Guilty!

[coberst]

Guilty!

Guilt is difficult to analyze because it is ‘dumb’. It is a feeling of being blocked and frustrated without knowing why we feel that way. This develops when embraced by powerlessness while clutched by the unknown. Guilt is a bind of life.

A feeling of guilt emanates from our peculiar ability to apprehend life’s totality but unable to move in relation to it. “This real guilt partly explains willing subordinacy to his culture: after all, the world of men is even more dazzling and miraculous in its richness than the awesomeness of nature. Also, subordinacy comes naturally from man’s basic experience of being nourished and cared for; it is a logical response to social altruism.”

There are many ways in which we feel this “bind of life”:
* When ill or injured we are cared for by a cultural system
* Not achieving all one can be
* Recognition that we are the source of a serious accident
* Inability to meet responsibility to family
* Displaying certain accomplishments
* Evolution’s bounty to me
* Fate’s bounty to me
* Sticking out in a crowd for some biological reason
* “There, but for the grace of God, go I”

Social organization helps the individual expiate guilt by sharing guilt and a symbolic confession of it. “This is why the main general characteristic of guilt is that it must be shared: man cannot stand alone.” Primitives seem to be more honest about these things, probably because they were more realistic about our desperate situation vis-à-vis nature. You cannot fool Mother Nature. Modern man seems more arrogant as regards nature.

Hubris is another word signifying a forgetting from whence real power comes. We seem like sophomores, not yet comprehending the source of real power; imagining it is in our self.

Quotes and ideas from “Escape from Evil”—Ernest Becker