Working Toward a Goal of Endurability

he Tragedy of Victim Correction as a Panacea~

People simply have to adjust and adapt to reality.

If you don’t, you could be maladjusted.

As the above says, this is Al-Anon approved literature, for Alateen. You couldn’t make this stuff up! Persuading people to think like this works best with Groupthink, but if you, on your own, must deal with a devastating reality in order to fit in and function, then you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do, and our self-responsible cultural norms (“Everybody knows that The Serenity Prayer is good.”) would provide the Groupthink. As Addiction: Why Can’t They Just Stop?, by John Hoffman and Susan Froemke, says, in a survey of addicts’ family members, “...the words that everyone used were powerfully negative: ‘devastating,’ ‘abusive,’ ‘horrible’.” Yet no concerns that would interfere with the victims’ self-responsibility could matter, since in the long run, caring about them would only mollycoddle and weaken the people who’d have to take care of themselves optimally. George Vincent wrote, “To survive growing up in an alcoholic family is second only to surviving the Holocaust,” but the big difference is that despite the fears that addicts’ kids feel, they aren’t really in mortal danger, so Buddhists, etc., could say that these fears are only illusions. Victim correction as a panacea could be called chicken soup for the soul, unconditional serenity and courage.

Yet though it might seem only natural to want to feel better by practicing Buddhistic self-discipline and self-re-education, and this doesn’t involve any medication, this is hardly natural. In the words of Ayn Rand, “We the Living” could very much object to this sort of de rigueur coping with helplessness, Stoically! Yet though a Marxist mentality of, “Love your brother,” is supposed to degrade the natural human spirit, a requisite mentality of, “As long as it’s your problem, ‘self-responsibility’ means courageously changing whatever you can and serenely accepting whatever you can’t,” mustn’t, or you might have problems coping with reality. (Everybody loves The Serenity Prayer, right?) In general, some forms of self-responsibility we do revere, and some we don’t. In general, this sort of self-help is cognitive therapy, the modern version of behaviorist psychology, so this can be given the title of behaviorist B. F. Skinner’s classic book, Beyond Freedom & Dignity, pragmatic in such a way that’s far more important than such abstract niceties. This represents what is good, what most motivates people to do what must get done, which is what those who have the problems should want. If, instead, the advisee insisted on drawing his own honest well-founded conclusions about what was happening to him, he’d be told that he’d better realize how important it is that he think in whatever ways would maximize his chances of self-reliant success in solving such big problems. What else could Alateen members, etc., be told, “Go right ahead and fail to deal with your problems adequately.”? Responsibility for one’s own choices means blame, naiveté, and controlling, while response-ability for one’s own problems means self-reliance, realism, and freedom. If such sophistry weren’t so predictable and absolutist, just think of how often people could: lose faith, play the victim role, not do what needs to get done (by those most motivated to do it), etc.

In theory this means self-responsibility, self-reliance, gutsiness, anti-controlling, good coping skills, realism, conventionality, respectability, etc., but in practice this means that nothing except, “Can I change this?”, including the most basic morality and concern for the weak, can really seem to matter. Sure, you could recognize that destructive sinfulness is destructive sinfulness, but in the end you’d have to forgive it, or you’d be maladjusted and suffer the consequences of this weakness. (“YOU VILL ENJOY!”) Frank Buchman, leader of the Oxford Groups, the club on which AA and then Al-Anon was based and until recently was called “Moral Re-Armament,” said, “D’you know Heinrich Himmler?... Say, you ought to know Heinrich. He’s a great lad.... [Hitler] lets us have house-parties whenever we like.” Anti-Nazi British travel-writer and journalist Robert Byron, who got a chance to observe Nazism up close, wrote in his diary, “Himmler apparently dotes on the Oxford Group [How cute.] and writes to its English members discussing their troubles with them,” so he was their Dear Abby. This was the same Himmler who said, in his speech on October 4, 1943 to the SS Group Leaders in Poznan, “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard,” but that personal strength concerned one of the Nazi practices that Buchman didn’t like. It’s pretty obvious what the “Dear Abby” version of that would advise those in trouble, who are members of an honored group of people who are working on their own resolute and impassively accepting attitudes. Anything less than, “Happiness is an inside job,” (in general), or, “Things happen. It’s what we do when they happen that’s key,” (in general), would have been too weak-spirited and blaming for Himmler, so he was their perfect “Dear Abby.” Himmler Logic, after all, would focus on whether the person with the problem seems to have a weak (as in literally WEAK) character, and would be quick to interpret inadequacies in problem-solving as weaknesses of character, so the weak seem contemptible, blameworthy, and, possibly, insidiously dangerous. This self-responsible self-help approach is also like the “exemplary dualism” of the Militia Movement, like classifying people as redbloods or mollycoddles, or as übermenschen or untermenschen; this preaches that those who seem to have (literally) strong characters are the allies of decent people so are at least forgiven, and those who seem to have (literally) weak characters are the enemies of decent people. Sure, Godwin’s Law for Usenet groups could include a rule that if a posting mentions Hitler or the Nazis, then this exaggerates too cheaply so the discussion ends and the person who posted that loses, but if some proponents of weakness-makes-wrong actually did like the Nazis...

Nazism wanted to build a New Humanity, a new, artificially Gelassenheit, personal character.

Yet, in a society with rampant depression, one could just as easily call that “pragmatic logic”: the weak courageously change what they can (themselves) and serenely accept what they can’t (everyone else), and what one deserves is completely irrelevant. You can’t change your enemies, except for one.

“Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” is all about what the weak should do, believe, and take responsibility for. Even sophisticated psychology tends to classify people, aspects of human nature, desires, etc., into categories that are very German, Freudian: übermensch means ineradicable so at least forgivable, while untermensch means true shamefulness, suspiciousness. (And, of course, treating this moral bankruptcy as necessary for realism seems a lot better than does treating this as admirably open-minded and gutsy.) These Oxford members no doubt tended to take his ideas about coping skills, to heart, since they wanted self-improvement that would build fiber. After all, we must accept that if you win, you win, and if you lose, you lose. That self-responsible self-motivation is also how, and why, market discipline works; we must discipline even perfectly innocent failures. The more that the weakness of the weak is blamed (What exactly is to blame when someone doesn’t protect himself well enough to succeed?): the more that they’d be motivated to take responsibility for taking care of themselves, the more hope that they’d have that they could change what causes their problems (themselves), and the more that we could all have faith in this red-blooded worldview. Prejudice against the weak means an optimistic and patriotic faith in The System, and focusing on how the weak could hopefully solve their own problems if only they made themselves worthy, changed what they can. Übermensch imperfection such as sinfulness would have to seem at least forgivable, while untermensch supposed imperfection would have to seem to be an insidious (as in “the hidden lie,” and, “We are all victims of victims.”) expression of weak people’s SELF-WILLS. Dictator or no dictator, just about all of those in any society must define “personal responsibility” in basically the same predictable way and truly believe it, or different people would play by different rules, and plenty of people wouldn’t take the rules to heart when fortitude would be most necessary. No doubt plenty of Oxford members who weren’t Himmler’s advisees, could have been just as easily, since they were just as free of whiny resentment; all “good” members followed the same school of psychology.

As far as self-help is concerned, the bottom line is that you’re simply going to have to deal with your own problem whatever it may be, and expectations that one simply deal with normal problems are interchangeable with expectations that one simply deal with an addict in the family. “Personal strength,” “strength of character,” etc., tend to mean literally strength, transcending “weak” but natural and warranted feelings. For anyone in trouble, this would be: self-help, self-responsibility, self-care, self-protection, self-actualization, self-empowerment, etc. As any conservative social analysis would say, you, that teen who looks like Archie, etc. could think productively, or think counterproductively (though if you’re the problem person, then probably we’ll just have to accept your counterproductive thinking, since people aren’t perfect and we mustn’t try to re-engineer human nature). The effects of “Archie’s” dad’s actions are short-term (since others are motivated to resolve them), but the effects of Archie’s reactions are long-term (since others aren’t). Twisting reality in “positive” ways is realistic, since it increases people’s chances of success. Archie’s non-addicted parent (who’d really have to have a Gelassenheit “productive” attitude, what with all that she must do to make her family as normal as possible), has just as much autonomy as does the typical adult, since addicts’ power over others is physical, not authoritarian. In general, motivation is everything; irrespective of moral responsibility, addiction or lack of it, etc., the only personal responsibility that we could count on is one in which those held responsible for problems are those motivated to take responsibility. Charles P. Pierce’s Idiot America, How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, says, “The [conservative] movement swallowed whole the quack doctrine of supply-side economics, adopting it with almost comically ferocious zeal,” and self-help, also, must follow this pattern, since in a gutsy and as-uncompromising-as-reality fashion, it holds that no matter how much others are responsible for your problems, if you win you win and if you lose you lose, that that’s what’s realistic, what most reliably works, and that stupidity is a virtue in the name of freedom. (We all know where intellectualism leads.) Idiot America also says about a Cuban-American refugee who worked with AIDS patients in the early 1980s, “The situation reminded her a little of the way things had worked in Cuba, where the government would tell you something that you knew from your own experience could not possibly be true, yet people seemed willing to believe that it was, and to act upon that belief, until the manufactured reality displaced the actual one [which is also the classic definition of brainwashing, washing the brain of “bad attitudes”]. She felt she was working in parallel worlds. There was the world of the disease, and of the people who had it; and then there was another world, in which everything was a symbol and in which her patients stood for something,” and one could say the same thing about this sort of self-help, where there’s the world of what people like Archie must actually deal with, and then there’s the world of what they symbolize: our duties regarding the never-ending virtues and necessity of response-ability for one’s own welfare, which shape what we should believe irrespective of what we’ve learned from experience, e.g. that Archie looks at himself. (Marxism applies how cultural conditioning works, to shaping “the ideal society,” right?)

It’s amazing which moral norms could (i.e. must) seem less important than whether or not the person with the problem is doing what’s necessary for him to overcome it successfully. That seems good; “whining” seems bad. What’s most important in practical terms, might go very much against what we’d like to believe is important. Banalities get things done. Realism is the ultimate mandate. This is the sort of Populism that H. G. Wells called “magnificent stupid honesty,” since it tries to prevent self-interested manipulable and manipulative abstractions that would say that you’d deserve more than what you’d won. (This “honesty” often has big unintended consequences, but could seem all-important.) “Stop doing that, since it’s judgmental and controlling!”, would probably make you at least hesitant, but, “Stop doing that, since that sort of thing has been proven to contribute to our very unnaturally high rates of depression and anxiety disorders!”, would probably seem judgmental and controlling to you. If this weakness-anathematizing conception of personal responsibility weren’t that absolutist, plenty of problems wouldn’t get resolved well enough, yet the fact that this is that absolutist, is pretty scary. (Yet, the fact that so many stupid and reckless people got such important jobs on Wall Street, shows that even this very costly way of motivating winning could fail in very important ways, though they could always be excused as “inevitable human imperfection.”) Sure, on Larry King Live on August 11, 2009, economist Ben Stein said, “Big government is a terrifying subject” (i.e. the kind that you could openly and proudly get terrified about), but you don’t dare say, “Big depression is a terrifying subject,” even if you’ve been there, or, “Big Wall Street greed is a terrifying subject.” Also, on an interview on a Christian radio network, Stein said, “...science leads you to killing people.” Magical thinking like this could seem more acceptable to economists, since they could always figure that consequences don’t really matter, since those who have the problems are always motivated to solve them; that “works.” Self-help’s conception of which freedoms, self-determination, personal rights and responsibilities, etc., do, and which don’t, seem to matter, sounds like something right out of The Communist Manifesto (and certainly plenty of others in the 19th Century noticed this, too), “...in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade,” if “Free Trade” is extended to include all of, “If you win, you win, and if you lose, you lose.” (A better word than freedom might be right, i.e., “I have a right to expect something better!” “No, the only right that you have is to protect yourself better, with proud self-reliance—provide for yourself and become a winner!”)

In fact, though we’re supposed to take addictive behavior as a given since addiction is a disease, the law certainly doesn’t treat addicts as not guilty by reason of insanity, one can’t be brought out of real legal insanity through “hitting bottom” or an intervention, and, as the publishers’ notes of Gene M. Heyman’s Addiction: A Disorder of Choice says, “He shows that the causes of addiction, its control, and its potential reduction are the same as the causes, control, and reduction of all voluntary behavior.” (Certainly you could imagine what would result if someone said at an Al-Anon meeting, “But when he relapsed, it was because he got angry and chose to, not because he saw something that triggered a compulsion to drink! That means that my objections are legitimate!”, or even, “But the person who caused this problem, whom I can’t change, isn’t addicted!”) Yet whether or not addiction is involved, you could always find some sophistry to make courageously changing what you can and serenely accepting what you can’t seem legitimate, and ignore any facts that would disrupt this pragmatism; form follows function. This, also, could be called “pragmatic logic,” applicable to any realities that contribute to our rampant depression. Both an acceptance of an addiction, and an acceptance of aggressive human nature, are fatalism about unrestrained desires, what the pleasure centers of our brains make us do, etc. What works for AA is what works for addicts, i.e. for addictive personalities, which would single-mindedly insist on: excuses to do what one pleases, stopping righteous indignation and “controlling,” etc. The more that we serenely accept übermensch, active, imperfections, the more that we can’t afford to accept the untermensch, passive, imperfections of those hurt by them, and who, therefore, must deal with them in order not to be maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional. If this wasn’t as simplistic and resolute as Reagan, their awareness that they’re victims would leave them both too weak by feeling helplessness and making unrealistic expectations, and too strong in that they could insidiously get the benefits of victimhood.

Your realities are whatever they are, and either you deal with them or you suffer the consequences. NOTHING CAN LIMIT HOW MUCH ALL THIS COULD AFFECT YOU. To paraphrase a Catholic riddle: “What’s the difference between a victim corrector and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist.” As pioneering behaviorist John B. Watson wrote, “The raw fact that you, as a psychologist, if you are to remain scientific, must describe the behavior of man in no other terms than those you use in describing the behavior of the ox you slaughter, drove and still drives many timid souls away from behaviorism,” and the only real difference between behaviorism and cognitive therapy is that it credits humanity with self-control abilities that animals don’t have, such as the ability to choose to serenely accept hardship and sinfulness; training people who are motivated to be trained is a lot easier. (This self-control would benefit the person who serenely accepts the hardship, sinfulness, etc. that he’s helpless to change, whether or not the person who caused the problem is addicted. ) As Paul Krugman wrote, “The truth is that good old-fashioned demand-side macroeconomics has a lot to offer in our current predicament—but its defenders lack all conviction, while its critics are filled with a passionate intensity,” and one could say the same for debates between those who stress personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s own choices, which could usually be called “blaming,” “guilt-based,” “controlling,” etc., and the gutsy people who stress red-blooded personal response-ability for one’s own welfare, which could always be called “self-help,” “self-empowerment,” “realism,” etc. As the Great Crash of 2008 shows, some things will never change.

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

♦♦♦♦♦

Sure, Rush Limbaugh is more unpopular than Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, and conservatives could be afraid that such aggressiveness looks “ugly” to the public. Yet, especially if you’re in big trouble, if you thought like Limbaugh and the other attack politicians then you’d face up to your problems more serenely and courageously, and we dare not care how profoundly ugly is coaching Archie, etc., into having attitudes of, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!” If Himmler had sent you some “Dear Abby” letters that didn’t mention the Nazi practices that Buchman didn’t like, the advice that the letters would have given would have helped you become more resilient, courageous, self-responsible, realistic, and abiding by Gelassenheit (a fatalism that teaches that willfulness leads to self-defeating frustration if you’re helpless to get what you want or need), so you would have ended up with a stronger character. Victim Correction as a Panacea, is Gelassenheit and similar all-encompassing attitudes about physical response-ability for one’s own problems, exactly what a society with rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., would most need. With that approach you’d be more likely to succeed, and that’s good, maybe irreplaceable. Your natural objections to this would be counterproductive (though you’re free not to hold others personally responsible by these standards, as long as you hold yourself responsible by them). The same would go for minimizing any “whiny” lessons we might learn from the Great Crash of 2008. If we can’t change wretched excesses on Wall Street but can change victims’ not fixing the consequences adequately, then either we correct the victims or we’ll have a dysfunctional society. Since we simply must solve our problems, our perceptions must be distorted in order to fit in with this; there is no alternative.

As Adrian Furnham’s 50 Psychology Ideas You Really Need to Know says, “People who believe that the events that occur in their lives are the result of their own behaviour and/or ability, personality and effort have less stress than those who believe events in their lives to be a function of luck, chance, fate, God, powerful others or powers beyond their control.” The self-responsible would also have the advantage of resiliently and resourcefully looking for solutions, with plenty of determination, and the worse that their problems are, the more important this would be. Blaming the victim always leads to the most pragmatic, well-motivated, solution, so the necessity of this isn’t partial, relative, or conditional. We must fix those who’d want to be fixed, and they should want to be able to solve their own problems as well as they could. Whether or not the person who’s causing you big problems is addicted, simply holding you response-able for your own welfare would be vitally realistic, since only you have a reliable motivation to solve your problem, and your solving it can always be treated as just a temporary hurdle so this, too, shall pass. Whenever you tell your own story of someone causing you big problems, you could always follow it with, “So how could I have helped myself by reacting better?”, and your advisor could always follow it with, “If you correct what you can change, yourself, you’d benefit.” If you have what those who ran the Soviet psychiatric system called, “inflexibility of convictions,” you’d be thinking as if it’s more important to be right than to be happy (or productive), which of course must stop and it wouldn’t be necessary to lock you up or even do anything unnatural to make your thinking fit in, even to the point of alcoholics’ teens believing, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself, so I’m serene and courageous!” Brainwashing, washing the brain of supposed dirt, could result from re-education camps, or from free-lance re-education that the educated people want since they want to fit in. As Archie’s realities show, the worse that your problem is, the more important it is that you think “right.” African-American street slang for victim-blaming is, “The Flip Game.”

Nothing can drive anyone away from this sort of cognitive therapy, just as nothing can drive Archie away from his unconditional and immoderate, contrived serenity and courage, though Gelassenheit is very unnatural social engineering. In self-help books about codependency, stories in which the problem spouses are addicted are absolutely interchangeable with stories in which the problem spouses simply choose to act like buttheads, since in both cases the victims are equally unable to change the victimizers’ behavior. Whatever you must do to take care of yourself, is whatever you must do to take care of yourself, so you must look at yourself when you’re looking for things that you could correct in order to solve your own problems. Sure, the Financial Times on March 10, 2009 quoted Bernie Sucher, the head of Merrill Lynch operations in Moscow, as saying, “Our world is broken—and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it. The compass by which we steered as Americans has gone. The last time I ever saw anything like this, in terms of the sense of disorientation and loss, was among my friends [in Russia] when the Soviet Union broke up,” but Americans have been culturally conditioned to serenely accept economic difficulties, and not to accept supposedly manipulative whining about them. Those with plenty of “personal strength” would tolerate Wall Street Darwinism and its effects. Archie could “get on with life” since folk wisdom, common sense, says that that’s what everyone must do; everyone could “stick it out.” (On June 19, 2009 [just before the threatened bloodshed began, “On 9/11 we were all Americans, and tonight we’re all Iranians.”], when Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that they were going to crack down on the protests of the election fraud, he said, “If the political elite want to ignore the law or break the law then they are taking wrong measures...,” so dogmatists of all stripes excite their followers by condemning the supposed intellectual elite.) Archie, and others who are powerless, couldn’t afford the dysfunctionality of feeling disoriented or lost. Realism requires that this self-responsibility be the lynchpin, so any concern that would conflict with this must be shrugged off. We all must adjust to and deal with reality, and others determine what is reality for you, which tends to mean that the strong (whether or not they’re addicted) determine what is reality for the weak. Resiliency is everything.

That’s why self-help in general tends to admire Al-Anon, The Serenity Prayer, etc., and this self-reliant ethos. The only thing that really matters is what you do and don’t have the power to change. This is how the ideal American faces his own problems. Since Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA who wrote much of their Big Book, was a stockbroker around the time of the Great Depression, one could call this The Great Depression Stockbroker’s Approach to Self-Responsibility; we’d have to be firm with those victims and whiners who object to productivity that involves strong character, such as “creative destruction,” and, “Your problem is your problem.” The economist who, just after the Great Depression, came up with the concept of creative destruction, Joseph Schumpeter, also wrote during the Depression that recovery from it, “is sound only if it [comes] of itself. For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatening business with another [worse] crisis ahead.” Daniel Gross’ Dumb Money says that Maestro Alan Greenspan, in an interview, “had an abstract fervor for the glories and potentials of creative destruction,” and, in the abstract, saying that alkies’ teens, etc., should have an attitude of, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, sounds just as proudly productive.

Being morally right isn’t good enough, and might even look like a vainglorious and manipulative evasion of real responsibility. As any cognitive therapist could tell you, those whose thinking is well-trained are those who could best cope with reality in a society with rampant depression, especially just after financial meltdowns. If they don’t adjust to reality, they’d just have to get re-educated. Winning debates that would prove that you’re in the right, isn’t how you win in life; you win by taking personal response-ability for your own welfare, which comes with its own set of ethical values. Degradation is just a state of mind, that could be called egotistical (“I don’t deserve this!”). Literally and inevitably, whatever anyone’s life is (including during the Great Depression), is “life on life’s terms,” “reality,” “life’s challenges,” etc., for him, what he must deal with in order to seem to have a strong character and adequate sense of responsibility. Hardship, others’ sinfulness, etc., build character, just as economic recessions motivate efficiency and give us more “creative destruction.” You’d be amazed how easily such anti-judgmental, anti-moralistic, etc., people have to criticize victims for having characters that aren’t strong enough, since they have to be strong enough to deal with their own problems.

On the CNN Money Summit program of January 30, 2009, Katie Benner, a writer from Fortune magazine, said, “It’s sort of like the moral hazard question and blaming people and feeling betrayed. You have to put that aside and just work together [until, of course, these same financial companies resume their Darwinist approaches]. It’s like you can’t divorce the financial system. It’s not like a spouse you can get rid of because they betrayed you. We’re stuck with one another,” which is what your classic codependent enabling relationship looks like, especially when a Wall Street business carries on as if the more that its recklessness could hurt the financial system, the more that the government must bail it out if it fails, because of the “systemic risk” that would result from the company going bankrupt. (Or, it could just threaten that the economy might melt down irretrievably if the company doesn’t get bailed out, which has been called “the ultimate Roach Motel,” since even if the crisis begins for the most surprising and uncontrollable reason, once you get in you can’t get out.) Those who’d disagree with what she said would seem unrealistic, since such companies would have that power, which isn’t government tyranny, and the government bailouts would seem necessary.

internal Lehman Brothers document

“Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it, and if I don’t then I’ll be having a pity-party,” doesn’t seem to be moral relativism. If Al-Anon/Alateen’s norms values definitions and expectations disagreed with those of Western cultures, then new members would feel culture shock and offense about divergent values, and people outside the groups wouldn’t consider those to be character-building. Since you absolutely must focus your attention on what you should do better to solve your own problems whatever they may be, you must think along the lines of the victim-self-blaming of the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, which Dr. David Burns, in Feeling Good, describes as: All-or-Nothing Thinking, Overgeneralization, Mental Filter, Disqualifying the Positive, Jumping to Conclusions, Magnification [of what you can change] and Minimization [of what you can’t], Emotional Reasoning, Should Statements, Labeling and Mislabeling, and Personalization, i.e. attributing everything to your own reactions inadequacies and failures since you can change them, i.e. “Things happen. It’s what we do when they happen that’s key,” in general. Archie was trained to face his helplessness caused by someone else, with, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, while it would have been more natural to think, “I’ll try to figure out what was my fault, and to what degree.” Predictably, anyone who’s only partially solved his own problem must focus his attention on the one thing he’s failed to solve. The fix is in (though fixed by untermensch-bashing cultural norms rather than by a conspiracy).

The final conclusion regarding who’s responsible, is always fixed.

Likewise, you’d simply have to deal with whatever consequences of 2008’s economic meltdown, “Our entire economy is in danger,” would affect you, including the consequences of the government’s strong reluctance to “control” the businesses it should have been regulating adequately and “great, great confidence in our capital markets and in our financial institutions.” That’s how people in trouble must take care of themselves self-reliantly. As Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson said on Larry King Live on March 9, 2009 about a nearby shantytown close to where a Depression-era shantytown once stood, “And I think what’s happening in our city is we have to make sure that we have tough love. We have to find a balance being compassionate on one hand, and then also a zero tolerance.” The most crucial thing in our economy is that people feel motivated to do what they must do, and whatever are the consequences of that, are the consequences. Intercultural studies have consistently found that self-blame as a symptom of depression, anxiety, etc., is unique to Western and Westernized people. Response-ability for your own welfare, means response-ability for how well you’ve faired. Depressed people who’ve lived 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; you must “look at yourself” so you could independently resiliently and resourcefully find a solution to your problem. In the long run, it would get solved. Once anyone has caused you a problem, he’d be helpless to turn back the clock and undo it and you’d be response-able for your own welfare, so he’d be the helpless one and you’d be the responsible one.

Naturally you’d have a zero tolerance toward your own serious problems that you’ve so far failed to solve. We take for granted that this is what “personal responsibility” sometimes has to mean, just as we usually take for granted that most of what causes our rampant depression and anxiety is just life’s normal imperfection. Bill Wilson’s attitude toward losers (however they lost) who don’t just deal with their own problems, was basically the same as Rick Santelli’s is now. Evasions of, and even weakness and failures in, this are the sort of breakdown of personal responsibility that we do seriously try to stop, without seeming naïve about human nature. Self-help means that if it’s your problem then you provide the help, which is why self-help for people in trouble in general has really taken to the AA-Al-Anon approach, so Archie is more than just emblematic of self-reliant self-empowerment for people in trouble in a society with rampant depression. One simply has to do certain things to get through life, and anything that would conflict with them can’t seem more important or pressing. Sure, the government can afford to balance a zero tolerance with (relative) compassion, but you can’t. Even Lehman Brothers’ in-house Introduction to Management course stressed that managers show empathy toward employees (We’ll find out how much greed and stupidity this empathy applied to.), but we mustn’t show empathy toward those who don’t serenely accept whatever they can’t change. Just as “The Greenspan Put” was whatever the economic problem, lower the interest rate, one could say that “The Wilson Put” is whatever your personal problem is, correct you.

This realism is something like, as World Bank president Robert Zoellick said on March 13, 2009, “The International Monetary Fund research of some 122 financial and economic crises shows that turnaround can’t happen unless you clean up the bad assets and recapitalize the banks,” it can’t matter what they did to cause such huge problems for everyone or what recapitalizing them would cost, and we’re to fix every big bankers’ crisis like this as well as fixing whatever problems it causes in our own lives. This “clean up the bad assets” means that the government nanny-ism must go beyond bailouts, to actually taking care of the banks by fixing whatever needs to be fixed, enough to save them. If money distributed to middle-class people wouldn’t really fix an economic meltdown, while money distributed to the rich people who caused the problem would work, then the only thing that really matters is what works, not why that’s what works or that they’d likely abuse the moral bankruptcy. The engine of America’s prosperity is that the people whose welfare is at stake have the personal response-ability, since they’re the ones with the most reliable motivation to get the engine moving, irrespective of any “excuses” they may have. If someone who isn’t addicted won’t stop causing you problems, then in taking care of yourself (even if this requires a good deal of effort and sacrifice), the only thing that would really matter is what would work, not why that’s what would work or that he’d likely abuse the moral bankruptcy. As Archie could tell you, there’s very little limit to what realism would unquestionably require, as long as one’s material realities in the real world would make the morally responsible option too unrealistic. This could seem even more natural within families, since we must understand when people act outrageously (maybe even violently) within their own comfort zones. Alcoholics are far more likely to beat up family members than their own bosses, though if the alcoholics really were just passive victims of their diseases and inebriation, they’d be just as likely to beat up anyone who frustrated them.

Since resiliency could make just about anything go away, Bush also talked about faith in our economic “resilience” regarding the Great Crash of 2008. This gutsy and self-responsible moral bankruptcy, “Care only about whether you can change it,” is de rigueur. There can be no exemptions to self-responsibility and self-care. Whenever so much is at stake, there’s no room for debate. As long as there’s no end to what could happen to you in reality, there’s no end to your self-responsibility to deal with reality. If you really cared that depressive disorders affect 34,000,000 American adults, you’d seem to be a maladjusted nutcase. The title of the chapter about Reaganist deregulation, of Charles R. Morris’ The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, is, “Wall Street Finds Religion,” and that’s how this fundamentalist and very demanding religion (“But that’s where a quarter-century of diligent sacrifice to the gods of the free market has brought us.”), must construe who are the sinners with the defects of character, and who are the martyrs. This religion would also say to have faith that, in the long run at least, you get what you deserve and deserve what you get. If Archie doesn’t stop blaming others or look at himself, he’d likely be given

Winners are winners, and losers are losers.

That is, treated as Ayn Rand would have treated someone who said, “But I’m a victim, so you owe me better!”, as if he’s: whiny, manipulative, pity-partying, controlling, etc. Though strenuously treating the weak who aren’t adequately self-reliant, as The Enemy, might sound a lot more offensive than would be some non-violent left-wingers’ strenuously treating the strong as The Enemy, it’s very easy to see the weak as having a very insidious terrifying and convention-spurning “victim power.” The ways in which one can correct the weak (pressuring them to try to take care of themselves better, which they’d naturally want to do), seem a lot less offensive than are the ways in which one can correct the strong (“the power of the gun,” moralistic guilt, self-righteousness, emotionalistic manipulative machinations, naïve niceties, etc.). The sizes of government and other morality-based restrictions seem like very pressing issues, but the sizes of our rates of depression and anxiety disorders don’t really seem to matter at all, and caring about them would probably seem bad. Objectivism is a philosophy, so it can interpret and label anything as anything, and blame everything on factors that break its rules. One who writes novels could make people seem morally response-able for their own problems. Absolutist extremism can be as popular as Reagan. You must believe in certain ideas in order to have “productive attitudes” in all circumstances, which would benefit you, especially in the worst circumstances. Even George Soros might consider a society with rampant depression to be an open society. No one has an inalienable right to endurability. As Malcolm S. Salter wrote in Innovation Corrupted, The Origins and Legacy of Enron’s Collapse, “Under what my Harvard colleague Chris Argyris terms ‘defensive reasoning,’ tacit premises are tested, if at all, against the self-referential logic used to create them,” which is very tempting to do when the logic has that Enron spirit and groupthink: seems pro-freedom and anti-victim-power. As the inspirational artistic and Globalist Enron commercial with the robot said, “We inherit some ideas that are unnecessary! We have to jettison that excess baggage, in order to make progress.” This has to mean plenty of sophistry in the same absolutist “pro-freedom” spirit as, “Since SEC regulation was so ‘light-touch’ that it allowed Madoff to get away with it for decades, that only proves that the guv’mint is incompetent.” (How else could one justify, “As long as it’s your problem, ‘self-responsibility’ means courageously changing whatever you can and serenely accepting whatever you can’t.”?)

Realistically, in a society with rampant depression, these are the same absolutist labels that would make people in trouble most likely to succeed, magnificently self-reliantly: Self-respecting people with strong characters, accept greed. Serenity means Gelassenheit. Just after the first time that the derivatives market crashed due to stupidity, in 1994, Congress considered but didn’t pass regulations on them, and Christopher Whalen, director of a Washington lobbying firm, said, “[The International Swaps and Derivatives Association] came to Washington [led by a Libertarian] telling everyone they’re stupid. Their message was that everything is okay [in derivatives]—a blanket statement, boom. That strategy has convinced everybody in Washington that they have something to hide,” though Congress didn’t pass the regulations since they love freedom innovation optimism and red-blooded realism. Yet when it comes to correcting victims in our day-to-day lives, knee-jerk blanket statements that accept problem people, and treat unpragmatic victims (and others who don’t “get it” a la Skilling) as dangerously unwise, seem necessary for all-around pragmatism. If you’re the person in trouble, then caring about you would seem to be along the lines of social welfare programs that have been proven not to work, to lead to people getting what they want by “proving” their victimhood. What personal problems don’t have to be taken care of this unconditionally, where the only thing that really matters is what oneself can or can’t change? This is how the ideal American faces his own problems, and with the right philosophical sophistry and popular support, anything could look ideal.

Of course everyone must take care of himself, whatever happens to him. This is also how market discipline disciplines. If anything else seemed to matter, that would be subjective: blaming, excuses, moralism, idealism, manipulative machinations, mollycoddling or victimology that could only weaken the victims, etc. The more that you blame the victims, the more faith that you’d have that we all ultimately have self-determination, and that they could lead happy lives if only they took care of themselves better—very uplifting and necessary. Nothing can drive those who must care about the demands of reality, away from this. Our economy and its norms must sometimes do things that would naturally cause resentment anger and/or fear, and since these could be debilitating (and manipulative) emotions we must get them under control. Form follows function. Needless to say, self-responsibility would help Archie like nothing else could, whether or not his problem parent was addicted. That’s common sense; either we define “common sense” like this, or we’d suffer the consequences of the weak not trying hard enough. (This way we’re vulnerable to the SELF-WILLS of only the strong, whereas if we compromised with the caring approach, we’d be vulnerable to the SELF-WILLS of both the strong and the weak.) You don’t have a right to expect better than this; you don’t have a right to expect anything that you can’t earn or achieve. Liquidate any constructs that say that you’re entitled to better. If someone else caused you big problems, you’d be in the same ignominious pigeonhole as those who choose to be passive, parasitical, etc., since what would really matter is that you take care of yourself better. We mustn’t care about this sort of inefficiencies. The fabric of our society depends on that self-motivated self-responsibility for one’s own welfare; it certainly can’t depend on people acting morally responsible. Weak people suspected of being irresponsible or surreptitiously self-serving, can’t be presumed innocent until proven guilty since one couldn’t prove that. Also, we can’t afford to allow victim-power, so it would be very easy to buy the illusion that the weak are at fault. Any real alternative to what causes our rampant depression, would seem anti-freedom.

What contributes to our rampant depression is as inevitable as Marxism says it is, but if the victims react pragmatically, the long-term effects wouldn’t be so bad. No one’s going to subsidize Archie’s efforts to deal with his own problems, and such response-ability for how others affect you, isn’t considered to be a subsidy of them. In Atlas Shrugged Rand implied that we aren’t really entitled to anything better than a 19th Century covered-wagon lifestyle, and who’s to say objectively what he’s really entitled to? Controlling others is what’s truly immoral. Übermensch imperfections seem red-blooded, and untermensch supposed imperfections seem ignominiously and manipulatively mollycoddle. Though all this might seem amoral, those who don’t live up to expectations would have to seem bad, with insidiously dangerous “victim-power.” Even Archie must do and believe certain “productive” and “well-adjusted” things, yet this self-responsibility and self-improvement aren’t coercion, or re-engineering human nature. It doesn’t matter what caused your problem, what you deserve, etc., only that fairness, money, etc., has to come from somewhere, be provided by someone, and you’re ignominious manipulative and naïve if you think that you’re entitled to have someone provide for you. Atlas Shrugged also includes, “Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce.... Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow,” and not an ocean of tears will solve your problem; only your successfully producing results could. Atlas Shrugged says, “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil,” and self-help would say, “For the person who has the problem to take half-measures, would avail him nothing and could even be called an insidiously passive-aggressive attempt to seem to be trying, yet fail. If the (well-motivated) victims don’t take complete responsibility for their own problems, they likely won’t get completely solved.” Also, when saying that charity simply is the opposite of justice, “But you always hear [accusations of insensitivity] said by a rotter about those who treat him as a rotter, those who don’t feel any sympathy for the evil he’s committed or for the pain he suffers as a consequence,” (She defined evil as Nietzsche did, as, “whatever springs from weakness,” unless the weak take response-ability for their own problems.) and since the uncharitability doesn’t distinguish between rotters who deserve to rot and those who don’t, this would include Archie and his unconditional self-responsibility. (We can’t really define what the fault for big problems is, so we can’t really define what evil is; we can’t afford to make this contingent on evil intent.) If you cause someone big problems, you also make him into an evil rotter unless he takes care of himself adequately (solves them). And, of course, calling this evil doesn’t seem judgmental.

If you can’t change anything, a lack of serenity about it would be magical thinking, since even an ocean of tears would be immaterial. We must accept that Wall Street takes big risks since a market economy is inherently risky, but you must have faith that you get what you deserve, and deserve what you get. If we allowed excuses for the individual not taking personal response-ability for his own welfare, who couldn’t come up with enough excuses, which would only hurt him in the long run even if they were perfectly accurate? We must remember why we can’t just forgive, shrug off realistically, etc., the dangers of emotionalistic righteousness, manipulative victim-power, negative attitudes, passivity, etc. Those who think like this wouldn’t learn anything from the Great Crash (other than, “Now Wall Street has learned its lessons about the stupid things it did.”), since what could have been learned would be sardonically condemned as mollycoddling, intellectualist, anti-freedom, not really important, unrealistic about the fact that we must reward winning and punish losing in order to motivate people, etc. This isn’t juvenile, since certain people do take responsibility for the consequences, so all problems end up resolved.

Without this rousing faith, too many losers would have too many excuses, and even legitimate excuses have a price.

We could distinguish between the sort of nihilism and moral relativism that’s as all-American as creative destruction, and the kind that isn’t. Objections to others’ destructive behavior could be disputed vehemently, as if they’re: judgmentalism, controlling, guilt-tripping, victimhood, passivity with hidden agendas, etc. Both Schopenhauer and Reagan/Greenspan would have said that these are usually insidious, so they can’t be proved or disproved but we can’t just let them happen, and we certainly mustn’t reward them! Some of this anti-repression is along the lines of psychoanalysis (very Germanic). Some is along the lines of red-blooded and character-building freedom, self-response-ability, and getting what we deserve as in “creative destruction” (very American). As Christopher Cox said just after the 1994 derivatives crash ($1,500,000,000,000.00 lost), “I’m concerned that now anything called a derivative will be considered inherent evil in Congress. It is sort of like a fire hose: In the wrong hands, it is dangerous,” (Plenty of deregulation followed.) and you can’t defend yourself from a fire hose being abused, without looking as if you’re on the side of evil. For the most part, whatever happens to you would seem to justify or at least excuse itself, since if you’re worthy you’ll prevent or solve your problems, and if you’re not, you won’t. A competitive economy in which whatever results from the power-plays is whatever results, is the epitome of efficiency as our culture defines it. It seems that empathy is for social workers, the sort of people who are ruining our society. It’s no wonder that self-help and its millions of believers love the AA, courageously change what you can and serenely accept whatever you can’t, approach to life!

(That’s life on life’s terms.)

Sure, it’s now being proven that the severe “stress” that can easily flare up in poor families can cause the poor kids to later have problems with depression, substance abuse, their short-term memory and learning ability, etc., but of course safety from that would have to come from somewhere, be provided by someone, and of course you’re ignominious manipulative and naïve if you think that you’re entitled to have someone provide for you. Our economy promotes moral responsibility through companies being motivated to act responsibly toward certain people, but if the person you’re dealing with isn’t motivated to act responsibly toward you, tough nookies. In the long run, accepting people’s victimhood would teach them to be weak and manipulative. We can afford to forgive sinfulness, but not this. Sure, many who deserve to win will lose, but few who deserve to lose will win and we need this to motivate people to try to win. If we cared about losers who deserve to win, then: this would involve authority deciding “what is good,” what worthy losers would get (which may total up to a lot) would have to come from somewhere, we wouldn’t really know that they wouldn’t end up winning on their own in the long run, and losers who deserve to lose could become entitled winners by “proving” that they deserve to, which, naturally, every loser would want to do. An unconditional faith all in this would mean unconditional faith in self-motivation, self-responsibility, our resiliency, realism, and freedom. (We can’t afford conditions, especially after the economic meltdown.) None of the massive helplessness that Schumpeter approved of came from the government, which means that the helplessness would seem acceptable, which means that you must accept it in order not to seem dysfunctional. Our passively and helplessly waiting for “green shoots” to appear in the economy after spending all that money on the bailouts, means freedom, since the timing of “green shoots” would result from what the individual freely chooses to buy or not to buy.

Archie (and others with very limited options) must think and do certain things, and are helpless, but everyone knows that since no authority figures are decreeing what they must think and do or making them helpless, that’s freedom. In the real world, sometimes fighting for freedom means fighting for things that look painful, morally bankrupt, etc., though with the right adamantly pro-freedom sophistry, this would end up looking good: stolid, realistic, self-responsible, anti-controlling, anti-mollycoddle, anti-untermensch, productive, character-building, optimistic (that in the long run we get what we deserve), patriotic, etc. That’s among our fundamental principles. Everyone knows that if Wall Street greed, directed by regulation, does something bad that wasn’t expected, this would be unintended consequences of the regulation, and if instead you considered it to be consequences of the greed, you’d seem unrealistic (We can change the regulations but we can’t change greed.), mollycoddle, negativist, etc. We want to believe. As Robert Heiner’s Social Problems, an Introduction to Critical Constructionism says, “Contempt for the poor could be considered a form of American patriotism in that it is a reaffirmation of the belief in America as the land of opportunity,” and the same would go for any other adult who’s having economic problems. Those who are in any sort of serious trouble (millions of people) often have to use the same self-responsible sophistry, cognitive distortions, in order to be adequately productive and goal-oriented, and to have faith that Westerners have self-determination. Even if things could keep functioning only if victims simply took care of their own problems, then of course it’s still all-important that things keep functioning; there is no alternative.

What else would you expect a realist to say about your dealing with any hardship, sinfulness, etc., that affects you?

Fighting for self-responsibility could feel very exciting. You don’t have a right to fear this, since you don’t have a right to expect better than winning what you win and losing what you lose. That’s justice; if it’s yours, then it’s yours, and if it isn’t, then it isn’t. After all, our economy keeps working and prospering despite all the greed and chaos since everyone feels motivated to take response-ability for whatever problems this causes him, and he has the freedom to do this self-reliantly. Whether or not the person who caused the problem is addicted, etc., the victim taking response-ability for his own welfare is what works, means efficiency, i. e. with the greatest motivation no matter what costs this brings about. (You’d better not whine about costs like these, either in the economy or within your family!) The fear felt by the person who has the problem, would motivate him far more than moral responsibility would motivate the person who caused it. Realism must mean banal and vapid materialism, and profundity that would disagree would be unrealistic. If we let people get what they wanted by proving their victimhood, then that’s exactly what they’d do; who’s to say what hardship, sinfulness, etc., is, and what isn’t, “just the way that life goes sometimes,” a very un-objective question? This must be as uncompromising as Ayn Rand admitted herself to be, since the demands of reality, and of self-reliance, don’t compromise; there is no alternative. Assertiveness seems manipulative, since even the most sincere person would want to believe that he’s entitled to more than what he’d won. As Hitler’s main role model Schopenhauer wrote in the book the most influenced him, The World as Will and Representation, the concepts of bad and evil ignominiously express “everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case,” which might sound stereotypically Nazi, unless you’re in a situation in which you’re legitimately objecting to what someone did to you, and your self-help advisors act as if your objections reflect your resentful, manipulatively desirous, passive-aggressive, pity-partying, self-righteous, unrealistic, victimhood, etc., SELF-WILL.

Each major depressive episode (and, probably, what caused it) is temporary, but dictatorships tend to be at least fairly permanent. Paul Krugman (We must all be realistic.) wrote, “There is an old European saying: anyone who is not a socialist before he is 30 has no heart, anyone who is still a socialist after he is 30 has no head. Suitably updated, this applies perfectly to the movement against globalization,” including child labor “in sweatshops” (There is no alternative, other than worse poverty and maybe child prostitution.), and the same could conceivably be said about anyone who wants natural (or even close to natural) rates of depression and anxiety disorders. Sure, as Anne Lamont wrote in Bird by Bird, “Reality is unforgivingly complex,” but whatever your realities are, you’re supposed to simplify them to courageously changing what you can and serenely accepting what you can’t; “bird by bird” won’t accomplish anything for you. We couldn’t afford to care about complexities (other than the complexities in the tactics of how we solve our own problems), since every situation has complexities. If your back is against the wall, you simply must serenely accept this fact. If this wasn’t so consistent predictable dogmatic and automatic, then not everyone would take response-ability for their own welfare. The real world simply has its requirements. Neo-Conservatives would love this folksy “perception management.” Yet as a New York Times op-ed said about the financial meltdown, “When you shout at people ‘be confident,’ you shouldn’t expect them to be anything but terrified.” Endurability isn’t just something that someone preaching on a soapbox would say would be nice. This is the tragedy of victim correction, that realism simply must be oriented around the fact that you absolutely can change what’s tactically wrong with your own reactions, and absolutely can’t change what’s morally wrong with others’ actions; not being realistic would be ridiculous (said sardonically, or maybe to encourage victims to empower themselves in what laissez faire economists would call “tough love,” though the expression “tough love” originally meant the authoritarian and coercive approach that parents could use on their teenagers who have drug problems and the like). Our economy reward$ those who think like this. And even if this sort of thinking leads to a worldwide economic catastrophe, it could always be blamed absolutely on the supposedly mollycoddle weak. (We all know how insidiously dangerous they are!)

This picture, taken in 2003, proudly shows financial regulators from the Bush administration along with lobbyists for the bankers (the guys with the shears), uncompromising in their pro-freedom approach.

Self-reliance and self responsibility where if you win you’re a winner and if you lose you’re loser, seem to be The Great Liberator. As Bush’s Chairman of the SEC (“We ♥ Madoff!”) Christopher Cox testified before Congress on October 23, 2008, “I think it’s vitally important that we never fail to appreciate how powerful a means of wisdom markets can be in allocating scarce resources in a nation of 300 million people and a world of 6 billion people,” and this is how the markets allocate scarce resources. Freedom from government and other “control” is a sacred American tradition, but endurability isn’t. (As Greenspan wrote in an “Objectivist” publication in 1963, “At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.” Private property, also, comes from guns, but our culture labels it and its consequences as freedom that you’d better not disagree with. Recently in his private dining room at the Fed, he told a senior regulator, “We will never agree on the issue of fraud, because I don’t think there is a need for laws against fraud,” since all-important competition is supposed to motivate traders to have reputations for honesty; if you win you win, and if you lose, you lose.) Aggressiveness seems ineradicable, and our objections to it seem eradicable. The only question that really matters is, “Are you dysfunctional?”, since only that must make a big difference in your own life; anything that anyone else does, doesn’t have to.

The moral bankruptcy is a tragedy in the ancient Greek dramatic sense, meaning that if all that victims could respectably care about is whether or not they can change things, moral bankruptcy and immunity from accountability would inevitably result. As can be seen in Nietzsche, the weak could easily seem to be the dangerously WILLFUL ones, since everyone’s beliefs regarding what they deserve are shaped by their own SELF-WILLS, and the weak can exercise their supposed SELF-WILLS only in ways that would seem mollycoddle, “dishonest” and “ignominious,” whereas red-blooded strength is “honest,” proud, and at least forgivable (i.e. must be forgiven). We must appreciate all the hidden dangers of unchecked “victim-power.” As Niebuhr wrote, power, which would include victim-power, “cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest,” over (hidden and surreptitious) SELF-WILL, though we dare not talk in such overgeneralized terms when passing judgment on overt sinful power. The fabric of our society depends on the self-responsibility of, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!” Blaming victims helps them find solutions. We fear fearmongering, but not greed-mongering. “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” could happen to anyone. Economist Steven Landsburg said, “Most of economics can be summarized in four words: ‘People respond to incentives.’ The rest is commentary,” and that’s also how this sort of self-help could be summarized: You’re the only one who has a reliable incentive to solve your problems, and nothing that disagrees with this “natural” pragmatism could matter, no matter what chaos and helplessness result.

As one could see in the Great Crash of 2008, such a laissez faire concept of personal response-ability could seem good ’n’ gutsy, until you see the consequences of the moral bankruptcy. (Of course, this self-response-ability must include the same self-justifying, fatalistic, conformist, simplistic, “upbeat,” absolutist, unconditional, predictable, and dogmatically necessary illusions as laissez faire economics has, the very illusions that got our economy into such trouble.) If you win you win and if you lose you lose, so: sophistry about what you deserve won’t work, no one controls or sacrifices for moral reasons, and rationality would mean being productive (the only necessary ideal). Just like bailing out the bankers, it can’t matter what the person who caused your problem did (or whether he was addicted), or what you must do to solve your own problem; you simply must take care of yourself each time that this happens, and expectations of morality can’t “interfere.” All relationships and marriages considered codependent are treated just as fatalistically, whether or not the problem person is addicted. As Greenspan said, that’s what works; if Archie wins he wins and if he loses he loses, and even behavior problems who aren’t addicted aren’t motivated to change so expecting them to do what they don’t feel an incentive to do won’t work. Victimhood doesn’t produce anything, so why should we give it any credit? The ends justify the means, since as Archie could tell you, the ends, functionability and good coping skills, are necessary. Is someone sociopathic? Avoid him since you’re incompatible! End of story! NO ONE HAS A RIGHT TO ENDURABILITY! Endurability has to come from somewhere. Either we have self-responsible self-reliance, or we have nanny-ism, whining, trauma-drama, etc. Both the economics that led to the financial crash, and self-help for anyone in trouble including addicts’ family members, wear the cloak of realism, which is both all-important and expected of all red-blooded people. After all, we must have an un-ignorable incentive to do certain things that we may or may not be able to do.

To paraphrase Greenspan, at the bottom of all of the endless expectations that we serenely accept and/or courageously change our problems whatever they may be, lies an awareness that if we don’t, we’ll suffer more. This is an undeniable fact, rather than extremist ideology. Sure, A Dictionary of Psychology defines blaming the victim as, “A pervasive tendency to assume that a person who has suffered a misfortune must have done something wrong to deserve it. It is explained by the just world hypothesis.” Yet it should be obvious from any self-help that victim-blaming is most important when someone must self-motivatedly take response-ability for injustices. This must be as pervasive as the injustices that must be courageously changed. Archie is keeping the faith. Victim-blaming gets things done, since the victims are motivated to do them. Whatever matters in the real world, matters in the real world. Whatever is reality, is reality. An accepting cynicism about victimizers (“Oh, well, that’s human nature.”) must lead to a rejecting cynicism about victims (“Stop your manipulative self-righteous and passive-aggressive pity-party!”), as well as a moral cynicism (“If that’s what red-blooded realism requires, then that’s what it requires! Stop trying to control others [i.e. the sinful]!”), since someone has to take responsibility for the consequences of every problem, and seem intolerably bad if he doesn’t. Sociopaths, addictive personalities, etc., would feel right at home with this ethos and the “perverse incentives” it produces. You mustn’t be intellectualist or “manipulative” enough to care about our rampant depression. As Greenspan wrote in an Economist commentary of December 18, 2008, “Human nature being what it is, we can count on a market reversal, hopefully, within six months to a year,” and one could optimistically say that human nature being what it is, victims (of anything) will reverse whatever was done to them.

The basic idea is that the weak should become more self-responsible and the strong should be forgiven, and then, realistically speaking, things would keep functioning efficiently. Including the human element would be too dangerously unpragmatic, manipulatively emotionalistic, disruptive of our self-reliant normalcy, etc. As Dr. Thomas A. Harris wrote in the preface of his I’m OK—You’re OK, “To many people [psychiatry] is like a blind man in dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there,” but Al-Anon-style psychology-psychiatry, Gelassenheit, neo-Buddhism (which self-disciplines the yin but not the yang, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” so could also be called Yang Buddhism), is productive, does produce contrived serenity courage and self-responsibility, whereas telling addicts’ family members, “You’re OK, even if his addiction really bothers you,” wouldn’t: mindless formula, mindful victims. This prevents victimhood. Defiance of this could be labeled as ignominious uppity untermensch WILLFULNESS, not “maverick” defiance. This mental health treatment is all-natural. Your feeling bad about anything would hurt only yourself. Everyone must adjust. Blinders bring serenity. For everyone, functioning productively and resiliently is all-important. Any fear could be dangerously problematic. To function in the real world, you can’t be horrified. This is so banal, it’s profound. That spirituality is the ultimate radical religion, which you must interpret literally. If the economy collapsed in 2008 because of a few people in the financial sector making risky loans or panicking during the crisis, all of those who’d have suffered the consequences would have had to have taken care of themselves, too; either they’d keep “looking at themselves,” or they’d fail in life since they wouldn’t recognize their own inadequacies. Even after the Great Crash of 2008, you mustn’t be horrified by anti-intellectualism and its conceptions of self-responsibility. (They must love Sarah Palin.) Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman wrote, “...zealots like the people at Heritage, who offer the same canned answers whatever the question,” and, from this sort of self-help, one could expect to get the same sort of self-responsible canned answers to every question.

(This is a chapter of Atlas Shrugged, which has the same conceptions of personal response-ability and honorability as does this self-help, but if you simply must show character by adjusting to reality since that’s what’s most expedient for the moment. The better that a victim is, the more victim-power he’d have, so the more dangerous he’d seem. An ethos that says that the main “defects of character” are resentment anger and fear in general, is a lot like a novel about the strong righteously triumphing over the weak, in that neither of these can care about the specifics of any helplessness, can see such realism-based questions in partial and relative terms, etc. If you think that the self-will in the business world is bad, you should see the whiny demanding and manipulative self-will behind one’s proving that he’s a victim!)

After all, all problems must be resolved. Attention must be systematically focused on how any victims (who are the most motivated to do this successfully), could most effectively take response-ability for their own welfare, since thoughts about right and wrong would be unpragmatic manipulative and judgmental opinion. Alateen isn’t extremist. Treating victims as victims seems so old-school, mollycoddling. The way that the Iraq war resulted so automatically from the whiny claims that Americans were victims of WMD, shows the great danger of manipulative victim-power. Moral relativism (“Your morality is culturally biased!”) becomes amoral absolutism (“Your morality is biased toward believing that you deserve better! Shame on you!”). Blame the victim, and you’ll get well-motivated self-reliant and anti-judgmental results, solutions. That’s the only thing that really matters (especially for those with big problems). In the real world, some things work and some things don’t, and whenever those who are morally responsible won’t take physical responsibility, cult-like neo-Buddhism would work much better than would moral responsibility. Don’t be pessimistic! In all situations, this is what it takes to win, so everything except “Can I change this?”, should be ignored, is for weaklings. The ignominious banalities of life, aren’t issues. This might not look sociopolitical or socioeconomic, but this is just cultural norms and expectations, along with social pressures, determining who is personally responsible for what in certain interactions, and those of the society at large tend to find the same unconditionally self-correcting platitudes inspiring. Very little of what could counter our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., would sound or feel gutsy, so very little of it could sell. (Endurability wouldn’t make good Populism.)

For an exemplary alkie’s kid who looks like Archie, to preach, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!” (If you could get people to believe in that self-responsibility, you could get people to believe anything.), should seem like wryly Kafkaesque theater of the absurd, but instead that seems very pragmatic and honorable. His group’s leaders are just trying to help him take care of himself better, which he really needs, and this would also help anyone else in trouble. No self-responsibility for victims sounds nice, but all victim-blaming that isn’t illogical could help the victims by improving their chances of success in the future. For everyone, not just a-holes’ families, realism means accepting that others won’t do what they’re not motivated to do. The only difference between those who Al-Anon corrects and everyone else, is the situation they’re in, and “self-responsibility” and “self-help” would mean the same things in any other situation where, to the same degree, you can’t change others’ actions but can change your own reactions. No matter what any Al-Anon or Alateen members, or those in equally desperate situations, may whine about, self-help psychology could respond, “But to look at yourself instead of blaming others would benefit you, by changing what you can and accepting what you can’t!” (Being in denial about the unconditionality, could make you more serene and courageous.) That’s reality, not victim-blaming. This doesn’t intend to blame or criticize you or be morally bankrupt, just make you more well-adjusted and spiritual. Whether or not the person who’s causing Archie’s problems was addicted, training him to have an attitude of, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, is tough love, since this benefits him. After all, the more that anyone judging such situations tried to be fair, the more unfair he’d be, since no one would solve the problems. Certain things simply have to get done, by those who are the most motivated to do them. Sometimes in life, the pragmatists must stand up to the weak. As Al-Anon shows, and self-help for everyone admires, unconditional acceptance and adjustment toward anything that you’re helpless to change, would always lead to peace and confidence—serenity and courage. (That’s a strong character.)

However a society defines “mental health” and “strong character” would have to reflect the realities that those in that society would have to take responsibility for.

As Miranda says in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “O brave new world, that hath such people in it.” Those who most believe in this sort of unconditional self-responsibility are good, hard-working people. As the Wikipedia webpage on Phil Gramm begins, “Gramm often noted in his political campaigns that he had repeated three grades in school but had overcome his academic deficiencies by hard work.” He’s a proven maverick. Now, Gramm is known as being the remorseless one who caused the financial meltdown, but he’d no doubt insist that no one could really disprove what he’s saying, and that those who have his standard of self-responsibility, would be most likely to succeed in life and look impressively red-blooded. Everyone knows that trying to make people (independently) stronger, isn’t extremist.

(“I only want to help!”)

AA is avowedly anti-intellectualist and pro-self-responsibility. Unconditional and resilient, “can-do” self-responsibility like Archie’s, is what made America great. Self-blame is the can-do attitude for people in trouble, “If only I can... better, I can succeed!” If it weren’t unconditional, it would allow cowardice, inadequacy, excuses, faking problems, unearned entitlement, maladjustment, dysfunctionality, etc., and we mustn’t be naïve about this. In a society with rampant depression, everyone could have an excuse for failure, and such cowardice saps productivity. Self-responsibility along the lines of the law of the jungle works (and worked very productively in the nineteenth century), if you make it work. Losers lose and winners win. The weak can be so unfair. Like any other reductionism, if you listened to many victim correctors’ insistent solutions to peoples’ problems, these solutions would all say basically the same things: change the specifics of one solution to the specifics of any other, and the one could sound just like the other. When reality requires that these expectations go to the point of a reductio ad absurdum (as in Archie’s case), then that’s what reality (and self-motivated self-reliance) require. Even if this requires more Stoicism than some Stoic saints had, if that’s what reality requires, then that’s what it requires. (These saints’ self-control shows that it’s possible, and Al-Anon-style self-control isn’t moralistic.) Such unconditional Stoicism can eliminate all misery, the worst of which could have caused big problems. Some ideas sell, some don’t, and this one sells. Which would you rather be, right, or happy? To the uninitiated, victim-blaming would seem bad rather than pragmatic, for 15% of the American adult population to suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year wouldn’t seem to be among the diseases that are parts of the natural order, etc. This is the same sort of logic that led to Phil Gramm calling America a “nation of whiners,” etc., that has the same unconditionally red-blooded, resilient, exhilarating, hard-working and character-building appeal to it! (Of course, the huge panic behind the Great Crash of 2008, which followed that, should have indicated that those on Wall Street were much bigger whiners, dangerously so, but they’re übermenschen.)

The alkies aren’t controlling Al-Anon members in the authoritarian, paternalistic, anti-freedom sense; that’s just the way that life sometimes goes. We all must adjust to our realities. That’s inherent to life. To end the description of each and every traumatic experience with, “So now I’m supposed to just shut up and deal with this reality, since doing so would benefit me,” might sound like the punch line of a sick joke, but the bottom line must always be pragmatic and well-adjusted. That’s how victim correctors are supposed to operate, since correction is good, and a lack of it is self-defeating. This is the language of letting go. AA slogans such as “Anger is one letter short of danger,” would apply, but “Easy does it,” wouldn’t. Unless what happened was so extreme that this would sound untenable, trying to correct the person who caused the problem, even assertively, could very easily seem or suggest: unrealistic, unreliable, others-helping, naïve, stupid, conditional, optional, half-hearted, limited, judgmental, troublemaking, “on principle,” moralistic, unattractive, sophistry-rewarding, altruistic, controlling, whiny, mollycoddling, intellectualist, philosophical, pathetic, resentful, maladjusted, negative, blaming, subjective, unproven, emotionalistic, manipulative, passive, etc. Trying to correct the person who has the problem in ways that would help him “take care of himself” better, could very easily seem or suggest: realistic, reliable, self-helping, natural, wise, necessary, vital, steadfast, limitless, forgiving, peace-making, pragmatic, trendy, marketable, achievement-oriented, “getting on with life,” self-empowering, gutsy, achievement-oriented, down-to-earth, material, proud, competitive, well-adjusted, hopeful, solving, objective, self-justifying, practical, self-reliant, active, etc. “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, isn’t self-abnegating, servile. And if what happened was extreme, then the worse was what he did, the more that expecting him to take moral responsibility for that much could seem draconian, naïve, etc. This is red-blooded self-responsibility, not tyranny, submission, etc., so few will respond to this as if it’s extremist.

We all know how Medieval this is!

Victim-blaming can’t make traumas worse, since victims can’t be counterproductive, dysfunctional, maladjusted, defeatist, negative, whiny, unaccepting, demanding, etc. Those who are trying to defend themselves from this (Defend yourself from personal response-ability for your own welfare? Horrors!), could feel uncomfortable expecting others to take such banalities seriously, but the end result of the banalities is rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc. Whatever happens that contributes to these gargantuan social problems, “Oh, well, that’s life, and the victims probably could have stopped the damage,” so even conspiracy theorists could feel very safe with this massive devastation. Al-Anon would probably say that the reason why it would expect members to accept whatever alkies do is that their disease of addiction makes them not guilty by reason of insanity (Addiction, a disease of people’s motivations, might as well be as involuntary as Alzheimer’s, and disease might as well equal total helplessness.), but if a non-addict caused a member a big problem, the only things that would really matter would be the victim’s serenity and courage. “That’s just the way that human nature is,” “That’s just the way that this sinful world is,” “Boys will be boys,” “That’s just the way that he is,” etc., imply the same level of fatalism and serene acceptance as does, “That’s just the way that addicts are.” This unconditionality would apply to the self-help and self-responsibility in handling any problem whatsoever, since whatever the real world requires, the real world requires. Coping with reality requires that the realities be interchangeable. What could possibly keep victim correction in check, limiting self-responsibility to what’s reasonable? Just think of all the resentment, self-righteousness, wimpiness, etc., that moral clarity would lead to. As one could see in how domestic violence was once minimized, destruction within the family, especially if from the husband, is considered especially banal, personal, excusable, understandable, natural, inevitable, etc., and these minimizing labels come from the usual “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” social norms. If only the weak took care of themselves better... All that you’d have to do is not care, and primitivism could happen so easily.

Realism also has a gutsy appeal to it.

(Cartoon generated by “Build Your Own Meat”)

Archie was taught to have great confidence in the self-reliance and self-determination of the individual. Instinctively, Americans would tend to be a lot less offended by Al-Anon-style victim correction, than by the whining and the victim-power that it corrects. That self-help formula feels right, helpful, beneficial, self-empowering, resilient, self-efficacious. Victims’ counselors care about them. This empathy requires correcting them, saving them from their own negativity and passivity. After all, “Oh, you poor thing!”, treats people as things. Victim correctors only want addicts’ kids, etc., to be more self-efficacious, serene, etc. The nescient majority has no problem with this level of victim correction, with just expecting people to “get on with life” despite realities this lurid, which seem to be just acceptable losses. The lower middle class approach is about solving problems self-reliantly and realistically, so we should teach the same self-responsible ideas that it does, instead of the petty bourgeois approach, which is palliative. Coping with reality means overlooking some realities, and such pragmatic and red-blooded cultural norms have to be insistent and unquestionable. As White House press secretary Ari Fleischer unabashedly said after Bush admitted that the Iraq-Niger-uranium documents are fake, “Yes, the president has moved on. And, I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on, as well,” a top-notch professional attempt to get the public to conform to letting go regarding Bush’s Machiavellianism. (Fleischer is rebelling from his petty bourgeois family, who obviously can afford not to adequately appreciate why, in the real world, sometimes when others cause you problems it’s necessary to move on rather than whine and intellectualize.) Caring about social problems is so passé, so 1960s, even caring about our rampant depression. In the 60s it was Big Brother AND the Holding Company, but now it’s Big Brother OR the Holding Company, since it seems that either we accept Wall Street excesses or we’ll have Big Brother. During the Vietnam War, defending it by telling opponents to move on, would have seemed morally bankrupt, rather than unconditionally resilient. As Al-Anon shows, it’s possible for pragmatists to expect someone to move on from, let go of, etc., literally anything that he can’t change.

That’s how you can cope with any reality!!!

That’s how all cultural conditioning and social pressures work, including that of all those strange foreigners who can’t think for themselves. (BTW, those who think for themselves wouldn’t conclude that for 15% of the adult population to suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year, is only natural.) Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct.

How much longer could we be silent about this social problem devastating millions?

Nothing that anyone in trouble could possibly say, could possibly counter expectations that are based on what the real world objectively requires. No matter what an alkie or any other problem parent might do that could traumatize his kid, he absolutely could change himself, and absolutely can’t change anyone else including the parent, which is all that the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer cares about. A priori, that’s all that you could care about. That mustn’t seem repulsive. You mustn’t really care about “the elephant in the living room” if you can’t change the elephant. If you think that that’s revolting, then that would be very unserene, discouraging, etc. Obviously, that, like Bontsha the Silent, is far from a natural way to think, though it could be called “cognitive therapy” (“Behavior Therapists and Cognitive Behavior Therapists... concentrate on a person’s views and perceptions about their life, rather than personality traits.”), which has been called, “a natural alternative to anti-depressant medication.” The above is the fully-approved outlook, since it’s very effective in preventing depression. All that you’d need to give self help advice, would be a tape recording that repeats the ideal canned response to questions regarding conflicts, “It would really do you a lot of good if you changed what you can and accepted what you can’t! That’s just the way the real world works!”, and you’d play that over and over as the person describes his own trauma. Any reasonable alternatives to victim correction as a panacea, could seem too unrealistic, fallible, subjective, passive, defeatist, untermensch, etc., for the realities that one must deal with. Pragmatism leads to happiness. Victim-correctors, therefore, are the ones who really care about victims.

If one were to apply what On Speculation and Manipulation in Therapy says, “When it works, justice is always very particular. It proceeds on a case-by-case basis with a careful weighing of the facts and an equally careful examination of the underlying logic of key arguments,” certainly the specifics of what addicts’ kids must deal with, would argue for someone else being to blame. Yet blaming others wouldn’t accomplish anything, and would divert attention from solving one’s own problems. It’s your problem, so what are you going to do about it? You’d better just serenely surrender to the inevitable. If we showed an understanding acceptance toward everyone, including the people who have the problems and aren’t dealing with them adequately, nobody would solve them, and the victims would be weakened in the long run. For these people to get on track in taking care of themselves, is the only thing that really matters. If everything must be pragmatic, nothing can be sacred. “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, is inculcated humility, expedient and well-adjusted, without coercion or authoritarian obeisance so this is pro-freedom. Even if the reason for the “negative thoughts” that the victim is washing his own brain of, is that he was unfairly overpowered, that wouldn’t be an authoritarian brainwashing, so his sincere opinion could still seem to be dirt that’s to be washed away and replaced with what he’s supposed to believe. The October, 2007 issue of Counselor, the Magazine for Addiction Professionals includes an article that says, “rigid fidelity may produce an adverse effect,” but for those who must deal with realities like this, rigid fidelity is as necessary as are adequate resiliency and coping skills. Naïveté doesn’t work. Victim-blaming optimistically and determinedly looks for very necessary self-motivated solutions, so, in the words of the Downing Street memo, “the intelligence and the facts” must be “fixed around the policy.”

Reductionism is key. In whatever respects one is weak or strong, the weak serenely accept, the strong courageously change, and the stronger don’t have to worry about changing or accepting anything. As any self-help counselor would tell you, abstractions are immaterial, and judgmental abstractions are self-serving, so conflicts are reduced to the concrete realities. Ambrose Bierce defined platitude as, “A moral without the fable,” and the self-reliant, self-responsible, morals of victim correction sound a lot better without the fables, which would have told of what the people had to deal with self-reliantly. The central message of any self-help approach for people in trouble is that to help yourself: No matter what caused your problem, you absolutely must focus your attention on correcting yourself, since you absolutely can change yourself, absolutely can’t change anyone else, and absolutely must make your life productive (whatever that requires). The real world requires certain things. Everyone must play their part. The only choice that you have is either you do whatever it takes to deal with your problem, or it doesn’t get dealt with. The only legit question is, “Can I change this?”, so no injustices could seem profound. As long as they happened in the past, they’re past history. Unendurability happens. Addicts’ friends and loved ones are the ones who are motivated to correct themselves, and they need more motivation to: change, empower themselves, accommodate to reality, be well-adjusted and productive. That’s only natural. Everyone, not just fundamentalists, must take this sort of spirituality literally. Focus on self-responsibility. Only the person who has the problem, is reliably motivated to deal with it as well as possible. We could live without moral responsibility (which we can’t count on), abstract principles like morality, etc., but can’t live without victims taking response-ability for their own welfare. Some things are luxuries; some are necessities. There’s nothing paternalistic here, so you could feel free.

Even addicts’ families, etc., are sustainable like this, since naturally everyone is motivated to be well-adjusted and functional—serene and courageous. Homespun fortitude is homespun fortitude. Addicts’ kids shouldn’t feel bad about themselves, guilty, etc., but when dealing with what their alcoholic parents do the kids should look at themselves rather than blaming others, so as they do this they should choose not to feel self-blame, and, of course, simply looking at themselves means simply looking at what they should have done better. Their self-help mentors would simply check to see how well they’re doing in following these instructions. (It’s no wonder that Should Statements are one of the single-mindedly self-responsible cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, or that depressed self-blamers have no gauge of how good is good enough other than, “Am I adequate to deal with my [devastating] realities?”!) If one rationale for victim correction doesn’t work, it’s replaced by another. As “Mary Smith” wrote in her suicide note, “All [my psychologist] could do is nitpick about how I need to feel small + helpless,” though Mary obviously had a gutsy personality, which is typical of the self-empowering “thinking” of victim correction: plenty of all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, and disqualifying the positive. To paraphrase British prime minister David Lloyd George, such alkies’ kids cannot conquer the chasms in their own lives by gingerly taking one step at a time. NOTHING CAN LIMIT HOW MUCH ALL THIS COULD AFFECT YOU. (As you could see in Archie and in all the other self-blame you might encounter, that isn’t just a fear of a slippery slope, of what might happen to you if this goes too far. Naturally, the realities that you’re response-able for dealing with, will go however far they’ll go, and with realism, there’s no such thing as going too far.) Samia Labidi’s chapter of Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam, Apostates Speak Out says, “The shackling of women had to be pursued without any letup, otherwise men risked losing control of the situation,” and with victim correction as a panacea, the shackling of untermenschen has to be pursued without any letup, otherwise übermenschen risk losing control of the situation through: untermenschen believing that they’re ENTITLED to better so they’ll stop “looking at themselves,” others pitying them, and these feelings getting more and more compelling since fear, including warranted fear, is the strongest motivator.

And, of course, when they look at themselves to see if they have the “defects of character” that AA’s Big Book really goes into, i.e. resentment anger and/or fear, then alkies’ kids would probably find that they feel plenty of untermensch feelings, but Al-Anon doesn’t consider correcting them to be self-blame. It should be that either you’re careful about blaming the victim or you’d be treated as not being careful enough about the accusations you make unswervingly, but that would leave too many problems unsolved. As British author Douglas Adams wrote, “When you blame others, you give up the power to change yourself.” As Susan Faludi wrote in Backlash about writings on codependency, “Norwood’s self-help plan, modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve-step program [through Al-Anon], advises women seeking the source of their pain to refrain from looking beyond themselves, a habit she calls ‘blaming.’” Self-responsibility is necessary for victims. Backlash mentions “puerile serenity,” though contrived serenity is what’s pertinent! And we’d better not have a backlash against this knee-jerk, unconditional absolutist one-dimensional uncompromising and unquestionable (but very self-helping and self-motivated) victim correction! In Atlas Shrugged, when Hank Rearden was put on trial and he dared the law to use its guns on him, it didn’t send him to prison since the public cheered him, but if you responded to this sort of power dynamic with a non-addict, by saying, “Let him do what he wants! I’m not going to change my behavior accordingly!”, you could suffer consequences that are worse than a prison sentence, and the public would tend to think that you’re a pathetic loser. As Bush said in May, 2005, “In my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

Though this conviction and ideology expects people to accept a laissez faire self-responsibility that’s as extremist as the self-responsibility that Enron propounded when it seemed so red-blooded, not only would Al-Anon not seem to be extremist wing-nuts, but if you firmly disagreed you could seem to be an extremist wing-nut. As Enlightenment-era economic philosophers wrote, being productive must override everything else. Most victim-blaming (a.k.a. self-responsibility) can’t seem bad. Those who deviate from these expectations are those who’d seem to be the authoritarians, the judgmental controllers. One can’t say “no” to realism, including, “Like Archie, you should stop blaming others and look at yourself, to improve yourself and your chances!” Unintended consequences, etc., of moral control are dreaded; unintended consequences, etc., of the law of the jungle seem only natural. As Libertarian Ron Paul explained Social Security,“ ...we have taught them to be dependent,” and a single-minded blaming and correction of any victims would have the same unconditional, gutsy and pro-freedom appeal. Social Darwinism protects us from all parasitism, which could only hurt the parasites. No doubt this thrilling philosophy also regards the Americans with Disabilities Act as tyrannical, so either handicapped people get jobs without the ADA, or they’ve been taught to be dependent. Realists can see the dangers that the weak would pose, unless they make great efforts to be self-reliant anyway and succeed. We mustn’t reward failure, victimhood, etc., or the weak could get what they wanted without earning it and the strong might not be motivated to achieve, so we must assume that the weak wanted to fail. This isn’t absolute power; Archie and those who are just as helpless can change some significant things. Such “imperfections” don’t seem nearly as scary as do comparable problems from the guv’mint. Helplessness isn’t tyranny.

The Al-Anon formula for self-help, laissez faire Social Darwinist ideology, and what “self-help” must mean in a society with rampant depression, are based on the same ideas, and come with the same frame of reference. You simply must accept whatever you get, that you’re powerless to change. As long as you can’t change what you’re afraid of, the more fear you’d feel, the more self-control you’d need in order to cope with reality. Naturally, we reward success and punish failure. We have to. We seem to be in a constant conflict between untermensch human nature, which tries to get what it wants (including masochistic emotional satisfaction) through mollycoddle cunning weakness, and übermensch human nature, which tries to get what it wants through red-blooded “honest” strength, and the übermenschen must win. Naturally, we must sometimes deal with things going wrong; safety could go against freedom. Victimhood shouldn’t entitle anyone to anything. The weak must be more motivated to play their parts. As Hitler’s idol Schopenhauer wrote, if we cared about what someone deserves other than whether he won or lost, then people could get what they wanted by “proving” that they deserve it, and naturally those whiners would want to believe that they do. If others care about your hurt feelings, that could seem manipulative. Both pro-freedom philosophies, and realism, must accept much of what contributes to our rampant depression. If you were for limited government, you’d be mainstream, but if you were for limited victim correction, you’d be a radical. While “Archie’s” situation is certainly atypical, a society that has rampant depression yet stresses response-ability for one’s own welfare would have to make that personal response-ability, that unconditional (though each situation gives opportunities for rationales for this personal response-ability, that victim correctors could focus on). All of the advantages of “the invisible hand,” apply to the lives of Archie and everyone else in trouble. (If you weren’t aware of our rampant depression with self-blame, you might think that things just take care of themselves.) No matter how individualistic one is, he’d still have to admit that every society must keep itself stable and functioning, and must enforce its expectations regarding who’s to do this. All of these supposed forms of individualism must indoctrinate their followers into believing in counterintuitive absolutisms such as the above, the ideal being complying with the Al-Anon “Serenely accept and courageously change” formula applied to any realities. That’s living in the real world. You do what you can. Beat the hardcore blues. No self-care could seem onerous. No one is entitled to anything, since everything has to come from somewhere or someone, isn’t going to just happen because “it’s what’s right.” Whatever happens is, therefore, “life on life’s terms,” “reality,” etc.

Maturity means accepting reality. Of course, we live in a competitive and self-responsible society, nothing’s guaranteed, and human imperfections are whatever they are. Those who have Nietzsche’s values would be both most likely to succeed, and most likely to seem to have good, well-adjusted backbone. Response-ability for one’s own welfare, one’s own problems: serves the greater good, maximizes efficiency, is a moral obligation that we can’t afford to forgive. Where would our economy be if people weren’t truly motivated to take response-ability for their own welfare? There are no guarantees in life, and if there were, plenty of people wouldn’t be productive enough. Emotionalism such as whining, victimology, and victimhood, wouldn’t be fair play in the contest for success. Fighting for what is good could actually turn out to be bad, since people: are naturally motivated to do what they want and to take response-ability for their own problems, aren’t reliably motivated to take moral responsibility, must be motivated to get what they want by winning and earning it, and mustn’t be motivated to get it by acting like victims or their allies. Asymmetrical warfare means that the strong fight fair and the weak fight unfair. If everyone were to get what they deserved, where would it come from? “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” etc., are, in the end, Social Darwinism that resolutely ignores its own consequences. You get whatever you get. Self-responsibly striving for success, is what it all comes down to. That’s the sort of values that our economy rewards; Archie and those who’d insist that we cope like him, would prove very strong resilient and productive. Cognitive therapists could probably prove that those who choose to think that serenely and courageously are the least likely to suffer depression, anxiety, etc.

Things simply have to keep functioning. If you don’t successfully deal with your own problems, who will? We must think realistically, so whatever shapes our realities shapes how we must think. If you don’t go along with the victim correction as a panacea, then that would seem to be your untermensch pathologies, character defects. Pathetic resentment is the ultimate enemy. Whatever is necessary for one to deal with his own realities self-reliantly becomes absolutely necessary, so otherwise he’d be inadequate, dysfunctional, etc. Even if he does plenty, if it’s inadequate to deal with his realities, he’d seem to be inadequate. The weak can be such a drain. Victim-blaming has advantages, such as: conventionality, pragmatism, realism, objectivity, exalting red-blooded strength, avoiding moralism, preventing manipulative and vainglorious machinations, faith that we get what we deserve, and confidence that the person who’s the most motivated to solve a problem is the one who’s in control. All that we’d have to do is treat the weak as a bunch of selfish manipulators, and we could have a de facto law of the jungle without having an official law of the jungle. Everyone must conquer their own doubts, their own “negativity,” for their own good, focusing on correcting themselves. Correcting women, poor people, etc., as if they fit the stereotypes of choosing to be weak for “fun” and/or profit, is intended to benefit them, strengthen them. Normal give-and-take, opinions about rampant depression, etc., seem too prone to manipulation, cowardice, etc. Simple wins.® Success and failure are objective, and questions of, “What’s unacceptably wrong?”, aren’t. (You’re expected to have realistic coping skills, so simply proving that what happened was wrong, isn’t enough.) That’s the real world; sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don’t. There is only so much to go around, and if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. It’s astounding what one can get away with, if what we really care about is the supposed whiners, manipulators, etc. Acting pathetic is the old (pre-Reagan) way of doing things. Weakness isn’t competitive, or fun. Victims could seem to be manipulatively insidiously and perfidiously exploiting victimizers’ (moral) vulnerabilities, in order to get what the victims want. (Paranoia about duplicitous untermenschen could seem healthy—gutsy and realistic.) If those judging you keep hearing from your society, that supposed victims are really untermensch manipulators, attention-seekers, whiners, etc., then that would be how those judges would be likely to judge you. (Prejudice acquires a new meaning, like Ron Paul’s: “Sometimes you have to pre-judge, since you can’t prove cunning untermensch machinations, and you should be optimistic that they could have succeeded if they really wanted to.”) Coping with reality must mean overlooking some realities. Even Archie doesn’t have to live in fear. You don’t deserve more than what you won. Your attention would be on what you should be doing better, better, not on the magnitude of the social problem. Some negativity seems pro-freedom,

but some seems dangerously anti-freedom.

Self-help programs like this, even those that apply to situations of unambiguous victimization, are top sellers. The alkies aren’t controlling Al-Anon members in the authoritarian, paternalistic, anti-freedom sense; that’s just the way that life sometimes goes. We all must adjust to our realities. That’s inherent to life. This is the exciting self-reliant freedom, can-do courage, and failsafe well-adjusted forgiveness, that we’ve gotten to know and love. If it feels good, believe it. (Fighting and/or caring for the underdog might feel good, though, but we must understand how this would mollycoddle them.) Addictive personalities would feel right at home. Hans Johst said, “When I hear the word culture, I release the safety catch on my revolver,” and intellectualism could cause similar feelings, even when the supposed intellectualism is a concern about the sociology of what leads to our rampant depression. We must all be motivated to deal with our own problems independently resiliently and resourcefully. We’ll get more chances to succeed. That simply is the unconditionally self-responsible role that we must play, to keep our society functioning with plenty of self-motivation, unconditionally. If people could get what they wanted by manipulatively playing the victim role, then that’s what they’d naturally do. Simply being morally right, has never earned or achieved anything. If you’ve “really failed,” you could become a projection screen for others’ beliefs about failures. Conformists firmly believe that certain things are good, so are blinded by ideology. (“Sure, approximately 15% of the U.S. adult population suffers from a serious depressive disorder in any given year, but if you act like what’s causing your problem is what contributes to our rampant depression, that’s just your manipulative ploy!!!”)

Many want to correct victims (who can’t afford intellectualism) because they ♥♥♥ care ♥♥♥ about them, more than do the petty bourgeois who say vaingloriously that they care, but aren’t realistic or confident about the individual’s self-reliance. (Manipulative ploys usually don’t work, especially in the long run.) These are the victim-fixers. We must stand up for self-reliant freedom. You can’t prove most manipulative, passive-aggressive, codependent, etc., machinations, so “presumed innocent of machinations until proven guilty” is out of the question. Whenever tenable, see problems as the victims’ free choice, eagerly believing that we have self-determination! Before the Reagan/Thatcher Era, caring about the causes of our rampant depression would have seemed only natural, but now, truly caring about most of them would seem to reflect a dangerously untermensch character. The weak have victim-power. Real power is honest, victim-power isn’t. Even if it had been proven what normalized helplessness contributes to our rampant depression, those who are well-adjusted would have to respond to it with, “Sure, what’s happening to you is the sort of thing that’s been proven to contribute to our rampant depression, but everyone knows that when that sort of thing happens to you, you’re just going to have to deal with it.” The red-blooded, pro-freedom, and pro-self-reliance cultural norms behind this are sacrosanct, so naturally we accept the consequences. Both the logic and the consequences, are predictable and stereotypical. As “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” says, we mustn’t try to re-engineer aggressive human nature, and must re-engineer passive human nature. Expecting victim-fixers to give up victim-blaming, would be like expecting addicts to give it up. Sure, William Styron wrote, “To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists,” but if we were guaranteed safety from what causes our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., we wouldn’t have enough motivation to earn and achieve.

Faith in anything would make one happier, including faith in this. People tend to believe what they want to believe. No matter what happens to you, if you didn’t have faith in your opportunities to succeed you’d seem unpatriotic, while, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, is patriotic. (“The weak are at fault, and might be faking it,” is the last refuge of both the scoundrel, and the sociopath.) Optimism that you’d succeed if only you were good enough, seems mandatory. Response-ability for one’s own welfare would work for everyone, and keeps everyone self-motivated. All three of these forms of responsible “individualism” would preach the basic ideas of the same self-reliant and self-responsible platitudes over and over again, like a dogma or cult since free thought regarding this would allow untermensch weakness and manipulative strength, and who’d fix the consequences of that? All this mustn’t ever seem repulsive. This must always constitute the same simplistic dogma over and over again, since certain things must be taken care of by those reliably motivated to do it. This could even answer The Big Questions of Life, since well-motivated and objective personal response-ability for one’s own problems, could lead to more peace and productivity than would moral rules. Motivate, motivate, motivate!!! With enough mass hysteria, conformity, compliance, and condemnation of whining, people could think that serious depressive disorders affecting 34,000,000 American adults, consists of either 34,000,000 rather severe character defects, or 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions.

Self-responsibility along the lines of the law of the jungle, works: eventually, if you try hard enough (which is along the same self-motivated lines as, “Greed is good. Greed works.”) As Gordon Gekko said, this must be The American Way, since anything else would rely too much on altruism and/or opinion-based restriction, coddle the whiny losers too much, etc. The law of the jungle protects us from untermensch manipulation, parasitism, quitting, etc. The dangers that are feared, are thoughts, feelings, and actions of the weak, the victims. Social Darwinism destroys, but protects us from failures in fixing destruction, and from whiny “weak characters.” Very little pragmatic victim-blaming would seem undoubtedly bad (especially to those who aren’t intellectualist). If your nephew died young because his priest had molested him, you might even put The Serenity Prayer on the homepage of his memorial website, since that prayer tells you how to cope with literally anything. Endurability might seem very basic to life, but in some situations, expecting endurability would be unrealistic. One depression is a tragedy; millions of depressions is a statistic. Victim-blaming develops a life of its own, since that simply is how things must be taken care of, with plenty of reliable self-motivation. The real world will make its demands! Objectivity, Objectivism, means might makes right, since might and victory are objective, and moral wrongness is both subjective and emotionalistic. Sure, Helen Keller wrote, “I do not want the peace that passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace,” but when we’re in trouble, what we do and don’t want is a bunch of BS. Whatever applies to addicts’ kids, also applies to oppressed minorities, etc., since inadequate adjustment and adaptation to one’s own realities, would cause the same sorts of problems for anyone. When it comes to moral responsibility, the slate is basically wiped clean. The more that you’d care about your own helplessness, the more helpless you’d become. Such realism is tautological, begging the question, “Your dad’s addiction is reality, so if you don’t adjust to it and function with it you’re maladjusted and dysfunctional, since that’s reality.” Everyone must get on with life. As Fleischer, Al-Anon, the beginning of Lee Greenwood’s Reagan-Revolutionary patriotic praise song God Bless the USA, etc., take for granted, victims who don’t do their best to “move on” would seem to be going against basic American expectations for resilient: self-reliance, self-responsibility, maturity, realism, etc. Some things seem to matter, some things don’t, and it soon becomes very obvious that the pragmatic ones do.

That’s how you can cope with any reality!!!

As you’d live your life, you’d naturally focus on how you could correct your ineffective reactions, efforts, etc. In the entire world, few could afford not to deal adequately with their own realities, and become losers; problems happen. All three forms of “individualism” would predictably hold that in reality, the ultimate reason for our unnaturally high rates of depression, anxiety disorders, etc., is a whiny and negativist victim culture, and or something else that’s simply mollycoddle. (Anything could be ultimately blamed on the victim not stopping preventing or dealing with it well enough. He’d also have plenty of victim-power.) This offers the hope of unconditional solutions, and in the real world, we can’t afford conditions. This is optimistic that the person who really wants to solve the problem, has self-determination. Satisfying winners’ SELF-WILLS is productive; satisfying losers’ runs the risk of parasitism, controlling, etc. People must be motivated to win, not whine. If the government didn’t cause it, then it’s a part of freedom. This self-responsibility, and figuring that winner equals worthy, are always objective, but other conceptions of personal responsibility and worthiness, aren’t. That’s the role that good victims will play. As is typical for dogma, the more that you’d disagree, the more that you’d seem to be one of the dreaded, omni-responsible, whiny negativists and mollycoddles. Wanting to be productive, optimistic, etc., is very important. The Fundamental Attribution Error, automatically attributing problems to the victims’ supposed faults, is the same whether the poor are blamed for their own poverty, or Al-Anon members are blamed for their own resentment. “There are no victims, just volunteers.” Each of us must do whatever he must do, yet that’s life, not slavery. Nothing that disagrees can really matter. If the only alternatives that a society had were either rampant depression, or its people not being adequately motivated to try to earn and achieve, then the rampant depression would be the realistic alternative. Victim blaming is always pro-freedom and pro-self-responsibility. Defying this, isn’t [all-American] defiance. All this is very predictable, even when it sizes up addicts’ families. Self-reliant realism, no matter what one’s own realities are, is non-partisan, objective, Objectivist. This is for the individual, even when the individual ends up devastated. No matter how high the rate of depression gets, this wouldn’t seem to be a social experiment, attempt to re-engineer human nature, etc. In the words of William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim, “All of this happens so smoothly that it seems downright rational.”

A study funded by the US government, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, found that conservatism is rooted in such neuroses as, “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity,” and that Hitler, Mussolini, Reagan, and Rush Limbaugh all “preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality.” Yet the self-help Newthink would have to say that all of these neuroses are good, even necessary. After all: Working with fear and aggression is realistic when that’s reality. Nazism seemed exciting in its day, very uninhibited and self-confident, fitting Freudian conceptions of normal human nature, which are basically German. Might makes right, since helplessness means that you must serenely accept. “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, shows how easy it is for weakness-makes-wrong to come naturally and seem obligatory. Your beliefs should make you fit in. All this must be done dogmatically and absolutistically, since half-measures will avail us nothing, and no abstractions (self-justifying opinions) could seem as important as realism. This personal responsibility must be as out-of-control as are the realities that one must deal with. “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it.” Someone absolutely has to take responsibility for each and every problem, no matter how many reasons he may give for why this is morally wrong, since every problem must get solved. Assuming that the weak want and/or need to be weak, are trying to take advantage of the strong manipulatively, etc., can’t be just a temporary trend. Realism gets first priority, and this isn’t just somewhat. Everyone knows how productive Nazi Germany’s economy was. The proponents of this are our friends, our allies, since they fight for self-reliant freedom. No one has a right to defend themselves from personal response-ability for their own welfare. Only strength is material. As Reagan said on April 7th, 1970 about that era’s protesters and activists, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,” and a non-violent version of this would apply to the victimologists and other losers. We must return to a self-responsibility like the pioneers’, old-fashioned übermensch pride and shame (old-fashioned yet exciting enough to attract a staunch, aggressively energized, and anti-“repression,” audience and following). Archie believes what he’s supposed to, which is self-empowering. Inequality is realistic and pro-freedom, and loves winners (without caring why they won). A big fear is of the supposed cunning “victim-power” of the untermenschen. They could have so much victim-power, that it’s scary! If you object to sinfulness, that’s really your will-to-power. Strength looks honorable, or at least forgivable. Tough, is good. Populism sounds very folksy and spontaneous. Blaming the weak sounds well-adjusted, productive, optimistic, gutsy, etc. Moral re-armament, standing up for strong self-reliant principles, etc., sound exciting, have plenty of vitality. Being pre-occupied with sexual morality, as our Fundament Christian leaders are, can’t be called whining, victimology etc., though caring about morality that isn’t victimless, can be. A lot of problems could ultimately be blamed on the weak, who should therefore try to empower themselves (which is good). What we need is more leadership and less whining. Gutsiness seems exciting and mentally healthy. It sounds sexy; caring about our rampant depression doesn’t. Confidence feels good. Pathetic resentment is the ultimate enemy. Sturm und drang speakers sound exciting, whether from a podium like Hitler, or on the radio. (Yet this aggressiveness also sounds obviously very depression-genic.) Caring about moral wrongness, other than what religious rules say, could very easily seem WILLFULLY emotionalistic: resentful, manipulative, melodramatic, self-righteous, whiny, etc. (the supposed triumph of the manipulative will). Realism about human nature means serenely accepting “honest” übermensch selfishness, and fearing insidious untermensch selfishness wanting the world to be as they’d have it. If you object to the irrationality and tunnel vision, you could seem to be looking down on the lower-middle-class (which was the Nazis’ main base of support), and outrage about that doesn’t seem to be appealing to pity or playing the victim role. Populism trusts the mediocre; the lower middle class are the ones who do the real work. It doesn’t matter that real common sense wouldn’t accept what causes rampant depression. Lower-middle-class people in any country, including Germany, are up against certain (whiny) sorts of people and could seem to be up against others, and must be stolid realists. As cognitive therapists would tell you, having the “wrong” opinions (not just aberrant ones) washed from your brain, could let you fit in much better. Reagan’s “We begin bombing in five minutes,” joke, and his statement of 1965, “We should declare war on North Vietnam... We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it, and still be home by Christmas,” showed that he had plenty of spark, which is what made him so popular! Attack politics works, in pressuring people into taking response-ability for their own welfare. Only the (dreaded) intellectual elite could afford to care. Gutter tactics are catchy. Banalities really have to matter. “Utilize, don’t analyze.” (As Hitler said, “How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.”) Without that self-empowerment, you might not succeed in taking care of yourself. Defying this, is parasitical (one of Nazism’s favorite words). One could be on a single-minded mission to correct victims, whether this be to fight the ignominious and parasitical untermenschen, or to maximize their very necessary self-help, self-reliance, and well-adjusted emotional strength. Weakness is bad, and that’s not judgmental in the Christian sense, or repressive in the Freudian sense. Conventional beliefs mean fitting in productively. “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” is Wagnerian realism, and Wagnerian judgmentalism. (We can’t have one without the other, since someone has to deal with each reality.) Such aggression looks very unexciting to those on the receiving end of it, and they don’t have a choice.

The cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, basically consist of absolutist self-responsible and “I’ll change what I can: myself,” victim-self-blaming. One could really see this Wagnerian level of self-responsibility, in discussions of codependency, which became popular in the 1980s. Self-help means self-reliance. Victim-blaming leads to self-motivated solutions. You’d rather count on greed, response-ability for one’s own welfare, etc., to motivate what needs to be done, than count on moral responsibility, which could also seem manipulative, unchecked in its victim-power, etc. As Reagan said, “Unemployment insurance is a prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders.” On the other hand, when the US government bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a London Metro headline called this a “£3trn deal ‘to save the world’” from economic collapse, though their failures were likely their own fault. “Realism” would require ignoring untermensch realities, which would dishearten, give excuses, divert efforts, manipulate, etc. No matter what hardship, sinfulness, etc., impacts each person’s life, he must deal with it productively; we mustn’t be unrealistic. Realists accept war, and this. A lack of this realism is what would seem neurotic: unrealistic, counterproductive, self-defeating, immature, passive-aggressive, passive, resentful, manipulative, mollycoddle, etc. No matter what are your realities (including extreme ones, hardship, sinfulness), if you have an outlook of, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, you’d be most likely to succeed in life. Realism cares only about what is, and what must be.

Realism is everything.

“Archie’s” realism is along the lines of economics, which is called “the dismal science,” since people tend to want to be more productive than they have the opportunities to be. To both Archie and economics, if you win you win, if you lose you lose, and we all must accept playing whatever roles our wins and losses will assign us. All must accept and work around inexorable human imperfection, including addictions. Only expecting people to take response-ability for their own welfare, works reliably with no mollycoddle side-effects such as parasitism victimology and pessimism (“You should choose to have a positive attitude, to benefit yourself.”). Whatever realities one must deal with, he must deal with, and whatever he must do to deal with them, he must do. That isn’t the sort of inefficiency, inadequate reward for effort, irresponsibility, parasitism, self-denial, etc., that economics cares about, since people are always motivated to: solve their own problems, optimistically believe that they’ll get what they deserve, take response-ability for their own welfare, serenely accept whatever they’re helpless to change, deny their own maladjusted desires, etc.—and motivation is everything. That’s also the (morally bankrupt) main idea of therapy for codependents: You’re motivated to solve your problems, and that behavior problem isn’t. This is results-oriented, objective, non-manipulative. One’s self-motivation maximizes the efficiency, productivity, utility, chances for success, etc., in his own life, including Archie and those in even worse situations throughout the world. They all have autonomy and are taking response-ability for their own welfare, and their helplessness is too isolated banal and “personal” to qualify as real issues. All must work with whatever they’ve got to work with, or they won’t produce enough. Cost-shifting is only natural, if it means personal response-ability for one’s own welfare. Ignoring this realism constitutes a big danger. This form of bailout doesn’t seem to bring a moral hazard. Learned helplessness leads to great inefficiencies, and we do try to stop these. No matter how natural learned helplessness is, in an adversarial society we must overcome it, since just because you’ve been helpless doesn’t mean that you’ll always be helpless, and you’ll have more of a fighting chance if you’re confident. If we didn’t have these everyday norms, people could get what they wanted through untermensch cunning (which would only weaken themselves in the long run), rather than through earning achieving and winning it. “We are all victims of victims.” Those who are preaching these “shoulds” and “musts” aren’t official authority, but disagreeing would seem heretical. All three of these self-empowering worldviews would insist that no one is entitled to endurability. Sure, this only holds the victims responsible, but no one is only a victim. Reality is reality, even when it’s reprehensible. You get whatever you get. Idealism, on the other hand, doesn’t work. This helplessness doesn’t come from the guv’mint. ~~We must take into account the threshold of human endurance.~~ As William Sloan Coffin said, “One of the attributes of power is that it gives those who have it the ability to define reality and the power to make others believe in their definition,” and that would include, “I’ve stopped blaming others, and I’m looking at myself!”, if those power dynamics had made this self-responsibility pragmatic. We might as well be telling the millions suffering from depression, “You’d better just fix your own choices, since if you try to fix others’ choices, the following is wrong with you....” Facts are stubborn things.

You could always count on victim correction. We can re-engineer untermensch human nature, since victims want to react more serenely and courageously. Realists can’t object to blaming the victims, since they’re the ones with the most reliable motivations to solve the problems. Blithe means well-adjusted. No matter what caused your problems, if we tolerated and/or mollycoddled your passivity, weakness, failures, pessimism, victimhood, etc., that would only hurt you in the long run. “I don’t have a problem unless I think I do.” Fairness, or even endurability, isn’t going to happen by magic. This anti-intellectualism, like the anti-intellectualism that led to the Iraq war, is common sense. (As Robert Novak said, “Weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger are little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” Elitist means unrealistic.) Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s book Exuberance says, “The result of a Pew Carter poll conducted in 2002 of 38,000 people in forty-four countries found that more Americans [65 percent] than respondents from other countries disagreed with the statement ‘Success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control.’” Even obscurantism can be therapeutic, if the knowledge it tries to obscure would go against serenity and self-reliant courage. (Which would you rather be, right, or happy?)

Sure, during that interview of Ron Paul, he was told, “...there are a lot of people that describe you as a flake. And that’s a quote,” and coaching addicts’ kids to believe, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!” might sound just as flaky, but if one has to succeed in a society with rampant depression, that sort of unconditional self-response-ability is necessary. Either handicapped people, etc., do whatever it takes to deal with their own problems, or they’re too parasitical to deal with reality. Ex-Nazi Hermann Rauschning wrote in 1939 about the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, “All these elements, so primitive and threadbare in their psychology, are nevertheless thoroughly effective in practice,” and the same goes for treating other wide swaths of people as manipulative and parasitical untermenschen, even if the intent is to pressure them into acting more übermensch.

Realism is also gutsy.

As Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind says, “At very best, self-determination is indeterminate.” Yet motivation is EVERYTHING, and we all know who’s most motivated to solve any problem. Some nihilistic acceptance is bad; some is realistic. Since few on social security, etc., are cynically parasitical, “We taught them to be dependent,” would require only that we taught them not to solve their own problems well enough that they’d succeed, as Archie succeeded. And of course, to care that “I’ve stopped blaming others, and I’m looking at myself!” could teach these others to evade moral responsibility, would weaken those red-blooded self-reliant efforts to succeed. Victim correction gives us objectivity.

Even the most caring person could teach this “independence,” so you could always count on getting victim correction. (It would really do you a lot of good, of course. ♥♥♥♥♥) Especially if one is in trouble, his having a productive attitude toward his taking care of his own problems, isn’t a dispensable luxury, while any fairness, is one. We mustn’t coddle maladjustment. Realists accept reality. Reaganomics doesn’t allow for excuses. In the Reagan era, James Watt seemed sane, too.

James Watt’s official Department of the Interior photo

This was also the same Reagan Administration that arranged for many varieties of deadly germs, as well as other military help, to be exported to Saddam, our ally against Iran. Once, Reagan’s ideas seemed extremist, but now they seem as realistic and necessary as, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, which, after all, would make anyone more likely to succeed.

As Aldous Huxley wrote, “The ends cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.” The ends of, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” might seem good, even necessary when the person must pragmatically deal with hardship and/or others’ sinfulness ad infinitum. Yet the means, the requirements that one unquestioningly adjust to hardship and/or sinfulness, are this excessive and pitiless. As Huxley also wrote, “[The psychological revolution] will really be a revolution. When it is over, the human race will give no further trouble.” If everyone serenely accepted whatever they’re helpless to change, no more trouble.

As Emily Dickinson wrote, “Opinion is a flitting thing But Truth outlasts the Sun.” Or, as Homer wrote, “Once the harm is done, even a fool understands it.” Trust your natural instincts (without focusing on your übermensch instincts), that don’t accept what causes rampant depression! Just imagine how different your life would look if those who now respond to the sorts of normalized helplessness that contribute to our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., by saying, “But everyone knows that when that sort of thing happens to you, you’ll just have to deal with it!”, realized how unfit for human consumption it really is!

“Sussman told the reporters to write a story on the deception surrounding the [Nixon Administration’s campaign to make it look as if the public supported the decision to mine Haiphong in Vietnam]. ‘This hits home,’ he said. ‘People understand attempts to tamper with public opinion.’”—Woodward and Bernstein, All the President’s Men

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”—Dick Cheney, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, August 26, 2002

“With those attacks [of September 11], the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.”—George Bush, just after the Iraqi invasion