And What Science Can
Do About It
And What Science Can
Do About It
#23
“Man’s task in life is to give birth to himself, to become... what he potentially is.”—Erich Fromm, Man
s Alexander Pope wrote, Christian spirituality says, “To err is human, to forgive divine,” while Eastern spirituality would say that to forgive and not to err are divine, and would give equal emphasis to the serenity that would lead one to feel contented while resisting temptation, and the courage to live up to his responsibilities to others. To Westerners, to say “to forgive divine” would seem to be for self-determination, while to say “not to err divine” would seem to be against self-determination, though to have one’s innermost feelings directed really does deprive one of self-determination more than does directing one’s behavior that affects others. Christian spirituality gives a particular responsibility to victims that Eastern spirituality doesn’t.
The American Pharmaceutical Association’s Highlights newsletter for July, 1999, says, “Depression is so prevalent it has been called ‘the common cold’ of mental health disorders. But this serious disease is nothing to sneeze at: Depression leads to more deaths every year than AIDS, costs the nation as much as coronary heart disease, and causes incalculable misery for people of all ages, races and ethnic groups.... Myth #1: Depression is a sign of moral weakness or personal failure. ‘Depression is a disease that results from biochemical disturbances in the brain,’ said Dr. Stokes. ‘It is not a character flaw and not something you can get over by pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.’ Patients also should know that depression is not their fault.”
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? With all that depression, we sure are concerned about the possible insidious untermensch character flaws of those who have the depression, unconcerned about the real übermensch character flaws of those who cause the excessive depression! We’re told to trust Christian morality, but it obviously lives by its own rules, which have nothing to do with the threshold of human endurance!”
No, all this doesn’t seem to consist of millions of rather severe character flaws, but millions of rather severe medical conditions. You’d think that this much depression is among the biological diseases that are just parts of the natural order. Such writings on depression never go into how important it is that this, for the most part, is a social problem. Such statements on depression are too busy talking about how the victims could correct something or other inside of themselves, since this is the pragmatic, self-reliant, and forgiving way to solve problems.
Another interpretation of Christian spirituality is the Prayer of Saint Francis, which says, “Lord, make me an instrument of your Peace. Where there is hatred, Let me sow Love. Where there is injury, Pardon. Where there is doubt, Faith. Where there is despair, Hope. Where there is darkness, Light. Where there is sadness, Joy.”
In other words, peace is to be achieved by acting as mechanistic instruments which supplant even the most well-founded hatred, awareness of injury, doubt, despair and sadness, with love (or at least unconditional serenity), pardon, faith, hope, and joy. Any enlightenment would have to be of the sort that wouldn’t make any hatred, awareness of injury, doubt, despair or sadness seem legitimate, or as the AA slogan says, “The first step to enlightenment is to ‘lighten’ up.” Here we have what really is to be the instrumentalist tool, though this is how Rev. Baxter wants us to think, that no matter how justified the rage and anger might be, they make it impossible for us to fulfill our larger humanity. If this is what it means to cope with one’s own problems, then not coping with one’s own problems by doing this, would seem to constitute a weakness of character. And someone could be enlightened and still think for himself and refuse to cooperate, e.g. Romans 7:15-23, but if you supplant hatred with love, awareness of injury with pardon, etc., you’ve basically pre-fabricated what will go on in one’s mind. The Prayer of Saint Francis is the prayer that follows the Just for today I will do something for twelve hours that would appall me if I felt that I had to keep it up for a lifetime as I make up my mind to be happy and take my “luck” as it comes and fit myself to it…
This prayer is the sort of thing that Dubya would probably regard as “peace and freedom and hope,” peace because it would program victims not to feel distress or cause conflict, hope because it would program them to feel hope, and freedom because this dictated blanket forgiveness is what James called the law of liberty, similar to what Sartre called freedom.
Dr. Martin Seligman, the guy who did the original learned helplessness experiments, which have since proved that if you trap and torture various mammals you could cause their brains to go into biochemical states of clinical depression, would call this programmed hope, unless it’s logically implausible, “learned optimism.” He’s now one of those motivational speakers by whom the devastated could be fixed. After all, this is the modern version of how Pavlov gave his dogs their conditioned reflexes.
St. Francis was saying, in essence, that not “where did this difficulty originally come from?” (or does that matter at all?) but “how can it be changed for the better? How could the victim think more serenely?” is the more pragmatic and usually the more productive question to ask in regard to human beings and their vicissitudes. Seligman wrote in his book Learned Optimism (The difference between learned helplessness, which is learned through experience, and learned optimism, which is learned by contriving one’s own observations and washing one’s own brain of sincere observations that aren’t optimistic, should tell you something.), “Behaviorism takes an enormously optimistic view of the human organism, one that makes progress appealingly simple: All you have to do to change the person is to change the environment. People commit crimes because they are poor, and so if poverty is eliminated, crime will disappear.... It is more than happenstance that the two countries in which Behaviorism flourished—the United States and the Soviet Union—are at least in theory the cradles of egalitarianism.” And the thought-reform of Communist China, with Eastern sophistication, was that of cognitive therapy, washing one’s opinion and conclusions from his brain and replacing them with what he’s supposed to believe, the reason why the inventors of brainwashing gave it this name.
Yet all you’ve got to do is look at what constitutes cognitive therapy, as the more sophisticated and equally all-American version of Behaviorism, and you could see strong parallels with Soviet mind control. Cognitive therapy’s idea of egalitarianism is that no matter how impoverished anyone is he shouldn’t allow himself to think resentful thoughts and this way we all could (and should) have equal serenity, and that even a woman whose husband abused her so she left home so now she’s poor mustn’t allow herself to think of herself as a helpless victim and this way we all could (and should) have equal courage.
This sort of victim-blaming can be so subtle that one doesn’t even notice it. One of the mini-articles in the Clinician’s Digest section of the November/December issue of Psychotherapy Networker, “‘Supportive’ Friendships That Are Toxic,” says that many assume that friendships help youths, “But a longitudinal study finds that girlfriends who coruminate—extensively rehashing their problems and dwelling on negative feelings—actually end up unhappier. Surprisingly, the study finds that isn’t the case with coruminating boys.” This article also says, “Rose’s study doesn’t explain why this gender difference exists. She speculates, however, that girls are likelier than boys to blame themselves for their emotional difficulties or failures, which intensifies their negative feelings. Thus, when their friends support their feelings, they may also be supporting these self-blaming thoughts.”
What this doesn’t say is that the mental health term “ruminate,” to think quite a lot about one’s own problems, which is supposed to be comparable to cows ruminating or chewing their cud, blames the victims. This doesn’t say anything about how to decide how much attention a given problem deserves, and how much would constitute an overreaction. Rather, this follows the usual pattern of cognitive therapy, of critiquing the unhappy thoughts of those on the receiving end of the hardship, sinfulness, etc., but ignoring the aggressive thoughts of those who cause the problems, unless not only are these thoughts pathological, but those who have them want to have their own thinking re-engineered. Of course, this isn’t supposed to take the form of the “self-blaming thoughts” that these girls supposedly have. They’re to take the form of, “I should simply stop thinking this way,” rather than, “I’m bad for thinking this way.”
It’s possible even for alkies’ kids to look at themselves instead of blaming others, and not feel guilty, as long as they plan their own thinking wisely enough. As can be seen in alkies’ hitting bottom, it’s also possible for alkies to choose to think right, but alkies’ kids can’t change anyone thinking but their own. For them to ruminate would seem to mean the same things as would be someone with insignificant problems, ruminating. Certainly one of the things that groups for addicts’ friends and loved-ones would have the least patience for, would be members “ruminating” about the very real hardship, sinfulness, etc., that impact their own lives, though this wouldn’t mean that they’d have to feel a self-blaming guilt.
William Ryan, in Blaming the Victim, tells of a belief popular then, that poor people are poor because they tend not to think in responsible, goal-oriented ways. He tells of experiments that were done in which both lower-class and middle-class kids were offered a choice between one candy bar now or two candy bars later, and the rates in which the middle-class kids deferred gratification were compared to the rates in which the poor kids did. The book says of one such experiment,
The added factor consisted of giving the children an experience in which the promise of delayed gratification (two candy bars next week rather than one right now) was either kept or not kept. When the experiment was repeated, this was the only factor that differentiated between those who chose immediate gratification, and those who chose to delay. Class and race were not related to delay. Those who had experienced a broken promise were the ones—not unsurprisingly—who were not willing to delay and thereby risk another disappointment.
But currently, with cognitive therapy and its inculcated learned optimism, even learning from bad experiences could be blamed on the victim. After all, he could always tell himself, “Sure, I was shafted then, but that doesn’t mean that I will be in the future. There’s no way that I could really know if I’ll be shafted in the future. Since optimism feels good and increases one’s odds of success, I’ll choose to be optimistic.” If instead, one learns to be discouraged, he could therefore be blamed for not trying hard enough to have a good attitude. Maybe he’s just looking for something to blame, etc.
Pierre J. Proudhon wrote, “In communism, inequality springs from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence,” and in the rules of cognitive therapy, inequality springs from placing little hassles on a level with real problems, in that both a woman with normal problems, and a woman with the problems that would arise from the man who is now her husband choosing to act like a butthead, would be expected to have enough serenity and courage to deal with their realities like well-adjusted, equally self-efficacious people, equally confident that they have self-determination. These rules would be against thinking for oneself, and though in America these rules wouldn’t have the law backing them up, they would have people’s beliefs that they’d better think this way backing them up, and if you end up having a contrived faith in The System, you end up having a contrived faith in The System, no matter how it got there. The only difference between using Behaviorism to achieve these ends, and using cognitive therapy, is that Behaviorism can’t contrive beliefs at odds with one’s experiences, so the only way that one could with Behaviorism eliminate the criminality that comes from poverty, would be to eliminate the poverty.
The book Helping Hands, a Handbook for Volunteers in Prisons and Jails, by Daniel J. Bayse, defines “jailhouse religion” as, “While true religion is a way of life, many narcissistic inmates want the forgiveness and acceptance that religion promises without having to follow the strict moral guidelines that are part of its teaching. It’s not unusual for inmates to make a religious commitment and then ask, ‘Well, I’ve been forgiven, when do I get to leave?’,” and says, “Many inmates use religion in a self-centered way. One inmate showed me a letter he was sending to his wife. In it he said: ‘We must follow God’s teachings. We must get along like God says and be a happy couple.’,” no matter what the husband does. This also says that Bayse’s research, “has shown that 49 percent of inmates agreed that ‘anytime you do something in your home that proves you to be untrustworthy it gives the family a chance to practice forgiveness and makes the family stronger.’” Christianity makes the best jailhouse religion. For example, Hinduism would say that people aren’t perfect and that one’s wife should count it a joy when she meets various trials for the testing of her faith produces steadfastness, but Hinduism would also say that to whatever degree people fall short of perfect is the degree to which they’re disrespected, and that those who cause the problems have some responsibility for making things right. “Jailhouse religion” doesn’t mean religion in general.
An open-minded Easterner who truly was enlightened would realize that the only peace that one could get from globally supplanting hatred awareness of injury doubt despair and sadness, with love pardon faith hope and joy, would be very short-sighted, especially in a society and economy that are based on adversarial principles where some of the adversaries are clearly stronger than others. And what about those who think that their well-founded hatred awareness of injury doubt despair and sadness are legitimate, that their rage and anger are justified? Would they be treated as if they chose to think negatively, un-pragmatically, anti-peace? What would be the result of a society’s aiming its corrections of human nature in that direction, to that degree? When science looks at such things, it would be very anti-instrumentalist, pro-humanist, not because Saint Francis happened to use the word “instrument,” but because the problem-solving approach he described is very mechanistic like Stoicism, automatically taking hatred, awareness of injury, doubt, despair and sadness, whether legitimate or not, and replacing them with what one is supposed to think in order to be a streamlined functionary.
Just imagine a woman getting up at a feminist consciousness-raising meeting, and simply saying, “This is what patriarchy thinks that we’re just going to have to accept, and that if we don’t then we’re the villains,” and then reading the entire Serenity Prayer, and/or the Bible verses that specify what it means to take as Jesus did this sinful world, and/or these other Christian ideas for re-engineering the human nature of victims. This would certainly explain why Christian ministers are so likely to treat men’s domestic violence, drinking problems, etc., as if they are understandable but for their wives to get divorced wouldn’t be. Though a Hindu or Buddhist minister might be sexist enough to say the same, Hindu and Buddhist doctrines don’t have any tenets saying that violence, repeated destructive drunkenness, and the like are understandable simply because sin dwells within those who do such things, but a lack of forgiveness isn’t understandable. Christian ministers who minister to those in prison tend to be on their guard for “jail house religion,” prisoners accepting Christianity only because to them it means that others must forgive them and that their family members must accept anything they do since God wants strong families, but all too many of these same ministers would end up reacting to anything that a prisoner does by trying to guilt-trip family members into forgiving it. (I first read about Romans 7:15-23 in an article in the Louisiana prisoners’ magazine The Angolite, by a prisoner who used this as an explanation for his criminality. Though he seemed to sincerely want to do what’s right and hate the wrong he does, he also has Paul’s attitude that in the moral realm anyone could become exempt from responsibility by pleading not guilty by reason of, “in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it,” just as in the legal realm a few people can plead not guilty by reason of insanity, and cognitive therapists would be the first to say that the prisoner should simply wash his brain of this belief since this defeatism would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
Regarding Christian expectations to forgive, here’s a figurine of the Precious Moments line, that was put out in 1983, the year before Lenore Walker’s book The Battered Woman was published, and is now suspended. The name of the figurine, believe it or not, is “Forgiving Means Forgetting.” This also shows the man as being left with more bruises than the woman, which no doubt happens very rarely. When women do choose to act like buttheads and abuse men either physically or verbally, I have as much disgust for them as I do male buttheads, and, in fact, I ran into a man on the Internet who may at first have come across as resentful to women so feminists would have just given him the finger, but when he told me stories out of his life such as a woman approaching him in a grocery store asking to exchange phone numbers and then saying “I hate men,” I told him that he must have the sort of frightened defensive demeanor that would attract sadistic butthead women, since sadistic men and women especially love to tear into the obviously vulnerable. But in the real world, domestic violence usually means not only that the women get clobbered, but that afterwards the men expect Christian forgiveness, likely with the support of their ministers, and both figure that for the sake of the family she’d better forget as well as forgive. Then if he does it again, she’d seem dreadfully self-defeating, though no one ever bothers to mention how dreadful was everyone who acted as the violent husband’s accomplices.
Because of the reference in The Serenity Prayer to what’s to be accepted in a very global way, as “sinful,” I’ll also refer to this as “sinful,” those who do it as “sinners,” etc., though to many the word “sin” may seem doctrinaire. My own ethics are Situation Ethics, which says that the moral rightness or wrongness of an act depends not on what any holy book says about it, but on what the consequences would clearly be in the behavior’s particular situation. This was supposed to be permissive, yet according to the standards of the Serenity Prayer, Situation Ethics is dysfunctionally self-righteous. It seems that if you care that the obvious consequences of an act made it horribly bad, then you’re not serenely taking this sinful world as it is. The same goes for “values clarification,” unless the only person who you might find lacking in values is yourself. When I use the word “sin,” then, I mean in the sense that anything that could be called a “sin” is supposed to be forgiven, not in the sense that anything that could be called a “sin” should inspire guilt feelings, be condemned, etc.
If you base self-help strategies on a Schopenhauerian sort of realism, a realistic acceptance of barbarisms of human behavior which means that all that someone has to do is choose to act barbaric and the victims would just have to accept this because that’s reality, you end up with something that’s very pre-Schroder German. You end up with what self-help would look like in a Götterdämmerung, Twilight of the Gods, society. William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich says of one of Wagner’s works, “With them, and with the world of the barbaric, pagan Nibelungs—an irrational, heroic, mystical world, beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in the Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an orgy of self-willed annihilation which has always fascinated the German mind and answered some terrible longing in the German soul.... In the German soul could be felt the struggle between the spirit of civilization and the spirit of the Niebelungs...” and this is the sort of dynamic that you see in Schopenhauerian forgiveness. To call something “sinful” or “uncivilized” certainly doesn’t say that you should forget excuse condone or reconcile with it, only that for the sake of your own inner peace you’ll just have to accept that if the control of the gods should fade away, people’s aggressive drives (which Freud, a German-speaking Austrian, along with Konrad “On Aggression” Lorenz, ad nauseum, said are inexorable so people must have catharsis) would naturally take over, so the best you could do is make sure you don’t let down your guard in ways that could be called voluntarily making yourself passive or weak towards them. towards others.
In such a society people would be encouraged to think in a productive, positive direction, meaning not that violating others’ rights would seem negative and counterproductive, but that not facing one’s problems with serenity and/or courage would seem negative and counterproductive. Problems are solved by correcting victimity. The closest that the society would get to wisdom would be tactical finesse. Both common sense and empirical studies could tell you that of those who live in a Götterdämmerung society, those who think in this self-helping productive and positive direction would be most likely to succeed. Even in such a society not everyone will act barbaric, and everyone would be free to protect themselves, so residents who don’t think like victims would be more likely to seek and to find people who’d treat them fairly, protect themselves resolutely, and otherwise do whatever it takes to deal with whatever problems should become their reality. If they each wrote on the blank slates of their minds, whatever beliefs their circumstances made the most advantageous, it would be all-important to write that resentment is bad, that Stoic acceptance of anything they can’t change is good, that wholeheartedly taking personal response-ability for their own welfare is good, etc. In Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, he wrote, “No one is such a liar as the indignant man.”. In Eternal Recurrence, Nietzsche wrote, “Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.” In Ecce Homo, “Pathetic attitudes are not in keeping with greatness.” The worse are the dangers they’d face, the less that they could afford to think like victims.
Along the lines of Götterdämmerung, a slogan that seems common in groups for those who seem codependent, which this “recovery wisdom” website says is an AA slogan, is “There are no victims, only volunteers,”, and while this absolutist statement has certainly “blurred the sharp contrast between right and wrong,” as Dubya would put it, this has also made the victims into self-reliant Americans who don’t blame others for their problems. Just imagine what Dubya would think if the wives of all those male rednecks in the South whose behavior problems fit the Judeo-Christian definition of “sin,” demanded better, rather than just self-reliantly fighting for or pursuing better, which any amoralists could do regarding anything that doesn’t suit them.
Dubya would probably agree with the ideas on the web page How the Co-dependency Movement Is Ruining Marriages, which tells of how this amoralistic goal of resolutely taking control of one’s own life, which would mean that the person who’d seem the most mentally healthy on a test for codependency would be a sociopath, has encouraged followers not to give of themselves even in normal marriages. When Teddy Roosevelt, probably the person who popularized the word “red-blooded,” said that his foreign policy was, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” he called this a “homely adage” as if it was originally folksy self-help, and this is how the codependency movement works, which on one hand means that the power that a woman can wield is limited to whatever the power of her stick is irrespective of how much she could verbally validate her rights, but on the other hand, also means that if she’s got the power she should exert it irrespective of how much those who’d be hurt could verbally validate their rights not to be. This is what you’d end up with if The Enemy is blaming people for what they caused, though this blame would stand or fall based on how much logic it has, whereas books on codependency tell us that we’d stand or fall based on how much resources tactics wariness and perseverance we have.
A good example of this sort of “thinking” is the case of Candace Newmaker, a transcript of which is on my webpage Candace Newmaker’s Experience. She was an adopted ten-year-old girl being treated for too much aggressive incorrigibility, and the treatment that she was given was ostensibly a psychodrama in which she was put in a simulated womb from which she was to be reborn to her adopted mom. Once she was in the “womb,” though, she was trapped and smothered to death, with the psychologists talking to her as if her problem is that she doesn’t have enough courage to fight her way out, as they trapped and smothered her more thoroughly. They also refused to listen when she said she was smothering since the psychologists thought that this was just manipulation and that it’s all-important to stamp out anything that could be called manipulation. As in the books for women with butthead husbands, a courageous fight seemed like the ultimate good and mollycoddle tactics like manipulation seemed like the ultimate evil, though even if Candace survived this and learned its Nazified lesson it certainly wouldn’t have given her a free spirit, not to mention the fact that since she was already had a pathological aggressive incorrigibility she would have had a freer spirit if she had less of a courageous fighting approach to life. If you’ve seen enough victim correction as a panacea, you’d see that oftentimes, whether or not an attempt to resolve something through words and logic, constitutes manipulation, is in the eye of the beholder, and beholders who believe in solving problems by making victims more red-blooded would tend to see manipulation-by-whining everywhere they look. On the other hand, if you fight courageously with plenty of resources tactics wariness and perseverance, this couldn’t possibly be called manipulation.
It used to be that criminological theories that blamed street crime on sociological forces decreased the responsibility of the individual, and blaming street crime on differences inside each criminal increased it. Schopenhauerian logic would do the opposite. Authority figures don’t inculcate the cultural norms that encourage street crime, to impressionable children. Teenage delinquents choose to ascribe to such norms because they seem attractive. Even the sociological phenomena that involve the stresses and lacks of legal opportunities that come from poverty, don’t compel anyone toward crime. The public could always expect the poor to choose to deal with their own hardships in peaceful ways. If criminality and frustration are learned then they can be unlearned, even if they’re learned through experience and unlearned by having one’s brain washed of them. But when individuals’ criminal tendencies are blamed, these inherent endogenous tendencies have the quality of inchoate atavistic desires that come naturally to some people but not to others. Those who have these leanings never chose, “I think that I’ll take whatever I feel like having, no matter how much this hurts others, or myself in the long run.”
Therefore, while rehabilitation programs may try to coach criminals into thinking in more responsible ways, in the end it would seem that if that’s the way that they inherently are, then that’s the way that they inherently are. If a woman’s husband causes her a great deal of problems, but her neighbor’s husband doesn’t cause his wife nearly as much problems, the first woman would be expected to give up on her husband because “that’s just the way that he is,” not use their neighbor as an example of how her own husband could choose to behave just as responsibly. While she absolutely can change where she lives, she absolutely can’t change the way that he is, so she’ll have to accept absolutely that he is that way.
The law certainly has more power to get criminals into shape, than a woman has to get her problem husband into shape. Yet according to the Doctrine of Original Sin, even the government would have to accept that if some people are intractably criminal while others who live in the same neighborhood aren’t, then those people can’t choose not to be intractable. To whatever degree, and in whatever ways, they do act intractable, are the ways and degrees in which the law would have to accept that that’s just the way they are. If those whose criminality arose from their environment, gave any resistance to attempts to pressure them into thinking in a law-abiding fashion, they’d be impugned as AA slogans would treat those who seem to be playing the victim role. If those with endogenous criminality gave any resistance to attempts to pressure them into thinking in a law-abiding fashion, then if we aren’t suave when trying to counter the compulsive effects of Original Sin, any failures would seem only natural. They might as well be under the control of an atavistic biological handicap. To whatever degree someone is capable of rational self-reflection, endogenous criminal tendencies could be washed from their brains, but holding such people accountable for any failures in the washing, would seem ridiculous. In fact, if attempts to wash endogenous criminality from the brain only made the subjects more hostile, this could seem only natural, but if attempts to wash exogenous criminality from the brain only made the subjects more defensive and pessimistic, this would seem to be mere victim-posturing.
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
