive therapy arose in the 1960s based on the then-popular Eastern transcendence, this could be called “Calcutta survival skills.”  Al-Anon’s approach was based on AA’s approach, in which the more impressionable a recovering alkie is, the more that he could get rid of his pathological thoughts.  Something very vital is missing.

Quite literally, it can’t matter how much someone else is responsible for your problem,

since if people’s response-ability for their own welfare weren’t unconditional, then those in situations for which others are clearly responsible, wouldn’t strive to become better happier people, which they’d probably need to do to deal adequately with their own problems.  And many AA slogans ridicule those who don’t have what Niebuhr (disapprovingly) called “Buddhistic” spirituality like this.  (Yet I could make the following guarantee: The very same all-American types who’d be the first to condemn Buddhistic spirituality as alien, extinguishing people’s autonomy and selfhood, brainwashing, etc., would also be the first to practice what Buddhism calls “mindfulness” when they’re in situations that contribute to our rampant depression.  After all, their chances of coping with them would be a lot higher if they chose to contrive a serene acceptance of whatever they’re helpless to change, than if they drew their own honest conclusions about it.)

Yes, that’s exactly what we’re supposed to do.  While it may be only natural to care that depressive disorders affect about 34,000,000 American adults, that much caring would be very unpragmatic in a society that would so require you to fight courageously.  Failsafe coping skills could be very valuable, even absolutely necessary.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, in his definitive book on Maoist brainwashing, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, outlines what he sees as the parts of the brainwashing process: “Milieu Control” to get rid of influences that could make the goal seem undesirable, “Mystical Manipulation” to make it seem to serve a profound purpose, “The Demand for Purity” and “The Cult of Confession” to anathematize conflicting beliefs, “The ‘Sacred Science’” to make the washing seem to fit modern goals, “Loading the Language,” so that everything is seen as the labels say they should be, “Doctrine over Person” in which one’s natural opinions based on his own experiences are washed from his brain and replaced with what he’s supposed to believe, and “The Dispensing of Existence,” where those who don’t fit in are treated as if they might as well not exist.

Yet it should be clear that the actual brainwashing is the Doctrine over Person.  That’s the actual brain-washing, the washing from the brain of negative thoughts.  The rest of the measures taken in China, remove influences that would weaken the brain-washing, strengthen the programming, or result from it.  Yet there are plenty of other ways of doing the same.  If those of a society try to wash negative thoughts from their own brains because this would make them most likely to succeed, the thoughts would be washed away, even if these thoughts were correct.  As a self-help slogan says, “Which would you rather be, right, or happy?”, so even truthful thoughts are to be washed from the brain if they’d interfere with being well-adjusted.  What “Which would you rather be, right, or happy?”, ultimately means, is, “Which would you rather do, care about intellectual legitimacy, or adjust to your realities that you’re helpless to change?”  People would want to: control their own milieus or ignore “negative people” in them, serve the purpose of thinking like a winner, anathematize conflicting beliefs, consider this zeitgeist to be unquestionable, label and mislabel events according to it, and figure that those who end up with depression and the like don’t really matter since they’re losers.  Thinking in such a way that would make you most likely to succeed and fit in, doesn’t come naturally.  Brain-washing is goal-oriented thought reform, whether that goal is conformity to an abstract ideology, or conformity to the rewards and punishments that any economic system hands out.  A central concept to Nazism is that even the most sincere fights for what’s morally right, reflect the aggressive but insidious SELF-WILLS of those who fight for this, but to see even such sincerity as self-serving is usually tenable, and much more likely to get productive results than would be holding the morally responsible people, morally accountable.

As long as people’s brains are effectively being cleansed of their own natural opinions, which are replaced by the beliefs deemed reform, then brainwashing is occurring, no matter why or how this is effective.  If “The ‘Sacred Science’” is replaced with “The ‘Sacred Anti-Intellectualism’,” then as long as those to be washed consider it to be sacred, it would have the same effect.  Not only that, anti-intellectualism is even more amenable to squelching free thought, since any thought that goes beyond, “What practicalities would best deal with this situation?”, could be labeled intellectualist.  “Which would you rather be, right, or happy?”, is the epitome of modern anti-intellectualism.

On the cover of the April, 2008 issue of Psychology Today, For a Healthier Life, is a picture of a sheep wearing human clothes, to illustrate the article, “CHANGE YOUR NATURE, BUILD COURAGE, PASSION, JOY, AND OPTIMISM.”  You might think that it’s pretty sheep-like to accept your own society’s norms that cause rampant depression.  Yet the more that one would reject these as unsafe, the more pessimistic he’d be.  Yet it so fits the self-help worldview (of which the unconditionally transcendent spirituality of Twelve-Step groups is a big role model), to hold that an uplifting changing of your nature would consist of becoming less sheep-like by becoming well-adjusted, adjusting well to even norms that cause rampant depression.  The whole idea of groups like Al-Anon is to use the transcendence of The Serenity Prayer to build courage passion joy and optimism in addicts’ family members.

Whether hope seems good or bad, would depend on what the alternatives are.  In Deepak Chopra’s Peace Is the Way, he writes that too much hope for peace could lead to inadequate action to bring monstrous aggressors under control.  As examples of mundane destructive hope, he gives, “My husband beat me again last night, but I hope he won’t do it anymore,” and, “My mother was an alcoholic, and I remember hoping desperately that she would stop.”  He then wrote, “Simply to hope that an alcoholic will get better, we now know, is a way of enabling the addiction, just as hoping that an abuser will stop hurting you is the same as making yourself a victim.

“Fifty years ago the best-trained therapists didn’t tell families of alcoholics to quit enabling them, and women who suffered from domestic violence were told to stay in the marriage for the sake of the children.  Today therapists say almost the opposite....”

The reason why we were able to make such a change, was that the victimized spouses had the alternative of leaving, and hope obviously wouldn’t have done them any good.  To say that to hope that an alcoholic will get better is the same as enabling, and that hoping that an abuser will stop hurting you is the same as making yourself a victim, reflects the current victim-blaming, in that true intentional enabling would require that the caretaker wants to remain a caretaker, abets the addiction, and doesn’t hope that the need for this would go away, and hoping that domestic violence would end certainly doesn’t intend for it to continue.  Yet attributing a self-destructive intent to the victims would pressure them into doing something that would solve their own problems, so this seems good.  Sure, from the Old Testament onward, moral responsibility was gauged by the intent of an act and not the magnitude of the consequences, but if we gauged victims’ response-ability like this as well, then plenty of destructive behavior would have no one taking responsibility for it, and naturally the victims wouldn’t want that irrespective of who is truly responsible.

When one looks at the sort of hope that Social Darwinism fosters, it should seem just as irrational.  Yet this hope comes from the fact that people are told that they’ll be rewarded if they feel it, punished if they don’t.  They don’t have any other alternative.  Plus, if one looks at this on the microcosmic level, and asks what would increase the chances of each particular individual succeeding, one would have to figure that if he felt hopeful, that would increase his chances.  You could say that it’s only natural to want to succeed, but the re-engineering of one’s own thinking that would follow from this, wouldn’t be only natural.

One publisher of Me Decade books has as its logo:

Another, in-house, publisher of Me Decade books, Affirmation Books, was a part of the House of Affirmation, which failed since, it seems, its co-founder, Father Thomas A. Kane, was helping himself to its money.  He also settled a suit with a man suing him for molesting him as a boy, etc.  One of their books written by Fr. Kane, The Healing Touch of Affirmation, says near the beginning, under the heading “Affirmation,”

Affirmation is the acceptance of the goodness of the other person as he is.  At the essence of all maturing love is affirmation: “You are good.”  “You are wonderful.”  The most tender, indeed healing, touch of affirmation is that I allow the other person to be as he is, immaturity and shortcomings included.  I do so not out of fear but out of free choice.  I encourage the other to be who he is so that his potential may be realized.

Yet under the ethos of the Reagan Era, only the übermenschen could get this sort of affirmation.  It’s pretty obvious why immaturity was such an important issue for Fr. Kane.  When it comes to the shortcomings that the untermenschen could seem to have, though, their self-reliance would have to live up to the optimistic standards of Reaganomics, so in any way they’d come up short of that, then that would be a shortcoming.  Many untermensch attributes, including immaturity, could therefore be attributed to them.  If they’re not adequately courageously changing what they could and serenely accepting what they couldn’t, they’d seem to be engaging in victimology, victimhood, etc.  This sort of self-help would admittedly be done out of fear,

since the person would realize that he’d better correct himself in whatever ways would make him most likely to deal with his own problems successfully.  If he doesn’t, he’d be warned of the consequences of this spineless shortcoming.  Yet this would seem to be a matter of free choice, the freedom to empower himself, realize his own self-reliant potential.

Just imagine telling Jane,

“Even if your husband’s alcoholism bothers you, I’m OK and you’re OK.  Go right ahead and trust your natural feelings.”

The Catholic hierarchy has since realized that such modern approaches have the dangers of permissivity.  Since then, the hierarchy has relied on more traditional approaches, such as that of the Servants of the Paraclete center in New Mexico.  As one of its directors, Father William Perri, told the Rocky Mountain News in 1987, “What we do here is forgive.  That means sometimes making some very hard decisions because some things are very hard to forgive.”  At the same time, Jane would have been encouraged to take as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as she would have it, as if this coping constituted resilient responsibility, rather than permissive irresponsibility.

Our culture post-Reagan is very fond of Doctrine over Person, of the sort that’s usually labeled “positive thinking,” and “good adjustment.”  The very same psychologists who tell us that we’d better have good survival skills in watching out for how others would harm us if given a chance, should be the first to realize both how “positive thinking” in a society with rampant depression would take a great deal of cognitive distortions, but that these distortions would have to involve plenty of victim-self-blaming, since if the individual had plenty of opportunities outside of himself but he failed, the problem must be inside of himself.  This would also lead to the human nature of the weak but not the strong being re-engineered, since the weak are motivated to wash their own brains of their warranted resentment, anger, fear, etc., but the strong aren’t motivated to wash their own brains of their aggressive character defects.  And “good adjustment” means that the person whose brain is cleansed, is the person who must adjust to something he was helpless to change.  We needn’t care much about the immaturities of the übermenschen, since the untermenschen would be the ones who’d have the resulting problems, and everyone knows that whoever doesn’t take response-ability for his own problems is INTOLERABLY immature.  Since they’d take care of the problems, the problems would be taken care of.

For example the “Today’s Gift” daily inspirational e-mail from the Hazelden Center for addiction recovery following Twelve-Step principles, for June 5, 2005,  is headed, “A negative attitude creates problems, not opportunities,” begins, “Some of us exaggerate small setbacks, making our lives far more complicated than necessary.  Instead, we need to nurture a positive outlook.  The wise among us say, ‘It’s all in how you look at it’,” and ends, “I will see my experiences as positive lessons today.  No one can change my perception but me.”  From the heading and first sentence, you might think that this aims for old-fashioned psychotherapy, the kind that works against overreactions and chronic negativism.  But the rest says, in essence, that no matter what your experiences may be, you’re  responsible for dealing with them, so if you aren’t adequate to do this, lose the battle, fail, and come up short with big consequences, you’d seem to be an irresponsible and inadequate, loser and failure with very consequential shortcomings.  If you don’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, you’d seem to be a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent.  But that needn’t lead to the sort of victim-self-blaming that’s characteristic of modern Western depression, anxiety, etc., since no one can change your perception but you.  Or as a woman the codependency group that I attended (so her husband must be a butthead), put it, “No one can bother me if I don’t let him!”  Of course, as Buddhism holds, those who are on the giving end of the problems are just as able to control their own feelings, as are those who perceive the problems.  We have as much control over our inlooks, as over our outlooks.

But if your frame of reference is “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 only part of the sinners’ inlooks that would get addressed, would be how they see their own self-destructive attitudes.  “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” doesn’t necessarily mean, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” but is necessarily that unconditional, all-or-nothing, and