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  Its moorings sunk in notions of Recovery, Victimization theory was embraced by a loose coalition of pop psychologists, social scientists, and academics. Often citing Harris, as well as his mentor, Eric Berne, they sought to explain every human frailty as a function of some hardwired predisposition or inescapable social root: You were basically trapped by your makeup and/or environment and thus had a ready alibi for any and all of your failings. As Wendy Kaminer observes in I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional, Victimization encouraged people to find fatalistic patterns—and the rationalizations they afforded—everywhere: “Grandfather was an alcoholic, mother is a compulsive rescuer, Uncle Murray weighs 270 pounds. Father is a sex addict, your sister is anorexic . . .” Within the movement, a teapot tempest raged over whether the real culprit was nature or nurture, or what degree of each. But both camps arrived at the same philosophical end point: You were helpless against the forces that made you what you were.

  Consequently, Victimization told people to stop beating themselves up: No one wants to make hurtful mistakes, but we’re human, and as Alexander Pope told us, humans err. You gotta let go of all that guilt! You didn’t make yourself this way, so it’s not your fault. After all, wasn’t the very first step out of twelve an admission of powerlessness? Victimization framed guilt as a bad thing, which, by implication if not definition, also framed conscience as a bad thing.

  By extension, the message became Your needs are paramount here. It’s all about you. Recovering a healthy sense of self entailed forsaking your excessive or unhealthy concern for others—for in the twelve-step universe, such excessive concern came to constitute the pitiable emotional quagmire of codependency. (As we will see later in the book, by the concept’s heyday in the late 1980s, the term would be applied to just about every interpersonal relationship that fell short of sheer bliss.)

  In their eagerness to provide additional mechanisms for overcoming guilt and self-loathing, the Victimization movement’s spiritual leaders made an important discovery: They could help a constituent better cope with the burden of his failings by redefining them. This insight led to clever semantic distinctions that either made the untoward behaviors sound tamer or, following Bill W.’s example, framed those shortcomings as actual medical or psychological conditions. Such artful use of language became a hallmark of the self-help movement and had dramatic repercussions far beyond the world of SHAM. Under this guiding principle, which became known as the “disease model” of bad or unproductive behavior, the roster of newfound conditions naturally mushroomed. Drug abuse, sex addiction, compulsive eating, compulsive lying, compulsive shopping, compulsive gambling—eventually these problems and many others were deemed diseases.

  With Victimization’s momentum thus established, and new books and gurus debuting as fast as publishers could sign the deals, it hardly seemed to matter that this widespread application of the disease model struck some knowledgeable observers as offhand and implausible. In PC, M.D., Dr. Sally Satel indicts the American Psychiatric Association, factions of the American Medical Association, and allied interests for scrapping hard science in favor of political correctness. “They arbitrarily devised convenient syndromes and talked about them as if they were uncontested medical fact,” Satel told me. “It didn’t matter whether there was any clinical evidence for it. It fit the behavioral model they had adopted.” Further, according to Satel, as the feminist movement picked up steam, premenstrual syndrome and postpartum depression, once the punch lines of male-chauvinist jokes, became fodder for earnest debate, then viable defenses in homicide trials. It wasn’t long, she says, before women as a class were conditioned to think of themselves as slaves to this hormonal governance.

  Politicians and their operatives also saw the possibilities here. They stirred the pot, adding to the sense of disenfranchisement among already disgruntled factions while reinforcing their feelings of oppression and entitlement. The government owes you. Society owes you. They made you this way. Again: It’s not your fault. Inexorably, such notions began to undermine clear-cut judgments about morality, since blame was being shifted from the people who transgressed to the people who (allegedly) caused the transgression. Even murderers sometimes ceased to be murderers and instead became victims of the conditions that made them murder. After a Jamaican immigrant, Colin Ferguson, shot twenty-five Long Island Railroad commuters, killing six, on December 7, 1993, Ferguson’s attorneys broached a novel “black-rage” defense, claiming that years of white oppression had driven him to the edge of insanity. Ferguson ultimately rejected the defense, decided to represent himself, and was convicted—but the case sparked ongoing discussions of black rage and its sociological effects, with the Reverend Al Sharpton and others insisting on the legitimacy of the concept.

  THE EMPOWERERS STRIKE BACK

  The black-rage defense represented the mentality “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger had in mind when, long before George W. Bush, she ignited controversy by observing, “There is evil in the world, and giving it a different name doesn’t make it less evil.” Notions of good and evil, right and wrong, have grown steadily more difficult to apply, even define, since SHAM got involved.

  Schlessinger emerged as part of the early backlash against Victimization, and surely became its most strident voice. But while members of the nascent Empowerment movement claimed they were promoting a more liberating and responsible view of human nature, they had difficulty getting people to relinquish the moral relief that Victimization afforded. The gospel of Victimization gave its followers easy outs for ugly behavior; it also made questions of guilt or innocence eye-of-the-beholder judgments—and in the end made such judgments largely irrelevant anyway. If individuals were driven by dark circumstances and barely remembered (but irresistible) forces from childhood, how could they be blamed for whatever stupid or immoral acts they committed along the way?

  This was an extraordinarily appealing message that critics of Victimization found impossible to overcome with half measures. The Empowerment camp had to create a form of sloganism that was as seductive as Victimization’s. “We are a very doing society,” Dr. Michael Hurd, the author of Effective Therapy and one of psychology’s canniest observers, told me. “People buy self-help books because they’re looking for answers. The extreme views tend to produce books with bullet points and catchy titles that sell. . . . In general, people in our culture don’t want to think through complex issues. They want to know, ‘What do I do?’ ” And when that’s the need you’re trying to meet, says Hurd, “There’s going to be a tendency to oversimplify.”

  Thus, Empowerment developed a new message: “You’re not powerless—you’re omnipotent!” Under the rules of Empowerment, you were the sovereign master of your fate and could defeat any and all obstacles in life.

  So were these second-stage gurus knowingly disingenuous? Promising more than they knew they could deliver? Here Hurd treads delicately. “It’s possible that some of them have been disingenuous,” he told me, “but you don’t like to think that it’s all about making money.” He concedes that the developing self-help industry was “a real test of integrity for the psychiatric profession.” Whatever their degree of sincerity, the fathers of Empowerment—soon joined by the keepers of political correctness and by opportunistic (if barely credentialed) SHAM gurus—trotted out their own clever semantics, in this case designed to make people feel unconstrained by anything. The handicapped or disabled became “special” or “differently abled.” Homes wracked by divorce and other domestic upsets became “nontraditional households.” The tenor could not have differed more from that of Victimization, but the goal was the same: eradicate the problem by couching it in destigmatizing language.

  Far from merely affecting how America spoke, these semantic shifts inevitably determined how America thought and felt about the circumstances they described. David Blankenhorn, founder and president of the Institute for American Values and the author of Fatherless America, told me, “There’s no question that one subtle change in termi
nology—replacing unwed with single before the word mother—altered the way society perceived the condition itself. It made out-of-wedlock pregnancy so much more palatable to a generation of women, and the nation.”

  Ultimately, despite its own excesses, Empowerment would not do away with Victimization or even stunt its growth very much. As we’ll see in more detail in chapter 8, even today, if you can’t stop smoking or snorting or stealing or gambling or having sex with people who are wearing a ring you didn’t give them, it’s probably not because you’re weak, venal, or decadent. It’s because you can’t help yourself. The stalker who knifed tennis great Monica Seles during a match avoided jail time because the judge was moved by his confession of his obsessive love for Seles’s rival Steffi Graf.

  Though the Empowerment camp now gets most of the coverage (and profits), Empowerment and Victimization represent a pair of formidable estuaries flowing from the same river. They exist side by side on bookshelves, and sometimes exist side by side in the same self-help expert. Joseph Jennings, a former gangbanger who has fashioned a thriving speaking career out of his squalid past, tells his inner-city scholastic assemblies “you can be anything you want”—but that if they fail, “it’s the legacy of slavery.”

  Two generations after West Side Story’s “Gee, Officer Krupke” poked fun at psychiatric cop-outs, that same core principle—what ails you is beyond your control—remains alive and (un)well. But paradoxically, it’s been joined by a second belief: There’s not a thing wrong with you, and you can have it all, if you just go for it with gusto!

  SHAM LAND

  In his brilliant book Fat Land, Greg Critser points out that more than a generation’s worth of faddish weight-loss programs have served only to produce the fattest generation of Americans on record. (Not insignificantly, weight-loss programs have become, in essence, self-help programs, especially now that both Phil McGraw and John Gray are actively involved.) So, too, almost four decades after I’m OK—You’re OK, one wonders what happened to all the self-improvement this mountain of help was supposed to bring about.

  Certainly SHAM’s debut in the 1960s coincided with a period wherein the nation began to make great strides in race relations, the glass ceiling, and other barometers of overall social health. America today “feels like” a more enlightened place in which to live than America in 1960: We conduct ourselves with greater sensitivity to the feelings of those around us. We communicate more openly and productively with our spouses and friends. We’re better at raising our children—or, at least, we give a whole lot more thought to it than did our parents and particularly their parents, who raised kids by the seat of their pants, seldom sparing the rod.

  But anyone who watches the news knows that not all of the changes in American society have been positive, and that even some of the “positive changes” may have more to do with redefining the bad things than with actually making them better. When you get away from the pleasant-sounding spin, the statistics are far less encouraging.

  Divorce in 1960 claimed about a quarter of all marriages. Today it claims about half. Although thankfully that statistic is trending back down, American marriages have the highest known failure rate in the world. It can be argued, and has been by feminists, that increased divorce isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People in general, and women in particular, no longer feel compelled to suffer dismal unions in silence. The rising tide of women’s rights and opportunities, combined with other societal support factors, has given restless wives the initiative and optimism to leave the kinds of marriages with which their counterparts from prior generations “made do.”

  But how many Americans walk out the door because they no longer feel compelled to suffer so-so marriages in silence? Worse, how many Americans has SHAM conditioned to think their marriages are so-so, when in reality they’re pretty normal?

  Nowadays, young marrieds of both genders may be a tad too focused on their own fulfillment, with catastrophic effects for domestic tranquillity. I first interviewed David Blankenhorn for a magazine assignment in 1988, and he told me, “I think people today are less forgiving in relationships, and more inclined to walk at the drop of a hat.” He made an interesting point about the famous JFK quote “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” and its relevance to a wholesale change in society’s perspective on the institution of marriage. “In years past,” Blankenhorn told me, “getting married was more of a selfless act. You did it in order to build something bigger than you—a family—and to be able to give what you could to the children of that union.” That’s all changed, he said: “People today go into a marriage expecting to a far greater degree to have their own needs met. Instead of giving to the marriage, they want much more from the marriage. And often what they want is unrealistic.” It’s hard to see such mental turnabouts as anything other than a consequence of SHAM-bred “insights.” Indeed, it may not be coincidence that the greatest jump in American divorce, postwar, came between 1975 and 1990, a fifteen-year period that roughly corresponds to the most feverish SHAM activity. (At the same time, more and more Americans are turning to SHAM gurus for advice on matters of the heart, which makes relationships one of the largest segments of the self-help movement, as we will see later in the book.)

  Whatever the ultimate truth here, there’s one group of Americans who don’t have the luxury of considering the matter with academic detachment: children. As a direct result of all this coupling and uncoupling, 45 percent of American children today live in “nontraditional households.” One child in three is born to an unmarried mother. The figure in 1960 was one child in twenty, adding credence to Blankenhorn’s observation about the semantics of unwed parenthood. An alarming number of those mothers are teenagers. To understand the larger consequences of divorce and illegitimacy, consider just this one statistic: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 72 percent of incarcerated juveniles come from single-parent households.

  Standardized test scores tell us that when kids from “nontraditional households” go to school, they do not learn as much as they should—but neither do their peers from intact families. Here, we may be seeing more bitter fruit from another SHAM tree: self-esteem-based education (a topic we’ll explore in detail in chapter 10). For these and related reasons, school discipline is not what it once was, and school violence is a national embarrassment. To be sure, pernicious forces besides SHAM are at work, but events like the Columbine massacre would’ve been “unthinkable” back in the days before schools lost their way, as Christina Hoff Sommers wrote in a 2000 issue of the American Enterprise. Before school administrators began worrying about everything except their mission of helping to raise technically competent, morally centered students.

  Speaking of attitudes and behaviors that once were unthinkable: In 1960, would a man who got drunk, broke into an electrical substation, and grabbed hold of a transformer that filled him with thirteen thousand volts have even considered suing the power company? That’s exactly what Ed O’Rourke of Tampa, Florida, did in March 2000. O’Rourke also sued the six bars and liquor stores that sold him booze on the fateful night. His lawsuit claimed that he was “unable to control his urge to drink alcoholic beverages.”

  O’Rourke’s case was no anomaly. On May 3, 2000, Seong Sil Kim threw herself in front of a speeding Manhattan subway car. She later collected $9.9 million from the city because the train, instead of killing her, merely amputated her right hand and inflicted assorted other injuries. And, of course, there is the now-infamous McDonald’s coffee spill. While riding in her son’s sports car in February 1992, Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico, spilled the coffee in her lap. She sued the fast-food giant, claiming the coffee was too hot. When a jury initially awarded her $2.9 million, many commentators pointed to the case as a fitting symbol of wasteful litigation and what one writer called the “death of common sense.” In fact, the case was more complicated than it was sometimes made to appear, and the award was later reduced to “only” $640,000. Still, the reasoning of j
urors like Betty Farnham is compelling: Explaining why McDonald’s was at fault, Farnham told the Wall Street Journal, “They were not taking care of their customers.” As if people aren’t responsible for realizing on their own that hot coffee is hot.

  As a highly regarded trial lawyer told me, “These cases would’ve been laughed out of court during the fifties, if anyone even had the balls to bring the suit.” While such lawsuits may be extreme examples, they do indicate that for all the recent talk about “empowerment,” America in 1960 was a more genuinely self-reliant place than America today.

  Further testimony: In her tell-all book Spin Sisters, Myrna Blyth, a former editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, admits that far from empowering women, the nominally feminist industry in which she worked has eroded women’s confidence by sending negative message after negative message. Blyth describes her experience of thumbing through women’s magazines of the “June Cleaver” era and being shocked at how “tough and resilient” those magazines assumed women to be. Whatever 1950s American women lacked in education and financial independence, Blyth argues, they more than made up for it in their ability “to cope with whatever hardship they had to face.” Yet today, after decades of nonstop exposure to an editorial mentality that makes them feel fat, out of style, sexually inadequate, and prone to every new psychic malady or invented disease that comes down the pike, women feel far less power over their domains, Blyth argues.

  If America of 1960 was a more self-reliant place, it was also, evidence suggests, a safer, more harmonious place. The U.S. homicide rate has declined in very recent years, but at 5.6 murders for every 100,000 members of the population in 2002, it loitered about 10 percent above where it stood throughout the mid-1960s—an era we then lamented as the height of urban unrest. Not just that, but when today’s perpetrators are brought to trial, they’re more likely to be acquitted because of the introduction of evidence that once would have been considered extraneous. Even Alan Dershowitz, a defense lawyer par excellence, conceded in his book The Best Defense that “almost all criminal defendants are, in fact, guilty.” Nonetheless, Paul Pfingst, a former prosecutor and San Diego district attorney, told me, “Guilt often gets obscured nowadays by all sorts of issues about how they turned out that way and why they did what they did.”