And What Science Can Do About It

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“But the futility and fruitlessness of the struggle of the whole phenomenon are more readily grasped in the simple and easily observable life of animals.  The variety and multiplicity of the organizations, the ingenuity of the means by which each is adapted to its element and to its prey, here contrast clearly with the absence of any lasting final aim.  Instead of this, we see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need, and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on in saecula saeculorum, or until once again the crust of the planet breaks.”—Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

“Taken as a whole, Stoic ethics is in fact a very valuable and estimable attempt to use reason, man’s great prerogative, for an important and salutary purpose, namely to raise him by a precept above the sufferings and pains to which all life is exposed... and in this way to make him partake in the highest degree of the dignity belonging to him as a rational being as distinct from the animal.”—Ditto

“The political form and tool of romanticism is fascism.”—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, from the subchapter The Loss of Self in Romanticism

“Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it”—from the entire, unredacted Serenity Prayer as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr

“The problem-solving and coping techniques you learn will encompass every crisis in modern life, from minor irritations to major emotional collapse.  These will include realistic problems, such as divorce, death, or failure, as well as those vague, chronic problems that seem to have no obvious external cause, such as low self-confidence, frustration, guilt, or apathy.”— Feeling Good, David D. Burns, MD, “The Clinically-Proven Drug-free Treatment for Depression”

 

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eterminism fits many forms.  Though we might consider Wagnerian conceptions of human nature, and conflict that seems “only natural,” to be pro-freedom, it actually leads to a great deal of not only helplessness, but norms and expectations that would expediently get things back to normal.

If your society tends to accept aggressive behavior at least fatalistically, then this acceptance would be in the name of “preserving freedom,” “not controlling or restricting others,” etc., which could seem to be the opposite of helplessness.  Attempts to stop aggressive behavior that the aggressive people could stop but you couldn’t, through assertive persuasion, could seem insidiously untermensch, in that naturally you’d want to believe that you’re entitled to more than what you have.  As can be seen in Nietzsche, the weak could easily seem to be the dangerously WILLFUL ones, since everyone’s beliefs regarding what they deserve are shaped by their own SELF-WILLS, and the weak can exercise their supposed SELF-WILLS only in ways that would seem mollycoddle, “dishonest” and “ignominious,” whereas red-blooded strength is “honest,” proud, and at least forgivable (i.e. must be forgiven).  We must appreciate all the hidden dangers of unchecked “victim-power.”  As Niebuhr wrote, power, which would include victim-power, “cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest,” over (hidden and surreptitious) SELF-WILL, though we dare not talk in such overgeneralized terms when passing judgment on overt sinful power.  We fear fearmongering, but not greed-mongering.  “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” could happen to anyone.

 

 

As one could see in the Great Crash of 2008, such a laissez faire concept of personal response-ability could seem good ’n’ gutsy, until you see the consequences of the moral bankruptcy.  (Of course, this self-response-ability must include the same self-justifying, fatalistic, conformist, simplistic, “upbeat,” absolutist, unconditional, predictable, and dogmatically necessary illusions as laissez faire economics has, the very illusions that got our economy into such trouble; after all, people will do only what they feel motivated to do.)  Economist Steven Landsburg said, “Most of economics can be summarized in four words: ‘People respond to incentives.’  The rest is commentary,” and that’s also how this sort of self-help could be summarized: You’re the only one who has a reliable incentive to solve your problems, and nothing that disagrees with this “natural” pragmatism could matter, no matter what chaos and helplessness result. Realism simply must be oriented around the fact that you absolutely can change what’s tactically wrong with your own reactions, and absolutely can’t change what’s morally wrong with others’ actions; not being realistic would be ridiculous (said sardonically, or maybe to encourage victims to empower themselves in what laissez faire economists would call “tough love,” though the expression “tough love” originally meant the authoritarian and coercive approach that parents could use on their teenagers who have drug problems and the like).  Our economy reward$ those who think like this.  And even if this sort of thinking leads to a worldwide economic catastrophe, it could always be blamed absolutely on the supposedly mollycoddle weak.  (We all know how insidiously dangerous they are!)  All relationships and marriages considered codependent are treated just as fatalistically, whether or not the problem person is addicted.  As Greenspan said, that’s what works; even behavior problems who aren’t addicted aren’t motivated to change so expecting them to do what they don’t feel an incentive to do won’t work.  Victimhood doesn’t produce anything, so why should we give it any credit?  The ends justify the means, since the ends, functionability and good coping skills, are necessary.  Is someone sociopathic?  Avoid him since you’re incompatible!  End of story!  NO ONE HAS A RIGHT TO ENDURABILITY!  Endurability has to come from somewhere.  Either we have self-responsible self-reliance, or we have nanny-ism, whining, trauma-drama, etc.  Both the economics that led to the financial crash, and self-help for anyone in trouble including addicts’ family members, wear the cloak of realism, which is both all-important and expected of all red-blooded people.  After all, we must have an un-ignorable incentive to do certain things that we may or may not be able to do.  One could say that the fix is in, not in the sense that a conspiracy put the fix in, but in the sense that our untermensch-bashing cultural norms did, so it’s predictable that if you’re the one with the problem, you’d be held response-able for “empowering yourself,” “taking care of yourself,” etc., by solving it.  If you believe that the Illuminati are running a conspiracy on Wall Street, that would sound red-blooded, but if you believe that a bunch of selfish traders are running a conspiracy on Wall Street, that would sound mollycoddle.

 

THE GREATEST RISK IS NOT TAKING ONE, AIG ad from 2001, so if you tried to restrain this you’d seem profoundly: weak, whiny, defeatist, controlling, unrealistic, counterproductive, opinionated, manipulative, negative, moralistic, etc.  Sure, post-scandal AIG CEO Edward M. Liddy said, “I have seen the good side of capitalism.  But over the past six months, since agreeing to take the reins of AIG and reviewing how it was run in prior years, I have also seen instances of the bad side of capitalism,” but one could also call the gutsiness of AIG in its PIG era, “character-building,” giving plenty of backbone and fortitude.

In theory this means self-responsibility, self-reliance, gutsiness, anti-controlling, good coping skills, realism, conventionality, respectability, etc., but in practice this means that nothing except, “Can I change this?” including the most basic morality and concern for the weak, can really seem to matter.  Sure, you could recognize that destructive sinfulness is destructive sinfulness, but in the end you’d have to forgive it, or you’d be maladjusted and suffer the consequences of this weakness.  (“YOU VILL ENJOY!”)  Frank Buchman, leader of the Oxford Groups, the club on which AA and then Al-Anon was based and until recently was called “Moral Re-Armament,” (Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here, from 1935, includes Buchman in its list of currently trendy “Messiahs.”) said, “D’you know Heinrich Himmler?...  Say, you ought to know Heinrich.  He’s a great lad....  [Hitler] lets us have house-parties whenever we like.”  Anti-Nazi British travel-writer and journalist Robert Byron, who got a chance to observe Nazism up close, wrote in his diary, “Himmler apparently dotes on the Oxford Group [How cute.] and writes to its English members discussing their troubles with them,” so he was their Dear Abby.   If Himmler had sent you some “Dear Abby” letters that didn’t mention the Nazi practices that Buchman didn’t like, the advice that the letters would have given would have helped you become more resilient, courageous, self-responsible, realistic, and abiding by Gelassenheit (a fatalism that teaches that willfulness leads to self-defeating frustration if you’re helpless to get what you want or need), so you would have ended up with a stronger character.  Victim Correction as a Panacea, is Gelassenheit and similar all-encompassing attitudes about physical response-ability for one’s own problems, exactly what a society with rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., would most need.  The wave of the future, the “new economy” of self-responsibility, requires that we want to be responsible members of society, take response-ability for our own welfare.

Sure, Niebuhr wrote that he was shocked about Buchman’s admiration of Hitler, though The Serenity Prayer summarizes the book that most shaped Hitler’s thinking, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation:   As with a panacea, we must see the entire world in terms of the ineradicable SELF-WILLS of the sinful, the ignominious and surreptitious SELF-WILLS of victims who don’t represent their own bad experiences to themselves as being as innocuous as possible (“Those manipulative whiners want to believe that someone owes them something!”), and, therefore, our responsibility to do this.  Niebuhr wrote that Buchman’s faith that dictators, business tycoons, etc., should use their power to push Christianity, vapidly ignored how realpolitik would affect the outcome, “The slightest acquaintance with the history of Christian thought on the problem of the relation of the absolute demands of the gospel to the relativities of politics and economics would prove its childishness,” but the same could also be said about applying a simplistic sloganeering spirituality to the situations that contribute to our rampant depression.  It isn’t possible to get any more vapid than,“Serenely accept everything that happens to you in a society with rampant depression, that you’re helpless to change.”

This was the same Himmler who said, in his speech on October 4, 1943 to the SS Group Leaders in Poznan, “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand.  To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard,” but that personal strength concerned one of the Nazi practices that Buchman didn’t like.  It’s pretty obvious what the “Dear Abby” version of that would advise those in trouble, who are members of an honored group of people who are working on their own resolute and impassively accepting attitudes.  Anything less than, “Happiness is an inside job,” (in general), or, “Things happen.  It’s what we do when they happen that’s key,” (in general), would have been too weak-spirited and blaming for Himmler, so he was their perfect “Dear Abby.”

Himmler Logic, after all, would focus on whether the person with the problem seems to have a weak (as in literally WEAK) character, and would be quick to interpret inadequacies in problem-solving as weaknesses of character, so the weak seem contemptible, blameworthy, and, possibly, insidiously dangerous.  This self-responsible self-help approach is also like the “exemplary dualism” of the Militia Movement, like classifying people as redbloods or mollycoddles, or as übermenschen or untermenschen; this preaches that those who seem to have (literally) strong characters are the allies of decent people so are at least forgiven, and those who seem to have (literally) weak characters are the enemies of decent people.  This leads to some predictable distortions in our conceptions of right, wrong, shame, etc.  Take the Nazi might-makes-right ethos, remove the racism and war crimes, and you’d have what Western culture considers to be the only conception of personal responsibility that works, which is what Hitler’s Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s main inspiration, Schopenhauer, actually wrote about.

The question of whether “it” can happen here, all depends on whether or not “it” includes the aspects of Nazism and Himmler that Buchman’s formula for living didn’t include; if not, “it” happens every day.  The “it” in It Can’t Happen Here included merely an ambiguous, covert, attitude-of-gratitude racism (“It was understood... that all Jews of all conditions were frequently to sound their ecstasy at having found in America a sanctuary, after their deplorable experiences among the prejudices of Europe....  The allegiance of all such Negroes as had the sense to be content with safety and good pay instead of ridiculous yearnings for personal integrity Sarason got by being photographed shaking hands with the celebrated Negro Fundamentalist clergyman, the Reverend Dr. Alexander Nibbs, and through the highly publicized Sarason Prizes for the Negroes with the largest families, the fastest time in floor-scrubbing, and the longest periods of work without taking a vacation.”), so the “it” in modern America could include merely an ambiguous, covert, attitude-of-gratitude form of the strong horrifying the weak.  A classic cliché expression is, “There is no alternative,” to the power dynamics of our economy, and another way to say this is that there is no alternative besides dictatorship and/or Zimbabwe-style economic failures, so every time that these power dynamics horrify us, we should be grateful that we’re not instead dealing with dictators’ outrages, and/or economic failures including massive unemployment, irrespective of any indefinable abstractions such as integrity.

 

 

Yet, in a society with rampant depression, one could just as easily call that “pragmatic logic”: the weak courageously change what they can (themselves) and serenely accept what they can’t (everyone else), and what one deserves is completely irrelevant.  You can’t change your enemies, except for one.  Yet the limits of the threshold of human endurance are a fact, and if we don’t deal with it, it will deal with us.

“Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” is all about what the weak should do, believe, and take responsibility for.  Even sophisticated psychology tends to classify people, aspects of human nature, desires, etc., into categories that are very German, Freudian: übermensch means ineradicable so at least forgivable, while untermensch means true shamefulness, suspiciousness.  (And, of course, treating this moral bankruptcy as necessary for realism seems a lot better than does treating this as admirably open-minded and gutsy.)  These Oxford members no doubt tended to take his ideas about coping skills, to heart, since they wanted self-improvement that would build fiber.  After all, we must accept that if you win, you win, and if you lose, you lose.  That self-responsible self-motivation is also how, and why, market discipline works; we must discipline even perfectly innocent failures.  The more that the weakness of the weak is blamed (What exactly is to blame when someone doesn’t protect himself well enough to succeed?): the more that they’d be motivated to take responsibility for taking care of themselves, the more hope that they’d have that they could change what causes their problems (themselves), and the more that we could all have faith in this red-blooded worldview.   Prejudice against the weak means an optimistic and patriotic faith in The System, and focusing on how the weak could hopefully solve their own problems if only they made themselves worthy, changed what they can.   “Personal strength,” “strength of character,” etc., tend to mean literally strength, transcending “weak” but natural and warranted feelings.

 

Anyone who’d love the Nazis, couldn’t help but love victim-blaming, targeting weaknesses (as in whiny) of character, etc.  Übermensch imperfection such as sinfulness would have to seem at least forgivable, while untermensch supposed imperfection would have to seem to be an insidious (as in “the hidden lie,” and, “We are all victims of victims.”) expression of weak people’s SELF-WILLS.  Dictator or no dictator, just about all of those in any society must define “personal responsibility” in basically the same predictable way and truly believe it, or different people would play by different rules, and plenty of people wouldn’t take the rules to heart when fortitude would be most necessary.  No doubt plenty of Oxford members who weren’t Himmler’s advisees, could have been just as easily, since they were just as free of whiny resentment; all “good” members followed the same school of psychology.

 

Also, in order to maintain its stability, such a society would have to insist that its people have a conception of “personal responsibility,” along the lines of the entire unredacted Serenity Prayer as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr, “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.”  Those who don’t take response-ability for their own problems like that, aren’t adequate to do this, lose the battle, fail, and come up short with big consequences, would seem to be irresponsible and inadequate, losers and failures with very consequential shortcomings.  If they don’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, they’d seem to be maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfits and malcontents.  And their defenses must be impregnable, so we mustn’t accept imperfections in them.

 

 

Sure, Niebuhr wrote, in The Nature and Destiny of Man, “This difficulty in the thought of Hobbes perfectly illustrates the conflict between the voluntarism of modern social history and the determinism of its psychology, a contradiction which becomes a permanent source of confusion in modern thought.”  Yet if a Christian theologian emphasizes the Doctrine of Original Sin as much as Niebuhr did, something like this would have to result.  Our aggressive actions would seem very determined, while our ability to give our society the homeostasis it needs by resolving all of our own problems as pragmatically as possible, seems to be very voluntary.  If our sinfulness, aggressive tendencies, etc., are treated as ineradicable, then our ability to take care of our own problems, and thereby keep our society running, couldn’t be limited.  That wouldn’t seem to be determinism, since if Original Sin made our aggression ineradicable, then that simply would be what God chose to impose on the human race.  “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” wouldn’t seem to be too much voluntarism, since if that’s what one must to to be a responsible member of his society, then that’s what he must do.

The psychological aspects of victim correction as a panacea, what The Serenity Prayer would call the unconditional “serenity,” were pioneered in the book that most inspired Hitler, Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, published in 1819, in the era of Sturm und Drang literature.  This was during the Romantic Era of Central European culture, which was a backlash to The Age of Reason, and held that, as a Neo-Nazi website says, “Life is more than logic!”  Many historians say that the Romantic Era of central European culture was the time and place that most shaped Nazism.  The Romantic Era was a backlash to the Enlightenment, which had faith that human intellect could solve our social problems.  The Romantic Era responded with a fatalism about aggressive human nature, and its tendency to override socially responsible logic.  Some of this fatalism was dismayed at this aggressiveness, and some figured that whatever constituted “natural vitality” must be good, but either way, this had to involve a conception of personal responsibility that would give a good deal of responsibility to the people who had the problems, rather than the people who caused them.  Enthusiasm about aggressive human nature would say that those who didn’t go along with this were manipulative wimps, while dismay about aggressive human nature would say that those who didn’t go along with this were inadequate to deal with the real world, and, therefore, were basically manipulative wimps.  “Romantic thinking” could be called a nice way to say believing what one wants to believe, and a society could afford people believing what they want as long as the victims would take care of the consequences since everyone wants to solve their own problems.  Alan Greenspan testified before Congress on October 23, 2008 regarding the causes of the Great Crash of 2008, “I made a mistake, in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is.  But I’ve been very distressed by that fact,” and, “This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades.  The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”  That certainly indicated irrationality coming from human nature, but it wouldn’t be treated as proof that Wall Street fat cats shouldn’t be Masters of the Universe.  Greenspan also testified, “We have to recognize that this is almost surely a once-in-a-century phenomenon, and in that regard, to realize the types of regulation that would prevent this from happening in the future are so onerous as to basically suppress the growth rate in the economy and... the standards of living of the American people,” so it seems that we mustn’t care about even this level of both greed and stupidity.

Ignazio Silone, in his essay in the classic collection of ex-Stalinists telling why they left, The God that Failed, wrote that he left after taking part in an official proceeding in which a writing of Trotsky was condemned without anyone having to read it, “Days of somber discouragement followed for me.  I asked myself: Have we sunk to this?  Those who are dead, those who are dying in prison, have sacrificed themselves for this?  The vagabond, lonely, perilous lives that we ourselves are leading, strangers in our own countries—is it all for this?  My depression soon reached that extreme stage when the will is paralyzed and physical resistance suddenly gives way.”

Of course, no Wall Street machinations, or even machinations of Wall Street lobbyists trying to get the government to give them the freedom to engage in financial machinations, would be treated like this.  Sure, Wall Street should take seriously that many American soldiers died for freedom, but if Wall Street treats freedom or our government’s concern for freedom as just opportunities for their own greed, it would seem that we simply must understand that that’s human nature.  Sure, on March 28, 2009, just after new regulations for financial institutions were proposed, Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment analyst for Charles Schwab, said, “History is littered with post-crisis regulations.  If there are undue restrictions on the operations of businesses, they may view it to be their job to get around them, and you sow the seeds of the next crisis.”  Sure, that means that we’re all supposed to just figure that simply because the greedy will find ways around laws that they consider to be too restrictive (and naturally they’d want to see themselves as victims of restrictive laws, since that would mean that their not taking them seriously would be justified), we must keep our laws weak.  This certainly isn’t based on principle, but seeing oneself as a victim of laws which would mean that he’s entitled to better, seems a lot more honorable than does seeing oneself as a victim of others’ simple power which would mean that he’s entitled to better.  Greedy machinations are taken as a given, while political machinations aren’t.

A webpage about Hitler, A Born Soldier, says, “Hitler’s favorite writer during the war was the early 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer....  Hitler, like Thomas Mann, was greatly impressed by Schopenhauer’s book: The World as Will and Idea.  Hitler read the book over and over again during the war and was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer’s teaching.”

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.”  It’s very clear how such ads, guides, etc., on anti-depressant treatment define “character flaw,” as the untermensch character flaw that could be attributed to depressed people, rather than the übermensch character flaws of those who cause the excessive depression.

Typical of ads for antidepressant medication, is the Learning About Depression webpage on the Zoloft website, which says, “If you have depression, this sad mood along with other symptoms can last weeks, months, or even years if not treated.  Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or a character flaw.  It’s a real medical condition, but there are ways to successfully treat depression....  Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults.”

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?  Depressive disorders affect about 34,000,000 American adults, yet the ‘character flaws’ that we talk about in connection with this, are those that could be attributed to the 34,000,000 American adults with depression!  What if we started discussing the other, real, character flaws, those of the people who cause the excessive depressions?  Sure, they’re not going to buy any medication, and probably won’t buy any cognitive therapy, to get those defects of thinking, under control.  Yet if I even brought up the real character defects involved with our rampant depression, I’d get some real resistance, from a very Wagnerian emotionality.  Repressing übermensch shortcomings seems bad, while trying to get rid of untermensch shortcomings seems good: healthy, vibrant, self-empowering, self-reliant, etc.  ‘Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,’ might as well be saying ‘The World as Will and Representation,’ since both look at the entire world, not just situations where this would be reasonable, by: treating aggressive SELF-WILL as untouchable, distrusting the victims’ supposed SELF-WILLS, and having them represent their own bad experiences to themselves as being as innocuous as possible.”

For example, you might think that the truth is essential to civilization, that those who think that anything’s more important than the truth must believe in the law of the jungle.  But just as Nietzsche condemned a “will to truth,” meaning the weak having a petty SELF-WILL to care about what the truth is, self-help psychology could figure that in the real world, plenty is more important than the truth, as in the slogan, “Which would you rather be, right, or happy?”  Those who’d rather be right would seem to be basically untermenschen, since the unhappiness that would result would also lead to the bad physical consequences of discouragement, so their desires would be that “will to truth.”  All that you could legitimately care about  is what you can change, not what the truth is besides the truths that would let you decide how you could best change what you must.

An an article in the New York Times Magazine of October 17, 2004, Ron Suskind told of a conversation he had with an unnamed senior Bush advisor who likely was Karl Rove:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”  I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.  He cut me off.  “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued.  “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.  And while you’re studying that reality-judiciously as you will-we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out.  We’re history’s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Though this might not sound too romantic, this was the essence of the culture of the Romantic Era in Germany.  The intellectual climate of The Enlightenment was replaced by a realism that said that analysis means nothing compared to what is reality, i.e., what the powerful make reality.  As any self-help book for people victimized by others would tell you, analyzing such power-plays wouldn’t accomplish anything, so could be called silly.  Of course, in New York, at that very same time, the intellectual money-changers on Wall Street were manipulatively creating the realities that would later become the Great Crash of 2008.

The introduction of the audio tape version of the pro-laetrile book World Without Cancer, by G. Edward Griffin, says that it tells us something about “the hidden nature of man.” This no doubt refers to the conspiracy theories, which the book describes as including not only some doctors, but also politicians and the mass-media.

If human nature is inherently WILLFUL, then objections to even unambiguous wrongness would have to reflect the objector’s SELF-WILL.  Probably every wrongness that contributes to our rampant depression has some sort of ambiguities to it, that would make objections to it seem to be just the objector’s opinion.  Though the law doesn’t treat those who commit crimes due to their own addictions as not guilty by reason of insanity, their family members must treat them as not guilty by reason of their diseases.  If they don’t, that would seem to be their own whiny opinions, though if someone in law enforcement decided to treat addicted criminals as simply passive victims of their diseases, that would seem to be his wimpy opinion.  Conspiracy theories are just suspicions about the supposed ulterior motives of those who assertively stand up for their own rights not to be victimized, carried to the limits of their illogic.

The conspiracy theories that purport to explain why cancer quack theories aren’t accepted by regular doctors, tend to involve bankers, who got their wealth through money-changing rather than through real achievement, and run-of-the-mill employees in the cancer-treatment industry, who supposedly go along with the conspiracy to save their own jobs, and can since it’s possible to fudge science whereas you can’t fudge “real work.” 

Of course, the bankers’ power-plays that are out in the open, would be akin to the “honest lie,” so wouldn’t be feared as a supposed bankers’ conspiracy would.  As Steven Pearlstein wrote in the Washington Post on March 19, 2009, regarding the proposed very high taxes on executive bonuses paid for by government bailout money,

As the financiers see it, there’s a big difference between the government that sets tough terms for participation in its financial rescue programs and a government that is a fickle and unreliable partner, that tries to micromanage their businesses and changes the rules of the game with every zig and zag of public opinion.  That may be an exaggerated view, but it is the financiers’ view and one we need to be mindful of, since at this point we need their money and cooperation as much as they need ours.

We must comply with their exaggerated view, since they have the power that if we don’t let executives responsible for the meltdown get large payments from tax dollars, we’ll suffer the consequences.  While the fact that they want tax dollars dished up to them wouldn’t qualify all-American, the fact that they’d be using overt power to get what they want, would.  This wouldn’t be a sneaky use of intellectual power to make people believe what The Conspiracy supposedly wants them to believe.

As Richard Hofstadter wrote,

The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms.  Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion.

It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical.  It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice.  It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism....  Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect... is lost.

This sounds a lot like the paranoia measured by the F-Scale, a psychological test for Fascism.  It seems that intellectualism is along the lines of “the hidden lie,” in that no matter how sincere intellectuals may be when they stand up for the weak, what they’re saying could still seem to reflect a hidden agenda, since intellectual abstractions could go in whatever direction the intellectuals want them to.

Plenty of politicians supposedly cooperate with The Conspiracy, to save all those jobs.  Since the SELF-WILL of any worker would need a job, preferably a respectable one, it would seem that contriving something for them to do, would serve their  SELF-WILLS, and, therefore, let them and the politicians who support them, benefit.  All of this is the sort of insidiously cunning SELF-WILL that untermenschen, mollycoddles, are known for.  While to most people, it would be a lot more plausible for tycoons to conspire to hide a cancer cure than it would be for run-of-the-mill cancer researchers to do that, to those who distrust the supposed hidden nature of man, even run-of-the-mill workers will want what they want, and everyone wants a good job.  The dirty tricks that people really would pull to get what they want, are a lot worse than the dirty tricks that you’d think they’d be willing to pull.

In a report from the Department of Health Education and Welfare, dated August 5, 1977, Laetrile: The Commissioner’s Decision, the section “CLAIMS FOR LAETRILE,” begins,

Laetrile (or amygdalin) has been recommended over the years primarily for use in the treatment and, more recently, “control” of cancer.  The claims appear to vary in relation to the sophistication of the intended audience.  Thus in the 1962 new drug application (NDA) for Laetrile submitted by Ernst T. Krebs, Jr., to FDA, the drug was claimed to be a palliative (i.e., a drug that mitigates the symptoms of a disease without curing it) to be used with other recognized therapies (R 201, Ex. B at 102).  By contrast, in a pamphlet in use in 1965, apparently addressed in part to prospective patients, it is stated that “Laetrile does not palliate, it acts chemically to kill the cancer cell selectively * * *,” and use of other cancer therapies concurrently is discouraged (R 201, Ex. C., # III).

World Without Cancer discourages this, by saying that conventional cancer therapy actually does more harm than good.  Conceivably, when an unsophisticated cancer patient looks at himself optimistically, he could think that if he uses laetrile, that would improve his chances of being cured.  Yet if a sophisticated person took a sociological perspective, he’d see how ridiculous it would be to hold that everyone who uses conventional therapy for cancer is more harmed by it than helped.  Claims that what contributes to our rampant depression, follow this same pattern.  To an unsophisticated and optimistic person, it could seem that this is just a collection of personal problems, and that, if only each of these people took care of their own problems better, that would solve the problem.  Yet if a sophisticated person took a sociological perspective, he’d see how ridiculous it would be to hold that depressive disorders affecting 34,000,000 American adults, consists of either 34,000,000 rather severe character flaws, or 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions.  Obviously, it’s long been known that those who want to sell unsophisticated people should use certain techniques and set certain moods, yet those people would seem to be the honest heroes who are fighting the manipulative weaklings, intellectuals, etc., the hidden nature of man.

The Wikipedia webpage on Ayn Rand says, “When asked in a 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club what the most influential book in the respondent’s life was, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice, after the Bible.”  Some of the heroes of Atlas Shrugged are just as implausible as are such supposed cancer cures, but have the same maverick, anti-intellectual-elite appeal to them.  The first is Rearden Metal, an alloy that’s lighter and stronger than steel, and is a great conductor of electricity, yet is cost-effective to produce.  Its inventor, Hank Rearden, finally finds a customer, Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, through Dagny Taggart, the main hero of the novel.  At that time, plenty of groups that could be called the mollycoddle intellectual elite, opposed Rearden Metal.  They claim that this is because they think that the Metal is unsafe, but when Dagny is able to speak with one of their leaders, he admits that the real reason is that the metal is so good that it could cause big problems for Rearden’s competitors and their employees.  Taggart Transcontinental uses Rearden Metal not only for some of their rails, but also for one of their bridges, which really makes such intellectual elite groups protest about supposed safety risks.  Yet the public supports the use of Rearden Metal so much, that Taggart stock goes up, and people come out to greet the first trial run of the use of Rearden Metal, “They were the sons of Taggart employees, and old railroad men who had retired after a full lifetime of Taggart service.  They had come, unsummoned, to guard this train,” and, “She caught the flicker of waving arms, of hats tossed in the air, of something flung against the side of the engine, which was a bunch of flowers,” though, “The reporters who came to the press conference in the office of the John Galt Line were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events.”  The bridge made of Rearden Metal doesn’t collapse during that initial run, so it seems proven (as if that proved that it wouldn’t be unsafe enough that the bridge wouldn’t collapse far to quickly after a few uses), and many, many companies buy plenty of Rearden Metal.  Then, the intellectual elite groups change to opposing Rearden Metal, explicitly because it would greatly burden the competition.

Another hero is an engine that engineers in an old, bankrupt company had developed, but since the company went bankrupt, the idea had been abandoned, and Dagny was left to look for information on how this engine is constructed.  “‘Hank, do you understand?  Those men, long ago, tried to invent a motor that would draw static electricity from the atmosphere, convert it and create its own power as it went along.  They couldn’t do it.  They gave it up.’  She pointed at the broken shape.  ‘But there it is.’”  This magical motor is what provides the electricity to the utopia set up by the rich over-achievers who went on strike, in a building in which the lock isn’t an ordinary lock, but one that opens when one says the oath of this utopia, “I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.”  (This, of course, was before the era of computerized technology.)  The first paragraph of the Quackwatch webpage Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science includes, “The Patent and Trademark Office recently issued Patent 6,362,718 for a physically impossible motionless electromagnetic generator, which is supposed to snatch free energy from a vacuum,” and goes on to say, “There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it.”

A medical doctor living in that utopia said, “I have spent the last six years on research.  I have discovered a method to protect the blood vessels of the brain from that fatal rupture which is known as a brain stroke.  It will remove from human existence the terrible threat of sudden paralysis....  No, not a word of my method will be heard outside [the utopia].”  It is the inventor of that engine, John Galt, who is the main leader of the strikers, and who gives the long speech that ends up on nationwide radio in America, he says that one of the benefits that the world would have had if it weren’t for the strike is his magical generator.

Just as implausible is the excuse that the man who took that factory over just before it went bankrupt, gave for why the bankruptcy wasn’t really his fault, “And then some newcomer nobody ever heard of opened a two-bit factory down in Colorado, by the name of Nielsen Motors, and put out a new motor of the same class as the Starnes model, at half the price!  We couldn’t help that, could we?  It was all right for Jed Starnes, no destructive competitor happened to come up in his time, but what were we to do?”  When Jed Starnes ran the factory, he wasn’t so incompetent that the motors that it would have produced would have cost twice as much as they should have.  His motors were probably about average in price, so for someone to have suddenly come up with one that cost half as much, really is unlikely.

So these ideals of how a laissez faire economy would make life gloriously easy for everyone, are in about the same league as both those computer programs that greatly contributed to the financial meltdown of 2008, and any quack cancer “cure” that the intellectual elite are supposed to be conspiring against (especially the “cures” that were based on research, as Laetrile seems to have been).  No doubt when those on Wall Street used those computer programs that were supposed to make more accurate predictions on whether or not those who’d formerly been considered bad credit risks really were, those who believed in them cheered them as a great pro-freedom innovation.  Chances are that the average person would have realized that any sort of mathematical model can’t reflect all the important realities, and that economics is one of the inexact social sciences, but one on Wall Street who had this skepticism would probably have been treated as if he opposed a freedom-loving innovation.

This is also very much along the lines of the Populist cheering for supposed cancer cures.  Just as those who rooted for Rearden Metal had that old-fashioned American spirit of enthusiastically supporting great achievement, those who believe in the “cures” believe that they’re supporting great innovation.  Of course the intellectual elite oppose it because of their hidden agendas that jealously oppose what’s good while claiming to oppose what’s bad, train journalists to think that their job consists of concealing from the world the nature of its events, etc.  Chances are that Rand would have considered these people who think that they know more than the scientists, as just another bunch of losers who dare to think that they deserve better, and as deserving whatever they get for their failures.  Yet all that you’d have to do is change their conspiracy theories into a novel in which they’re right and they fight the insidious conspiracy and win, and you’d have a novel with one of the main themes of Atlas Shrugged.  The same people who’d cheer the mavericks in Atlas Shrugged, would cheer them in this novel, and would seem to be winners rather than losers.  Not only that, if that theme is so much based on desires to believe that we could like a great life if only we could get rid of the oppressive jealousy of the intellectual elite, what other themes of Atlas Shrugged are based on that emotionalism?  (But, of course, übermensch emotionalism doesn’t seem to be emotionalism.)

The entry on Niebuhr in The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2001, says that he “defended Christianity as the world view that best explains the heights and barbarisms of human behavior,” so we’re simply supposed to accept the existence of barbarity, and change our vulnerability to barbarisms.  Reinhold Niebuhr, a biography, by Richard Wightman Fox, says that in the last half of the 1930s Niebuhr had almost a cult following among young Christians in England, giving a student conference at Swanwick. Among his fans (not his detractors) a favorite limerick was:

t Swanwick when Niebuhr had quit it
A young man exclaimed “I have hit it!
Since I cannot do right
I must find out tonight
The right sin to commit—and commit it.”

But, of course, if anyone thinks that The Serenity Prayer implies a fatalism about others’ sinfulness, that person would seem to be victim-posturing, whiny, negativist, resentful, etc.

Throughout this website, in connection with various forms of nihilism, I have

a.k.a. German calligraphy, which looks far more Goth than does the original Gothic calligraphy.  The creepiest-looking Fraktur could probably be found on SS documents and publications.  Obviously German culture gets off on this creepiness, which, still, could be called exciting.  Yet even old-fashioned and formal German calligraphy could be Fraktur, as in the following snake-like heading (with a lower-case s that looks more like a sword or a lower-case f) of the “Family Register” pages of an antique heirloom German Bible:

An illustration of authoritarian compliance in America, that Dr. Thomas A. Harris’ I’m OK—You’re OK gives, is the following, from the California Superintendent of Schools, Max Rafferty, from a publication dated April, 1965:

The good citizen stands in relation to his country as the good son to his mother.

He obeys her because she is his elder, because she conjoins within herself the vision of many, and because he owes to her his begetting and his nurturing.

He honors her above all others, placing her in a special niche within his secret heart, in front of which the candles of respect and admiration are forever kept alight.

He defends her against all enemies, and counts his life well lost in her behalf.

Above all else, he loves her deeply and without display, knowing that although he shares that privilege with others, the nature of his own affection is unique and personal, rising from the deepest well-springs of his being, and returned in kind.

This is the good citizen.  While his kind prevails, so also flourishes the Great Republic.

This servile authoritarian submission might seem to be the opposite of the self-reliant personal response-ability that you’d see in both victim correction as a panacea, and the Wagnerian ethos that it parallels.  Yet every society has to get its homeostasis from somewhere.  If those who are supposed to solve the problems, don’t, then this society’s norms would have to label these derelicts as bad.

For example, I’m OK—You’re OK also includes, “If the husband has been abusive for ten years and the wife has taken it for ten years, then she, in her way, has participated in the exchange.  If either partner refuses to acknowledge this complicity, there is little hope for change.”

If this is the only way that the wife and her therapist could solve her problem, then this is the only way.  On the other hand, to call her “complicit” really does attribute some very negative things to her.  And when the victimization is more subtle, so that it seems more reasonable to see the victims as basically losers and failures, it seems all the more natural to treat them as bad.  Sure, this hardly seems to be a “good German” authoritarianism.  At the same time, intercultural studies have consistently found that depressed people who’ve lived in developed areas outside of the modern West have tended to feel paranoid, but modern Westerners, whether depressed or not, tend to figure that even if someone did “get you,” that would mean only that you lost the battle so you’re a loser.  Modern Western and Westernized depressions tend to include plenty of guilt feelings, and this guilt tends to be about “failures” that the shameful people didn’t really choose to bring about.  They only have the sort of indirect responsibility that could be attributed to victims, that you’re just as responsible for letting a problem happen as you are for bringing it about, even if you tried to stop it but you didn’t try hard enough.

   To call anything “romantic,” could make it seem flowery and namby-pamby, but not necessarily so.  Being in denial about certain realities could be called both “romanticism,” and “gutsy optimism.”  (For example, the gutsier an American is, the more likely he is to be in denial about what’s going on in Iraq.  Yet someday those who are gutsy would have to regret this, though they’d also have plenty of excuses for it, i.e., “But you must understand that everyone makes mistakes!  If you don’t, then you’re a naïve perfectionist!  Demanding whiners like that are bound to fail in life, and aren’t going to get much respect!”.)  Anti-intellectualism could be called both “airheaded magical thinking,” and “gutsy common sense.”  Moral relativism and other moral bankruptcy could be called both “moral cowardice,” and “Stoic realism.”  Pioneering cognitive therapist Albert Ellis, in his Guide to Rational Living, also, said that rational (not self-abnegating) Stoicism is a great coping skill that could let one deal with just about any problem of his.

When women are accused of “romanticizing” problem men and therefore seeming masochistic, these men hardly seem flowery (and, of course, men could romanticize such things without seeming sadistic).  Near the beginning of Gamblers Anonymous’ handbook is a story in which a recovering pathological gambler meets up with an old gambling buddy who’s still gambling compulsively:

“And I always felt better for having chanced it, even when I lost and was forced to walk out without a nickel in my pockets.”

Abner had heard it all before: it was the credo of the quintessential romantic—someone who believed it was more honorable and courageous to gamble on the unknown, even if one chose incorrectly, than it was to find ways to solve even the smallest problem through an understanding of predictable events.

Though the gamblers would tend to lose considerably more money than they’d win, this romantic mindset has the same attractive qualities as the German Romantic era’s mindset: gutsy spontaneity, dynamism, exhilaration, aggressive excitement, self-confidence, anti-authoritarianism, freedom to believe irrational things, magical thinking, glorification of the id and dreading of the superego, associating honorability with courage and other things that look impressively gutsy rather than with anything restrictive, fearlessness, not letting your own losses bother you, a faith that everything will keep functioning anyway since those who want anything to keep functioning will make it keep functioning, a self-righteous love of moral bankruptcy for all of the above reasons, and, despite the supposed free spirits behind both of these, plenty of what Erich Fromm called “Escape from Freedom.”  Ironically, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil ends by describing his dignified walk to the gallows, as, “It was as though in though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

The fact that some things defy thoughts and words, really should teach us the profound danger of caring so much about strength.  Yet the anti-intellectualism characteristic of Romantic Era Germany, implied, “Action is good, analysis is bad, so the stronger you are, the better you’ll look.”   To a lot of modern Westerners, a non-violent version of this could seem not only familiar, but necessary.  This seems necessary because when it comes to solving problems, thoughts and words about who’s morally responsible for it wouldn’t accomplish anything, but action and self-empowerment on the part of the person whose problem it is, would.

Another thing to keep in mind is that though now we think of Nazism as something that sociopathic youth get involved with to be destructive, in Nazi Germany Nazism was synonymous with being constructive.  Sure, the Stormtroopers were gutsy partiers, but they had to be eliminated just after the Nazis came to power, since then the Nazis had to look as if they brought order.  Throughout most of the Nazis’ reign relatively few people knew about the concentration and extermination camps, but all knew about the übermensch-loving norms of Nazism.  When it was in power, it seemed only natural that constructive people stolidly fought their own battles and dealt with their own problems like übermenschen, while counterproductive people played the victim role like untermenschen (unless one was strong enough, in which case he seemed to have every right to defend himself through abstract pleas).  That, after all, was how their economy kept working, producing.  A Hitler Youth camp slogan said, “Praise be to what makes us hard,” and that ethos rewarded success.  Functioning in a might-makes-right economy wouldn’t be much different from working for Enron when it seemed to be a hero rather than a villain, and at that time the employees tended to think that working for Enron was exhilarating and rewarding.  When Nazi propaganda said that was good, this agreed with both that reality, and the fact that strength has always looked impressive.  For example, if you lived in Nazi Germany, and you met Otto Ambros, who was production chief of I. G. Farben’s Zyklon-B poison gas facilities,

chances are that all would treat him as an ambitious executive who has the “killer instinct” that could make executives more effective.  In fact, if he could have seen the youth who today call themselves “neo-Nazis,” he’d probably have considered most of them to be deadbeats.  If you lived in Nazi Germany, and had the nerve to tell those around you that someone that aggressive is probably going to cause more grief than he’s worth, you would have been treated like a mollycoddle.

Another way of saying “The World as Will and Representation,” is, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  What “the world as will and representation” means in modern terms, is seeing the entire world in terms of a Freudian acceptance of the aggressive WILL and übermensch character flaws, and cognitive therapists’ re-engineering of untermensch character flaws, and how people represent their own problems to themselves.  If they don’t act well-adjusted, i.e. adjust themselves well enough to those realities, that could seem to be their SELF-WILLS manipulatively and exploitively expecting the world to be as they’d have it.  And that’s also the basic idea of The Serenity Prayer.  Niebuhr’s favorite theological doctrine was the Doctrine of Original Sin, which others, also, have associated with Wagnerian German ideas about aggressive human nature being ineradicable.  The reason why we’re supposed to take as Jesus did this sinful world, is that we can’t change it.  Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, and taking as Jesus did this sinful world, are what Schopenhauer described as “sublime” reactions to things that would naturally bother people, the same thing that Niebuhr called a spiritual “serenity.”  If this is what’s expected of people and they fall short of expectations, it would seem only natural to attribute this to the sufferers’ WILLS, that they want the world to be as they’d have it, or maybe they’re manipulatively, exploitively, trying to get what they want.  While sinfulness must be forgiven, supposed manipulativeness mustn’t be.  And this seems to be the entire world as will and representation, since no matter what happens to anyone, the only question that he could honorably ask would be, “Can I change each aspect of my problem?”  No problem could seem to be a social problem if it seems to result from the ineradicably aggressive WILLS of those who cause it, and/or the (possibly masochistic) ignominiously cunning WILLS of those who have it.  Naturally this would lead to rampant depression, but we’d react to it as if the problem is all within the untermenschen.

The World as Will and Representation includes, “Wrong through violence is not so ignominious for the perpetrator as wrong through cunning, because the former is evidence of physical strength, which in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race.  The latter, on the other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays weakness, and at the same time degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral being,” and, “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.”  Here we have the whole rationale for why the German public (who, for the most part, weren’t savage) supported the Nazis, that it was only natural for them to be aggressive in war, that since the stereotypical Jew exercised his own SELF-WILL through intellectual pursuits rather than physical aggression he uses the ignominiously cunning approach instead of this, and that since a society can’t function with all that aggression unimpeded, people must obey authority as “good Germans.”

Of course, it sounds a lot more plausible to hold the weak responsible for believing what they want to, than it does to hold the strong responsible for believing what they want to.  On March 11, 2009, the New York Times ran an article, Financial Fraud Is Focus of Attack by Prosecutors, which includes,

That nearly all of the banking industry acted the same, possibly reckless, way could actually help any executive who lands in court, lawyers said.  The herdlike behavior suggested that bankers were competing for business using widely shared assumptions, rather than trying to get away with a crime.  It would be hard to prove that anyone broke the rules, these lawyers said, since regulations in the riskiest parts of the mortgage industry were so lax.

Of course, one big reason why they were so lax was that the financial firms lobbied for lax regulations, but that’s perfectly legal.  Something else that’s perfectly legal, but would seem suspect if the weak did it, was the financiers’ belief in exactly what they’d want to believe.  Just as those who assertively stand up for their own rights could be accused of wanting to believe that they have these rights and that they have to be taken seriously, these bankers also believed what they wanted to, that the price of houses would keep going up so they could keep getting profits from mortgages that would have been unsafe otherwise.  Yet when the strong believe what they’d naturally want to, we’d have to understand that they really did believe it, but when the weak believe what they’d want to, then that seems to be just another expression of their

 

 

Typical of today’s lower-middle-class populism are the conspiracy theories about why science doesn’t accept laetrile.  In both G. Edward Griffin’s book World Without Cancer, and the video that sums up the first half (the part that mostly isn’t about the conspiracy theories), says,

With billions of dollars spent each year in research, with additional billions taken in from the cancer-related sale of drugs, and with vote-hungry politicians promising ever-increasing government programs, we find that, today, there are more people making a living from cancer than dying from it.  If the riddle were to be solved by a simple vitamin, this gigantic commercial and political industry could be wiped out overnight.  The result is that the science of cancer therapy is not nearly as complicated as the politics of cancer therapy.

Therefore, it seems that when politicians enact laws against laetrile, this is their vote-hungry SELF-WILLS at work.  They seem to fulfill this hunger by enacting expensive government programs, so they must stifle an inexpensive and self-reliant cancer cure.  It also seems that the mass media might be in on the conspiracy.  The mass-media, after all, gets its power from ideas, which could be called ignominiously cunning.

The new introduction, written after Chad Green and Steve McQueen died despite taking laetrile, includes, “It has been suggested that the mass media have decided to ignore Laetrile because, when it did receive national publicity, it became popular.  People decided to give it a try in spite of the negative publicity.  If they had been told they were going to die anyway, why not?”

The new second chapter, about some experiments done on laetrile, includes, “In any event, only Dr. Martin was to know which mice were being treated—or, for that matter, whether any of them were.  Ah, isn’t science wonderful?”  Science, after all, is, like the messages of the mass media, made of abstractions.  They, therefore, are susceptible to cunning.  If it seems that the purpose of this cunning is to get billions of tax dollars, this would be dangerously ignominious cunning.

What this book has to say about the case of Chad Green, is the following:

For example, in 1977, the parents of Chad Green kidnapped their own son and took him to Mexico to avoid being forced by officials in Massachusetts into giving him chemotherapy for his leukemia.  They preferred nutritional therapy instead.  This is part of the heavy price we pay for allowing government the power to decide what is best for us and our families.  When special-interest groups become politically strong enough to write the laws, then it is those groups that tell us what to do—all in the name of protecting us, of course.  The Chad Green story made big headlines but, unfortunately, the same thing involving other children has happened numerous times since then but with only minor news coverage.

Of course, this doesn’t mention the facts that he died of what certainly sounded like the symptoms of cyanide poisoning, and that his parents didn’t get the laetrile treatment simply because they wanted to exercise their freedoms.  The doctors responsible for writing the laws on laetrile seem to be a special interest group exercising their SELF-WILLS.

As William James wrote, Americans tend to classify people as either redbloods or mollycoddles.  Redbloods are those whose strength and toughness powerfully impress the human race in all circumstances, and mollycoddles are the weak who seem ignominiously cunning.  Not only that, since even the most sincere assertiveness that stands up for one’s own rights, would have to reflect his own SELF-WILL in one way or another, what he expects to get (and, therefore, his striving), even that could be deemed mollycoddle manipulation.  Just as if you tried to stop your problem but didn’t try hard enough you’d still seem responsible for it, if you sincerely believe that what happened to you was bad or evil this could still seem to be a manipulative expression of your own SELF-WILL.  Every society has to get its homeostasis from somewhere, and your society gets its from your courageously changing what you can and serenely accepting what you can’t.

 

(Nazi posters about the WILL, saying “Through military will to military strength,” “One battle, one will, one goal: Victory at any cost!,” and “National Socialism—the organized will of the nation,” along with a poster for the classic Nazi film Triumph of the Will)

 

Sure, when one person causes a problem for another by doing something that would qualify as “bad,” “evil,” “sinful,” etc., chances are that the victim would see the moral responsibility of the person who caused the problem, as high.  Chances are even greater that since the person who caused the problem is the sort of person that would cause it, he’d see his own moral responsibility as low.  Both of these could equally be attributed to the person’s SELF-WILL.  It could be only natural to take what’s wrong with the sinful person’s WILL, more seriously than we’d take what’s wrong with the victim’s WILL.  Yet, as could be seen in both Schopenhauer and, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” we’re far more likely to take the victims’ SELF-WILL seriously, than we are to take seriously the SELF-WILLS of those who cause the problems.  Those who cause the problems played the ACTIVE part, so they’re very likely to seem impressive, red-blooded, while the victims were PASSIVE, so they’re very likely to seem ignominiously cunning, mollycoddle.  It would seem that we must protect the freedom of the ACTIVE people, from our judgmental opinions, and moral responsibility is subjective.  Their SELF-WILLS would be accepted along the lines of, “Oh, well, that’s just the way that sinful human nature is.”  It would seem horrific if you insisted that they choose to replace their sinful desires with serenity, unless these desires are hurting themselves (and even then, we’d dare not count on this working).  The more strength and freedom that we’d give to the übermenschen, the more strength and freedom that we’d give to intrepid achievement, and that’s GOOD.

On the other hand, to hold the PASSIVE people response-able for their own welfare, would seem to encourage self-help, self-efficacy, self-empowerment, self-reliance, self-responsibility, self-motivation, anti-moralism, etc.  If one doesn’t operate along the lines of whatever his society’s socioeconomic realities are, he can’t be productive, conscientious, honorable, adequate, etc.  For example, someone said on a blog of the Orlando Sentinel, under the name “Justin Credible,” said, “Feeding the homeless only encourages more homelessness.”  Those who believe in that sort of self-reliance, incentive to work and achieve, etc., would probably be most likely to succeed, and impress others with their exciting gutsiness, even if programs to feed the homeless don’t encourage homelessness.

Such quotes of Jesus such as Matthew 5:43-48, from the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust....  You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” say that we mustn’t let our untermensch feelings come naturally.  Amber Frey originally thought that she’d become a self-help guru, and the book she ended up writing, Witness, For the Prosecution of Scott Peterson, quotes Matthew 5:38-45, which includes the stuff about turning the other cheek, and a few paragraphs later, says that when she was asked whether she forgave Scott, she answered, “I forgave him a long time ago,” and, “I don’t think I had a choice.  Until I forgave Scott, I felt I couldn’t move forward.  I felt I wasn’t free to get on with my life.”

The Nazi Conscience, by Claudia Koonz, tells of how, just as any cultural conditioning defines what people’s consciences treat as GOOD and BAD, Nazi propaganda shaped this into seeing loyalty to Aryans as GOOD, and disloyalty to them as BAD.  The Nazi Conscience calls this an “ethnic fundamentalism,” since the racism was as dogmatic as fundamentalism.  Sure, as this says, “A comparison of antisemitic acts and attitudes toward Jews in the popular press of Germany and four European nations (France, Great Britain, Italy, and Romania) from 1899 through 1939 demonstrates that Germans, before 1933, were among the least antisemitic people,” but after “good Germans” got enough social pressures to conform, they wouldn’t give much resistance to their government’s anti-Semitism.  When German Jews were merely excluded from much of society, many non-Jewish Germans naturally felt sorry for them, but Nazi propaganda warned that such pity gave Jews what modern self-help philosophy would call a manipulative “victim-power.”  In order for an intellectual to have seemed acceptable, he had to say that he agreed with all of this strange ideology.

Yet to illustrate this ethnic fundamentalism, the book gives an example of some American racism, written by none other than L. Frank Baum, which very clearly reflects exactly the sort of übermensch-exalting that really gave Nazism its emotional pull:

The nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them...  The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.  Why not annihilation?  Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they should die than live like the miserable wretches that they are.

As Schopenhauer wrote, the entire human race tends to see military strength, as “nobility” and “glory.”  This isn’t really racism, in that it doesn’t attribute any negative character traits to Native Americans’ genes.  The whole idea is that previously they came across as übermenschen, but currently they came across as untermenschen.

All you’d have to do is remove the genocidal racial discrimination, and you’d have just the sort of gutsiness that the Reagan Era made very popular.  If a pundit talked like that on the radio, he could have exactly the aggressive excitement that Savage Nation pundits go for.  The stronger you are, the more likely you are to have what’s exciting, pro-freedom, übermensch, red-blooded, self-reliant, etc., on your side.

No matter how much helplessness such aggression causes, it would seem pro-freedom.  Rather than accepting annihilation, that would accept rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc.  Those radio programs would have an exciting appeal to them, no matter who ends up getting hurt by the aggression.  And no matter how savage the “Savage Nation” pundits may get, anyone who’d dare to act like a victim of such ideology would necessarily be labeled as ignoble and inglorious, and maybe intentionally manipulative!

That sort of ethos could also seem vital to society.  As long as it seems that übermensch equals good and untermensch equals bad, we could be sure that those who try to get what they want by earning achieving or winning it, would seem GOOD, and those who try to get what they want by proving that they deserve more than what they won, which at the very least would reflect their own SELF-WILLS, would seem BAD.  It could seem vital that this is done with the same dogmatic quality as fundamentalism, since if we allowed anyone to get what he wants by proving that his victimhood entitles him to it, then naturally people who are good at sophistry would get what they want like this.  That’s how market discipline, disciplines.  Everyone must have the incentive to keep trying.  It would also seem that the more faith that you had that all would get whatever they deserve, the better.  Sure, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” admits that what’s in question could just as easily be hardship and/or sinfulness ad infinitum, but after “good Americans” get enough social pressures to conform to the Serenity Prayer, they wouldn’t give much resistance to that moral bankruptcy and its consequences.  No matter how high our rate of depression may get, attempts to counter it would seem untermensch (i.e. weak), manipulative (i.e. ignominiously cunning and WILLFUL), controlling (i.e. against the impressive strong), etc.  If the weak have a manipulative “victim-power,” that would give the unworthy a strength that the worthy couldn’t honorably defend themselves from.  Sure, this conception of what’s GOOD and what’s BAD, is extremely banal and unquestionable, but this provides homeostasis for our society, in a way that those who provide the homeostasis have great motivation to do so as effectively as they could!  A society’s homeostasis can’t be conditional, or depend on personal responsibility being profound.