Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a complicated figure, but one that I admire in some ways.  One of those ways relates to his declaration that, in regard to the political and business interests that demonized and despised him, he was proud to “welcome their hatred”.   I find this inspirational and liberating.  The country was broken, badly broken, and those who still believed they were entitled to their depraved individualism and obliged only to their own greed, power and dominance needed to be shown as culpable and then converted or restrained.

When I was attending school to become a psychiatric corpsman for the Navy, one of the instructors described our cornerstone concept and professional aspiration as “striving to treat our patients with ‘brutal compassion’”.  Yes, establishing both an environment and a personal relationship that is non-judgmental, safe, and nurturing is vital, but it’s also the first and usually easier part.  Telling defensive or fragile clients what they need, but don’t want to hear, is tougher, and can spur drama.

Post Navy, I got called in for counseling while working on the personality disorder unit of a for-profit, corporate hospital.  “Your job is to listen and validate feelings”, they instructed.  I responded, “Let me re-phrase.  My job is to foster a dependence on the hospital?”  My transfer was then a mutual decision.  That corporation collapsed a few years later due to increased reimbursement scrutiny and criminal charges.  I’m proud of that stand I took.   My young family was living paycheck to paycheck with two daughters in diapers.  If a transfer hadn’t been agreeable, well… lots of ramen for a while.

Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”  For many here in Utah, salary is up-ante'd by temple worthiness, social access and eternal living standards. That's simply the local tribe, almost everywhere, politics, religion and business commonly demand duplicity, willful ignorance, jaded rationalization, or at least cowardice, in the name of profit, pragmatism, getting along, and not having to choose between real food and baby diapers. But that doesn’t mean we should acquiesce to those demands without some soul searching, or at least looking for a middle way. 

Barry Goldwater is in my head now, “Extremism, in the name of liberty, is no vice.”  Well, yes it is.  Extremism in the name of anything is a vice.  Moral courage however, through criticism, or determined recitation of facts and ideals, or peaceful protest, or civil disobedience, or artistic provocation, or simply refusing to participate, would likely be enough to really change the world for the better if enough of us could rise to them and risk the consequence.

I’ve said previously that art is personal and cultural psychotherapy.  It is, but psychotherapy is not one thing.  It’s not one conversation on a couch, or one cathartic melt-down, or a single discipline, or epiphany, or therapist, or medicine, or outcome.  It’s is usually not even about getting fixed.  It’s about improvement, both subjectively and objectively.  “I’m broke, depressed, alienated from my family and fixated on losing my hair”, can become, “I’ve got my finances together, I’m less stressed out, I reached out to my family, but I just can’t stop thinking about my hairline.”  It’s not all "fixed", but its better, and can become better still.

It's a curious paradox.  I'm advocating individual insight, effort, and fortitude against the perils, corruptions and empires of individualism.  Next quote to pop up, “No longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from”.  Jewel will now be in my head for the rest of the day while I paint "yoked" figures.