And What Science Can Do About It

 #12

 

“Being certain he [an alcoholic whose “friends have slipped away” and maybe “the weary round of sanitariums and hospitals has begun” but, “He may have come to the point where he desperately wants to stop but cannot.”] wants to stop, you can go to him with this volume as joyfully as though you had struck oil.  He may not share your enthusiasm, but he is practically sure to read the book and he may go for the program at once.  If he does not, you will probably not have long to wait.  Again, you should not crowd him.  Let him decide for himself.  Cheerfully see him through more sprees.”—from Chapter 8 of AA’s Big Book, “To Wives”

 

 

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s Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Susan Faludi wrote in her book Backlash, The Undeclared War Against American Women, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, in the chapter titled “It’s All in Your Mind: Popular Psychology Joins the Backlash,” the theories behind the idea of codependency were inspired by the ideas of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.

The implication of the ideas of codependency is that this comes also from traditional stereotypes of the masochistic woman, though in reality the March 24, 2002 New York Times ran an article “The Country Music Country Radio Ignores,” by Neil Strauss, which told of how country stations are choosing their music according to what brings the most profitable audience rather than which country recordings have the most traditional, earthy, substance to them, and that this includes marketing to women since they tend to make most of the spending decisions for their families, “Today, the men are singing love songs and apologies to women while sassy women are singing about dissing the men,” so even the redneck female market doesn’t have much affinity for taking care of guys with behavior problems; heck, after a few hours I’d get sick of dissing men, which I regard as genuine “negative thinking.”

The webpage Surprising Risk Factor of Suicide, by Dr. Dean Edell, says, “It’s the eighth leading cause of death in this country, and in 1997 claimed about 30,000 lives - by comparison, only 19,000 people died as a result of homicide.”

The webpage Some Facts About Suicide, from the website of the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, says, “There were 31,204 deaths by suicide recorded in 1995; 30,535 in 1997.  The actual number is probably significantly higher, because many suicides are recorded as accidents.”

As Beating Depression, by John Rush, MD, says, “Does a depressed person in India appear the same, behave in the same way and experience the same symptoms as a depressed person in the United States?  In Africa, depressed persons rarely experience self-blame, guilt or suicidal rumination as part of their depression, whereas Western depressions typically involve much guilt and self-blame, and predispose to suicide.  Arabs who develop depression tend to complain of difficulties in digestion, abdominal pain, and loss of appetite and weight.  Again, guilt, self-blame and suicide are rare.  On the other hand, westernized and more affluent Arabs develop a depression more similar to that seen in the West.”  Ironically, probably what push people toward self-blame, guilt feelings, and suicide, are norms that are supposed to increase each individual’s self-confidence and self-direction.  This self-confidence requires that “personal responsibility” not be based on moral responsibility, which seems restrictive, manipulative, and opinionated.  Rather, “personal responsibility” would have to be based on something more objective and gutsy, that is, response-ability for one’s own welfare, one’s own problems.  The worse your problem is, the more of a failure you’d be.  At least that doesn’t involve a moralistic guilt, or finding blame.

As Erich Fromm wrote in The Sane Society, copyright 1955, “The interpretation of life as an enterprise seems to be the basis for a typical modern phenomenon, about which a great deal of speculation exists: the increase of suicide in modern Western society.  Between 1836 and 1890 suicide increased 140 per cent in Prussia, 355 per cent in France.  England had 62 cases of suicide per million inhabitants in 1836 to 1845, and 110 between 1906 and 1910, Sweden 66, as against 150 respectively.  How can we explain this increase in suicide, accompanying the increasing prosperity in the nineteenth century?”

                    

When you’ve seen guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this?  I’ve always been told that modern Western culture fosters good self-esteem.  We’re even told that we should be careful about the moral judgments that we pass on others, since that would put them down, make them feel guilty, etc.  Yet since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, someone has got to take responsibility for each and every problem.  That someone would then have to be the person who has the problem, the victim.  In fact, when untermenschen seem to be evading their own personal response-abilities, that seem a lot scarier than when übermenschen evade their personal responsibilities, since everyone knows that the aggressiveness of übermenschen is supposed to be taken as a given, while the pleas of the untermenschen are naturally to be suspected as insidiously reflecting their own SELF-WILLS.”

At least The Sane Society treats this as a social problem.  (If it didn’t, it would have had a title like, How You Could Best Deal With Your Depressions In an Insane Society.)  On the other hand, the chapter of Beating Depression from which that quote comes, is titled, “How common is depression?”, and begins,

A major difficulty in studying the prevalence and incidence of depression round the world has been that of diagnosis.   Depression in the United States or Europe may not look like depression in India, Iran or Kenya.  As Henry Maudsley noted, the content of specific delusions in depression may be affected by the cultural context. 

It is striking to note that the term ‘depression’ is missing from the vocabulary of a number of non-Western cultures.  This does not mean that depression as defined in the West does not exist.  Rather, it may be experienced and conceptualized differently. 

Is depression more common in one culture than another?

The implication is that our depression could very easily not be a social problem.  Maybe the only reason why cultures like our own seem to cause more of it, is that those anywhere would tend to think of “depression” as consisting of the symptoms that it produces in one’s own culture, so the depression of other cultures might not be recognized as depression!  If Westerners associate depression with the self-blame, and those in developed Eastern areas tend to feel paranoid while those in undeveloped areas tend to have mainly physiological symptoms that would suit someone in very deprived circumstances, then, therefore, it would seem that only Westerners tend to feel depression!  Since, as Antidepressant Treatment—the Essentials, by John H. Greist, MD and Thomas H. Greist, MD, says, “According to National Institutes of Mental Health figures, 20,000,000 people or approximately 15% of the U.S. adult population suffers from a serious depressive disorder in any given year,” that would mean that in any given year, 15% of the Easterners living in developed areas feel largely paranoid, and 15% of Easterners living in undeveloped areas feel largely those physiological symptoms!  They just wouldn’t look depressed to many Westerners, since they don’t largely feel that intense self-blame that Westerners would consider synonymous with depression!

Dr. Mark S. Gold’s The Good News About Depression, when discussing the fact that psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, by relying on symptoms rather than biological measurements, “makes no mention of the manifestations of depression in different cultures,” says,

For example, guilt as a symptom of depression appears to be a Western phenomenon.  Kraepelin [in the 19^th Century] observed that his Japanese patients were neither guilt-ridden nor suicidal.  According to a more recent study, developing cultures tend to emphasize physical symptoms.  Asian cultures generally do not reveal their feelings.  A study of Hawaii’s ethnic groups showed that depressed Japanese showed more suspiciousness, Caucasians more helplessness.

 

          

(A UN publication, for Africa)

 

Robert Burton’s classic from the (first) Elizabethan era, The Anatomy of Melancholy, described the depressive of his era as, “He dare not come in company for fear he should be misused, disgraced, overshoot himself in gesture or speeches, or be sick; he thinks every man observes him, aims at him, derides him, owes him malice,” and otherwise as suspicious, jealous, fearful maybe even terrified, and solitary.  Maybe he wouldn’t look depressed to modern Westerners, either.  It could seem, then, that Easterners doing intercultural studies of depression, unless they made it a point to remember that depression looks different in different types of societies, would recognize the depressions in developed areas of the East and Elizabethan England, but wouldn’t recognize the victim-self-blaming of modern Western depression, as depression!

Dr. John D. Campbell’s Manic-Depressive Disease, from 1953, says the following about depressed Westerners who, still today, feel that sort of fear rather than the self-blame:

Combined with other symptoms, ideas of reference might constitute a persecutory complex or delusion, but not the malignant paranoid delusion such as is observed in schizophrenia, paranoid condition or true paranoia.  In the last the patient feels he is being persecuted because he is some unusual personality; there is an element of grandiosity in the delusion.  In depressive reactions, on the other hand, the patient feels he is being talked about, watched or persecuted because of his unworthy, evil life, because of the sins he has committed or because of the omissions of which he is guilty.  In one condition there is a feeling of superiority, in the other, feelings of unworthiness.  The idea of punishment often arises in the mind of the depressed patient, especially those with a marked feeling of guilt.  Having lived his life so recklessly, having squandered his resources, wasted his opportunities, he reasons, he must now pay for his terrible deeds.

While the fears described in The Anatomy of Melancholy, “he thinks every man observes him,” doesn’t necessarily mean feelings of superiority per se, that did imply that the person thought that he was singled-out as a target of that much attention.  He really could have used the advice of the pro-humility statement connected with AA, “If you’re worried about what others are thinking about you, don’t worry.  They’re not [thinking about you].”

Also very much worthy of note, is that, of the above-described things that depressed modern Westerners could feel guilty about, very little of them could even possibly qualify as conscientiousness about harm aggressively and volitionally done to others.  He seems unworthy, guilty of omissions, guilty of recklessness (a label that could be put on any failures that it seems he could have prevented if only he were careful enough), having had squandered his resources (which, also, probably doesn’t mean that he did it with a genuine irresponsibility), and wasted his opportunities (which, also, probably wasn’t feckless).  This is your classic thinking along the lines of, I failed, so I’m a loser, so it’s my fault.  But for my inadequacies in taking care of myself, I’d be a winner!  I should be independent resilient and resourceful in taking response-ability for my own welfare, and should be optimistic that I had enough opportunities to succeed better than I had, if only I’d utilized my opportunities well enough!

And the reason why this victim-self-blaming is so all-pervasive in modern Western cultures, is that our conception of the “personal responsibility” that we take seriously, is very much along the lines of a therapy in which alkies’ kids in general resolve, “I’ve stopped blaming others, and I’m looking at myself!”  No matter what the alkie parents are actually responsible for, their kids would be more likely to succeed if they resiliently, resourcefully, and independently did their best to solve their own problems.  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,” so all that even kids have to do to seem manipulative, is not handle their own problems resiliently resourcefully and independently enough.  How else could we possibly measure objectively whether someone is adequate or inadequate?  Sure, when Alateen tells alkies’ kids to “look at themselves,” they’d no doubt tell the kids that this doesn’t mean that they have to feel guilty.  Yet it could be very difficult not to feel guilty, if one figures, “If only I’d done the smart thing, this wouldn’t have happened!”

Those self-help ideas from Twelve-Step groups’ self-help aren’t oriented toward finding out which lovers or spouses of alcoholics subconsciously get their thrills by caretaking, playing the martyr role, living a melodrama, etc. but don’t realize this consciously, and then treating those who intentionally let people walk all over them differently than those who simply are walked on.  Among the slogans of AA, the thinking of which Al-Anon shares and has more of an opportunity to use, are “Things happen.  It’s what we do when they happen that’s key,” “We are all victims of victims,” “To be wronged is nothing, unless you insist on remembering it,”  “When one finger is pointed at someone else, there are three pointing back at me,” “Expectations are premeditated resentments,” “Let nothing that others do alter your treatment of them,” “Put aside the idea of fairness or unfairness,” “Your feelings aren’t somebody else’s fault,” “Comparisons are caustic,” “Hate binds you to the things you hate,” “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional,” “To be afraid is to have more faith in evil than in good,” “Anxiety is fear of oneself,” “FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real,” “Fear exists only when you are running from it,” and “Resentment is like taking poison in hopes that your enemy will die.”  In other words, those who expect complaints to win the complainer something, might as well be $cientologists “dead-agenting,” which is their using finger-pointing, resentment, etc., as tools to evade even the most legitimate criticism, such as by responding to efforts to make people aware of how Lisa McPherson died in a psychotic episode when receiving the “care” that $cientologists have in mind for it, by publicizing supposed dirt about those who try to warn others about this, or about even the family members of the warners.

This isn’t the sort of thinking that would use actuarial reasoning to distinguish those who really do have tendencies toward wanting to: be martyrs, caretake, live melodramas, or play the victim role, from those who seem passive since they don’t seem to be taking care of their own problems resolutely enough.  In fact, all that women would have to do is:

• do unpragmatic things when things happen in their alcoholic homes,
• act like victims in their alcoholic homes,
• remember some wrongs,
• point fingers at those who are walking all over them, have expectations,
• let what others do alter their treatment of them,
• don’t put aside the idea of fairness and unfairness, feel badly in their alcoholic homes,
• make comparisons, and
• hate some things in their alcoholic homes,

before they’d seem to:

• opt for suffering,
• have more faith in evil than in good, fear themselves,
• have delusional fears, create their own fears, and

do something like taking poison in hopes that their enemies will die.

The webpage on enabling, on the website of Co-Anon Family Groups, includes,

How do we enable?

We enable addicts by doing things such as:

 

• Paying their bills, making car payments, covering bounced checks, paying bail, paying traffic tickets;

   

• Making excuses for their behavior, changing appointments, calling employers on absenteeism, writing late or absentee excuses to schools, covering up for missed family functions;

   

• Providing the addict with money, clothing, housing and food;

   

• Caring for the addict’s family by allowing them to live with us, taking their children to school, babysitting, etc.

What does enabling do for us?

Enabling gives us a false sense of control.  We do what society tells us a “good” father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter or friend should do, but we are not getting the results we desire.  We feel frustrated and resentful.  Because the addict’s behavior does not change, we think we have failed.

Our actions, done with the best of intentions, have back-fired.

This very much reflects an old-fashioned conception of a mature personal responsibility, the conception that came from the same groups as:

One could also call this an example of how market discipline, disciplines.  This says that all must be motivated to take care of themselves.  Bill Moyers told of “what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call ‘the animal spirits of business.’”  One could admire animal spirits since, as one could see in the pragmatism of addicts’ family members, if a society’s conception of personal responsibility stresses a response-ability for one’s own welfare, sure this could be called animalistic, but at the same time, those who’d have the personal responsibility would feel a far stronger motivation to live up to it as well as they could, than if the society stressed moral responsibility.  “Animal spirits” mean no manipulative machinations, utopian whining, artificiality, etc.

As Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner says, “Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.  Economists love incentives.”  In the sort of self-empowerment promoted by groups based on, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” it’s to be accepted that what each person gets is what he wins, rather than what he deserves.  Of course, believers could ALWAYS “prove,” using a Social Darwinist logic, that those who lost must have deserved to, such as by supposedly intending to play the martyr role.  All economies require homeostasis, processes to fix any problems that come up.  The most reliable way of doing this, is that problems are prevented or solved by those with the most reliable motivation to do whatever it takes to do so, i.e. the victims.  If we cared about the unfairness of simply expecting these victims, in general, to deal with their own problems along the lines of, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” then anyone could get what he wants not by earning or winning it, but by manipulatively playing the victim role.  Those who face their own problems with a stolid true grit, are most likely to succeed.

We’re supposed to understand that addicts, supposedly, are simply under the sway of the disease of addiction.  Yet the whole idea of not enabling them, is to motivate the addicts to stop using, even if this requires letting disasters happen.  The law, also, doesn’t treat addiction as if it makes addicts not guilty by reason of insanity.  The big difference is that the law can change the addicts by giving them adequate incentive to stop their diseases, but family members can’t, other than by making them hit bottom.

It should also be obvious that for anyone who lives with the addict, to try to stave off the consequences of his addiction, would be very different from someone not living with the addict doing this.  If the addict goes into poverty, so do those who live with him.   For them to try to stave off the consequences by lying to the boss, etc., really doesn’t fit the untermensch pattern of vaingloriously trying to be “good” though this egotism only does harm, which makes them into resentful whiners.  Yet it still seems so easy to see the weak as ignominiously cunning, and striving.  Even if one really did have insidious motivations, such as to control someone through some sort of machinations, they’d be pretty hard to prove, so our society couldn’t assume those accused of such machinations, as innocent until proven guilty.  The heroes of our economy tend to be strong dynamic and daring cowboys (For a while, these included Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow), and its villains tend to be weak.  You don’t want to be like a villain who’s trying to control someone who’s like a hero, do you?

Enablers are supposed to enable so that they could feel in control and morally “good,” though this only removes the incentive that the addicts have to live responsibly.  This is basically the same sort of self-serving WILLFUL and ignominiously cunning, striving of the weak, that Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, described as, “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.”  Also, “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.”  After all, everyone would have an incentive to believe that others owe him something.

One thing that those who don’t live with the addicts must restrain themselves from doing, is to take care of those who do live with the addicts.  They must be motivated to stop their diseases, even if this means that the innocent family members are homeless until the addicts stop.  Of course, no matter what this does to the spouses, they could always be blamed, since it could seem that subconsciously, though they don’t realize it consciously, they get vainglorious thrills from the martyrdom of living in poverty so that the addicts could hit bottom.  They must be after some sort of incentive, which could only be the satisfactions of playing the martyr role.

Sure, this would mean that a lot of them will go through hardship due to others’ sinfulness, but everyone would be motivated to try to succeed, and to innovatively take personal response-ability for their own failures.  This is the sort of personal responsibility that has a strong affinity with, “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.”  This would mean that people would have an incentive to be strong, wouldn’t have any incentive to be weak.

Freakonomics goes on to say, “The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme.  His solution may not always be pretty—it may involve coercion or exorbitant penalties or the violation of civil liberties—but the original problem, rest assured, will be fixed.”  Another problem with incentive schemes is that the more powerless you are, the less that you could give others the incentive to respect your rights.  Sure, the law doesn’t have to treat addicts as not guilty by reason of insanity, but the only way that addicts’ spouses could give them the incentive to stop, would be for the whole family to “hit bottom” or otherwise be very disrupted.

Yet another thing that market economists like, is holding that the incentives that they’re counting on, are incentives that come naturally.  For example, if regarding the fact that

someday we looked back at this and thought,

many who believe in a laissez faire approach to our interpersonal interactions, both economic and otherwise, would say that if the laissez faire approach leads to that level of helplessness, then those who are affected like this simply must accept it, for the sake of the greater good.  This would simply seem to be the price that we must pay for the freedom to do the things that lead to the helplessness.  This is a pretty big sacrifice that would be made for the greater good, but this sacrifice would seem to happen naturally.  This wouldn’t be the sort of sacrifice for the greater good, that comes from authoritarianism.  This is the sort that would come naturally, that would result from the natural forces contesting in a contest of power, and whoever wins, wins.

Those who like this natural approach of sacrifices to serve the greater good, would no doubt figure that one big reason why we could accept that much depression, is that we could always stop the depression through either secondary prevention (i.e. stopping the cause once it’s already occurred), or tertiary prevention (i.e. treating the problem once it’s occurred).  Treating that much depression like that, especially if the treatment is through drugs, is obviously not natural.  Yet from a laissez faire perspective, this would seem natural, in that people naturally do have the incentive to stop their own depressions, and don’t have a reliable incentive to contribute to the primary prevention (i.e. preventing the causes) of the rampant depression.  For that large a fraction of the population to be treated as if their problem is that they’re suffering from deficiencies of Vitamin P, or even deficiencies of a Buddhist mindfulness and “choosing to have a positive outlook,” certainly isn’t natural, but people are naturally motivated to do such things.  Expecting those in the situations that self-help books for people in trouble talk about,

to go into Zen states might seem idealistic, but since they have the incentive to practice such pragmatism, these Zen states are actually essential for realism.  Every society simply needs homeostasis, norms by which it maintains its stability, and these norms and expectations would probably be very expedient.  Sure, that rate of depression is very unnaturally high, but it could still seem “natural,” since it results from spontaneous conflicts, and a Wagnerian conception of human nature could see that as very natural.

This acceptance of what’s natural, would be very evident in the case of the addicts’ spouses who are told, “Enabling gives us a false sense of control....  Our actions, done with the best of intentions, have back-fired.”  If the entire family goes into poverty because of the addict’s addiction, then these consequences would have happened only naturally.  If instead the addict’s spouse had stopped this from happening, this would have been an unnatural, possibly virtuous, “enabling.”  Naturally the spouses would be motivated to do whatever necessary to make the addict recover.  Therefore, even though the spouses’ helplessness is typical of what causes our rampant depression, this wouldn’t have the anti-freedom connotations of, “His solution may not always be pretty—it may involve coercion or exorbitant penalties or the violation of civil liberties—but the original problem, rest assured, will be fixed.”  Sure, since the addict can always relapse numerous times in the future, the only guaranteed solution for his spouse would be to get divorced and build a successful career independent of him.  That could also be called naturally motivated, rather than based on coercion penalties or violations of civil liberties.  Of course, if, hypothetically, the economist had the power of the law behind him, he could cure the diseases of most of these addicts by making them feel effects along the lines of hitting bottom without making their families feel the same, but that would cost so much money that economists would find it very un-economical.  Of course, that would qualify as coercion penalties and violations of civil liberties, while if the undeserving family members hit bottom with the addicts, that wouldn’t.

Most of these addicts’ spouses are women.  It would benefit them if they serenely accepted the men’s moral wrongs, since the women can’t change them, and courageously changed their own tactics in how they deal with “life on life’s terms,” since they can change this.  Therefore, that could be called a self-empowering and self-reliant feminism.  Backlash skeptically says, “Despite their infantilizing methods and their distaste for ‘self-will,’ codependency’s creators and practitioners claimed to have a feminist outlook.  The codirectors of the National Self-Help Clearinghouse declared, ‘The codependency movement may well be the psychological arm of the women’s movement.’  Norwood herself compared her Women Who Love Too Much groups to the consciousness-raising sessions of the early ’70s.”

Yet if it would benefit each woman to serenely accept others’ choices and courageously change her own choices, and wouldn’t benefit her to discuss this as a social problem.  Discussing how she could correct herself, would be the most effective thing for her to do.  Even if her society has rates of depression and anxiety disorders that are so unnaturally high that they constitute  social problems, her discussing her own normalized helplessness as consciousness-raising sessions would have, would seem inexpedient, futile, blaming, controlling, manipulative, opinionated, judgmental, showing SELF-WILL, etc.  If she talked only in terms of how she could most effectively change what she could, this would seem pragmatic, productive, goal-oriented, pro-freedom, self-reliant, objective, forgiving, humble, etc.  The same would apply to non-whites dealing with the effects of racism that they don’t have the power to stop.

And self-help’s entire worldview, especially self-help for women in trouble, reflects this whole plan to maximize initiative.  Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, copyright 1941, includes, “There is a peculiar irony in the fact that [Nietzsche’s] doctrine, which was meant as an exposure of the vindictive transvaluation of values engaged in by the inferior classes, should have itself become a vehicle of the pitiful resentments of the lower middle classes of Europe in their fury against more powerful aristocratic and proletarian classes.”

Actually, the American version of this is a transvaluation of values, which is very pragmatic since it holds responsible the people who are most motivated to take responsibility.  In the case of people in trouble, that means holding the victims responsible.  If they had a forgiving attitude toward whoever caused the problems, that would seem pragmatic, since they’re not motivated to take a practical responsibility for what they did.  If the victims are then held response-able for their own welfare, their own problems, then the people who have the personal response-ability, are those who have the initiative to take responsibility wholeheartedly.

If, instead, people could get what they wanted by playing the victim role and manipulating others into giving them what they want or need, then plenty would.  Many of these people would honestly believe that what was done to them was bad or evil so someone owes them something, but it’s very easy to believe that someone owes you something.  It wouldn’t do our society any good, and would do it harm, if people had the incentive to see how others harm them, as bad or evil.  Even if it actually was bad or evil, we’ve simply got to accept that life isn’t perfect, and the more pragmatically that people take care of their own problems, the better.

Not only that, the question of whose welfare is at stake, is usually a lot more objective than is the question of who has how much moral responsibility.  Therefore, it seems only natural to treat both those who cause the problems through dynamic action, and those who had the problems and successfully took care of them, as übermenschen, redbloods, and to treat those who have the problems and didn’t do enough to take care of them, as untermenschen, ignominiously cunning mollycoddles.  According to this worldview, the power that the aristocratic and proletarian classes had as Nazism developed, could have seemed to have resulted from ignominious cunning, so wouldn’t have a powerfully impressive übermensch quality to it.

As long as you’re the one with the problem, 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.  And your defenses must be impregnable, so we mustn’t accept imperfections in them.  Even if, as in the case of addicts’ spouses, unambiguously someone else is causing your problems, then if you fail to deal with them adequately, you could be labeled as “resentful,” (intentionally) “passive,” (insidiously) “controlling,” etc., as if the results of your interactions with him reflect the strivings of your own SELF-WILL.  This conception of “personal responsibility” would probably be the one that would give a society the most homeostasis, self-stabilizing, and therefore, seems good.

If this leads to the same transvaluation as values as does, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” then, in the final analysis, this would still seem good, since you absolutely can’t change anyone besides yourself, absolutely can change yourself, absolutely must solve your own problem, and absolutely are the one who has the reliable initiative to solve it.  Sure, this might seem more acceptable in the case of addicts since those without the power of the government are to treat addiction as if it makes addicts not guilty by reason of insanity, but if the person causing you the problem isn’t addicted to anything, you still absolutely couldn’t change his choices, so you absolutely must serenely accept them.  It’s guaranteed that any self-help book for women in trouble, will tell them to have an attitude of “Boys will be boys,” toward any men with bad characters.  Either women are motivated to act pragmatically toward them, or these women would seem to have some strange, untermensch, motivations to have a strong sense of (cunning) control, be “good,” etc.

 

 

 

This is the sort of thinking that follows the pattern that the Defense Intelligence Agency insider quoted on the top of Victim Correction as a Panacea page 8, described, “In the most recent meeting, we also were told that, as much as possible, we should avoid ‘caveat-ing’ our intelligence assessments....  Forget nuance, forget fine distinctions; they only confuse these guys.  If that isn’t a downright scary dumbing-down of our intelligence product, I don’t know what is.”  If self-help victim-blamers allowed caveat-ing, then naturally the moral responsibility of those who are morally responsible, would call for a good deal of caution.  Without the caveats, it would seem only natural to treat domestic violence, depression, etc., as personal problems that each affected individual would have to deal with separately.

it would seem that maybe the problems aren’t inside the victims.  Not only that, the problems outside of the victims aren’t just someone’s visionary or whiny opinion.  Yet this would go against the whole ideology that says that we all must self-reliantly deal with our own problems, that this is objective while moral responsibility is subjective, etc.  And when you add to this that codependents, typically for untermenschen, are supposed to choose to be weak for fun and/or profit, any caveats could seem to be their exploitive manipulative tools and/or excuses.  All you’ve got to do is look at what Dr. David Burns listed, in Feeling Good, as the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, and you could see how this victim-self-blaming can’t have any caveats: All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filter, Disqualifying the Positive, Jumping to Conclusions, Magnification [of what’s wrong with yourself or right with others] or Minimization [of what’s wrong with others or right with yourself], Emotional Reasoning, Should Statements, Labeling and Mislabeling, and Personalization, which Dr. Burns defines as, “You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for,” and not partially, or under certain conditions, either. Terribly beleaguered women look at books such as Women Who Love too Much: When [silly] You Keep Wishing and Hoping that [that sociopath] Will Change, for the hope that all those problems result from defects that are inside of themselves, which they can therefore change.

The sort of absolutist and unconditional victim-self-blaming that you could see in these cognitive distortions, really is similar to the way that self-reliant and Objectivist people must approach their own problems.  If you have a devastating problem (no matter who or what is to blame for it), and you succeeded in doing 90% of what’s necessary to get it resolved, that wouldn’t mean that you’d give yourself an “A” grade, but rather, that you’d focus your attention on correcting whatever needs to be corrected in order for you to successfully protect yourself.  One of the stickers sold by the Franciscan Missions, says,

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

This might sound like exactly the sort of self-denial that was characteristic of the era of the Inquisition, and which codependents now vaingloriously pride themselves on.  (Then again, though many were pleased that the new Cardinal of Boston, Sean O’Malley, is a Franciscan since he wouldn’t live as ostentatiously as Cardinal Law did, if I had O’Malley’s job I’d want to live simply since that would help the recently traumatized public feel a lot more at ease, and I don’t think much of asceticism!  I could even have an attitude of, “Give and forget, receive and remember,” since this is what a consideration for those people, would require.)  Yet, in practical terms, that isn’t much different from, “Forget what you did right, remember what you did wrong.”  Yet this is how you must think if you’re faced with a devastating problem, you did plenty right to address it, but you still have to figure out what you should have done better so that you’ll be safer in the future.  And though during the era of the Inquisition plenty of people didn’t have attitudes like, “Give and forget, receive and remember,” if when you did only 90% of what you had to do to solve your problem, you proudly gave yourself an “A” grade, you’d probably end up as a shameful loser.

It’s very easy to be hypocritical about having a good character as in “moral character.”  It’s very difficult to be hypocritical about having a good character as in what the Learning About Depression webpage on the Zoloft website says, “If you have depression, this sad mood along with other symptoms can last weeks, months, or even years if not treated.  Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or a character flaw.  It’s a real medical condition, but there are ways to successfully treat depression....  Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults.”

If you have this sort of weakness of character, you’ll be a loser, and those around us don’t have the same acceptance of that, as they have of, “I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.  Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good.  So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.  For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.  So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.  For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members,” (Romans 7:15-23), and “Oh, well, boys will be boys.”  In fact, if your character isn’t adequate to deal with what causes that very unnaturally high rate of depression, then you’d have an inadequate character, be a loser, etc.

The same would go for orthodoxy of belief.  Even in the era of the Inquisition, if anyone’s religious beliefs weren’t very orthodox, few would have really noticed.  Yet if today, you said that you don’t have an orthodox agreement with, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” then when hardship and/or others’ sinfulness impacts your life, you’d be a whiny loser who isn’t adequately taking care of your own problems.

That same page of Manic-Depressive Disease, discussing that same quasi-paranoia, also says, “A patient in his first interview with the psychiatrist may deny that people are talking about him or watching him, but later betray the presence of a mild degree of this symptom by saying, ‘It seems like people don’t think I’m really sick—they seem to think I’m just lazy or neurotic or something.’”  Such ads for anti-depressants sure do think that enough people attribute depression to laziness, neurosis, or some similar weakness of character!  All that would be necessary for a depressed person to feel the self-blame instead would be for him to internalize such beliefs, “Everyone knows that I must be lazy or neurotic, or have some other weakness of character!”

Maybe the trickiest aspect of victim-blaming, other than blaming people for inadvertently not doing enough, is that few people really are masochistic enough to choose the problems that they’re blamed for choosing.  As William Ryan’s classic Blaming the Victim, in a chapter about a belief popular then, that poor people are poor because they tend not to think in responsible, goal-oriented ways, says,

A related point—often the most overlooked point in any discussion of the culture of poverty—is that there is not, to my knowledge, any evidence whatever that the poor perceive their way of life as good and preferable to that of other ways of life.  To make such an assertion is to talk pure nonsense.  To avoid making such an assertion is to admit, at least implicitly, that the culture of poverty, whatever else it may be (if, indeed, it is anything more than a catch phrase approximately as respectable intellectually as the concept of The Pepsi Generation) is, in no conceivable sense, a cultural phenomenon.

Of course, if it seems that the victims’ choices to be victims were unconscious, then there needn’t be any evidence whatever that those who seem to have wanted their own problems, perceive their way of life as good and preferable to that of other ways of life.  If one doesn’t accept that they unconsciously let themselves in for their own problems, then he’d be told that since unconscious desires are insidious, of course one can’t expect proof that they exist.  If any woman diagnosed as codependent responded by saying, “What evidence do you have that I prefer the martyr’s life as good and preferable to that of other ways of life?  To make such an assertion is to talk pure nonsense,” then unless she really does glorify that sort of thing, she’d be told that she can’t afford to require proof of a danger before she’d take it seriously, and her supposed love of martyrdom would be that danger.

 

 

 

Margo is the woman who the chapter “Dying for Love,” in Women Who Love too Much, keeps referring back to.  This describes her story as, “‘My first husband... ran around on me... my second husband [molested my daughter, and the day after I first heard] I put my daughter and everything of ours I could fit into my car, and left.’... The next player in her marital round-robin was Giorgio, who drove a white Mercedes Benz convertible and made his living supplying cocaine to some of the wealthiest noses in Montecito.”

To use victim correction in her case, would pose three problems in moral justifiability.  First off, none of these guys’ problem behavior arose out of addictions, so the sort of acceptance that you could see in the Gam-Anon chapter of Gamblers Anonymous’ handbook, “Realizing that pathological gambling is an emotional illness does help, as does the understanding that the gambler is not trying deliberately to hurt or destroy his or her family or friends,” wouldn’t apply.  Margo left each of these problem husbands, but she did have to live with the chaos and poverty that her marriage to them, having their children, etc., made of her life.  Their choices were undeniably choices.  Secondly, the destructive choices of second and third of these husbands, are clearly outside of the slightly excessively normal range.  Alcoholism can legitimately be treated as “just the way that it goes sometimes,” but not pedophilia and drug pushing.  And thirdly, she was very ready to leave her problem husbands, leaving the pedophile the day after she heard that he was abusing her daughter.

Yet that book, mainly in that chapter, goes on to say:

“To avoid her own feelings she is literally ‘fixing’ with a man, using him as her drug of escape.”

“A woman who uses her relationship as a drug will have fully as much denial about that fact as any chemically addictive individual, and fully as much resistance and fear concerning letting go of her obsessive thinking and high emotionally charged way of interacting with men.”

“To wait for someone like Margo to figure out on her own that she is a woman who loves too much, whose disease is becoming progressively severe and may very well ultimately cost her life, is as inappropriate as listening to all the typical symptoms of any other disease and then expecting the patient to guess her condition and her treatment.”

“For the woman who loves too much, her primary disease is her addiction to the pain and familiarity of an unrewarding relationship.”

“Each chart demonstrates how addiction, whether to a mind-altering chemical or to an unhappy relationship, ultimately affects every area of the addict’s life in a progressively disastrous way.”

“Usually the help she seeks involves turning to someone else, perhaps a professional, in one more attempt to change her man. It is crucial that the person to whom she turns helps her recognize that she is the one who must change, that her recovery must begin with herself.”

“Sadly, the vast majority of women like Margo will choose to continue practicing their addiction, searching for the magic man who will make them happy, or endlessly trying to control and improve the man they are with.”

“Facing your own problems means that, having let go of managing and controlling others and of the games, you now are left with nothing to distract you from your own life, your own problems, and your own pain.  This is the, time when you need to begin to look at yourself deeply, with the help of your spiritual program, your support group, and your therapist if you have one.”

So though none of these men did what they did due to an addiction, their choices are treated as if they might as well be the toxic properties of abused drugs.  That’s just the way those drugs are, and that’s just the way those men are.

Dealing with one of the husbands could seem to be the sort of thing that realists must do to deal with human nature, but dealing with the other two would be more appropriately done with an attitude of “with fear and trembling.”  And “relationship addicts” are supposed to use dysfunctional romantic relationships to get the excitement that druggies get from drugs, but a drug addict wouldn’t leave his drug of choice as soon as he finds out that it’s exactly the sort of drug that gives him the excitement that he’s after.  Sure, Margo left her pedophile husband immediately after hearing about the molestation, but the 1965 victim-blaming study that Ann Jones satirically summarized as, “Without the wife-beater’s wife there would be no wife beating,” found all its research subjects in the women who’d turned their violent husbands in to the police.  If any wives seem to have “let themselves in for trouble” by marrying men who make criminal choices, the women’s turning their husbands in to the cops, leaving them immediately, etc., seems to matter absolutely nothing.

Yet if you look at the practicalities of victim correction as a panacea, you could see that sure, the worse that a problem gets the more difficult it would be to justify holding the victims response-able for their own welfare, but also, the more important it would be that she take care of her own welfare.  If that’s just the way that certain men are, then escaping soon after marrying them isn’t good enough.  Sure the pedophile was her first divorce attorney, and the dope pusher was rich, but she could still seem to have let herself in for trouble.  Self-motivation is the most reliable motivation, and she’s the one who’s the most motivated to solve any problems that others may cause her.  We’d need a panacea to deal with such problems, since they all MUST BE DEALT WITH.  We’ll end up with a lot more of these problems solved, if we minimize blame by calling them merely “unrewarding” and “unhappy” relationships, and magnify personal response-ability for one’s own welfare by treating the ways in which men’s behavior affects every area of her life in a progressively disastrous way, as ways in which her own self-defeating desires affect her life.  Sure, the World Health Organization projects that by 2020, only heart disease will cause more disease burden globally than depression, so Globalism certainly is causing a big problem, but all MUST BE DEALT WITH, and this is to be dealt with by treating each individual who has it.

Though criminality is a measure of intent where the accused seem innocent until proven guilty, victimity, from the moment this word was coined, hasn’t been.  “There was even a group,” Faludi wrote, “for Formerly Employed Mothers At Loose Ends, or FEMALE.  Apparently now even a poor job market was seen as an individual woman’s personal psychosis.”  Occam’s Razor would cut all of this away as nonsensical.  That is also very unfalsifiable, in that all sorts of people would seem to be doing themselves in, but such presumptions would make good survival skills since action-oriented survival skills mean erring on the side of caution as to whether they’re self-determined so the victims could try to determine a new outcome.  Of course, if these alcoholics’ family members became amoral stalwarts, this would forestall such whiny disturbances and impositions, so their characters would then seem to have integrity.  The only other way in which one could live up to such expectations could be called a “reverse hypocrisy,” in which the standards by which victims judge themselves are more stringent than the standards by which these victims judge others.  This is exactly how addicts with a “self-will run riot” think the world should feel, since their fears, resentments, claims of victimization, etc., are enemies of the self-willed.  Yet such attitudes towards victims’ concerns may explain why some AA members, like Ebby, the guy who originally gave Bill W. the founding ideas for AA (including basing it on the Oxford Group, whose Christian founder said that he’d like Hitler if only he gave up his anti-Semitism but kept his other war crimes), kept relapsing though they weren’t experiencing addictive cravings at the time.  In groups like this you can gauge how badly you’re treated by how much you’re blamed for letting misery happen, just as with many fundamentalists you can gauge how poor is the mental health that we are all exposed to, by how badly they think humanity is being punished for original sin.

This has its roots in how Alcoholics Anonymous tries to smooth out problems.  Their model searching and fearless moral inventory, as printed in their original Big Book from 1939, is as follows:

 

I’m resentful at:	The cause:	Affects my:
Mr. Brown	His attention to my wife. Told my wife of my mistress. Brown may get my job at the office.	Sex relations Self-esteem (fear)
Mrs. Jones	She’s a nut—she snubbed me. She committed her husband for drinking. He’s my friend. She’s a gossip.	Personal relationship. Self-esteem (fear)
My employer	Unreasonable—  Unjust—  Overbearing—  Threatens to fire me for my drinking and padding my expense account.	Self-esteem (fear) Security.
My wife	Misunderstands and nags. Likes Brown. Wants house put in her name.	Pride Personal sex relations Security (fear)

On an e-mail list, I was discussing this inventory with someone who’s interested in finding solutions to social problems rather than just talking about what’s wrong, and he said that he would have liked to have seen a column in this table headed “Solutions.”  I responded that if it had one, and what was in it was consistent with the rest of the inventory, then what would be said in the “Solutions” column would be, “I will choose not to feel resentment,” not “I will stop my drunken affair and my costing my boss so much.”  The Tenth Tradition of AA says, “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy,” but defining moral transgressions as resentment anger and fear is taking a position on outside issues. What causes such emotions occurs outside of the group.  To tell people to shut off such natural responses to outside events where the personal could be political, tells them what their attitudes should be toward injustices, and how they should perceive the rights of victimizers and the response-abilities of victims, which are about as sociopolitical as you could get.  On the other hand, if AA limited its corrections and its labeling as “immoral,” to members’ volitional acts, that would get rid of the outside issues.

And, as Backlash has described, Norwood’s approach in holding women response-able for their own problems, ended up not working as outlined.  Her treatment for women who seem to be attracted to problem lovers, was to have them shy away from men they’re very much attracted to, and marry men who seem only moderately attractive.  She had a huge readership and audience wanting to find out how they could deal with grief that their partners cause them, but, “Norwood’s own ‘recovery’—through marriage to the ‘right’ man—proved short-lived.  In the spring of 1987, Norwood abruptly quit making speeches.  She could no longer market her experience as a successful case study: being married to the nice boring husband turned out to be not so nice after all, and soon she divorced him.”  But while the actual victim-blaming didn’t hold up, quite possibly the more victims who do blame themselves, the more likely they are to be watchful enough to prevent problems.  As Backlash says, “Norwood at last turned to an Al-Anon meeting. It was here, she says, that she discovered the merits of surrender.”  Quite possibly those who surrender to realities that they’re powerless to change, including the characters of pedophiles drug pushers and the like, will end up more well-adjusted and functional.

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