Guilt is a funny thing. Those who are actually guilty of a transgression many times use it as a means to shift the blame for many various reasons. Some of them have to do with gaining power over others, Sometimes it is to keep some basic sense of the truth from leaking out to the public so that those who try so diligently to hide it can keep it from reaching public scrutiny. The favored mechanism is to find a helpless scapegoat that is either completely innocent at least initially and prod them into making grievous blunders so as to prove that they are indeed the guilty parties. This is many times called foreign policy and is used by politicians to justify their most heinous self-aggrandizing initiatives. On a more personal level this can be as simple as finding some past boo boo and using it perpetually as a stick to chastise with to sanctify one’s own dubious actions. The animal world for the most part does not have these problems. With the exception of the common canine house pet or the higher primates, one will find the only sense of remorse to be discovered in the victor over victim sense of direct violent confrontation. Where the gods of the ancients got into the act many millennia past as referees is anybodies’ guess.
Those bipeds within our midst who exhibit more sociopathic traits of little of no remorse for their long history of self-serving disruptive actions either gain power or get locked up. The big criminals tend to use their lesser cousins as easy victims in order to divert public attention from their own malfeasance. Again, one finds politicians, and their minions of journalists and car salesmen and of course late night after hours pitchmen immediately the most likely candidates for deceit. Some institutions like banks are built upon the principles of total deceit making the borrower think that the banks themselves have even the smallest assets to cover the loans that they freely make. The consequence of having the right contacts and the ability to put up impressive looking edifices eventually leading to a public bail out where the borrowers who are struggling to make payments on ever increasing high interest loans are expected to dig deeper in that resource of trading ever increasing amounts of time devoted to mind numbing senseless work in order to keep this predatory system functioning. Needless to say that bankers unlike nineteen year old conscripted soldiers who end up massacring innocent civilians have no concept of guilt at all. The irony being that the former are generally employed once again at the expense of public financing to go out and collect unsecured debts on a national scale for the latter. Collectively imposed guilt laid squarely upon ones minions is reinforced by the notion that groups generally never behave with any sense of immediate conscience in the present tense. But of course can be easily manipulated when the true import of their inappropriate actions is handed down from on high to plague them as individual perpetrators.
This brings us to the topic of religion, or in the modern sense of same, that eternal quest to become an unassailable righteous overbearing victim cult that by the fact of past ill fortune has become universally oppressed. Generally the stories made up after the fact by the more clever functionaries of the said group who employ their deviousness to achieve greater and greater seats of influence that they inevitably misuse tend to balloon into absurd dimensions. A few hundred or a thousand of their past brethren who had run afoul of the local community standards in some fundamental sense who are taken to task in the mortal sense are now elevated to multiply at the rate of rabbits into hundreds or thousands and eventually millions. Their mortal remains existing only in the minds of those foolish enough to believe such whoppers by people whose actions continually bring them under suspicion for illicit acts. Fear of discovery does not necessarily equate to guilt! The time honored technique employed since ancient time is to cook up some child-like fairy tale about how humanity is beholden to some generally undisclosed immortal personage extent in the singular or plural that only the chosen few have a direct line to as authorized intermediaries. Here a little knowledge of everything from the exact time of the next eclipse to enforcing the further fantasy of a Panopticon type of omniscience that extends past simple physical existence usually turns the trick to allow long lectures that skew common sense by inverting it in favor of the charlatans. The ‘rubes’ generally being so overawed that they forget to bring any common sense driven skepticism to uncover the blaring mis-truths of these professional fakirs!
The existential quest for a solution to the most basic question of self-conscious existence like that big old, “WHY” are tough enough to scribble upon the tenuous parchment of a finite life. Allowing one’s own empowerment to be spirited away in the perpetual night of the self-aggrandizing fictions of the truly guilty steers one away from every finding the the closest approximation of an answer to the ‘biggies’ that truly sanctify the longterm prospect of everyday living. Those who lose focus of their eyes upon the prize of this sort of self-discovery end up guilty in the most ironic sense of passively allowing themselves to become the real victims of the whole dirty business in the end. An old comedian of yesteryear who achieved fame upon both stage and screen at a pivotal time when the latter medium was busily displacing the former once quipped, “You can’t cheat an honest man!” Perhaps true honesty with one’s self is the anti-venom of guilt?
By the way, those of you who are feeling more than a little nervous after reading this, “You know who you are!”