White Guilt, Straight Guilt, Original Sin

I see white guilt as a mechanism for social control and stability rather than a necessarily authentic emotional reaction. Why would I ever trust an emotion that has to be felt in order to belong to a specific group? The same thing as Christian guilt.

As regards that: The Catholics have this thing called Original Sin. Original Sin means you’re guilty for having been born. For stuff you never even did yourself. I made it out from under there with my life and sanity. Honestly after that this white guilt stuff seems kinda amateurish.

My experience of these things is that they are meant to wear away at my internal resources and replace those parts of me with dependencies. The same way that advertising seems to me to be meant to erode things like self confidence and replace such capacities with the desire for products.

All of the brand guilt seems to me to be obviously useful to the people who want the rest of us to do things. Beyond a certain point the effects of any guilt on me is corrosive to the efforts I make to integrate my personality. And almost none of it is of any use to any attempts I make to think for myself. Maybe on the macro level the stuff works out for the greater good? That’s my guess.

And once again this is bringing up a question I’ve never considered before: how do I feel about — what shall we call it? — straight guilt? Well to the extent it gets people to see queers as human I suppose I’m for it. But people seem to me to have a way of mistaking their guilt for actual work towards solving the problem they feel guilty about.

It seems to me that guilt is almost as much used as a way of excusing ourselves from action as it is used to goad us to better behavior. We feel guilt. So we reassure ourselves we are good. But we don’t see what we can do. And so in actuality we bestow ourselves with the same strategic advantage as the sociopath who couldn’t care less.

Guilt is good when it works but I’ll take self interest any day. Anyone who works for “my” rights knowing that it makes “their” rights safer is someone I can probably trust to get actual work done over someone who basically just feels guilty about something that’s happening only to me.

Ah but its Spring. My heart dances with glee and I want to stop writing about politics before I say something cynical.

Vincent