GUILT, VIOLENCE & MONEY

Guilt is the glue that holds society together. It’s how we hold each other accountable, by prohibitions, laws, inhibitions, judgments, and punishments. It’s all very familiar and historical.

Yet there isn’t one positive emotional vector in all of that. Love is what we wish would hold us together, but it doesn’t work very well yet. We’re still amateurs at it because we handle the intrinsic conflict in intimacy so badly, primitively.

Guilt is how we built society. We traumatize each other to follow the same principles of behavior. Job, from the Bible, demonstrates perfectly how we expect life to inflict suffering in the name of God or whatever is deigned good. Willingness to suffer is the foundation of guilt. We expect we will suffer as a part of loving each other "for better or worse."

Guilt is the childish way of binding people together to the same purposes and behaviors. It doesn’t require any skill in managing all the variable needs, demands, and contradictions of normal experience. Children experience guilt perfectly, as though they were built for it. They leap into personal sacrifice for the sake of loving those they can’t do without. As one might expect, all psychological symptoms have guilt at the core of perpetual suffering.

Society is structured the way that children would structure it. Pontificating self-righteous priests of earlier times, who shouted fire and brimstone, thought that they were unique and lofty, when they were only imitating and formalizing what they had learned as children, to suffer

punishment as a part of caring for others, and preach it to others.

And yet we must give guilt its due. It has produced what we call "civilization," which has come to mean, most recently, the absence of mayhem and murder as a regular diet. Guilt pulled us out of the hideous madness of enjoying violence. Now we inflict it mostly on those outside of our clan. We have come to believe that most of the world is inferior to us, and if we don't dominate them they become extremely dangerous. Of course doing so makes them dangerous.

Eons ago, imagining ourselves to be the chosen few, outsiders, and sometimes even insiders were useful for sacrifice to appease terribly self-centered, jealous, punitive, and violent gods. Guilt made us abandon this violence as an intrinsic part of our relationship to God, something we

originally believed was essential to the purity of the spirit.

All earlier forms of society seemed to have regarded it essential, like when kings sacrificed their own blood. Instead of differentiating humanity from animals as nature obviously intended for us, blood sacrifice and cannibalism merged us with them—and with each other—rendering torture and murder a holy event. Animal predation of other humans was emulated with relish and vigor. In some ways, we haven’t stopped committing blood sacrifice, most typically at times of war and peacetime violent acts.

We also continue to identify ourselves as predators because we eat meat, while for other animals predation is instinctive and defines their relationship with everything. It describes only our diet and our unnatural proclivity to

violence, particularly against our own species.

Guilt produced the rule of law, which literally means law-enforcement. The institution of law was an attempt to mediate the impulsive and self-serving decisions of the king and his nobles. To replace these marauding cutthroats, law producing people defined their life by prohibitions and

permissions, centering authority in aristocratic humans called policemen, prosecutors, and judges who pontificate morality—whom we believed perfectly expressed our sentiments. That created the rule of principle that has proved to be more powerful and repressive than the king had ever been—battening down the hatches of possibility and opportunity with prohibitions, tollgates, and regulations.

The implicit purpose of these regulations and policemen is that we must curb our own violent tendencies, on the premise that we will never be able to commit to non-violence as a species. In other words, we have a seriously self-deprecating view of ourselves.

Guilt has an older brother we call shame, a primitive, emotional precursor to its more-esteemed relative. Shame expresses a relationship to authority in which there is no differentiation between the person and crime, expressed perfectly by the king’s command "off his head" without any further deliberation, as if to offend the king deprives one of life. Shame is paramount in all forms of class society in which people are differentiated into castes.

If someone commits an offense against hierarchical decorum, shame deprives them of any right to dignity. Thus, the shameful person throws stones at themselves along with the crowd. People who feel huge amounts of shame spend their whole lives carrying it upon themselves like a badge of inferiority, which in spite of their protestations of innocence has the character of expectation. Shame is the emotion of being "lesser than." The shameful person is the bowing servant or the genuflecting supplicant.

On the other hand, guilt is responsible for our internalizing judgment, which has deeply supported the emergence of individuality. The price we have paid for our rebellion from the unquestioned authority of superiors is to

become tied up in knots of self-condemnation. This has produced two well-known results, depression and oppression.

There’s a surprise for us when we examine these parts of human nature. Guilt and other so-called feelings like depression are not emotions. Guilt is a set of attitudes, postures, and prohibitions that squash emotion to produce

what we call depression, inside of which nothing can be felt or enjoyed. Depressed people look like they’re feeling sad. But they aren’t. We feel very sad when we look at them. If we get emotionally involved with them we work much harder than they do. Meanwhile they’re just feeling

emotional emptiness, an abandonment of themselves inflicted initially by someone else, but for the rest of their lives perpetuated by themselves. That’s part of what makes suicide possible.

Guilt also produces an internal judge constantly berating our performance in thought, word, and deed—disallowing, drowning out any other thoughts or feelings. Clearly, such excessive conscience, and the depression it creates are very oppressive to the human spirit.

In spite of modern efforts to moderate guilt, it permeates every aspect of experience. If we don't experience guilt we often feel rudderless, so we splash it over everything as if it belonged to life, when it’s only an instrument, and a very blunt one. But it’s not an end in itself as we’ve made it. It is not the judge of everything.

Guilt reduces the complex determination of relative value and the assessment of variable harm and good in any situation into the dunce response of right and wrong. It allows, even encourages, our pretense to believe that life choices are arrived at by allowing gross sweeping, un-thought-out generalities to define the sensitive vagaries of specific events. Guilt pretends that good and evil always stand distinctly apart and require an aggressive choice of one or the other.

When truthfully good and evil always stand side-by-side in any and everything we do, imagine, think, or feel. They are inseparable twins, partners, and possibilities of any act or intention. There is not a moment in our life when we aren’t doing both good and evil. What is good for us is not so good for somebody else, is an example of this complex interplay of competing elements.

We are loathe to learn how to manage the process of making judgments by ourselves because the first person we need to understand is ourselves, that is before we can begin to bring that same quality of comprehension to others. We need to try to understand the good and bad of our own lives, immensely enlarging the definition of good and bad.

For instance, we need to ask ourselves how our habits and beliefs enhance our experiences, and how they thwart and prevent them from evolving in their most creative and useful ways. What frightens and depresses us? When we answer questions like that for ourselves, we might be able to do it meaningfully for others, bringing a quality of sympathy and understanding that improves their lives. Guilt squashes the asking of these questions.

What’s more, guilt is the principal instrument by which bureaucracy, the agent of the mob we call "the majority," rules. Groups of any kind dominate us much more easily if they can determine whether we’re good or bad, most

particularly when we agree with them.

In the struggle of coping with life, only individuals can bring the quality of careful examination to the table of discernment—what guilt wants to turn into an instant and violent judgment. Only individuals can assert “get lost” to

guilt’s powerful desire to erase complexity with impulsive conclusions. Only one person at a time is able to insist that present circumstance—whatever it may be—requires careful processing and represents a complexity of interests rather than a simplistic good and bad.

We’re all amateurs at asserting ourselves in the face of guilt. It’s no wonder. We’ve never made doing it a central focus in our education. In fact we believe that conflict—in this case the conflict of competing needs and desires—is a social sin. That to participate in it is harmful, particularly in

relation to those we love, even though intimacy is where conflict most often occurs, and is most often needed in order to negotiate new understanding.

We also operate—pretend—as if everybody knows how to negotiate difference, when in fact what we do is turn a blind eye or an accusing finger toward the violence that’s rampant in the world. We don't admit that our lack of skills in managing conflict and complexity produces violence. The viable truth is that we all are responsible for it.

Violence begins in the heart. It’s about what we do with our feelings either directly or indirectly. Women are just as violent as men. Women often produce the energy and the implied command that requires others to commit it for them, as in the case of parents who inflict their children with their vengeful agenda. The physical outcome of violent emotions is just the enactment. Not everyone acts violence out physically, but we all participate in its emotional origins.

Any alternative perspective about violence creates the familiar model of villain/victim, that vicious cycle that is one of the principal perpetrators, progenitors, and perpetuators of the feud that is violence. Unless we want to keep hurting and killing each other, there are no villains, just victims of human frailty, ignorance, and of the trauma that these inadequacies inflict on all of us.

Increasingly guilt only makes matters worse by over-simplifying solutions, polarizing alternatives, both of which fuel the energy of killing.

There is, however, one place where guilt still belongs in rather large measure. Curiously and ironically it’s a place where it’s nonexistent, and has been so for a very long time. This amoral place is wherever money is concerned.

Money is by definition amoral. That’s how we’ve arranged and defined our relationship to it. As such, money gives the proverbial finger not only to guilt, but also to the life of the spirit, which it reduces to a joke. ”Who needs it?”

We philosophize that we can buy whatever we want withit, while we treat money as though it has no moral or spiritual consequences by making it the most important thing in life.

Amoral means anything goes. Money becomes the model for justified crime because its exchange operates outside of morality. Serious criminals constantly tell us that we’re no different than them. To our great misfortune, they’re right.

Crime is the fastest growing industry in the world. It’s what gives any who choose to do so the right to steal, cheat, and to tell lies, which they call “advertising.” We duplicitously say, "We are just doing business." The checks and balances on money are window dressing, not fundamental. Money is our model for acceptable uncivilized behavior. As long as money remains amoral, crime in one form or another will remain one of the most rewarding career paths, and criminal acts retain the implicit permission to occur they presently possess.

We seem to regard the gross inequality in money as a necessary accident, a natural process of a fictional—pretend—entity we call "the marketplace," which, like "the majority" we entrust with far more power than we give anyhuman. We believe the acts performed in its service have no moral meaning.

If money is a measure of what we produce, then the marketplace is nothing more than legalized gambling whose purpose is to skim profit without contributing anything to the common pool of resources. It’s glorified stealing, a rip-off in which we celebrate a dimly concealed criminal act. "Crime" is herein defined as any act that takes without giving something of equal value—not just in the eyes of the giver, but for both parties.

Profit means to grab as much as we can of whatever’s valuable and available. It’s another example of greed and hording. To render profit moral keeps us corrupt and permeates society with corrupt assumptions. What goes

around comes around, and always will as long as we dodge this bullet.

Perhaps we protect money’s independence from morality as a kind of surreptitious rebellion from guilt’s oppressive character. But if that’s so, it’s time to face the music.

In modern culture the amoral god—money—is the great moralizer. How much we have of it determines our value as a person, our right to command respect and admiration, and our claim to the resources of opportunity and the world.

What have we done? We’ve put Machiavelli in the driver’s seat! And then we pretend that we haven’t.

Once again, we aren’t bad people who must be punished. Giving power to money and those who have it are the inevitable consequences of our guilt. We’re innocents doing the best we can. Perhaps we have needed a powerful safety valve to shut off the excessive oppression of guilt and the rule of law that is blind and impersonal. It doesn’t want to see us as individuals with our special and unique combinations of good and bad.

It is fearfully daunting to imagine making all our own judgments instead of entrusting them to gun-toting police, pontificating judges, and arrogant bureaucrats.

Government by law enforcement keeps original sin alive. It perceives human nature as unlawful, sinful, perverse, and must therefore be policed. It refuses to appeal to the best aspects of human nature instead of the worst. Such cynical attitudes about humanity become self-fulfilling predictions that keep us bound in oppression.

The fact that the vast majority of us have to be anxious about whether we’ll have sufficient resources in life to be reasonably safe and comfortable is an enormous disgrace for a culture as prosperous as ours! To treat that as normal rather than blatantly corrupt is outrageously pretentious.

In order to manage our perpetual anxiety about safety we must participate in the last remaining vestige of slavery, which is employment. Although it lacks most of the demeaning and abusive characteristics of slavery of two hundred years ago, it still forces us to do other people’s work in order to survive instead of work designed by ourselves, the only type of "employment" worthy of being called "democratic."

To deprive money and finance of moral authority, money and authority must be completely divorced, such that money becomes only a convenient way of measuring what people exchange with each other, leaving authority to govern without spending money. Activity of any kind, most particularly civic, must be done because people want to do it, never in order to be paid. That ruse is what makes employment a kind of servitude that takes far more than it provides.

We must acknowledge the corrupt immoral stain of our financial habits in order to be genuinely accountable to each other.

Marx was wrong about “redistributing wealth”. He didn’t go far enough. The solution to the huge inequities of power still operating in this human world, is to make its principle source and ammunition—great wealth—impossible! Great enterprises need huge resources. But individual people don’t … beyond some relatively small number (a million or two?).