What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [113]
In America, slavery was once part of the southern way of life. It was believed to be constitutional, and southerners felt their sense of self violated when abolitionists tried to take it away. Yet slavery is a terrible institution. Wife beaters and their battered spouses have a way of life, one that is also terrible. Being a way of life does not make something right or good or benign.
Heavy drinking is a bad way of life. It destroys the individual and those he loves. There is nothing to be said in its favor. These are old saws. But what is new is the emerging fact that individuals cannot do all that much about this way of life once it has taken hold. After a lifetime of trying, about one-third of alcoholics escape it. One-third escaping such a debilitating condition is a real accomplishment, but it is the other two-thirds that constitute the major tragedy. Drugs (with the possible new exception of naltrexone), psychotherapy, AA, inpatient treatment, and willpower all show only the slightest victories—at best—for that two-thirds.
When a destructive institution like slavery or wife beating will not be overthrown by the individuals it most hurts, we are justified in appealing to something more powerful than the self to overthrow it. Just as there is a higher morality than individual choice that makes slavery and wife beating wrong, so too with alcoholism. Few of our problems cry out more clearly for social control.
Social control has been tried, you say, and it failed. I agree: Prohibition, although it decreased alcohol-related illness, was a tremendous failure, and I do not propose reviving it. But how much alcohol is consumed and the rate of alcoholism are very sensitive to less-sweeping social control. Liquor taxes, for example, are low. They have not kept up with inflation over the last forty years. It is estimated that doubling the present federal tax would cut cirrhosis deaths by six thousand per year, to say nothing of the number of lives it would save on the highways. Reducing the number of liquor stores and bars, restricting advertising, raising age limits, and curtailing profits from the sale and manufacture of alcohol would all cut heavy drinking.31 When individuals are powerless to change a problem of the magnitude of alcoholism, it falls finally to the society to act.
IT HAS become fashionable to blame alcoholism on the way your parents raised you or on other misfortunes of childhood. The very unchangeability of alcoholism, in this view, testifies to the power that childhood events exert over adult life. In fact, all of the problems of adulthood examined in this book have been attributed to such events. In the next and final part, we look at whether your childhood exerts such a hold on your life today. At stake is nothing less than whether you are a prisoner of the past or are free to change.
PART FOUR
Growing Up—At Last
Freud considered that after age 45, psychoanalysis could do nothing for a neurotic: Jung was convinced that 45 was roughly the period of life when its immensely important second development began, and that this second period was concerned with matters which were, in the broadest sense, religious.
Many people are put off by this attitude. They want nothing to do with religion and are too lazy or too frightened to accept the notion that religion may mean something very different from orthodoxy. They attach themselves to the notion that Man is the center of all things, the highest development of life, and that when the individual consciousness