It seems to me that practically, learned helplessness–the result of completely unmanageable trauma–amounts philosophically to the claim that Nothing is Allowed.
As I have said, sensations lead to images that together lead to emotions that “surface” as thoughts.
If we define Nihilism as the idea that everything is allowed because nothing matters, then does its common ancestry with learned helplessness not become obvious?
And I think this is where we can find the psychosocial origins of something like Satanism. Blaming the victim, as embodied in sacrifice, is very old and occurs in many if not all cultures, if we go back far enough. But consciously subverting an existing religion is only found, as far as I know, in rebellion to Christianity. The Black Mass is a mockery of the “real” mass.
But imagine having your psyche destroyed in the name of Christian theology. Whatever your mind may be thinking, your body is telling you that life is hopeless, and nothing you can possibly do will save you from the shame and humiliation inflicted on you when very young, which remain present daily realities indefinitely.
Is it not easy to flip from all of one thing to all of another? As I have said before, when it comes to continuums, there is often less distance between the dichotomous poles than between the fringes and the middle. You flip from nothing is allowed to everything is allowed, and from a coerced embrace of Christianity to a chosen embrace of its polar opposites, in all ways.
When you have been fucked up by fucked up people, nuance is very hard. It’s very hard to say a little of this and a little of that, but I mostly don’t like this third thing. One mania leads to another mania. Rigidity leads to rigidity, and is most comfortable with rigidity.
This is why I really believe that ALL human progress needs to begin with developing effective technologies for teaching voluntary deep relaxation that we deploy generally. Things like Autogenics and Progressive Relaxation work well for mostly normal people, but people with trauma need something better.
Kum Nye is intended for that purpose, but even though I’ve been doing it a while, I honestly am not sure I have even begun using it properly. Tarthang Tulku developed it for the messed-upness in the 1970’s, which of course was vastly worse than what he grew up with in Tibet. We are several levels past that now. Phones and TV have both suspended many people in a waking sleep of very deep nature; and phones, TV, work–especially mothers working outside the home– moving around the country and many other factors have diluted parent-child bonding in some ways, and made the connection unhealthily close in others.
I will say again that all of our problems have solutions. Our worst problem is and remains that the “solutions” being pushed are making everything worse, and the lunatics pushing them have seemingly insulated themselves from the calls of reason and basic decency.