#3-9
In Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, he wrote, “No one is such a liar as the indignant man.” In Eternal Recurrence, Nietzsche wrote, “Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.” In Ecce Homo, “Pathetic attitudes are not in keeping with greatness.”
“When I’m good, I’m very good. When I’m bad, I’m better.”—Mae West
hatever springs from weakness” was how Nietzsche defined evil. This is also victim correction’s definition of the enemy. After all, weakness is unpragmatic, gives opportunity for manipulation, and isn’t likely to be too forgiving. Form follows function, and the function is to increase homeostasis as reliably as possible, so the form is to anathematize weakness. Our society could keep functioning even if we have genuine evil, but can’t if we don’t have enough homeostasis. It seems that aggressive tendencies are ineradicable, so we must eradicate the hurt feelings and other weaknesses that result from aggressive behavior. The worse is your problem, the more that, if you assertively and objectively stood up for your own rights, you’d seem to have a scary amount of victim-power. As can be seen in Nietzsche, the weak could easily seem to be the dangerously ones, since everyone’s beliefs regarding what they deserve are shaped by their own , and the weak can exercise their supposed only in ways that would seem mollycoddle, “dishonest” and “ignominious,” whereas red-blooded strength is “honest,” proud, and at least forgivable (i.e. must be forgiven). We must appreciate all the hidden dangers of unchecked “victim-power.” As Niebuhr wrote, power, which would include victim-power, “cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest,” over (hidden and surreptitious) , though we dare not talk in such overgeneralized terms when passing judgment on overt sinful power. We fear fearmongering, but not greed-mongering. “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. As conventional thinking in 19th century Germany and America would tell you, there are two kinds of human nature, the aggressive kind, which we must accept since it’s dynamic objective successful and ineradicable, and the passive kind, which we mustn’t accept since it’s insidious weakening and weakening. Sure, the objections to this that are to be summarily washed from people’s brains, are certainly human nature, but they’re labeled as passive, immature, unrealistic, ignominious, negativist, defeatist, and insidiously manipulative human nature, so in the long run, washing these from the brain is what most suit’s the human nature of rugged individualism.
These are the same cultural norms that take the strong more seriously than the weak. As one could see in the Great Crash of 2008, such a laissez faire concept of personal response-ability could seem good ’n’ gutsy, until you see the consequences of the moral bankruptcy. (Of course, this self-response-ability must include the same self-justifying, fatalistic, conformist, simplistic, “upbeat,” absolutist, unconditional, predictable, and dogmatically necessary illusions as laissez faire economics has, the very illusions that got our economy into such trouble; after all, people will do only what they feel motivated to do.) Economist Steven Landsburg said, “Most of economics can be summarized in four words: ‘People respond to incentives.’ The rest is commentary,” and that’s also how this sort of self-help could be summarized: You’re the only one who has a reliable incentive to solve your problems, and nothing that disagrees with this “natural” pragmatism could matter, no matter what chaos and helplessness result. Realism simply must be oriented around the fact that you absolutely can change what’s tactically wrong with your own reactions, and absolutely can’t change what’s morally wrong with others’ actions; not being realistic would be ridiculous (said sardonically, or maybe to encourage victims to empower themselves in what laissez faire economists would call “tough love,” though the expression “tough love” originally meant the authoritarian and coercive approach that parents could use on their teenagers who have drug problems and the like). Our economy reward$ those who think like this. And even if this sort of thinking leads to a worldwide economic catastrophe, it could always be blamed absolutely on the supposedly mollycoddle weak. (We all know how insidiously dangerous they are!) All relationships and marriages considered codependent are treated just as fatalistically, whether or not the problem person is addicted. As Greenspan said, that’s what works; even behavior problems who aren’t addicted aren’t motivated to change so expecting them to do what they don’t feel an incentive to do won’t work. Victimhood doesn’t produce anything, so why should we give it any credit? The ends justify the means, since the ends, functionability and good coping skills, are necessary. Is someone sociopathic? Avoid him since you’re incompatible! End of story! Endurability has to come from somewhere. Either we have self-responsible self-reliance, or we have nanny-ism, whining, trauma-drama, etc. Both the economics that led to the financial crash, and self-help for anyone in trouble including addicts’ family members, wear the cloak of realism, which is both all-important and expected of all red-blooded people. After all, we must have an un-ignorable incentive to do certain things that we may or may not be able to do. One could say that the fix is in, not in the sense that a conspiracy put the fix in, but in the sense that our untermensch-bashing cultural norms did, so it’s predictable that if you’re the one with the problem, you’d be held response-able for “empowering yourself,” “taking care of yourself,” etc., by solving it.
THE GREATEST RISK IS NOT TAKING ONE, AIG ad from 2001, so if you tried to restrain this you’d seem profoundly: weak, whiny, defeatist, controlling, unrealistic, counterproductive, opinionated, manipulative, negative, moralistic, etc. Sure, post-scandal AIG CEO Edward M. Liddy said, “I have seen the good side of capitalism. But over the past six months, since agreeing to take the reins of AIG and reviewing how it was run in prior years, I have also seen instances of the bad side of capitalism,” but one could also call the gutsiness of AIG in its PIG era, “character-building,” giving plenty of backbone and fortitude.
In Infectious Greed, How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets, a book from 2003, when the realities that led to the Crash were already very obvious, Frank Partnoy wrote that Procter and Gamble early on invested in a good deal of risky derivatives, “It was a well-established economic principle that markets with large sophistication and information gaps—such as the market for ‘lemon’ used cars—did not function very well. It wasn’t that Procter & Gamble was defenseless when approached by Bankers Trust’s nerdy salesmen; it was that the costs of an unregulated market were too great given the sophistication and information gaps between Procter & Gamble and Wall Street bankers.” Since Procter and Gamble is strong, to our social norms this would seem logical. Yet if it was a weak person who was taken in, our norms would start preaching about how he wasn’t defenseless, and that if our laws had to protect people who aren’t really defenseless as if they are, we’d be living in your classic tyranny of the mollycoddle.
In theory this means self-responsibility, self-reliance, gutsiness, anti-controlling, good coping skills, realism, conventionality, respectability, etc., but in practice this means that nothing except, “Can I change this?” including the most basic morality and concern for the weak, can really seem to matter. Sure, you could recognize that destructive sinfulness is destructive sinfulness, but in the end you’d have to forgive it, or you’d be maladjusted and suffer the consequences of this weakness. (“”) Frank Buchman, leader of the Oxford Groups, the club on which AA and then Al-Anon was based and until recently was called “Moral Re-Armament,” (Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here, from 1935, includes Buchman in its list of currently trendy “Messiahs.”) 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.” Anti-Nazi British travel-writer and journalist Robert Byron, who got a chance to observe Nazism up close, wrote in his diary, “Himmler apparently dotes on the Oxford Group [How cute.] and writes to its English members discussing their troubles with them,” so he was their Dear Abby. If Himmler had sent you some “Dear Abby” letters that didn’t mention the Nazi practices that Buchman didn’t like, the advice that the letters would have given would have helped you become more resilient, courageous, self-responsible, realistic, and abiding by Gelassenheit (a fatalism that teaches that willfulness leads to self-defeating frustration if you’re helpless to get what you want or need), so you would have ended up with a stronger character. This was the same Himmler who said, in his speech on October 4, 1943 to the SS Group Leaders in Poznan, “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard,” but that personal strength concerned one of the Nazi practices that Buchman didn’t like. It’s pretty obvious what the “Dear Abby” version of that would advise those in trouble, who are members of an honored group of people who are working on their own resolute and impassively accepting attitudes. Anything less than, “Happiness is an inside job,” (in general), or, “Things happen. It’s what we do when they happen that’s key,” (in general), would have been too weak-spirited and blaming for Himmler, so he was their perfect “Dear Abby.”
Himmler Logic, after all, would focus on whether the person with the problem seems to have a weak (as in literally ) character, and would be quick to interpret inadequacies in problem-solving as weaknesses of character, so the weak seem contemptible, blameworthy, and, possibly, insidiously dangerous. This self-responsible self-help approach is also like the “exemplary dualism” of the Militia Movement, like classifying people as redbloods or mollycoddles, or as übermenschen or untermenschen; this preaches that those who seem to have (literally) strong characters are the allies of decent people so are at least forgiven, and those who seem to have (literally) weak characters are the enemies of decent people. This leads to some predictable distortions in our conceptions of right, wrong, shame, etc. Take the Nazi might-makes-right ethos, remove the racism and war crimes, and you’d have what Western culture considers to be the only conception of personal responsibility that works, which is what Hitler’s Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s main inspiration, Schopenhauer, actually wrote about.
The question of whether “it” can happen here, all depends on whether or not “it” includes the aspects of Nazism and Himmler that Buchman’s formula for living didn’t include; if not, “it” happens every day. The “it” in It Can’t Happen Here included merely an ambiguous, covert, attitude-of-gratitude racism (“It was understood... that all Jews of all conditions were frequently to sound their ecstasy at having found in America a sanctuary, after their deplorable experiences among the prejudices of Europe.... The allegiance of all such Negroes as had the sense to be content with safety and good pay instead of ridiculous yearnings for personal integrity Sarason got by being photographed shaking hands with the celebrated Negro Fundamentalist clergyman, the Reverend Dr. Alexander Nibbs, and through the highly publicized Sarason Prizes for the Negroes with the largest families, the fastest time in floor-scrubbing, and the longest periods of work without taking a vacation.”), so the “it” in modern America could include merely an ambiguous, covert, attitude-of-gratitude form of the strong horrifying the weak. A classic cliché expression is, “There is no alternative,” to the power dynamics of our economy, and another way to say this is that there is no alternative besides dictatorship and/or Zimbabwe-style economic failures, so every time that these power dynamics horrify us, we should be grateful that we’re not instead dealing with dictators’ outrages, and/or economic failures including massive unemployment, irrespective of any indefinable abstractions such as integrity.
Yet, in a society with rampant depression, one could just as easily call that “pragmatic logic”: the weak courageously change what they can (themselves) and serenely accept what they can’t (everyone else), and what one deserves is completely irrelevant. You can’t change your enemies, except for one. Yet the limits of the threshold of human endurance are a fact, and if we don’t deal with it, it will deal with us.
“Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” is all about what the weak should do, believe, and take responsibility for. Even sophisticated psychology tends to classify people, aspects of human nature, desires, etc., into categories that are very German, Freudian: übermensch means ineradicable so at least forgivable, while untermensch means true shamefulness, suspiciousness. (And, of course, treating this moral bankruptcy as necessary for realism seems a lot better than does treating this as admirably open-minded and gutsy.) These Oxford members no doubt tended to take his ideas about coping skills, to heart, since they wanted self-improvement that would build fiber. After all, we must accept that if you win, you win, and if you lose, you lose. That self-responsible self-motivation is also how, and why, market discipline works; we must discipline even perfectly innocent failures. The more that the weakness of the weak is blamed (What exactly is to blame when someone doesn’t protect himself well enough to succeed?): the more that they’d be motivated to take responsibility for taking care of themselves, the more hope that they’d have that they could change what causes their problems (themselves), and the more that we could all have faith in this red-blooded worldview. Prejudice against the weak means an optimistic and patriotic faith in The System, and focusing on how the weak could hopefully solve their own problems if only they made themselves worthy, changed what they can. “Personal strength,” “strength of character,” etc., tend to mean literally strength, transcending “weak” but natural and warranted feelings.
Übermensch imperfection such as sinfulness would have to seem at least forgivable, while untermensch supposed imperfection would have to seem to be an insidious (as in “the hidden lie,” and, “We are all victims of victims.”) expression of weak people’s SELF-WILLS. Dictator or no dictator, just about all of those in any society must define “personal responsibility” in basically the same predictable way and truly believe it, or different people would play by different rules, and plenty of people wouldn’t take the rules to heart when fortitude would be most necessary. No doubt plenty of Oxford members who weren’t Himmler’s advisees, could have been just as easily, since they were just as free of whiny resentment; all “good” members followed the same school of psychology.
The Zoloft homepage is headed:
It had said, “It is estimated that about 20 million adults in the U.S. suffer from depression each year, and that up to 25% of all women and up to 12% of all men in the U.S. will experience an episode of major depression some time in their lives. About 1 out of 6 American adults have depression during their lifetimes. Depression is not a sign of weakness or a character flaw. It is a medical condition.”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? Amidst this rampant depression, the possible weaknesses and character flaws that we discuss, are those of the victims. Yet what response would I get, if I started talking about the moral weaknesses of those who cause the problems? Even the worldliest moral responsibility, such as Situation Ethics, would say that the real strife that they cause, isn’t just someone’s moralistic opinion. Yet if I started talking about this, eventually I’d be told that kvetching about them wouldn’t do any good, and would sound restrictive, manipulative, whiny, unforgiving, and judgmental. I could seem to be indulging what Nietzsche called my will to truth, in that I’m insisting that we care about the truth of who caused what, rather than just thinking of my situation in pragmatic terms, that my problem is my problem. Of course, untermenschen would be far more likely to seem guilty of a will to truth than would übermenschen, since their strength would tend not to come from what Gandhi called ‘Truth Strength,’ Satyagraha.”
In that Zoloft ad, we had the usual tendency to associate “sign of weakness or a character flaw,” with literal weakness such as depression, rather than the aggressive behavior that triggers a good deal of the depressions. If it weren’t for this, it would seem only natural to figure that we have millions of reasons why we should treat this as a social problem, rather than millions of reasons why one should use a certain medication. Though your culture might have told you that this is what “weakness of character” means, so when ads for antidepressants talk about “weakness of character” leading to depression this doesn’t bring to mind pictures of sociopaths devastating others, your natural common sense should tell you that if the average American’s character really is wimpy enough for about 20 million adults in the U.S. to suffer from depression each year, then we must be pretty wimpy.
Regarding the Great Crash of 2008, Donald Trump, on Larry King Live of September 17, 2008, said, “Well, there’s a lot of greed on Wall Street. And a lot of people are making crazy deals and you can blame everybody, even the regular consumer that went out and bought a house and got a mortgage that was ridiculous,” and, “But it’s the times and it’s greed and I’m not sure you can ever do anything about pure greed.” You might think that to say that an almost-catastrophic problem resulted from “pure greed,” would be inflammatory language. Yet to many, it would seem only natural to take pure greed as a given. That’s human nature. No matter how great are the consequences, plenty of people would accept that that’s reality. While one may think that this is naturally what Trump would want to believe, obviously plenty of people in that audience were willing to accept this. Of course, greed couldn’t be called hidden , could be called honest , so could seem safer even when it causes big problems. Also, it could seem that greed on Wall Street is inevitable so we’d better just take it as a given. Sure, Warren Buffett called the derivatives responsible for the Great Crash of 2008, “weapons of financial mass destruction,” but it could seem inevitable that, even if the regulators get control over the derivatives, those in the investment houses would come up with new kinds of weapons of financial mass destruction, and the regulators would have the usual fear of regulating them adequately.
Joe Nocera’s Executive Suite column of The New York Times, which it describes as, “There’s no business like big business — or at least there isn’t to Joe Nocera, the Talking Business columnist for The Times,” for October 7, 2008, was titled, On the Theory That Punching Dick Fuld Will Help Solve the Credit Crisis, and was about Lehman Brothers’ CEO Dick Fuld being the first to testify in the Congressional hearings on the Great Crash of 2008. This said, “But let’s be honest here. Every firm on Wall Street — and every C.E.O. — did the same things that Mr. Fuld did, and rewarded themselves every bit as handsomely,” “There is a lovely memo floating around the Internet, written by Henry Paulson when he was chief executive of Goldman Sachs, in which he says that Goldman’s chief regulatory priority is to get the S.E.C. to loosen up debt ratios for the big investment banks,” (He also testified in 2000 before the Security and Exchange Commission, “[W]e and other global firms have, for many years, urged the SEC to reform its net capital rule to allow for more efficient use of capital.”), and, “I’m not saying that the urge to punch Dick Fuld in the nose isn’t a powerful one. I am saying that it is a little misplaced. The best efforts of everyone — including Mr. Waxman — should be geared toward solving the crisis, better understanding why it happened, and making sure it can never happen again. Then we can turn our attention to the likes of Dick Fuld.”
So the fact that what he did was par for the course, was supposed to be a reason for taking it as a given, and think of objections to it in terms of the objectors’ irrational urges. You might think that if that sort of behavior is par for the course, then finding out about it would give up better understanding of why the crisis happened. Finding out about Paulson’s agendas would tell us a lot. Yet to attribute the motivations of Fuld (and all the CEOs to testify after him) to a greedy universal such as the way that Wall Street is, and attribute the motivations of those who hold him accountable to their vindictive urges, is basically Nietzschian, just like the Nazi ideas that accepted aggression and treated objections to it as insidiously manipulative. Talking about Fuld’s testimony as if he was to be the only CEO to testify before that hearing, and talking about Paulson’s memo about loosening up the debt ratios as if he didn’t do more about this than write a memo, was certainly minimization of the sort that would make one less whiny. And, as any self-help expert could tell you, as you’d try to get through life, if you took as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as you’d have it, you’d feel more serene and look less resentful and controlling.
The Washington Post of October 4, 2008 included an article about how the bailout would be carried out, Paulson Moves On to Nuts and Bolts of Rescue, by David Cho, which included, “The trick, Paulson said in an interview earlier this week, is coming up with the right price. If the government overpays, taxpayers could be saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. Paying too little could force other banks to write down assets that are similar in nature, which in turn could trigger a cascade of bank failures.” It should be obvious to anyone that those banks aren’t being forced to do anything. In fact, if a powerless person or institution who made that much of a choice was portrayed as being forced, that would seem disgustingly manipulative. If what they would have seemed to have been forced to do caused that much damage through a mass panic, to portray that as being forced would have seemed horrifyingly manipulative. The next time you’re helpless and you claim to have been forced to do troublesome things that you weren’t really forced to do, you’ll probably be treated as if you’re trying to pull some really dirty tricks that would only hurt yourself in the long run since manipulation doesn’t really make you a winner. Yet it seemed that we’d basically have to understand that those banks were so passive, since they’re strong.
Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect, Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, describes an experiment that Palo Alto high school world history teacher Ron Jones did. He told his students that he’d demonstrate to them how Nazism got its following. Then, for the next week, “First, Jones established new rigid classroom rules that had to be obeyed without question. All answers must be limited to three words or less and preceded by ‘Sir,’ as the student stood erect beside his or her desk.... The more verbally fluent, intelligent students lost their positions of prominence as the less verbal, more physically assertive ones took over.... A cupped-hand salute was introduced along with slogans that had to be shouted in unison on command. Each day there was a new powerful slogan: ‘Strength through discipline’; ‘Strength through community’; ‘Strength through action’; and ‘Strength through pride.’” Jones’ students recruited others to join this movement. At the end of the week, he had the members of this movement gather for a rally in the auditorium, in which they’d see the presidential candidate who the nationwide version of their movement would back. When they got to their auditorium, what they saw was an old film of the Nuremberg Rally.
Just imagine what would have happened if, instead, your average high school, or even college, class were told, “It is estimated that about 20 million adults in the U.S. suffer from depression each year. It’s only natural to care about this, and what causes it, rather than just going through life as if it doesn’t exist. At the same time, caring about this isn’t exciting. And while caring about this isn’t intellectualist, its causes would tend to be so complex, ambiguous, and simply accepted or excused by our current cultural norms, that intelligence would probably be necessary to establish just what these causes are.” That wouldn’t arouse the sort of instantaneous following that Jones’ Nazi-esque movement did. At the end of the assembly where the students saw the film of the Nuremberg Rally, Jones said that they should take with them a new slogan, “Strength through understanding.” Strength through understanding what our rampant depression means, certainly doesn’t have a Wagnerian excitement to it, but if you live in the midst of something this big, then not understanding it is an unbelievably big weakness.
Modern psychology has two very big influences who were obviously influenced by Wagnerian German themes.
The following, from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, from the same era as Sturm und Drang literature, pretty much sums this up: “Wrong through violence is not so ignominious for the perpetrator as wrong through cunning, because the former is evidence of physical strength, which in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race. The latter, on the other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays weakness, and at the same time degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral being,” and, “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.”
“Blaming others” instead of “looking at myself,” sure would have been ignominiously untermensch. If one says, “But you’re victimizing me!” even if this really is happening, that’s bound to reflect his , since naturally he’d want to believe that: he’s entitled to plenty, he’s so righteous, he’s not to blame whatsoever for his problems, etc.
. To say that your feelings that something was bad or evil reflect a striving of your , is to say that that they’re manipulative, reflecting a self-serving hidden agenda that even you probably aren’t aware of. All you know is that you’re right. Of course, the bad or evil person’s bad or evil choices, his belief that excusing or forgiving them is what’s right, etc., certainly reflect the striving of his , but it would seem that we simply must accept that that’s the way that human nature is. François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, says, “The torrent of abuse that the Party directed toward [Pasternak] was made of base but strong passions—egalitarianism, nationalism,” and one could call egalitarianism a base passion if it comes from the desires of the weak. Even desires for fairness would be base, if it’s the weak who desire it and it would be easier to just shrug your shoulders and say, “Oh, well, life isn’t fair.” That’s why getting judgmental seems presumptuous.Sure, Alexander Berkman wrote, “Not all the misery we have in the world today comes from the lack of material welfare. Man can better stand starvation than the consciousness of injustice. The consciousness that you are treated unjustly will rouse you to protest and rebellion just as quickly as hunger, perhaps quicker.”
Yet everyone would want to believe that they deserve more than what they have. Some supposed injustices, are just life’s inevitable imperfections. There really is no objective way to prove how much the cause of one’s own misery is true injustice, or his own “You owe me!” complex. All are presumed innocent until proven guilty, including those who committed the possible injustices. Therefore, all the problems would seem to be with the victims’ “You owe me!” complexes. Then one could add to this all the people who manipulatively say that they’re victims of injustice, but don’t really, profoundly, believe it! Then again, in the real world, profundity doesn’t count for anything. 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. It at least sounds plausible to hold that a society should have a policy of “People must be motivated to win, not whine,” so they’d try to achieve rather than get what they want by playing the victim role, so caring about injustices would seem bad: manipulative, restrictive, and inadequately rewarding.
And since this would apply equally to any situation, including alkies’ kids dealing with life with the alkies, this is the world as will and representation. 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 the world as will and representation means that telling alkies’ normal kids to look at themselves rather than blame others, doesn’t seem any different than telling manipulative or hypochondriac blame-finders to do that. No problem could seem to be a social problem if it seems to result from the ineradicably aggressive of those who cause it, and/or the (possibly masochistic) ignominiously cunning of those who have it. Another way of saying, “The World as Will and Representation,” is, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” 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.”
Pat Buchanan, in a syndicated column in 1977, wrote, “...despite Hitler’s anti-Semitic and genocidal tendencies, he was an individual of great courage... Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.” The “defects of character” stressed by AA’s Big Book, resentment anger and fear in general, are the same as what Buchanan and Hitler meant by “character flaws,” i.e. not handling one’s own problems (whatever they may be) with enough stolid and self-reliant backbone. “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” as well as, “Whatever your problem is, courageously change what you can and serenely accept what you can’t,” also define “character flaws” as supposed weakness masquerading as morality.
Niebuhr was a hell-raiser, before Stalinism made him fatalistic about human nature. Yet if any organization preaches the Serenity Prayer at people, the final result would be the same, that self-reliant seems good, and weakness that tries to get persuasive strength from emotion and/or abstractions seems intolerably bad. As the history of The AA School of Self-Help Psychology shows, Nazism, minus anti-Semitism and committing outrageous aggression, equals taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as you’d have it.
Manic-Depressive Illness, Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin and Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, says, in its chapter on personality differences, “Character has been defined as ‘personality evaluated’—that aspect of an individual which bears a moral stamp and reflects the person’s integrative and organizing functions. The concept of character is employed less frequently in the United States than in Europe, although it is often used interchangeably with that of personality.” Actually, the word character is used plenty in the United States, whether it be in comments on depression or from the likes of Pat Buchanan and Frank Buchman, to pass judgment on how integrated and organized are traumatized people. After all, such judgments aren’t moralistic. Someone absolutely has to provide our society’s homeostasis, since things simply have to remain integrated and organized.
Schopenhauer wrote of his favorite classical philosophies, Cynicism and Stoicism. These are rampant in victim correction as a panacea. For example, the subtitle of the book The Manipulative Child, by Drs. E. W. Swihart, E. W. Swihart Jr., and Patrick Cotter, is, “How to Regain Control and Raise Resilient, Resourceful, and Independent Kids,” not, “How to Regain Control and Raise Kids Who Don’t Try to Pull Machinations.” In the pre-Reagan era, self-help books on assertiveness often contrasted it with the dysfunctional ways to respond to others causing you problems: passively, aggressively, or manipulatively, which required cunning insincerity, that one tries to get what he wants indirectly, etc. Yet according to that more recent conception, plenty of perfectly sincere assertiveness could be labeled as “manipulative.” Any spoken words that stand up for one’s own rights, could be said to reflect his own emotionalistically and based on guilt, whereas dealing with one’s own problems Stoically resiliently resourcefully and independently, couldn’t possibly be called manipulative. To treat the words bad and evil as if they mean everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case, is certainly cynical, but those of the Reagan school could say that if we don’t, then people would try to get what they want through perfectly sincere “victimhood” and “victimology” (which, in a society in which about 1 out of 6 adults have depression during their lifetimes, would be very warranted), rather than by achieving and earning what they want.
Schopenhauer was very much a writer of the Romantic era of the early 19th Century. In Germany, with its Wagnerian leanings, the Romantic Era was sometimes like romanticizing the Mafia, dramatically exciting, but ignoring the real consequences of aggressive behavior. The Wikipedia webpage about Nazism says about this, “Many see strong connections to the values of Nazism and the irrationalist tradition of the romantic movement of the early 19th century.” Actually, what has more of a connection to Nazism’s values is regarding, as Van Wyck Brooks wrote in Days of the Phoenix, “Wagner as a symbol of his epoch,” a love of strength and fear of manipulative weakness, rather than irrationality (though that love of strength and fear of weakness could easily become irrational, look like The Big Lie, etc.).
A webpage about Hitler, A Born Soldier, says, “Hitler’s favorite writer during the war was the early 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.... Hitler, like Thomas Mann, was greatly impressed by Schopenhauer’s book: The World as Will and Idea. Hitler read the book over and over again during the war and was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer’s teaching.”
(Nazi posters about the will, saying “Through military will to military strength,” “One battle, one will, one goal: Victory at any cost!,” and “National Socialism—the organized will of the nation,” along with a poster for the classic Nazi film Triumph of the Will)
As the webpage Germany’s Progression of Prejudice says, “The ideal volkish German is native, has unmixed blood, possesses a moral character, and a bellicose, bloodthirsty nature [and loves traditional German wild-hick music, which sounds extremely anthemic].” Of course Schopenhauer liked traditional German wild-hick music, “[The fact that common people could produce lyrical art] is proved by many single songs written by individuals who have otherwise remained unknown, in particular by the German national songs, of which we have an excellent collection in the Wunderhorn, and also by innumerable love-songs and other popular songs in all languages.” Actually, the only thing particular about German, and (especially!) German-Slavic, music, is that they’re as anthemic as you’d expect German music to sound. (Naturally, every nationality creates its own wild-hick music in its own image...)
And, in fact, both those who believe in a Wagnerian logic, and those victimized by it, could hold to this same logic. Those who believe in Wagnerianism would want to believe that because strength seems so admirable, and those victimized by that would need to be pragmatic by adjusting to it. An article in the Los Angeles Times of December 2, 2006, about a woman who decades ago as a child was raped by a priest who later admitted it yet she remained faithful, “She can’t forgive Mahony’s inaction” by John Spano, says, “She credits her faith for helping her survive. She liberally quotes Viktor Emil Frankl, a Viennese doctor who survived German concentration camps, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Their writings inspired her, allowing her to find ‘the pearls’ within difficult and painful experiences.” Both those who prioritize stolid strength, and those who need it to survive since people who prioritize stolid strength are victimizing him, must have a positive outlook toward difficult and painful experiences. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s book Exuberance, to illustrate how Churchill’s gutsiness was exactly what the world needed to defend from Nazism, quotes him as saying after the war, “It was the nation and the race dwelling all around the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar,” though this talk about a race with a lion heart sounded like it could have just as easily came from the Nazis.
The question of Germany’s reparations for World War I, very much parallels current problems that lead to our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc. We often hear that one big reason for Nazism’s coming to power, was was the ordeal that Germany had to endure in order to pay reparations for WWI. Yet compared to what Germany did to the countries it owed reparations, what Germany went through was pretty endurable. Someone had to pay for the damages that German aggression caused, and if it wasn’t Germany, it had to have been its victims. Those other countries needed the money right away, so even having to wait until Germany could provide it was a compromise. The costs of World War I played a part in all the causes of the Great Depression, even the stock market bubble of the late 1920s, which was started by the Fed lowering interest rate so that those in Europe could borrow more to fix the damages from the war. Germany kept trying to finagle its way out of paying the reparations. Its runaway inflation of the 1920s didn’t have to happen, and may have even been a passive-aggressive stunt that the German government pulled to get the Allies to lessen or forgive the reparations.
Yet both Nazi propaganda, and current common sense, have said that expecting Germany to take responsibility for the big consequences that it chose to cause, was just too burdensome. Though the profound wrongness of Germany’s aggression was so much bigger than was what the Germans had to put up with due to the reparations, the consequences of the aggression could be minimized as one of those inevitable results of human nature that realists will accept, while expecting Germany to take responsibility for the consequences seems to be artificial morality. Rather than figuring that the reparations caused World War II, one could only wonder what Germany would have done if, before it started, it was warned that if it started another world war, it would have to pay for whatever material consequences it caused, this would not be lessened one bit, and it would look pretty ridiculous if Germany whined about taking responsibility for what it very freely chose to do. Sure, after World War II Germany could have said that at the time it was completely helpless to turn back the clock and undo the war, but before the war, it had far more control over what it would be responsible for, than many people have when they must take response-ability for their own welfare. After the war even proportional compensation could be called vindictive and resentful, but before the war, it couldn’t. If that was too much of a price for one country to pay, then it didn’t have to start World War II. (Of course, West Germany could have used the same excuse that Wall Street is now using so much, that after the new democratic government had replaced the Nazis, the war was a bad bet that the old regime made and the new regime wasn’t really responsible for.)
When looking through books that give words in languages besides English, that say unique things so we might even want to incorporate them into the English language, you could see that many words in the German language reflect the cynicism about human that could be called Wagnerian. Übermensch is fatalistically accepted, and much supposed untermensch isn’t accepted, though a lot of what seems to be untermensch is actually just assumed to exist. Surreptitious motivations are also attributed to it. Since untermensch is supposed to be ignominiously cunning, it would seem that if we presume people innocent of it, or any of its supposed negative attributes, until proven guilty, then their ignominiously cunning tactics would work! For example, if psychologists followed their ethics that require that what they do be based on science, how many women could they possibly diagnose as codependent? After all, the subtitle of Robin Norwood’s Women who Love too Much, is When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change. Yet it still seems that these women who keep wishing and hoping that their own martyrdom will stop, can’t be in denial that they keep intentionally letting themselves in for their own martyrdom, since if they were, just think of all the harm that would result, hidden from even their own conscious minds!
In the books There’s a Word For It, but It’s Untranslatable, by Howard Rheingold, and The Meaning of Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod, you could find the following German words:
Weltschmerz—literally, “world-grief,” a nihilistic and aggressive version of ennui, the sort of glorification of destruction that trendy music seems to like, whether it be the violence of punk rock, or the contrived Satanism and other destructiveness of heavy metal. The high class version of that would be such German literature as the Sturm und Drang genre, and Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. There’s a Word for It says that this means, “the idea that languid sorrow and ultimate self-destruction is romantic in some way.” The Meaning of Tingo’s definition of weltschmerz, though, has implications of what both Schopenhauer and Wagner really had in mind, that sure, we must accept that the human condition is ineradicably aggressive, but this is still unfortunate: “It broadly means world-weariness, but carries with it both a sense of sorrow at the evils of the world and a yearning for something better.”
Those who believe that is such an ineradicable part of human nature, would have to figure that either we get it under control in such a coercive and unquestionable manner, or each individual must deal with his own problems unquestioningly, including those that result from others’ sinfulness, by courageously changing what he can and serenely accepting whatever he can’t. No matter how ineradicable we may consider sinfulness to be, in order for society to keep functioning, either authority would have to stop it, or its victims would have to fix its physical and emotional consequences.
(proud and gutsy SS insignia, as worn by Mengele
, Eichmann
, Himmler
The definition that Tingo gives for liebestod is more subtle (or, maybe, more insidiously acceptable), “a love that is consummated only in death or that is thought to find fulfillment only after death.”
Some more subtle examples of this general pattern are papierkrieg, excessive paperwork that you must fill out to make a complaint, and schlimmbesserung, a so-called improvement that makes things worse. To engage in battle by requiring your opponents to fill out excessive paperwork, is ignominious cunning involving abstractions.
And those who are promoting The Big Lie by assuming that might-makes-right really does make right, would probably be those most likely to use the argument that sure, attempts to make things genuinely morally right might look like they’re improvements, but in the end they’d probably just make things worse. If the person who has responsibility for each and every problem, is the victim of it, then the person who has the responsibility for each and every problem is the person who has the most reliable motivation to resolve it as wholeheartedly as possible. It might sound better if the person who had the moral responsibility for causing a problem had the responsibility for solving it. Yet if he got responsibility for it rather than the person who has the most reliable motivation to resolve it wholeheartedly, that would make things worse, since someone like that is probably not going to resolve it as completely as possible.
For example, in any relationship that could be considered “codependent,” one person is unambiguously morally responsible for the other’s problems. Yet to hold that first person responsible for stopping them would likely lead to a worse outcome than would holding the victim responsible for doing whatever it takes (including, possibly, “the feminization of poverty”), to take care of her own problems. She’s supposed to just accept that “That’s just the way he his,” even if he isn’t an addict. What we’re left with is, “It’s every person for him/herself,” and thinking in terms of moral responsibility would seem to be a schlimmbesserung. In fact, the more that the victim would try to get moral responsibility, the more that this person would look like the cunning, intentionally weak, untermensch.
Sure, as the non-English words in that book show, people everywhere do selfish things that violate others’ rights. Yet such German words are the only ones that imply that a certain conception of human nature is what’s mentally healthy. This philosophical position is exactly what has most shaped modern psychology, through Freud and Niebuhr.
This Germanthink says that accepting übermensch human nature is healthy, both because it’s unchangeable, and also because, “physical strength... in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race.” The sadism of schaddenfreude, backpfeifengesicht, liebestod, and the nihilistic weltschmerz, seem to indicate just how uncontrollable is our aggressive human nature. The regretful but fatalistic weltschmerz, seems realistic. The coercively authoritarian radfahrer says that, realistically speaking, maybe the only way to keep society functioning despite our aggressive human nature, would be to meet force with coercive force, and praise submission to it. Naming baby girls “strength in battle” certainly doesn’t suggest a natural level of aggressiveness, but if you come from a culture that sometimes does that, you’d probably be very likely to believe that aggressiveness is ineradicable and, therefore, we’re all just going to have to take as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as our yearning weltschmerz would have it.
Rejecting untermensch human nature is also what’s deemed “mentally healthy,” since most cognitive therapy and following of the Serenity Prayer succeeds in changing that, and it looks both ignominious and cunningly dangerous. If someone is masochistically disappointed when something turns out not nearly as badly as he had hoped, then that’s just the sort of self-indulgent self-destruction that ads for antidepressants would call “weaknesses of character” of the sort that the unsophisticated attribute to depressed people. The same would apply to when weltschmerz or liebestod associates excitement or love with one’s own destruction or death. If someone sulking could be described as playing the liver sausage, he’d be described as playing the victim in a way that seems as carnal and as blandly bitter as liver sausage. If the peace offerings that guilty husbands offer their spouses are considered to be “dragon fodder,” then the victim’s resentment seems to be The Problem that must be corrected. These are exactly the sorts of attributes that self-help psychology would attribute to those who are supposedly codependent, passive-aggressive, manipulative, or otherwise choosing to be weak for “fun” and/or profit.
A popular complement in Germany is scharf, meaning sharp, which is what the breeder of the Doberman Pinscher said he wanted its temperament to be. The calligraphic font in which I put the heading of these “Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary” webpages, is a favorite of Germany, and is actually called Fraktur, which means, “Fracture.” Of course, the most creepy-looking Fraktur comes off of SS documents and publications.
Yet even old-fashioned and formal German calligraphy could be Fraktur, as in the following snake-like heading (with a lower-case s that looks more like a sword or a lower-case f) of the “Family Register” pages of an antique heirloom German Bible:
Germany also produced the Sturm und Drang, or “Storm and Stress” genre of literature, at about the time of the founding of the USA, when the rest of the Western world was establishing healthy ideas of freedom so the period is called “the Enlightenment.” The Nazi Doctors, edited by George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin, says that the American medical establishment regarded the Nuremberg Code for medical experiments on humans, as a “good code for barbarians, but an unnecessary code for ordinary physician-scientists.” Also, only the Krauts could come up with a dog sport like the schutzhund.
Yet it’s pretty obvious that what’s really going on behind these presumptions that übermensch character defects are ineradicable while one could get rid of hurt feelings by saying The Serenity Prayer, is that the übermenschen have the power to effect their wills, while the untermenschen don’t. We’re going to have to take as Jesus did this sinful world, not because sinfulness is ineradicable and if the victims don’t accept this then they’re resentful “dragons” “playing the insulted liver sausage,” but because the sinners had the power to sin and the victims didn’t have the power to stop however that impacted them. If they took responsibility for solving the problems, they’d likely get solved. If those who caused the problems took responsibility for solving them, they likely wouldn’t. All of this pinning labels on these people afterwards, as if the sinners’ not taking responsibility is forgivable but the victims’ not taking responsibility isn’t, is just a rationalization to make that allocation of personal responsibility seem moral. Sure, this normalcy produces rampant depression, but thinking along the lines of, “Wrong through violence is not so ignominious for the perpetrator as wrong through cunning, because the former is evidence of physical strength, which in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race. The latter, on the other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays weakness, and at the same time degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral being,” makes that seem moral, and makes the supposed ignominious cunning of the weak, look like a moral hazard.
The main Teutonic influence on modern psychology, would have to be Freud, who was a German-speaking Austrian. J. P. Scott wrote about stereotypically German ethologist Konrad Lorenz, “If Lorenz is right, then man can never lead a happy, peaceful existence, but must continually be sublimating the spontaneous [aggressive] ‘drive’ which accumulates within him.” ETHOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES OF AGGRESSION by Johan M.G. van der Dennen says, “As in Freudian thought, there is absolutely no escaping violence. According to Lorenz, if aggression does not find us, we will find it—because of the way we are built (Zillmann,1979).” This same German mindset is very much behind the aversions that psychologists have, to even the most secular moral responsibility, such as Situation Ethics. Fundament Christians tend to hate Situation Ethics, since this bases its moral judgments not on what any holy book says about any questionable behavior, but on what its predictable consequences would be in its particular situation. Yet if you tried to pass judgment on someone else’s destructive behavior using the criteria of Situation Ethics, modern psychologists would probably treat this as draconian: repressive, controlling, guilt-tripping, judgmental, etc. Very easily, the morally responsible one could seem to be the helpless one, since he was powerless over the way that he was built, over some of the consequences of what he did, etc. Treating aggression as evil wouldn’t accomplish anything, since no one naturally wants to abide by this moralism.
The other big ethnically German influence is German-American Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote The Serenity Prayer. The part of The Serenity Prayer that most people don’t know about, includes, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.” Only someone with a German ethnic background, or someone who’d gone through severe sinful traumas, would say explicitly that people should pray for that. Yet even if the only part of the prayer that one knows of, practices, and advocates, is the famous first sentence, then whenever one is up against any sinfulness, amoralism would become de rigueur. He’d seem dysfunctional if he ponders any question other than, “Can I change my problem?” Even the first sentence alone, strains at resentment and swallows sinfulness. This is where the Wagnerian perspective has to lead. Someone has to take responsibility for the consequences of any and every aggression, serenely courageously and wisely. Aggression, the way that this sinful world simply is, seems ineradicable, but people’s objections to it don’t, so peace could be achieved only by eliminating those objections. They could be labeled as dishonorably weak, willful, and manipulative. While sinfulness is forgiven, supposed manipulativeness isn’t. Very easily, the victim could seem to be the one responsible for making the choices which shaped the outcome, since he could control his feelings, could take care of his problems once they’ve happened, should very much not want to be weak, etc. Treating weakness as evil would accomplish something, since naturally everyone in trouble wants to improve himself by becoming less weak. Yet, as with any other headgame, few would want to admit explicitly that the worse that the hardship and/or sinfulness got, the more important it would be that those who have the problems, deal with them responsibly.
We end up with untermensch-phobia, and the paradigm of the sneaky weak. The weak are very likely to be treated as if, either consciously or subconsciously, they chose to be weak for fun and/or profit. It therefore seems only natural to treat the strong as powerfully impressing the human race, and the weak as degraded as physical and moral beings. If 20,000,000 Americans suffering a serious depressive disorder in any given year, seemed to constitute millions of reasons why we’d better take this seriously as a social problem, that would allow all sorts of manipulators to ignominiously and cunningly use this as an excuse to get mollycoddled. if that were treated as millions of reasons why antidepressants are good, then this would mean more freedom for the strong, and self-reliance for the weak. This would also lead to the triumph of the will, since the more that one wants to do something at others’ expense, the more that others must understand in order not to seem ignominious, manipulative, whiny, trapping, etc., so he wins. He is the one who seems impressive, after all.
Weakness for fun would be like codependency, duplicitously choosing to be at the mercy of aggressively sick partners, since this would bring the emotional satisfactions of living a drama, being a martyr, playing the caretaker, being the righteous one, etc. Weakness for profit would be manipulative, playing the victim role as a machination to benefit materially.
All you’ve got to do is look at the guilt feelings and self-blame that are unique for modern Western depression, and you could see how this untermensch-bashing is a very powerful slave morality. As an Internet brochure for Effexor, which seems to have a bad reputation for withdrawal symptoms, describes them, “Depression can make you feel guilty for no reason or make you feel worthless, no matter how many good things you do,” internalizing responsibility, though the Drug Counsellor’s Handbook, A Guide for Everyday Use, on the United Nations website, for drug counselors in Africa, says and highlights,
Intercultural studies have consistently found that depressed people living in developed areas outside of the modern West have tended to feel paranoid, but modern Westerners, whether depressed or not, tend to figure that even if someone did “get you,” that would mean only that you lost the battle so you’re a loser.
That same Effexor website includes a webpage that says, “If you have depression, you are not alone. Each year, an estimated 19 million American adults suffer from depression,” which makes this a social problem, but each of these people will simply have to take care of their own problems by taking antidepressants.
Modern Western realism and self-reliance means that you’d have to figure that you’re personally responsible for changing or accepting whatever you must. 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. The weaker you are, the more problems that you’d have to deal with, and the less resources that you could use to deal with them. Therefore, the weaker that you are, the more likely that you’d be to be treated as an ignominious and/or perniciously manipulative untermensch, and, as you could see in the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, the more likely that you’d be to think that you’re the problem. If you’re one of the 19 million American adults who suffer from depression this year, and this means that you must deal with this by taking antidepressants which have horrible withdrawal symptoms if ever, for any reason, you aren’t able to get your daily fix, then you’d seem übermensch if you accepted this reality, untermensch if you didn’t.
More of this on Victim Correction Webpage 10
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
