And What Science Can Do About It

 

 

 

“Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”—Chinese proverb

“The idea of looking inside oneself for important research problems was well put by C. Wright Mills who advocated in his book The Sociological Imagination that social scientists ‘translate private troubles into public issues.’  If you are going through a divorce, that’s a private trouble.  When half the marriages in America are failing, divorce is a public issue.”—David A Karp, Speaking of Sadness, Depression, Disconnection, and the Meaning of Illness

 

able of Contents of Entire Victim Correction Series:

Victim Correction as a Panacea Is the Problem-Solving Strategy That’s Basic to the Modern Western Definition of “Personal Responsibility,” Which Holds That If Victims Automatically Do Their Utmost Best to Take Responsibility for Their Own Welfare by Dealing with Whatever Happened to Them, Then They’re Respectably Self-Reliant, the Problem Is Being Pragmatically Solved by the People with the Most Reliable Motivation to Succeed, and This Would Fulfill Christian Commands for Unconditional Forgiveness and Steadfastness in the Face of Trials.  Victim Correction as a Panacea Says, in Essence, that Judging Sinners Seems Judgmental, but Judging Sinnees on How Pragmatic Stolid Self-Reliant and Peaceable.  This is Characteristic of the Reagan/Thatcher Era, as in the Still-Popular Theme Song  That Was Emblematic of Reaganism, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” Which Proudly Begins, “If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life,” Whether This Was My Fault or Not I’d Simply Take Responsibility for My Own Welfare by Rebuilding, While if One Instead Said, “If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life and I caused their destruction, I’d accept and take care of my problem,” He Would Have Seemed to Be Abdicating Personal Responsibility for His Own Welfare.

 

Very Much Connected to This Is My Web Page Candace Newmaker’s Experience, Which Gives an Actual Transcript of an Example of This Sort of “Thinking,” That Was So Extreme That on April 18, 2000, the Little Girl Died During an Appointment with Her Psychologists, Since When She Told Them She Was Suffocating to Death They Felt That What Was Most Important Was That They Stamp Out This Supposed Manipulative Stunt, and They Also Insisted That If Only She Was Courageous Enough She’d Fight Enough to Save Herself, As They Made Both the Suffocation And the Trapping Worse, Saying, “She needs more pressure over here so she can’t... so she really needs to fight,” “Getting pretty tight in here,” “Yep... less and less air all the time,” and after she says her last word, “Candace is used to making her life everybody else’s problem. She’s not used to living her own life,” overcoming her own problems.  (No, I’m not kidding, and if you’ve seen enough victim correction as a panacea, you wouldn’t be surprised.  In fact, this would seem somewhat inevitable, since an effective, courageous fight in the face of any problem is the goal, and mamby-pamby behaviors like manipulative claims that one is suffering are the anathema.)  Very much related to this is my A Glimpse Into the Soul of Victim Correction webpage, excerpts of a book from Al-Anon which tells members the specifics of how they could most effectively make their alcohol-induced crises work for them in potentially all their affairs, the sort of thinking which many think is the source of all these psychotherapeutic self-help expectations that victims stolidly face up to their own problems, along with slogans from AA which express this in characteristically absolutist fashion.  Also there’s my The Cigarette Industry and Victim Correction webpage, on how such a hated industry is clearly able to win respect by heaping all sorts of mollycoddle invectives on those who oppose them, as if of course they’re being pilloried by petty whiners, while at the same time they actually realize that the accusers have a good reason.  You could also see all my victim correction as a panacea webpages summarized and correlated on my Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary webpage, and this may be the best place to start.

The Psychological Aspects of Victim Correction as a Panacea Could Be Seen In the Book that Most Inspired Hitler, Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, Which Describes Exactly that, Seeing the World In Terms of The Ineradicable Aggressive Will, and How the Victims of This Could Represent Their Problems to Themselves as Transcendently as Possible. 

Why Progressive Politics Needs Something This Self-Evident and Scientifically Provable, In That All We Have to Do Is Stop Such Absolutist Unconditional Presumptions, And We Could See How Dangerous It Is to Make Such Expectations of Those in Crisis

An Overabundance of Cold, Hard Data Showing Much Too Much Suffering from Psychiatric Disorders to Be Natural

How This Comes From Victim-Blaming That Seems Acceptable, Productive, Vitally Necessary, In That If You Focus Your Attention on Blaming Victims for Not Reacting Stolidly and Effectively Enough Then You’d Be Telling Them Single-Mindedly What They Could Correct to Improve Their Fates, Maybe from Unlivable to Livable

Mainstream Examples of Unconditional Forgiveness as a Coping Skill

The Distortions in Thinking That Such Vital Necessities Lead To

Dubya’s Statement of Principles, That Very Much Use Victim Correction as a Panacea

 

 

The Acceptance of Victim Correction as a Panacea Comes from Cultural Conditioning, Exactly the Same Mind-Bending Force as Does the Religious Fanaticism of the Psycho Terrorists.   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.

Typical Nietzschian Presumptions That Since Depression and the Like Are So Common in the USA, All Those Victims Must Be Horribly Faulty in One Way or Another, Faulty In Their Weakness

My Own First Encounter with Victim Correction as a Panacea, Concerning Codependency

Susan Faludi’s Backlash Tells of Codependency Groups Blaming the Actions of Men, on Women for Supposedly Fitting the Female Stereotype of Being Self-Sacrificing.

How This Victim-Blaming Came from the Absolutist Tendency of Alcoholics Anonymous and Its Ladies’ Auxiliary, Al-Anon, to Assume That Simply Because a Problem Is Yours, Then Something Is Wrong with You If You Don’t Just Shut Up and Deal with It Resiliently; Those In the Ladies’ Auxiliaries Must Serenely Accept Hardship and Sinfulness That Good Little Wives Serenely Accept

 

My Codependency Group, like Faludi’s, Said Forcefully That If Butthead Men Bring Problems Into Being Then They’re Simply the Wives’ Problems.  Victimizers Wouldn’t Be Condemned for a Lack of Values Unless It Was So Graphic That This Can’t Seem to Be Only Someone’s Opinion, and Even Then Caring About It Would Likely Seem Futile, but Victims, Who Are Expected to Have All of the Indomitable Independent Self-Reliant Courage That Their Reality Requires, Wouldn’t Have to Have a Graphic Lack of Endurance or Rugged Individualism In Order to Be Found Lacking.  Such True Grit, Such Braving the Elements, Is Supposed to Give Victims Free Spirits, and Many Conservatives (Judeo-Christian and Moslem) See It as Women’s Self-Indulgence.    You could see a good example of a tunnel-vision attempt to make a sufferer ruggedly individualistic, applied to someone for whom it would be the least appropriate, on my webpages Candace Newmaker’s Experience and The Cigarette Industry and Victim Correction.
 

  Holding Victims Responsible Has More Short-Term Pragmatism, Provides More Self-Efficacy, Since Victims Have the Most Reliable Motivation to Solve Their Problems, and Blaming Them Would Tell Them How They Could Manage Their Own Lives Better so Would Benefit Them, No Matter How Their Problems Occurred.

 

These Requirements Can Lead to Some Extreme Distortions in How We Perceive Our Relationships with Others, such as That We Must Wash Our Brains Of Perceptions That Could Deflate Our Optimism, and That We Must Accept As Reality Any Antagonism in an Adversarial Society, Yet Awareness That We Must Accept This Would Deflate Our Optimism.

 

  Also, William James Wrote That Americans Tend to Classify People as Either Redbloods or Mollycoddles.  This Means That Victimizers Have Rights and Victims Have Responsibilities, and That They’d Seem Dishonorable if They Don’t Just Shut Up and Take Responsibility for Their Own Welfare.  Any Clod Can Look Noble When Morally Facing Up to Enough Victimization, as Even Dubya Looks Noble When He Morally Faces Up to the Terrorists, but What Seems to Matter Is How Noble You Look When Achieving Physically, Which Winners Will Succeed at Doing and Losers Won’t.

If the People of a Society Used as Its Favorite Strategy for Coping, a Prayer Which Said in Its Small Print, “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,”  You’d Probably Have Serious Doubts Both About the People Who’d Make Themselves so Unquestioningly Accepting, Intentionally Without Limits, and About How Much Is Required to Cope in This Society.  Yet This Is the Part of the Serenity Prayer That’s Usually Edited Out but Was Originally Written as the Specifics of the Serenity Prayer, Following,  “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”  The Basic Idea Is that Judging Sinners Seems Judgmental, but Judging Sinnees on How Pragmatic Stolid Self-Reliant and Peaceable Their Reactions Are, Seems Pragmatic Stolid Self-Reliant and Peaceable.  When the Problem Is Hardship Rather than Sinfulness, the Expectations Made of the Sufferers that They Deal With Their Problems So If They Don’t They’ve Fallen Sort of Expectations, Would Be the Same.

The Worldview of The Serenity Prayer Would Score High on Those Questions on the F-Scale, the Psychological Test for Fascism, That Concern Might Makes Right and a Perceived Obligation to Accept It.

The Serenity Prayer Expects Us to Take as Jesus Did This Sinful World, and The Bible Handbook Says, “Christ’s absurd reversals of true morality would place the good at the mercy of the bad, and would make an end of civilized society.”  Here Are Some Examples of How Absolutist Are the Christian Expectations of Forgiveness.

And Here Are the Bible Verses That Make These Absolutist Commands.

How the Absolutist Expectations Made of Victims in Such Christian Teachings, as well as the Redblood/Mollycoddle Dichotomy and Victims’ Pragmatism That’s Indispensable, Are Reflected in Absolutist Self-Blaming Cognitive Distortions of Depression That Are Unique to Western and Westernized People.  George Barton Defined a Communist as, “A person who feels disloyal when he catches himself thinking,” and You Could Call a Follower of the Serenity Prayer, “A person who feels maladjusted when he catches himself thinking.”  How Else Could One Have the Ability and Docility To, If Needs Be, Accept Hardship as a Pathway to Peace and Take as Jesus Did this Sinful World, Always Absolutely and Automatically, Never Relatively and With Due Deliberation?  Patriotism Has Been Called “the last refuge of the scoundrel,” but Patriotism Is Pertinent in Only Some Instances of Scoundrel Behavior, while “You absolutely can’t change this behavior or the fact that it’s left you saddled with this problem, so you have absolutely no other choice but to accept these, and your responsibility to deal with your problem, absolutely,” Is Probably Pertinent (and True) in All of Them, so It Could be Called the Last Refuge of Potentially All Scoundrels.

More Christian Expressions of Expectations of Absolute Forgiveness

The Proposed Self-Defeating Personality Disorder, and Its Absolute Acceptance That Some People Are Wretched So We’ll Just Have to Fix the Potential Victims

The Previous Definition of the Passive-Aggressive Disorder That Was Rejected as Condemning People for “Situational” Factors, Characteristic of the Fact That Victim Correction as a Panacea Marches Forward as if Nothing Is Situational, Since Judging Sinners Seems Judgmental but Judging Sinnees on How Pragmatic Stolid Self-Reliant and Peaceable Their Reactions Are Seems Pragmatic Stolid Self-Reliant and Peaceable, so the Red-Bloodedness of the Reactions Is the Only Issue

A Woman Who Killed Herself and Said in Her Suicide Note Both That She Was Taking Medication for Clinical Depression and That Her Psychologist Incessantly Accused Her of Choosing and Needing to Feel Helpless

 

How Exactly These Distortions in Thinking Can Be Seen in Dubya’s Suppositions of What We Have a Right to Expect Others to Do

A Whole List of Differences That A Reasonable Person Would See Between Victim Correction as a Panacea and Corrections That Would Discriminate as to Whether the Victim Really Is at Fault

Zen States as a Coping Skill?  That’s What You’d Need to Have If the Reality That You Must Deal With Is Bad Enough That to Be In a Zen State Would Be Self-Help, and Not to Be In One Would Be Self-Defeating.

The Goals of Scientific Research That Would Make Known the Effects of Removing Personal Responsibility From the Wretched and Giving It to the Victims

Research on This Would Lead to the Ultimate Truth Strength, Satyagraha.

 

 

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Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)

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 Documentation On the Social Problem of Unnaturally Rampant Depression

 Standard Rationales for Victim Correction as a Panacea

 Schopenhauer on Predators

 Emphasis on Victim-Self-Blaming

Darwinist Lehman Brothers’ INSIDE Sales Tips

Darwinist Lehman Brothers’ INSIDE Introduction to Management Book

Out of the Same Mold as the Great Crash of 2008

Message for Intellectuals in the Islamic World

Candace Newmaker’s Experience

Breaking Important Confidences for Your Own Good

A Glimpse Into the Soul of Victim Correction

Cigarette Industry and Victim Correction

Niebuhr’s Ideas on Our Nature and Destiny

Herbal Experiences for Women

Some Ideas for Rapport

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