And What Science Can
Do About It
And What Science Can
Do About It
#24
“We come together to recover from the effects of alcoholism on ourselves. We learn that no one else is responsible for solving our problems or making us happy. That is our responsibility. The point is not what others can do to improve, but what we can do to improve.”—from Al-Anon’s handbook, How Al-Anon Works, for Families & Friends of Alcoholics, so this is how one of the main role-models for modern self-help, says that alkies’ spouses should see some serious consequences of the alcoholism
“You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement) or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the ‘binocular trick.’”—Dr. Burns’ definition of the cognitive distortion Magnification or Minimization
“God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”—the main idea, and one absolutely can change himself, absolutely can’t change anyone else
ou can also see Dr. Burns’ cognitive distortions of depression arising from secularists reducing each and every situation to, “The only question that I may respectably ask about my problem is whether or not I can change something. I can change what goes on inside myself, can’t change what goes on inside anyone else, and may or may not be able to change what goes on in the material world. Our shapes all of our thinking, and when shapes übermensch action, that’s a lot more honest and objective than when insidiously shapes people’s sense of having had been victimized.” Supposed untermensch is a basic concept of both Nazism, and modern Wagnerian psychology. As can be seen in Nietzsche, the weak could easily seem to be the dangerously ones, since everyone’s beliefs regarding what they deserve are shaped by their own , and the weak can exercise their only in ways that would seem mollycoddle, “dishonest” and “ignominious,” whereas red-blooded strength is “honest,” proud, and at least forgivable. (We must appreciate all the hidden dangers of unchecked “victim-power.”) “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. Frank Buchman, leader of the Oxford Groups, the club on which AA and then Al-Anon was based and which is now called “Moral Re-Armament,” 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.”
Anyone who’d love the Nazis, couldn’t help but love victim-blaming, targeting weaknesses (as in whiny) of character, etc.
The first four of these distortions, All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filter, and Disqualifying the Positive, are exactly what you’d expect from a society where the devastated are prescribed absolutist self-correcting beliefs that they’re to make themselves hold to by deliberately ignoring everything that would disagree or distract them. Victims could be blamed using overgeneralized suppositions that each one of them wanted their problems even if they didn’t.
NAMI’s About Mental Illness webpage includes a list, “Here are some important facts about mental illness and recovery,” which begins:
- Mental illnesses are biologically based brain disorders. They cannot be overcome through “will power” and are not related to a person’s “character” or intelligence.
- Mental disorders fall along a continuum of severity. The most serious and disabling conditions affect five to ten million adults (2.6 — 5.4%) and three to five million children ages five to seventeen (5 — 9%) in the United States.
- Mental disorders are the leading cause of disability (lost years of productive life) in the North America, Europe and, increasingly, in the world. By 2020, Major Depressive illness will be the leading cause of disability in the world for women and children.
When you’ve seen ads and other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? It sounds as if this much strife results from one of those diseases that are parts of the natural order. Yet in the Eastern world the rate of depression is going up with Globalism. Clearly the environmental causes of this, and hygienic measures to eliminate them, should be very important. But our culture tells us that these causes are just the imperfections that are inherent to life and/or human nature. And, if a problem seems to be just an inherent imperfection, then it necessarily follows from that, that if I can’t deal with that reality, then I must have weak character, will power, etc. That’s exactly the sort of thinking that leads to all sorts of victim-blaming, that I’m simply supposed to deal with the sorts of problems that cause our rampant depression, so if I don’t, that must mean that my outlook isn’t optimistic enough, my survival skills aren’t good enough, the biology of my brain isn’t resilient enough, my self-confident determination to succeed isn’t strong enough, etc.”
One parallel of the idea of codependency, which arose out of the same Reaganist cultural climate and is as Reaganist in its implications, was the proposed “Self-Defeating Personality Disorder,” included in the “proposed” section of one of that era’s editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which includes basically the same fatalism about sinfulness and demands that victims therefore take up the slack, and the same conjectural assumptions about what a person wants subconsciously. The Self-Defeating Personality Disorder is very similar to Freud’s idea that some people, particularly women, have subconscious masochistic desires, and that the only way to recognize them is through the same sort of conjectural thinking that would be necessary to spot any other subconscious desires.
The only difference between this and the idea of codependency is that codependents are supposed to do the same things but with different motives, to solve problems productively and vaingloriously, and to live a melodrama, so all that those who came up with the idea of the SDPD had to do was change the motivation behind the symptomatic behaviors, and if they wrote a book about this, it could have sold 20,000,000 copies. The conjecturalism of the SDPD is why this proposed “disorder” never became official, as well as the fact that the public became incensed after an employer who a woman sued for sexual harassment, tried to defend themselves by proving that she has Self-Defeating Personality Disorder, as if the guilty man’s behavior is a symptom of her disorder (Or does what’s wrong with his behavior matter at all?). In other words, feminists have said about this, “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.” What that condemnation of the conjecturalism as not being scientifically valid, missed was that it necessarily victim-bashes, blaming victims for the characteristics of others’ destructive choices, which the victims didn’t prevent so seem to have tacitly approved of. This conjecturalism is the conjecturalism of survival skills, where the skills in question are those that make the difference between surviving and not surviving, the person who has the personal responsibility is the person who’s skillfully surviving, “erring on the side of caution” means erring on the side of victim correction since that would lead to the most protection, “realism” means whatever cognitive distortions would make one the most self-motivated, blameworthiness is based on outcomes not intent, conclusions must be drawn intuitively, all of this is only natural, and caring that these suppositions go against scientific and other academic principles would seem self-defeatingly intellectualist.
Here’s the proposed symptomatology of Self-Defeating Personality Disorder:
A. A pervasive pattern of self-defeating behavior, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts. The person may often avoid or undermine pleasurable experiences, be drawn to situations or relationships in which he or she will suffer, and prevent others from helping him or her, as indicated by at least five of the following:1. chooses people and situations that lead to disappointment, failure, or mistreatment even when better options are clearly available [or do these other people’s choices matter at all?]
2. rejects or renders ineffective the attempts of others to help him or her
3. following positive personal events (e.g. new achievement), responds with depression, guilt, or a behavior that produces pain (e.g. an accident)
4. incites angry or rejecting responses from others and then feels hurt, defeated, or humiliated (e.g. makes fun of spouse in public, provoking an angry retort, then feels devastated) [or does it matter at all whether or not the second person overreacted?]
5. rejects opportunities for pleasure, or is reluctant to acknowledge enjoying himself or herself (despite having adequate social skills and the capacity for pleasure)
6. fails to accomplish tasks crucial to his or her personal objectives despite demonstrated ability to do so, e.g. helps fellow students write papers, but is unable to write his or her own
7. is uninterested in or rejects people who consistently treat him or her well, e.g., is unattracted to caring sexual partners
8. engages in excessive self-sacrifice that is unsolicited by the intended recipients of the sacrifice
B. The behaviors in A do not occur exclusively in response to, or in anticipation of, being physically, sexually, or psychologically abused.
C. The behaviors in A do not occur only when the person is depressed.
Note: For coding purposes, record: 301.90 Personality Disorder NOS (Self Defeating Personality Disorder).
Ironically, though Timmen L. Cermak’s possible symptomatology for codependency includes “experiencing depression,” and the list of “Characteristics of Women Who Love Too Much” that was passed out at the codependency therapy group that Backlash describes, included, “Number fourteen: You have a tendency toward episodes of depression,” what would have been the official version of this “she let herself in for it” personality disorder, said, “The behaviors in A do not occur only when the person is depressed.” Yet if someone has a tendency towards episodes of depression, and this shapes the choices that she makes throughout her life, then dysthymia, mild chronic depression, must be affecting her all the time, which would mean that she’s depressed all the time. Therefore, she would be letting herself in for trouble, only when she was depressed, as a result of that depression. Maybe, as far as the self-help gurus are concerned, whether or not someone’s self-defeating behavior is due to the self-blame that in the modern Western world comes with depression, is too academic and analytical for pragmatic problem-solvers to care about.
What’s extremely noticeable about those official symptoms for SDPD, is that virtually all of them involve interactions with people who take advantage of the person who’s diagnosed as “self-defeating.” In fact, “rejects opportunities for pleasure, or is reluctant to acknowledge enjoying himself or herself” is supposed to be “despite having adequate social skills,” and “fails to accomplish tasks crucial to his or her personal objectives” could involve that he “helps” others. One could compare that to the chapters of Menninger’s Man Against Himself, from 1938, which tell of what he considered to be the variety of consciously or subconsciously self-destructive tendencies: Asceticism and Martyrdom, Neurotic Invalidism, Alcohol Addiction, Anti-Social Behavior [one’s own anti-social behavior, not one’s partner’s], Psychosis, Self-Mutilations, Malingering, Polysurgery, Purposive Accidents, Impotence and Frigidity, and The Psychological Factor in Organic Disease. The only things that this list, and the list of the modern conceptions of a subconscious self-defeating tendency, have in common, are the martyrdom (though Man Against Himself seems to require literal martyrdom for profound and godly reasons, not banal marriage to dysfunctional men) and the accident-proneness. Other than that, the original conceptions of how subconsciously self-defeating tendencies would manifest themselves tend to be genuinely self-defeating, while the newer conceptions tend to require others to do the actual defeating. The theme of that book is that all those forms of self-defeating behavior, as well as suicide, have subconscious motivations of aggression self-punishment and loving social satisfactions, but one would get more of these from sadomasochistic interpersonal relationships. Nowadays, “man against himself” is defined not as man against himself, but as man giving others opportunities to be against him. As Reagan’s fans would put it, like most other types of behavior, self-defeating behavior used to be a lot more self-reliant than it is now.
So why do self-defeating people nowadays seem to tend so much to get their self-defeating satisfactions through other people, rather than doing the defeating themselves, while decades ago it seemed to be vice-versa? One would have to wonder: did human nature change so radically between then and now? Is it that conjectures that someone “lets himself in for” problems that others cause him, are a lot harder to disprove than are conjectures that someone expressed his masochism through things “going wrong”? Or maybe what’s become important is the politics of self-determination, that Reaganomics requires a faith that one has self-determination even if others have obviously caused his problems, so “self-defeating tendencies” has to mean largely problems that others have actually caused, so self-defeating people seem to have gone from bodily self-destruction to entrapping others into doing the destroying. If one starts out with ideals such as, “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,” that would seem morally acceptable if those dealing with the hardship and/or sinfulness, let themselves in for it.
Not only that, this has got to be the only possible personality disorder, with a very controlling, authoritarian, social movement behind it. The discussions about the proposed Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, tended to stress how important it seemed to preserve old-fashioned marriage. This would mean both considerable restrictions on divorce, and a social stigma put on single mothers. Yet any woman who doesn’t divorce a husband who has a chronic behavior problem, would therefore seem self-defeating. Any forgiveness she’d give to him, even if he swore that he’d make a sincere effort to stop, would seem masochistic on her part. And for every man who has such problem (or even a risk that he has the sort of character, history, etc., that meant that he’d likely have such a problem), there’s a woman who either must be married to someone like that, can’t have children, or must raise her children as a single mother. Yet the forcefulness of these social movements seem irrelevant to whether or not a woman seems masochistic. These movements have many politicians bowing down to them, when they act as if of course the government has every right to try to achieve these goals through the law. In some areas of the USA, these movements already have a lot of control over people’s minds, yet these movements don’t seem sadomasochistic. And heaven forfend that these social movements hold men accountable for their behavior that leads to the destruction of families, the way that diagnoses like SDPD would hold the women accountable for tolerating it!
You might remember that the name of Norman Lear’s situation comedy about a divorced mother raising her two kids alone, wasn’t Living the Decadent Life, but One Day at a Time, as in, “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.”
Very relevant to this, is another statement in Man Against Himself, in the chapter on alcoholism, that to play the role of an alkie’s wife, actually, goes against the traditional feminine role, to the degree that, if an alkie’s wife really were self-defeating, her family couldn’t function. In the typical sexist terms of the psychoanalysis of that era, Menninger wrote that an alkie’s wife could be driven to divorce because, “...maternal solicitude. This, ultimately, the normal wife rebels against giving to a grown man supposedly her protector and master.” In modern rational terms, one could say that, at the very least, an alkie wouldn’t be a reliable breadwinner, so she must be at least willing to make up for this. An alkie’s wife who truly was self-defeating, would then have plenty of opportunity to screw-up in her own job, since everything would depend on her. Yet when reading books such as Women Who Love Too Much, one reads of the wives of problem men playing heroic, resilient and perseverant roles, much like the poignancy of American pioneers facing up to the elements self-reliantly. They could be proud that they hold themselves up to high standards, while their husbands live by very low standards.
In the definition of SDPD, are typical criteria for determining victimity. If you insisted on criteria similar to those used to determine criminality or unethicality, such as innocent until proven guilty of having a destructive intent, this would seem to lack realism about the subconscious mind, and realism as to the fact that too many problems would go unresolved if we judged victims by the same standard. This sounds to me like the modern version of the old joke which goes like this: “A woman gets a job as a psychologist’s secretary, but a week later she quits. When her friends ask her why, she says, ‘When I got to work early, he said that I was just trying to perform better than was expected of me. When I got to work late, he said that I was just trying to rebel against authority. And when I got to work on time, he said that I was just trying to follow the rules exactly as written!’.” The modern version of that joke would go like this: “A woman gets a job as a psychologist’s secretary, but a week later she quits. When her friends ask her why, she says, ‘When I got to work early, he said that I was just trying to be his victim by performing better than he expected of me. When I got to work late, he said that I was just trying to be his victim by making him angry at me. And when I got to work on time, he said that I was just trying to be his victim by following his rules exactly as he wrote them!’.” And frankly, I thought up this modern version of that old joke long before I read this proposed definition of a Self-Defeating Personality Disorder, back when I was being treated for codependency, since this was exactly the same thinking that pervaded that. We have here very clearly that conjecturing that one has subconscious masochistic tendencies seems only natural, maybe even necessary for his survival skills, while conjecturing that one has subconscious sadistic tendencies would seem paranoid and insanely judgmental, so those in the land of the free and the home of the brave seem to have a lot more masochism than sadism. What would have been ideal would have been for the DSM to propose both a Self-Defeating Personality Disorder and an Others-Defeating Personality Disorder, i.e. subconscious sadism, which are based on equally conjectural and self-contradictory symptoms, give the statistics for how pervasive both seem to be in the American population, and hopefully explain why we seem so slanted towards masochism.
One example of what might, at first, look like a psychologist attributing subconscious sadistic motives to behavior that wasn’t consciously sadistic, is one of the headgames that Dr. Eric Berne described in Games People Play, the Schlemiel. Berne wrote that the word schlemiel is “a popular Yiddish word allied to the German and Dutch words for cunning,” and that what Berne means by the game of Schlemiel is, “He breaks things, spills things, and makes messes of various things,” so that he could get the satisfaction of being forgiven. This diagnosis, conceivably, could look paranoid, treating klutziness as if it really means that the klutz is sadistically out to get those hurt by it.
The post-Reagan version of the Schlemiel, would respond in the way that post-Reagan culture responds to those who hold others morally responsible for recklessness or negligence that could be called “accidents” or “mistakes.” That is, “How dare you play the victim role by acting like a victim of my accident! How dare you accuse me of victimizing you! As the AA slogan says, ‘We are all victims of victims,’ and in this sense, I’m certainly your victim!”
One example of what could be diagnosed as a game of Schlemiel, is the tendency for the Iraq invasion to involve mishaps that hurt others. According to the official report of The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, of March 31, 2005, the beliefs that Saddam recently had nuclear biological and chemical weapons, required three different wrong analyses. The belief in the nuclear weapons came from some aluminum cylinders the regime bought that could have been used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, as well as reports and documents about seeking uranium from Niger, that turned out to be faked. The belief in the biological weapons came from the false reports of an information source, who ironically was given the moniker of “Curveball,” who’s emotionally unstable and was in a hangover during an important meeting as if he couldn’t help but get soused the night before the planned meeting. Yet The Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Postwar Findings About Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare to Prewar Assessments, issued on September 8, 2006, even includes,
The belief in the chemical weapons came from diverse observations that could be interpreted as resuming the chemicals weapons program, though as late as 2002 the Intelligence Community didn’t hold that the regime had been actively setting up a major chemical weapons program.
And then there was that statement that Cheney gave on April 15, 1994, in a tape done by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in which he says about the Gulf War,
Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it—eastern Iraq—the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families—it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.
Of course, after the invasion and these results occurring, it’s still possible for Dubya, Cheney, etc., to act as if these consequences were a complete surprise. It’s still possible to hold that if anyone holds the Bushmen responsible, then they’re victims of manipulative political machinations. The more that other countries, terrorist groups, etc., caused problems in Iraq, the more that the Bushmen could act like victims of their evil, such as Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon’s statement on the big bombing in Nineveh, that it was planned to “break the will” of the American people.
Also, it seems to be just a mishap that Valerie Plame was “outed” as a CIA agent. It would seem that those who leaked the fact that she worked for the CIA, honestly believed that her job was as a desk analyst rather than a secret agent. At least the leak to Bob Woodward, was mentioned in an offhanded way rather than as part of an intentional scheme. If the reason for telling of her job was legitimate, then why leak it, insisting that the sources remain confidential? So here we’d seem to have two supposed mishaps, the outing of someone who wasn’t thought to be a secret agent, and this appearance of duplicity.
The abuses in Abu Ghraib, seem to have resulted from renegade trailer-trash guards, taking advantage of the opportunity to abuse the detainees. This opportunity meant that, purely due to mismanagement of the prison, the guards felt safe abusing some detainees in the middle of the prison corridor, though they often screamed, and/or ended up with injuries that others, such as medics, would have had to have seen and reported.
If the place were that mismanaged, then it was “See no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil,” where one could do anything in full view, causing loud noise, and causing injuries, yet no one would see hear or report it. That’s one heck of a mishap to have happened to the leaders of this war, yet we’re to accept this as just another of life’s inherent imperfections.
Not only that, as Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect, Understanding How Good People Turn Evil says, after discussing the “iconic” picture of the prisoner wearing the blanket, with the electrical wires clipped to his fingers, “There were even more shocking photographs that the U.S. government chose not to release to the public because of the greater damage they would surely have done to the credibility and moral image of the U.S. military and President Bush’s administrative command. I have seen hundreds of these images, and they are indeed horrifying.” Dr. Zimbardo was an expert witness for the defense in the trial of the sadistic guards.
And it looks like, during the fighting in Falluja, when the American troops used white phosphorous against insurgents, it also hit civilians. White phosphorous, known in the Vietnam War as “Willie Pete,” ignites and burns when it hits the air at a temperature slightly higher than room temperature, and when it hits the skin, so it can have a napalm-like effect. Pictures taken of civilians in Falluja who’d just been killed, show their skin and muscles having had been burned away, but not their clothes. At first, the US military said that the Willie Pete was used in Falluja only for illumination, but then they discovered that Willie Pete was actually fired at combatants. Another mishap, that the leaders didn’t know this at first. And if the Willie Pete turns out to have hit civilians too, this would be yet another mishap as far as the leaders are concerned. If this were used with gross recklessness, that wouldn’t be the leaders’ fault.
And then we have the al Jazeera memo, which, the Daily Mirror tabloid claimed, tells of a discussion between Dubya and Tony Blair just after some fighting in Falluja in April, 2004, in which Dubya said he wanted to bomb the headquarters of al Jazeera in Qatar, and Blair talked him out of it. Though Dubya insisted that the memo was a ridiculous fake, the attorney general in Britain warned the British media that they’d be breaking the law if they published details of the memo, though they certainly wouldn’t be breaking the law if the document was a forgery. Two of those who leaked the document were charged under the Official Secrets Act, which, also, wouldn’t apply to forgeries. So it seems very likely that the memo is genuine. A Downing Street spokesman said, “We have got nothing to say about this story. We don’t comment on leaked documents,” not supposed leaked documents. When Labor MP and former defense minister Peter Kilfoyle tried to make the memo public, he said, “I am calling for the publication of the record, which we know exists, of a meeting in April 2004 in which George Bush allegedly called for the bombing of the al-Jazeera HQ in Qatar and which also discussed the launch of the assault on Falluja, which I find a very important issue, particularly related to the British attempts at restraint.”
Yet even if this were proven, Dubya could still treat this as just another mishap. This was just something that he said to a friend when in a bad mood. You certainly wouldn’t want to be held responsible for every angry thing that you said to a confidante when you were in an angry, stressed-out mood, would you? In fact, the sort of all-or-nothing and labeling logic that you’d see with victim correction, would say that only a neurotic would take literally the nasty things that a folksy Texan would say when he’s in a bad mood, to a confidante, so he might as well not have said them at all. Though al Jazeera said that if the memo is genuine then that “would cast serious doubts” on American claims that when American bombs hit al Jazeera facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan that was accidental, but one must keep in mind how accident-prone the American military brass has been in this war. If it seems strange to people in other countries, that a head of state could say something like that to an allied head of state, simply out of anger, then those foreigners would seem too uptight. In order to seem well-adjusted, Americans must accept a lot along the lines of, “Oh, well, that’s human nature,” and others could be expected to be just as tolerant.
The big difference between this and the Schlemiel headgame, is that, as Berne wrote, “The real payoff in this game, however, is not the pleasure of destructiveness, which is merely an added bonus for [the schlemiel], but the fact that he obtains forgiveness.” He’d realize that he’s not entitled to it, so to him this would be a real gift. Yet since the American military, and the militaries of its allies, come from a position of strength, they’d expect forgiveness. As the small print of the much-beloved Serenity Prayer says, if the weak don’t forgive the strong, the weak are expecting the world to be as they’d have it. Of course, Dubya could be accused of playing the post-Reagan version of the Schlemiel, since he could treat any skepticism of even the irrationality behind why the USA and Britain ever invaded Iraq, as if it’s just a political ploy.
Not only that, the strong would seem innocent until proven guilty. Schlemiels as Berne described them, are basically klutzes. As Schopenhauer wrote in The World as Will and Representation, “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.” Klutziness is ignominious by German standards, lacking the boldness of strength. Attributing a subconscious cunning to klutziness, isn’t really different from attributing it to anything else that, by German standards, would seem unimpressive. Yet the militaries of all the Western countries that invaded Iraq, would be among those who seem impressive. Schlemiel, after all, means cunning, and while the impressive strong could attribute cunning to the ignominious weak, by simply jumping to the conclusion that they used cunning, the weak would have to prove any allegations that the strong used cunning.
The Position Paper of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: The Need for Federal Intervention, sent to the Department of Justice in November, 2003, includes the following:
Other well known consultants to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, such as Dr. Fred Berlin a psychiatrist who treats priests at Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorder Clinic in Maryland, has argued that treatment professionals should not be required to report current or newly revealed acts of child molestation. More disturbing, Dr. Berlin, a founder of the clinic, has admitted publicly that he covered for sex criminals, angering legislators, child-advocacy groups and State officials in Maryland. Considered by Dr. Berlin to be one of his mentors, the clinic’s cofounder, Dr. Money, has stated that a mutual sexual relationship between a 10 or 11 year-old boy and an adult is not pathological. Additionally, Dr. Paul McHugh, former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, was recently chosen by the American bishops as the chief behavioral scientist for their new clergy sex crimes review board. In the past, Dr. McHugh has stated that the clinic was “justified in concealing multiple incidents of child rape and fondling to police, despite a state law requiring staffers to report them.” When he was Director of Psychiatry and oversaw the sex clinic, Dr. McHugh publicly stated that “we did what we thought was appropriate,” and agreed with the actions of his “subordinate, clinic head Fred Berlin, who broke the then-new child sexual abuse law on the grounds that it might keep child molesters from seeking treatment.”
Dr. Fred Berlin is also known for testifying in favor if the defense in famous trials for sex crimes, minimizing the responsibility of the criminals. He’s also known for promoting the idea that since rapists tend to be passive victims of diseases in which their hormones compel them to rape, the enlightened approach to rape would be to set them free and give them “chemical castration” injections. For example, in the case of the Ski Mask Rapist of San Antonio, Joe Smith, Berlin said about him, “Mr. Smith’s problem is that he’s driven sexually in a way that he can’t control. If you could cut that part of his brain out in terms of the rest of his character and temperament and personality, he’s basically, and I choose these words carefully, a fairly decent human being.” In response, the mother of one of his child victims said, “I’ve heard people say that before, he’s a nice guy. Nice guys do not rape five-year-old girls.” He marauded around the neighborhood at night, naked except for wearing a ski mask, breaking into women’s homes and raping them. When he was put on trial for this, he was found guilty, but the jury gave him a ten-year suspended sentence where he’d be given chemical castration. Yet after he got married and he and his wife wanted to have kids, Berlin’s clinic allowed him to taper off the injections. Then, he began marauding around the neighborhood wearing nothing but a bandana, breaking into women’s homes and raping them. He said about this, “You feel cured. It’s just like an alcoholic that says he can stand by a beer and not take a drink, but once he takes that one drink, he’s fallen off the wagon.” His attitude toward his current prison sentence is very much along the lines that he’s just a passive victim of his disease, “If they lock me up, if they keep me locked up forever, they’ve gotten rid of me. There’s a whole bunch more that’s going to be doing the same thing. I guarantee you.”
Berlin’s attitude towards Smith’s behavior shows why Berlin is a favorite expert witness for those on trial for sex crimes, “The sex drive is another powerful biological force. God or nature put it into us so that the human race would continue. When that drive gets pointed in that the wrong direction, as is it is in the case of Mr. Smith it still recurrently wants to be satisfied, and it doesn’t take a mental health expert to recognize what a problematic situation that can then be.” It doesn’t seem to matter that perverts, in general, tend to have unusually strong, obsessive desires, and unusually weak inhibitions. One could call this sort of acceptance of pervs “fatalistic,” like the kind that Schopenhauer showed when he wrote in The World as Will and Representation, about how pederasty has always been with us all over the world, “Thus the sense of beauty, which instinctively guides selection for sexual satisfaction, is led astray when it degenerates into a tendency to pederasty,” and “Expel nature with a pitchfork, she still comes back.” Schopenhauer wrote about this, “I have done so by giving them the opportunity of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty.” So even the intellectually sophisticated could see that fatalism as a defending of pederasty.
The obvious question, to those unaware of how patriarchal authoritarianism works, is how someone who bases some very fatalistic ideas on “The sex drive is another powerful biological force,” could ally himself with the Catholic hierarchy, which prohibits marriage in its ministers because in the Middle Ages it figured that if priests don’t marry then the Church would inherit more of their money than if they did get married. As Dr. Jay Feierman said about all Catholic priests and monks, “If you tell a man that he’s not allowed to have particular friends, he’s not allowed to be affectionate, he’s not allowed to be in love, he’s not allowed to be a sexual being, you shouldn’t be surprised at anything that happens.” If one must accept this universal principle vis-à-vis predators, then it would seem only natural to accept this with everyone. But No More Secrets, by Caren Adams and Jennifer Fay, who’ve done work with many abused children, says that very common among sexual offenders is a “rigid and authoritarian background, such as military, religious, or a punitive family.” This Fascistic attitude would be very quick both to put the clamps on normal healthy behavior, and to accept aggressive behavior. It proves how evil human nature really is, and is useful when leaders want to use this aggression in their military campaigns. Just look at German tradition, insisting both that good people be meek “Good Germans,” and that, as Freud put it, “aggressiveness remains ineradicable.”
Berlin realizes that Smith was probably sexually abused as a child, but presumably his abuser would seem to be just a victim of his disease, too. If predators are that compulsive, and they do that much harm, then why would one want to show understanding toward them? Berlin told the Washington Post that the laws for civil commitment for sex offenders, mean that no longer will “individuals be held to account only for acts they have actually committed, but now also for the acts that someone else says they are going to commit.” And another time, Berlin said, “If you want to use words like ‘molester’ and ‘victim,’ then a molester is a victim who grew up.” If Berlin honestly believes that these people can’t control this compulsive behavior, and that child molestation would produce future offenders, then he should see that these laws commit people for mental impairments that would make them uncontrollably dangerous to others, the same as any other civil commitment. Once again, permissiveness toward predators really does mean something very different than does giving permission to everyone to lead normal, natural lives.
Those who are sexually abused need safety more intensely than the offender needs to attack, so what really matters in the end is who has the power to get what they need, not how strong each person’s needs are. But at least Berlin has the modern version of moral relativism, that we all must simply accept this is how this sinful world is, rather than the old-fashioned kind, such as Dr. Money’s attitude that objections to pedophilia with 10 or 11 year-olds, are just a matter of opinion. Berlin’s “If you want to use words like ‘molester’ and ‘victim’...”, sounds as if he was taking issue with the opinions of those who want to use these judgmental words, but at least that doesn’t hold that the behavior is acceptable.
On another webpage Berlin is quoted as saying, “Most serial rapists do have some degree of interest and capacity to relate in a consenting relationship, but it doesn’t erase the intense cravings that push them in a more dangerous direction.” This more follows the pattern of perversions like pedophilia, than being oversexed. As Dr. Gene G. Abel wrote, “It was once thought that a child molester was interested only in children and that if therapy could stimulate his sexual interest in an adult woman, such as his wife, his obsession with children would disappear. Now we know that, in most cases, the child molester has a normal sex life with his wife but still maintains his deviant sexual interest in children.” It seems more respectable, though, to say that someone is a helpless victim of being oversexed, than to say that he’s a passive victim of a perversion. That Texas jury probably wouldn’t have sentenced Joe Smith to only injections to reduce his sex drive, if they thought that, rather than being an overly-red-blooded man, he’s a pervert.
So the very same Catholic patriarchy that has been transferring perv-priests from parish to parish, chose men like this as their advisors on sexual abuse. If any women accepted such attitudes, they’d seem masochistic. A woman would seem to have a masochistic thing about flirting with danger, if she agreed with someone who thought that concealing multiple incidents of child rape and fondling to police despite a state law requiring staffers to report them, was justified, or with someone who’d try to get lenient treatment for sex offenders because even predatorial sex drives will demand to be satisfied, even if the predators are also in consenting relationships. OK, so do those in the Catholic hierarchy who chose these men as their experts on sex offenses, seem to have a sadistic thing about flirting with danger?
A colleague of Berlin’s at Johns Hopkins, and fellow consultant to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Dr. John Money, was quoted as saying in 1985 to the Louisiana newspaper The Acadiana Times, about the Fr. Gilbert Gauthé pedo-priest case, “Most pedophiles I’ve come across, are people who fall in love with children. There’s something distinctly childlike in pedophiles: Psychosexual age does not keep pace with chronological age.”
The word childlike, is a professional euphemism for childish, used even when it should seem only natural to call someone childish. As Dr. Berne wrote in Games People Play, “The word ‘childish’ is never used in structural analysis, since it has come to have strong connotations of undesirability, and of something to be stopped forthwith or gotten rid of. The term ‘childlike’ is used in describing the Child (an archaic ego state), since it is more biological and not prejudicial.” Common sense would also tell you that childlike is a euphemism for childish.
So when a professional who specializes in treating perverts, calls the childish ones “childlike” instead of “childish,” that would seem good and non-judgmental. But just imagine if the wife of a pedophile, called him “childlike” instead of “childish.” This would seem to be a certain sign of masochism on her part, that she’d try to make his childishness seem morally neutral. Likewise, it seems therapeutic for a therapist to say about their pedophile patients, “I guess that they fall in love with children,” but masochistic for a pedophile’s wife to say, “I guess that he falls in love with children.” Since the very German worldview that pervades psychology, equates weakness with being ignominious, it seems so much easier to attribute masochism to the weak, than it does to attribute sadism to the strong.
But what’s worse is the dark side. Here is that antinomic de rigueur amoralism that, through Niebuhr, has its roots in the inevitabilities from the Doctrine of Original Sin. The sinners go into the “people whose natures are to be taken as a given, if the surmountable hurdles that they create matter at all,” pigeonholes and the victims go into the “people whose natures are to be corrected” pigeonholes,. The victims would seem even more self-defeating, self-distracting, if they asked, “On a scale of one to ten, to what degree am I responsible for this, and why?” A victim may not actually be self-defeating, and when those who do the actual defeating, cause suffering disappointment failure or mistreatment, get angry, etc., they may be doing this for the most evil reasons, but this doesn’t even seem worth mentioning. After all, Jesus said that God, “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good,” and Saint Paul wrote, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand,” so it seems that we’ve just got to accept that evil sometimes happens. As long as someone chooses to commit sin or evil, then that’s life, that’s human nature, so we’ll just have to accept it serenely. This is put forward unapologetically as if it’s a Schopenhauerian antinomic version of pluralism, where different people around us offer different things because they have different characters, some of them are barbaric, and we should avoid them just as we’d avoid anyone else with whom we’re greatly incompatible. One of the words that survival skills don’t take literally, is “know,” both as in “You should have known that he’d do that,” and as in, “You must have known that those people would end up causing you problems, since so many of those you know have ended up doing that.” Since “know” means basically intuit, there’s no way to falsify what someone should have intuited, or did subconsciously intuit. Therefore, this sort of “pluralism” could never be proven to be anti-self-determination.
Any sociologist would tell you that of the behavior that any society would condemn, it condemns different behavior to different degrees, some as peccadilloes within the norm, some as slightly excessively normal transgressions that are taken somewhat seriously, and some as serious offenses, and that how seriously a society takes a behavior determines how safe those in that society can feel from it. Those who are most likely to treat such serious consequential behaviors as if they might as well be just peccadilloes, are the very same psychologists who’d also tell us that we should be optimistic that we likely won’t be victims of these serious consequential behaviors, that we shouldn’t blame others for our problems, that we shouldn’t act helpless, etc. If those in our society would condemn them as little as if they were peccadilloes, then others would do them to us just as readily as if they were peccadilloes, others certainly would be to blame for a lot of our problems, so often enough we certainly would be helpless. For our society to tell everyone not to blame others for their own problems, and not to feel helpless, would make no sense if serious problems are treated as if they’re free from condemnation, and not just, “You should avoid people like that just as you’d avoid anyone else with whom you’re incompatible.”
Symptom number four, “incites angry or rejecting responses from others,” when done to prove how much of a butthead someone is, is what Gandhi is known for doing, which he called “truth-strength,” but by modern standards Gandhi’s truth-strength would seem to be passive-aggressive set-ups, unforgivingly getting strength at the expense of buttheads by manipulatively contriving one’s own passivity.
In fact, the concept of a “Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder,” would be fine if taken literally, but if taken figuratively would lead to plenty of Wagnerian accusations. If someone actually does keep sabotaging his own efforts, he certainly is passive-aggressive. Yet those who stress the importance of street-savvy survival skills, just might be quick to conjecture that someone who isn’t doing enough to get his own bad realities under control, is actually expressing his own hidden untermensch human nature. Sure, the conclusions that psychologists draw are supposed to be based on science, but street-savvy survival skills would say that if you suspect people only if what you’re saying could be proved scientifically, you’re going to let a lot of dangerous problems continue.
Those diagnosed as self-defeating would be told simply that in relation to the bad and evil in their midst, they’re to fight for themselves more, and protect themselves as much as possible; there’s always room for improvement. This is the only truth that could give redbloods strength. The victims might prevail better if they react warily, so this blame of them would seem to be constructive criticism, giving ideas for how they could improve and empower themselves, and optimistic strategies for how they could prevail better, so if they don’t act accordingly they’d seem counterproductive. If someone they might encounter chooses to act like a butthead, it would seem that he simply is a disaster waiting to happen, and that for the potential victim to care about the immorality (or Situation Ethics) of it would be unpragmatic, maybe dangerously so. It would seem unwise to ask any questions other than, “Do I, or do I not, have the power to change this?” The potential victim can’t change the disaster waiting to happen, but he can change whether or not he’s vulnerable to it, so it would seem he should focus his attention in this direction. This is why the amoralism is de rigueur, since if any victims or potential victims don’t treat the effects that the sinners have on others as if they’re just another pluralistic choice, the victims would likely hear admonitions along the lines of, “Things happen. It’s what we do when they happen that’s key,” and, “Put aside the idea of fairness or unfairness. Just keep in mind avoiding all of those with whom you’re incompatible.” This seems to be the solution the whole solution and nothing but the solution, so if you say that this amoralism and demands made of victims would cause more than just a solution, this would seem counterproductive. As is typical for this sort of reasoning, the rule was “Praise be to what makes us hard,” and the harder you are in spirit when a sociopath causes you problems, the more that you’ll courageously change what you can and serenely accept what you can’t. It used to be that our conception of disasters that one couldn’t stop so he’d just have to avoid or fix them, a falling tree or any other problems from unchangeable natural elements, was “acts of God”; now our conception of disasters that one couldn’t stop so he’d just have to avoid or fix them, is “acts of sinners.” The thinking of the Serenity Prayer, after all, inspires modern self-help psychology, and it says that when you’re faced with evil as we were on September 11, 2001, what’s worth mentioning is if someone seems cowardly, uncourageous, not if someone is barbaric.
And this doesn’t eliminate the problem. The long-term effects of this remedy for victimization, as well as the long-term effects of similar remedies for anything labeled codependency or anything else, are basically the same as are the long-term effects of the remedy that Louise Hay’s book Cancer: Discover Your Healing Power gave for women whose injured demeanors unwittingly attract aggressive types, “If you find yourself saying ‘Everyone always does such and such to me’—criticises me, is never there for me, uses me like a doormat, abuses me—then this is your pattern. There is some thought in you that creates this behaviour. It is you that must change the belief that creates the experience. When you no longer think that way, they will go and do that to somebody else.” (Or does what they do matter at all, in the victims’ “creating” their behavior by simply attracting them?) All sorts of people, even those who aren’t potential lovers, are the potential victims of those who are sociopathic enough that romantic relationships with them would lead to disappointment failure or mistreatment. In such exigent circumstances, if these people didn’t have a zero tolerance toward their own shortcomings and inadequacies in dealing with the buttheads, the victims would be tolerating their softness toward the buttheads. Of course, when, in one way or another, these buttheads cause new victims to go into depression and they talk about this with professionals trying to reassure them, they’d be told, “Suffering or not suffering from these illnesses does not have anything to do with a person’s willpower. Many times, society assumes a person suffering from depression is just lazy, or lacks motivation to get his or her life together. One might be labeled as simply having a behavior problem. This simply is not true,” or if this caused them to suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, they’d be told, “This condition is not a sign of personal weakness.” If this caused them to suffer an anxiety disorder, they’d be told, “Anxiety disorders and panic attacks are not signs of a character flaw. Most importantly, feeling anxious is not your fault,” and, “Let me tell you how to control your anxiety before it controls you.” After all, how Jesus took this sinful world was, quite literally, as a scapegoat.
Hazelden’s catalog, under the heading “CORNERSTONE CONCEPTS OF SOBRIETY,” describes a book it sells, Drop the Rock, Removing Character Defects, as, “Steps Six and Seven focus on the self-defeating behavior that stands in the way of both our recovery and our ability to grow. Drop the Rock helps you identify the character defects that are holding you back.” First off, it should be obvious that according to our original, proud secular and anti-authoritarian, American principles, which include plenty of self-improvement, “character defects” doesn’t mean self-defeating behavior, but others-defeating behavior. Here we have one of the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, the minimization of others’ others-defeating behavior, and the magnification of response-ability for failures in your own defenses.
This magnification, along with its irrational logic, has to be the most dangerous aspect of this definition of “character defects.” In practice, if you insisted that “self-defeating” would mean only what’s overtly self-defeating, such as clean and sober addicts relapsing, that insistence would probably seem self-defeating. We seem maladjusted and maladaptive if we don’t simply adjust and adapt to any hardship sinfulness and surrender that affects us, one day at a time. Any neglect or failures in doing so, would therefore seem self-defeating. Insisting that the label “self-defeating behavior” would require the same intent and volition as would the label “other defeating behavior,” would therefore seem self-defeating, since the double standard would be necessary for the most advantageous adjustment and adaptation. Choosing something that’s less advantageous, would then seem self-defeating. The Self-Defeating Personality Disorder assumed an unfalsifiable subconscious intent to defeat oneself, but the fact that this would have been accepted so readily by people who’d never assume that many have subconscious sadistic leanings, shows how ready people are to blame victims in general. It seems that the more that you hold victims responsible for their own welfare, the more that the responsible people would be the ones with the most reliable, self-reliant, and steadfastly forgivingly Christian, motivations to solve the problems. Therefore, you’d seem to have culpably bad survival skills if you responded to attempts to remove your self-defeating character defects, by saying, “If something I do isn’t overtly self-defeating, I don’t want to hear about it,” or responded to a diagnosis of Self-Defeating Personality Disorder by saying, “If you can’t prove that I’m subconsciously masochistic, consider me innocent until proven guilty.”
Plainly and simply, you have victim correction as a panacea, where to hold accountable those who cause suffering for, disappoint, cause failures for, or mistreat, those close to them, seems judgmental bitter mollycoddle controlling blaming accusatory opinionated utopian defeatist and dispensable, while to hold accountable only the victims seems pro-forgiveness constructive self-reliant self-determined persevering self-improving objective pragmatic self-empowering and indispensable. (This is the expanded version of, “Judging sinners seems judgmental, but judging sinnees on how pragmatic stolid self-reliant and peaceable their reactions are, seems pragmatic stolid self-reliant and peaceable.” Judging sinners could seem to be more than just judgmental, and sinnees could also be judged on whether or not they’re conciliatory, resilient, forgiving, etc., and these judgments would then seem conciliatory, resilient, forgiving, etc.) The whole idea of codependency is based on the same assumption of subconscious leanings, and the same blind serene acceptance of even evil choices as if they’re just life’s inevitable vicissitudes. In both cases, what you end up with is that the people who are actually causing the problems seem to be getting entrapped by the victims, who are just trying to lure in sinners so that when they sin they’d be serving the victims’ purposes. Combine the conjectures that are an inherent part of attempts to spot subconscious desires, and this tendency away from holding victimizers responsible and toward holding victims response-able, and you get a trap that’s pretty hard to escape. Symptom #3 of the Self Defeating Personality Disorder says that one could assume that when you accidentally hurt yourself you really hurt yourself intentionally, and this should lead to self-help and self-improvement, but if someone assumes that when you accidentally hurt someone else you really hurt him intentionally, the person who made this assumption would seem paranoid, accusing you of being out to get someone else.
As Gunther S. Stent wrote in an essay included in Ashley Montague’s Science and Creationism, “Even cursory study of the Bible [as a major shaper of Western culture] would have made it clear to [sociobiologists] that in the Western culture to which they belong as whose values they share, the actions of persons are judged on the basis of intent and not, as generally assumed in sociobiological thought regarding morally relevant behavior, of the consequences,” when determining sinners’ dispensable responsibility, but when victims’ indispensable response-ability is determined, the only things that really seem to matter are what their problems are and what they can hopefully change. In the “proposed disorders” section of the same edition of the DSM was a proposed “Paraphilic Rapism Disorder,” and while diagnosing a woman with SDPD would have increased her personal response-ability since whenever she’d encounter buttheads she’d likely be the only one who’d get scrutinized, diagnosing a man with Paraphilic Rapism Disorder would have lessened his personal responsibility, since that would really seem to be just the way that he is.
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
