And What Science Can Do About It


 #3

 

 

 

“‘Brainstorm,’... has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration....  Told that someone’s mood disorder has evolved into a storm—a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else—even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that ‘depression’ evokes, something akin to ‘So what?’ or ‘You’ll pull out of it,’ or ‘We all have bad days.’”—William Styron, Darkness Visible

 

Go to Page 2

 

 

any have said that progressive politics needs something new, and self-evident, to get it going again, and an awareness of victim correction as a panacea, as well as the unnaturally high rates of depression and other psychiatric disorders which surround it, would be an ideal fire-starter.  If after a random person ate some food his chances of emerging uninjured was only about 85%, this food would seem unfit for human consumption, yet it was once measured that only 85% of the American adult population get through any given year without suffering a serious depressive disorder, but nothing that happens to these people seems unfit for human consumption.  Only the victims seem inadequate in one way or another.  Expecting everyone in a society to endure a level of helplessness that causes rampant depression, is like playing Russian roulette: five out of six would end up intact, but one out of six wouldn’t.  Europe, maybe even modern Germany, should be able to understand what’s wrong with victim correction as a panacea more quickly than most Americans would.

Such a zeitgeist, which defines good and bad character in terms of how stolid it is rather than how moral, is exactly what would promote a patriarchal status quo.  A very typical example of this is Tony Blair saying just after he was elected for his third term, “I know that Iraq has been a deeply divisive issue in this country.  But I also know and believe that after this election people want to move on, they want to focus on the future—in Iraq and here.”  Everyone knows that an important definition of a “good character” meaning stolid character, is that the person doesn’t continue to be emotionally hurt by problems that happened in the past.  Therefore, it would seem that at the time that the Anglo-American military invades and occupies Iraq, anyone who objects to the false pretenses about Saddam recently having WMD, would be whiny and measly enough to be resentful about something that happened in the past, since any and all claims necessarily would have been made in the past.  The same would also apply to any blue-collar criminal who tries to evade responsibility for all of his crimes that would have occurred in the past, but somehow that evasion doesn’t seem to work for low-class people.  The only question that one could honorably ask about his own problem, no matter how much hardship, sinfulness, etc., was involved in it, is, “Can I change this?”, over and over and over again to optimistically look for ways in which he could change each aspect of it if he were good enough.  One could also say that caring about the discord that occupation would cause in Iraq would constitute caring about the future, but even that could seem resentful, since the discord constitutes resentful evil, so anyone who’d be dissuaded by it would be bowing down to some resentment.  And this resentment has the scariness of the untermensch.

For example, the Gam-Anon chapter of Gamblers Anonymous’ handbook, includes, “The aim of the Gam-Anon program is to aid the individuals involved with a compulsive gambler to find help by changing their own lives....  Living or being associated with a compulsive gambler creates its own kind of hell.  For most people, it is a devastating experience...  At any moment the house might be lost or the furniture repossessed.  There may not be enough money to put food on the table or clothe the children....  The meeting is opened with a moment of silent meditation and closed with the Serenity Prayer.”  And the philosophies of such ladies’ auxiliaries to Twelve-Step groups, have inspired a lot of current self-help psychology in general.  If it’s your problem, you’d better just help yourself.

At first, the gambler’s wife would look at the real problem, his gambling, ask herself, “Can I change this?”, and answer, “No.”  Even if someone caused her problems that couldn’t be attributed to a mental disease that made him not guilty by reason of insanity, she still absolutely can’t change others’ actions and can change her own reactions.  Next, she’d think, “No law is forcing me to stay married to him.  Can I change this?”  If she can afford to, she’d answer “Yes,” move out, and whenever her new desperate living situation caused her problems, she’d ask about each aspect of each one, “Can I change this?”  If she can’t afford to leave, then she’d have to look at each of the realities that he caused for her, and ask about each aspect of it, “Can I change this?”  In any case, the only choices that she’d have available to her would be this pragmatism, or those big realities making her life very dysfunctional.  Those who face their problems solely along the lines of, “Can I change this?  Can I change this?  Can I change this?  Can I change this?  Can I change this?”, would probably be most likely to succeed.  This is the main idea of all victim correction as a panacea, such as that no matter what caused 34,000,000 Americans to suffer from serious depressive disorders, they can’t change this, but can each change their own brain chemistries through anti-depressants.

All you’ve got to do is look at the statistics regarding depression and you’d see that the problem here isn’t just a matter of opinion:

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

The April, 2001 issue of Psychology Today magazine, says in an article about how people could better manage the psychiatric disorders of family members, “More than 100 million Americans have a close family member who suffers from a major mental illness.  Of the 10 leading causes of disability, half are psychiatric.  By the year 2020, the major cause of disability in the world may be major depression.”

The book The Secret Life of the Brain, by neurologist Richard Restak, says, “Over the next century, depression will be the number one cause of disability in the developing world and the number four cause of death worldwide.  Currently it afflicts 17 percent of people in the United States—12 to 13 percent of men and over twice as many women (about 25 percent).  That breaks down into somewhere between 15 and 25 million Americans with a depressive episode in a given year.”

 The book Malignant Sadness, the Anatomy of Depression, by Lewis Wolpert, says, “A recent report, Global Burden of Disease, published by the World Health Organisation, states that depression was the fourth most important health problem in the developing world in 1990 (accounting for about 3 per cent of the total burden of illness) and predicts that it will be the number one health problem in the developing world in 2020 (accounting for about 6 per cent of the total burden).  Over the same period the annual number of suicides will increase from 593,000 to 995,000 in the developing world.”

Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life, Sixth Edition, by James C. Coleman, James N. Butcher, and Robert C. Carson, copyright 1980, says, “In fact, it has been estimated that some 8 to 10 persons in 100—about 25 million Americans—will evidence a severe depressive episode at some time in their lives (Brown, 1974).  Over 2 million of these will suffer profound depressions (President’s Commission on Mental Health, 1978).”  These are referenced to an article by B. Brown in the Behavior Today of April 29, 1974, and the Report to the President, from the President’s Commission on Mental Health, U.S. Government Printing Office, of 1978.

When you’ve seen ads and other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “Could we really afford to keep assuming that we must fit in with all this?  If many of those who are skeptical of the status quo, were asked, ‘Does it surprise you that the injustices that you talk about, are far more than just philosophical injustices, that they contribute to some very unnaturally high rates of depression?’, chances are that they’d find that this greatly confirms their suspicions!  In fact, chances are that even those who’d oppose such an opposition to the status quo, wouldn’t say that even if we could prove what makes our rate of depression so unnaturally high, we’d still have to go right on accepting it and treating the massive depression with mega-medication, since we can’t interfere with people’s freedom to do what causes it!  Maybe the only real way to fit in, would be to fit in with the threshold of human endurance, which is very different from what our culture tells us to accept.”

If you’re overpowered, you might think that power does matter.  His having more power than you, is what determined the outcome. Yet if you act as if this fact does matter, you could seem to be playing the victim role, manipulatively using victim-power, self-defeatingly acting passive, etc.  Naturally, we can’t do anything about the social problems that contribute to our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., unless we proceed as if power does matter.

Since our rate of depression is so high, and since in Eastern countries it’s going up with Globalism, this undoubtedly is a social problem.  Proof that it is, would only be proof of why we can’t afford not to go against the victim-blaming logic that William Ryan described in Blaming the Victim, “This is how the distressed and disinherited are redefined in order to make it possible for us to look at society’s problems and to attribute their causation to the individuals affected....  To the extent that society plays any part in social problems, it is said to have somehow failed to socialize the individual, to teach him how to adjust to circumstances, which, though far from perfect, are gradually changing for the better....  These programs are based on the assumption that individuals ‘have’ social problems as a result of some kind of unusual circumstances—accident, illness, personal defect or handicap, character flaw or maladjustment—that exclude them from using the ordinary mechanisms for maintaining and advancing themselves....  All were seen, however, as individuals who, for good reasons or bad, were personal failures, unable to adapt themselves to the system.”  If our solution is to treat as many millions of those people as possible, with medication, then relying on this mega-medication would hardly constitute an adequate and problem-free solution.

Not only that, many of our cultural norms that we now take for granted, that we even insist that people accept as defining what their personal responsibilities are, would have seemed radical before the Reagan era.  These would have basically the same conception of what the are an individual’s rights and responsibilities in an adversarial economy, as Jeff Skilling would.  While this is both very patriarchal and demanding, it could also be called “pro-freedom,” and, therefore, the cultural conditioning we’d get on whether or not you’re adequately self-reliant, would look something like Jeff Skilling’s opinion.

The patriarchal power dynamics are very obvious, in that defining “character defects” as the following do, would obviously tend to make the powerless seem characterologically defective:

 

Chances are very good that those who are causing the resentment, anger, fear, depression, etc., have defective characters in the moral sense, but those who want to convince us that depression is a medical condition, NEVER say, “Depression is not a sign of the moral weakness or character flaws of others who’ve caused strife.  It is a medical condition.”  If “good character” is defined in stolid terms rather than moral terms, the more powerful that one is the more likely he’d be to have a “good character,” and the more that victims just shut up and took care of their own problems, the more they’d have “good characters.”  If the people want to move on, want to focus on the future—in Iraq and here, they’d have “good characters.”

 

 

 

Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote of how small and limited our planet is in the entire universe, despite how grandiose people may be about whatever they believe in.  “The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

Since Sagan was used to dealing in the world of science, he was used to working under norms in which the most important factor is what’s the truth.  Sure, scientists who work for corporations or organizations that either support or oppose them, have to care about how much clout one has relative to those who oppose oneself.  Yet in the end, the truth would probably win out.

The big problem about treating economic doctrines as if they’re a lot more banal than believers might want to think that they are, is that no matter how banal they may be, every society has to have one in order to function.  And, as Niebuhr wrote, in every “industrial” society we’ve had so far, what has decided conflicts isn’t what’s the truth, but who has what power.  If you’re in a conflict with someone who has more power to decide the outcome than you do, but you have the truth on your side, and you act as if that ENTITLES you to something, you’ll look like just another untermensch who wants to believe that he’s entitled.  This would seem to be what Nietzsche called a “will to truth.”  What is, now, the truth probably resulted from something that happened in the past, and only resentful untermenschen care about what happened in the past.  When someone defends someone else’s freedom, what the first person defends is probably how the second person exercises his power, not how he exercises the truth.  Realists realize that truth is immaterial.  What is the truth in your particular situation may seem banal and limited, but what is freedom, or otherwise fits that society’s revered principles, seems profound and transcendent.  Power can achieve things, but the truth, especially powerless truth, can’t.  You could be accused of taking the truth too literally as a scientist would, but scientists couldn’t.
 

 

 

 

Though as the trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling begins, those who support Lay and maybe even Skilling say that we should understand that the Enron story isn’t just another story of opportunistic greed.  Instead, it was something worse, an ethos with a cult following, which, in the name of freedom, had many people cheering it.  According to The Smartest Guys In the Room, The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall Of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, “Most companies with trading desks don’t allow the traders’ ethos to trump all other values.”  Regarding what this ethos is, the book also says that though Enron traders “cringed when he said things like ‘we’re on the side of the angels’—what an emotion-laden thought!—they agreed whole-heartedly with the underlying sentiment.”  The traders’ Objectivism was truly their “ideology,” about which they could get very “self-righteous.”

Those who greedily fleeced Tyco, WorldCom, etc., didn’t have this Reaganist flag-waving cheering them on.  And a lot more of the modern West’s depression and victim-self-blaming, has to arise from situations like Enron’s self-righteous pro-freedom dogmatism, than situations where one person simply fleeces another.  And since Houston is so outraged at Enron, chances are that most of the good ol’ Texans are angry at the supposed greed, rather than at the pro-freedom self-righteousness.

The closing arguments of the trial of Skilling and Lay, showed a good deal of the pro-freedom rhetoric which, before the scandal, would have had many cheering it.  Skilling’s lawyer Daniel Petrocelli described former Enron employees who testified for the government as, “people who have been robbed of their free will.  Their lives are in the hands of our government, they know what needs to be said.”  He also said, “These people came up here and they didn’t tell big lies, they told little lies.  Because in their heart, these are good people—Fastow aside.  These are good people.  That’s how they build the whole case: coercion.  What’s on trial here folks is fear.”

Lay’s lawyer Chip Lewis looked at the prosecutors and shouted, “Don’t come to Houston, Texas, and lie to us,” at which Lay’s family and Skilling briefly applauded.  Lay’s lawyer Bruce Collins said that at the end he reassured investors that the company was doing fine because, “He was not a chicken little.  No one wants a ‘chicken little’ as a leader...  He did not at any time think the sky was falling.”  Lay’s lawyer Michael Ramsey said, “One brave American citizen who is resolute can stop a guilty verdict,” and, “There may be a court in America that bends to political pressure but it’s not this court!  There may come a day when an American jury yields to a media mob, but it’s not this day!,” though he also said, “When you say not guilty, you’re not saying innocent, you’re saying not proven,” which hardly sounds like something to get emphatic about.

Previously, this was exactly the sort of renegade defiance that made people cheer Enron.  The guv’mint would seem to be robbing people of their own free will to serve a manipulative goal, the guv’mint is lying to us, no one likes pessimistic Chicken Littles, everyone likes brave people who don’t yield to whiny political pressure, etc.  Skilling and Lay could have made great guests of Jeffrey Derderian, local pundit in Rhode Island, who was also one of the co-owners of The Station nightclub, which burned down in about six minutes because so much flammable material was in it.  Yet now that the scandal has broken, this looks like just another bunch of defiant criminal defendants.  When Lewis looked at the prosecutors and shouted, “Don’t come to Houston, Texas, and lie to us,” and Lay’s family and Skilling applauded, some jurors looked at each other and rolled their eyes.  Some jurors gave Petrocelli a cool reception.  When one sees the consequences of this sort of defiance, it no longer seems to have the Wagnerian excitement of the German Romantic era.

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was a major inspiration of both Nietzsche and Wagner, so we could go beyond calling this sort of zeitgeist “Wagnerian,” to say that Wagner was Schopenhauerian.  His magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, includes, “Wrong through violence is not so ignominious for the perpetrator as wrong through cunning, because the former is evidence of physical strength, which in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race.  The latter, on the other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays weakness, and at the same time degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral being.”  Pre-scandal Enron had the appeal of strength, and other dynamic things such as optimism and the inspired maverick, which in all circumstances powerfully impress the human race.  Both the guv’mint and the media seem to be engaging in ignominious cunning.  All you’ve got to do is listen to the “Savage Nation” style pundits, and you could see how attractive the red-blooded emotionalism really is.

Lay had previously said in his speech in front of the Houston Forum, “But a time of political and public hysteria is not a ripe time for truth.  Those with a public voice were telling the stories they wanted to tell and the people were reading the stories they wanted to hear—stories of powerful, greedy and soulless executives eager to trample on anyone and everyone to achieve their ruthless aims and immoral goals.”  Before the scandal, Lay certainly took advantage of the media’s admiration of Enron.

Those in Texas, especially, would want to believe in what originally seemed to be the principles of Enron, that if those in a company aren’t overtly cynical, then their exercise of their freedom won’t devastate masses of people.  The Smartest Guys In the Room quotes an Enron executive as saying about Lay’s continued guarantees that the public should keep treating Enron as a reliable investment, “Ken thought that there was nothing wrong with Enron that what was right with Enron couldn’t fix.”

One who holds to the red-blooded spirit that both Reaganomics and Texas are known for, would accept that:  If Lay based the assurances that he gave to the investing public, on this sincere diehard optimism, then it wasn’t malicious, so it wasn’t really morally bad.  We must accept that achievers in business will sometimes confidently take risks like this.  With life, come risks and disappointments.  As long as his intent wasn’t to trample on anyone and everyone to achieve his ruthless aims and immoral goals, then your holding his recklessness morally accountable, is only your judgmental self-serving and resentful opinion.  Sure, Kenny Boy had a responsibility to be careful about what he tells the public to have faith in, but if a CEO doesn’t live up to this responsibility since he prefers optimism, then we should understand his not living up to a duty to do something.  If we refuse to accept Kenny’s recklessness, then what’s to stop us from refusing to accept normal imperfections in business?  And though holding Enron accountable is productive since the power of the law would back up this accountability, if another business causes someone a problem like this, in a situation where he can’t change it, then he should try to see it in a way that would let him serenely accept it.

Chances are that a lot more of our rampant depression arises from morally ambiguous situations like this, than morally unambiguous situations like “powerful, greedy and soulless executives.”  The same would go for the victim-self-blaming that’s characteristic of modern Western depression, anxiety, etc.  It would sound a lot more morally bankrupt to figure, “I was responsible for letting that powerful greedy and soulless person triumph over me,” than to figure, “I was responsible for failing to make sure that those optimistic guarantees I counted on, weren’t just mistakes.”

As Jonathan Friedland, the Washington correspondent for the Guardian, wrote, “Timothy McVeigh saw himself in that kind of John Wayne tradition of the rugged individualist who knows best.  And the rest of the country who are still taking their orders from Washington, they’re too blind to see what this kind of inspired maverick can see.  And that tradition... [is] deeply rooted in American popular culture and shared by both left and right.”  As Bobby Shriver said on Larry King Live on October 13, 2006, “And we were reading this poll the other day that the number one movie star, Larry, in America today is still John Wayne.  He hasn’t had a movie in the theaters, as you know, in 40 years.”

That’s what Enron’s leadership have been all about, even now.  Lay also said in his Houston Forum speech, “The whole plea bargaining process allows—even encourages—blatant prosecutorial abuse....  The prosecutor becomes a human guillotine when given the power to charge an individual, act as judge and jury, as well as executioner if a ‘cooperating’ witness does not assist the prosecutor as the prosecutor believes the ‘cooperating witness’ should.”  If you ignored the fact that this would apply equally to blue-collar crimes involving conspiracies, it could qualify as more deregulation, protection of business from government, and from the intellectual elite supposedly fomenting a whiny emotionalism that somehow seems appealing.

Sure, Lay’s inane guarantees might reflect the childlike character that led to this powerful executive, being nicknamed “Kenny Boy,” but it seems that we must understand aggressive childishness, just 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,” accepts other aggressive human imperfection.  If those hurt by him don’t just take response-ability for their own problems, their own welfare, then their passive supposed childishness would seem inexcusably immature.  The sinful are forgiven, but those who don’t deal with their own problems with enough serenity courage and wisdom, aren’t.

The Smartest Guys In the Room credits Skilling with the Enron-ism of treating those who aren’t in line with Enron’s intellectually pure Newthink, as if they just don’t “get it.”  “Skilling, in particular, was infamous for dividing the world into those who ‘got it’ and those who didn’t.  Internally, it was part of the company’s code; Enron itself was divided between those who got it (the traders; the deal-makers) and those who didn’t (the old-line pipeline executives).”

A Houston Chronicle article, in a section headed, “People had to get it,” says, “The cultural changes in the company even threatened the very language that defined the company’s values: respect, integrity, communication and excellence.  In the late 1990s, the company’s Visions and Values Task Force considered expressing the principles with words such as ‘smart,’ ‘bold’ and ‘aggressive.’  The effort failed, but it spoke volumes about what was afoot at Enron.”

Anyone faced with a problem has to “get” the reasons why these values, and others like strength of character and honorability, must be defined in such pragmatic goal-oriented strong ways.  We mustn’t weaken the fiber or demoralize the self-reliance of the population.  One could even say that all of Ken Lay’s denials of problems during the last days of Enron, when all those problems were being uncovered, were at least compatible with good values, since what he said constitutes optimism, and that’s productive.  Sometimes any confident person could be too confident, so we must allow room for this.  This wasn’t a case of powerful, greedy and soulless executives eager to trample on anyone and everyone to achieve their ruthless aims and immoral goals.  This was the insistence on stolid strength and self-reliance, and ethos that says that whoever wins the battle simply is the winner, that’s typical of Reaganomics.

 

Deregulation, self-responsibility, and realism became important prerogatives.  This normalcy is far more business-as-usual than businesslike.  This, after all, is what has to look gutsy and exciting when it comes from attack politicians, “Savage Nation” commentators and media which go for a sardonic excitement, constant stridency, etc.  A popular complement if Germany is scharf, meaning sharp, which is what the breeder of the Doberman Pinscher said he wanted its temperament to be, and this scharf appeal is what that media aims for.  It’s truly astounding how similar are the strident anger of the attack politicians, and the strident anger that Hitler consistently expressed in his speeches, which his audiences, also, found attractive and exciting.  Of course, the American exciting aggression is very likely to contribute to the 5% to 7% of American adults having a serious mental illness and 5% to 9% of American children having a serious emotional disturbance in any given year, but once they do, they’d be treated as if of course real Americans won’t mollycoddle their weakness.  And, if any pundit tried to stand up for their rights, that person wouldn’t sell, since pleas for the helpless couldn’t have that exciting gonzo appeal.

And this also has everything to do with what’s pragmatic and self-efficacious.  As Teddy Roosevelt said, “There is a homely old adage which runs, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.’”  This says basically the same thing as “Serenely accept what you can’t change, and courageously change what you can and must; you will go far.”  The weak express their wills through words and hurt feelings, neither of which will accomplish anything in the material world.  On the other hand, using the big stick, is courageously changing things.  Of course, whether each person is able to carry a big stick, depends on whether or not he has one.  If he’s powerless, then he’ll have to accept, serenely and quietly.

 

 

The webpage Germany’s Progression of Prejudice says, “The ideal volkish German is native, has unmixed blood, possesses a moral character, and a bellicose, bloodthirsty nature,” and that’s very similar to the appeal that the Savage Nation pundits go for, advocating morality, but continually projecting an angry excitement.  When the stock market had its latest downturn, Orange County went bankrupt since it invested a lot of money in risky investments.  If it had a businesslike approach it would have invested mainly in low-risk investments, but in the political realm that attitude would have seemed square, unappealing and unmarketable.

For example, just after the Oklahoma City bombing, Bob Grant, on the Bob Grant Show on WABC radio in New York City, said to a caller who objected to his blaming Muslims for the bombing, “the indications are that those people who did it were some Muslim terrorists.  But a skunk like you, what I’d like to do is put you up against the wall with the rest of them, and mow you down along with them.  Execute you with them.  Because you obviously have a great hatred for America, otherwise you wouldn’t talk the way you talk, you imbecile.”

Grant had also said plenty of racist things, such as, on April 30, 1993 referring to black churchgoers as “screaming savages,” saying on July 15, 1993 that black fraternity members represent “the savage mind, the primitive, primordial mentality,” and, on January 6, 1992, referring to the crowd at charity event in which overcrowding led to some deaths, “the 3,000 to 5,000 savages who showed up for the rap stars’ basketball game.”

His webpage on the radio station that currently broadcasts his show, WOR in New York, says, “Bob Grant brings a history of more than 25 years of exciting talk to WOR.  Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!  Life’s more interesting that way.”  That’s the appeal of Reaganomics.  Its riskiness is supposed to be exciting, and make life more interesting.  Sure, this attack politics would hurt a lot of people, leading to a higher rate of depression, but those losers don’t seem to matter, and they’d likely seem to be the villains, anyway.

Before the Oklahoma City Bombing, G. Gordon Liddy had said on his radio program, “They’ve got a big target there on their chest....  Don’t shoot at that because they’ve got a vest on underneath that.  Head shots, head shots....  Kill the sons of bitches,” which many figured was the sort of rhetoric that inspired the bombing.  His audience, also, found that sort of statement to be very stimulating.

On March 18, 1994, one of Bob Grant’s callers said, “What could I do as a citizen of this country, which I believe in and have seen fall apart as I’ve been growing up?”

Grant responded, “Well, get a gun and go do something then, OK?”  Life’s more interesting that way.

 

 

 

The old version of Globalism could be seen in the following statement which State Department planner George Kennan made in 1948: “...we have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population....  In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.  Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.  To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.”

The modern version would go as follows: “Each individual, no matter how poor he and his country may be, must learn to think in a confident, achievement-oriented fashion.  This would mean that he choose not to think envious and resentful thoughts, since such bitterness would only dishearten him and feel bad.  His real task in the coming period is to fit in with a pattern of relationships which will hold him responsible for his successes or failures, whether or not he caused them, since that would encourage him to try very hard.  Rather than finding blame, he should find solutions.  To do so, everyone will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and their attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on their achievement-oriented objectives.  All this is ruggedly individualistic, and silences anyone who could possibly seem manipulative judgmental or controlling, and life’s more interesting that way.”  This is no different from how self-help psychology tells American women who’ve just escaped from impossible husbands, that the women must accept that they’re now responsible for dealing with “the feminization of poverty,” as confidently as they could.

In the theories of psychology, this equating strength with honorability and weakness with cunning, come from two very German-influenced influences, Freud and Reinhold Niebuhr.  Both accepted aggressive human nature along the lines of the Doctrine of Original Sin.  This, taken to its final outcome, is best shown by the title of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation.  This was written during the Romantic Era of Central European culture, from the 19th Century until World War I, which, in Germany, looked a lot like the red-blooded romanticism and magical thinking of pre-scandal Enron.  If those with a public voice told whiny stories, that would have turned people off, not on.

 

The The World as Will and Representation zeitgeist has four basic elements, and this is the same zeitgeist of market discipline.  As Justice Potter Stewart said in concurring with the Furman v. Georgia decision regarding the death penalty in 1972, “These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual,” and the same could be said for the punishments that come from market discipline, but whether one physically wins or loses is objective, and whether one is right or wrong is subjective.  (Yet, of course, if the law punishes people based on happenstance, that would seem intolerable, but if the real world punishes people based on happenstance, for you not to accept that that’s the real world would seem intolerable.)

These elements are:

  1. Humanity’s aggressive will is ineradicable, so trying to thwart it would only mean trouble, so the will of the powerful seems sacrosanct.  This is also a main theme of psychoanalysis.

  2. Those weak enough to lose those battles, must therefore deal with the resulting realities by making their representations or perceptions of the world as Stoic as possible a la cognitive therapy, as well as by perfecting their tactics in solving the problems.  If a business causes someone a problem like those that Enron caused, in a situation where he can’t change it, then he should try to see it in a way that would let him serenely accept it.  Though cognitive therapy would be just as effective in re-engineering aggressive human nature as it would be in re-engineering hurt feelings, cognitive therapy is far more likely to be used on those who have the problems, than on those who cause them.

  3. Objections to this are to be held in contempt, as if they expect the world to be as the (mostly weak) objectors’ SELF-WILLS would have it, or maybe they’re after something more specific that they want.  Impugning the weak is pretty much the norm.  This cunning is what modern psychotherapy would call “manipulation.”  Though sinfulness must be forgiven, supposed manipulativeness mustn’t be.

  4. This must seem to be what constitutes the entire world, since those in trouble can’t afford distractions, especially those dealing with the immorality of what was done to them.  Serious apologies, compunctions, or other equivocations about this, seem bad, since they could weaken the self-reliant problem-solving, and strengthen the willfulness of victims’ objections.  Pragmatism, honorable self-reliance, and forgiveness, must seem desirable in all situations.

Take the above quote from The World as Will and Representation, replace “violence” with “toughness,” and you’d have the American version of this.  Though the old German version said that those who seem ignominiously cunning are more dishonorable than are those who are tough, the new version stresses that the “mollycoddles” are more dangerous since you can’t defend yourself against tears and other mercenary and manipulative “victim power.”  In this sense, the new version is more Nazified.

Treating aggression as ignominious (not as just “sinful” but forgiven), would seem weak, unhealthy, and insidiously dangerous: repressive judgmental resentful manipulative whiny naïve anti-freedom and inhibited, which in all circumstances are powerfully unimpressive.  Rather than “ignominious for the perpetrator,” this would be ignominious for the victim who doesn’t just deal with his own problem stolidly.  Since his intellect reflects his will, plenty of his honest opinions that don’t stolidly represent the problem as being innocuous, could be deemed “cunning.”  Weak people suspected of real cunning won’t be presumed innocent until proven guilty, since real cunning is sneaky and hidden, few thoughts can be proven, and we want to have faith that people deserved whatever they got.  And all this applies “in all circumstances” where it could seem tenable.  To old-school Germans, “all circumstances” would include violence.  Life’s more interesting that way.  And even if this leads to about 5% to 7% of adults having a serious mental illness, and about 5% to 9% of children having a serious emotional disturbance, they could always get treatment, which would be the least ignominious way to deal with their problems.

This might sound like a real Götterdämmerung, but market discipline also has to discipline like this.  According to market discipline, if you have the buying power then your will means everything, but if you don’t then your will seems contemptible, presumptuous.  One is most likely to get rewarded, if he makes his reactions, including his representations of what happened to him, as pragmatic as possible, and makes this his entire worldview.  Also, the red-blooded leitmotifs of the culture of the Romantic Era in Germany, though it shaped the basic might-makes-right ideas on Nazism, could also seem excitingly unrepressed.

The foreword of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting’s book about Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Aren’t, says, “Because satire can be quite a cruel weapon.  It has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful.  When you use satire as a weapon against powerless people, it is not only cruel, it is profoundly vulgar.”  Yet life’s more interesting that way, and that would also encourage achievement.  Satire used against the powerless, sounds excitingly gutsy.  Good ol’ boy vulgarity sounds respectable, such as the line in Johnny Cash’s classic Folsom Prison Blues, about a good ol’ boy thrill killing, “But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.  When I hear that [train] whistle blowin’, I hang my head and cry.”

That has the impressiveness of strength, and ridicules the ignominiousness of the weak who don’t just shut up and take care of their own problems.  The American culture has a similar dichotomy, in that about a century ago, William James wrote that Americans tend to classify people as either redbloods or mollycoddles, which also treats the strong as honorable, and the weak who don’t take care of their own problems, as manipulators.  In fact, that same foreword quotes one of Limbaugh’s fans as saying, “You know, Rush is right: Racism is dead in this country.  I don’t know what the niggers have to gripe about now,” as if the weak are cunningly and ignominiously looking for opportunities to get mollycoddled.  That would be contrasted with the big patriotic theme song that was emblematic of the Reagan era, Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, in which the first verse begins, “If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life,” goes on to say that the hero would simply take responsibility for his own welfare by rebuilding, and ends “and they can’t take that away,” as if those things were gone because some people took them away.  That’s quite literally the ideal of the Reaganomics zeitgeist, which would then satirize the weak who gripe instead of dealing with their own problems like that.

The unspecified “they” sounds almost paranoid.  As the textbook Abnormal Psychology, Clinical and Scientific Perspectives, by Barclay and Martin, says in its section on paranoid schizophrenia, “People with delusions of persecution, believe that they are threatened and persecuted by various people or groups: neighbor, competitor, boss, communists, the FBI, or some vague ‘they.’...  The controlling agents may be God, the devil, parents, political groups, or again a vague ‘they.’”  Yet one who believes in resilient resourceful and independent self-help, would also believe that no matter what “they” might do, the outcome would be the result of how well the victim took response-ability for his own welfare.

Christopher Lasch wrote in his article in the New Republic of August 10, 1992, For Shame, that our culture has,

a cult of the victim in which entitlements are based on the display of accumulated injuries inflicted by an uncaring society.  The politics of “compassion” degrades both the victims, by reducing them to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, the attainment of which would make them respected.  Compassion has become the human face of contempt.

One needn’t be a sociologist to see in this, the crux of Reaganomics, that if only those who keep talking about victimology and victimhood, or sue businesses because their pain and losses (rather than objective achievement) entitle them,

or evade their personal response-ability for their own problems, etc., thought like Lee Greenwood instead, that would solve our problems.  Sure, that’s impersonal, but it would make people more respectable, if we consider those who seem to be übermenschen/redbloods to be respectable, and those who seem to be untermenschen/mollycoddles to be contemptible.  Just as in old Wagnerian Germany it was the weak who seemed “ignominious,” in modern America it’s the weak who get the “contempt.”

If instead we tried to have a balanced approach that differentiated the real victims from the fakes, showed contempt for the victimizers, etc., that would seem too: unpragmatic, abstractly analytical, idealistic, equivocal, iconoclastic (Just look at the unequivocal personality types that were icons during the Reagan/Thatcher era, and that still inspire profound admiration, which would include the pro-freedom and red-blooded, “hold them up to impersonal standards, the attainment of which would make them respected.”), moralistic, opinionated, unrealistic about how much real victims must deal with their own problems, restrictive, unforgiving, potentially manipulative, etc.  Even if all that someone did was set limits as to how much victim-correction he’s willing to accept, that could seem to be choosing not to impersonally become adequately correct, and, therefore, respectable.

A society with rampant depression will have plenty of real victims.  In order for it to keep functioning, it must pressure them into simply dealing with their own problems objectively and self-reliantly.  In all societies including those with rampant depression, no one could seem self-reliant enough unless he’s self-reliant enough to succeed with whatever realities and risks he must deal with.  (Of course, if he showed some self-reliant responsibility, but not enough, that loser would get contempt rather than respect.)  Before the Reagan era, these social pressures and cultural conditioning were usually done more subtly than anything that implied, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  Reaganomics couldn’t exist without these unequivocal conceptions of: personal rights, personal responsibilities, supposedly manipulative, mollycoddle victims, why responsibility should (predictably) be projected onto victims, which entitlements seem respectable, which “defects of character” we take seriously, etc.

This approach to psychology and problem-solving, could be called both healthy and unhealthy, for the same reasons that Social Darwinism could be called both healthy and unhealthy.  Or, as The self-help book about cognitive therapy, Feeling Good, by David Burns, MD, put it, “Now we come to a truth you may see either as a bitter pill or an enlightening revelation.  There is no such thing as a universally accepted concept of fairness and justice....  Here’s proof: When a lion devours a sheep, is this unfair?  From the point of view of the sheep, it is unfair, he’s being viciously and intentionally murdered with no provocation.”

All of these, from the point of view of the active individual, look spontaneous unrestricted earthy Populist and “interesting.”  Both of these seem attractive for the same reasons that many people found working for Enron to be an exciting experience.  Both of these seem Naturalist, since people are supposed to just “act naturally,” and attempts to control them, fix them, etc., are the anathema.  Yet in any system based on survival of the fittest, most animals will die prematurely.  In Social Darwinism, those who lose the battles don’t literally die (though our death rate among the poor is extraordinarily high), yet the consequences are just as out-of-control on a massive scale.  The outcomes of the battles aren’t to be second-guessed.  If those outcomes mean rampant depression, anxiety, etc., then the measures required to normalize this would seem bad, controlling and unrealistic.  And according to the self-help school of psychology, attempts to get control over the causes of the high rates of depression, anxiety, etc., are bad for the same Naturalist reasons.  If we dare not try to get control over all that uninhibited chaos, that’s going to be very unhealthy for those devastated by it.  Yet when most observers size up whether or not a culture is mentally healthy, devastated vanquished people are pretty much treated as unpersons.  If we end up with very unnatural rates of depression, anxiety, etc., that wouldn’t seem to indicate that the culture is actually unnatural.

Just look at The Serenity Prayer and its pervasiveness in modern self-help, and you could see how, whenever facing the sort of interpersonal conflict that assertiveness was supposed to deal with, whether your winning would be to “win at all costs” or get the closest thing you could to a normal life, the only question you could legitimately pose about any possible responses would be, “Would this change anything?”  Chances are that the person who’d want this sinful world to be as he’d have it, is addressing the sinfulness assertively, but as long as he can’t change it, he’s supposed to be serene instead.  Or if he can change some things, he’s supposed to do so without saying anything, including assertively.

Moral relativism becomes amoral absolutism, since whatever sinfulness you must serenely accept in order to be realistic, then that’s what you must serenely accept.  If you don’t, you could seem: self-righteous, that you’re diverting your attention from changing what you can (yourself), that either you think that judging others will change them or you don’t but you’re doing it anyway both of which are pretty stupid, that you’re just trying to control the immoral for sport and you really must get out of that habit, that you want to play the victim role, that you should have more confidence in the extent to which your reactions rather than your enemies’ actions determine what happens to you, that treating what someone else did as morally wrong is no way to come to an amicable agreement, etc.

And, of course, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” or even, “serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can notwithstanding how morally bankrupt that conception of ‘personal responsibility’ would be in my situation,” doesn’t mean, “moderating my feelings so that they’re proportional to what happened.”

Niebuhr’s magnum opus, The Nature and Destiny of Man, came from lectures that gave at the same time as The Moscow Show Trials.  They were probably a big reason why at that time, he was very aware of the fact that no matter how much a political movement might claim to serve the common good, it’s actually run by human beings, which, therefore, must include their SELF-WILLS.  Yet the ironic thing is that the only self-will that the Show Trials really showed, was Stalin’s.  All of the Old Guard Bolsheviks who were put on trial, confessed to the supposed crimes that they were put on trial for.  Sure, many of the defendants were tortured into confessing, and threatened that family members would be tortured if they didn’t confess.  Others, who refused to confess, were executed without a public trial.  Yet no doubt plenty of the defendants confessed because they thought that this served the common good.  That would mean that if they were more selfish, that would have served The Truth, far better than their self-sacrifice did!  Of course, one could say that the fact that they so believed in their favorite dogma was a narcissistic belief that they’re right, but that’s as simplistic as is the supposed narcissism of, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”  Anyone who’d think that what the Show Trials showed was the dangers of SELF-WILL, must have a strange bias against self-interest!  And just as, if the defendants in the Show Trials hadn’t confessed that would have reflected their own SELF-WILLS but would have also served The Truth, if those who are unjustifiably accused of choosing to be weak for “fun” and/or profit, refuse to confess to this, that would reflect their own SELF-WILLS but would also serve The Truth.  The Truth is bound to serve a lot of people’s SELF-WILLS, and democratic and humanistic truths will certainly serve this.  If you look at each of them separately, you could always lecture her about how her SELF-WILL expects this sinful world to be as she’d have it, see her as resentful and/or manipulative,

etc.

For example, though Jane was a role model when she swallowed the traditional notion that since men’s SELF-WILLS are very likely to be out of control like her husband’s, women should eschew themselves having strong SELF-WILLS, and she swallowed this “hook, line and sink-her,” if she instead had been defiant, this would have led to more integrity for her, and for her society.  Just imagine an Al-Anon comic about an alcoholic wife and her sober husband, in which, in the first frame she’s apologizing for relapsing when she was already sober and he tells her, “There’s nothing to forgive....” with the same extremely open body language that Jane had,

and in the second frame, since he absolutely can change himself and absolutely can’t change anyone else, he’s sitting in a park serenely thinking, “This is so much better than staying home and watching Mary get drunk.”

To say that if Saddam used the germs that the Reagan Administration arranged for him to receive, for genocide of anyone, Reagan would be responsible since he should have known that Saddam would likely do that, would be the logic behind the law of negligent homicide.  According to that, if you do something that ends up killing someone, and a person using a reasonable prudence and care could have foreseen that danger, you’d be guilty of negligent homicide.  Yet when our culture sizes up moral responsibility, a tolerant, well-adjusted, attitude would figure that: only a utopian would hold everyone to a standard where they have to be reasonable, it’s un-American to think that someone has a duty to care, expecting reasonable prudence is prude, and it’s Draconian to make someone pay for an omission of foresight.  If Saddam used those germs, and somehow the American public knew that the Reagan Administration arranged for him to receive them, well-adjusted Americans would find plenty of other excuses for Ronnie, such as that naturally realpolitik requires that leaders sometimes take life-or-death risks.  It would simply seem too resentful and manipulative, to hold someone responsible for anything that didn’t have a malicious intent.  White Americans would have cared more about white Jews being exterminated, than any Arabs being exterminated, but in the end, even the extermination of Jews would seem to mean that Ronnie only made a mistake.

Probably the best rough definition of a codependent relationship, would be one in which no moral arguments or assertive statements could talk the problem person out of the problem behavior, because “That’s just the way that he is, and you can’t change him.”  The subtitle of Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love too Much is, “When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change,” so the problem seems to be that the women keep addressing the men’s destructive choices, assertively.  In normal conflicts, an assertive mien would still be suggested.  But self-help books that have been influenced by the current thinking on codependency, would say that even though The Assertive Woman condemns the manipulative woman who tries to get her alcoholic husband to relapse, steadfast assertiveness now seems manipulative, since steadfast assertiveness keeps wishing and hoping that someone’s choices will change.  By the current standards, the above claim that the goal of assertiveness is not “victory” but being able to express your needs and desires openly and honestly, is codependent-style melodrama.  Your goal is to express your objections whether this changes anything or not?

Instead, it seems that the only thing that matters is whether or not you can change what you want or need to.  This would reflect the current prerogatives: deregulation, self-responsibility, realism, etc.  What’s the right or wrong way for you to act or think, depends on how powerful or powerless you are.  If your spouse is reasonable enough that moral arguments would convince him, then for you to convey to him assertively the moral rightness of your position, would seem productive.  If your spouse isn’t reasonable so your marriage has the tyrannical quality of a codependent relationship, and you did exactly the same thing, you’d seem to have codependent desires to express your needs and desires openly and honestly though this would accomplish nothing.  He actually would be an “aggressive person” who has a “compulsion to ‘win at all costs’,” but since he wins because he has the power to effect his will, rather than because of his words or other abstractions, you’re expected to accept that “That’s just the way that he is.”  And the worse that anyone’s problem is, the more that she can’t afford to care about how it comes from a social problem.

Women Who Love too Much, When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change, is a very good example of Reagan-Era market reform.  The ethos of such self-help, disciplines exactly as market discipline, disciplines.  Holding each of us response-able for our own welfare, including our own problems, would be far more reliable and pragmatic than even the most worldly ethical responsibility, which could be called altruistic.  The more outrageous are those who caused the problems, the more important it would be that the victims stolidly take response-ability for their own problems.  That ethical responsibility could be called subjective, while response-ability for one’s own problems seems objective.  That ethical responsibility could seem to be an attempt to control, manipulate, etc., the redbloods who caused the problems, while if those with the problems don’t take care of themselves well enough, and/or do try to control, manipulate, etc. those redbloods, then these victims would seem to be mollycoddles.  Forgiveness seems to be not only a Christian virtue, but also a secular requirement, since those who are bitter seem maladjusted, unappealing, etc.  All this leads to some very convoluted logic, such as that many of the lovers and wives of problem men both want to be martyrs, and keep wishing and hoping that the martyrdom would change into normalcy.

Yet that pushes and motivates people, the same way that market forces do.  Sure, to say that these women both want to be martyrs and keep wishing that the martyrdom will change, is very illogical, but it would seem that only intellectualists care that much about logical inconsistencies.  If you’re the one with the problem, then it would benefit you if you held yourself responsible for your success or failure in doing whatever’s necessary to get it under control.  Victim correction as a panacea is the most failsafe way for problems to be solved with as much self-motivation as possible.  That’s far more important than any intellectualisms.

If even those who keep wishing and hoping that those who martyr them will change, see themselves as having had “let themselves in for trouble” with the martyrers, the martyrs won’t see their own self-responsibility as morally bankrupt, would be more resolute in correcting their own weaknesses, etc.  Victim-correcting books that claim that the victims really are ethically responsible for their own problems, would probably have more of a market value than would the morally bankrupt books, such as those that would say simply, “As long as you keep wishing and hoping he’ll change but he doesn’t, then irrespective of how morally responsible he is, it’s your problem, so what are you going to do about it?”  All that serene conscious-lowering would, therefore, seem to be a reform over the old whiny, consciousness-raising way of handling such situations: holding the men morally responsible for their own abusive behavior.

The importance of the fact that the victim is always the person who’s most motivated to solve his problems, can be seen in how much differences the amount of motivation made in the slowness of the rescues in New Orleans.  One could object to the moral bankruptcy of automatically giving responsibility for solving problems, to the people who have the problems.  It could seem that, especially with enough assertive pressuring, those who are legitimately moral responsible for causing problems, would take responsibility for solving them.  Yet, at the very least, they’d be relatively less motivated to solve the problems, as would the people whose welfare is at stake.

While the slowness in helping the New Orleans survivors evacuate, was probably not due to conscious racial discrimination, the motivation to do a good job was no doubt less than it would have been if the evacuees were largely white.  Sure, Leo Bosner, a 26-year FEMA employee and union leader, warned in his daily alert to his higher-ups three days before Katrina came ashore, “If the hurricane winds blow from a certain direction, there are dire predictions of what may happen in the city,” but one still won’t really get moving if he isn’t really motivated.  When one is supposed to solve a problem which requires a good deal of resourcefulness and other tactical wisdom, the degree of motivation that he feels, would make a big difference in how successful he is.  Sure, FEMA were motivated to do something in its rescue efforts before the public got angry, but it was quite half-hearted and half-assed.  Likewise, if the person who caused a problem accepted the responsibility to solve it, he’d be motivated enough to do something, but likely not motivated enough that it wouldn’t be half-hearted and half-assed.  If the victim took responsibility, on the other hand, he’d be motivated by the same self-interested motivating force that market economies are all about.

And whatever the evacuees’ ethnicity, we kept hearing about how good it was that charitable American companies were coming forward and helping the evacuation.  Of course, this meant that whether each evacuee got the help he needed, depended on whether he was lucky enough to get whatever charity he ended up with.  And this dynamic even holds true in the legal process that’s supposed to make sure that innocent people sentenced to death, aren’t executed.  Whenever someone who’d been sentenced to death is exonerated, we’re told to see this as a sign that the system works.  Of course, we wouldn’t hear about anyone who was innocent but was executed anyway.  Many of these people wouldn’t have been executed, if they got enough help from those non-profit organizations set up to prove innocent prisoners’ innocence.  When, regarding a case where the non-profits were responsible for the exoneration, we’re told, “This proves that the system works,” what actually “worked” is some under-funded private efforts, that sometimes work and sometimes don’t.

Yet at least these convicts have the advantage that for the citizens to make sure that our legal process operates right, is a part of our beloved traditions.  If someone is in a situation typical for those that contribute to our rampant depression, helping him could seem un-American, since it could seem he’s just trying to get what he wants through manipulative tactics.

And if one doesn’t live up to such expectations, he’d be treated as falling short of expectations, choosing to be either too weak, or too manipulatively strong.  For example, The Assertive Woman, by Stanlee Phelps and Nancy Austin, says, “Manipulation involves particularly devious or indirect methods to induce someone to do something, or behave in a certain manner.”  Yet ever since the Reagan Revolution, plenty of assertive statements could seem manipulative, since they’re just words, and the more adroit (though honest) they are, the more that they could be treated as emotionalist expressions of the assertive person’s WILL.  For example, the subtitle of the book The Manipulative Child, by Drs. E. W. Swihart, E. W. Swihart Jr., and Patrick Cotter, is, “How to Regain Control and Raise Resilient, Resourceful, and Independent Kids,” not, “How to Regain Control and Raise Kids Who Don’t Try to Pull Machinations.”  Even an undoubtedly assertive person, would be trying to get his problem solved by persuading others, rather than through independent resiliency and resourcefulness.

An example of trendy self-help’s conceptions of manipulation, is the following, out of Robin Norwood’s definitive Women Who Love Too Much: “Not managing or controlling him also means stepping out of the role of encouraging and praising him.  Chances are you have also used these methods to try to get him do what you’d like, and this means they have become too for manipulating him.... Think about why you are lauding something he’s done.  Is it to help raise his self-esteem?  That’s manipulation.  Is it so he will continue whatever behavior you’re praising?  That’s manipulation.”

What this book is about, is relationships or marriages with addicts and their functional equivalents, guys who, unambiguously, have behavior problems that are greatly disrupting their romantic relationships and/or families.  The only way in which the women could seem to be playing the victim role, would be to see them as putting themselves into the position of the genuine victims of the sinful men.  The redemptive Christian influences in our culture tell us that just because someone is now destructive, doesn’t mean that he’s incapable of reformation.  Yet if one tries this with a spouse who, unambiguously, is the problem, this would seem to be, plainly and simply, manipulation, particularly devious or indirect methods.  She wouldn’t be operating like a real operator, but trying to engage in normal give-and-take rapport, eliciting someone’s cooperation.  Yet what these women would be doing, would actually be as devious and indirect as would be a kid not independently using enough resiliency and resourcefulness to deal with a big problem.  Normal give-and-take means that one gives expecting to take something in return, and that could easily seem to fit the current definition of manipulation.  After all, The Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines “elicit” as “to draw out or forth,” and for a woman to draw normal cooperation out of a man who’s supposed to love her, seems to be manipulation.  Such is the much-beloved moral bankruptcy that holds supposedly self-serving people accountable for not “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.”

As far as trendy self-help is concerned, resiliency resourcefulness and independence are important virtues, so social problems aren’t really social problems.  If only each person handled his own problems resiliently resourcefully and independently enough, that would take care of them.   Even for narcotics addicts “The Triangle of Self-Obsession” consists of resentment anger and fear, so weakness seems bad and strength seems at least excusable.  Bold and aggressive people are the least likely to have those weaknesses of character.  Umpteen webpages advertising antidepressants, try to dispel the notion that depression is due to “a character flaw” of the depressed person.  Bold and aggressive people are the least likely to have character flaws like that.  Those who do could be treated as “Iris Indirect,” would be, since we’re all personally responsible for dealing with our own problems, so if we don’t, we’re surreptitiously evading our personal responsibilities.  If we don’t take care of our problems resiliently resourcefully and independently enough, others’ delusions that we’re using particularly devious or indirect methods to induce someone to do something, would seem healthy, even stouthearted.  If one had the slightly older zeitgeist, the one that would aim for such healthy balanced things as an ability to express your needs and desires openly and honestly, it might be harder to have such a strange conception of what, in relation to our rampant depression, constitutes a character flaw.

The person who, on a test for codependency, would seem to be the most self-determined self-respecting free-spirited and mentally healthy, would be a sociopath, so here we go again with boldness and aggression being the ideal.  A webpage has a question by an open-minded man, about books on codependency, which includes, “Also some of the ideas about ‘breaking free’ seem to be an anarchist’s or sociopath’s dream come true.  For example, ‘Rules of society have been created by bureaucrats who have not grown out of their inner child’.”  And while the webpage How the Co-dependency Movement Is Ruining Marriages might seem to have a dutifully religious bent, it really is saying the same thing when it gives an example of a conventional questionnaire to see if one is “dealing with co-dependency issues,” on which you’d score the healthiest if you’d “not do what others expect, be as irritable and unpleasant as you wish, make people angry with you, don’t try to make the people you love happy...,” and that that would be, “A formula for sociopathic behavior if I’ve ever seen one.  You go in with anxiety and come out a terrorist!”  If what one aims for, on the other hand, is assertive voice gestures and posture, as well as the sort of moral accountability that would lead to assertiveness counting for something, then there’d be no need for the sociopathic behavior.

Before Enron’s bankruptcy, it was a darling of many politicians, the media, Wall Street analysts and commentators, even credit rating agencies (who, supposedly, would have no reason for showing leniency), since Enron seemed to represent a refreshingly unhindered wave of the future.  According to a BBC webpage on the scandal, “Enron was the seventh-biggest US company in 2001, and its bankruptcy in December of that year was the largest such filing in American history at the time,” and, “Enron was feted in the US financial media for its ‘innovations’, and Fastow named chief financial officer of the year in the US.”  (CFO magazine awarded him its “excellence award for capital management structure” in 1999, saying, “Analysts have attributed the company’s success largely to Fastow.  Much of its growth has been fueled by the unique financing techniques pioneered by Fastow.”  According to Pipe Dreams, Greed Ego and the Death of Enron, by Robert Bryce, “The magazine praised Fastow’s work in the financing structure created so that Enron could buy Azurix as well as several power plants while keeping the debts off its balance sheet.”)  Conspiracy of Fools, by Kurt Eichenwald, says, “...in its annual rankings, Fortune had hailed Enron as America’s best-managed company, knocking General Electric from the number-one perch,” though a current BBC webpage says, “...disgraced energy trading giant Enron became a byword for corporate misgovernance and greed,” and another quotes the Los Angeles Times as saying that Lay would either be found guilty of fraud or “not guilty by reason of staggering ignorance and incompetence,” so, “Should jurors choose to believe Lay, he will be court-certified as an idiot.”

Robert Bruner, a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia, said that Enron was pervaded with “desks cluttered with visionary bubble diagrams... and weird office toys... people throwing crumbled wads of paper at each other.  This was an environment that was both playful and aggressive.  Enron, in its final manifestation, wanted to be the world’s coolest company.”  But what’s cool about the scharf aggressiveness?  Few thought that the Hell’s Angels were cool.  Sure, aggression could have the spontaneous appeal that the scharf sardonic pundits use to attract and excite their audiences.  Yet to anyone with any maturity, the consequences of a big corporation having a lot of that, should be clear.


Enron Business (eb) vol. 4, 2001


 COOL!!!, as is

 Life’s more interesting that way.

And starting in the 1980s, the most up-and-coming economic leaders weren’t those who made things, but those who made deals.  Conspiracy of Fools says that when the former head of the trading department was made president of Enron and he wanted all the former losses reported then so they wouldn’t be attributed to his presidency, one of Enron’s few moral executives thought, “It was a typical trader’s mind-set—dump the problems on the last guy, move on clean.  But it might not work well.”

This book also says about someone who, at least for a time, was the head of the wholesale division, that after a PR executive said that one thing that the company must do is apologize as part of a PR formula, “At that, the room exploded.  ‘We’re not apologizing for anything!’, John Lavorato, a top trader, roared.”  Also, “Lavorato was a typical trader—rambunctious, loud and demanding...”  Therefore, it wasn’t a good idea for him to go to the bank with Enron officials to get the checks to pay employees retention bonuses to keep them at Enron despite the forthcoming bankruptcy.  When he was told not to, “Lavorato’s voice broke.  ‘I’m sorry, Ray, I’m sorry,’ he said.  ‘I just want my money.  I’ve never had a big payday.  I just want my money.’”  When the officials returned from the bank, he was one of the two waiting outside the Enron building to get their checks and cash them as quickly as possible, to increase the chances that they’d clear before the bankruptcy.

Traders naturally would be the great heroes of Reaganomics.  What traders are supposed to contribute to the economy is that their competitive deal-making determines what’s the fair market value of anything they’re dealing in.  As Conspiracy of Fools says, what Enron called its “mark-to-market” accounting wasn’t really marked to the market value, since in real mark-to-market accounting, “the market was independently assessing the value.”  Every society needs a standard to determine what’s the value of anything, independent of anyone’s opinion.  As this same book says, “Even before the dawning of the 1990s bull market, a new ethos was gradually taking hold in corporate America, according to which anything that wasn’t blatantly illegal was therefore okay—no matter how deceptive the practice might be,” and when you see this sort of ethos in our day-to-day lives, it would proscribe objections to ambiguously unethical behavior (and very little is unambiguously, inexcusably, bad), as if they’re trying to impose one’s own self-satisfied and repressive opinions on others.

The above Enron magazine cover, with a punching fist to illustrate “Three Men & A Mission,” gives a good idea of what they thought their mission was.  As The Smartest Guys in the Room says about Enron traders, “Maximizing profit was not inconsistent with doing good, they believed, but an inherent part of it, and the judge of good and bad was the immediate consequence of a split-second trade.”  That would give no opportunities to the ultimate enemies of Reaganomics, manipulators.  The Smartest Guys in the Room also says, “They believed that free markets made the world a fairer place, one where price dictated deals, rather than relationships or other ‘noneconomic’ factors,” so assertive communications within a relationship would seem to be manipulation that tries to win things through convincing abstractions, rather than through the objectivism of whether or not one wins a contest of power.  Any jerk can state what he wants positively.  Talk is cheap, and none can afford being counterproductive.  If the weak who tried to get what they wanted through such emotion-based abstractions, weren’t treated as grasping manipulators who are “out to get” the strong, the camel’s nose would be under the tent.  Assertiveness could get anyone all sorts of things, so the person who comes up with the most compelling sophistry, wins, and compels.  Every society needs a standard to determine what each person has a right to expect, independent of anyone’s opinion.  We can’t even afford to treat those suspected of manipulation, as innocent of manipulation until proven guilty, since that would leave too many problems unsolved.

That’s also how our culture tends to determine both value, and values.  (Any society’s values, especially those that it most firmly expects people to live by, would have to be shaped by how it defines such things as “fair,” “weaknesses of character,” “personal responsibility,” and “serenity.”)  Anyone who disagrees with the themes of the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, that if you’re a loser then you must have deserved it, would be disagreeing with a very self-righteous ideology.

The Enron traders believed in being “intellectually pure” in this regard, which, in practical terms, means as absolutist as those cognitive distortions.  The Smartest Guys In the Room also quotes a former Enron trader as saying, “People were able to take risks the way they wanted and be accountable for it, which is the most sacred thing in a trading shop,” though clearly “accountable” meant that they were more responsible to their bosses for the results of good or bad luck, than these traders would be to the public for their machinations.  In the words of The Serenity Prayer, the boss has the power to change what the traders do, but the public can only if they could prove that violations of the rules took place.  This might be very difficult to do in accounting, where technicalities could make subterfuges seem to follow the law.  As an Enron in-house risk-management manual put it, “Reported earnings follow the rules and principles of accounting.  The results do not always create measures consistent with underlying economics.”  In other words, “risk management” consists of making sure that the principles of accounting would create the right abstract picture, not of measuring the real economic realities.

Enron traded in energy as a commodity.  The money-changers certainly don’t produce anything, and commodities trading is so much of a gamble that Stock Market Gambling from The Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey, says, “Some of the preferred areas of stock market gambling that attract the interest of compulsive gamblers have been...options, commodities....  Some like the riskier action that the commodities and option index allows.”  So in that meritocracy, whether you seem to be a success or a failure could very easily depend on how lucky you are.

And much of the logic of self-help self-empowerment has no qualms about attributing one’s success or failure to how well he deals with extraneous things that are pretty much a matter of luck.  This also seems refreshingly unhindered, anathematizing anything that could be labeled “passing judgment,” “vindictive,” “controlling others,” “repressing others,” “guilt-tripping others,” etc.  The whole idea of being able to take risks the way one wants and being accountable for it, might sound good, but it’s amazing the myriad of reasons why those who don’t have the power of an employer would simply be expected to accept a very consequential lack of moral accountability.  There, the absolutism wouldn’t be only for the sake of “intellectual purity,” but also because any moral accountability could give opportunities for manipulation, one’s attention being distracted from figuring out how he could most effectively change what he can, resentment, etc.

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, in An Unquiet Mind, wrote that she came from a military family with a Puritanical attitude of insisting on self-reliance.  She lived for a time in a hypomanic state, one reason being that she didn’t want to rely on medication because of “matters of value from my upbringing.”  She was still able to function in this because, “Often the only thing that would keep me going was the belief, instilled by my mother years before, that will and grit and responsibility are what ultimately make us supremely human in our existence.  For each terrible storm that came my way, my mother—her love and her strong sense of values—provided me with powerful, and sustaining, countervailing winds.”  Enron’s ethos, also, held that that’s what  makes us rise above the animalistic, and that self-efficaciousness like that is what constitutes both values and responsibility.

The film version of The Smartest Guys in the Room includes film clips of the Milgram experiment, to suggest that all those normal Americans who went along with Enron’s harmful behavior were just another bunch of “good Germans,” who are actually more typical than one might figure.  Yet going along with Enron’s very consequential untruths was far closer to the American norm.  That would require only that one very much accept two basic principles that are very much a part of the American mainstream.  The first is that the things that motivate economic success are good, such as contrived optimism, a very success-oriented view of life, and market discipline, which disciplines losers and rewards winners.  The second is that when free-spirited people use these, they could lead to bad consequences, but we should be as hesitant to restrain them as we’d be to restrain a John Wayne.  Beliefs like those make us interpret of the meanings of the social occasions that contribute to our rampant depression, as merely imperfect rather than heinous.

                                                                              

>> >>>=|¦|=|¦|==================●=●=●==================|¦|=|¦|=<<< <<

>> >>>=|¦|=|¦|==================●=●=●==================|¦|=|¦|=<<< <<

This is one side of Enron’s “Visions and Values Magic Cube,” including “RESPECT” along with “INTEGRITY,” “EXCELLENCE,” and “COMMUNICATION.”  One could say that Social Darwinism advances pragmatic varieties of respect integrity excellence and communication.  Yet according to The Smartest Guys in the Room, Enron, fairly early in its existence, tried to build Dabhol, a high-budget power plant in India, through a sales representative who insisted on positive thinking and getting rid of negative thinking, and “critics such as the novelist Arundhati Roy, who called the Dabhol project ‘the biggest fraud in India’s history,’ have seized upon it as the ultimate symbol of the failure of globalization.  An Indian Wall Streeter says, ‘I’ve never been to another country where every single person hates one company’,” along with Union Carbide, presumably.  According to Vijay Prashad’s Fat Cats and Running Dogs, the Power Purchase Agreement signed with the local government obliged it to pay for the maximum amount of power that could be produced no matter how much was actually used, agreed to pay for this in dollars, gave Enron an extraordinary rate of return, double-charged the government for some fees “following from its training with Andersen,” and was provably extremely overpriced.  Yet according to the current Newthink, this would constitute respect, since respect includes trusting that the people are sophisticated enough not to sign an agreement that they didn’t want.  For this same reason, that agreement would also qualify as integrity excellence and communication.

The Asia Times Online, says, in Enron’s eight-year power struggle in India, “The [Dabhol Power Corporation] blames the [State Electricity Board]’s financial troubles on transmission losses through poor equipment and theft, and the failure to collect dues, rather than on steep tariffs.”  The strong could always blame the weak for not taking care of their own affairs better, despite the corrupt choices that the strong may have made.

A classic rendition of values like Enron’s, came from Queen Victoria’s Viceroy to India, Lord Curzon, regarding a famine in 1897 which could have been remedied by giving food in warehouses to the starving, “Any government which imperiled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism; but any Government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralized the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime.”  Little of what could go wrong now would make people that unambiguously helpless, so insisting on that sort of self-reliance could really seem to be just tough love.

When Enron’s Senior Vice President for Global Finance, Linda Powers, testified before the U.S. House Appropriations Committee in 1995, she said, “the projects are serving as action forcing events that are getting the host countries to finally implement the legal and policy changes long urged upon them.”  The actions that this would force would reflect such conceptions of self-reliance, and wouldn’t reflect the older conceptions of respect integrity excellence communication and moral fiber.

 

                                                                              

 

Enron had three inspirational in-house memo pads, in their three company colors.  On one appeared a quote of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”  On one was a quote of Naguib Mahfouz, “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.”  On the other was one by Jeff Daly, “Two monologues do not make a dialogue.”  According to the worldview of both Enron and The Serenity Prayer, wise questions are those that ask which problem-solving tactics would be the most effective and pragmatic in the microcosmic sense. “the judge of good and bad was the immediate consequence of a split-second trade.”  Gamblers Anonymous’ handbook’s chapter for gamblers’ family members says, “The aim of the Gam-Anon program is to aid the individuals involved with a compulsive gambler to find help by changing their own lives...  Living or being associated with a compulsive gambler creates its own kind of hell.  For most people, it is a devastating experience...”  In the microcosmic sense, if one is in such a devastating experience, he can’t change the person who’s morally responsible for it, but can change himself, so the wise questions for him to ask would be, “What could I do to change my own life?”, and, “How could I best aid myself?”  After all, they aren’t being expected to deal with a famine self-reliantly, so it would seem easy to treat their problems as not really significant.

Both this, and what The Smartest Guys in the Room calls Enron traders’ “self-righteous” “cultlike fierceness” in their love of “competition—and not just any competition but brutal, Enron-style competition,” are based on eliciting self-motivation.  In the end, self-help Newthink would have to agree that the trivialization and belittling of one’s problems, are very compatible with respect integrity excellence and communication, if one believes that: being confident constitutes respect, this would encourage self-reliance which is the most objectively provable integrity, this is likely to inspire excellence, and this is the most uplifting form of communication.  An unforgiving judgmentalism also connotes a lack of give-and-take communication. Enron’s achievement-orientation seems a lot more visionary than does behaving oneself.  One could even say that values, as Enron defined them, are more valuable than old-fashioned values, since someone will likely fix the consequences of someone’s lack of old fashioned values, but who will fix the consequences of a lack of self-reliant problem-solving?

 

 

 

Gay ex-conservative David Brock, in his books Blinded by the Right and The Republican Noise Machine, tells of how, though he first became a conservative because he saw conservatism as allowing more free thought, he’s seen how the current angry right-wing populism tends to treat free thought basically the same as it would treat assertions.  After all, both free thought and assertions are just a bunch of ideas.  When any ideas claim that people’s rights have been violated, these ideas could be called victim-posturing, disheartening, negativist, controlling, and judgmental.

Blinded by the Right gives his first-hand experience with the vast right-wing conspiracy, says about the closeted gay Republican subculture that he got into in the early 1980s, “He bore all the marks of some gay men of a certain age who have forced themselves to live a double life: He had a surfeit of unhappiness and self-loathing that came rushing to the fore whenever he had downed the requisite amount of Scotch....  Perhaps because they were trying too hard to fit into GOP ranks, they often embodied the worst attributes of the extreme right—racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism....  The secretiveness, not to mention the binge drinking and the common use of male prostitutes, lent a disturbing quality to it all....  In time, I did develop an internal dialogue about being a gay conservative, and it went something like this: Being conservatives, we valued modesty, we’d just as soon keep private matters private, we rejected the identity politics and victimology of the left....  Most conservative gays I knew, especially the older set, were in a constant state of panic about being discovered.”

Oh, heaven forefend, victimology!  What’s all the more strange but typical, is how the word victimology, which originally meant victim-blaming, now means an obsessive analysis on why certain groups deserve more because they’re victims.  For example, the Report on the Archdiocese of Chicago Accused Priest Abuser Monitoring System, says, “This would involve informing the monitors of the sexual abuse behavior of the accused priest abusers, patterns of the abuse, victimology, ‘triggers’ for re-offense, and other pertinent information.”  Clearly, this “victimology” doesn’t mean sociologists making a case that when girls or non-whites are abused, this is a part of their oppression.  This “victimology” means studying which traits of the potential victims, would make them likely targets.  Self-help self-reliance comes closer to actual victimology, than does what self-help calls “victimology,” since the only way that victims and potential victims could practice self-help, is by figuring out what makes them likely targets, and stopping it.

If our rampant depression were treated as a social problem in the same way that many social movements in the 1960s treated social problems, it would seem very strange to talk about millions of Americans suffering from depression, as millions of Americans who’d better get fixed through antidepressant medication, cognitive therapy, etc. Just imagine what the 1960s would have looked like if, instead, these social movements had said, “If racism, sexism, etc., bother you, then go to a cognitive therapist and learn how to think more optimistically about the opportunities that people have.”  That certainly would have meant a lot less victimology, victimhood, etc.

The real suffering that Brock discussed, which was to get worse when conservatism didn’t try too hard to get the AIDS pandemic under control, didn’t seem to be the real issue.  Before the 1980s, this would have seemed as unbalanced, as a psychological approach inspired by groups of addicts’ friends and family members, which train them to respond to all their problems by courageously changing what they can and serenely accepting what they can’t.  Yet in order to be most likely to succeed under Reaganomics, you’d have to anathematize inadequacies in your boldness and aggressiveness, including anything that could be called “victimology,” not being serene courageous or wise enough in dealing with any problems including addicted spouses, etc.  “Don’t find blame; find a solution,” and if you choose blame, you could be treated as “Iris Indirect.”

Victimology has to be the epitome of what Enron’s Visions and Values would consider to be a character defect.  Those who are bold and aggressive would be the least likely to have it.  It could be labeled as severely lacking in respect, self-respect, integrity, excellence, and communication.  And those who condemn victimology probably do so with an absolutist intellectual purity, along the lines of (in a sardonic voice) “You aren’t a victim at all, you shameless self-absorbed excuse-making manipulator!”, rather than a relative, “You aren’t as much of a victim as you think you are.”  If you disagree with this, it would seem that you just don’t “get it.”

And both Brock’s Blinded by the Right, and his research-based follow-up book The Republican Noise Machine, tell of how “the conservative movement” with all its wealthy financiers, has been making a concerted effort to push our culture, including its social pressures and conceptions good and bad, to go their way.  Matt Labash, a young writer for Rupert Murdoch’s neo-Conservative Weekly Standard, was asked, “Why have conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard and FOX News Channel become more popular in recent years?”  Labash answered, “Because they feed the rage.  We bring pain to the liberal media.  I say that mockingly but it’s true somewhat....  While these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media like to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective.  We’ve created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective....  It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it too.  Criticize other people for not being objective.  Be as subjective as you want.  It’s a great little racket.”

This currently has all the appeal of an earthy, down-home version of postmodernism.  But while postmodern and other such romanticist anti-intellectualism are very airheaded, this sort is very earthy, so it seems very sexy, very in-line with what freedom-loving Americans are supposed to like.  In fact, “romanticist” could mean German Romanticism, in which its magical thinking meant that might makes right but society would keep functioning anyway.  Gut-level spontaneity is good, and gut-level spontaneity is as subjective as you want.  The fact that this is just as unreliable as postmodernism, seems immaterial nowadays.  When moral responsibility seems subjective since it isn’t objectively measurable, includes many mitigating factors, etc., it seems necessary to protect ourselves from those subjectivities, since they could be labeled “manipulative.”  Manipulation could seem to be a moral hazard that could be very powerful, very forceful and compelling, and one can’t defend himself against it without looking as if he’s re-victimizing victims.

 

 

 

And this all reflects the general minimization of moral responsibility and magnification of response-ability for one’s own welfare.  The helplessness that causes 1/5 of the American population to have a serious depressive disorder in any given year, mostly seems to be just the sort of imperfections that of course people deal with.  And intercultural studies have consistently shown that depressed people who’ve lived in developed areas outside of the modern West have tended to feel paranoid, but modern Westerners, whether depressed or not, tend to figure that even if someone did “get you,” that would mean only that you lost the battle so you’re a loser.

       

The Houston Chronicle, in a webpage of letters from those associated with Enron, quotes a British former employee as writing, “I also hope the wrong lessons are not drawn from the collapse of Enron.  Just because the company collapsed does not mean that everything it did and stood for are wrong.”  If one wants to believe that its basic principles were good, he’d have to believe that it ended due to a “collapse” rather than a scandal.  In a society with our rate of depression, all sorts of recognitions of wrongs would also seem to be “the wrong lessons.”  As usual, the subtitle of The Manipulative Child indicates that those who are bold and aggressive would be the least likely to have this character defect, which could be labeled as severely lacking in respect self-respect integrity excellence and communication.  This paradigm is done with an absolutist intellectual purity, and if you disagree with this it would seem that you just don’t “get it.”

Susan Faludi’s Backlash, which reflects the older consciousness-raising, includes a section which tells of how self-help books for women in the 1980s went through two stages.  The first, in the early 1980s when Fundament Christianity seemed mainstream, encouraged women to fit the traditional female role.  The second, in the later 1980s, had given up on moralist traditions, but very much held onto absolutist versions of traditions which hold the weak responsible for the consequences of their weakness, under the presumption that they could have won the battles they lost, if they really wanted to.  This is what involved codependency, the theory that holds that many of the women who are romantically involved with addicts or their functional equivalents, “let themselves in for” any of the problems the men cause them.  A man who fit this pattern, was Robert Blake, who grew up in an abusive home, painted “The Mata Hari Ranch” on the outside of his house, Mata Hari being a woman known for aggressively manipulating men, and then was very attracted to Bonnie Bakely, who had a big history of conning men.  If a woman grew up in an abusive home, paints “The Casanova Ranch” on the outside of her house, and later—surprise, surprise—gets into a bad romantic relationship with someone who characterologically cons women, people would have no problem telling her, “You let yourself in for it, since that’s what reminds you of when you first experienced love,” so treating her as responsible would make sense.

A current example of this intellectually pure moral bankruptcy, is the statement on the Co-Dependency, a Healing Journey webpage, which begins, “Codependency is a toxic disease due to loss of self - -- loss of the feeling of anything positive about one’s self, and self esteem,” yet goes on to say, “As codependents, we view ourselves as victims of