Determinism and Learned Helplessness

“…we enslave people in poverty because we give people everything, we make it easy for them to live in poverty and at the same time -- it's the combination of the two -- at the same time the leaders will say, ‘You can't make it, you can't make it.’…”—Glenn Beck

I was raised in the kind of poverty that Beck was talking about. My mother raised my sister and me on nothing more than a miniscule amount of child support and a couple hundred dollars of food stamps every month. And even then, she was constantly under the threat of having that taken away if she dared get a job to try to support us, not to mention the threat that the state government, which had retained legal custody of my sister and me after a bitter custody fight in which we were abused by our male genetic donor (though it wasn’t even investigated by the county we lived in, much less proven), coming in to take us out of our home if Mom stepped out of line.

When I was twelve, my male genetic donor* (who I will not refer to as Dad), lost all rights to visitations, except for those supervised by an agent of the local child illfare service—who sided with mgd.* This agent, as well as the child illfare agent in charge of our case, began telling me about then that, as long as I lived with Mom, I couldn’t get a job without having our family benefits cut by the same amount as the money I made. I don’t know if it was true or not, but I believed it then.

Like any kid in such a terrible situation, I decided that, if Mom wasn’t going to work to support our family, I certainly wasn’t willing to earn money that would be taken from me to make up for what the government so generously gave us.

If I’d stayed in the path that the child illfare and income redistributionist pukes had set my feet upon, I’d be just another mindless drone voting to put more slop in the trough. Like I said in another Friday Philosophy post a while back, I chose differently.

It just took me about five years to realize that I could.

Between the time mgd* lost visitation rights and the time I met the best counselor I’d ever had, I became more and more bitter. I felt helpless, and decided that, if nothing I could do could change my circumstances, then I’d just do nothing. It was easier. However, when I was seventeen, the juvenile courts appointed a new counselor to my sister and me. That counselor diagnosed me with a condition I’d never heard of: depression caused by learned helplessness.

I mean, I knew I was depressed. I even knew why—or thought I did. I thought I was depressed because I was stuck. That counselor, may the blessings of God always follow him all the days of his life, taught me that I wasn’t stuck (or at least, soon wouldn’t be), that I’d only been told I was by people in authority over me, and frightened and browbeat into believing it.

Much like the American people—specifically inner city blacks who vote Democrat—have been told that they’re stuck, there’s nothing they can do about it, and have been browbeat and frightened into believing that the only way they can help themselves is to keep voting for those who keep telling them they’re stuck: the Democrats.

Witness the lines outside government offices for handouts in the Great Government Mortgage Payment Program: when asked why they were standing in line, the people (always black) said that they were there for the money. The Obama money. The money that their savior had promised them. They didn’t know where it was coming from, or why it was coming. They just knew it was there for them. Because they were there for it. Because Obama promised it to them. No, they didn’t have to do anything for it—there was nothing they could do, other than stand in line and wait for it. Because they were poor. And black. And the government said so.

Beck is entirely correct. As was Franklin with his take on the matter. These people are still slaves.

And it is disgusting the way their masters have them believing in their own helplessness.