The main model for the
self-help for people in trouble is certainly the Twelve-Step groups, especially
their ladies’ auxiliaries, the groups for addicts’ friends and family members,
such as Al-Anon. Tthe chapter of Gamblers Anonymous’ handbook, tells of
how gamblers’ families and friends should learn to live with their own problems.
Near the beginning, this says, “Living or being associated with a compulsive
gambler creates its own kind of hell. For most people, it is a devastating
experience: family relationships become unbearably strained and the home is
filled with bitterness, frustration and resentment. Emotionally, the
stress takes its toll as the life of the Gam-Anon member seems to crumble and
become unmanageable; tensions are aggravated because life, in material terms, is
unstable. At any moment the house might be lost or the furniture
repossessed. There may not be enough money to put food on the table or
clothe the children.”
And, of course, the goal of Gam-Anon is to use
Twelve-Step spiritual principles to help the friends and family members deal
with their own problems. Included in this is that their practice of their
Fourth Step, which entails “A SEARCHING AND FEARLESS MORAL INVENTORY OF
OURSELVES,” means, “We find that we had to become completely honest with
ourselves. Most of us discover that we have many defects of character of
which we were not aware. We find it helpful to take a moral inventory of
ourselves. Among our faults we find self-pity, dishonesty, impatience,
hate, false pride, envy, and negative thinking. Lest we become
discouraged, it is also important to remember our assets as well as our
liabilities.” Their practice of their Sixth Step, which corrects the same
“DEFECTS OF CHARACTER,” includes, “When we accept the
fact that serenity comes from within, our progress develops. Exploring
further along this line, we gain insight. We see that with defects of
character such as self-pity, self-justification, impatience and resentment, we
will never find this peace of mind and serenity we seek.” Yet I haven’t
yet seen anyone treat this as if it’s just too extremist laissez faire.
The
discussions that go on between cognitive therapists and their clients, could be
aimed toward getting rid of what this book calls “mental slippage,” pathological
irrational thinking. On the other hand, these discussions could sound, to
one degree or another, like the discussions on the 1970s TV show Kung Fu,
between the young Grasshopper and his Shaolin master, who’d explain how all is
an illusion. The theme of this TV show is that such Shaolinism would give
the sort of resiliency and other insight that would be very useful in surviving
in the lawless Wild West, where the problems certainly wouldn’t be illusions
as Western culture would define the term. Yet a logical person could have
responded to Grasshopper’s master by saying, “But where do you draw the line,
between what I am or am not expected to accept Stoically? Would a partial
acceptance seem good enough? How general must my acceptance be? As I
try to accept this, must I dismiss from my mind facts that would show that this
really is pretty demanding? Do I get partial credit for whatever degree I
do accept this?”.
One example of this is the first discussion given in
Feeling Good. This starts out sounding as if the goal was to get rid
of mental slippage. Eric, a first-year law student, tells of his
inordinate fear of “goofing up” in class:
DAVID: Suppose you did goof up in class. Why would that be particularly
upsetting to you? Why is that so tragic?
ERIC: Then I would make a fool of myself.
DAVID: Suppose you did make a fool of yourself. Why would that be
upsetting?
ERIC: Because then everyone would look down on me.
DAVID: Suppose people did look down on you? What then?
ERIC: Then I would feel miserable.
DAVID: Why? Why is it that you would have to feel miserable if people
were looking down on you?
ERIC: Well, that would mean I wouldn’t be a worthwhile person.
Furthermore, it might ruin my career. I’d get bad grades, and maybe I
could never be an attorney.
DAVID: Suppose you didn’t become an attorney. Let’s assume for the
purposes of discussion that you did flunk out. Why would that be
particularly upsetting to you?
ERIC: That would mean that I had failed at something I’ve wanted all my life.
DAVID: And what would that mean to you?
ERIC: Life would be empty. It would mean I was a failure. It would
mean I was worthless.
That comes amazingly close to the following hypothetical discussion between a
cognitive therapist and his client, written by Dr. Aaron Beck:
Patient: Not being loved leads automatically to
unhappiness.
Therapist: Not being loved is a “nonevent.” How can
a nonevent lead automatically to something?
Patient: I just don’t believe anyone could be happy
without being loved.
Therapist: This is your belief. If you believe
something, this belief will dictate your emotional reactions.
Patient: I don’t understand that.
Therapist: If you believe something, you’re going to act
and feel as though it were true, whether it is or not.
Patient: You mean if I believe I’ll be unhappy without
love, it’s only my belief causing my unhappiness?
Therapist: And when you feel unhappy, you probably say to
yourself, “See, I was right. If I don’t have love, I am bound to be
unhappy.”
Patient: How can I get out of this trap?
Therapist: You could experiment with your belief about
having to be loved. Force yourself to suspend this belief and see what
happens. Pay attention to the natural consequences of not being loved, not
to the consequences created by your belief. For example, can you picture
yourself on a tropical island with all the delicious fruits and other food
available?...
Both of these are as extremist laissez faire,
as is teaching those married to pathological gamblers, “When we accept the fact
that serenity comes from within, our progress develops. Exploring further
along this line, we gain insight. We see that with defects of character
such as self-pity, self-justification, impatience and resentment, we will never
find this peace of mind and serenity we seek.” According to the self-help
zeitgeist that started in the Reagan era, no matter what you must deal with, you
must deal with it, and the more pragmatically you do this, the more you’d
benefit.
That discussion between David and Eric ignores one very crucial fact about
having standards in general, and deferred gratification in particular. The
whole topic of William Ryan’s book Blaming the Victim, from 1971, was
that in that era the poor were blamed for their own poverty, because, among
other reasons, their lifestyles didn’t fit the “Deferred Gratification Pattern.”
It seemed that those who had strong characters did fit this pattern, and would
therefore succeed in their careers.
Yet what the victim-blamers would never have admitted, is that this would
have to go both ways. In order for someone to forsake something in the
present for the sake of the future, he’d also have to have confidence that when
that future arrives, he won’t be told that since his sacrifices would then be
past history, if he doesn’t just ignore the fact that he made them, he’d seem
resentful, whiny, manipulative, etc. Yet that’s exactly what the
Reaganomics worldview would say of those who didn’t end up getting what they had
sacrificed for in the name of deferred gratification. Everyone knows that
if you care about something that you sacrificed in the past then that
would constitute resentment, that if what you care about is now past history
then if you complain about it now those complaints could be just
manipulative attempts to get people to feel sorry for you, etc.
Yet even if someone is diplomatic enough to use the Shaolin approach, that if
one doesn’t now get what he worked to build in the past then he should choose
not to let that bother him, that would lower the standard just as much as would
the explicitly victim-correcting approach. One crucial thing that Eric
should have said to David, would have been, “If I really did have a good chance
of flunking out, especially if this happened after I’d already spent years
preparing for a career as a lawyer, then why bother doing all that work to get
my degree? If, hypothetically, I did do all this work and ended up
flunking out, and I came to you as a cognitive therapist, would you ask me in a
blasé fashion, ‘Why is this particularly
upsetting to you? And what does this mean to you?’? If that’s
the sort of standard that you think is normal, then why should I bother trying?
Am I just supposed to accept that this, and anything else, is just a crapshoot,
since regarding anything that I could try to achieve, you could ask objectively,
‘If you did fail, why
would that be particularly upsetting to you? And what would that mean to
you?’?”
When this sort of logic could get particularly insidious, is when it’s along
the lines of “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a
pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would
have it; Trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your
will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with
You forever in the next—Amen.” If Eric did
flunk out, then this probably would have been inevitable. He’d probably
still be able to have a good career. And that wouldn’t have happened
because anyone else did anything unethical at his expense. Yet if
something along these lines had happened to a client, the same pragmatic rules
would apply. He’d feel and function a lot better if he chose not to let it
bother him, than if he didn’t. A cognitive therapist could always ask, “Why
is this particularly upsetting to you? And what does this mean to you?,”
since very little in life is absolutely bad, so one could always come up with
sophistry to minimize the significance of what happened. Sure, the client
could answer, “Naturally this level of moral bankruptcy bothers me, since it’s
pretty hard to be optimistic knowing that that’s the standards by which anything
else like this that would happen to me in the future, would be judged.”
This wouldn’t look good in a textbook example of cognitive therapy, but if in
the real world a client says that, the therapist could always respond by asking
a more diplomatic version of,
“Why would that be particularly
upsetting to you?”
If, instead, this were a discussion between Grasshopper and his master, he could respond,
“Why would that be particularly
upsetting to you?”,
and Grasshopper would have to answer, “Nothing could bother me if I don’t let
it, Master.” Cognitive therapy has plenty of empirical evidence that it
works, but one could find even stronger proof, in all the monks of philosophies
like Buddhism, who’ve successfully achieved Zen states.
One factor about
the self-responsibility evident in the cognitive distortions of modern Western
depression, could be seen in Feeling Good, in a chapter on the standards
by which the depressed judge themselves. If you asked the average
Westerner what was his idea of an ideology that was likely to cause massive
guilt feelings, he’d probably answer that this would have to be a moralistic
ideology. Yet, as Blaming the Victim says including on its cover,
blaming the victim is an ideology.
This ideology is far more likely to cause
guilt feelings than is a moralistic ideology, since moralistic ideologies limit
their judgments to what people choose to do, and usually leave room for
atonement or repentance. To whatever degree any moralistic ideology wants
to make its expectations reasonable, it can in most cases. On the other
hand, everybody knows that sometimes reality is unreasonable, and whenever it
is, expectations that the victims emotionally and physically deal with these
realities, would be just as reasonable.
In fact, some Fundament Christian
psychologists distinguish both guilt, and feelings of shame, as either “true,”
meaning that based on violating the rules, and “false,” meaning that based on
failure. These psychologists stress that caring about “true” guilt and
shame, would actually give you more freedom of choice than would caring about
“false” guilt and shame.
The chapter of Feeling Good, “Start by
Building Self-Esteem,” says that the depressed people that these Western
cognitive therapists have worked with, tend to think in terms of “false” guilt
and shame. “A survey by Dr. Aaron Beck. revealed that over 80 percent of
depressed patients expressed self-dislike. Furthermore, Dr. Beck found
that depressed patients see themselves as deficient in the very qualities they
value most highly: intelligence, achievement, popularity, attractiveness,
health, and strength.” Maybe if they judged both themselves and others in
terms of “true” guilt and shame, then when they feel devastated, they’d be
worked up about other people as threats, rather than about themselves as losers.
And when this chapter discusses the factors of “false” guilt that could go
through the minds of depressed Westerners blaming themselves, another factor is
very noticeable. That is, that the standards by which you’d judge
yourself, would depend on how severe are the realities with which you must deal:
“Unfortunately, when you are depressed you may not be alone in your conviction
about your personal inadequacy.”
“...how do I get a sense of self-worth?
The fact is, I feel damn inadequate, and I’m convinced I’m really not as good as
other people.”
“I raise the same question over and over again: ‘Are you really
right when you insist that somewhere inside you are essentially a loser?’’”
“But they are basically winners; they’re not like me.”
“As a result you will
probably feel even more inadequate.”
Exactly whether one seems adequate or
inadequate, seems to be a winner or loser, would depend solely on what he came
up against. You’re personally responsible for changing or accepting
whatever you must. If you aren’t adequate to do this, lose the battle,
fail, and come up short with big consequences, you’d seem to be an irresponsible
and inadequate, loser and failure with very consequential shortcomings. If
you don’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and
feel content with it, you’d seem to be a maladjusted maladaptive and
dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent. No matter how easy or difficult your
spouse is, whether you’re an adequate or inadequate member of your family
depends on whether you’re adequate or inadequate to deal with that person.
And whether you’re a loser or a winner, would depend on what you’re up against.
This would naturally be more likely to lead to guilt feelings, than would be a
self-responsibility based on whether or not one chose to violate pre-defined
rules.
When it comes to the weaknesses of character that are literal weaknesses, one would have to ask, just what constitutes not having enough backbone?
The only standard that we could have, is that everyone knows that mental health
means dealing with reality, so whatever your realities are, that’s what you’re
response-able for dealing with. If you aren’t adequate to do this, lose
the battle, fail, and come up short with big consequences, you’d seem to be an
irresponsible and inadequate, loser and failure with very
consequential shortcomings. If you don’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function
with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, you’d seem to be a
maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent. And if
you don’t take these weaknesses seriously, so you’re not resilient resourceful
and independent enough to deal with whatever your realities are, our culture
would treat you as if that’s a manipulative ploy. The subtitle of
the book The
Manipulative Child, by Drs. E. W. Swihart, E. W. Swihart Jr., and
Patrick Cotter, is, “How to Regain Control and Raise Resilient, Resourceful, and
Independent Kids,” not “How to Regain Control and Raise Kids Who Don’t Try to
Pull Machinations.” All this seems as natural to us, as jihad seems to
violent fundamentalist Muslims.
Glaringly, some right-wing radio
talk-show hosts try to come across as aggressive, boorish, vitriolic angry
wolves on the attack. Yet this is just the sort of person, that would say
that if you think you’re a victim of aggressive wolves on the attack, then
you’re just getting a manipulative sense of power in being a victim. These
people and their fans are the one’s who’d most aggressively sardonically and
indignantly accept this rampant devastation, without really thinking about it.
And those who are trying to evade moral responsibility for
anything, often have certain advantages, such as that West Virginia Coal
Association President Bill Raney said about the Alma Mine No. 1 accident, just
18 days after the Sago Mine accident, “2005 was our safest year in the history
of mining in West Virginia. But you have an enormous number of components
involved... and when just one of the many moving parts has a problem, it
generates a tremendous response.... It points to the challenges the coal
industry is under to provide energy for this state and this nation.” Those
who are morally responsible can usually say that things are more complicated
than their accusers say they are, and that what constitutes culpable negligence
is a matter of opinion. Also, those who are strong enough to cause the
problem, could probably say that they’re more productive than the victims, so
could claim the respect and deference that would come from that. All the
more reason to minimize others’ moral responsibility and magnify your own
response-ability for your own welfare, focus your attention on how your
reactions should be more serene courageous and wise, etc.
Self-help authorities might even say that we shouldn’t
blame ourselves, and we should understand the difference between responsibility
and blame. Just because, systematically, we must take responsibility for
solving anything that happens to us that no one else is taking responsibility
for solving, that doesn’t mean that we’re to blame for the outcome. Yet if
we seem response-able for dealing with what seems to be life’s inherent
imperfections, then naturally if we aren’t adequate to do this, lose the
battles, fail, and come up short with big consequences, we’d seem to be
irresponsible and inadequate, losers and failures with very consequential
shortcomings. If we don’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it,
fit in with it, and feel content with it, we’d seem to be maladjusted
maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfits and malcontents.
That’s what dealing with life’s inherent realities, means for
everyone in the world. It really is inherent to
life that we all must accept certain things we’d rather not, and our cultures
determine what we accept and reject. The book Road to H: Narcotics,
Delinquency, and Social Policy, by Isidor Chein, D. L. Gerard, R. S. Lee,
and Elsa Rosenfeld, from 1964, says, “Though the nonaddict may regard the
withdrawal experience as a terrible deterrent to addiction, the addict develops
the same attitude toward dependence on opiates as the organization man does toward
the ‘rat race’ of business life in large corporations.” The rat
race means competition, and you’d think that the “man in the gray flannel suit”
would tend toward meek cooperation, but if competing is what he’s got to do,
then that’s what he’s got to do. And if you look at norms that other
cultures have, which, since we haven’t internalized them, seem as offensive as
does withdrawal from opiates, you could see more of how people could internalize
some pretty painful attitudes and behaviors. But just in case you think
that Western culture is too anti-authoritarian to have similar problems, just
imagine what an Easterner who’s aware of the practical problems that would
result from our much-beloved moral bankruptcy, would independently conclude about the attitude
of, “There’s something wrong with you if you object to many people pledging to
follow, ‘God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to
change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’” Such a
person would no doubt realize that this puts no limits on how much hardship
and/or sinfulness, people are simply supposed to take as a given. And when
you consider that the original unredacted Serenity Prayer includes, “Accepting
hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is
not as I would have it,” he’d be right. He’d probably have an intuitive
sense for what constitutes a society’s moral standards, and how a society
supports its moral standards. That level of moral bankruptcy
ranks right up there with withdrawal from opiates, but many, including many
“organization men” of the 1950s, would feel obligated to accept it.
Our idea of living up to
moral expectations, is being nobly unobtrusively self-reliant. Aldous
Huxley once said, “We can use an analogy and say that, after all, the grace of a
dancer is a function of the skeleton. The muscles are kept in place by the
skeleton, and it is thanks to the skeleton that these graceful movements can be
carried out. But also, the arthritis of the dancer’s grandmother, this,
too, is a function of the skeleton. And it is the same thing with a
culture, that we require this fixed framework, within which and out of which we
can develop our human potentialities, but at the same time, this fixed framework
may become somewhat rusty, and completely paralyze the human being, and prevent
him or her from passing beyond the limits of the culture.” In the West, we
tend to think of restrictive cultural conditioning as the authoritarianism that
we associate with Eastern culture, but victim correction as a panacea arises out
of the Reagan/Thatcher era interpretation of what our culture deems as “personal
responsibility.” This is best shown in an all-or-nothing forgiving Bible
passage, James 2:8-13, “If you really fulfill the royal law, according to the
scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you do well. But if
you show partiality, you commit sin, and are convicted by the law as
transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has
become guilty of all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’
said also, ‘Do not kill.’ If you do not commit adultery but do kill, you
have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who
are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy
to one who has shown no mercy; yet mercy triumphs over judgment.” The law
of liberty is the sort of social norms that Western culture depends on in order
to maintain homeostasis, and the royal law is what we condemn as
authoritarianism. For example, Secular Humanist Ibn Warraq wrote in Why
I Am Not A Muslim, “For modern theologians, even though it is the husband
who is violent, demanding, or difficult, it is still the wife who has to adapt
herself, to bend, and accommodate to her husband’s whims.” Take out the
violence, and what you’d have is that if a woman adapts herself, bends, and
accommodates to her demanding or difficult husband’s whims because of
theological reasons, that’s the royal law, but if she does so to maintain
serenity and stolid respectability in that she can’t afford to get divorced,
that’s the law of liberty.
If our society in general has taken greatly to a prayer
which says in its small print, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking
as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” this would
certainly give structure to a society. No matter what happens, we’d have
the advantage of knowing who’s responsible for what. Yet this certainly
could take away from our potentialities. Those who are bogged down with
the hardship and the effects of others’ sinfulness, and those who have to face
the world with such low standards of what they should be able to expects from
others without seeming to want the world to be as they’d have it, certainly
don’t have as much room for real achievement as they should have.
f anything, the psycho terrorist attacks prove how unreliable are conventional beliefs. Those who plan, execute, and support such attacks are gravely under the influence of cultural conditioning. This tells them that serving certain fanatically religious principles is good, and that giving a damn about thousands of people being killed, and about themselves dying, is bad. This clearly isn’t something that these people independently concluded would be a good idea, but is something that they were culturally conditioned into believing. The idea that the amount of psychiatric disorders in the US means that all those people’s minds or bodies must be this faulty, or that that’s simply the price that has to be paid for the status quo, also isn’t something that those who believe this had independently concluded. While such believers don’t accept massive death, they do accept far more massive devastation. They don’t reluctantly accept this with an objective awareness of exactly what’s being destroyed, “with fear and trembling,” but rather, automatically, just as the terrorists automatically accepted the massive deaths, and Muslim women automatically accept that they wear their chadors. Those terrorists and others like them say that they’d like to turn the clock back a thousand years, back to the time that the mid-East was the center of world civilization, but heaven forfend that they remember that the reason why the mid-East was the center of world civilization then was that it was the center of math and science, inventing the numbers we use including the idea of having a number zero, algebra and algorithms (Arabic seems to like the prefix “al.”) etc.
