Recently I've posted some messages on how common depression is in the
modern West, how the self-blame which usually accompanies this is
unique to the modern West, and that research on this could let those
around us know how unsafe are some of the cultural norms that they
propound. The DSM IV says that affective disorders affect 20% of the
American population, anxiety disorders affect 25%, substance abuse
disorders affect 27%, schizophrenia affects 0.7%, and sociopathy
affects 3.5%. Intercultural studies have consistently found that that
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. Clearly what passes
as "individualism" here, is a minimizing of ethical responsibility and
a magnification of response-ability for our own problems, since if the
person who caused the problem takes responsibility for it that seems
repressive, controlling, moralistic, etc. but if the victim takes
response-ability for it, that seems to be self-help, self-empowerment,
preventing more pain for himself, etc.

For example, you could look at http://www.drozur.com/victimhood.html,
"Psychology of Victimhood: Reflections on a Culture of Victims & How
Psychotherapy Fuels the Victim Industry," which is, "For an online
course for CE credit based on this page." This webpage talks of
"understanding of violent systems, the perpetuation of these systems
and the role victims play in these systems," "It is now politically
incorrect to explore the role of victims in violent systems," "It is
my hope that this paper will be of benefit to victims and
perpetrators, and to the professionals who help those in violent
systems," "Sending an abusive husband to jail stops the beatings, and
may give the wife a feeling of justice and revenge. It will not help
the husband deal with his violent behavior, and it will not teach the
wife about her more subtle role in the violent relationship," "The
answer lies in understanding that not only do the mental health
workers mirror the general culture of victimization, but they also
abide by the unspoken politically correct rule that the role of the
victim in violent systems is NOT to be explored," etc. In other
words, a "violent system" is the abuser and the abused, who are
treated as partners in the abuse.

The basic idea is that which Ann Jones satirically summed it up in her
book Next Time She'll Be Dead, "Without the wife-beater's wife there
would be no wife beating," so while she isn't to blame, he couldn't
commit domestic violence but for her living with him. This basic idea
could also be summed up, that even if a predatorial man "got" a woman,
that would mean only that she lost the battle so she's a loser. What
that webpage says in bold-face, constitutes a good summary of victim
correction as a panacea, "Do not blame the victim has been translated
into: do not explore the role of the victim," and, "by alleviating all
women or any victim from any and all responsibility to predict,
prevent, or even unconsciously invite abuse, is to reduce them to
helpless, incapable creatures, and in fact, re-victimizes them." Even
if the victim doesn't seem to be at fault, and even if we consider the
complexities of each situation, the bottom line would still be that
either the victim takes response-ability for her own welfare so her
suffering would likely stop, or she doesn't and it doesn't. The
bottom line also would minimize the moral responsibility, so the
message that such criminals would get, would be less serious than
would the message that people convicted for committing exactly the
same acts outside of their own families, would get. This is pure
pragmatism, along with the dishonor that our culture holds for those
who play the victim role. Simply "exploring" this issue wouldn't lead
to her successfully preventing or fixing her problems. This webpage
begins "We have become a nation of victims," and says in the first
paragraph, "While some victims are truly innocent (i.e., the child who
is being molested, a victim in the other car in a drunk driving
accident), most violence involves some knowledge, familiarity or
intimacy between victims and victimizers," so it seems that most
victims of violence (not just domestic violence) aren't truly innocent
since most violence involves some knowledge, familiarity or intimacy
between victims and victimizers. That's not an exploration.

Usually when psychologists talk like this, the problem doesn't involve
violence, but rather situations where moral responsibility is at least
somewhat ambiguous. Yet since their logic would be based on the
unconditional absolutisms that the cognitive distortions of modern
Western depression reflect, unambiguous violence could be interchanged
with the ambiguous problems, and the bottom lines would still be the
same. Whether what happened to each of them was accidental sinful or
criminal, not to encourage that they focus their attention on solving
their own problems would leave them unsolved, and therefore could be
said to re-victimize them. If one thinks along the lines of the
social activists of the 1960s, he'd now be treated as a passivist,
since if one looks at this in sociological terms, he could seem both
whiny and defeatist.

Which leads to William Ryan's classic book, Blaming the Victim. This
was published in 1971, when those who cared about such things were
still thought of as activists. The victim-blaming that it described
was of the old-fashioned sort, the condemnation of which was the main
theme of the Book of Job. "Behold, you have instructed many, and you
have strengthened the weak hands. Your words have upheld him who was
stumbling, and you have made firm the feeble knees.... 'Think now,
who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut
off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the
same.' "--Job 4:3-8 The study that Ann Jones summarized as "Without
the wife-beater's wife there would be no wife beating," was done in
1965, and actually involved old-fashioned victim-blaming, that the
women were responsible not only for being there, but for provoking the
violence and getting masochistic satisfactions from being there. In
the modern version of the Book of Job, he'd be told that whoever's
fault his problem is, if he doesn't stop his pity-party and face his
own defects in taking care of his own problems, he'd be re-victimizing
himself. That's basically what the modern victim-blaming tells
battered wives and the poor. This might not look like blaming in the
old-fashion sense, but when you consider that the Merriam Webster
computer dictionary's definitions of "blame" are, "to find fault with"
and "to hold responsible or responsible for," and one doesn't have to
be blamed morally in order to seem to be at fault and to be held
responsible.

Therefore, Blaming the Victim is all the more pertinent now, and
certain sections of it are especially pertinent, especially to those
who must deal with depressive victim-self-blaming. The book includes
a chapter about the greater need and the lesser supply of both
psychological and medical care among the poor, titled "The Hydraulics
and Economics of Misery," after the sort of hydrological quality that
Freudian psychology says that aggression, etc., have. Near the
beginning, this chapter summarizes research on mental illness among
the poor, saying that they have much higher rates of general emotional
disturbance than the middle classes, have more continuous disability,
and are more likely to suffer disturbance when going through certain
consequences of poverty such as prolonged unemployment, yet the middle
classes are far more likely to get effective treatment by more
qualified professionals. And that's what this chapter seems to focus
on, "In terms of delivery of care...," and how mental health
professionals could be taught that their poor clients would tend to be
unmotivated fearful resigned uninhibited distrustful ashamed and
violent, due to past history, of course. Yet if the book accentuated
what the rates of general emotional disturbance are among the poor,
and also among the middle classes which are high enough, this could
have constituted very conclusive proof that not only did the poor not
"ask for" their poverty, but that blaming them would be adding insult
to injury.

This chapter tells of someone who felt depressed because he thought
his cough was caused by throat cancer, no cancer was seen, he was
treated as suffering from depression, and months later he died from
the throat cancer. This was to illustrate how mental health
professionals could be biased in seeing mental illness when none
exists, yet it includes a statement, "...it lacked the usual features
of self-accusation and self-deprecation," which says a lot more about
victim-blaming in general.

In fact, the last section about mental health of the Hydraulics
chapter begins, "I am not done yet; there is something more to say
that carries us one step further," that poverty has such devastating
emotional effects. Yet that isn't really "one step further," that
really should be the main point in proving devastating helplessness.
That section says, "That these issues are--or, until recently, at
least, have been, so remote from mental health thought is testimony
that, with regard to the mental health of the poor, current doctrine
and theory in psychiatry and its allied fields is, indeed, ideological
in nature." Remote not only from mental health thought, but also from
the average person's "common sense" regarding what he could safely
expect himself and/or others to simply deal with, and this has far
more consequence in people's day-to-day lives.

Somehow, they're blamed for supposedly choosing to live fecklessly,
and even though they hate the results of this, they go right on living
like that in a "culture of poverty." He book is very skeptical of the
idea that this is literally a "culture," which would mean that they
hold to their fecklessness despite the consequences, out of a cultural
loyalty to it. So if this is a "culture," it would have to be in a
figurative sense, where their sociology is just relatively influenced
by certain cultural norms. If that's the case, then they certainly
wouldn't go right on doing them. In the two American subcultures that
actually did decide to drop out of society, the hippies and the
original Americans to drop out of society, the hillbillies, the people
don't feel stressed-out by poverty, since they truly did "ask for it."


Something in another chapter, also, shows one of the problems with
unrecognized victim-blaming. Someone did an experiment which seemed
to show that poor people are more likely to choose immediate
gratification over deferred gratification that would give them more
gratification. So Seagull did an experiment where the experimental
group was promised greater deferred gratification if they forsook
immediate gratification but ended up having the promise of the
gratification broken, and the control group was given the same offer
but ended up getting the gratification they were promised. Next he
offered both groups the same offer, that they could choose between a
lesser immediate gratification and a greater deferred gratification.
Naturally, those in the group which had the promise broken were more
likely to choose the immediate gratification than the control group
was, since the experimental group had been burned. The sentence
concluding the paragraph on this says, "As Seagull and his associates
say, 'The situational variable, then, rather than class affiliation,
determined the ability to delay.'" Yet Blaming the Victim didn't go
into the fact that what's really at work here isn't the ability to
delay, but the desire. If those in the group which had the promise
broken, were then given an offer of deferred gratification that was
somehow guaranteed, they'd be just as able to defer gratification as
anyone else. Yet if you've learned from experience that the deferred
gratification might not actually happen, you're not going to want to
do it again. And poor youth, especially non-white youth, have very
likely learned from their adult neighbors stories about their
investing time, money, etc., in training, jobs with good potential for
promotion, etc., but didn't get the results that whites and/or those
who didn't seem to have come from the "culture of poverty," would
have. The sort of deferred gratification that poor people must engage
in to become middle-class, wouldn't even come with anyone's promises
that they'd get any gratification. If an employer signed a contract
with a poor youth, saying that if he got certain training with good
grades, successfully took certain arduous jobs that would give him
just the experience he needed, etc., then he'd get a middle-class
career, he'd be very likely be able to defer gratification like that.
But since expecting employers to do that would seem un-American, and
"in the real world there are no guarantees," the ambitious poor youth
in the real job market would be deferring gratification for the sake
of a possibility of future gratification. To call an unwillingness to
accept that, an inability to defer gratification, especially when
one's odds are that of a poor person trying to reach the middle class,
really does show the character of blaming poverty on a "culture of
poverty."

Recently I've posted some messages on how common depression is in the
modern West, how the self-blame which usually accompanies this is
unique to the modern West, and that research on this could let those
around us know how unsafe are some of the cultural norms that they
propound. The DSM IV says that affective disorders affect 20% of the
American population, anxiety disorders affect 25%, substance abuse
disorders affect 27%, schizophrenia affects 0.7%, and sociopathy
affects 3.5%. Intercultural studies have consistently found that that
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. Clearly what passes
as "individualism" here, is a minimizing of ethical responsibility and
a magnification of response-ability for our own problems, since if the
person who caused the problem takes responsibility for it that seems
repressive, controlling, moralistic, etc. but if the victim takes
response-ability for it, that seems to be self-help, self-empowerment,
preventing more pain for himself, etc.

For example, you could look at http://www.drozur.com/victimhood.html,
"Psychology of Victimhood: Reflections on a Culture of Victims & How
Psychotherapy Fuels the Victim Industry," which is, "For an online
course for CE credit based on this page." This webpage talks of
"understanding of violent systems, the perpetuation of these systems
and the role victims play in these systems," "It is now politically
incorrect to explore the role of victims in violent systems," "It is
my hope that this paper will be of benefit to victims and
perpetrators, and to the professionals who help those in violent
systems," "Sending an abusive husband to jail stops the beatings, and
may give the wife a feeling of justice and revenge. It will not help
the husband deal with his violent behavior, and it will not teach the
wife about her more subtle role in the violent relationship," "The
answer lies in understanding that not only do the mental health
workers mirror the general culture of victimization, but they also
abide by the unspoken politically correct rule that the role of the
victim in violent systems is NOT to be explored," etc. In other
words, a "violent system" is the abuser and the abused, who are
treated as partners in the abuse.

The basic idea is that which Ann Jones satirically summed it up in her
book Next Time She'll Be Dead, "Without the wife-beater's wife there
would be no wife beating," so while she isn't to blame, he couldn't
commit domestic violence but for her living with him. This basic idea
could also be summed up, that even if a predatorial man "got" a woman,
that would mean only that she lost the battle so she's a loser. What
that webpage says in bold-face, constitutes a good summary of victim
correction as a panacea, "Do not blame the victim has been translated
into: do not explore the role of the victim," and, "by alleviating all
women or any victim from any and all responsibility to predict,
prevent, or even unconsciously invite abuse, is to reduce them to
helpless, incapable creatures, and in fact, re-victimizes them." Even
if the victim doesn't seem to be at fault, and even if we consider the
complexities of each situation, the bottom line would still be that
either the victim takes response-ability for her own welfare so her
suffering would likely stop, or she doesn't and it doesn't. The
bottom line also would minimize the moral responsibility, so the
message that such criminals would get, would be less serious than
would the message that people convicted for committing exactly the
same acts outside of their own families, would get. This is pure
pragmatism, along with the dishonor that our culture holds for those
who play the victim role. Simply "exploring" this issue wouldn't lead
to her successfully preventing or fixing her problems. This webpage
begins "We have become a nation of victims," and says in the first
paragraph, "While some victims are truly innocent (i.e., the child who
is being molested, a victim in the other car in a drunk driving
accident), most violence involves some knowledge, familiarity or
intimacy between victims and victimizers," so it seems that most
victims of violence (not just domestic violence) aren't truly innocent
since most violence involves some knowledge, familiarity or intimacy
between victims and victimizers. That's not an exploration.

Usually when psychologists talk like this, the problem doesn't involve
violence, but rather situations where moral responsibility is at least
somewhat ambiguous. Yet since their logic would be based on the
unconditional absolutisms that the cognitive distortions of modern
Western depression reflect, unambiguous violence could be interchanged
with the ambiguous problems, and the bottom lines would still be the
same. Whether what happened to each of them was accidental sinful or
criminal, not to encourage that they focus their attention on solving
their own problems would leave them unsolved, and therefore could be
said to re-victimize them. If one thinks along the lines of the
social activists of the 1960s, he'd now be treated as a passivist,
since if one looks at this in sociological terms, he could seem both
whiny and defeatist.

Which leads to William Ryan's classic book, Blaming the Victim. This
was published in 1971, when those who cared about such things were
still thought of as activists. The victim-blaming that it described
was of the old-fashioned sort, the condemnation of which was the main
theme of the Book of Job. "Behold, you have instructed many, and you
have strengthened the weak hands. Your words have upheld him who was
stumbling, and you have made firm the feeble knees.... 'Think now,
who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut
off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the
same.' "--Job 4:3-8 The study that Ann Jones summarized as "Without
the wife-beater's wife there would be no wife beating," was done in
1965, and actually involved old-fashioned victim-blaming, that the
women were responsible not only for being there, but for provoking the
violence and getting masochistic satisfactions from being there. In
the modern version of the Book of Job, he'd be told that whoever's
fault his problem is, if he doesn't stop his pity-party and face his
own defects in taking care of his own problems, he'd be re-victimizing
himself. That's basically what the modern victim-blaming tells
battered wives and the poor. This might not look like blaming in the
old-fashion sense, but when you consider that the Merriam Webster
computer dictionary's definitions of "blame" are, "to find fault with"
and "to hold responsible or responsible for," and one doesn't have to
be blamed morally in order to seem to be at fault and to be held
responsible.

Therefore, Blaming the Victim is all the more pertinent now, and
certain sections of it are especially pertinent, especially to those
who must deal with depressive victim-self-blaming. The book includes
a chapter about the greater need and the lesser supply of both
psychological and medical care among the poor, titled "The Hydraulics
and Economics of Misery," after the sort of hydrological quality that
Freudian psychology says that aggression, etc., have. Near the
beginning, this chapter summarizes research on mental illness among
the poor, saying that they have much higher rates of general emotional
disturbance than the middle classes, have more continuous disability,
and are more likely to suffer disturbance when going through certain
consequences of poverty such as prolonged unemployment, yet the middle
classes are far more likely to get effective treatment by more
qualified professionals. And that's what this chapter seems to focus
on, "In terms of delivery of care...," and how mental health
professionals could be taught that their poor clients would tend to be
unmotivated fearful resigned uninhibited distrustful ashamed and
violent, due to past history, of course. Yet if the book accentuated
what the rates of general emotional disturbance are among the poor,
and also among the middle classes which are high enough, this could
have constituted very conclusive proof that not only did the poor not
"ask for" their poverty, but that blaming them would be adding insult
to injury.

This chapter tells of someone who felt depressed because he thought
his cough was caused by throat cancer, no cancer was seen, he was
treated as suffering from depression, and months later he died from
the throat cancer. This was to illustrate how mental health
professionals could be biased in seeing mental illness when none
exists, yet it includes a statement, "...it lacked the usual features
of self-accusation and self-deprecation," which says a lot more about
victim-blaming in general.

In fact, the last section about mental health of the Hydraulics
chapter begins, "I am not done yet; there is something more to say
that carries us one step further," that poverty has such devastating
emotional effects. Yet that isn't really "one step further," that
really should be the main point in proving devastating helplessness.
That section says, "That these issues are--or, until recently, at
least, have been, so remote from mental health thought is testimony
that, with regard to the mental health of the poor, current doctrine
and theory in psychiatry and its allied fields is, indeed, ideological
in nature." Remote not only from mental health thought, but also from
the average person's "common sense" regarding what he could safely
expect himself and/or others to simply deal with, and this has far
more consequence in people's day-to-day lives.

Somehow, they're blamed for supposedly choosing to live fecklessly,
and even though they hate the results of this, they go right on living
like that in a "culture of poverty." He book is very skeptical of the
idea that this is literally a "culture," which would mean that they
hold to their fecklessness despite the consequences, out of a cultural
loyalty to it. So if this is a "culture," it would have to be in a
figurative sense, where their sociology is just relatively influenced
by certain cultural norms. If that's the case, then they certainly
wouldn't go right on doing them. In the two American subcultures that
actually did decide to drop out of society, the hippies and the
original Americans to drop out of society, the hillbillies, the people
don't feel stressed-out by poverty, since they truly did "ask for it."


Something in another chapter, also, shows one of the problems with
unrecognized victim-blaming. Someone did an experiment which seemed
to show that poor people are more likely to choose immediate
gratification over deferred gratification that would give them more
gratification. So Seagull did an experiment where the experimental
group was promised greater deferred gratification if they forsook
immediate gratification but ended up having the promise of the
gratification broken, and the control group was given the same offer
but ended up getting the gratification they were promised. Next he
offered both groups the same offer, that they could choose between a
lesser immediate gratification and a greater deferred gratification.
Naturally, those in the group which had the promise broken were more
likely to choose the immediate gratification than the control group
was, since the experimental group had been burned. The sentence
concluding the paragraph on this says, "As Seagull and his associates
say, 'The situational variable, then, rather than class affiliation,
determined the ability to delay.'" Yet Blaming the Victim didn't go
into the fact that what's really at work here isn't the ability to
delay, but the desire. If those in the group which had the promise
broken, were then given an offer of deferred gratification that was
somehow guaranteed, they'd be just as able to defer gratification as
anyone else. Yet if you've learned from experience that the deferred
gratification might not actually happen, you're not going to want to
do it again. And poor youth, especially non-white youth, have very
likely learned from their adult neighbors stories about their
investing time, money, etc., in training, jobs with good potential for
promotion, etc., but didn't get the results that whites and/or those
who didn't seem to have come from the "culture of poverty," would
have. The sort of deferred gratification that poor people must engage
in to become middle-class, wouldn't even come with anyone's promises
that they'd get any gratification. If an employer signed a contract
with a poor youth, saying that if he got certain training with good
grades, successfully took certain arduous jobs that would give him
just the experience he needed, etc., then he'd get a middle-class
career, he'd be very likely be able to defer gratification like that.
But since expecting employers to do that would seem un-American, and
"in the real world there are no guarantees," the ambitious poor youth
in the real job market would be deferring gratification for the sake
of a possibility of future gratification. To call an unwillingness to
accept that, an inability to defer gratification, especially when
one's odds are that of a poor person trying to reach the middle class,
really does show the character of blaming poverty on a "culture of
poverty."