Regular commenter Sharon responded to my Gloom post below, and spurred some more thoughts.

Living overseas has made me much less optimistic about “the march of democracy/liberty.” I’m less certain that, as the Bush administration said quite a bit over the last few years, that liberty is a universal impulse.

I think there are several, equally strong, if not stronger impulses – perhaps none more corrosive than the desire to be told that the problems in one’s life are not one’s own fault, they’re somebody else’s.I may have mentioned this before, maybe not – so, around December 2001, I’m working at a tiny Washington wire service, my paychecks are bouncing, my career is going nowhere, thousands are dead in New York, anthrax is in the mail, I’m flabby, and I just have no idea what the hell I want out of life.

Depressed, frustrated, needing something to pick me up, I went to the “self-help” section of Borders, and looked for the most insanely optimistic believe-and-achieve nonsense I could find, because I yearned for a naïve confidence, rather than the “what’s the point?” gloom I was in. I picked out Tony Robbins.

It worked for me – I know there are folks out there for whom he’s not their cup of tea. I’ll spare you the sales pitch, but Robbins’ work is very big on positive thinking, but even more, on personal responsibility – “your life is what you make of it.” “You will never succeed if you accept excuses, or if you wait for someone else to give you what you want.” “The difference between the successful and the not successful is that the successful people just keep trying, when everything says they ought to give up.” And so on.

I changed my attitude, and my life changed quite a bit in a short period of time. Some of it was luck, but a lot of it was looking at my life and demanding better of myself, and refusing to accept excuses or look for scapegoats. Started working out, started freelancing more, started networking more… I stopped waiting for life to give me what I wanted.

(This isn’t to say Robbins or his book is necessary; it dawned on me after reading it that a lot of his messages are part of some people’s mental software. Some people never have to be taught any of this; some just inherently have this striving, I-can-do-it attitude. I suspect that the vast majority of supremely successful people have this stuff hard-wired into their personalities.)

I now sadly realize how rare this attitude is. I think the vast majority of people still have the attitude of sitting back, waiting and taking what life gives them, or believing that their problems are so big and difficult that they have no chance to overcome them.

Also, the attitude that “there’s nothing I can do about my problems because of X” – X being some outside force, real or imagined – is extremely common overseas. It may very well be the biggest distinction between the “American” attitude and those of other countries’.

Now I see that for a lot of people around the world, they’re deeply invested in the belief that there’s nothing that they can do to improve their lives, that all of their problems come from outside forces, that the deck is just inevitably stacked against them. Changing this worldview would force them to recognize their own failures, their own flaws, the opportunities missed and the hard work that’s required. It’s like those dealing with addicts say, “you can’t help them until they want to help themselves.”

And this goes to the root of a lot of things.

Why do people become jihadists? Probably a lot of reasons, but a big one is that your average Ahmed feels like his life has no meaning, no purpose; he has no direction, no prospects, no hope of a better future. Then some jihadist imam gives his life meaning – he was created for a purpose: to kill infidels, and to enjoy 72 virgins in Paradise.

Obviously, a huge divide in our political system is between those who say, “I can achieve my dreams, I just want government to get out of the way,” and those who say, “I have no hope of achieving my dreams without the government coming in and helping me.” And, conversely, those saying to others, “You cannot achieve your dreams without the government helping you.”

How much racial tension stems from the sense that, “I can’t get ahead because The Man will always keep me down?” or, conversely, “I can’t get ahead because the company will always promote some Affirmative Action hire instead of me”?

If you think about it, the mentality that “I’m helpless, there’s nothing I can do about my problems” might be the single biggest impediment to human progress.

On a related note, I was intrigued by a comment by “Pollster” on this blog:

At this year’s American Association for Public Opinion Research conference, data was presented on perceptions not of how the economy is doing, but whether it is getting worse or better. Republicans sometimes say it is getting worse, sometimes better, and that balances out over several years. Democrats consistently say it is getting worse every single month and have been saying so for several years.

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(We can speculate that Democrats will never believe that the economy is getting better until there is a Democrat in the White House.) Think about what it’s like, to be somebody who ALWAYS thinks things are getting worse, regardless of what you see around you. Talk about a mentality of “learned helplessness.”

The desire for a scapegoat is a powerful one; it is also probably the impulse that is the most significant obstacle between us and our dreams.

Cam: The world needs to get married. I’m always my wife’s scapegoat.

I can say that because my wife rarely reads this blog.

On a more serious note, what you’re describing with the Democrats and the economy isn’t scapegoat-ism, it’s delusion. They’re saying Republicans are to blame for a horrible economy… but the economy isn’t horrible at all.

Scapegoating would be me blaming Netflix for my lack of blogging because I’m constantly having to watch the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes I’ve ordered.