This is the vanguard of psychology research, as I understand. "Resiliency" is the buzzword.

It's called "Blaming The Victim", and I hope you can see why some would consider it a negative message.


Neuroscience disagrees. So do advertisers, obviously.

First, heliocentrism. Then, natural selection. Now, brain imaging.

It is disappointing to travel through scientific history always being as wrong as the great thinkers have proven to be.

After decades of very smart people with very expensive equipment looking very hard for some evidence that humans have control over the decisions they make, it is clear that science is incapable of detecting where the automatics end and the will begins. It all looks like automatics.

If true, it would mean that humans lose their exclusive claim to self-direction, and join the rest of animal life on the planet. If true, we don't get to blame. If true, we don't get to gloat.

The neuroscientists have declared their findings and given up on us, with most noting that if evolution takes over a hundred years to be accepted, then brain imaging will almost certainly take longer. Not in our lifetimes, they say. They've moved on to the next cool field of research: WHY we cling so desperately to the idea that we control what we think and do, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.


The question is not whether it can be done. The question is why it isn't done. You have your answer. Science has another. Compare and contrast.


Scientists might say, "We are reacting to our environment like every other living thing, all the time", instead.


Truth helps people, right?


How many companies can you name that are making a fortune from making and keeping poor people obese and obese people poor?


Nice, Mike! Since everyone is reposting faves, here's mine:

Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died

There. Right there. This is our biggest problem. We live in a culture that rewards self-victimization. I'm sorry, but I cannot think of anything more pathetic.

No wonder so many people are so messed up.

Food companies are ripping you off blind. How is this self-victimization? And how is this self-victimization being rewarded?

So you are saying that I have no choice but to do whatever the food companies tell me to do?

That's weird. I have a garden with tons of veggies and I raise my own chickens and ducks for eggs. I am not saying everyone can do that. But you are not forced to buy pop tarts just because the are there. It's still a choice.

PS - you explicitly used the word "victim" in your earlier post. I still do not understand how a patron of a grocery store is a victim. Just by existing are we all victims?

Are only poor people victims?

The food companies tell you to buy their stuff or become a farmer.

So, yes, apparently.

So then I DO have a choice? For example, I can grow much of my own stuff or I can go to a farmer's market. I can also buy fruits, veggies and meat at the store.

I still don't get how food companies are ripping people off. Are they overcharging for food? You made this statement, but to me it makes little sense.

I do think you are being awfully hard on this poor woman though. What do we *really* know about her? Not to mention the the reporter might easily have "puffed up" her assets to contrast them sharply with her letter poverty. We don't *know*, for example, what sort of car she drove. It might easily have been a used and economical Honda CR-V. Just calling her car a Sport Utility Vehicle does not imply she drove a brand-new enormous gas-guzzler. And "vacations" does not mean 3-week trips to Europe either. Maybe it means weekends at the beach, or a camping trip. I don't think there is anything the least bit wrong with a mother wanting to do things for her kids. I was a single mom and I took my son on vacations every year. We didn't spend fortunes, but I felt it was important to get away and see and do other things.

You seem to denigrate her seemingly nice apartment too. If she could pay the rent what is wrong with a nice homelife for your children? So much depends on the area of the country, or the country, where you live as well. I could rent a lovely 3-BR apartment in the Jacksonville, FL area (where my son is moving) for a monthly rent that would barely rent me a garage here in NJ.

I don't think MOST of us base our lifestyles on the idea that he might get laid off at any minute. Well maybe many of us do now in the current economic climate. Heck, I was just laid off myself - last day of work was May 31. But a couple years ago I don't think most people were thinking that way.

Making a nice life for your children doesn't hinge on an apartment in the suburbs, vacations, etc. If you have no savings and must go on welfare as soon as you lose your job, then you have been living above your means. We - and our two children - lived in a small, four room, three-story walk-up over a store in Queens. We pounded every penny into savings, my husband went to school after work, and eventually we were able to move up. But a lost job would not have meant welfare...not for a very long time. And we had a wonderful family life because we gave our kids ourselves, not things.

HappyLC,
I think the key to your post is the phrase, 'If you have no savings....' Who cares how you live or where you live if your choices and discipline make it possible to save. Anything that interferes with that is what causes problems.

A house is not savings. Not if it has a mortgage you won't be able to afford. Even mutual funds are not savings - sorry to say. Keeping most of your savings in CDs, I guess that would be safe. But there has to be that SOMETHING that keeps you afloat in desperate times.

While it's a good point that we learn many things in life, the fact is that if you don't know you have a problem you aren't making an effort to fix it. Or better, if you think that your problem is X, you don't dedicate any time to figuring out how to change how you do Y.

Subway is allegedly healthy and here we have whole grains, a little meat and cheese, fresh vegetables, how bad can it be? True, the soda that usually gets bought with it is a problem but hey, if everybody drinks sodas / eats fast food / etc. and many of those whom I know well are quite skinny despite that, then that does not seem like the problem. What would we eat at home? Whole grains, a little meat, some veggies?

Obesity is really counterintuitive when you try to link it with food. I can eat gigantic fried chuck burger patties even with cheese or a fatty sauce and, depending on the cycle and my body's whim, lose weight on that, plus coffee with heavy cream and so on. On the other hand I can literally starve on whole grain pasta and store yogurt, granola bars and cans of slim-fast, and lose nothing or more likely gain it, not to mention doom myself to an inevitable near-future of a 'see-food' diet. Who would think?

All we hear from marketing -- which tells us more about what the government says than the government ever has, actually making the situation worse -- is that what's killing us is the fat in foods, our lack of exercise, and our problems with laziness that getting the first down to nearly nothing and the second up to really-something is so hard for people.

I see this as going over well for cultural reasons; a majority chunk of the population is raised to believe that we were born sinful and it's our fault God-Jr got killed, we suck! We have to be sorry, constantly sorry, constantly apologizing, for anything resembling "human behavior" since humans are inherently evil. Well, you take a whole culture that is brainwashed into this pattern and you just tell them hey, it's your fault for being so imperfect, and they buy it, and not a lot of critical thinking goes on beyond that point for most people. They're getting fat on the same food that people around them are still skinny on. It appears to be that they eat 'too much' or exercise 'not enough' and bottom line is they just aren't good enough. It's personal, psychological, not science.

(I might add that as a mystic I'm a jesus freak so I'm not knocking religion above, I'm merely pointing out that these frameworks of dogma likely have some psychological side effects and this may be one of them.)

I didn't cook until I did lowcarb. I didn't have time, I wouldn't have cooked things that seemed much different than what I could buy out somewhere anyway, I knew zero about it, it created a big mess that was more of the time issue than the cooking, it required tons of planning or stuff went back in the fridge, it heated the house up in summer, and when I did cook at home it was usually pasta which I thought was healthier than stuff with meat. I repeatedly "paced" people I lived with for food detail intake and still got fatter, they didn't; so it didn't seem like the food. Learning to cook when the whole subject was just a massive frustrating pain in the ass and did not seem like it would seriously improve things, seemed pointless. Besides which when you don't do something much AT ALL you tend to lack not only the habits and the know-how but the equipment as well. Everything in my kitchen except dish/silverware and one pot and a flat grill pan, I bought after starting lowcarb. I didn't have seasonings more than a couple, and I never had the stuff in the recipes you were supposed to like broths and herbs and such. If you're going to cook 'real food' you have to gradually DO it and build up the raw materials, machines and cookware and knives and more for actually pulling it off.

Not until I started really reading about lowcarb did I realize I HAD to learn to cook because stuff that wasn't stuffed with grains, fructose, or chems was so difficult to get at a drive-through window.

People are ignorant. The media (and gov't especially via school) puts decades of effort into making them that way. That doesn't make any person less responsible for themselves. But it does make it a lot more understandable.

PJ