Rand’s followers would also be very likely to associate the strong with what in all circumstances seems impressive, and the weak with ignominious cunning.  After all, strength and weakness are objective, while any excuses that the weak may have for being weak, are subjective.  (After all, moral responsibility includes so many mitigating factors!)  The only way to guarantee that the lights remain on in business, is if all knew that they had to win whatever they wanted, rather than using sophistry to prove that they’re victims.  Randroids would get very sardonic about ideas that disagree with theirs, since those ideas would get their persuasive power from factors that seem subjective, so would seem to get their power from emotional manipulation.  Any victim-blaming that isn’t simply fanciful, would have to seem at least acceptable, since if someone deserves something better because he was a victim then that wouldn’t be an objective, honorable, or achievement-oriented way to deserve something, while if you hold him response-able for his own problems, that would be objective honorable and achievement-oriented.

Chronic Depression: Disease or Character Flaw?, says both, “A majority (55 percent) of those polled who have never been diagnosed with depression symptoms understand depression is a disease, and not ‘a state of mind that a person can snap out of,’” and, “The survey also describes a strong correlation between clinical depression symptoms and diminished social and economic circumstances for families.  Survey respondents with depression report greater rates of divorce and unemployment than the general public.  What’s more, respondents who have experienced multiple depressive episodes are even more likely to be divorced or unemployed.  They also are more likely to have lower income and educational levels.”

So the “character flaws” that we’re concerned about, are the mollycoddle, or untermensch, character flaws, that could be attribute to depressed people, rather than the red-blooded, or übermensch, character flaws of those who cause the excessive depression.  And when you consider how high our rate of depression is, as on Zoloft’s Learning About Depression webpage, “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,” you could see that this is a lot of divorce, unemployment, etc.

 

The homepage of the Mental Illness—What a Difference a Friend Makes website, by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, says, “An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older—about one in four adults—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.”  As the title suggests, this website is about getting the friends of the 26.2% of the American adult population, to support these people rather than stigmatizing them.  The ways in which one friend treats another, is one of the few sociological factors of this huge social problem, that we could honorably take seriously.  If we take the other sociological factors seriously, we could seem to be trying to manipulate like untermenschen, and/or to restrict the übermenschen.

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?  Here we go again with the assumption that when it comes to depression ‘character flaw’ means the untermensch character flaws that could be attributed to depression, that this problem consists of either 34,000,000 rather severe character flaws or 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions, that we don’t address what causes such a high rate of depression, etc.  If we took seriously the red-blooded character flaws of those who really do cause our rate of depression to be so unnaturally high, we’d seem to be manipulative mollycoddles trying to stifle their sacred freedoms!”

             

The great, inspirational, patriotic theme song of Reaganomics, Lee Greenwood’s song of praise, God Bless the USA, begins, “If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life,” I’d simply take responsibility for my own welfare by rebuilding.  The first verse ends, “and they can’t take that away,” with this unspecified “they” sounding almost paranoid.  That wouldn’t matter, since one in a situation like that is supposed to care only about taking care of himself, rather than his own victimhood.

Christopher Lasch wrote in his article in the New Republic of August 10, 1992, For Shame, that our culture has,

a cult of the victim in which entitlements are based on the display of accumulated injuries inflicted by an uncaring society.  The politics of “compassion” degrades both the victims, by reducing them to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, the attainment of which would make them respected.  Compassion has become the human face of contempt.

One needn’t be a sociologist to see in this, the crux of Reaganomics, that if only those who keep talking about victimology and victimhood, or sue businesses because their pain and losses (rather than objective achievement) entitle them, or evade their personal response-ability for their own problems, etc., thought like Lee Greenwood instead, that would solve our problems.

Sure, that’s impersonal, but it would make people more respectable, if we consider those who seem to be übermenschen/redbloods to be respectable, and those who seem to be untermenschen/mollycoddles to be contemptible.  Just as in old Wagnerian Germany it was the weak who seemed “ignominious,” in modern America it’s the weak who get the “contempt.”

If instead we tried to have a balanced approach that differentiated the real victims from the fakes, showed contempt for the victimizers, etc., that would seem too: unpragmatic, abstractly analytical, idealistic, equivocal, iconoclastic (Just look at the unequivocal personality types that were icons during the Reagan/Thatcher era, and that still inspire profound admiration, which would include the pro-freedom and red-blooded, “hold them up to impersonal standards, the attainment of which would make them respected.”), moralistic, opinionated, unrealistic about how much real victims must deal with their own problems, restrictive, unforgiving, potentially manipulative, etc.  Even if all that someone did was set limits as to how much victim-correction he’s willing to accept, that could seem to be choosing not to impersonally become adequately correct, and, therefore, respectable.

A society with rampant depression will have plenty of real victims.  In order for it to keep functioning, it must pressure them into simply dealing with their own problems objectively and self-reliantly.  In all societies including those with rampant depression, no one could seem self-reliant enough unless he’s self-reliant enough to succeed with whatever realities and risks he must deal with.  (Of course, if he showed some self-reliant responsibility, but not enough, that loser would get contempt rather than respect.)  Before the Reagan era, these social pressures and cultural conditioning were usually done more subtly than revering, “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.”  Reaganomics couldn’t exist without these unequivocal conceptions of: personal rights, personal responsibilities, supposedly manipulative, mollycoddle victims, why responsibility should (predictably) be projected onto victims, which entitlements seem respectable, which “defects of character” we take seriously, etc.

             

As Schopenhauer also wrote in The World as Will and Representation, “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.” 

The weak wouldn’t even have to be trying to manipulate anyone in order to seem manipulative, since naturally everyone wants to believe sincerely that they deserve more than what they won, and strive to get more than what they won.  The only assertive statement that would seem acceptable throughout, would be “No, I won’t do your bidding,” since everyone has the power to say “no.”  On the other hand, assertively standing up for one’s own rights, could seem manipulative, since who’s to decide what his rights are, how much forgiveness he’s supposed to show, etc.?  If you’re strong you objectively seem worthy, and if you’re weak, you don’t.  As William Ryan wrote in Blaming the Victim, “All of this happens so smoothly that it seems downright rational,” and the same goes for how naturally the strong seem to be powerfully impressive in all circumstances, and the weak seem ignominiously cunning.

The bottom line is that:  Redbloods in all circumstances powerfully impress the human race.  Since mollycoddles use their weakness to get coddled, they’re manipulative, ignominiously and exploitively cunning, even when they sincerely mean everything they say, since if they think that something is bad or evil then that would reflect their own SELF-WILLS.  What you end up with, both in Germany and in the USA, is that the strong are übermenschen/redbloods so they tend to get the personal rights, and the weak are untermenschen/mollycoddles unless they just shut up and deal with their own problems, so they tend to get the personal responsibilities.  This sort of character defect involves mollycoddle ignominious cunning, which might be harder to defend oneself against than would be open and honest aggression, and is insidious rather than explicitly WILLFUL, so an untermensch-phobia could become popular.

             

The first document included in the volume of documents published by the United States Government Printing Office, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume 5, Soviet Union, is the “National Intelligence Estimate” dated December 1, 1960.  Believe it or not, this actually includes,

Political struggle takes the form of a constant agitation designed to capture and organize in broad mass movements the sentiments which focus on the great issues of the current period—peace, disarmament, anticolonialism, social justice, economic development.  By manipulating these issues and by dramatizing the growth of Soviet power, the Soviets are also trying to align the governments of the under-developed and uncommitted states with the Bloc, and against the West.  The Soviet leaders hope that the result will be a progressive isolation and loss of influence for the Western powers, divisions among them, and a decline in their ability to deal effectively with threats to their interests.  This is what the Soviets mean by “peaceful coexistence”—a strategy to defeat the West without war.

Just before I read this I’d read, in Dr. Thomas A. Harris’ I’m OK—You’re OK, copyright 1967, ways in which his psychological approach, which was in essence to choose to think rationally instead of impulsively or in authoritarian terms, could help us avoid nuclear war, such as:

Hamlet’s alternatives were “to be or not to be.”  Our national alternatives are believed to be “to win or not to win” the struggle against world communism.  To win is more important than to be, it would appear, in view of the final armed aggression that will lead to global incineration.  A Vietnam village is shelled so thoroughly that when troops finally enter it there is nothing standing and no one living.  The commander of an operation of this sort is quoted as saying, “We had to destroy them to save them.”

So peaceful coexistence, which was that important, seemed to be just a manipulative ploy.  No doubt in 1960, the American government was also using the same political tactics that the National Intelligence Estimate described the USSR as engaging in.  The American government would have been pretty stupid if it didn’t, and any Americans who thought that it shouldn’t engage in this perfectly non-violent and ethical behavior, would have seemed anti-American.  The big difference would have been that, while the Soviet government was doing this in the name of “peace, disarmament, anticolonialism, social justice, economic development,” all untermensch concerns, the American political efforts would be in the name of übermensch freedom, even when they were backing dictatorships.  Getting power for oneself by claiming to be fighting for untermensch concerns would seem to be “manipulating these issues,” while getting power for oneself by claiming to be fighting for übermensch freedom wouldn’t seem manipulative.  This would seem to be good and red-blooded.

On webpage #22 of this series, I have the following:

This pendant is a logo for pedophiles attracted to girls, sold by a company that produces jewelry of logos for both pedophiles attracted to girls, and those attracted to boys.  The webpage selling this, describes it in a way that sounds like a beneficent version of both sadism and self-satisfaction, “A magnificent jewel with forms, both gentle and strong, that can express the intensity and the deepness of a feeling as well as the balance and the harmony of a relation.  The open line formed by the two hearts represent duration and liberty, a link that holds and sustains without attaching.”  Yet the part about duration and liberty, sustaining without attaching, sounds both like something that more normal ruthlessness, such as that of “commitment-phobic” men, could insist on, and something that self-help psychology could echo.  Whether this sort of logic comes from pedophiles, commitment-phobic men and their moral equivalents, or self-help philosophy, all could say that balancing duration with liberty, sustaining with not attaching, is good.  The only way in which we could really know what balance is right, is what balance feels right.  No doubt the “balance and the harmony of a relation” in which one is strong and the other is weak, would feel very balanced and harmonious to John Mark Karr.

Of course, that means what balance feels right to the person who wants the liberty.  When commitment-phobic men suddenly accuse the romantic partners that they chose to have, of “trapping” them, this might sound very different from self-help books accusing women diagnosed as codependent, of having “control” issues in that they try to stop their partners’ undoubtedly shameful behavior.  Yet, in fact, both of these make the same morally bankrupt assumptions, that all must be free to preserve whatever liberty they consider to be balanced.  This “balance” could end up as being as unbalanced as the difference between the gentle and the strong in a pedophile relationship, but the rights of the übermenschen seem a lot more worthy of defending than do the rights of the untermenschen.  If when the übermenschen cause strife for the untermenschen, the weak take personal response-ability for controlling such things as their own feelings of resentment anger and fear, there would be harmony, and the victims would be well-adjusted, balanced.  While “cherchez la femme,” look for the woman, had meant to suspect her since she’s the one who traditional moralism would morally condemn, now “look for the woman” would mean that since she’s the powerless one, for her to solve her own problems by correcting herself would mean: self-help, self-efficacy, self-empowerment, self-reliance, self-responsibility, self-motivation, anti-moralism, etc.

You might wonder why the rights of the übermenschen would seem a lot more worthy of defending than are the rights of the untermenschen.  All you’ve got to do is look at a self-help book for people who are undoubtedly victimized by others, and you could see that what these books are really about, is power dynamics.  Women in romantic relationships or marriages with men who unambiguously victimize them, are to empower themselves resourcefully.  Of course, different women in such situations would have different amounts of resources available to them, and women who are so greatly oppressed would probably have less resources available to them than would most women.  Yet that self-reliance is treated as the red-blooded way for them to deal with their own problems, while if the women tried to “control” the men, especially in ways that could seem manipulative, that would seem mollycoddle.  Though this doesn’t involve the willful submission of the weak to the strong, that the pedophiles seem to like, this does involve the strong seeming impressive in all circumstances, and the weak seeming ignominiously cunning.  The strong are immune from much responsibility so that their rights would be protected, but everything must have someone taking responsibility for it.  That would probably be the weak and supposedly manipulative, little mollycoddles.

As a good example of the sort of supposed fair balance that our culture in general would expect people in general to accept if they’re not whiny and resentful untermenschen, the following GIF (so the words in it couldn’t be found by a search engine), appears on the Zoloft website, where Zoloft has given it the file name “fairbalance.gif”:

Senator William Fulbright said, “Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor….”  Yet one wouldn’t even need to confuse power with virtue, in order to figure that might makes right.  After all, all moral rights that can’t be backed up with the power of those who claim to have them, are abstract.  Therefore, they could be called subjective.  Even if these rights are of the sort that those in virtually all societies throughout history have held that people have, one could always bring in enough qualifiers and excuses, to make it seem as if whether or not a given person in a given situation is entitled to them, are a matter of opinion.  Secular Humanist Paul Kurtz mentioned in a United Nations forum, “the general moral virtues that are widely shared by humans of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds,” but realists could hold that nothing should be taken literally, including these virtues.  And once one starts taking such things figuratively, they could seem to mean anything that one wants them to.

Yet whether one is a winner or a loser, is objective.  If a society loves the zeitgeist 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 this zeitgeist would hold that the less that you have the power to change things, the more that you must treat your objections to your helplessness, as bitter and maladjusted.  The more power that you’d have to change things, the less that you must squelch your own honest objections.  While Niebuhr wrote that he strongly objected to Nietzsche’s attitude of might-makes-right, the bottom line of The Serenity Prayer, is that weakness makes wrong.

             

Enron was certainly a Randroid’s paradise.  When Ken Lay said in his speech in front of the Houston Forum, “The whole plea bargaining process allows—even encourages—blatant prosecutorial abuse....  The prosecutor becomes a human guillotine when given the power to charge an individual, act as judge and jury, as well as executioner if a ‘cooperating’ witness does not assist the prosecutor as the prosecutor believes the ‘cooperating witness’ should.”  This could apply just as readily to blue-collar criminals on trial.  Yet if supporters of a defendant accused of blue-collar crime were to talk like this, it would seem to be a horrible example of someone trying to evade responsibility by playing the victim role histrionically.  After all, since most of those labeled “manipulative” don’t act mercenary, you’d think that talking about them as manipulators would ring hollow, but what constitutes “manipulation,” is in the eye of the beholder.  You’d also think that talking about prosecutors as human guillotines would also ring hollow, but such skepticism of the guv’mint seems healthy and admirable.

Until Enron became a failure, it would have seemed that cheering for the law to restrict them, is what would bring out the worst in us, our manipulativeness, and cheering for Enron is what would have brought out the best in us, our love of achievement.  In a handwritten note, Skilling praised Fastow’s “creative financial mind” and “very clear sense of Enron’s strategy and ability of finance to support it,” and his specialty was to create false impressions, not to increase efficiencies.  But, of course, Skilling probably figures that anyone who condemns this, is an untermensch who wants to believe that he and the other untermenschen are entitled to more without having to earn it.  As The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall Of Enron, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, says about Enron traders, “Maximizing profit was not inconsistent with doing good, they believed, but an inherent part of it, and the judge of good and bad was the immediate consequence of a split-second trade.”  The book also says, “They believed that free markets made the world a fairer place, one where price dictated deals, rather than relationships or other ‘noneconomic’ factors.”  The book says about Jeff Skilling, “The markets, he believed, were the ultimate judge of right and wrong.  Social policies designed to temper the market’s Darwinian judgments were wrongheaded and counterproductive,” and that he said about one of Enron’s trading programs, “The concept was pure intellectually. It made all the sense in the world.”  Therefore, those who’d object to Fasty’s creative bookkeeping that isn’t proven illegal, maybe even the accounting that broke laws that Libertarians would object to, could be considered to be manipulative whiners and louses, going against what the markets would determine to be fair.

When Ken Lay acted angry as he testified at his own trial, many thought that this would naturally turn the jury against him.  Lay testified that he blamed the failure of Michael Milken’s employer Drexel Burnham Lambert, as well as the failure of Enron, on a “run on the bank,” rather than criminal activity.  “Failure does not need to be equated with criminal activity.  About 99 percent of the time it has nothing to do with anything that turns out to be criminal.”  Lay blamed the failure of Enron, on only Fastow and his allies, a “witch-hunt” by the Wall Street Journal and other media, and a literal conspiracy of investors who bet on Enron’s stock price going down, who supposedly had a meeting in Florida that Lay called the “bears in hibernation” meeting.

After his testimony, Lay said outside of court, “I think today has been a good day for us.  I think the last week or so has been a good week for us,” though if a defendant for a blue-collar crime testified angrily, no one would think that this looked good.  He also said, “I’m fighting for my life.  You’ve got an Enron Task Force here who wants to put me in prison for the rest of my life, and I’m not going to sit up there on the stand and not respond, and respond very forcefully, to a lot of lies being thrown up by the task force.”

Yet in the glory days of Enron, if he angrily and defiantly acted like a victim of guv’mint machinations, many would have cheered.  Sure, when Lay testified, “Rules were important, but you should not be a slave to rules either,” many figured that this is the moral relativism of a fraudster.  Yet in the glory days, this would have seemed that he was realistically not taking things literally.

Just after Lay and Skilling were found guilty on many charges, Skilling and his lawyer Dan Petrocelli talked about how fair people tended to be toward them.  Petrocelli said that as they file their appeals, they’d “continue to fight the good fight,” and, “we’ve just begun the fight.”  Skilling said, “We fought a good fight.  Some things work.  Some things don’t.”  Yet what these appeals would consist of, would be claims that they were treated so unfairly that the verdicts would have to be overturned.  Since the crux of the Enron defense was that most of those who testified against them didn’t really commit any crimes but the guv’mint threatened them that if they didn’t they could spend a lot of time in prison, you’d think that they’d honestly consider themselves to be victims of a horrifying outrage.  As Skilling testified during his trial, “We are innocent. And by ‘we’ I mean Enron Corporation.  It was a fine company.  I am innocent of all of these charges, and I will fight for that for a long time,” though if it really was, the American public would have to be pretty petty if Enron’s defenders had to defend it “for a long time.”

If someone just found guilty of a series of blue-collar crimes said that he’d appeal, and that these appeals would constitute “fighting the good fight,” rather that fighting back against their rights being violated in ways that would shock the conscience, then that fight would seem very manipulative, especially if he talked in terms of whether or not his claims of innocence “worked.”  Skilling said that he was “disappointed” in the verdicts, far less than what he’d feel if he really believed that all those convictions were hoked-up.  Yet when redbloods play the victim role like that, they don’t seem to be trying to play upon people’s sympathies.  Petrocelli said, “We will have a full and vigorous appeal,” which suggests both that he doesn’t really regard Skilling as a beleaguered victim of a miscarriage of justice, and that this is “vigorous,” so it shouldn’t get the shame and suspicion that would go to whiners.

After he was convicted, Skilling did an interview where, on one hand, he referred to the American law enforcement who prosecuted him as the “Gestapo,” but also said that he helped to convict himself, “I was the best source of information that the government had.  Absolutely.”  So what was supposed to make them the Gestapo?  That they distorted what Skilling told them, to a degree that made them the moral equivalent of the Gestapo?

Enron traders used in the California electricity crisis, market-fixing tactics that they called  “Fat Boy,” “Death Star,” “Get Shorty,” and “Ricochet.”  Yet before these became known, if Lay responded to criticism of self-serving traders deciding how much electricity would cost, with the sort of rebelliousness that he showed during his trial, that would have had many cheering for it.  He would have seemed to be the Great American Hero, fighting guv’mint machinations.  If the extent of Enron’s rule-breaking wasn’t known, and he said, “Rules are important, but you should not be a slave to rules either,” he would have seemed to be the realistic redblood, and those who objected would have seemed to have been literalist mollycoddles.  This would have meant that Lay act as if Enron was a victim of such mollycoddles, but that defensiveness would have been defending their rights.  And the same would have gone for any other time that Enron seemed to be pioneers of the free market.  He’s the sort of person who’d make an ideal guest for “Savage Nation” type radio programs, angrily and righteously acting like a victim of the weak.

Sure, Houston lawyer and ex-prosecutor Michael Wynne said about Lay’s testimony, “Lay was arrogant and defiant.  If the defendant is going to take the stand, that’s the best you could hope for as a prosecutor.  He just appeared to be defiant.”  Yet Lay may have simply been used to acting like a hero of the free market.  He’d be expected to act defiant, and arrogant behavior would seem within the norm.  Though lawyer Brian Wice said, “I’ve never seen the transformation of a witness from grandfather to Richard Nixon in a day,” plenty of free-market advocates would transform like this.  They wouldn’t want to seem to lack empathy and reasonability, but when the weak want something that would interfere with market dynamics, this couldn’t be tolerated.

Pipe Dreams quotes one of Sherron Watkins’ former co-workers as calling her a “conniving, manipulative self-promoter to a dangerous extreme.  She was poison in the well.  She brought down people and deals to try to make herself look the hero.”  Yet given the environment in Enron, where Skilling told honest genius risk-assessor Vince Kaminski to stop acting like a cop (which was mentioned in testimony at Skilling’s trial to prove his guilt), all that Watkins might have done is to tell the truth.  This would boost her career by her doing her job as she’s supposed to.  Yet it seems so natural to cheer the red-blooded daring, and anathematize restrictions.

According to the logic of redblood-coddling, this could be considered conniving, cunning, even if she didn’t do any more plotting other than planning how she could do her job the most effectively.  If her bringing down people and deals in Enron made her look the hero, then chances are very good that these are the same people and deals that Kaminski would have brought down if he knew about them.  They were probably a lot more conniving and cunning than she was, but we tend to excuse redbloods’ cunning, since we must accept that people aren’t perfect, we must make sure that we don’t get too suspicious and violate their rights, they seem innocent until proven guilty of an unethical intent, etc.

There was enough real corruption that she didn’t have to do any manipulating, yet in a redblood-coddling environment like Enron, even if all that she did was to use particularly persuasive words as she told the objective truth, that could be labeled “manipulative.”  Even if the worst that her ulterior motives got, was that she wanted to be rewarded for turning in corruption, she’d still seem to have a sneaky self-serving intent, as do those who call what was done to them bad or evil, supposedly to denote everything that is not agreeable to the striving of their wills, because they want this sinful world to be as they’d have it, etc.

This is clearly an example of the manipulation manipulation, since any employee’s serious efforts to stop the corruption, could be condemned as manipulative, so all must be able to get away with corruption.  Any serious efforts to stop the corruption would necessarily be serious efforts to bring down people and deals, wherein the whistleblower would look the hero.  This would also require planning for optimal effectiveness, which could be called “conniving.”  It could seem that if only they had the sort of STRONG characters that might keep one from suffering depression, they’d build their careers by making deals, rather than through whiny negativism against them.  Making deals, moves forward.

In the cases of the unethical corporations that have just made news, we care, since investors were the victims.  Caring about them seems respectably red-blooded.  On the other hand, if workers were the ones whose rights were ignored like this, people would tend to figure that if they’re mature enough, they’d deal with their own problems, learn from this experience not to have such a naïve trust next time, etc.

             

The manipulation manipulation, would include what the father of Columbine killer Eric Harris, wrote in his own journal before the massacre, about Brooks Brown, a former friend who, along with his parents, tried to turn Eric in for a webpage making violent threats against him: “We feel victimized.  We don’t want to be accused every time something happens.  Eric is not of fault.  Brooks Brown is out to get Eric.  Brooks had problems....  manipulative con artist.”

Chances are that before 1980, blaming someone like Brooks of manipulation, never would have occurred to most Americans.  Yet ever since the Reagan era, we’ve become very likely to see the strong as victims of the conniving weak.  We couldn’t presume those accused of manipulative machinations, innocent until proven guilty, since if we did, how could we protect ourselves from something that insidious?  Exactly what is manipulation, seems to be a matter of opinion.  In an imperfect world all must take care of certain problems, simply because they’re their problems.  Therefore, one could seem to be pulling manipulative machinations, simply by holding those who are morally responsible for their problems, responsible for fixing them.

Brooks Brown and his parents didn’t get any benefit from turning Eric Harris in, other than hopefully getting protection from the cops.  He actually did put up that threatening webpage.  Yet one could always interpret certain things Brooks did as “signs” that he supposedly has a manipulative character.  Of course that wouldn’t prove that he’s manipulative, but of course if you required proof before you treated someone as manipulative, then just about all manipulators could manipulate successfully.

         

Though the Doyle-Peterson-Mouton Manual on how to try to stop the pedo-priests, from 1985, is considered relatively progressive, it’s still an official Catholic document, reflecting the interests of the Catholic Church.  “Some extremely serious issues have arisen that presently place the church in the posture of facing extremely serious financial consequences as well as significant injury to its image,” and they also hurt a lot of kids.  Therefore, the following hypothetical in the same document, has all the attributes of manipulators playing the role of the victims of others’ manipulative tactics: “A case involving a homosexual priest who has been suspended by a bishop following the discovery of his sexual activity with a juvenile or adolescent.  In this hypothet, the priest is a Gay Liberationist and as such retains the services of a gay lawyer, the support of gay organizations... and strikes back at us, suing to show, among other things, all sexual skeletons in our closet across the county.  There is a strong gay ministry movement as evidenced by the literature and this hypothetical confrontation can occur.”

This might look like a facetious satire of a powerful organization acting like victims of a group that they’ve long oppressed, even killing many of them.  The reason why gays could be called “fagots,” is that during some witch-burnings, a number of gays were tied together in bundles like the fagots used to start fires, and put on the piles of firewood under the “witches.”  Groups of gays have never given death sentences to Catholics.

Yet this is very real.  That was at the same time that many in the Catholic hierarchy were enabling pedo-priests.  This included urging victims and their families not to commit “the sin of scandal,” telling them that the hierarchy was preventing the pedo-priests from re-offending though it wasn’t, etc.  If it cared more about what happened to the molested kids, it wouldn’t have had to worry about the financial consequences as well as significant injury to its image.  Yet one of its documents was afraid that a gay lawyer would help a perv, though in fact the gay movement hates pervs.  And maybe the Catholic hierarchy’s experiences have taught it that it could get away with irresponsibility by acting as if anyone who objects is bigoted against Catholics.  Oh, it’s such a victim!  Yet it’s strong enough that its cunning doesn’t look ignominious.

Despite our high rate of depression, one’s symptoms of depression are treated as if they’re just his own individual aberrancy, and are corrected accordingly.  Dr. David Burns, in Feeling Good, his self-help book about cognitive therapy for depression, lists the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression as: All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filter, Disqualifying the Positive, Jumping to Conclusions, Magnification or Minimization, 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.”

That completely ignores the fact that that’s also how the redbloods/übermenschen see the personal responsibility of those who have the problems, but this doesn’t seem pathological.  Rather, when the “redbloods” tell the “mollycoddles” that they simply must take response-ability for their own problems, then anything else would seem impractical, restrictive, manipulative, subjective, unforgiving, and judgmental.  For example, when Shimon Peres said in New York just after the 2006 bombing of the Lebanese civilians in Qana, “Lebanon cannot behave like they are responsible for nothing and the whole world owes them everything,” no one said that to see the responsibility for this situation in terms of “nothing” and “everything,” distorts it into absolute terms.  Rather, the Israeli military would likely be treated just like any other military that went right on bombing despite the enemy using human shields, and afterwards said, “Don’t blame us, since they’re the ones who chose to use human shields.  We simply had to triumph over our enemy.”  When the redbloods magnify others’ personal responsibility and minimize their own, in all-or-nothing, overgeneralized, mentally-filtered, and positive-disqualifying terms, we don’t then figure that they’d better get this under control by taking some medication, or getting some thought reform.

             

When John McCone, leader of the McCone Commission that investigated the Watts riot of 1965, argued hotly that claims of police brutality were a “device… [of] our adversaries, those who would like to destroy the freedom that that this country stands for,” he didn’t have to prove that though it seemed that some police brutality spontaneously triggered the riot, actually that was just a manipulative device.

After it became known that Dubya was informed just before the flooding of New Orleans that it could be major, and he responded, “We are fully prepared,” some involved in the Bush Administration blamed their confusion on the “fog of war.”  Michael Brown responded, “I don’t buy the ‘fog of war’ defense.  It was a fog of bureaucracy.”  Either way, that zeitgeist wins.  If it were the “fog of war” that confused them, then they’d be tough warriors confused by the realities of tough war.  If it were the “fog of bureaucracy” that confused them, then that would prove how dysfunctional bureaucracy is.

Senator Jay Rockefeller wrote to Cheney in July 2003 about the warrantless NSA spying, saying that since the program is so secret, he was “unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities,” but Republican Senator Pat Roberts responded that Rockefeller could have used certain tools to stop any spying he didn’t like, and “Feigning helplessness is not one of those tools.”  No need to prove any claims that anyone is feigning helplessness as a manipulative tool or device, since America’s heroes are the stalwart, and if we assumed people innocent until proven guilty of manipulation, we’d allow a lot of it to go on.

When you consider how easy it is to make those who are helpless seem characterologically weak, it should be clear how easy it would be to make them seem manipulative, since both involve choices to be or remain weak.  The Unfinished Bombing, Oklahoma City in American Memory, by professor of religion Edward A. Linenthal, quotes Oklahoma City psychologist Kay Goebel, a long-time member of the board of directors of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation, as saying, “When the memorial task force was put together in the summer of 1995, I spoke strongly against naming one of the committees ‘families, survivors, and victims.’  I thought the use of the term ‘victim’ was not in anyone’s best interest.  We should not be about creating more victims through the power of diagnostic names, because people can live out a diagnosis they are given,” and Arthur Kleinman, professor of medical anthropology and psychiatry at Harvard University, as saying, “Someone becomes a victim, an image of innocence and someone who cannot represent himself....  Then he becomes a patient....”

Our culture really does have problems distinguishing between two different definitions of passive, one that the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines as, “not active : acted upon,” and the one that it defines as, “SUBMISSIVE : PATIENT.”  Victims are certainly passive in the sense that they’re acted upon, yet a culture that tends to see the weak as mollycoddles, is very likely to see victims as passive in the sense that, at the very least, they’d tend to let themselves in for trouble, or surrender too quickly.  Voluntary passivity comes pretty close to passivity for fun and/or profit, passivity either for melodramatic thrills, or to manipulate something out of someone.

For example, formerly battered wife Michelle Weldon, in her book I Closed My Eyes, when discussing how her being abused wasn’t her fault, wrote, “If I was unwilling, did that still make me a victim?”  Formerly, to call someone a victim meant that she was unwillingly acted upon.  Now, it means that she’d have a self-concept of being a victim, and, therefore, would be as responsible for her victimization as if she had voluntarily submitted.  As the You Are a Target, Not a Victim homepage (with a forthcoming book) says, “YOU ARE NOT A VICTIM no matter what anyone--your friends, therapists, or mother--tell you.  You are not a survivor either.  You are a TARGET and you can stop it today.  No one has to stand still for target practice.  Yes, you may have been hurt by someone’s anger, unhappiness, lies, accusations, and mind games, but ‘victim?’  No longer.  Never again.  Get it out of your consciousness.  Victims survive.  Victors win.  You are not going to survive anything, you are going to WIN.

“So do you want to have been victimized and survived it?
Or do you want to be victorious and win?”

Then are included, at the top of the list “What this site can do for you,” “Show you that no one can abuse you without your consent,” and, “Teach you how to cease playing the victim role.”

Regarding a woman who married especially problematic men, Robin Norwood, in Women Who Love Too Much, wrote “For the woman who loves too much, her disease is her addiction to the pain and familiarity of an unrewarding relationship....  No matter how sick or cruel or helpless her partner is, she, along with her doctor or therapist, must understand that her every attempt to change him, help him, control him, or blame him is a manifestation of her disease, and that she must stop these behaviors before other areas of her life can improve.  Her only legitimate work is with herself.”  This is based on the supposition that if a woman keeps getting involved with problem men, then she must have subconsciously “let herself in for trouble.”  Yet the You Are a Target Not a Victim webpage, doesn’t require that the woman seem codependent, before her only legitimate work would seem to be with herself.  As Ann Jones satirized the victim-blaming of battered wives, “Without the wife-beater’s wife there would be no wife beating,” but this is how self-help regarding wife-beating, must be that unconditionally pragmatic.  Whether or not each battered woman “let herself in for it,” she can’t change the way he is so she must serenely accept this, but could change where she lives so she must change it courageously.

             

Probably the social movement that arose around Terri Schiavo’s family’s desire to believe that she was still conscious and could recover with therapy, will go down in history as one of anti-intellectualism’s greatest instances of surreal thinking.  Regarding this, Tom DeLay said to a meeting of the Family Research Council on March 18, 2005,

This is exactly the kind of issue that’s going on in America, that attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others.  The point is, the other side has figured out how to win and to defeat the conservative movement, and that is to go after people personally, charge them with frivolous charges, link up with all these do-gooder organizations funded by George Soros, and then get the national media on their side.  That whole syndicate that they have going on right now is for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to destroy the conservative movement.  It is to destroy conservative leaders, and not just in elected office, but leading.  I mean, Ed Feulner, of the Heritage Foundation today was under attack in the National Journal.  This is a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in.  And you need to look at this, and what’s going on and participate in fighting back.

We all know now about how guilty DeLay acted concerning Abramoff.  The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs report on Abramoff’s harming various Native American tribes, “GIMME FIVE”—INVESTIGATION OF TRIBAL LOBBYING MATTERS, says that Abramoff told a tribe’s representatives, “Scanlon was Congressman Tom DeLay’s former staffer and later described him as ‘DeLay’s dirty tricks guy.’”

 

Yet he could play the victim role, act as if any moral responsibility that he might be given, is victimizing him.  Since those classified as redbloods get the rights and the respect, they could respectably act like victims of those holding them morally responsible, since those judgmental manipulative whiners are trying to violate the redbloods’ rights.  Of course, if someone classified as a mollycoddle tried to evade moral responsibility by saying, “That whole syndicate that they have going on right now is for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to destroy our movement....  And you need to look at this, and what’s going on and participate in fighting back,” the American public would freak out at such emotionalist manipulative and calculated groupthink intended to evade moral responsibility.  One could call such machinations, “DeLay Tactics,” a redblood playing the victim role, honorably since his defensiveness would seem to be defending his own rights, he’d be presumed innocent until proven guilty of insidious tactics, etc.

Also, the reason why the Schiavo case has turned so many Americans off of Fundament Christianity’s efforts to control us through the law, is that this sort of helplessness seems anti-redblood, pro-mollycoddle.  On the other hand, real Americans would accept the helplessness behind the fact that depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults, along the lines of: “Sure, depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults, but everyone knows that we must accept the helplessness that this culture regards as normal, since all must deal with the normal vicissitudes of life,”  “Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults, and that’s simply among those biological illnesses that are parts of the natural order,” “Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults, so these 34,000,000 American adults should take antidepressants, or learn to have optimistic outlooks,” “Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults, and the question that we should ask about this is whether it consists of 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions, or 34,000,000 rather severe weaknesses of character” and, “If you care a lot that depressive disorders affect 34,000,000 American adults, something must be wrong with you.”  To treat this social problem as a social problem, would seem anti-redblood, pro-mollycoddle.  A refusal to accept the normal vicissitudes of life is a typical mollycoddle tactic, so those who don’t accept what one’s culture regards to be the normal vicissitudes of life, would seem to be mollycoddles trying to restrain redbloods.

             

If you want to get into more explicit manipulation, there’s always Enron’s in-house risk-management manual, saying, “Reported earnings follow the rules and principles of accounting.  The results do not always create measures consistent with underlying economics.”  “Risk management” consists of making sure that the principles of accounting would create the right abstract picture, not of measuring the real economic realities.  For the real Texans at Enron, this sort of machinations would seem to be natural gamesmanship.  As long as their games don’t provably violate accounting principles, objections to them would seem to be just opinions.  And interpretations of principles are probably subjective, but the person being held morally or legally accountable would probably be given the benefit of the doubt, be presumed innocent until proven guilty.  The interactive webpage Enron’s Blame Game shows how everyone involved in the scandal blames others, but that sort of blame-finding doesn’t seem mollycoddle, since that defensiveness is defending the rights of the accused.

Sure, just before Rick Causey pled guilty, Mike Ramsey, lead attorney for Ken Lay, said, “I’ve talked to Rick Causey myself, and I don’t believe he willfully did anything wrong.  I don’t believe he would agree to plead guilty to a crime when he didn’t commit one.”  That would have to include his signing with Fastow, the “global galactic” agreement, which anyone could now see.  Yet when Causey did plead guilty, that didn’t make Ramsey seem comparable to blue-collar criminals’ lawyers expressing confidence that their clients are innocent.

On the other hand, if someone tries to convince others that he’s a victim (and not a victim of a victim), and his claims fit a limited set of principles rather than an open practical view of all the realities involved, this would be treated with unapologetic contempt.  Even if the principles he used were more in touch with all the realities involved, it would seem derogatory to say that he’s thinking and acting “on principle,” since mature people realize that such abstractions are pretty futile.  If the principles are as constricted and legalistic as the accounting principles could be when people try to use them to suit their own ends, then that would seem to be sinisterly conniving.  Just imagine what conventionality would think that the person who has the problem, therefore must deal with it.

~    ~

The table at the bottom of Narcotics Anonymous’ pamphlet “The Triangle of Self-Obsession” has the following table, which shows the sort of thought reform that this expects, and not just reforming over-reactions (and yes, “Past” means problems happening to you in the past, “Present” means problems happening to you in the present, and “Future” means problems happening to you in the future):

The way we react to people, places, and things:

Negative                            Positive

Resentment         Past             Acceptance

Anger              Present          Love

Fear               Future           Faith

After all, whenever anyone feels resentment, anger, fear, etc., that’s his SELF-WILL expecting the world to be as he’d have it.  Very much along these lines is Nietzsche’s idea of a “will to truth,” as he wrote in his Genealogy of Morals, “That which constrains idealists of knowledge, this unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself even if as an unconscious imperative—don’t be deceived about that—it is faith in a metaphysical value, the absolute value of truth, sanctioned and guaranteed by this ideal alone (it stands or falls with this ideal).”  It’s as if the value of the truth only seems to be self-evident, but really isn’t.  Nietzsche also defined evil as “whatever springs from weakness,” and the only way that weakness could seem evil, is if you realize that the only ways in which the weak could express their WILLS is through abstractions such as words and morality, which could seem duplicitous, whereas objective power couldn’t.

So here we have a characteristic characteristic of Wagnerian psychology, that moral relativism becomes amoral absolutism.  Not only do moral objections seem to be merely the objectors’ opinions, but those objections seem to arise from their WILLS, which makes them seem worthy of all sorts of mollycoddle labels: self-serving, manipulative, blame-finding, etc.  We usually associate an attitude of “The rules are for suckers,” with sociopaths.  Yet moral responsibility is subjective, but who has the power to do what, is objective.  Everyone has their own opinion, which probably reflects what they want.  The rules could seem to be the manipulative tools of willful people who, actually, aren’t conniving to manipulate anyone.  Naturally everyone would want to believe that they’re entitled.  While moral relativism is based on sincere principles, moral-relativism-becomes-amoral-absolutism is a means to an end, to get rid of objections to genuinely destructive behavior since objections can be very pesky.  Even the most legitimate objections to destructive behavior, could be called such things as “controlling” (Just look at any book on codependency, and you’d see that a woman could be accused of desires to control her man, simply because she expects him to stop some unambiguously immoral behavior.), “unforgiving,” “discouraging,” “bitter,” “disruptive,” “guilt-tripping,” “negative,” “unhappy,” etc.  Naturally, even the worldliest moral responsibility, doesn’t feel exciting or inspire dynamic action.

And in case that sounds like simply the opinion of one extreme Kraut, that says the exact same thing as does, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful word as it is not as I would have it,” that if you think that something is evil, your abstract opinion results from the fact that what happened is not agreeable to the striving of your WILL.  Paul Kurtz wrote in the April/May 2005 issue of Free Inquiry, “Being of good will means that we are not mean-spirited or surly, despairing or nihilistic, vindictive or hateful.”  This is typical of secular humanism, which makes it far more virtuous than the amorally absolutist spirituality of, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as [my WILL] would have it.”

 

 

This amoral absolutism might start out by saying that when you want to pass judgment on someone, you should remember that your opinion reflects your WILL, rather than fathoming what happened or comprehending its true inner essence.  His motives were probably understandable (Very little is truly evil.), in ways that sophisticated people would fathom and comprehend, though the victims’ WILLS might not want to see this.  Yet what that leads to is the sort of absolutism that you’d see in the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression.  Since what he did was understandable, well-adjusted and fair-minded people would simply understand it and take care of their own problems.

Chris Mooney wrote in the November-December, 2004, issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, “And of course, when the debate isn’t going their way, they cry persecution.”

About half of the most famous book advocating laetrile, G. Edward Griffin’s World Without Cancer, tells of the conspiracy theories that are supposed to explain why the official judgment of reputable cancer researchers, says that laetrile doesn’t work.  This book tells of a researcher working in the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, claiming that some experiments that he supervised, which were supposed to disprove laetrile, ended up proving that it works.  Some of those working for Sloan-Kettering who knew about this, got it a good deal of publicity.  This book says that just after this series of experiments ended with one that showed laetrile ineffective, a doctor wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, “According to the folklore, the conspirators were ignoring evidence of Laetrile’s effectiveness and attempting to promote their more orthodox (and more toxic) forms of cancer chemotherapy.”

One might think that to cry persecution like that, would make one a mollycoddle.  Yet those who Chris Mooney wrote about, are the creationists and those who don’t believe in human-induced global warming.  These both seem too gutsy and all-American to seem to be whiners.  And the conspiracy theories about laetrile come from members of the John Birch Society.  These conspiracy theories have the sort of folksy appeal that gutsy all-American Populism has.  Sure, those who are smart and sophisticated would probably regard this as a cowardly way to avoid responsibility for making sure that what they’re saying is right.  Yet, for the most part, Americans don’t think of those who cry persecution when they’re expected to prove their right-wing beliefs, or cry conspiracy when they think that intellectuals and bankers had rigged their disproof of Populist beliefs, as insidiously manipulative.

Yet when the untermenschen even seem to be crying persecution, conspiracy, and the like, then this very likely would seem mollycoddle.  When the weak seem to cry persecution, it would be very easy to think that we’d better not fall for that, since if we did, then what’s to stop people from evading their own personal responsibility whenever they wanted to evade responsibility?  If those who came up with the conspiracy theories about laetrile were hippies rather than Populists, would the media have been so quick to investigate claims that Sloan-Kettering was covering-up an experiment that could have proven laetrile?  (Kurt Butler’s book skeptical of “alternative medicine,” Lying for Fun and Profit, includes a subchapter on laetrile, titled “Mother Jones Caught in Bed with John Birch.”)

I’m OK—You’re OK also includes, favorably, the following, from Robert Hutchins’ article in the San Francisco Chronicle of July 31, 1966, about America’s international relations:

We are the victims not of the wickedness of others—that is a paranoid view—but of our own mistakes and delusions.  This is not to deny that others are wicked.  Of course they are.  What we have to do is to avoid wickedness ourselves, offer an example of magnanimous and intelligent power and organize the world to curb the inevitable wickedness we shall find at home and abroad.

That is exactly the logic behind the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, that Dr. David Burns, in Feeling Good, called “Magnification or Minimization,” and, “Personalization.”  We absolutely can’t change anyone else’s actions and absolutely can change our own, including our own reactions.  Serenely accepting what we can’t change would include stopping ourselves from feeling like victims, which could also be called feeling “paranoid.”  If that article were written after the Reagan/Thatcher era, it probably would have said instead, “We are the victims not of the wickedness of others—that is the view of whiners who think like passive victims—but of our own mistakes and delusions.”  Therefore, it seems, we should personalize our own problems, see them in terms of how we could most pragmatically take care of ourselves.  The more self-responsibility, the better.

Yet that is supposed to be the sort of treatment that seems appropriate for those who German tradition would call untermenschen, and American tradition would call mollycoddles.  Robert Hutchins’ article, on the other hand, applies that same logic to an effort that German tradition would call übermensch, and American tradition would call red-blooded.  While for the untermenschen-mollycoddles to take others’ wickedness as a given would seem realistic and pragmatic, for übermenschen-redbloods to take others’ wickedness as a given would seem wimpy.  Even when the wickedness that the übermenschen-redbloods claim to be fighting against is ambiguous, this probably wouldn’t seem to be just his self-justifying, and therefore subtly manipulative, opinion.  American tradition would expect only the untermenschen-mollycoddles to take to heart, “We are the victims not of the wickedness of others—that is a paranoid view—but of our own mistakes and delusions.”

World Without Cancer includes a letter alleging that experiments disproving laetrile were rigged, that a laetrile proponent working for the federal government wrote to a congressman.  The book then says, “Now, that takes guts.  For a man who is employed by the federal government, especially as head of the Cytochemistry section of the National Cancer Institute, to charge openly that his superiors are corrupt—well, such a man is, unfortunately, a rare specimen in Washington.”

If this paranoia instead came from hippies who held that that’s how big pharmaceutical corporations make a lot of money, then this paranoia would hardly be associated with “guts.”  Yet if the paranoia comes from Populists whining about the guv’mint, intellectuals, and bankers (who also deal in ephemeral abstractions which, as can be seen in the Enron and Milken-Boesky scandals, can be faked), that does seem gutsy.  Yet if it weren’t for both the quirkiness of the conspiracy theories and the dangers of relying on unproven treatments for cancer, the hippy suspicions would actually require more guts, since suspecting the guv’mint seems all-American, while suspecting corporations could seem un-American, as well as dysfunctional.  One is far more likely to succeed in life if he suspects the guv’mint, than if he suspects the corporations.  Not only that, the American public would probably find a news story more interesting if it investigated the suspicions of people who seem to have guts, than if it investigated the concerns of those who can see the dangers of relying on unproven treatments for cancer.  Gutsiness seems so much more attractive, though the dangers of exalting it to this degree should be obvious.

The Rise and Fall of Laetrile, on the Quackwatch website, says that though Ernst T. Krebs, Jr., the “father” of laetrile, is known as “doctor,” “After taking courses in five different colleges and achieving low or failing grades in his science courses, he finally received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Illinois in 1942.”  When his science professors responded to his mistaken ideas by giving him low or failing grades, he had to accept that.  Yet once he got the John Birch Society on his side, when scientists condemned his mistaken ideas and he’d respond by alleging conspiracy, that would seem to take guts.

Likewise, it would make a lot more sense to see depressive disorders affecting 34,000,000 Americans, as a social problem rather than 34,000,000 personal problems.  In that case, we’d probably see plenty of those who we now associate with “the establishment,” making arguments that we now associate with anti-psychiatry, that it’s up to you to prove unequivocally that each of these people actually have a disorder.  That would seem good and gutsy.  On the other hand, as long as this problem seems to consist of 34,000,000 personal problems, then to say that their disorders must be proven unequivocally, would seem to be a mollycoddle evasion.

When this sort of double standard is applied to our day-to-day lives, another problem comes into play.  That is, that whether or not someone seems to be living up to his own personal responsibilities, would depend on exactly what he’d seem response-able to do.  For example, as that Alateen comic,

shows, if you must deal with unreasonable realities, then you’d seem deficient, passive-aggressive, self-defeating, etc., if you don’t.  What other criteria could we have, as to whether or not someone is showing enough strength, rather than indulging his own desires to quit, blame others, etc.?  To say that the words bad and evil denote everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case, might sound like the sort of moral bankruptcy that Hitler loved, unless you’re faced with someone in a situation where a forgiving attitude would help him adjust and adapt, so naturally you’d want him to make himself happier by lowering his own standards.  Then, either you’d expect him to stop blaming others and look at himself, to take as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as he would have it, or you’d have to accept his dysfunctional behavior that would follow from his maladjustment.

This has got to be why out culture is so likely to correct people’s “weaknesses of character” that consist of literal weaknesses, meaning too weak to deal with whatever one’s own realities are.  Claims of victimization could be described in rather facetious terms, such as “playing the victim role,” “playing the race card,” and “playing the blame game.”  The latter two were even used to dismiss objections to the mishandling of the rescue efforts from the New Orleans flood.  Obviously these objections aren’t playing anything.  Of course, when Tom DeLay responds to criticism of how the New Orleans flood was handled at first, by genuinely playing the victim role like a Machiavellian, acting like a victim of political opponents, red-blooded Americans would likely join in defending him.  By far most of the supposed headgames that Berne described in Games People Play, consist of people addressing problems in ways other than, “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.”  Naturally, since speaking softly and carrying a big stick, seems synonymous with getting what you want fairly and effectively, while even the most assertive words, could easily seem to be merely a futile emotionalist and self-satisfied game.

 

 

One could see in the invasion of Iraq, the ultimate manipulation, since it’s far more enforceable than most manipulation.  When someone plays the victim role so that you’ll give him what you want, then as soon as you catch on, have had enough, you could stop.  Yet it’s very clear that Dubya is counting on the fact that once he’s played the victim role in claiming that Saddam still had WMDs, and gotten the American military to invade, it can’t stop even if it’s gotten sick of the fallacies.  That would look cowardly, and create instabilities.  Therefore, this is a form of manipulation whose results would be sealed in stone.

Of course, one could always hold that it’s impossible to prove whether or not Dubya really was that sure that Saddam still had WMDs.  The discussions leading up to the war were secret, you can’t know what someone was thinking, etc.  Yet when someone who comes from a position of weakness sincerely believes that he was victimized more than he actually was, it would seem very fair to say that even if he really did sincerely believe that, obviously he wanted to believe it, since that would mean that he was entitled to what he wanted.  And, obviously, Dubya still wants to believe that invading Iraq was good.  Even if he sincerely believed that the USA was Saddam’s victim so the USA should send its military there, obviously he wanted to believe that, so he’s still responsible for manipulative machinations, for not reality-testing, not seeing that the rest of the world obviously weren’t that afraid of Saddam, etc.

On March 8, 2007, a Tory MP who’s also a shadow homeland security spokesman, Patrick Mercer, was demoted, since he’d said about the black men he had known in the Army, “They prospered inside my regiment, but if you’d said to them ‘Have you ever been called a nigger,’ they would have said ‘Yes.’

“But equally, a chap with red hair, for example, would also get a hard time—a far harder time than a black man, in fact.

“But that’s the way it is in the Army.  If someone is slow on the assault course, you’d get people shouting: ‘Come on you fat bastard, come on you ginger bastard, come on you black bastard.’”

Also, “I came across a lot of ethnic minority soldiers who were idle and useless, but who used racism as cover for their misdemeanours.”

“I remember one guy from St Ann’s (Nottingham) who was constantly absent and who had a lot of girlfriends.

“When he came back one day I asked him why, and he would say, ‘I was racially abused.’  And we’d say: ‘No you weren’t, you were off with your girlfriends again.’”

That obviously sounded racist.   Yet if an American politician had said something like that, he could have gotten away with justifying it with the following: “All that I was saying was that blacks could get away with manipulation, more than anyone else could.  They could get away with acting like victims of the insults that are par for the course in the military, and they could get away with being idle and useless, by claiming that they’re victims of racism.  That didn’t attribute negative qualities to them.  That’s just saying that whites accept their whining more than these whites would accept anyone else’s whining.”

 

Metanoia’s webpage on the stigma of suicidality begins, “Social stigma and prejudice are our enemies. Every human being is taught from childhood that suicidal people are shameful, sinful, weak, selfish, manipulative—taught that we are contagious, that we want to harm others.  None of these ideas are true. No scientific study has ever confirmed that a significant proportion of suicidal people have these qualities,” but I doubt very seriously that many Easterners would look at a suicidal person and think, “Boy, he’d better be held accountable for his manipulations.”  Yet the weak, especially those who don’t remain inconspicuous, are classified as mollycoddles, and mollycoddles strive to connive to get some sort of satisfaction from their weakness.  This dichotomy could be seen to an extreme degree in the influences that Twelve Step groups have had in our self-help psychology.

Labels implying “mollycoddle” tend to fit the pattern that Ruth deForest Lamb described during the Great Depression in her muckraking book American Chamber of Horrors, “‘Bureaucracy’ of course is an accusation frequently made against Food and Drug officials by those whose anti-social practices they endeavor to curb.  For it is one of those convenient portmanteau charges in which may be packed all sorts of personal grievances and guilty alarms.”  The label “bureaucracy” gets its power from all its mollycoddle and redblood-stifling implications, “How dare you try to control me, you conniver!”  The same goes for similar labels, such as “immature” and “manipulative,” when the person doesn’t act overtly immature or manipulative, just not mature or self-reliant enough to handle a huge problem through self-help, “How dare you try to manipulate me, you conniver!”  These labels, as you might expect from any dichotomous thinking, have the same portmanteau quality, in which may be packed all sorts of personal grievances, such as those that you’d expect people with addictive personalities to have toward their unserene victims, and guilty alarms, such as those that you’d expect people with addictive personalities to have about their unserene victims.  Though when Bush set broad guidelines for how much torture of al Qaeda suspects would be unacceptable, they said that psychological torture would if its emotional effects lasted “months or even years,” one could always figure both that what determines how long these effects last is how resilient the victim’s outlook is, and that those affected for a long time might have manipulatively chosen to play the victim role.

William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim says in its concluding chapter, “For example, in 1940, eight million were out of work, while in 1942, only a little more than one million were out of work.  The seven million who went from a jobless status to drawing a weekly paycheck in that two year period were no different in 1940 than in 1942.”  Those who worked before 1929 and suddenly found themselves unemployed in 1930, were no different than they were in 1929, but would have been more likely to succeed if they began to approach their failures in getting re-hired, solely along the lines of, “What could I have done better, which would have made the difference between failure and success, and which I could do better next time?”  If, on the other hand, they tried to respond to this by rallying a social movement along the lines of, “And you need to look at this, and what’s going on and participate in fighting back,” that would seem terrifyingly un-American.

Yet one strain of conservatism is an opposition to campaigns to err on the side of caution when it comes to possible dangers in food additives, pollutants, etc, and you could see a psychologist’s skeptical take on such campaigns, in Propaganda Techniques Related to Environmental Scares.  This begins, “Psychologists have studied several perceptual factors that help explain how reasonable people can conclude that they have suffered toxic exposures and injuries when they have not,” such as believing what most people believe, appeals to authority, vivid examples, confusion techniques, sensational terms, and categorical terms.  Yes, if we err on the side of caution then the public would believe that some things that are actually safe, are dangerous, but at the same time, if we err on the side of provability then the public would believe that some things that are actually dangerous, are safe, and would likely get emotional about defending the polluters’ rights.

This webpage clearly reflects Reaganomics’ conceptions of left-wing movements as a bunch of manipulators getting what they want by playing the victim role.  Of its 13 paragraphs, 3 begin with the word “manipulators,” as in, “Manipulators dramatically announce that people in the community have cancer, birth defects, immune disorders, and other disturbing health problems, as if this were a discovery, or something unusual,” “Manipulators strive to divorce us from the facts.  Rather than encouraging us to examine the evidence and reasoning of people who appear to disagree with us, they block communications and openly or indirectly try to persuade us that people who disagree with their views are dishonest, not trustworthy, incompetent, biased, racist, only concerned with money, insulting our intelligence, corrupt, betrayers of the American dream, and so on.  The subtext is: ‘Do not consider alternative points of view.  Do what we tell you, without realizing that we are controlling you.’  Like cult leaders, manipulators encourage us to close ranks and form an in-group suspicious of those who question the party line,” and, “Manipulators often try to control beliefs and actions by exploiting people’s feelings.”  This webpage also makes claims about the manipulators doing certain things, which few people would choose to do and which could easily be countered with the facts, such as, “For example, inviting the single child with a birth defect to the town hall meeting may overwhelm the fact that there are fewer birth defects in the neighborhood than in most similar residential areas,” “If the release of something harmless to humans is announced along with discussions of studies indicating cancer, birth defects, or brain damage in animals, concern or alarm may ensue,” and, “Inflammatory emotional rhetoric hardens attitudes against the opponent, and subtly justifies bending the rules to fight against the evil doer.”

This is such an unrealistic depiction of people’s motivations, that it depends on such fallacies as believing what most people believe, appeals to authority, vivid examples, confusion techniques, sensational terms, and categorical terms.  Since that webpage so strongly favors scientific proof, where is any proof that these people are manipulating, while those who want restrictions to be more lenient (who might have public relations experts tactically planning their statements), aren’t manipulating?  At least most of the time that right-wingers accuse left-wing movements of manipulative tactics, the people in question could possibly have a motivation to set up a manipulation.  But what’s the hidden agenda of environmentalists supposed to be?  Why would they set up those ruses, expecting to control people?  And what exactly does it mean to be a manipulator?

But then again a lot of the psychological theory shaped by Reaganomics and the amoral addictive personalities of Alcoholics Anonymous, doesn’t ring true either.  For example, why would so many people in their day-to-day lives try to get what they want by manipulatively playing the victim role, since it should be obvious that even when you claim victimization in desperate good faith, plenty of people will treat you as if you’re the moral equivalent of a cult leader (something that addictive personalities, especially, are likely to do to their own victims)?  Why would the depression that 1/5 of the American population sometimes experience, be products of their own negative outlooks, when our culture so pressures everyone to have gutsy, positive outlooks?  Why would so many people choose to get romantically involved with alkies and the like, because these lovers want to feel self-righteous, live a melodrama, nurture, play the martyr role, etc.?

William Ryan, in Blaming the Victim, gives the following quote to show the offensive and anti-scientific attitude that many social scientists had in that era about the poor living according to the law of the jungle.  “One of the more obnoxious of the experts is Walter Miller who, unlike Oscar Lewis, sees us being inundated by the questionable behavior of the lower orders.”  The quote of Walter Miller’s that Ryan gives is:

“Smartness,” as conceptualized in lower class culture, involves the capacity to outsmart, outfox, outwit, dupe, “take,” “con” another or others, and the concomitant capacity to avoid being outwitted, “taken,” or duped oneself.  In its essence, smartness involves the capacity to achieve a valued entity—material goods, personal status—through a maximum use of mental agility and a minimum use of physical effort.

But, as Ryan wrote in this same chapter, “A minority of the rich share many traits of the Sanchez and Rios families, and other families studied by Oscar Lewis—they are alienated from social institutions, tend to be unemployed or irregularly employed, demonstrate high rates of antisocial behavior, and have high divorce rates.  Does this small group of the rich constitute a Culture of Affluence?”  The description that Miller gave of the supposed “smartness” in the Culture of Poverty, is very similar to the sort of smartness that the Social Darwinism of the 1980s, insisted on.  We were all to accept that business operates according to the law of the jungle.  Those who outsmart outfox outwit dupe “take” or “con” another or others, are winners, and those who are outwitted “taken” or duped, are losers.  Achievement-orientation means achieving a valued entity—material goods, personal status—preferably through a maximum use of mental agility and a minimum use of physical effort.  One shouldn’t work hard, but work smart.  Sure, the law of the jungle means that the strong triumph over the weak, but if you object that the rich triumphed over you through a maximum use of mental agility and a minimum use of physical effort, your objection would be labeled “class warfare.”  Why this double standard?  Because the rich are redbloods and the poor are mollycoddles.  When redbloods operate according to the law of the jungle, we’re to accept this as we’d accept John Wayne’s operating according to it, but when mollycoddles operate according to it, then it would seem that their weakness is the fault of their own primitiveness so we shouldn’t coddle them.

Concern for the New Orleans survivors of Hurricane Katrina who couldn’t evacuate the city in time, and who therefore had to deal with the inadequacies of the federal disaster relief, would normally seem mollycoddle. After all, they were poor and sick, and what caused their problem was a natural disaster, so it could seem that beggars can’t be choosers. It would seem that any problems that happen, are just life’s inevitable imperfections Yet the rescue efforts took place in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security. Any inadequacies in the tactics in dealing with that, would, if these inadequacies weren’t based on racism, also be there in tactics that deal with massive results of terrorism. Caring about inadequacies in one’s own battle plans, would seem red-blooded rather than whiny. The authorities wouldn’t just accept problems in these as inevitable, unless they literally were inevitable. When looking over a battle strategy, treating evitable problems as inevitable, would seem cowardly.

This is the mentality that you could really see in the transcript on my Candace Newmaker’s Experience webpage, of psychologists putting her in a jerry rigged contraption and blaming her for not successfully fighting her way out of it until it smothered her to death, as if redbloods don’t quit and we seriously impugn supposed mollycoddles supposedly manipulating.  You’d be amazed where this sort of psychologist would see the grasping hands of manipulators at work.  (When redbloods, such as wife-batterers, manipulate, that seems to be a disembodied trap that potential victims are response-able for not falling into.)  The psychologists responsible for Candace’s death had a strange at-all-costs obsession with discouraging quitting and supposed manipulation, even though Candace had such aggressive angry behavior problems that the last thing that she needed was to become more red-blooded.  It seems honorable to define evil as “whatever springs from weakness,” since this would mean more bravery, less whining, less manipulative machinations, less presumptively high standards, etc.

This mentality could be put across as encouraging self-determination and self-reliance, without bothering to say that self-determination means rights of the sinners and self-reliance means response-abilities of the people who’ve got the problems.  Correcting victimity would both make people less mollycoddle, and allow more freedom of movement for redbloods.  That dichotomy is the root of many Reagan/Thatcher-style double standards; for example, murderers who evade responsibility for their murders because they were crimes of passion, are classified as redbloods, but murderers who evade responsibility for their murders because they were abused or impoverished as children, are classified as mollycoddles.  I found it absolutely amazing that so many in the American government speaking about the attack of the psycho terrorists described them as “cowards” and “cowardly,” as if two-bit terrorists could afford to go after military targets if they were braver, and as if their lack of courage was really worth mentioning.  (Even Germany called them barbaric instead, with  German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder saying, “This is not only an attack on the United States but an attack on the civilised world,” a sentiment that Colin Powell repeated the next day while winning allies.  I find their cowardliness to be about as worthy of mention as would be any bad taste in clothing.)

Of course, if one is labeled a “mollycoddle” depends not only on what he tries to get someone to do nurturantly, but also on how big and respectable he looks.  Certainly codependents seem mollycoddle, since they’re supposed to seek helplessness for fun and profit.  Yet those who’d intentionally try to elicit nurturance from codependents should be treated as far more mollycoddle, since these people really are trying to elicit coddling.  The profession of nursing has been associated with codependence.  Nursing is one of those pink-collar professions that are underpaid since so many women enter it to fulfill traditional roles.  The role that nursing fills is that of nurturing.  The book Alcoholism and Other Drug Problems by James E  Royce and David Scratchley, says about adult children of addicts, “A high percentage of workers in the helping professions seem to be unconsciously acting out their childhood caretaker roles, as in one claim that 83 percent of nurses are children of dysfunctional families.”  The definitive Women Who Love Too Much says about a codependent nurse, “She was ‘nurse’ both at work and at home.”

The Johnson & Johnson company’s “Campaign for Nursing’s Future” expects that this future will be achieved not by paying nurses more money as more nurses use their scientific aptitudes in more well-paying professions, but by trying to encourage more people to go into nursing to get an emotional reward from nurturing.  The campaign’s slogan is “They Dare to Care.”  The campaign’s pamphlet “Because I’m a Nurse” says, “Nurses are the ones who are always there, providing invaluable expertise as well as essential caring, support and advice to those in need, their families and other caregivers.  You can make the difference too—between life and death, comfort and pain, knowledge and fear, freedom and dependence.  That’s a powerful, gratifying feeling.  Just imagine having that feeling every day.”  This pamphlet also talks about the scientific aptitudes that nurses could take pride in.  Yet this campaign still assumes that if nurses get satisfaction from fulfilling the responsibilities of the job, this means not that nurses should be paid more since they’re such dedicated workers, but that they should be paid less since their dedication would make them want to fill caregiving roles without the pay they deserve.  If “Nurses are the ones who are always there” they really “make the difference,” and “They dare to care,” then they’re worth a lot.  Naturally this underpayment is what companies like Johnson & Johnson, and the hospitals and clinics they supply, would want.  The more that people are manipulated into nursing careers by telling them how much their caregiving is needed and that they dare to care, the more that nursing would resemble charity to a daring degree, rather than something for which the nurses are paid as others would be.  The only difference here is that the people who elicit charity from professional daring codependents, are companies rather than the weak themselves.  If a weak individual tried to get people’s caregiving by telling them that they “are the ones who are always there” and really “make the difference,” he’d seem diabolically manipulative.  Big companies who play upon nurses’ dedication to their caregiving, don’t seem to be playing upon people’s dedication to caregiving.  The same would be true for other behavior that in the business world would look acceptable, but in one’s private life would look mollycoddle.  For example, if in office politics one brings up a competitor’s transgressions in order to “score points,” it would seem that all well-adjusted people would adjust to that, but if at home a woman brings up her husband’s transgressions in order to “score points,” she’d seem to have opportunistically trumped up an excuse to whine manipulate and guilt-trip.

The Johnson & Johnson company certainly won’t be labeled mollycoddle, since the label of mollycoddle can be pretty odious.  It implies that one’s weakness is a ruthlessly selfish endeavor to get something manipulatively, whether that something is:

• the material benefits or attention that others would give the “mollycoddle” out of pity,

• a control over others by guilt-tripping them,

• a way to have power over those who count on him by acting weak,

• poignant thrills that the “mollycoddle” himself would get such as by being a martyr or living a melodrama,

• excuses for his past failures,

• a justification for evading personal response-ability in the future,

• the sine qua non rationale for the activism of intellectuals and their allies,

etc.  Or, as Rev. Baxter might put it, mollycoddles get pride and a manipulative sense of power in being victims, identify with their victimhood, and use rage and anger as a tool.  (Every time I’ve heard the word “victimhood” used, which probably originated during the Reagan/Thatcher era, the person who used it seemed self-righteously absolutely insensitive about the concerns of some victims, as if their concerns are just their mollycoddle self-image, and that’s self-righteous in the American sense, the sense of, “I’ve got backbone and you’re spineless.”  Ditto for the word “victimology” meaning sociological study of an oppressed group, or any of its permutations.)  Just as Baxter thinks that typical activists for minorities aim to get pride and a manipulative sense of power in being victims, to identify with their victimhood, and to use rage and anger as a tool to control people, the whole idea of a codependent is someone who supposedly aims for exactly the same things by getting romantically involved with buttheads, though Norwood was so uncontented when she was married to the alcoholic that without being injured she developed bruises, internally-bleeding stigmata, as if she suffered so much emotional turmoil that she was deteriorating physically.  The short-sighted way in which alkies and druggies think even when they’re not overwhelmed by addictive cravings or the effects of the drugs, is very counterintuitive, so one’s intuition might naturally make him think that he could win over a druggie, but this would seem to be codependent wishful thinking along the lines of, “I’ll succeed at this though no one else has been able to.”  This is how such victim-blaming works.

It seems that if your rights have genuinely been violated, but simply holding you response-able for your own welfare would still be tenable, then if you try to defend your legitimate rights in a way other than through active practical fight or flight, you’re a mollycoddle, so what you do would seem to be just your underhanded maneuvers.  No matter how real your victimization was, if you care about what you deserve, about who’s to blame, etc., you’d seem to be a mollycoddle manipulator trying to pull some machinations.  If, as Dubya accused, you really did go through life with schemes to get what you want by getting people to feel sorry for you, or with an attitude of, “Whenever you’ve got a problem, blame somebody else,” you’d soon be in big trouble.

The label of redblood, on the other hand, can free one from personal responsibility, since if you held a John Wayne morally accountable for causing any problems but the most grave, morally unambiguous, and unforgivable, and he internalized such inhibitions, he wouldn’t be a John Wayne.  If Dubya wants to see what “individuals were required to do less and less,” what individuals having inadequate backbone, really looks like, he ought to take a good look at redblood-coddling.  The “redbloods” get the benefit of any doubt, leaving the “mollycoddles” to seem as if their weakness has a nefarious or morally bankrupt intent on the part of the “mollycoddles” behind it.  The “red-blooded” psychological defense for crime, “crime of passion,” tends to be accepted a lot more than the “mollycoddle” psychological defense, “result of childhood trauma,” since any red-blooded problem would likely be accepted, at least relatively, under the rationale that if you don’t accept that red-blooded problems exist you’re a mollycoddle utopian, while hypervigilance from childhood trauma doesn’t seem as inevitable.  Asking that victims’ response-ability be relative rather than absolute would seem pernicious because this would seem to be a partial mercenary mollycoddle ploy.  This is one of the main ways in which those around us decide who seems honorable and who seems dishonorable.  This could also justify both America’s exporting pathogenic germs to Iraq, and America’s warring on Iraq because of their weapons of mass destruction, because both of these used the “tough” red-blooded approach, and opposing both of these actions could have seemed wussy.

On my Candace Newmaker and The Cigarette Industry and Victim Correction webpages, I show how this could often sound like just an allegory, the Catty Mollycoddles Versus Noble Redbloods allegory (or the mollycoddles could seem whimpering, or passive-aggressive, or manipulative, or defeatist, or....)  The Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines allegory as, “1 : the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations; also : an instance (as in a story or painting) of such expression  2 : a symbolic representation : EMBLEM,” and that’s about what this dichotomy sounds like, like an overgeneralized fable intended to make a point.  Modern believers in Reaganism have only it to blame for the thinking that said that Clinton was a victim of those who held him accountable for trying to cover up his extramarital affair, in that all those mollycoddles were whining and moaning as a means to an end, in order to achieve a political purpose, which would make them the dishonorable villains.  The real problem is when people make candid and balanced objections, which aren’t just a means to an end, but they’re still treated as if they