#3-6
You’ve Got a Lot to Take Care Of, You Whiny Loser.
“You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought [from The Life 101 Series]”—title of a self-help book, by Peter McWilliams
uite literally, the only thing that you could afford to really care about, is that the worse that your problem is, the more important it is that you take response-ability. The worse that your problem is, the higher the stakes are, and the more that you wouldn’t want the resolution of the problem to depend on someone like that creep who’s that hurtful. The more negative that your problem is, the more that you can’t afford the luxuries of negative thoughts, discouraged feelings, inadequacies in courage, etc. As Lewis Smedes wrote in his 1986 book Forgive and Forget, in a section called “Forgiving Monsters,” “If we say monsters are beyond forgiving, we give them a power they should never have. Monsters who are too evil to be forgiven get a stranglehold on their victims; they can sentence their victims to a lifetime of unhealed pain. If they are unforgivable monsters, they are given power to keep their evil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most.” Since form follows function, the function is learning to live with big problems (even those that have continued to exist physically), so the form must be Stoic acceptance.
The Depression and Suicide webpage of Dr. Mike Magee’s Health Politics website, says, “In 1999 there were nearly 30,000 suicides in the United States; close to twice the number of homicides.... The breeding ground for suicide is broad and deep when one considers that only 25 percent of our citizens with depression receive adequate therapy.”
As Antidepressant Treatment—the Essentials, by John H. Greist, MD and Thomas H. Greist, MD, says, “According to National Institutes of Mental Health figures, 20,000,000 people or approximately 15% of the U.S. adult population suffers from a serious depressive disorder in any given year.” Yet it seems that we’re just going to have to fix all these people as if this weren’t a social problem.
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? What causes this unnaturally rampant depression, includes some very major traumas. Yet everyone knows that ‘mental health’ means adjusting to reality, that pragmatism requires dealing with reality, that Objectivist self-reliance requires stolidly dealing with reality since whatever moral judgments that one might make about what caused it would be subjective, etc. Not only that, the worse that my problem would be, the more important it would be that I simply take response-ability for my own welfare, and the more that, if I assertively and objectively stood up for my own rights, I could seem to have scary victim-power. The more that someone else was morally responsible for it, the more important it would be that I not rely on holding someone like that, morally accountable. In a society with rampant depression, what other alternative would be available to me?”
Sure, treating this as a personal rather than a social problem would require some socially sanctioned moral bankruptcy, but ignoring the real causes would help to solve the problem expeditiously, and that would be important. To treat all that suicide in the same way would be even more morally bankrupt, but even more important. We simply can’t afford not to get all that suicide under control as expeditiously as possible. It’s no wonder that, despite our culture’s professed love of self-confidence, our suicide rate is close to twice our homicide rate. Though this certainly wasn’t Dr. Magee’s intent, this could be called “health politics” for the reason that since some people are responsible for the consequences of others’ choices, and this responsibility is treated as if it’s morally obligatory. Though it may seem only natural that the worse that your problem is, the less that you could afford to care that the horrible creep who caused it is morally responsible, your natural common sense should tell you that this could lead to some pretty extreme victim-self-blaming.
One must think in the absolutist terms that the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression reflect. If a problem is yours, then you should absolutely focus your attention on what you should correct in order to deal with it. You absolutely can change yourself, absolutely can’t change anyone else. You absolutely must get it under control. “Realism” would mean thinking in the way that would best serve your goal of solving your problem optimistically, not thinking in the way that would best reflect reality. Usually if you’re 90% correct, that deserves an A grade, but if you get your problem only 90% under control, then you’ve got too many breaches in your defenses. As William James wrote, Americans tend to classify people as either redbloods or mollycoddles, so you can’t take partial credit for partial self-reliance, attempted self-reliance, etc. Moral responsibility is based on a standard of presumed innocent until proven guilty of a guilty intent, while response-ability for one’s own welfare is based on a standard of, “Someone absolutely has to deal with this, and that would be the person who’s the most motivated to do it well.” And the worse that the problem is, the more important would be your taking response-ability for your own welfare.
One very typical example of pragmatic minimizing and magnifying logic that’s as one-track-minded as are the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, is “you must understand” logic. As long as you can’t change your problem, you must understand that you must serenely accept it, and if you can change it, you must understand that you must courageously change it. Whatever is reality, mental health means you must understand. When someone decides to do something destructive, you must understand that that’s human nature. (Of course, if depressive disorders affect 34,000,000 American adults then that would qualify as human nature, too, but untermensch human nature could be chemically re-engineered. The quaint jazz-age self-help book Eugenics and Sex Harmony by Dr. Herman H. Rubin, from 1933,
says, “The best way to control the self-preservation instincts, such as fear and anger, Doctor [Josephine] Jackson insists, is to refuse to stimulate the emotion when the external situation is not suitable for action,” in other words, when victims can’t change their own victimization.) Once someone has already done anything destructive, you must understand that he can’t turn back the clock and undo it. (Therefore, he’s the helpless one, and you’re the responsible one.) The worse was what someone did at your expense, the more that you must understand that you’d better take response-ability for your own problem, since it’s so grave, and you certainly wouldn’t want to depend on someone like that to take responsibility for it. If he doesn’t accept his own moral responsibility for the problem he caused you since that would be too burdensome, you must understand that you couldn’t expect him to be a saint, but if your self-responsibility to solve your own problem is too burdensome, you must understand that that’s life. As long as what happened wasn’t absolutely evil, you must understand why your refusals to forgive it are just your unforgiving opinion, which is bound to reflect your own . If your partner is commitment-phobic and he tries to end your relationship or marriage by treating you outrageously, you must understand that for your own good, you shouldn’t stay with someone like that. If your society’s rate of depression is astoundingly unnaturally high, you must understand. And, of course, if you must understand that others’ moral responsibility is to be minimized in such a way that would let people get away with the devastation that contributes to our rampant depression and anxiety disorders, then if you don’t, what would seem to be wrong with your supposed untermensch maladjustment would be magnified. After all, someone simply has to take responsibility for your problem, and this must be as uncompromising and unconditional as the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression. If everyone were forgiven, who’d provide the homeostasis that our society needs?
As Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind says, the American culture has taken to German ideas about the ineradicability of aggression and other destructive impulses from the id, without also including the German awareness of what the consequences of this are. “Freud was very dubious about the future of civilization and the role of reason in the life of man.... [Max Weber’s] science is was formulated as a doubtful dare against the chaos of things, and values certainly lay beyond its limits.” The American version of this is that, as long as someone does something for which this sort of forgiveness would seem plausible, he should get it. One should be realistic by giving it to him.
James B. Stewart’s book Den of Thieves, quotes Michael Milken as saying, before his scandal, “We don’t need to talk about our successes. We only need to talk about our failures.” This was given as an example of how demanding of a boss he was. Yet whenever anyone is faced with a problem, he doesn’t need to talk about his successes. He does need to talk about his failures, since that’s what he absolutely must fix. That’s exactly the sort of personal responsibility that you could see reflected in both the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, and self-help teachings such as that of that Alateen comic strip.
For even alkies’ kids to be proud of all of the resilience that they’d shown, wouldn’t do them any good. The only thing that would do them good is to figure out how they could become more resilient. And the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression consist of obsessing about how one could take better care of his own, and/or his families’, problems in the future. That same book says that Wall Street slang for companies that had been prosperous but aren’t any more, is “fallen angels,” no matter why they’re no longer prosperous. If some helplessness was either the immediate or underlying cause of someone’s depression, then he’d also qualify as a “fallen angel,” so it would seem that he’d better figure out how he could become a respectable success once again.
The hip self-help book Joy, by William C. Schutz, copyright 1967, tells of, “the arenas of joy and misery as the interpersonal-need areas called inclusion, control, and affection.” This goes on to say about control, “Control behavior refers to the decision-making process between people, and the areas of power, influence, and authority. The need for control varies along a continuum from the desire for power, authority, and control over others (and therefore over one’s future), to the need to be controlled, and have responsibility lifted from oneself.”
None of this seems morally right or wrong, unless the person is a control freak. Yet in current self-help thinking, a desire for any control over others, even if this is limited to what’s necessary for control over one’s future, seems to be a manipulative trick. A central aspect of codependency is the codependent trying to control the addict, in such a way that addicts should be controlled. Of course, others are powerless over addicts, but if they had that power, it would be considered to be manipulative control. Codependence and Enabling--The Reciprocal Disorders, on the website of Empowered Recovery, Candidly Helping the Family and Friends of Alcoholics Recognize, Understand, and Resolve an Alcoholic Relationship, is headed, “‘I’ve decided what’s best for you and I’m going to help you do it.’—The epitome of codependence.” Chances are that any normal person would have a better idea of what’s right for addicts, than the addicts would, but that doesn’t matter. When addicts’ significant others try to get control over the addicts’ destruction, the significant others would get control over their own futures, but that doesn’t matter either. Considering that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV says that substance abuse disorders affect 27% of Americans, the significant others of all these people didn’t partner themselves with boozers or dopers in order to give them opportunities to control those who need it, but that doesn’t matter either. The only thing that does seems to matter is that in 1967, different control dynamics within normal interpersonal relationships were to be expected, but ever since the Reagan/Thatcher era, if normal people tried to control addicts, who certainly should be controlled, that would seem manipulative. The more that the controlled person should be controlled, the more that the victim would have the stigma of weakness. If he tried to disagree, he wouldn’t stand a chance.
A man who was molested by his priest when he was a boy, said that since the molesters are so lacking in a moral and ethical guilt, the victims have to make up for this, by feeling more guilt. The less responsibility that the predator takes, the more responsibility that the victim must take, in order to fend him off. The modern Western version of this is that the more counterproductive the sinful person is, the more that the victim had better make sure that he lives up the standards of being well-adjusted and productive. “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,” says that no matter how much your zeitgeist sees productive as good and counterproductive as bad, you shouldn’t seriously try to correct even the overt destructiveness of sinful behavior. If you did, that would seem idealistic, mollycoddle, and judgmental. On the other hand, if you seriously try to correct the victim who doesn’t productively set out to courageously change what he can and serenely accept what he can’t, that would seem pragmatic red-blooded and forgiving. The less that the sinner feels guilty about how counterproductive he actually is, the more that the victim must feel guilty about how counterproductive he seems.
In theory, this doesn’t necessarily mean shame and self-blame. This is supposed to mean that you take responsibility to solve your own problems no matter what caused them, rather than responsibility for them. “Should statements” don’t necessarily have to lead to guilt feelings, since you’d only be figuring out how you should be handling your own problems more serenely courageously and/or wisely. Yet since you have the responsibility to solve your own problems no matter what caused them, if you aren’t adequate to do live up 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. After all, if only you were more serene courageous and/or wise, you might have handled your own problem better. And since optimism is good, it would seem that you should be optimistic that you had the opportunity to deal with your problem, if only you were serene courageous and/or wise enough.
The logic of a certain commercial, was certainly inspired by this. The TV ads for the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, seem to imply that their adding alternative medicine to the usual approaches for cancer, make them more effective. But instead of proving this, they have people talking in positive terms, such as the following: a woman says that after seeing other information about lung cancer on the Internet, which was “grim,” she was pleased to see the Cancer Treatment Center’s website, which was “full of hope.” She then goes on to say, in an admonishing, slightly scolding, tone of voice, “You have to take responsibility for your own recovery. You may be scared and weak, but you have to get yourself in the position to get the best treatment that you can. There’s always hope, that if it’s possible to survive my kind of cancer, I saw people who did it.”
So it doesn’t seem necessary to prove that something really does offer more warranted hope. You’re simply admonished that though you feel scared and weak, you’re still responsible for taking care of yourself. As long as some people have succeeded, you could still figure that you should have hope. If the problem you’re facing is one that you’re supposed to solve yourself, then the worse that it is, the more that you may be scared and weak, but you have to make yourself serene courageous and wise enough to handle your own problem, which includes a faith that there’s always hope.
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
