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?  It seems that ‘character flaw,’ when it comes to depression, means the untermensch character flaws that could be attributed to depressed people rather than the übermensch character flaws of those who cause the excessive depression in others.  The only question seems to be whether this consists of 34,000,000 rather severe character flaws or 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions.  The extent to which this rate of depression isn’t only natural isn’t even mentioned.  Yet medications have risks and side effects, which realists must accept.”

At the bottom of each Zoloft webpage is the following warning,

and the reports of such things happening to a few adults probably aren’t just the illusions of the family members who reported them, but we still don’t address the question of preventing the problem in the first place.  That would restrict the übermenschen, and mollycoddle the untermenschen.

The “natural alternative” to antidepressant medication, cognitive therapy, doesn’t have that risk, but does have the same problems inherent in treating this social problem as the personal problems of its victims.  The goal is for them not to think like victims.  While many would say that this means only putting a stop to pathological thinking, those in desperate situations would simply have to think in ways that would help them adjust to whatever realities they can’t change.  It may seem extreme that Dr. David Burns wrote in his classic self-help book on cognitive therapy for depression, Feeling Good,

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

“Here’s proof: When a lion devours a sheep, is this unfair?  From the point of view of the sheep, it is unfair, he’s being viciously and intentionally murdered with no provocation.”

One could always say that that’s extreme enough that, at the very least, people can legitimately refuse to accept it.  But really, that’s no more extreme than is 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.”  Nor is that any more extreme than is the implication in, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference,” that if what you can’t change, or what you must do or sacrifice to change what you can, is serious enough, then you’d seem maladjusted if you don’t just accept that reality, sublimely.  Attempts to correct the thinking of the übermenschen who caused the problems, would seem to be un-American attempts to re-engineer human nature, while attempts to correct the thinking of the untermenschen who have the problems, would constitute self-help.

It’s no coincidence that those who made The Serenity Prayer popular are recovering addicts.  Any professional writer of advertisements would tell you that the success that a message will have in reaching people, will depend on the pursuits of those it reaches.  This is exactly the message that those who have addictive personalities, which is very much oriented toward a callous self-will run riot, would make popular.  Yes, it’s true that one’s genetic proneness to addiction contributes to one’s likelihood to become addicted, but if that was the whole story, most alcoholics’ life stories of their own alcoholism would go like this: “I’m just a normal Schmoe who just wanted to be a social drinker, but one day I started to get these inchoate, initially wordless, atavistic compulsions to drink heavily, which gradually became more disabling.  It was as if I suddenly began to come down with Alzheimer’s,” just as most non-alcoholics choose to drink only socially.  The only real difference between the gist of victim correction as a panacea, and the gist of the responses you’d get if you tried to guilt-trip an alcoholic, is that victim correctors have their wits about them so would be diplomatic.  For example, the problem-escaping strategies that Faludi wrote about, are the diplomatic way of saying, “It’s my way or the highway.”  Those with addictive personalities would have basically the same sense that “realistic” acceptance of problems means that a victim’s problem is simply his problem.

They’d indignantly insist that others have this same realism, as the realistic acceptance that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has toward having at least two extramarital affairs, beginning one just after agreeing to end the preceding one, and divorce.  According to an article by Stephanie Salter in the May 24,2001 San Francisco Chronicle, “Rudy Giuliani’s Affliction: Poor Form,” Giuliani’s wife Donna Hanover first found out about the affair with Judith Nathan and the ensuing divorce, via an impromptu press conference Giuliani gave, he and Nathan keep flaunting their affair.  When Hanover objected publicly his divorce attorney Raoul Felder, who’s pretty much known for his laissez faire amoralism toward divorce (He’d no doubt agree with that psychologist whose husband ran off with her best friend after twenty-three years of marriage, and who responded, “I let myself go.  I don’t blame him.  He’s a man just like any other man.  If I had done all this work on me before, maybe he would have stuck around’ said that Hanover was “howling like a stuck pig,” and that by keeping their kids away from Nathan, an important person in their dad’s life, Hanover was being “an uncaring mother.”

Philip Delves Broughton of The Daily Telegraph in England wrote that Felder also said that Hanover would have to be “dragged kicking and screaming” from Gracie mansion.  Felder might as well have said, “We are all victims of victims,” “To be wronged is nothing, unless you insist on remembering it,”  “When one finger is pointed at someone else, there are three pointing back at me,” and “Put aside the idea of fairness or unfairness.”  The only difference between victim correction as a panacea and sociopathic thinking, is that sociopathic thinking is in the first person (”If you don’t just take in stride what I did, and pragmatically get on with life, you’re letting this bother you though you don’t have to, you’re just trying to manipulate people by getting them to feel sorry for you, you must love to play the victim role...”) and victim correction as a panacea is in the third person (”If you don’t just take in stride what he did, and pragmatically get on with life, you’re letting this bother you though you don’t have to, you’re just trying to manipulate people by getting them to feel sorry for you, you must love to play the victim role...”).  Both sociopathic and addictive personalities are known for the lack of guilt feelings and lack of learning from experience regarding harm done to others.  Someone is pretty unlikely to feel guilty or learn from experience if he figures that in all cases, the solution the whole solution and nothing but the solution, is that for victimizers to take responsibility for the consequences of what they did is a dispensable luxury while for the victims to take response-ability for their own welfare is an indispensable necessity, that victims who object are just mercenary mollycoddles, and that “redbloods” have rights while “mollycoddles” have response-abilities.

Enron is now a fallen idol of those who have these same conceptions of good and bad.  Enron’s Visions and Values gave their values as “respect,” “integrity,” “excellence,” and “communication,” all of which could have both old-fashioned, and pragmatic, definitions.  Pragmatism could seem to constitute very good values, if, in your society, winners contribute to the building of the civilization, and losers don’t.  If winning competitions of power is necessary to contribute, then your society’s conceptions of respect, integrity, excellence, communication, etc., would have to support this sort of productivity.

The above quote from The Authoritarian Personality describes pretty much the same rock-ribbed zeitgeist as the Enron ethos described in The Smartest Guys in the Room, “They believed that free markets made the world a fairer place, one where price dictated deals, rather than relationships or other ‘noneconomic’ factors,” in that both would achieve fairness by condemning abstractions that would come from anyone who lacks economic strength.  Weakness is associated with deviousness.  Abstractions seem to be tools for manipulators.  And the strong can respectably act persecuted, since their defensiveness is defending their own rights, from the weak.  This especially seems to be true if they seem to be aggregating into conniving political movements.  Enron tried to live up to these ideals, mostly by making deals rather than doing anything productive, but they could still say that winners are winners and losers are losers.

The big difference between the fascist worldview and Enron’s, is that, as can be seen in all those right-wing wing-nut conspiracy theories, that worldview fears that those who deal in abstractions especially financiers, could deceive the masses through conspiracies, which is exactly what the deal-makers at Enron did.  The Powers Report, commissioned by Enron after the problems were discovered, blames the problems on, among other things, “overreaching in a culture that appears to have encouraged pushing the limits.”  Yet the theory behind this culture was that the limits were to be pushed to try to be more productive than the limits would allow, not more deceptive.  These deceptions in accounting are very much along the lines of deceptions that conspiracies among bankers and/or intellectuals are supposed to perpetrate, manipulatively setting up subjective intellectual constructs.

This, actually, is typical of Reaganomics.  Despite all the red-blooded appeal that it has, it got most of its appeal from two supposed strengths that, actually, were very manipulative.  The first is the prosperity of the late 1980s, which, actually, resulted from the deficit spending of the federal government.

The second is that the rich role-models of the Reagan era, were exactly the sort of deal-makers who fascists like to write conspiracy theories about, such as those about the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission.  And while the ignominious cunning that they used didn’t involve conspiracies that promised to coddle the weak, those who seemed the most successful tended to use dirty tricks to seem successful.  As James B. Stewart’s book about the Milken-Boesky scandal, Den of Thieves, says, “It was as if the nation’s investors had awakened from a decade-long dream and recognized finally that high returns could not be realized without increased risk.”  Enron was just another case of some deal-makers becoming role models by cooking the books to make their deal-making seem unusually successful.

This is a lot like what the book Pipe Dreams, Greed, Ego and the Death of Enron, says of the effect of oil on Texas’ culture.  The cowboy culture would score high on the F-Scale, since cowboy culture regards physical strength as something that in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race, and cunning as ignominious.  Yet in much of Texas, success or failure has a lot to do with oil, which means that success isn’t contingent on real work.  As this book says, “Houston has a fearless ‘can-do’ spirit that stems largely from its energy industry, an industry in which technical innovation and risk-taking are the stuff of legend,” and, “Houston is a city of irrepressible optimists.  Despite years of boom and bust, it’s a city that still believes that the prices of oil and natural gas will go up and stay up.”  While the technological innovation is real achievement, risk-taking means that whether you’re a winner or a loser would depend largely on luck.  Optimism that the price of oil will go up, is optimism about something that you played no part in causing, and that other Americans would have to pay for.  It’s no wonder that J. R. Ewing was duplicitous!

As Ken Lay said to the Houston Forum on December 13, 2005, just before Rick Causey pled guilty, “In February, 2001...  I was confident that Enron was financially strong, highly profitable, growing rapidly, and had a ‘sustainable’—or as I put it, an ‘unassailable’—advantage over its competitors.  Along with what was referred to as ‘old economy’ assets (its extensive domestic and international pipelines, power plants, liquid plants) with Enron Online, the company had become one of the largest e-commerce or ‘new economy’ companies in the world.”  And, of course, e-commerce is simply deal-making.  Yet, it seems, as long as Ken Lay has good ol’ boy prerogatives, such as that as long as a positive thinker genuinely believes in his obviously ridiculous guarantees then he didn’t commit fraud, and that it’s fine to act like a victim as long as a strong person is acting like a victim of the guv’mint and a negative attitude in the public, this would still seem to reflect the love of Power and “Toughness.”

When Rick Causey did plead guilty, his Exhibit A to Plea Agreement, said, “I and others in Enron senior management did willfully and unlawfully use and employ manipulative and deceptive devices and contrivances and directly and indirectly (i) employ devices, schemes and artifices to defraud; (ii) make untrue statements of material facts and omit to state facts necessary in order to make the statements made, in light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading; and (iii) engage in acts, practices, and courses of conduct which would and did operate as a fraud and deceit upon members of the investing public, in connection with purchases and sales of Enron securities,” and gave some specific examples of this, which could easily be proven.

When Ken Lay said in his Houston Forum speech, “The Enron Task Force investigation is largely a case about normal business activities typically engaged in on a daily basis by corporate officers of publicly held companies throughout the country,” he probably had in mind that the sorts of things that Causey described, are things that everyone does, not that they didn’t happen.

And to some degree, what was wrong with what he described, could be called ambiguous.  Though the Powers Report, which Enron itself had commissioned, said, “Causey was and is Enron’s Chief Accounting Officer.  He presided over and participated in a series of accounting judgments that, based on the accounting advice we have received, went well beyond the aggressive,” one could always say that whether what Causey did was just aggressive accounting, is a matter of opinion.  What the Powers Report’s judgment was based on, was “the accounting advice we have received,” and one could always say that other accountants might have different opinions.  Causey’s Exhibit A to Plea Agreement says about one of Enron’s obfuscations, “which [I and others in senior management] knew was material information,” but unless a decision-maker said that he knew that this was the sort of thing that the law requires reporting, how do you prove that they knew that this was material information, more material than the information that aggressive accounting could obfuscate?

Therefore, one could always paint the government forces investigating Enron, as if they’re the ones employing manipulative and deceptive devices and contrivances.  Lay said in his Houston Forum speech, such things as: “The sordid history of this case and how it was handled clearly begs the question: Does the U.S. Justice Department or anyone else in our federal government feel any need to find out how and why [the collapse of Enron’s outside accounting firm, Arthur Andersen] happened, and whether anyone should be held personally accountable and responsible?”

“Was it a coincidence that Andrew Weissman’s decision to leave came only days after our defense team filed a motion in court claiming prosecutorial misconduct in our case?”

“The prosecutor becomes a human guillotine when given the power to charge an individual.”

“Either we stand up now and prove that Enron was a real company, a substantial company, an honest company... or we will leave this horrific legacy shaped by others for someone else to sort out.”

“The whole plea-bargaining process allows—even encourages—blatant prosecutorial abuse.”

“Truth is the great rock.  Whether it will continue to be submerged by a wave—a wave of terror by the Enron Task Force—will be determined by former Enron employees.”

Also, Ken Lay says on his PR website that since Linda C. Thomsen, deputy director of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission, said, “[T]he President’s Corporate Task Force, which celebrates its second anniversary tomorrow... [has demonstrated that] just the mention of the name Enron evokes images of duplicity and greed,” and Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Mark W. Everson said, “[T]he corporate culture of Enron guided by Mr. Lay is now synonymous with corporate fraud and greed at its worst.  And Enron’s crooked ‘E’ logo depicts the corporate management team at Enron—crooked,” therefore these statements of fact mean, “Are these signs of a dispassionate prosecution of crime?  To me they look more like part of a political campaign.”  When you consider that Lay’s indictments concern only the time that he certainly knew the specifics of the fraud that resulted from his corporate culture, you could see that the indictments are no connivance.

If Lay’s defense is that everyone pulls the sorts of tricks that they pulled, but if Fastow hadn’t pull his tricks no one would have looked for and found other corruption in Enron, then it would be pretty hard for Lay to play the victim role.  No one would really care about that “truth.”  That is, unless he acts like a victim of the guv’mint, the epitome of those whom the fascist worldview would see as manipulative and whiny.  All but the most blatant white-collar criminals have an even greater advantage, since they could say, as Lay did, “The Enron Task Force investigation is largely a case about normal business activities typically engaged in on a daily basis by corporate officers of publicly held companies throughout the country.  In virtually every other situation, if there were concerns that any of these business activities were not being done appropriately, these concerns would be addressed by a regulatory agency, like the SEC, or as a civil matter in the courts,” though the Enron prosecutors didn’t invent the prison terms that the law said these crimes could have, and a blue-collar criminal wouldn’t dream of acting like a victim of the guv’mint, simply because it didn’t try a cooperative, restorative-justice-type, approach with him.

If one regards financiers’ abstractions as what constitute bold and aggressive productivity, all the rest could follow from there.  What would always remain would be the mentality that says that “weaknesses of character” means weaknesses, and that respect integrity excellence and communication, mean whatever’s necessary to excellently get a respectable amount of goals achieved rather than manipulatively and self-righteously finding blame.  Weakness would very easily seem to be orchestrated for fun and/or profit, to get melodramatic thrills and/or to manipulate exploitively.  Though it should have been obvious to anyone who worked with Fastow that his goal was to make Enron’s finances look better than they really were, rather than use its money more efficiently, Lay’s and Skilling’s defense, and several commentators, have held that this wasn’t unambiguously fraudulent.

As Robert Goodman’s The Luck Business, The Devastating Consequences and Broken Promises of America’s Gambling Explosion, copyright 1995, says, “The rapid proliferation of government-promoted gambling in the 1980s and early 1990s was part of a much broader economic change taking place in America.  As long-term investment in productive enterprises declined and the possibility of making a secure income sharply diminished, they were replaced by a host of ventures that stressed quick profits through enterprises of chance,” and that includes speculative investments.  Even way back in the Reagan era, many of the heroes were stockbrokers, and a popular book, by Donald Trump (who now has invested in casinos), was titled The Art of the Deal.  Enron’s deceitful tactics fit this pattern.  With its old-fashioned productive operations, such as its gas pipelines, any fraud that it could have committed in the USA, would have been easily detectable.  Yet if anyone disapproved of the buying-and-selling activities that Enron preferred, that person would seem out-of-touch with the economic realities that make productive enterprises pay less.  Any nice ethic that’s unrealistic given whatever reality is at the moment, is unrealistic, and that includes the work ethic.

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(Enron’s plan for its future on its “Visions and Values Magic Cube,” its luxurious trading floor)

One very obvious example of a Wagnerian aggressiveness, is the Savage Nation pundits, whose audiences are attracted to their chronic anger.

One big advertiser on Michael Savage’s radio program, is the state of Nevada, offering businesses the opportunity to keep more of their hard-earned money, rather than paying it in state taxes, if the businesses re-located there.  Of course, the reason why Nevada’s taxes are so low, is that it’s able to collect a lot of its taxes from gambling.  That certainly isn’t hard-earned money.  Nevada businesses would get more benefits from the local governments, than they’d pay for, since gambling would pay for the rest.  Moral conservatives would find gambling morally wrong, and plenty of pathological gamblers cause enough problems for their families and acquaintances.  One gauge of whether any printed matter is obscene is whether its socially redeeming value outweighs its cheap-thrills value, and gambling has no socially redeeming value.  Yet for businesses to go to Nevada and pay less taxes because gambling is funding much of the state’s expenditures, could seem to be the excitingly tough, Savage Nation, thing to do.

Those who are bold and aggressive would be the least likely to have what the fascist worldview would consider to be character defects.  Those defects could be labeled as severely lacking in respect, self-respect, integrity, excellence, and communication.  And that worldview has an absolutist intellectual purity.  If you disagree with this, it would seem that you just don’t “get it.”  A whole lot of manipulative and deceptive devices and contrivances, would be included among the normal business activities typically engaged in on a daily basis by corporate officers of publicly held companies throughout the country, so mature people simply deal with this normal reality.  (Of course, in our day-to-day encounters that involve personal responsibility, if one even suspects a powerless person of trying to pull manipulative and deceptive devices and contrivances, he wouldn’t be presumed innocent until proven guilty.  And of course, we care about that manipulation.)

This leads to its own form of manipulation and distortion, which shows why African-American street slang for victim-blaming is “The Flip Game.”  Might makes right means that those who are strong and/or strong-spirited would seem powerfully impressive in all circumstances, while those who are weak would seem ignominiously cunning.  Those who may have the moral responsibility would be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but we couldn’t afford to presume weaklings who may be ignominiously cunning, innocent until proven guilty, since ignominious cunning is insidious, someone has to take responsibility for every problem, and even if a complainer is sincere his opinion still reflects his WILL.  The strong could get coddled honorably, since their defensiveness would be defending their own rights.  Even their overt lies and manipulation would qualify as “this sinful world,” what’s to be taken serenely and forgivingly.  After all, a society could maintain its stability with, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” since those who must suffer the consequences would be motivated to solve their own problems, so the problems would get solved.  On the other hand, a society couldn’t maintain its stability with, “Taking as Jesus didn’t, this judgmental world as it is not as I would have it” (Jesus talked about judgmentalism as if it’s unforgivable.), since if the victims don’t simply and wholeheartedly take response-ability for their own problems, who would?  It seems only natural to talk about depressive disorders affecting 34,000,000 American adults, as if this means that they’d better just get fixed.  Schopenhauer’s era was called the Romantic Era, and one could call this presumption that that much depression is simply among the diseases that just happen, a dream that we could do things that cause an abnormally high rate of depression, without an increased risk of unnatural strife.

If deal-makers are treated as the driven all-American good ol’ boys, then they’d be among those who could respectably use manipulative tactics.  Conventionalism and Anti-intraception, would mean understanding that that’s realism, so disagreement with it is just avant garde philosophizing.  Mysticism and “the disposition to think in rigid categories,” would mean the thinking of the 18th Century German Romanticism, which inspired Nazism.  This would assume that as long as everyone takes care of their own problems, then any problems that come from might-makes-right would vanish, so anyone who doesn’t would seem to be ignominiously weak.  Power and “Toughness” is the whole idea, especially since those who tap into the power that comes from deal-making, would end up more powerful.  Destructiveness and Cynicism, would naturally come with the competitive power tactics, but as long as everyone takes care of their own problems, then might-makes-right won’t really cause any long-term problems.  “The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world,” is what the defensiveness is all about.  If one assumes that he has a right to engage in extremely aggressive accounting, then anyone who disagrees would seem to be pulling mollycoddle machinations.

 

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