Gluttons for Guilt and Shame

guilt

ɡilt/

noun

1.

the fact of having committed a specified or implied offense or crime.

“Guilt is the interest paid on a debt you never owed in the first place.” That was my grandfather’s response to a question during a chess game over five decades ago. “Regret and remorse are necessary to our repentance…but not guilt”, he said, “total waste of time and effort”. Naturally, I didn’t believe him. After all, I was 8 years old and knew everything by that time. Checkmate!

As the years slipped by, and him long dead, I've changed my mind. Gramps was right. Guilt is the bastard child of regret and remorse. How else can you explain criminal, psychological, political and religious guilt as powerful motivators for good and evil? How else can you explain the ravages of ‘shame’? Guilt is the broken record of conscience. It goes round and round stuck in a groove between regret and remorse. Worse, it is often confused with having a conscience. Mahatma Gandhi identified his seven deadly sins of conscience that should instill shame from guilt:

Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Knowledge without character
Politics without principle
Commerce without morality
Worship without sacrifice.”
― Mahatma Gandhi (Young India, 22 October 1925)”

Guilt is not as unendurable as grief. In fact, guilt can become like a comfortable old sweater to keep out the destitute cold of grief. Guilt can become a badge of honor for the criminal, the lunatic, the politician and the saint. Voltaire believed that “Every man is guilty of the good he did not do.” Guilt and grief arise from the same soil, like the weeds of pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint. Nietzsche thought all these mental weeds led to guilt through religion. Churchmen think otherwise. Stop regretting what you did and do something about it. Stop wallowing in your guilt, they preach. As millennial-philosopher-theologian, Matthew Bixby, said recently, "God loves you because God IS Love, and that love is imperishable and inalienable. You can’t take it away even if you wanted to." Regret and remorse should lead to grace and forgiveness, not to guilt. Guilt leads a loneliness that can only be broken by love, in God’s case that is Love itself. But this is new theology. It’s a theology that Teilhard de Chardin would have welcomed.

Perhaps that explains the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland after a voter referendum altered the constitution to legalize homosexual marriages. This is the country dubbed by Pope Saint John Paul II as ‘the most Catholic country in the world’. What happened? Guilt played on the conscience of both sides in the debate. Catholic education in Ireland was predicated on sexual guilt, and, therefore, became indoctrination instead of enlightenment.

Homosexual marriage advocates, on the other hand in a Shakespearean irony, based their cause on the shame driven guilt of extensive Irish clergy homosexual pedophilia. The case of Father Brendan Smythe was so notorious that it brought down the coalition Republic of Ireland government in 1994. Numerous priests and bishops, complicit in his pedophilia either actively or by neglect, were defrocked in the widespread scandal. A cogent argument can be made that the recent Irish voter approval of homosexual marriages was, in fact, a guilt-ridden vote of disapproval of their Catholic clergy. That vote was a much an act of revenge for the national shame inflicted as from any other factor.

Jewish guilt is another matter. It comes in two flavors; cultural and religious. Object and predicate of many ‘borscht-belt’ jokes, cultural Jewish guilt has its temples in the media capitals of New York and Los Angeles. You can say that if you're Jewish, but you’re anti-Semitic if you are not Jewish when you observe it. Religious Jewish guilt goes back to Moses, who even as he lay dying laid a huge guilt trip on a whole people theologically:

"Well I know how defiant and stiff-necked you are: even now, while I am still alive in your midst, you have been defiant toward the Eternal; how much more, then, when I am dead! ... For I know that, when I am dead, you will act wickedly and turn away from the path that I enjoined upon you, and that in time to come misfortune will befall you for having done evil in the sight of the Eternal whom you vexed by your deeds" (Deuteronomy 31:27, 29).

Oy vey! Who knew?

Purely psychological guilt, with equally disastrous consequences, works like this.

"I've got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn't do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing." — D.D. Barant (Dying Bites (The Bloodhound Files, #1))

Psychological guilt is the most common in the human experience because it is the most obvious. Parents feel guilty they did not spend enough time with their gambling-drug-porn addicted children. When one such child was, Elliot Rodger, spoiled brat UCSB student who went on a shooting rampage because he didn’t know how to get laid. His parents assuaged their guilt by giving him a BMW, but he still couldn't get a girl. So, he killed six people and injured 14 more. The parents, exploited by local liberals, of course, blamed Elliot’s guns. The guns are guilty. Shame on those naughty guns! Still another college student feels guilty that she got a scholarship to escape her ghetto home leaving her siblings to be ruined by poverty, disease and crime. Millions of cases can be cited. All have one thread in common, regret, remorse, guilt, shame and finally futility.

Diversity is guilt in lipstick. Soon, thanks to Billary, genital politics will be a sexually transmitted disease. Political Correctness guilt has propelled the recent social justice fetish de jour menu; affirmative action, quotas, head start, bussing, diversity, wage inequality, war the 1%, suppression of offensive speech, trigger warnings, and the latest, war on white-privileged-males. All of these arose out of regret infecting remorse and falling into the grave of guilt.

Tom’s shoes have a little tag announcing their guilty motivation to donate a pair of shoes free to ‘a poor child’. All that’s missing is a soundtrack of violins. Black rapper performers are permitted to use the word ‘nigger’, but self-imposed guilt prevents any white person from even writing the word out being auto-condemned by guilt and reference the “N-word”. Then there’s the “C-word”, and the “F-word, and soon every letter of the alphabet will be on the Gluttons for Guilt list of forbidden words. This makes the Vatican’s index of forbidden books look like a libertarian library by comparison.

Black racism married to white political guilt and shame not only elected Barack Obama, but it set off a wave of self-censorship that would upchuck Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and John Locke. Instead of ending discrimination and racism propagating white guilt only intensifies them as many sober black Americans have protested to no avail. Guilt is a political career for ‘minority’ activists. The Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton are more than sufficient proof of that truth.

Who is responsible for all the miseries of the world? Why racist, old, white, Christian men with oil stock portfolios, of course. Get rid of them and all our inequality problems will be solved. Climate will no longer change. No one will ever be offended again. Children will no longer be indoctrinated believing their life is dictated by some super-fairy floating in the heavens beyond Pluto. Women will be paid the same as men regardless of competence or ability. We can marry whoever we choose even across species, and with how many permutations of partners as we please. All debate will cease. Procreation will be outside the womb and entirely controlled by the state. Women will be at last free of the fetus parasite within them. “God is dead and everything is permissible” just as Fredrich Nietzsche observed. All this is attainable through propagating the guilt and shame of angry, old, white, racist, Christian men until they are all exterminated by liberal, atheist, diverse, tyrants of truth. Do you hear that cacophonic soundtrack in the background of the digital device you call your life? It's only our symphony of regret, remorse, and guilt. Gluttony is merely the conductor. Shame is just the adagio. It's the music of our DNA.

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann

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