Forgive and Forget

When Freud first invented the talking cure he declared that people were suffering because they had forgotten past traumas. Thus, treatment consisted in exercises that would cause them to remember the forgotten traumas, and therefore, to produce something like a fill-in-the-blanks life story.

For Freud, forgetting constituted repression, so lifting repressing meant remembering something painful.

Freud himself got beyond this theory, but, regrettably, many other people have not. No small number of therapists believe that recovering memories cures and that patients should be hypnotized until they can remember horrific childhood traumas.

Anyway, in the matter of trauma, patients risked being destroyed by their grievances. Today, as an adjunct of therapy, patients believe that they have been victimized. They define themselves by their grievances.

Hating the person who traumatized you seems to have become the order of the day. Hating him, attacking him in public, canceling him… it all comes down to the notion that certain people should never be forgiven. And, in direct opposition to Freudian theory, certain injuries should never be forgotten.

So, we have lost the ability to forgive and forget, largely because we have been persuaded that it is bad for our mental health. One understands that Judeo-Christianity is based on forgiveness, even on atonement. On one side it tells us that we should accept our sins and do penance for them-- the better to receive forgiveness. On the other side it tells us that we should forgive others their sins. 

One hastens to add that in Christianity there is only one unforgivable sin-- blaspheming the Holy Ghost. As for what that means, Augustine has explained that the only unforgivable sin is-- impenitence. 

Anyway, now we have Tara Parker Pope, in the Washington Post, reporting that the therapy world has discovered that forgiveness contributes mightily to good relationships. Holding on to resentments, extracting justice by punishing those who have done you will, is a bad idea. It is bad for your mental health. 

Cue, Everett Worthington, a therapist who developed a way for couples to forgive each other:

Early in his career as a marriage counselor, psychologist Everett Worthington noticed that many couples were angry about perceived slights and real wrongs — and he realized they could make progress only if they forgave each other.

Those insights prompted Worthington to embark on a decades-long academic career studying the science of forgiveness.

While the act of forgiving is often discussed by faith communities, Worthington has found that a secular approach to forgiveness also can be a useful strategy in improving health. He and his colleagues recently completed a study conducted across five countries showing that when forgiveness is taught, practiced and achieved, the result is better mental and overall well-being.

“Forgiveness can change relationship dynamics and prevent a lot of very costly things that can happen in society,” said Worthington, a professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University. “There are injustices we experience every day. People don’t have to forgive — it’s a choice people may make or not make.”

Notice that forgiveness has been relegated to what Pope calls “faith communities.” This means that when we discarded the old religion, we discarded much of what made it psychologically valuable. 

Dare we might say that many people who are nursing grievances would become largely more functional if they let go of injuries that were inflicted decades ago:

Similar studies in the United States also show benefits. The findings have broad implications for public health, said Tyler VanderWeele, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Human Flourishing Program.

“I think the experience of being wronged is quite common,” said VanderWeele, a co-author of the new research and organizer of the Harvard conference. “We’ve seen that this forgiveness workbook can be used to address forgiveness and improve mental health. If the resource is widely disseminated, the effects on population mental health could be substantial.”

The old-time religion was right:

Studies have shown that children who forgive do better academically and that, overall, forgiveness can result in lower blood pressure, better sleep and less anxiety, among other things.

Now, the point that the article leaves out concerns the extension of forgiveness. You do not just forgive and forget; you allow yourself to be forgiven your own trespasses. If you imagine that you are defined by your sins, or by your malevolent wishes, then you will have problems in life. If you have overcome therapy culture and have learned to atone for your sins, to the point where you are able to receive forgiveness, you will improve your character and your relationships.

Miscellany

First, this week….

Here’s some news you probably cannot use. Rocket Mortgage Co. which turns out to be the nation’s largest mortgage broker, is now putting tampons in the men’s restrooms. The New York Post has the story:

A tipster revealed to StopWoke that Rocket Mortgage is putting tampons in men’s restrooms as part of an initiative from the company’s LGBTQI+ resource group “Perspectives.”

“What we found through a tipster is that Rocket Mortgage is providing tampons in the men’s restroom across their company as a part of this sort of far-left LGBT initiative from their sort of LGBT resource group,” StopWoke founder Rob Smith told “Varney & Co” Thursday….

According to the StopWoke report, Rocket Mortgage, the nation’s number-one mortgage lender, partnered with Aunt Flow, a business that helps ensure offices, schools and more have free feminine products available.

In an email obtained by StopWoke, Rocket Mortgage informed employees of the decision, declaring it was a step towards “menstrual equity.”

Menstrual equity-- they have completely lost their minds. Now, at the least, you know where not to go for your next mortgage. 

Second….

As for the Bud Light kerfuffle, we have just remarked that the marketing executive responsible for the Dylan Mulvaney nonsense has been put on leave. A step in the right direction, we would say. 

Here are a few words from Lionel Shriver, a female novelist, about the Bud Light and the Nike visions of gender equity, from the Spectator:

Nike is next. The sportswear company has also partnered with Mulvaney, who’s been leaping about on camera doing awkward, sissified calisthenics while wearing a Nike running bra. But the purpose of a running bra is to firmly support breasts, and Dylan Mulvaney doesn’t have any breasts.

Good old Nike, selling sports bras by using a model who does not have breasts.

As for menstrual equity, Shriver has a few words:

While the rumour on Twitter that Tampax has also engaged Mulvaney as a sponsor is erroneous, the company did send the male-anatomied show-off multiple free boxes of tampons. As I recall, during my reproductive years Tampax never posted me any free tampons. At least such a welcome giveaway (they’re expensive!) would have made biological sense.

To raise the level of seriousness, our third point comes from Wall Street Journal columnist, Jason Riley. At a time when the country is railing against an app called TikTok, accusing it and other social media of ruining American children, Riley raises the most salient issue, one that, strangely, no one else has raised:

Nor is it helpful to tell parents that a Chinese-owned social media app is mostly to blame for the mental-health problems of American youth. Social media has certainly made raising children more challenging insofar as it can exacerbate teenage anxiety and self-esteem issues. But blaming TikTok is passing the buck rather than meeting the challenge. The bigger problem has to do with today’s child-rearing culture. If we have raised a generation of young people who seem too distracted or too sedentary or too self-absorbed to function properly, then we are to blame, not China.

Fourth, from the inimitable Candace Owens, as quoted by Nelly Bowles in her Friday column for The Free Press:

Candace Owens with a weird question: This week, the Daily Wire’s most erratic talent asks: “Can you name one objective thing that has gotten better in American society since women were given the right to vote?” Right. 

As a member of the just asking questions community, I’ve defended question-asking against many criticisms. But this pushes me to my edge. To be clear, I obviously don’t vote (in order to retain marriage prospects, and because I think women who do are crazed bloomers-wearing banshees), but that’s just me.

That will give you something to think about.

And, fifth, on the environmental front, Germany shut down its last nuclear power plant. The result-- a spike in energy costs.

Environmentalists in Germany finally won their big prize: shutting down the country’s last nuclear power plant. The same day it announced the closure, German utility company Eon announced a 45 percent rise in energy costs for customers (sorry!). It’s basically assured now that—just like other countries that shut down their nuclear plants—Germany will now start burning a whole lot more coal. Truly the craziest people on this warming earth are our so-called environmentalists, who seem hell-bent on getting us back on fossil fuels. If you have money and want to give it to an eco-group that isn’t explicitly pro-nuclear energy, what I want you to do is take that cash and light it on fire. 

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Don't Bring Your Whole Self to Work

You would have thought that the “bring your whole self to work” movement would by now have been dismissed. Any manager worth his salary must understand that oversharing at work is a bad idea. Many aspects of your whole Self should be kept out of the workplace. 

Aside from the fact that oversharing is distracting and that advertising your vulnerability causes you to lose respect, no one really knows what the whole Self is anyway.

Six months or so ago I debunked this latest executive coaching fad. I even pointed out the cogent analysis provided in the New York Times by Pamela Paul.

One would have thought that people would by now have gotten over the, bring your whole Self to work, movement,

Alas, I spoke too soon. 

Apparently, if we are to believe Wall Street Journal columnist Callum Borchers, the movement is alive and well in many corporate offices. Worse yet, many companies believe that it is therapeutic to share and to overshare.

One would have been much happier if one could report that the corporate world has figured out how to erect a wall between the personal and the public, between private matters and business dealings. Alas, such seems not to be the case.

Apparently, corporate honchos have chosen to use the pandemic as an excuse to overshare, that is, to turn workplace interactions into therapy:

The pandemic made many of us more comfortable talking about our mental health at work, surveys show. Feeling less pressure to act like we’ve got it all together, some people now swap struggles with burnout and impostor syndrome almost as freely as they talk about sore joints after a weekend 5k.

Why do people not share their mental health problems at work. Borchers explains:

… mental-health taboos in the workplace—the fear that co-workers will think you’re distracted or otherwise compromised on the job. Even as some people feel secure enough to acknowledge battles with stress, self-doubt or even diagnoses like clinical depression, it can be hard to discern the line between being vulnerable at work and TMI.

The truth is, if you advertise your vulnerability or your lack of confidence people will naturally lose respect for you. They will be forced to decide whether your actions and decisions reflect your mental health issues or what is best for the company.

Worse yet, when you share your mental health issues, you put other people in a position where they are not trained in how to deal with them.

In some companies, staff learns how to listen compassionately and with empathy. If it sounds vapid, that’s because it is:

Learning how to listen compassionately without playing amateur counselor is now part of leadership training at Yelp Inc., says Carmen Whitney Orr, the company’s chief people officer. She views employees’ increased willingness to talk about mental health as a silver lining of the pandemic but fears the openness won’t last without care and attention.

Obviously, some of those who open up and overshare pay a price for it. If they take time off from work, they discover that work goes on without them:

Sergio Valenzuela, a data analyst in Portland, Ore., says he paid a professional price for taking a five-week mental-health break from work last year. He says he told colleagues about the toll of losing several loved ones, including his mother, in close succession and described fatigue that came from feeling he had to outperform others because he is an immigrant.

Mr. Valenzuela says his employer supported his leave of absence. Upon returning, he felt that important decisions affecting his team had been made without his input, which caused him to question his standing in the company. He left for a new opportunity several months ago.

He would do it all again—the break was exactly what he needed—but he warns against naively expecting that sharing emotional truths doesn’t happen without trade-offs.

The bottom line is this: keep your private matters to yourself. If all of those around you in the office see you as depressed or as suffering from trauma, they will treat you accordingly. They will not let you forget it. And despite what everyone is telling you, if everyone looks at you with pity or compassion, you will have that much more trouble putting the trauma behind you.

Psycho Paganism

Consider Freud’s cast of characters. Oedipus, Narcissus, Eros, Thanatos, even Psyche. What do they have in common. They all come from pagan myth and legend, even from pagan literature. 

When Freud chose to grace the world with his thoughts about Moses and monotheism, in his last book, he seemed to cast himself as the anti-Moses, leading his people back to the Egypt of the pharaohs. That is, back to pagan idolatry. Freud had no real use for monotheism.

So, Freudian psychoanalysis bases itself on the notion that the unconscious mind is structured like a pagan Greek tragedy. Thus, that we are all pagans beneath the skin, but that civilization, that would be Judeo-Christian civilization, repressed our pagan past and alienated us from the raw vitality made manifest therein.

As though that were not sufficient, Freud’s sometime colleague, Carl Jung was hawking pagan idolatry. So much so that he even, for a time, believed that Hitler himself was a Norse deity come back to life.

For extra credit today, name our leading Jungian psychologist. If said psychologist has been pretending to be promoting the values of Judeo-Christianity, he is conning you. Or perhaps, he is conning himself.

Anyway, an Israeli journalist by name of Liel Leibovitz recently wrote an article in Commentary wherein he argued that we as a civilization have increasingly abandoned Judeo-Christianity, and have replaced it with pagan idolatry.

One feels compelled to point out that one Tara Isabella Burton argued the same point several years ago in her book, Strange Rites. I recommend her book. 

Anyway, Leibovitz has some statistics:

In 1990, scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions.

It is fairly obvious that paganism derives from polytheism. In contemporary terms, we are invited to worship at multiple cults to multiple divinities. The more common term is multiculturalism. The result is moral chaos, different sets of moral rules for different members of different cults. 

Now, Liebovitz adds this point. 

… the soul of paganism, illuminated by the idea that no fixed system of belief or set of solid convictions ought to constrain us as we stumble our way through life.

Dare we mention, if the natural world is associated with a panoply of deities and if said deities can transform themselves at will, scientific or objective knowledge about the workings of said natural world would seem to be precluded.

At the least, this tells us why, caught as we are in an encompassing narrative, we refuse to debate issues of climate change. We believe that our polluting machines and industrial might have offended some very serious deities and that the gods will avenge the slight. At that point, why bother to debate the issue.

As for how pagans attest to their faith, one way has traditionally been to sacrifice children. Now, is this what was happening during the Covid pandemic, when we sacrificed children’s minds and education by shutting down schools? Obviously, people keep telling us that said children will easily make up the lost learning. But such is dubious, at least.

Liebovitz explains our child sacrifice:

Child sacrifice, alas, is alive and well in America these days, too. We may not, like the Vikings, toss our young into wells as offerings to the heavens, but turn over every rock in our craggy contemporary political landscape and you’ll find some pagan policy offering up the well-being of children to the gods of virtue. 

In March 2020, to choose one stinging example, Sweden bucked the global trend and responded to Covid-19 by keeping schools open. The results of this experiment were available shortly thereafter: Zero dead kids, almost zero kids sick, and very little, if any, risk to teachers. By January 2021, a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention affirmed that Covid rates in schools that had reopened were 37 percent lower than the rates in the same communities at large. The Biden administration largely ignored this evidence; it took some liberal cities such as New York a full 18 months to reopen their schools.

The results: dramatic upticks in juvenile mental-health crises, sharp declines in basic academic proficiency and just about every other metric of human misery visited on our children. A rational society, to say nothing about one guided by traditional values, would have curbed this suffering long before it blossomed so terribly; the pagans instead composed a fanciful narrative of what constitutes righteous behavior and then forced it on their children, whose pain was then explained away as a necessary evil if one wanted the forces of science to vanquish the darkness and cleanse the soul. When Anthony Fauci said, “I am the science,” he couldn’t have sounded more like the mighty Perun had he worn a cape and a crown.

You may not know that Perun is the ultimate in Slavic divinities, but we might also remark that in Greek mythology, Athena is the goddess of wisdom, that is, of science. Her Roman counterpart is Minerva.

As though the Covid response was not bad enough, we have since gotten into the business of mutilating children. We have imagined that children can change genders by changing their minds. The result-- we have subjected them to biochemical and surgical mutilation. We call it trans rights, but it is really a form of child sacrifice-- to the gods and goddesses.

America, the World's Scold

The statement has been widely reported and often repeated. Lawrence Summers was talking to an official from a developing country. The official described American foreign policy thusly:

Describing America’s increasing loneliness on the world scene, Mr. Summers said, “Somebody from a developing country said to me, ‘What we get from China is an airport. What we get from the United States is a lecture.’ 

So, we have become world leaders in what Walter Russell Mead calls “moralistic posturing:”

Too many self-described democracy activists want the U.S. to dissipate its diplomatic energy in moralistic posturing. They would rather we prioritized sermons and sanctions over building a multilateral coalition to check Chinese expansion. Their problem is not that they love righteousness too much. It is that they have thought too little and too superficially about what righteousness really demands.

Some believe that China and Russia and India and other countries around the world are ganging up on the United States. That is, these countries are producing an international realignment, one where we are no longer the world’s leading superpower. The age of American hegemony seems largely to be over.

We have been reporting this for quite some time now. The moment when the Biden administration decided to weaponize the dollar, and to confiscate assets that foreign countries held in dollars told many countries to move out of dollars, into yuan. Today, that includes Saudi Arabia and Brazil.

Some believe that China wants to rule the world. Others believe that we are involved in a clash of civilizations. When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, in a rare moment of lucidity, declared that we could not even build high speed railroads, a chorus of shrieky schoolgirls intoned that China was using slave labor. Said chorus did not explain how Western Europe had built high speed railroads without using slave labor. And had been doing so for decades.

Besides, we believe that we are on the side of history and justice and all that is good and ideal. We believe, as Francis Fukuyama has proclaimed, that liberal democracy will prevail. It will do so because Hegel said so.

Aside from the amusing fact that a certain number of American conservatives have flocked to the Hegelian view-- isn’t Hegel the godfather of Marxism?-- the truth remains, we are engaged in a competition against a number of the world’s nations. And, as long as we believe that we are too idealistic and too pure to compete in the world of manufacturing and industry, we are going to lose.

One understands that the Biden administration has been throwing massive gobs of money into restoring American manufacturing. Reports in the business press suggest that this is a good thing and that we are in the process of onshoring industry. 

One likes to feel optimistic about these matters, but the truth remains. We are lagging in manufacturing and, we seem not to understand that the products that are being friendshored to Mexico are produced in China. We have conveniently ignored the advance of China in selling goods throughout Asia.

And we seem not to understand that we do not have the personnel, the human capital to do the job. One will not mention the esteemed columnist who said so, but an important columnist averred the other day that we could find human capital in the immigrants who are flooding the country from Central America. Said columnist did not remark that the average IQ of people in these countries is around 78-- meaning that they are not going to be running robots or writing code. 

As for the larger worldview, Mead explains that the Biden administration, incapable of engaging in competition in the new world order, had been reduced to being a chronic scold:

Internationally, it was another grim week for the Biden administration, the United States of America, and world peace. Brazil, the country with the largest population, economy and landmass in Latin America, reinforced its alignment with China as its president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva pledged to work with Xi Jinping to build a new global order and called on the European Union and the U.S. to stop shipping weapons to Ukraine. Indian officials reported that China is supporting the development of a military listening post on Myanmar’s strategic Great Coco Island in the Bay of Bengal. Saudi Arabia, which flirted a few weeks ago with opening diplomatic relations with Israel, is intensifying its oil cooperation with Russia and now seeks a meeting with Hamas. Farther south, a Sudanese military faction backed by Russia’s Wagner Group battles for control of Africa’s third-largest nation.

Biden administration policy, ineffective, ineffectual, and generally weak and pathetic. We have become the world’s scolds, and as Mead points out, no one likes a scold.

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Courtly Love, Modernized

It used to be called courtly love. Now it’s a felony.

As noted yesterday, courtly love arose during the Middle Ages at the time of the crusades. It was a ritualized seduction, conducted by married women in relation to underage males. In principle, according to the poetry that the young men, called troubadours, wrote, the relationships were never consummated.

As the old saying goes, if you believe that,  you will believe anything.

Now, the important point is that courtly love was an important step toward courtship. Keep in mind that marriages back in the day were invariably arrangements. What we call courtship or dating did not become common practice until after the Protestant Reformation. It was an outgrowth of courtly love.

One understands, because one has previously speculated about it, that when Luther and his followers were excommunicated in the early sixteenth century, they were free to marry. And yet, they had very little to offer a prospective spouse. They did not have wealth, status, prestige or power.

What was left? Obviously, they could only offer love. Thus did romantic love become a staple of the marital estate. As for courtship leading to marriage, it was manifest in Shakespeare's high comedies, in the late sixteenth century, but very rarely before that.

In the meantime, relations between older experienced women and younger adolescent boys did not exactly go out of style.

They are alive and well in today’s America. Why, just last week, a half dozen young women were busted for engaging in carnal relations with high school boys, that is, with boys who were around 16 or 17 years old. Naturally, this has not exactly provoked a gale of outrage. These young women, most of whom are, dare I say, comely, do not look like rapists. Calling what they have done rape, as our gender neutered legal system has it, feels like a bit of a stretch.

Prosecuting an attractive twenty something female for hooking up with a seventeen year old male feels like an exaggeration, forced on all of us by the failure to distinguish between males and females, by our failure to understand that the relationships are incommensurate.

Anyway, it has usually been the case that young men who engage in carnal relations with older women are doing it for educational value. They are learning how to make love with women. You might or might not consider this a social good, but one fails to see how said teenagers have been traumatized, their lives ruined, by such casual encounters.

Of course, if the genders had been reversed, the acts would have been quite different. And the level of exploitation would have been manifest. A female who was seduced by a teacher would most likely have believed that she was involved in a relationship. A teenage boy, not so much.

Nowadays, women have been liberated. They have been freed from the rules that define dating and courtship. They have even chosen to express their sexuality as they see fit. It might not be the best thing, but it does not come down to us from the moon.

Unfortunately, the legal system seems hellbent on repressing the raw vitality of female sexuality. And, as you might imagine, feminists far and wide have been silent about all of it. It’s a cold day when feminists, who began their crusade by promoting the free expression of female sexuality, have been struck dumb over this modern version of courtly love.

So that you can better appreciate the horrors these high school boys were subjected to, here are some mug shots of the offending females.

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Cults to Machismo

If you think that American girls have it bad, wait until you take a look at American boys. Not only are they suffering from great emotional distress, they are becoming more and more suicidal.

You might, if you are churlish, suggest that this is the direct consequence of the much noted war against boys. Christina Hoff Sommers has documented the problem extensively. Apparently, these attacks on boys, these efforts to deprive them of their manhood, have caused them to become depressed and suicidal. No one should be surprised.

That they end up in their parents’ basements playing video games should also not surprise us either. After all, the school system has been built to value female over male activities, and especially to undermine all manly pursuits.

At least, and it does count as something of a relief, the authors do not blame it on social media and other assorted gadgets.

As for the extent of the problem, here are some statistics, via the Washington Post and Yahoo News:

Teenage boys, in particular, are experiencing high levels of mental distress. The CDC's 2021 National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) showed a massive increase in male suicide among teens and young men. From 2020 to 2021, suicide rates for males rose significantly, according to the CDC, with the largest increase among males ages 15 to 24. Among this group, the suicide rate was up 8 percent in 2021 over 2020.

And also,

"Boys' human development has been compromised by the boyhood that we have built and managed for them for generations," said Michael C. Reichert, founding director of the Center for the Study of Boys' and Girls' Lives at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "How to Raise a Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men." Common societal expectations - that boys should be strong and independent, for example - hamper boys' ability to acknowledge emotions and ask for help.

Of course, this is a problem masquerading as a solution. The researchers suggest that boys have problems because they are not sufficiently girly. They are not in touch with their feelings and do not express their emotions. They have not done enough therapy.

In truth, this maniacal effort to turn boys into girls and to punish them for not playing the feeling game, is the cause of the problem.

Given that girls can now do everything that a boy could ever do, one must ask what is left for boys. They are no longer allowed to grow up to become breadwinners. See this Wall Street Journal article, about the loss of breadwinner status. They are no longer needed to protect and provide, for women or for children. What is left? 

As it happens, what’s left is machismo. What’s left is a caricature of masculinity, a tough guy, gang banging attitude that pretends to be more manly by beating up others.

Consider this. One Michael Carroll wrote a book entitled, The Cult of the Virgin Mary. In it he argued that cultures produce machismo when males are ineffectual, when they fail to protect and provide for others. At that point, when normal manly pursuits are precluded, or when men have failed to fulfill them, then adopt a mock masculine posture, one that is essentially a bluff.

So, machismo is a function of a female dominant culture. As Carroll points out, cults to the Virgin Mary arose in Europe during the times of the crusades. When all able bodied men, the lords of the manor, rode off to the Holy Land to defeat the infidels, women were left in charge. Naturally, they spent no small amount of time seducing the boys who had remained, the stable hands, the cooks and the gardeners. These males played along in a practice that was called courtly love. Unable to show off their prowess at war, they suffered ordeals for love. 

But then, lacking male role models, these boys tended to grow up to become caricatures of masculinity, tough guys who sat around doing nothing, ineffectual at protecting and providing, but happy to pretend to be playing a role.

So, the more America becomes ruled by women the more it produces macho men. It is not a good thing. 

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