Guilty As Charged

"Guilt is like a bag of fuckin' bricks. All ya gotta do is set it down."
-- John Milton (The Devil's Advocate)

I've been thinking a lot lately about guilt. I've come to the conclusion that it is an utterly useless, but quintessential, human emotion. We're bombarded with it from our earliest days on earth, it seems. In an effort to raise us to be upstanding future citizens, or suitable carbon copies of themselves, parents use guilt as their primary weapon of choice. Parental guilt works on two levels, conscious and unconscious. On the conscious level, our mothers and fathers use guilt openly, usually to accomplish some obvious objective, like picking up our toys or stopping us from murdering our siblings.

On the unconscious level, parents pass their character flaws, fears, hopes, and resentments on to their children without even knowing it. They do so in too many ways to count. One parent might make their son or daughter their best friend and confidant because of an unhappy marriage, thereby robbing them of a responsibility-free childhood. Another may do it by berating their child for being too heavy or too shy. Another may simply abandon their child, financially or emotionally. All of the above involve parents selfishly putting their own needs first and instilling guilt in their child as a result. Kids end up feeling that if they do x, y, or z they will be loved, that parental love is conditional and can be taken away. Love and security thus become shifting sands, which makes for quite the anxious Johnny and Sally. And it's a vicious cycle. Kids get it from their parents, who got it from their parents, who got it from their parents, and on and on. Familial guilt is an ancestral curse that can't be lifted without a conscious awareness of its operation in the mind and a hell of a lot of work.

But that's for the therapists to sort out. What interests me at the moment is how childhood guilt negatively manifests itself in adult personalities and relationships. When you start to look for it, you quickly come to see how pervasive guilt is in everyday life. How nearly everybody is both its wielder and its victim. As an adult, guilt takes a new form, having metastasized over time into anger, pessimism, depression, or feelings of inadequacy or incompetence. Nothing's ever good enough, no matter how much a person accomplishes, how many friends they have, how much money they make, or how far they've gotten in life. If you always think you did something wrong, or that there is something inherently wrong with you, how are you supposed to feel good? And so we get people making bad life decisions. Jumping into relationships to feel complete or fulfilled. Turning to booze or drugs to numb internal anguish. Divorces, broken relationships, depression. Not pretty.

When you bother to look, you see guilt everywhere. At work, it's criticism that's not constructive or well-intended, but rather, the kind that's excessive and mean-spirited and designed to tear a person down so the purveyor can feel better about himself or herself. In a church or mosque, religious leaders use the ole GNG (Guilt N' God) to get you to pray more, give more money, vote a certain way, or in extreme cases, engage in a murderous crusade or jihad against an enemy who is, you guessed it, GUILTY! of all kinds of transgressions conjured up by those very same religious leaders.

In the military, you've got all kinds of behavioral conditioning going on from the earliest days of boot camp. There's no way to put human beings in life and death situations and get them to kill strangers without it. So they appeal to "duty," "honor," "sacrifice," "patriotism," and "pride," to attract recruits. Here's an excerpt from the Marine Corps website:

Who are these young men and women who choose to put others before themselves? They are selfless individuals - optimistic, and filled with a sense of duty to themselves and their country. They choose to follow in the footsteps of those who came before them, and to defend both our nation and its honor.

Can you see the guilt working its magic in there? What they're really saying is "We're better than the average person because we're serving the nation and they're not. We're willing to risk our lives for the good of the country, and they're not. They're guilty for benefiting from our blood and our sacrifice without lifting a finger. Those who serve with us are NOT guilty because they are willing to die for a cause. Be one of us and you too will not be guilty, you too will be honorable." I'm not picking on the Marines. Every branch's website has a similar theme. And I'm not slighting the military by pointing this out, either. All I'm saying is that the military, like other groups, uses guilt to control people. I'm no history professor, but I'm sure the same is true for every military power that ever existed in history, from the Greeks, to the Romans, to the British, to Napoleon, to Hitler, to the Chinese and Soviet Armies. There is no denying that guilt is a great human motivator.

In fact, if you read any of Bin Laden's or Al-Zawahiri's writings or speeches, you'll see that guilt is at the very heart of Al Qaeda's philosophy. It's dripping with it. Islamism mixes guilt with moral relativism and a bastardized interpretation of the Muslim duty of jihad, to glorify -- and attempt to justify -- the mass murder of innocent people. In my view, there is no clearer demonstration of the destructive power of guilt than the suicide-bomber and our ill-advised invasion of Iraq. Distilled to its core, the use of guilt is really an appeal to self-hatred. You're making someone feel bad about something they've done or haven't done in order to goad them into doing something you want. To me, appeals to jihad and patriotism are two sides of the same guilty coin. Any time the goal is killing, you can bet your ass that guilt has its finger on the trigger.

People are even using the PLANET to make us feel guilty. We're on to inanimate objects now. Apparently, we're fucking the Earth up with our carbon emissions, strip-mining, and cowfarts. (Okay, that last one is NOT on us.) We need to do something NOW, they say. We need to "save the planet for our children and their children," says Big Al (big props on the Nobel Prize btw, Al.) So now, we're also supposed to feel guilty towards people who haven't even been born yet! Where does it end? Brief environmental aside: The irony is, the Earth is going to be just fine no matter what we do. It's the human race that's going to be fucked. Mercury, Venus, and Mars are future versions of where we're going. They're totally deserted and completely uninhabitable. But the planets themselves are still there, aren't they? They did just fine, and so will our Mother Earth, long after we've microwaved ourselves into oblivion.

Guilt is so deeply-ingrained in us, that we don't even know we're using it or being subjected to it. So, as an experiment, play a little game with yourself this week. Listen closely to your conversations with your parents, your siblings, your friends, your lovers, your exes, and your pets. Follow the bouncing guilt ball. Pay attention to how our politicians are using guilt in their debates and election campaigns. Make no mistake, politicians are the Jedi Masters of guilt-mongering and deflecting. You'll see that every damn word out of their mouth is blaming or attacking another person or party for something they did wrong, or something they didn't do that they should have done. You're bad, I'm good. We know what we're doing, you don't. We deserve your money and your votes, not them.

Once you've heard all that guilt, you'll probably want to down a stiff drink. Afterwards, maybe you'll decide that you don't need to respond to people's guilt trips anymore. Maybe you'll conclude that you don't need to attack to get what you want out of people. If enough people do this, maybe we'll start having healthier relationships and just maybe, a little less conflict in the world.

So, like Pacino said, put down that bag of fuckin' bricks.

In conclusion, I'd just like to say that if you thought this entry was too touchy-feely or presumptuous on my part, or just plain unsatisfying, I'm very sorry. I didn't meant for that to happen. I feel really badly about it. I'll try to do better next time, I promise.