Self-Serving Myths Of The Past

Many people see our problems and feel that society is slipping out of control, that the ability to cooperate for the good of our communities has been lost, and our willingness to abide by our long-standing social contracts is compromised. It's true that an entire generation of young barbarians has grown up for whom the way to deal with others is to grab whatever you want. But it seldom occurs to us that our nihilistic system supports ruthless abusers, from back-street hoodlums to Wall Street arbitrageurs and Enron executives. Many naive women and men long for some idealized good old days, while ideologues try to bring them back. Both types ignore one important fact.

The much glorified and mythological American past that many reactionary politicians and religious leaders seek to recreate, as Henry Hyde and Jerry Falwell do, was almost exclusively for the benefit of affluent white males. It excluded Negroes, Indians, poor whites, Mexicans, and most women from any possibility of finding consistent satisfaction.

We know; we were there at the time!

Don’t misunderstand us when we criticize evil choices and call for a rebirth of spirituality. We love our American homeland deeply but we detest and want to expose the ruthless abusers who claim to be the only true Americans as they measure patriotism, success and justice almost exclusively in financial terms. If we didn’t love our people, we’d run with the wolves attacking them. Few persons understand that virtually all wars are financial conflicts orchestrated by ruthless power freaks in high places and fought to the death by poor boys who get few benefits for their sacrifices. Even as, the George W. Bush administration increased fees charging American veterans four and five hundred percent annually in the Veteran’s Affairs hospitals and excluding more and more veterans. The Bush administration prepared to destroy the Veteran’s medical program along with Social Security by privatization. Especially, when we need them desperately with the failings of our financial systems.

Understand this well.

Calling the American past, during the thirties, forties and fifties, our golden era of spirituality and morality, as so many primitive politicians and reactionary religious ideologues do, is a scheme to destroy civil and gender rights and eliminate the wages of the worker from production. It is a form of narcissistic self-deception that leads to private benefits for a few at the expense of everyone else. Here is how it really was for millions of Americans during the so called golden age of morality and decency.

RACIAL HATRED -- Only radicals with a hidden agenda or profoundly ignorant persons can say with a straight face that life in America was spiritual, was more moral when racial and sexist violence was the law of the land, was ruthlessly enforced by state-sanctioned terror. The psychopathic Mississippi or Alabama Ku Klux Klan sheriffs who beat poor people sadistically and organized forty-five hundred murders of black men, women and children during the 20th century were all too real. Louisiana politicians like Huey Long harnessed race hatred for their own benefit and used brutal tactics to block Negroes from first class citizenship. Jard saw this close-up because his father personally saved Long from assassination by two gunmen in the 1930s. Men and women of African, Mexican or Indian heritage, for that reason alone, were not permitted to vote, to serve on juries, eat in restaurants, sleep in clean hotels, use public toilets, go to schools and colleges for which they were paying taxes or hold decent jobs. For generations college educated Negroes were given only filthy, back breaking jobs in steel mills across Pennsylvania and Indiana. Black U.S. Navy gunners, risking their lives battling German U-Boat wolf packs on the frigid North Atlantic crossing during World War II, were beaten savagely by American military police for trying to get hot coffee in government canteens. When one young Black fighter ace from the famed Tuskegee Group returned home from years in combat protecting white bomber crews in Italy, the only job he could get was as a janitor in the local bank. Indian children were locked in concentration camps and beaten when they spoke the only language they knew. Japanese American parents remain locked in concentration camps while their sons were dying while fighting German Nazis as members of the famed 442 Regimental Combat team. The Go For Broke boys won more medals than any unit their size in World War II but when they came home they were denied service by everyone from doctors to barbers and renters because of their ancestry. When minorities tried to succeed professionally, to become first class citizens by enrolling their children in good schools and building their careers, hundreds of armed white men, usually led by police chiefs and blessed by racist pastors, would beat or murder them. There was a lynching of a black man about once a week for a hundred years across the south.


GENDER HATRED -- Even during the profitable postwar economic boom, women remained second class citizens. They were refused admission in universities and graduate school programs only because they were female. Georgia Tech officials denied seven highly qualified young women acceptance in its engineering programs in the middle fifties. The dean defended his decision in court, saying,

We cannot enroll them -- they would have to pass through the male gym on their way to the engineering lab.

Indecent to expose the sweet innocents to sweaty male bodies, cannot cut another door into the lab! Women still cannot serve as pastors in the two largest American denominations. Because they have no testosterone glands, Roberta quips. After all, radical men know that God created women to tend men's sexual needs and see their food is cooked! It was not until 1965 that laws were abolished that prohibited even married women from using contraceptives in order to control the size of their families. Scores of social workers were sentenced to prison by male judges for teaching poor women to use birth control methods. Corporations hired women only as secretaries, food servers and cleaning women, even if they had to earn the family living because irresponsible men fathered children and then ran away from their responsibilities. Teaching and nursing were the only professions generally open to women and they both paid badly. Many, probably most business, political, educational and religious leaders of the era wanted women barefoot and pregnant, subservient to their male lords and masters.

Entire companies still behave toward this way toward women. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently had to press criminal charges against the Mitsubishi Automobile Company in Tennessee to end years of sexual harassment of it’s women employees. Company executives refused to block the frequent humiliation of women and then fired those who complained about their criminally abusive supervisors and managers. The corporate executives, trained in Japan where women are little more than convenient sexual servants to men, ordered their American managers to hire nude dancers and prostitutes to entertain home office vice presidents visiting the factory. Even when they were caught, rather than correcting the abuse, the executives mounted an expensive publicity campaign to escape justice. We are happy to report it didn’t work.

Many sexist men of the lunatic fringe -- with the brainwashed daughters, spouses and girlfriends they manipulate, hate women who are succeeding beyond their abilities -- especially successful women who accept as lovers and mates only sophisticated and supportive men. Bright and competent woman understand that neurotic men are on a one way ride to nowhere, at least emotionally and culturally if not always financially, and choose not to go along with them. Talented women despise their primitive attitudes and assumptions about relationships, and that is more than most existentially alienated men of the right wing can tolerate. The haters are usually supported by fundamental preachers and reactionary politicians in an attempt to return uppity women to subservient citizenship. If that doesn't work, if self-directing women still refuse to waste their potential as menial servants and brood mares, especially if they refuse them as sexual partners, a great many angry men become violent. This was the theme of the motion picture Thelma And Louise a few years ago, in which two abused women broke away from their existentially alienated and brutal men. The macho motto of such men could well be the old New England advice that thousands of fathers gave to their sons before marriage;

A woman, a dog and a walnut tree -- the more you beat them the better they be.

SOCIAL HATRED -- Freedom of speech was limited during the Joe McCarthy madness of the fifties. Many persons had to take loyalty oaths and the attorney general of the United States kept lists of traitors who protested that the Cold War was harming America. Anyone who blamed the National Guard for shooting down students at Kent State University was called a Soviet sympathizer. Millions of naive men and women were persuaded by well orchestrated propaganda campaigns that shooting the students served the protesters right. Of course, years later former Secretary of State, Robert McNamara, admitted all this in his autobiography. We especially loved the scene in the movie Nixon where President Nixon slipped out of the White House to the Lincoln Memorial to talk to some students protesting the decade long Vietnam War. He asked;

Why do you hate me so much for defending our country against the evil communist menace?

He lectured the kids about the dangers of socialism, until one of the girls cried out with a burst of insight.

Why -- you are so beholding to those making money from the conflict that you can't stop the war either!

J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the F.B.I. For example, kept a secret dirty tricks file with which to blackmail virtually every American political, business and educational leader. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both hated Hoover and wanted to fire him as head of the Bureau but feared that Hoover would reveal their illicit sexual and financial affairs -- Kennedy’s lust for women and Johnson’s manipulation of defense contracts to amass a personal fortune. Hoover’s greatest vindictiveness was reserved for anyone trying to end the slaughter of sixty thousand American white farm and black ghetto kids being sent to kill Vietnamese farm boys. Along with quarter million more maimed and several million ripped away from their homes. Plus the slaughter of almost three million Vietnamese civilians. He went ballistic when Martin Luther King came out in opposition of the war -- screaming around his office that he was going to get him if it was the last thing he ever did. During the civil rights struggle across the south, Hoover sent only southern F.B.I. Agents south to investigate the murder of voter registration workers. He reasoned they would be less likely to find any exculpatory evidence and he was pretty well right. Only a very few agents were successful investigators. Hoover didn’t work in a vacuum, however. A large number of reactionary politicians later named one Washington building The Hoover Building. He was their kind of guy and he had indeed served them well! Hoover was so vehemently against civil rights that Jard still wonders whether the murderous Hoover didn’t secretly orchestrate both John Kennedy’s and Martin King’s assassination. It was possible because it was later revealed that he had several assassination teams under his personal control.

Signing a petition or going to an anti-war rally was dangerous for anyone who opposed Washington's power freaks. Army officers who protested the Vietnam disaster were cashiered by the thousands. Civilians that our government branded 'Doves' usually lost their jobs and some went to prison. As we said earlier, we do indeed love America and want it to prosper but we see the United States as the people and the farms, the lakes, communities and businesses rather than as the financial, political and religious aristocracy who lust to gain all the wealth and power and prestige. You cannot convince us that reactionary sexist and racist legislators care one iota about the people of this nation! The back room conspiracies, vicious electioneering attacks and outright felonies committed by those who yearn to dominate America have destroyed much trust in and respect for government. That is why the people of Minnesota in a previous election voted into the governor’s office a popular professional wrestler, Jesse Ventura, who beat both political parties in one fell swoop.

SELF-FOCUS
How can so many persons assume that an era of coercion and brutality was more spiritual than this period when more persons have laws to protect them from ruthless and reactionary abusers?

Do the fearful ever talk about anything except reducing taxes and controlling the lives of the women and men who don’t agree with them?

A PRINCIPLE OF SOUND RELATIONSHIPS

The sound Basic Principle of Life we want others to learn from us is this --

GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO COOPERATE WITH ME.
BAD THINGS DON’T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO COOPERATE WITH ME.
GOOD THINGS DON’T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO DON’T COOPERATE.

The Basic Principle is effective in normal relationships because people prefer:

PLEASURE TO PAIN IN THE PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PRESTIGE TO DEVALUATION IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PURPOSE TO MEANINGLESSNESS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE.

Obviously, the world has fallen on difficult times because change has become incessant and we have accepted secular philosophies that go against the grain of human spirituality. And of course, any attempt to keep the cultural traditions of our uneducated, pre-industrial ancestors as Truth Incarnate is self-destructive. Nevertheless, that is precisely what many persons try to do. The passage of time and the flood of new persons being born and growing up changes everything until we are like the befuddled King of Siam in the musical play THE KING AND I. He sings:

When I was a boy, what was what.
Now I am a man, things have changed a lot.
Some things nearly so, some things nearly not.

We humans are inclined to pack our beliefs in bundles - to cast them in concrete with handles on them, so we can pass then on unchanged and unchallenged to our children and their children. Just as our parents and our grandparents tried to do. We will, as the king continued to sing:

Fight to prove what we do not know is so! Tis a puzzlement!

This means, of course, that you must assume the responsibility for yourself and the people for whom you are responsible because huge societies never collapse overnight And yet, they seldom adapt in time to save themselves. Half a century ago Billy Graham was saying that America was in trouble, that without a spiritual renewal such as John Akers and Lee Atwater discussed years later, we were doomed to defeat as a society. He preached that only through a spiritual restoration with strong philosophical values could we mature enough to succeed. We did respond to Graham's call, from 4 or 5 percent who said they followed a spiritual life-style in 1940, to 35 or 40 percent who say they do now, and yet we are still in trouble because of the even swifter growth of Nihilism in our institutions and our human reluctance to adapt.

Fortunately, through years of study and counseling, we have identified a Basic Logotherapy Principle of satisfaction that will help keep you on the right track as you cope with widespread nihilism and narcissism. This principle isn't what a greedy society offers people, this is what you as an AUTHENTIC or a CONGRUENT promise to the people with whom you share life. It is this:

GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO COOPERATE IN ORDER TO REDUCE ALIENATION AND TO ADVANCE OUR COLLECTIVE FULFILLMENT

The title of Jard's first major book - NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST - was fascinating to reporters, talk show hosts and newspaper editors. Some of them wanted to believe he was right but a significant number of people with closed-minded life-themes wanted to prove he was an idiot to think such obvious nonsense. Every intelligent person knows, some reporters implied, that nice guys finish last Leo Derocher, the baseball guru, even wrote a book to that effect John Kelly was the host of a killer talk show in a large Ohio city who did everything but put a dunce cap on Jard's head when he arrived before a studio audience of three hundred persons, while many thousands viewed out in the community. He even seated him on a stool before beginning his attack. Kelly then asked the studio audience to vote on the proposition that decent men and women can succeed. About half said Jard was correct, that nice people can do well, while the other half decided he was all wet, good persons don't have a chance in this lousy, rotten world. That was interesting since none of the audience had read the book; had no idea what he'd written, although they were willing enough to judge in advance. Kelly then turned to Jard and gloated over the negative vote, Now, Doc, How are you gonna handle the skeptics? He then sat down in the audience while the three cameras whirled up close, presumably to watch Jard sweat as the people grilled him.

Jard started out by agreeing with the host, admitting if you define a decent guy or gal as a wimp, a doormat, a marshmallow - such a person couldn't expect ranch in a nihilistic, pragmatic society. On the other hand, he said, I define nice guys and gals as persons like Joe Butterworth who apply life's Basic Principle through:

MANAGING INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS CONSISTENTLY WISELY AND WELL,
SHARING LIFE'S GREATEST REWARDS WITH COOPERATIVE WOMEN AND MEN,
CREATING A COMMUNITY OF ACHIEVING PERSONS WHO BELONG TOGETHER.

Jard leaned back on the stool, folded his arms and waited quietly while the cameras frantically panned around for some kind of action. Kelly was so startled by the statement that he sat silently considering the answer for thirty seconds or more and that's an eternity of dead time on television, before coming slowly to his feet. He muttered right on camera - Well, I'll be damned - I never thought of it that way. He was hooked and rather than the six minutes Jard was supposed to have, he discussed NICE GUYS for thirty minutes and sold a lot of books in the community! When the audience voted again, only two persons out of three hundred still said that Jard was all wet. He went home and the next Sunday took our minister aside to repeat the story. He concluded, If you had my conversion rate, we'd be the largest congregation in the city!

This basic element of consistent satisfaction, dealing fairly in your relationships, sharing the benefits of cooperation and offering others a community where they can belong with people who support each other - will surely go a long ways toward making your life the best it can become. It is a practical expression of the faith, hope and love that is vital to consistent growth. There is another aspect to the basic principle. It is:

BAD THINGS DON'T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO COOPERATE IN OUR ACTIVITIES AND RELATIONSHIPS

You must recognize the obvious - that accidents occur, recessions come, companies fail and much more in an imperfect world. The Tragic Quartet of suffering, rage, guilt and death is all too real. However, to the limit of your abilities, you promise to be consistently open-minded and accepting of other people in your relationships. You shall neither blame women and men for your own failures nor punish them for circumstances beyond their control. You will not hide when people require your help and will end all cruel psychological games designed to hurt someone who gets sucked into some hateful scheme. Because you serve society in an organization or as a free-lance as a committed person should, according to the by-product approach to satisfaction, you will apply faith, hope and love to guarantee meaning and belonging that wells up out of your accepting life-style. You become a mature person in your relationships and that gives you better opportunities to influence other persons toward a satisfying life.

There is one more factor to the Basic Principle.

GOOD THINGS DON'T HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO REFUSE TO COOPERATE IN GETTING GOOD THINGS DONE


Accepting and maturing men and women don't want to be cruel even though we all are frustrated at times and tempted to become aggressive or apathetic. However, we are finite persons with limited time and resources to invest in a satisfying life. Therefore, we have not only the right but the responsibility to use our powers where they will accomplish the greatest good for ourselves, the people we support and for humankind. Be patient; don't write people off too soon. Offer distressed or difficult men and women time to understand, despite possibly negative life-themes and low expectations that you mean well. Work with them and discover ways to convince others that you do indeed work, love and play according to sound Logotherapy principles. Be very patient as you try to lead people to consistent satisfaction.

Nevertheless, as finite persons, times do come when we cannot invest still more effort in the activities of some people without depriving someone else of something vital. Some of the people we try to help, have hidden agendas or vested interests that are destructive to those you support. When that happens you should move on however regretfully, to use your time and energy for someone who will respond to your support and generosity. Even the deeply accepting Jesus said something about not casting one's pearls before swine, but then, he may have been having a bad day. We were forced to abandon Andy the musician who hates himself and everyone else. We had taken him in after he was released from prison, put him in our upstairs apartment without charging him rent and fed him for several months. Despite doing our best, he grew consistently angry and aggressive in drunken fits, swearing at and threatening to harm Roberta, our daughter and an elderly aunt, until Jard drove him away at pistol point in order to protect the family. We'd done all we could for Andy and was not going to have him abuse us in order to meet his selfish, distorted needs. Our good efforts simply could not continue for a man who was threatening violence against us and someone we love. We all have to be tough at times.
The Basic Principle is effective in normal relationships because the vast majority of people prefer:

PLEASURE TO PAIN IN THE PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PRESTIGE TO DEVALUATION IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE,
PURPOSE TO MEANINGLESSNESS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF LIFE.

Apply this principle in your relationships - Good things happen to people who cooperate with me and discover why it is so successful a method for relating to others, for enhancing your growth and influencing others to a fulfilling life-style.

MAKING YOUR LIFE COUNT

Our lifestyle psychology course NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST shows you How To Get People To Do What You Want And Thank You For It.

The only way to make reluctant persons let you win every pot at cards, take home every attractive lover or get the lion’s share of the money, is by cheating, bullying or stealing everything you want. You shall have to outwit, outrun or out-bluff the people you want to take advantage of. The major trouble with that deceptive approach is society develops its own ways of dealing with people like that. Unless you get out of town ahead of the mob coming with tar and feathers, moving every few months to new hunting grounds, life can get very painful. Of course you could take up free lance bank robbing or selling dope down by the elementary school -- after your company fires you, your kids run away from home and your spouse files for divorce.


IN THIS COURSE YOU WILL LEARN HOW TO:

• Identify the personality patterns that motivate yourself and other women and men.

• Consistently get inside the thought processes of the people you want to influence.

• Persuade other persons to tell you everything you want to know about anything.

• Identify the step by step progression of a successful interpersonal relationship.

• Master several powerful conflict avoidance and conflict control techniques.

• Use a refusal to cooperate as a request for additional information.

• Climb the cooperation ladder to consistent interpersonal success.

• Finalize agreements so there are fewer brush fires for you to fight.

MAKING YOUR LIFE COUNT

This course is about people and about succeeding or failing in life, since some degree of success and failure are the only real options that are open to us. It is written with the knowledge that neither power nor pleasure exists in a vacuum. Virtually everything good we do in life requires the cooperation of people in different ways. And every one of them has his or her own agenda that is personally important.

Therefore, you will have to overpower, out-skill, deceive, or persuade others before society will consistently allow you to share in the marbles, money, passionate lovers, prestige or promotions you want. Only in this way can you make your life count for something worthwhile.

Of course, few of the people who are succeeding are willing to share their hard-earned knowledge with you. Mentors are hard to find and they always want much in return for any help they offer.

The purpose of this course is to teach you how to predict the attitudes and activities of the men and women you must influence every day in order to keep your life successful. It also shows you how to influence their choices in ways they approve by using sound methods of personal effectiveness. You can do these things by learning and using powerful techniques developed by some very good psychiatrists and psychologists. These methods are unknown to most people, although professional therapists, consultants and social workers have been using them for decades with much success.

Most people struggle through life the best way they can, succeeding once in a while, but more often failing because they never learned how to consistently make good things happen when and where they are needed. They simply blunder along -- accepting whatever the luck of the draw offers them daily, never really taking charge of their relationships in a mutually rewarding manner that keeps people cooperating with them.

Many persons try to succeed by using the values, attitudes, expectations, and skills they chanced on in childhood. Unfortunately, in this age of relentless change, when power and authority are shared by more and more people, to depend on what you picked up as a youngster is a poor way to shape your life into a successful affair. In our conventional behavioral patterns many mistakes have been handed down from generation to generation. At home you were probably socialized not to ask embarrassing questions of your elders. At school you were expected to memorize the correct answers. And if you are like most people, you are still waiting for someone to ask the right questions so you can show what a good student you were. Unfortunately for your welfare, no one is ever going to ask them, since most of the answers you learned in school are no longer appropriate. Yet -- millions of men and women who would never imagine crossing the country by covered wagon instead of jet aircraft, who would never take some medicine man's snake-oil cure, try to succeed in life by using methods that were outdated a century ago. And then can’t understand why they aren't among the successful achievers.

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YOUR SOUL AND YOUR BELIEFS - LOGOTHERAPY FOR FULFILLMENT

For as long as humankind has left a written record, men and women have thought of themselves as having a soul -- or even as being a living soul who came out of the Cosmos in some mysterious manner. This crucial aspect of personhood is still perceived as the key element of our inner life by theologians, philosophers and most existential scholars -- often with the assumption that only creatures with self-introspective abilities can exist in an altered state even after death. Roberta can remember the grief she felt as a youngster when her parents explained that her badly wounded dog wasn’t going to be in heaven -- poor Tippy had no soul to carry on after his demise!

She was desolate as a child but obviously has matured to understand more clearly what theologians and philosophers mean when they speak of the soul as the central factor of human personality. Of course, most persons spend little or no time pondering how and why the soul originated in the complex creature-self or unified body/spirit personality humans have evolved to become. Unfortunately, a great many women and men fail to understand there are often choices we should make and service we must offer to others for nothing more rewarding than the health of our intangible but always active souls. The very perceptive Ernest Becker wrote;

It really doesn’t matter if we discover that our inner assumptions about human nature and the world, our self-awareness in language, art, laughter and tears, is built into ourselves genetically or socially. We still haven’t discovered the inner forces of evolution that have led to our character development in ways that no other mammal shares. But it is this development in a human mammal capable of introspection, that we still mean by the word ‘soul.’ The soul remains the mysterious life force for each person, with the inner dynamisms and pulsations of existence.

In other words, the soul is at the heart of our self-awareness, is the crucial element of the creature-self aspect of each personality. The soul is the seat of spiritual virtues, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices and through it humans yearn to make sense of life and love, of significance, rage, guilt and violence. This causes thoughtful men and women to ponder the purpose of their lives according to their values and expectations. Our ancestors always created superstitions, traditions and philosophies in order to understand life in a pre-scientific era and to rely on theologies and ideologies to justify what they planned to accomplish. Of course from our human beginnings on the Savannah of Africa, some women and men were open minded and generous while others were closed minded and grasping. Some people loved others and other persons seemed incapable of offering love or support to anyone beyond their own supporters. Obviously, this crucial aspect of life is what we are concerned with.

Earlier scientists, physicians and psychologists, who were themselves maturing beyond myths and superstitions to understand life and matter through scientific methods, assumed that while humans were often confused and conflicted, they would live more successful lives guided by scholarship than by worn down religious traditions and ideologies. Superstitious beliefs, they assumed, would soon be banished. Men and women would surely learn how to live without the myth of a supernatural God insulating them from reality. Fearful and illogical humans would choose to live in a rational manner because the scholars were pointing out their many idiosyncrasies and irrational decisions. Boy -- did the early scientists ever underestimate the staying power of subjective human expectations and beliefs! Jard sat beside Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square one day and debated the nature of his flight around the world from Singapore with a twenty year old member of the Flat Earth Society. The young woman insisted that he had actually flown around the rim of a plate shaped world! Since he had seen the curvature of the earth from thirty-five thousand feet, he was not persuaded by the charming if somewhat ideological girl. When teaching psychology at Olivet College, he once had several Creation Science true believing students walk out of a class session when he pointed out that the resistance microbes develop to anti-biotic medications is a form of evolution occurring before our eyes. The ideological youngsters had no intention of learning anything about science -- their minds were already closed to anything new unless it fit into their constricted world-view.

One major problem in psychology arose because that Freud and many of his contemporaries had imbibed deeply of the secular philosophy of Nihilism. This mind-set is the disastrous belief in disbelief, the assumption that all values are relative, that real politik comes out the barrel of a gun and the ordinary people should be used or even abused by the aristocratic elite that controls every nation. Nihilism is the wretched philosophy of meaninglessness that focused Germany’s aggressive attitude through five bloody wars, destroyed its peasant farmers through the Industrial Revolution and orchestrated six million additional victims during the Holocaust in less than a century. The mind set that Germany was superior to all other nations, that it had a divine right to dominate Europe, was embedded in its national anthem -- Deutsland Uber Alles -- ‘Germany above everything else.’

Humans have always been prone to violence in our relationships, as a brief reading of history, scripture or the Greek tragedies reveal very well, but our ancestors always understood that war and the sacrifice of their sons and the destruction of their homes and crops was evil and spiritually bankrupt. Warfare and heroism is far more glamorous and heroic at a distance than up close and bloody. It was very hard to convince a farmer that watching a band of pillaging horsemen abscond with his family’s winter food supply was some great boon to society in the long run. Only powerful aggressors who planned to personally benefit from slaughter have justified war. They still do, as they sacrifice ordinary men and women and their wealth in order to serve their nefarious purposes!

Only in the last few centuries have philosophers and theologians, usually in the service of narcissistic rulers, rationalized aggression as somehow beneficial to a society and blessed by God. Only recently have the spin doctors of America created a bloddy,war,relationships to justify rapine and raiding, of maiming and murder. The spin doctors of society understand that fear and greed always sell better than faith, hope and love, that mind-bending propaganda in an era of televised images can step by step seduce naïve people into virtually any kind of self-defeating behavior.