That’s how all cultural conditioning and social pressures work, including that of all those strange foreigners who can’t think for themselves. (BTW, those who think for themselves wouldn’t conclude that for 15% of the adult population to suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year, is only natural.) Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct.
Nothing that anyone in trouble could possibly say, could possibly counter expectations that are based on what the real world objectively requires.
No matter what an alkie or any other problem parent might do that could traumatize his kid, he
absolutely could change himself, and absolutely can’t change anyone else
including the parent, which is all that the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer
cares about. A priori, that’s all that you could care about. That mustn’t seem repulsive. You mustn’t really care about “the elephant in the living room” if you can’t change the elephant. If you think that that’s revolting, then that would be very unserene, discouraging, etc. Obviously, that, like Bontsha the Silent, is far from a natural way to think, though it could be called “cognitive therapy” (“Behavior
Therapists and Cognitive Behavior Therapists... concentrate on a person’s views
and perceptions about their life, rather than personality traits.”),
which has been called, “a natural alternative to anti-depressant medication.”
The above is the fully-approved outlook, since it’s very effective in preventing depression. All that you’d need to give self help advice, would be a tape recording that says, “It would really do you a lot of good if you changed what you can and accepted what you can’t! That’s just the way the real world works!”, and you’d play that over and over as the person describes his own trauma.
Any reasonable alternatives to victim correction as a panacea, could seem too unrealistic, fallible, subjective, passive, defeatist, untermensch, etc., for the realities that one must deal with. Pragmatism leads to happiness. Victim-correctors, therefore, are the ones who really care about victims. 
If one were to apply what
On Speculation and
Manipulation in Therapy says, “When it works, justice is always very
particular. It proceeds on a case-by-case basis with a careful weighing of
the facts and an equally careful examination of the underlying logic of key
arguments,” certainly the specifics of what addicts’ kids must deal with, would
argue for someone else being to blame.
Yet blaming others wouldn’t accomplish anything, and would divert attention from solving one’s own problems. It’s your problem, so what are you going to do about it? You’d better just serenely surrender to the inevitable. If we showed an understanding acceptance toward
everyone, including the people who have the problems and aren’t dealing
with them adequately, nobody would solve them, and the victims would be weakened in the long run. For these people to get on track in taking care of themselves, is the only thing that really matters. If everything must be pragmatic, nothing can be
sacred. “I’ve stopped blaming
others and I’m looking at myself!”, is inculcated humility, expedient and well-adjusted, without coercion or authoritarian obeisance so this is pro-freedom. Even if the reason for the “negative thoughts” that the victim is washing his own brain of, is that he was unfairly
overpowered, that wouldn’t be an authoritarian brainwashing, so his
sincere opinion could still seem to be dirt that’s to be washed away and replaced with what he’s supposed to believe. The October, 2007 issue of
Counselor, the Magazine for Addiction Professionals includes an
article that says, “rigid fidelity may produce an adverse effect,” but for those who must deal with realities like this, rigid fidelity is as necessary as are adequate resiliency and coping skills.
Naïveté doesn’t work. Victim-blaming optimistically and determinedly looks for very necessary self-motivated solutions, so, in the words of the Downing Street memo, “the intelligence and the facts” must be “fixed around the policy.”
Reductionism is key. In whatever respects one is weak or strong, the weak serenely accept, the strong courageously change, and the stronger don’t have to worry about changing or accepting anything. As any self-help counselor would tell you, abstractions are immaterial, and judgmental abstractions are self-serving, so conflicts are reduced to the concrete realities. Ambrose Bierce defined platitude as, “A moral without the fable,” and the self-reliant, self-responsible, morals of victim correction sound a lot better without the fables, which would have told of what the people had to deal with self-reliantly. The central message of any self-help approach for people in trouble is that to help yourself: No matter what caused your problem, you absolutely must focus your
attention on correcting yourself, since you absolutely can change yourself,
absolutely can’t change anyone else, and absolutely must make your life productive (whatever that requires). The real world requires certain things. Everyone must play their part. The only choice that you have is either you do whatever it takes to deal with your problem, or it doesn’t get dealt with. The only legit question is, “Can I change this?”, so no injustices could seem profound. As long as they happened in the past, they’re past history. Unendurability happens. Addicts’ friends and loved ones are the ones who are motivated to correct themselves, and they need more motivation to: change, empower themselves, accommodate to reality, be well-adjusted and productive. That’s only natural. Everyone, not just fundamentalists, must take this sort of spirituality literally. Focus on self-responsibility.
Only the person who has the problem, is reliably motivated to deal with it as
well as possible. We could live without moral responsibility (which we can’t count on), abstract principles like morality, etc., but can’t live without victims taking response-ability for their own welfare. Some things are luxuries; some are necessities. There’s nothing paternalistic here, so you could feel free.
Even addicts’ families, etc., are sustainable like this, since naturally everyone is motivated to be well-adjusted and functional—serene and courageous. Homespun fortitude is homespun fortitude. Addicts’ kids
shouldn’t feel bad about themselves, guilty, etc., but when dealing with what their alcoholic parents do the kids
should look at themselves rather than blaming others, so as they do this they
should choose not to feel self-blame, and, of course, simply looking at themselves means simply looking at what they should
have done better. Their self-help mentors would simply check to see how
well they’re doing in following these instructions. (It’s no wonder that
Should Statements are one of the single-mindedly self-responsible cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, or that depressed self-blamers have no gauge of how good is good enough other than, “Am I adequate to deal with my [devastating] realities?”!) If one rationale for victim correction doesn’t work, it’s replaced by another. As “Mary Smith” wrote in her suicide note, “All [my psychologist] could do is nitpick about how I need to feel small + helpless,” though Mary obviously had a gutsy personality, which is typical of the self-empowering “thinking” of victim correction: plenty of all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, and disqualifying the positive. To paraphrase British prime
minister David Lloyd George, such alkies’ kids cannot conquer the chasms in their own lives by gingerly taking one step at a time.
(As you could see in “Archie” and in all the other self-blame you might encounter, that isn’t just a fear of a slippery slope, of what might happen to you if this goes too far.
Naturally, the realities that you’re response-able for dealing with, will go however far they’ll go, and with realism, there’s no such thing as going too far.) Samia Labidi’s chapter of Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam, Apostates Speak Out says, “The shackling of women had to be pursued without any letup, otherwise men risked losing control of the situation,” and with victim correction as a panacea, the shackling of untermenschen has to be pursued without any letup, otherwise übermenschen risk losing control of the situation through: untermenschen believing that they’re
ENTITLED to better so they’ll stop “looking at themselves,” others pitying them, and these feelings getting more and more compelling since fear, including legitimate fear, is the strongest motivator.
And, of course, when they look at themselves to see if they have the “defects of character” that AA’s Big Book really goes into, i.e. resentment anger and/or fear, then alkies’ kids
would probably find that they feel plenty of untermensch feelings, but Al-Anon doesn’t consider correcting them to be self-blame. It should be that either you’re careful about blaming the victim or you’d be treated as not being careful enough about the accusations you make unswervingly, but that would leave too many problems unsolved.
As British author Douglas Adams wrote, “When you blame others, you give up the
power to change yourself.” As Susan Faludi wrote in Backlash about writings on codependency, “Norwood’s self-help
plan, modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve-step program [through Al-Anon], advises women
seeking the source of their pain to refrain from looking beyond themselves, a habit she calls ‘blaming.’” Self-responsibility is necessary for victims. Backlash
mentions “puerile serenity,” though contrived serenity is what’s
pertinent! And we’d better not have a backlash against this knee-jerk, unconditional absolutist one-dimensional uncompromising and unquestionable (but very self-helping and self-motivated) victim correction! As Bush said in May, 2005, “In my line of work you got to keep
repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind
of catapult the propaganda.”
Though this conviction and ideology expects people to accept a
laissez faire self-responsibility that’s as extremist as the
self-responsibility that Enron propounded when it seemed so red-blooded, not
only would Al-Anon not seem to be extremist wing-nuts, but if you firmly
disagreed you could seem to be an extremist wing-nut. As Enlightenment-era
economic philosophers wrote, being productive must override everything else.
Most victim-blaming (a.k.a. self-responsibility) can’t seem bad.
Those who deviate from these expectations are those who’d seem to be the authoritarians, the judgmental controllers. One can’t say “no” to realism, including, “Like Archie, you should stop blaming others and look at yourself, to improve yourself and your chances!” Unintended consequences, etc., of moral control are dreaded; unintended consequences, etc., of the law of the jungle seem only natural. As Libertarian Ron Paul explained Social Security,“ ...we have taught them to be
dependent,” and a single-minded blaming and correction of any victims would have
the same unconditional, gutsy and pro-freedom appeal. Social Darwinism protects us from all parasitism, which could only hurt the parasites. No doubt this thrilling philosophy also regards the Americans with Disabilities Act as tyrannical, so
either handicapped people get jobs without the ADA, or they’ve been taught to be dependent. Realists can see the dangers that the weak would pose, unless they make great efforts to be self-reliant anyway and succeed. We mustn’t reward failure, victimhood, etc., or the weak could get what they wanted without earning it and the strong might not be motivated to achieve, so we must assume that the weak wanted to fail. This isn’t
absolute power; “Archie” and those who are just as helpless can change some significant things. Such “imperfections” don’t seem nearly as scary as do comparable problems from the guv’mint.
Helplessness isn’t tyranny.
The Al-Anon formula for self-help, laissez faire Social Darwinist ideology, and what “self-help” must mean in a society with rampant depression, are based on the same ideas, and come with the same frame of reference. You simply must accept whatever you get, that you’re powerless to change. As long as you can’t change what you’re afraid of, the more fear you’d feel, the more self-control you’d need in order to cope with reality. Naturally, we reward success and punish failure. We have to. We seem to be in a constant conflict between untermensch human nature, which tries to get what it wants (including masochistic emotional satisfaction) through mollycoddle cunning weakness, and übermensch human nature, which tries to get what it wants through red-blooded “honest” strength, and the übermenschen must win. Naturally, we must sometimes deal with things going wrong; safety could go against freedom. Victimhood shouldn’t entitle anyone to anything. The weak must be more motivated to play their parts. As Hitler’s idol Schopenhauer wrote, if we cared about what someone deserves other than whether he won or lost, then people could get what they wanted by “proving” that they deserve it, and naturally those whiners would want to believe that they do. Both pro-freedom philosophies, and realism, must accept much of what contributes to our rampant depression. While “Archie’s” situation is certainly atypical, a society that has rampant depression yet stresses response-ability for one’s own welfare would have to make that personal response-ability, that unconditional (though each situation gives opportunities for rationales for this personal response-ability,
that victim correctors could focus on). All of the advantages of “the invisible hand,” apply to the lives of “Archie” and everyone else in trouble. (If you weren’t aware of our rampant depression with self-blame, you might think that things just take care of themselves.) No matter how individualistic one is, he’d still have to admit that every society must keep itself stable and functioning, and must enforce its expectations regarding who’s to do this.
All of these supposed forms of individualism must indoctrinate their followers into believing in counterintuitive absolutisms such as the above, the ideal being complying with the Al-Anon “Serenely accept and courageously change” formula applied to any realities. That’s living in the real world. You do what you can. Beat the hardcore blues. No self-care could seem onerous. Whatever happens is, therefore, “life on life’s terms,” “reality,” etc. Maturity means accepting reality. Of course, we live in a competitive and self-responsible society, nothing’s guaranteed, and human imperfections are whatever they are. Those who have Nietzsche’s values would be both most likely to succeed, and most likely to seem to have good, well-adjusted backbone. Response-ability for one’s own welfare, one’s own problems: serves the greater good, maximizes efficiency, is a moral obligation that we can’t afford to forgive. Where would our economy be if people weren’t truly motivated to take response-ability for their own welfare? There are no guarantees in life, and if there were, plenty of people wouldn’t be productive enough. Emotionalism such as whining, victimology, and victimhood, wouldn’t be fair play in the contest for success. Fighting for what is good could actually turn out to be bad, since people: are naturally motivated to do what they want and to take response-ability for their own problems, aren’t reliably motivated to take moral responsibility, must be motivated to get what they want by winning and earning it, and mustn’t be motivated to get it by acting like victims or their allies. Asymmetrical warfare means that the strong fight fair and the weak fight unfair. If everyone were to get what they deserved, where would it come from? “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” etc., are, in the end, Social Darwinism that resolutely ignores its own consequences. You get whatever you get.
Self-responsibly striving for success, is what it all comes down to. That’s the sort of values that our economy rewards; “Archie” and those who’d insist that we cope like him, would prove very strong resilient and productive. Cognitive therapists could probably prove that those who choose to think that serenely and courageously are the least likely to suffer depression, anxiety, etc.
Things simply have to keep functioning. If you don’t successfully deal with your own problems, who will? We must think realistically, so whatever shapes our realities shapes how we must think. If you don’t go along with the victim correction as a panacea, then that would seem to be your untermensch pathologies, character defects. Pathetic resentment is the ultimate enemy. Whatever
is necessary for one to deal with his own realities self-reliantly becomes
absolutely necessary, so otherwise he’d be inadequate, dysfunctional, etc. Even if he does plenty, if it’s inadequate to deal with his realities, he’d seem to be inadequate. The weak can be such a drain. Victim-blaming has advantages, such as: conventionality, pragmatism, realism, objectivity, exalting red-blooded strength, avoiding moralism, preventing manipulative and vainglorious machinations, faith that we get what we deserve, and confidence that the person who’s the most motivated to solve a problem is the one who’s in control. All that we’d have to do is treat the weak as a bunch of selfish manipulators, and we could have a de facto law of the jungle without having an official law of the jungle. Everyone must conquer their own doubts, their own “negativity,” for their own good, focusing on correcting themselves. Correcting women, poor people, etc., as if they fit the stereotypes of choosing to be weak for “fun” and/or profit, is intended to benefit them, strengthen them.
Normal give-and-take, opinions about rampant depression, etc., seem too prone to
manipulation, cowardice, etc. Simple wins.®
Success and failure are objective, and questions of, “What’s unacceptably wrong?”, aren’t. (You’re expected to have realistic coping skills, so simply proving that what happened was wrong, isn’t enough.) That’s the real world; sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don’t. There is only so much to go around, and if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. It’s astounding what one can get away with, if what we really care about is the supposed whiners, manipulators, etc. Acting pathetic is the old (pre-Reagan) way of doing things. Weakness isn’t competitive, or fun. Victims could seem to be manipulatively insidiously and perfidiously exploiting victimizers’ (moral) vulnerabilities, in order to get what the victims want. (Paranoia about duplicitous untermenschen could seem healthy—gutsy and realistic.) If those judging you keep hearing from your society, that supposed victims are really untermensch manipulators, attention-seekers, whiners, etc., then that would be how those judges would be likely to judge you. (Prejudice acquires a new meaning, like Ron Paul’s: “Sometimes you have to pre-judge, since you can’t prove cunning untermensch machinations, and you should be optimistic that they could have succeeded if they really wanted to.”)
Coping with reality must mean overlooking some realities. Even “Archie” doesn’t have to live in fear. You don’t deserve more than what you won. Your attention would be on what you should be doing better, better, not on the magnitude of the social problem. Some negativity seems pro-freedom,
ictim correction as a panacea is
another way of saying “self-help,” since if
you’re the one who has the problem, you’re the only one who helps.
