And What Science Can Do About It

 #16

 

“It is possible to have a full and useful life, though your husband continues to drink.  We know women who are unafraid, even happy under these conditions.  Do not set your heart on reforming your husband.  You may be unable to do so, no matter how hard you try.   We know these suggestions are sometimes difficult to follow, but you will save many a heartbreak if you can succeed in observing them.”—from Chapter 8 of AA’s Big Book, “To Wives”

 

 

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hese people might be told that the reason for this inculcation is that no matter how warranted their anxiety or other unhappiness is, it’s to be eliminated and optimism is to be contrived.  No problem could really be a problem if the victim prevented solved or dealt with it well enough, so victims who don’t take care of their own problems well enough seem omni-responsible.  This would be very different from the pre-Reagan/Thatcher conception of mental illness, as inappropriate thoughts and feelings.

Susan Faludi’s Backlash tells of how several of the supposedly diverse women described in Robin Norwood’s book Women Who Love too Much, are actually Norwood herself, but she responded to this, “I never claimed those were case studies. Some are really fictional. The point is not which parts are me and which aren’t.”  Similar to Nietzsche’s ideas about the “will to truth,” what matters is what the point is, not what the truth is.  That’s exactly what you’d expect from a pragmatism that really sets no limits as to what problems are to be solved through self-help.  That, rather than a concern for what really does reflect reality, is what most of those around us would consider to be “realism.”

For example, in the following comic, the reality would be that the alkie is to blame, but realism would be for alkies’ kids to decide, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, since that way they’d be more well-adjusted, more likely to succeed in life.  Obviously for an alkie’s kid to blame others would make plenty of logical sense, but would still be unpragmatic.  While this kid obviously wouldn’t have the sort of victim-power that seems scary, who’s to say exactly where the line is to be drawn between legitimate and manipulative victim-power?  Not only that, if he reached adulthood with a positive attitude, he’d seem a lot less untermensch than if he didn’t.  If the kid instead insisted on talking about who really is to blame, he’d then be treated as if this is his “will to truth” manifesting itself.

A MedicineNet.com webpage on depression says, “Depression is a very common condition that is believed by many experts to be the number one cause of disability in the world.  In the U.S., 17% of people will experience depression at some point in their lives.  An estimated 19 million people in the U.S. are currently suffering from depression.  Depression is more common in women than in men, with 25% of women suffering from depression severe enough to warrant treatment at least once during their lifetime.

“It’s important to remember that depression is an illness that affects both the body and mind.  It is not something that we can just wish away or ‘snap out of’, nor is it a sign of a weak character.”

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?  Obviously, that many Americans don’t have characters that are that weak.  Just as obviously, there really are enough people with morally weak characters, that we have such an exceedingly high rate of devastation.  Yet it seems very fair-minded to hold that this massive problem comes from problems inside of each of the victims, since these problems are biological, and, therefore, blaming them isn’t really blaming the victims.  Of course, to make it seem plausible that this many Americans have such serious malfunctions inside themselves, would require a lot of sophistry, or maybe a pragmatic ignoring of realities that would make you discouraged, maladjusted, etc.”

It could seem that you simply shouldn’t be aware of such grave and major realities.   Natural feelings about the causes of our rampant depression, seem like idiosyncratic aberrations.  This would go against Occam’s Razor.  For such a large percentage of the American population to be greatly biologically prone to depression, is far more unlikely than is for very few of us to be greatly biologically prone, and the rest of the depressed Americans having good reasons to be devastated.  This would also go against falsifiability.  We tend to err on the side of blaming something inside the victims, since that would honor our ethos of pragmatism, fearing moral restriction and manipulative guilt-tripping, and forgiveness.  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.

After, all, after Dr. David Burns’ book about cognitive therapy for depression, Feeling Good,

says,

Now we come to a truth you may see either as a bitter pill or an enlightening revelation.  There is no such thing as a universally accepted concept of fairness and justice.  There is an undeniable relativity of fairness, just as Einstein showed the relativity of time and space....

Here’s proof: When a lion devours a sheep, is this unfair?  From the point of view of the sheep, it is unfair, he’s being viciously and intentionally murdered with no provocation.  From the point of view of the lion, it is fair.  He’s hungry, and this is the daily bread he feels entitled to.  Who is “right”?  There is no ultimate or universal answer to this question because there’s no “absolute fairness” floating around to resolve the issue.  In fact, fairness is simply a perceptual interpretation, an abstraction, a self-created concept.  How about when you eat a hamburger? Is this “unfair”?  To you, it’s not.  From the point of view of the cow, it certainly is (or was)!  Who’s “right”?  There is no ultimate “true” answer.

the book goes on to say that this doesn’t mean that this book is either advocating an anarchy that would result from eliminating social norms prohibiting destructive behavior, or overgeneralizing by condemning all anger, even that which could inspire changes that the angry person could make.  The point is that people serenely accept whatever they can’t change, even if this means, “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.”  While this does mean moral bankruptcy, this doesn’t mean anarchy.  While this neo-Buddhism does mean Stoicism, this doesn’t mean the sort of self-abnegation that many associate with religious Stoicism.  And if in response to this you brought up certain truths, such as what are the dangers of applying moral bankruptcy and Stoicism to situations like yours, you’d be told that what matters isn’t what’s the truth, but what’s the point.  That you become well-adjusted, is what constitutes realism.

When cognitive therapy treats the effects of bad experiences, rather than the screwed-up thinking of addiction, cognitive therapy would operate like the brainwashing technique that Dr. Robert J. Lifton in his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism called “Doctrine over Person.”  When what someone is supposed to believe disagrees with his own conclusions that he independently drew from his own experiences, he’s to wash his brain of his own conclusions, and replace them with what he’s supposed to believe.  All of the other brainwashing techniques, such as deprivation of food and sleep, and milieu control, either strengthen the effects of the actual washing of the brain, or get rid of things that would interfere, though pragmatists could achieve the same strength of belief by telling people how thinking as prescribed would benefit them.

Cognitive therapy was heralded as a great improvement over Behaviorism by re-engineering people’s characters through re-engineering their thinking rather than through conditioning them with rewards and punishments.  The Communist Chinese brainwashers never bothered with Skinnerian or Pavlovian conditioning, sort of like the difference between martial arts and boxing.  Those who’ve analyzed cults have called this technique “thought-stopping,” (and in this web page, and this one about the Moonies which cult expert Steven Hassan himself experienced directly, and this web page, and this web page, and this one)  And yes, I’ve seen cognitive therapy refer to thought-stopping, by that name, as a good form of self-control, such as in the web page EMOTIONAL THOUGHT STOPPING (A Mood Enhancing Exercise), which begins, “Each year over 17 million people in the United States are depressed. Of those fewer than 30% get help!  Each year over 30,000 people in the United States commit suicide,” and then goes on to say about thought-stopping, “it has its roots in the genius of the early Greeks” (i.e. Stoicism), and “Again, during this exercise we do not try to solve any of life’s problems or the problems caused by our depression, in fact, we do not even allow thoughts concerning our problems to remain in the conscious, even for a second,” and “You may have been exposed to the procedure if you are familiar with the bible, and some modern therapists use its concepts.”

When $cientologists practice thought-stopping, they say that they’re stopping disruptive thoughts from the “reactive mind.”  Such pragmatism doesn’t question the fact that in a long-sighted sense, this allocation of responsibility is very un-pragmatic, since it simply assumes that if a psychological problem is yours then you’re simply going to have to find some way to change it for the better, and the greater is the physical problem that you’re reacting to and you’d have to adjust to, the more that you’d seem to fall short.  This short-sighted pragmatism would also lead to a lot of duplicitous thinking in a long-sighted sense.  If to those in your society your problem seems like it’s plainly and simply your response-ability no matter what caused it, then those in your society, including yourself, will have to distort your perceptions in the direction of seeing a victim’s problems as being his fault if he didn’t prevent enough of them, or solve them yet, or successfully wash his own brain of them yet.

 

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The Main Victim Correction as a Panacea

 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

Out Of The Same Mold As Enron

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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