This could look a lot like Fr. James Foley’s thinking.  You’d be able to cope with sinfulness better if you don’t care what the rules say.  In fact, if you did care about the rules, or maybe even the destructive consequences, you could get all sorts of negative labels, as if you’re legalistic, self-righteous, bitter and resentful, manipulative and guilt-tripping, controlling and repressive, etc.  And chances are that once the morally responsible person caused the problem, he’d be completely helpless to turn back the clock and undo what he did, whereas probably you wouldn’t really be helpless, since you could still solve your problem.  He could say that he didn’t take the rules literally, which can mean all sorts of things, and, of course, you don’t want to look like a literalist.  He could insist that expecting normal give-and-take from him is manipulative, “I gave and therefore you owe me,” and, of course, you don’t want to look like a manipulator, etc.  Complete moral bankruptcy would mean that you’d courageously change whatever you can and want or need to, and serenely accept whatever you can’t, without any concern about what was morally right and wrong, and that could make you most likely to succeed.

Another pedo-priest, whom normal priest James Gschwend said is not well, “I’m sorry it happened, but I did everything I could to encourage him to get counseling,” is Fr. John Powell.

He started to abuse one girl when she was twelve years old.  Another girl he abused, when she was seventeen years old, said that thirty years later she wrote to him about this, and he wrote back.  “He told me that it was to awaken my sexual identity and because I was vulnerable and naïve and he was well known and spoke about love, I was overrun.”  How he spoke about love was that he wrote several self-help books about relationships, including one titled Happiness Is an Inside Job.

Sure, to say that happiness is an inside job, isn’t necessarily morally bankrupt.  The person could be in a morally neutral situation, and to say that he’s responsible for his own state of mind would also be morally neutral.  But, then again, “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,” doesn’t necessarily mean accepting hardship and/or others’ sinfulness, either.  Yet when what the person must deal with, is hardship, sinfulness, or anything else, then that’s what he must serenely accept, in that happiness is an inside job.  Naturally someone who’d molest vulnerable and naïve girls, would want to hold that happiness is an inside job, in a very overgeneralized and global sense.  That would also make unhappiness an inside job, not just in situations that could be called life’s unavoidable imperfections, but also in situations of hardship and/or sinfulness.  The victims would seem to be the ones who have the problems.  Plus, anyone who’s that childish is probably suggestible enough that he often could choose to feel giddy.  To say that no matter what makes about 5% to 7% of our adults have a serious mental illness, and about 5% to 9% of our children have a serious emotional disturbance, is also saying that happiness is an inside job, that no matter what problems happened outside the person, if his internal chemical imbalances are taken care of, then his problem is taken care of.

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

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

The webpage Living with a Sociopath Partner - You’re not Crazy, says, “In projection, a characteristic of themselves that they find just too painful to accept is projected onto us.  And the most frequently projected characteristic is mental illness.  ‘I don’t have a personality disorder.  YOU have a personality disorder.’  Another common and difficult defense mechanism is blame shifting.  It’s your fault this happened because blah, blah blah blah...  And explanations can be vehemently delivered.”  And it should be pretty obvious that the crux of the victim’s supposed personality disorder, would be resentment and/or inadequate response-ability for his own welfare.  He’d seem to want the world to be as he’d have it.  If what happened was his fault, then this, also, would have to be due to his painful and weak emotions, and/or lack of response-ability for his own problems.

A good example of how a manipulative religious group, is a statement from the Christ of the Hills Monastery in New Sarov, Blanco, Texas, an “ecumenical” monastery that patterns itself after Eastern Orthodox tradition.  It has had such a history of molesting boys,

and, beginning in 1985, admittedly faking a miracle of a supposedly crying icon of the Virgin Mary, that Mark Long, an attorney for one of the molested males, wonders what was the real reason for setting up the monastery.  The state of Texas, certainly very careful about interfering with legitimate religion, filed a seizure notice against the entire monastery, since it was the site of repeated crimes.  The monastery had made the following statement about their “miracle” icon before they admitted that it’s a fake:

...The Monks do not believe that the Mother of God is weeping because she is happy.  Rather, they see her tears as a sign of distress over how far we have all gone from Christ.  Certainly, the current world situation, and the sad absence of the kind of life Christ calls Christians to lead in His Holy Gospels, are enough to cause our Holy Mother to weep.  They see her call as a call to repentance, prayer, fasting and change of life—from a worldly way of living to a Divine one...

The Call of the Mother of God:

1) Daily Repentance, Weekly Confession

2) Fasting (Wednesday and Friday)

3) Ceaseless Prayer (see The Way of a Pilgrim)

4) Love God, Love Neighbor.  Live the Gospel of Jesus Christ

5) Refrain From all Judgment

Naturally pervs would want us to refrain from all judgment.  Sure, all that stuff about “distress over how far we have all gone from Christ,” is judgmental, but that seems to be God’s right.  Also, you could bet that this faked miracle could have attracted that many donors for that long, if tried to inspire satisfied rather than guilty feelings.

The material for the “Sexual Aggression: Awareness, Prevention and Intervention Program” given by the Arkansas Department of Correction, says, “Wolfgang and Ferracuti in The Subculture of Violence (1967), suggest that a violent subculture in our society exists with its own set of values and norms.  Norm adoption in this deviant society is the same as for society at large; a psychological process of establishing one’s membership by demonstrating those attributes deemed desirable by the culture.  In the case of the subculture in question, the norms are markedly different from generally accepted social norms.  The attributes most valued are violence, dominance through physical aggression, and a rejection of legitimate authority.  Just as other cultures offer rewards and sanctions for certain behavior, so also does the subculture in question reward and censure its members.  The rewards in question are a dark simile of the prestige and social stature accorded to those who succeed within the confines of legitimate social convention.”

Sure this simile doesn’t make everything literally the same.  Legitimate social convention praises honest achievement, while the violent subculture would figure that it’s for suckers.  Yet the basic ideas, which prioritize independent strength, are so similar that the end results of both could be very similar.  The end result of the permissiveness of the two most explicit lines of the entire unredacted Serenity Prayer, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” would be about the same as the end result of permissiveness that actually respects the sinful behavior.  Moral responsibility seems to be a luxury, while one’s own gutsy responsibility for his own welfare, his own problems, seems to be a necessity.  Not only that, the weak could seem a lot more dangerous than the strong do, as could be seen in “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” as if the victim and not the sinner is the one with the presumptuous willfulness.  And, of course, one mustn’t be a sucker to that whining.  As in the violent subculture, praise goes to the winners and scorn to the losers.  Both promote their cultural norms and values, in the usual ways.

Added to this is the fact that pro-freedom magical thinking tends to distort events in the same ways that the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression do, and conditions like sociopathy require exactly this magical thinking.  This magical thinking, no matter who engages in it, must think in all-or nothing overgeneralized terms, with a mental filter and disqualifying the positive.  If these pro-freedom principles were partial conditional compromising or on a case-by-case basis, or would credit what’s right about those who’d object, then whoever could come up with persuasive sophistry to prove that he really was a victim, would win.  Someone who wants to believe in this conception of “freedom,” which is actually license, would have to jump to conclusions, minimize moral responsibility and magnify victims’ response-ability for their own welfare, believe what he feels like believing, see how everyone including the victims should act more like redbloods, label and mislabel events according to how they’d fit in with these “pro-freedom” ideals, and attribute the consequences to the victims’ inadequacies and failures in taking care of themselves.  That’s what seems productive, constructive, well-adjusted, etc.

One example of this pro-freedom magical thinking, which didn’t come from sociopathy or addictive thinking, was that of Dr. Thomas Szasz.  Though in the 1960s and 1970s his thinking that mental illness is just a myth was popular among jejune anti-intellectual liberals, nowadays, since so much research has now proven the physical realities of psychiatric disorders, those who’d have the greatest affinity with him would be jejune anti-intellectual conservatives.  His thinking very much fits the mold of pro-freedom magical thinking, which extraordinarily free-spirited good ol’ boys would naturally love.  And if a problem this common is seen as the social problem that it is, naturally liberals would see that it does exist, and conservatives would need to believe that it doesn’t.  Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s book on suicide, Night Falls Fast, quotes a paragraph of his, to show his zeitgeist.  This ends with, “If we refuse, however, to play a part in the drama of coercive suicide prevention, then we shall be sorely tempted to conclude that the psychiatrist and his suicidal patient richly deserve one another and the torment each is so ready and eager to inflict on the other.”

Here, you could see those cognitive distortions.  This one sentence involves three mis-labels, which are very typical for modern Western distortions.  The first is that “coercive suicide prevention” is a “drama” that the participants “play a part in,” as if those who must have someone committed to prevent suicide, are just satisfying a perverse desire for very consequential drama.  Those diagnosed as codependent, also, would seem to want their marriages to be very consequential dramas for them to play their parts in.  Secondly, the psychiatrist, by diagnosing the suicidal patient as insane, seems to be “ready and eager to inflict” torment on him, since this would seem anti-freedom.  And thirdly, the patient seems to be “ready and eager to inflict” torment on the doctor, though the patient didn’t choose to be suicidal.

These labels can’t be partial conditional compromising or on a case-by-case basis, or credit what’s right about those who’d object, since to say that diagnoses should be relatively hesitant to treat someone as insane wouldn’t wave the flag of pro-freedom, and would allow those who’d come up with persuasive sophistry, to win.  That certainly jumps to conclusions, minimizes moral responsibility and magnifies the responsibility to be pro-freedom, engages in emotional reasoning, sees how everyone including the victims should act more like redbloods, labels and mislabels events according to how they’d fit in with these “pro-freedom” ideals, and personalizes the outcome as if such expectations are what decide whether each person is good or bad.

The following AA slogans, the ideal of modern self-help philosophy, also reflect pro-freedom magical thinking:

• “We are all victims of victims.”

• “There are no victims, just volunteers.”

• “The people we hate teach us the most.”

• “I don’t have a problem unless I think I do.”

• “Everything is perception.”

• “Your beliefs create your reality.”

• “Choice, not chance, determines destiny.”

• “Stay out of your head—there’s no adult supervision there.”

• “The only requirement for serenity is a desire to stop thinking.”

• “There’s no one too dumb for this program, but it’s possible to be too smart.”
   

It would seem that if amoralism became de rigueur everything would turn out in the end, since those who have the problems would deal with them wholeheartedly.  What doesn’t break them makes them stronger.  The victims’ failings are the only real dangers.  The magic of anti-intellectualism, is that our absolutist conceptions of the prestige and social stature that go to strength, don’t get analyzed in relative terms.  It seems that analyses and relativities are for eggheads.

 

In these slogans, which the mainstream figures would benefit just about everyone, you could see the same pattern.  If these judgments passed on the weak, were partial conditional compromising or on a case-by-case basis, or credited what’s right about those who’d object, just think of all the whining this would allow, etc.

The main difference between use and abuse of victim correction, is whether the intent is to help the victim become more pragmatic honorable and/or forgiving, or to help the sociopath have a rationalization.  Often enough, abuse means de rigueur amoralism in the first person, “You must understand what I did,” while use means de rigueur amoralism in the third person, “You must understand what he did, since if you did you’d be more likely to succeed, closer to American ideals of strong perseverance, and more well-adjusted and forgiving.”  It’s only natural that people who’d figure, “Sure, what I did violates some rules which are supposed to prevent harm, but you should act as if they don’t exist,” would also be very likely to figure, “Sure, what he did violates some rules which are supposed to prevent harm, but you should act as if they don’t exist, since that way you won’t feel resentment, be impractical victim-posturing moralistic or repressive, etc.”  Also, to look at social problems along the lines of how each victim could empower himself, would make many Americans look as blameworthy as the magical thinkers think that they are.  To say that all those diagnosed as codependent want to make their own lives into very consequential dramas in which they’d play their parts, sounds a lot more self-empowering than is a belief that those involved in having suicidal people committed aren’t refusing to play their parts in very consequential dramas, though both of these beliefs would see many Americans as having a perverse desire for something very destructively mollycoddle.

To some degree this is what comes naturally to those who don’t have much moral sense.  Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd tells of, “that indifference to fate that, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.”  Yet naturally a person made sinful by his indifference, would also want to abuse this, under the presumption that your indifference to others’ sinfulness would make you sublime.  Victim correction as a panacea lets sociopaths and addictive personalities join the side of the angels, since the angels would hold that finding blame is bad, guilt-trips can be so powerful they’re dangerous, etc.  During the sentencing phase of Terry Nichols’ trial for conspiracy in 160 killings, for which he got life in prison because of his conversion to devout Christianity, his lead defense attorney Brian Hermanson said, “Terry Nichols asked for you all to keep in their prayers everyone who has suffered a loss and hope that all people can recover from the hate and the fear that has resulted from the Oklahoma City bombing.”  Yes, I’ll bet he did.

Of course, sometimes it would be hard to tell the difference between abuse of victim correction, and that which aims to make things correct.  As The Smartest Guys in the Room says, “Yet from the beginning through the bitter the end, Andersen took the position that virtually everyone involved in the Enron scandal to one degree or another would embrace.  Arthur Andersen claimed it was a victim—a victim of an unjust, politically-motivated prosecution and a victim of Enron itself.... precious few were willing to concede that they did anything wrong.”  And that’s why, especially according to Enron’s self-righteous Social Darwinism, it seemed acceptable to play the victim role, that their defensiveness is defending their own rights against a supposed political campaign targeting the Darwinism.  It could seem very principled to say that unless one could prove such things as a malicious intent or a violation of the technicalities of the law, he’d better not be very accusatory.  Enron even had an in-house memo pad on which appeared an inspirational quote of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”  Enron’s laissez faire attitude could say that the principles that would let them get away with it, are what matter, even in this profound sense.  Real Americans find the cowboy spirit, especially what it considers to be profound, very attractive and rousing.  That’s why Ronnie Reagan has been so popular.

It could also seem very principled, very achievement-oriented, to at least excuse Enron’s optimistic assertions, even those made by Ken Lay just before Enron’s bankruptcy which got a question from his audience of, “I would like to know if you are on crack.  If so that would explain a lot.  If not, you may want to start because it’s going to be a long time before we trust you again.”  He seemed to believe what he was saying.  Of course, that would also make him very unreliable, and sure enough, that’s the kind of responsibility he took recently.  On Larry King Live, July 12, 2004, Larry asked him, “As a CEO, does the Truman doctrine apply, the buck stops here?...,” and he answered, “Well, the buck stops here from this standpoint, Larry.  And I’ve said, I take responsibility for what happened at Enron, both good and bad.  But I cannot take responsible—responsibility for criminal conduct that I was unaware of.”  So what seems to be the good kind of personal responsibility is the kind that Dr. David Burns called “Personalization,” “You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.”; you could have taken care of things better, so gutsy maturity means taking responsibility for them.  Lay very likely would be as likely to figure, “You must understand what he did, since if you did you’d be more likely to succeed, closer to American ideals of strong perseverance, and more well-adjusted and forgiving,” as Lay would be to figure, “You must understand what I did.”

When it comes to his moral responsibility, though, despite the fact that the cooking of Enron’s books was quite widespread and their auditors were in on it as if going along with it meant going along with their customer, it could seem that we don’t have enough proof that he must have known.  In fact, Conspiracy of Fools says that even after Andy Fastow’s fraud and incompetencies were known, as Lay was trying to sell Chuck Watson on his company merging with Enron, Lay told him, “The only reason our share price has fallen so far, the only reason we’ve had recent problems, is because of short sellers and the media.”  The book then says, “Watson studied Lay.  His voice was strong and emphatic.  Lay either believed everything he was saying, Watson thought, or was the most accomplished liar he had ever met.”  Yet any house-of-cards company with “the right attitude” could honorably play the victim role, since “the right attitude” would mean seeing any problems as things that can be overcome, and those who’d be holding the company responsible could be labeled as whiny and/or manipulative mollycoddles.  When Lay didn’t immediately respond after Sherron Watkins first gave him her “implode in a wave of accounting scandals” memo, she showed it to an executive, who responded, “I’ll tell you, Ken gravitates toward good news.  It’s one of his greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses.”  It wouldn’t take much of “the right attitude” for anyone judging Kenny-boy to conclude that since his tendency to deceive himself about bad things has such a great potential to give strength, we should accept it since it wasn’t proven guilty.

Robert Lee Willie was one of the death-row inmates on whom Dead Man Walking was based, the one who looked like Sean Penn.

 

 

Before Willie and his partner in crime, Joseph Vaccaro, killed a woman who they kidnapped and raped, they kidnapped and raped another young woman, Debbie Morris, and let her go.  Sister Helen Prejean began her endorsement of Morris’ book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking, with,  “What an incredible story!  What kind of 16-year-old woman is this who could so personally engage her abductors that they felt obliged to return her safely home?”  Yet what this really means is that this strong-spirited woman appealed to sociopaths, and this was her saving grace.  And what appeals to sociopaths is an all-American-style strong character.  Dead Man Walking quotes Willie as saying to Sr. Prejean, “...but I do trust you.  You’re a fighter. I can’t stand people that act like victims.  That’s why I don’t much like niggers. They’re always actin’ like somebody owes ’em somethin’.  Not just niggers.  Chinks and spics, too,” and, about blacks, “Slavery’s long over.  They keep harpin’ on what a bad deal they’ve had.  I can’t stand people that make themselves out to be victims.”  Personally engaging someone like that, would require that one have guts, and would forgive monsters whenever this would be pragmatic.  This anathematizing of people who make themselves out to be victims, is the sort of secular ideal that Enron’s traders would consider to be among the “things that matter.”

The above quote from “Forgiving Monsters,” is quoted in Morris’ book.  One could also say that by pragmatic standards the personal engagement was good, since it made the difference between success and failure, life and death.  If one wants to be an Angel On Death Row like Sr. Prejean, both forgiving monsters and being personally engaging to them would also be useful, but this wouldn’t be the pragmatism that self-help books praise.  When Sr. Prejean forgives monsters, it isn’t to achieve the goal of not giving them the power to have a stranglehold on their victims.  The back cover of Forgiving the Dead Man Walking, published by the Zondervan religious publishing house, says, “In one incredible act of grace, SHE FORGAVE HIM,” though spiritual grace is actually Sr. Prejean’s motive for forgiveness (though in practical terms, if Morris didn’t forgive Willie, the power that he’d have to get a stranglehold on her, her sentence of a lifetime of unhealed pain, and the evil kept alive in her heart, certainly would have been ungraceful, and not only to sociopaths who hate those who act like victims). This is the sort of spiritual ideal that Enron’s traders would consider to be among the “things that matter.”

In the March/April, 2003 issue of The Angolite prison magazine, an inmate writes, “In a perfect world there would be no victims, no overwhelming pain caused by a critical moment’s disregard for the dignity or life of others,” but in this imperfect world, “the acknowledgement of human weakness that fosters forgiveness and redemption is all too often subdued by self-righteousness or indifference.”  Of course, in a perfect world there would be no crime, too.  Also, criminals certainly weren’t independent from the victims, when the criminals committed the crimes.  It would, of course, be fair for a criminal who genuinely has resolved not to commit any more crimes, to act as if in the here and now, he’s the helpless one, helpless to turn back time and undo what he did in the past.  After all, whenever non-criminal sinners defend their actions like this, even if they aren’t wholeheartedly remorseful, self-help psychology would insist that those who don’t accept that are self-righteous, indifferent to what really matters, etc.  (The open secret is that Jesus didn’t take this sinful world as it is; he required repentance, but commanded mere mortals to take this sinful world as it is.)  Yet for inmates to have as their ideal that victims’ concerns wouldn’t exist, really isn’t any different from organizations in which the members predominantly have addictive personalities, having as their ideal that victims’ concerns wouldn’t exist.  If such an organization were to attempt to re-engineer human nature, re-engineering solely this area of human nature would seem the most desirable and the least objectionable.  As the New Testament would put it, what we’re supposed to feel toward sinners is agápè, an unconditional love that we feel because we discipline ourselves to, rather than philos, brotherly love which comes naturally and is deserved,  As long as we feel agápè toward sinners, the world will be a lot more serene, and that would get rid of strife.

Your Mental Health says that if you have Antisocial Personality Disorder, “Glib rationalizations justify everything you do—you blame your victims for being so stupid or helpless and claim that they had it coming.  ‘If I didn’t do it, someone else would.’”  Yet that’s what self-help for women victimized by butthead lovers or husbands, and any other form of Doctrine of Original Sin, Over Person, says.  The only way that such problem could be solved through self-help is for each woman to pray for wisdom and courage as if that’s what she’ lacking, and to figure that since each involvement with a butthead is her self-defeating tendencies causing her own problems, if she wasn’t involved with that particular butthead, she’d have been involved with another who’d have done the same thing to her.  If the men solved the problem, that wouldn’t be self-help.  John Walsh’s book No Mercy quotes Detective Bernard Tracy of the Westfield, New Jersey police department, obviously familiar with criminal types, as saying about family annihilator John List, “He’s the type that could stick a guy in the oven and say, ‘boy, it’s hot in here,’” and self-help books are the type that, if someone stuck a guy in the oven, would say to him, “Boy, it’s hot in here, so what are you going to do about it?”  (Of course, if the violent husband had committed exactly the same violence outside the home, the more violent he is, the more that it would seem that he should be locked up permanently as a career criminal, but violence in the home gets treated along the lines of the Doctrine of Original Sin, where the more violent he is, the more that it would seem that his wife must serenely accept that he is that way and courageously change where she lives, which would cause her a lot of problems and would eliminate violence only until he manipulates another woman into marrying him.)

Beyond Tolerance, Child Pornography On The Internet, by Philip Jenkins, says about “neutralization,” a consciously intended minimization of moral responsibility that tends to be characteristic of all destructively deviant subcultures, “A criminal act such as a robbery can be justified by a number of excuses or denial techniques, such as the denial of responsibility (‘It’s not my fault’); the denial of injury (‘They can afford it’); denial of the victim (‘They had it coming’); condemnation of the condemners (‘The police are bigger crooks than I am’); and the appeal to higher loyalties (‘The gang is my life’).”  Beyond Tolerance also says, “Struck by the conventionality of many deviants, criminologists noticed how their subjects rationalized or justified actions that, in essence, they knew to be wrong,” so neutralization is a machination to obfuscate endogenous negativity, while minimization minimizes exogenous negativity because everyone knows that’s a good thing to do.  Jenkins writes about pervs’ expressions of outrage at a serial killer of children, “I tend to take these affirmations at face value rather than as neutralization,” but if you don’t take minimizations at face value, you’d seem resentful.

Enron’s acting like “a victim of an unjust, politically-motivated prosecution,” such as Ken Lay saying in a press conference about his indictment, “I have a feeling those things are being done not, not necessarily by the President or anybody around the President, but probably by others that, you know, feel that it’s a good thing to keep stirring up,” is certainly a “condemnation of the condemners.”  This is the sort of pro-freedom sentiment that the pervs are trying to lay claim to.  Condemning the condemners would seem to be the only self-respecting way that Lay, et. al., could respond.  (As Lay began the press conference, he said, “As CEO of the company, I accept responsibility for Enron’s collapse, as I’ve said before.  However, that does not mean I knew everything that happened at Enron and I firmly reject any notion that I engaged in any wrongful or criminal activity,” though if he thinks he’d have to know everything in order to spot any of the frauds, that might seem more unforgivable than would the crimes!)

As I mention on webpage #1 of this summary, if you must deal with a situation that someone else caused, and that’s bad enough, you must apply the same neutralization to what happens to you, that organized sociopathy applies to their own behavior.  Whenever possible you’re to have an attitude of, “It’s not his fault,” since his premeditation probably wasn’t evil, and minimizing the malice would make you more serene.  An attitude of, “Oh, well, I can afford it,” would also make you more serene.  An attitude of, “I had it coming,” would let you see how you should change your self-protective tactics.  Otherwise it’s irrelevant whether you had it coming, since the whys and hows of how something came don’t matter, only the whys and hows of changing what already came, and you’d always seem responsible for not changing your physical problem and/or emotional strife.  A condemnation of the condemner would also be changing what you can, yourself, and would be condemning resentment and weakness.  On the other hand, condemning sinfulness would seem utopian mollycoddle and judgmental.  An attitude of, “Dedication to self-responsibility is my life,” would be loyal to American values that Americans tend to take more seriously than most moral values.  Beyond Tolerance also quotes pervs posting in perv newsgroups, as “Marion [a nine-year-old girl photographed being sexually abused and these photos were then circulated on the Internet among pervs] will become a darling of the ‘victim’ culture...,” and, in response to a fellow perv thinking that another little girl in kiddie porn was being pinned down, “ ‘Someone’ needs to go get some new glasses and a life.”

And sometimes sociopaths’ dismissiveness, the dismissiveness of non-sociopaths who want to minimize sociopathic behavior, and what would seem to constitute mental health, converge. Ukrainian Catholic Bishop Basil Losten of Stamford, Connecticut, responded to the founding of the Connecticut chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, “It is my firm belief that a new chapter of your organization is not needed in our state at this time.  The adversarial atmosphere that currently exists is not conducive to healing.”  That’s also what the pervs would say, that the less that people care about what they do, the less strife they’ll cause.  But what’s really worthy of notice is this conception of “healing,” and, therefore, mental health, as getting rid of objections.  After all, when most people go to psychologists, it’s to change attitudes on which their strife depends, not to discover what really means what.  If you think that child molestation means a lot, then your adversarialism is not conducive to healing.  Actually, the adversarial atmosphere isn’t just a bunch of gratuitous resentment.  This comes from behavior that truly was objectionable.  Serene acceptance of it might lead to placidity in the short term, but would require dishonesty with oneself, and would only allow for more to happen in the long term.

The webpage EMOTIONAL THOUGHT STOPPING (A Mood Enhancing Exercise), tells all those millions of depressed Americans, “Each year over 17 million people in the United States are depressed. Of those fewer than 30% get help! Each year over 30,000 people in the United States commit suicide,” to deal with their problems pragmatically by stopping any thoughts that could make them feel depressed.  This webpage also says, “Misuse of Emotional Thought Stopping may be harmful, but so is untreated depression,” no doubt meaning that any sociopath who wants unquestioning acceptance could tell you to stop any thoughts that object to anything he does.  You could see this same pattern in what would constitute self-helping use of victim correction as a panacea, as versus the abuse of the pragmatic de rigueur amoralism to evade responsibility for destructive behavior:

• Use of victim correction means victims praying for the ability to accept any hardship sinfulness and surrender that they can’t change, because the serenity that this would give them is pragmatic.  Abuse means sociopaths saying that if the victims don’t accept the sociopaths’ sinfulness then the problem is that the victims are resentful.
   

• Use means victims focusing their attention on how they could most productively handle their own problems, because this is what “works.”  Abuse means sociopaths acting as if it isn’t their fault that the consequences of what they did turned out so bad since the victims could have gotten better control of them.
   

• Use means victims doing their best to be honorably stolid and self-reliant.  Abuse means sociopaths blaming victims’ objections on their weak spirits, blaming consequences that were worse than they had to be on the victims’ not having the resolve that would have increased their measure of success, and figuring that they themselves meet Nietzschian ideals of strength.
   

• Use means victims trying to live up to the ideal of forgiveness.  Abuse means sociopaths acting like passive victims of the victims’ unforgiving attitude and the sociopaths’ sinful natures-destinies.
   

• Use means victims neutralizing what happened to them including their own undeserved helplessness, since that positive outlook would go against their playing a pathetic, passive role.  Abuse means sociopaths neutralizing what they did including their victims’ undeserved helplessness, since that positive inlook would make themselves feel better.
   

• Use means an attitude that it’s bad to think in a way that would appeal to a “victim” mentality, and it’s good to get a life rather than distracting yourself finding blame and finger-pointing, since these are productive and red-blooded.  Abuse means sociopaths condemning their condemners as being of the mentality of a “victim” culture, and as finger-pointing rather than getting a life, since this would make themselves feel better.
   

• Use means “There are no victims, only volunteers,” and “It takes two to tango,” so in a very overgeneralized sense, those romantically involved with addicts or their functional equivalents are active participants and may have sought out codependent relationships.  Abuse means, in the words of Beyond Tolerance, that among pervs, “children are commonly assumed to have consented to the actions or directly to have sought sex, so the experience is consensual.”

That webpage also says about thought-stopping to treat depression,  “You may have been exposed to the procedure if you are familiar with the bible, and some modern therapists use its concepts.”  The Biblical writing which most describes such though-stopping is the Prayer of Saint Francis, since this says that someone who acts as an instrument, simply supplants perturbed feelings with serene feelings.

Beyond Tolerance quotes a newsgroup poster who is a perv but doesn’t seem to like this fact, as writing to a perv newsgroup, “don’t waste time deluding yourself with how your rights might have been violated... you are the invader of others rights.”  The same could be said to all of those who act as if they’re the victims of their condemners’ judgmentalism, guilt-tripping, (truthfully) saying “You owe me!”, expecting this sinful world to be as they’d have it, etc., when these aren’t machinations contrived to manipulate.

And let’s not forget the oxymoron “passive-aggressive,” the use of which can very easily be passive-aggressive itself, since it makes victims look like scheming victimizers and therefore the sinners would seem to be hapless victims of the scheming.

 

Go to Page 23

 

 

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Men Dying for Love

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The Main Victim Correction as a Panacea

 Documentation On the Social Problem of Unnaturally Rampant Depression

 Standard Rationales for Victim Correction as a Panacea

 Schopenhauer on Predators

 Emphasis on Victim-Self-Blaming

Out Of The Same Mold As Enron

Message for Intellectuals in the Islamic World

Candace Newmaker’s Experience

Breaking Important Confidences for Your Own Good

A Glimpse Into the Soul of Victim Correction

Cigarette Industry and Victim Correction

Niebuhr’s Ideas on Our Nature and Destiny

Herbal Experiences for Women

Some Ideas for Rapport

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