The guilt culture

[Atrapa Almas]

So the flowers vase fell from the table and got broken...

Hey! The vase could not fall by itself. WHO DID IT?

In our western culture, we do need inocent and guilty people. The guilty ones are to be blamed, probably punished. The inocent ones are perfect. So once we have punished the responsible of breaking the vase, we can buy another vase and put it in the same place, just at the border of the table, where it may easily fall once a guilty human passes nearby.

Our focus on guilty/inocent its a problem to understand and solve the problems, its a problem to improve our way of doing things.

In our culture, the problem is never that the flower vase is very close to the table border, because we always have a guilty person to blame instead of just putting the vase in the center of the table.

When people do figth both of them are totally inocent from their perspective, and thus have nothing to learn. And both of them are guilty from the perspective of the other, and thus must be punished.

Guilty people go to hell and inocents go to heaven. There is no middle term. Our culture seems to be black and white autist by design in this topic.

This culture is a mayor problem in companies where most people is busy finding who will be labeled as the guilty to be punished and almost no body is working to prevent the mistake happening again.

And this culture is a mayor problem for child trauma. Children are genetically forced to love their care takers. But when caretakers do not take proper care of those children, the children may also fear or dislike them. Our culture does not allow greys in this topic.

So when children love their care takers, they must become the guilty ones, the responsibles of the problem and thus hate and punish themselves.

And when children love themselves, their caretakers must become the guilty ones, the responsibles of the problem so they must hate and punish them.

Many people self hate is actually an efford to protect loved ones from the responsability of their acts, so they can keep loving them.

I was thinking into this today and wanted to share. Its not a scientific fact, just a reflection of mine that may be wrong.

Hugs.

 

[Lysholm]

You are correct. A primary example is any two-party political system. Us versus them, good versus bad, right versus wrong, God versus Satan. People think in binary because it's easy and safe - if there are only two choices we can only be one of two things. While easy to navigate, it's very hard to enforce because there are so many exceptions. People, including children, are forced into this unnatural state so society can inefficiently lumber on. It's all a shared delusion designed to force us into siding with institutional authority.

Funny thing is people have a very fuzzy sense of self, so they identify primarily on what they are not first, whatever is left is what they are conform into. This is terrifyingly convenient for our leaders, as they only need to identify something as alien to steer the hoard.

 

[Darkkin]

Guilt is about more than just blame; it is an embodiment resulting from inequality. One of the driving factors of the individual is the identity, that one thing that sets us apart from the ubiqitiy of the herd mentality. Everybody, every brain is unique, but there are some that can shine brighter than a neutron star collision. And just by merely existing these brains draw fire, they surf the razor thin membrane between genius and madness. Emotions are fierce and everything is visceral, vivid, and endlessly unique.

It isn't mania because the control is iron clad, deft and inherent. And those who truly have these quantum minds can shut them down as quickly as they can shift to warp. That level of control is a necessary shield because should others see what these individuals can truly do they can scare the hell out of their peers. It isn't normal; it is total acceptance of one's autistic wiring. It is the freaking user's manual that NDers are missing. It is innate and almost impossible to hear through an ever rising throng of disapproval and responsibilities.

There are smarter people in the room, but when you're smart enough to know you're among the top five percent, you occupy an unique niche. Highly self aware, knowing you are completely fallible, but still have a very different skill set than those around you. From very early age, you hear about how you are too much, too stubborn, fiery, fierce...too dramatic, everything is saturated and impossibly rich, too rich. So you dial it back and done the carapace. You retreat from people because they cannot abide what you are, who you are. You grow quiet, but the silence is not still. The inner self is unleashed slamming through waves of emotion and sensory overwhelm. A gannet in a hurricane. Instinctively the wings seek the currents, the sensory keys. (e.g. music and a repeative motion). A subtle shift of a wing and there it is, the eye of the maelsteom vortex. And the vortex funnel is the way to the quantum gear.

This gear is an interface few people understand, and even fewer know how to access. It is the gear that teachers, parents, coaches, professors, and employers have all seen turned on in a crisis moment and like an unwieldly fledgeling, just when it seems like a cataclysmic crash is imminent, those wings catch the winds and beat a hard hitting hyper-resonant tattoo of defiance against the looming cliff face. Balanced, the gannet skims, catching hold of the freshening westerly and pulls away from the cliff, the stony faces of the naysayers. And the gannet is once again chasing the vortex of the maelstrom.

That kid in school, deemed lazy because they are bored, who continuously pulls off the skin of the teeth projects and effortless grades. Guilt is weaponized as a flay against the moral core of the gannet, but like a school of bait fish located in the huge swaths of open ocean, inertia and neutral air space positions hold, until the critical moment. The moment when the gannet hears it, the dolphin calls, a mega pod. But no one else sees or senses the bait ball, the dolphins, let alone that damn gannet. It is a war zone, parents frustrated to the point of wrath, but still that gannet holds its flight line. The dolphins haven't queued up yet, and the wind is wrong. Cataclysm looming, the gannet is omniously still, an eerie stasis...

The dolphins have gone dark, deep and silent, and then from beneath the first bubbles explode driving the fish to the surface. Critical mass. The gannet drops, plunging like a shooting star toward the teeming mass of sea and warring factions. And in the heaving melee, the gannet hits the water, diving deep, wings pistoning the bird into the depths of the sea, away from the chaos...and once again, the vortex opens out of the deepening black and the gannet disappears once more into places beyond the mundane.

This is one of those systems where there is no comfortable middle ground. It is all or nothing, unscripted, unplanned. And as slapdash as it seems, it is eerie in the speed of its efficency, on the fly problem solving and flexible creativity. The gannet is the master of the maelstrom vortex, but it isn't careless with it because when all is said and done, it is still power. It can intimidate, upset, and very frequently scare people simply because of its alien nature. The gannet holds the keys to the vortex and like those who practice mindfulness and meditation, this is different level of consciousness, highly active and endorphin inducing...

It is a balanced, self sustaining, self regulating system that works with the inherent wiring of my whacked out autistic system. This is how stims are designed to work. Stims, one of the biggest guilt triggers among autistics. Hard truth. Like the winds in the vortex, they have a specific goal, find a release. Enter the repeating motions...and a single song marks time, the pattern of the vortex sheer. Years of being treated like a failure and freak because you have to hide what you can do to keep a bearable status quo. But here is the kicker, you've got your own mental health in hand because you don't try to break your system. You know how to control and focus the vortex. You've carved out a niche that while not huge, is your own. You have against all odds defined your own purpose and charted your own course. The amount of self demolition and learning that has going into such a seeming small thing is decades worth of stife, doubt, and work.

The pacekeeping endurance flight of the gannet is the result. No one sees that wondrous bird, all they see is the quiet mask of adulthood and responsibility. They see an independent individual, capable and mostly competent. It is enough to keep the peace and pass muster, but even then the gannet's quiet drifting still draws fire for the even keel it represents. Those battling with their own inner maelstroms don't have conditioned gannets and are facing Charybdis. Basic empathy responds because the damn gannet understands on an instinctual level, and guilt rises in an overwhelming tide...

Once again, guilt is weaponized because of what others want, but have yet to attain. You've done the hard work, and fought to save the gannet. And the maw of Charybdis blocks the way...

This is what weaponized guilt triggered by unintentinally triggering a jealousy response in others looks like. You feel guilty about what you have, logically knowing you've come through hell to reach this point, yet stil people resent you for what little you have. People wonder why you keep secrets, why you hide what you can do. It is because of weaponized guilt. People don't want to do the work so they seek to undo yours...

As selfish as it is, I've learned a few tricks to avert disaster, including channeling all that overwhelming emotion and frustration into my vortex, casting my damn gannet to otherwise unreachable heights. Guilt is one of the most complex emotions in human society. It is a moral compass, it is a motivator, as well as a weapon. It can help as much as it harms, and all too often that harm comes through the negligent wielding of emotion to elicit empathy.

 

[Progster]

The guilt-blame game is part of the them-versus-us mentality which characterizes the human condition. It unites and divides. Also, those who blame others often want to fuel their egos, are lacking in self-awareness or are in denial of their own faults.
Agreed, sometimes wisdom is in knowing that stuff just happens and there is no fault, and therefore no blame.

 

[Angular Chap]

It seems to me that guilt is probably the second most common way to control and influence people, after fear.

I've heard the phrase "culture of fear" and I think you're right, there is also a culture of guilt around as well.

 

[Captain Jigglypuff]

This is actually why I question the accuracy of forensic science especially with crime investigation processing. Sure a hair could tell us who it belongs to but being found at a crime scene doesn’t necessarily explain how it got there. It could have been stuck to a shirt via static electricity and hair naturally falling out or even planted there with tweezers. You don’t know every little detail of a crime scene just by looking at it and there are things that happened that have no physical evidence such as verbal arguments. I remember I told two men that were forensic scientists that I didn’t believe their science is 100% accurate and asked them a very valid question of how they could tell if any DNA evidence was planted by someone wearing rubber gloves and latex to frame someone else for a crime in my biology class. They never gave a satisfactory answer to my question and said that “no one would ever do that” and all of the kids there except one boy started to call me “stupid” for questioning a so called 100% accurate science and refusing to admit that I was wrong and stupid which I refused to do because I technically wasn’t wrong. If I dropped my wallet in a bank and left without noticing I had dropped it and then the bank gets robbed two minutes later and my wallet is the only physical thing that was left afterwards doesn’t mean that I robbed the bank or had any part in it. Everyone just acts like justice and being innocent or guilty is black and white but there is so much more to it. Sometimes what may sound like a lie to some people is actually the truth to others. There really is no absolute truths in this lifetime other than birth and death are a natural part of life and that time will always continue to move forward and cannot be stopped entirely.

 

[Ken]

I agree completely. I have labeled this as a punishment oriented society. Where the root cause of any fault is never even considered. Instead, someone must be punished. If someone has been mislead into committing a crime, the societal response is to punish them. Never to teach them about how they were mislead.

Indeed, I agree with your thinking. Than you for posting.