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July 28, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:18
1420 Shame Vs. Guilt

Some thoughts on the differences between these two mental states.

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It is Monday, the 20th, 19th or 20th of July 2009, and I thought that it might be interesting to talk about shame,
which is one of the most fascinating of What I would sort of probably categorize as social control emotions, self-attack, self-manacled slave emotions, and so perhaps we can have a chat about it, and you can let me know what you think.
Shockingly, I'm neither debating nor having a conversation with anyone other than you, and you and I. So...
The thing that I remember first about shame was, there was some of it in church, but I don't really remember church very much when I was a kid.
I do remember stealing.
When I was maybe four or five, a five-penny piece, I think I was given it to put in the collection plate, and then they asked me where I had it.
I'd actually put it in my sock or something, because I wanted to buy a comic book or a candy bar or something like that later, and I just didn't see any sense in just giving it into a plate that went seemingly to nowhere.
It also didn't make much sense to me when I was a kid that...
It didn't make much sense to me that I would, as a little kid, hand over a five-pence piece to a guy in really rich and ornate robes who lived in a house bigger than, it seemed, the sky.
It was like the biggest house, the biggest place I'd been, was the church, you know, with its huge stone arch ceilings and so on.
And so it just didn't really make any sense to me why a guy...
In what looked like gold robes would need five pennies from a poor kid when he lived in such a huge, ornate, and golden mansion.
It just seemed to me completely bizarre.
It felt like he should be giving me five pounds, not me giving him five pence.
But that may be neither here nor there.
And it was interesting because when it was discovered, and I can't remember whether I confessed or I was found out, but when it was discovered...
That I had hidden the money, with obviously no intention of putting it in the collection plate, there was no punishment.
And do you know what? I found this out over and over and over again when I was a kid, that as long as you were guilty, there was no punishment.
As long as you appeared guilty, there was no punishment.
As long as you appeared...
Like, if you were brazen...
And actually talked about the theory behind giving money to the golden man in the golden house, then you would have gotten punished.
But I got that if you hung your head and pouted your lip and looked really, really sorry, then people didn't punish you.
They didn't care about the principle in particular.
Nobody explained the principle of theft.
And... Because I sort of understood it like I was being given five pence, and it would be nice if I put it into the collection plate, but fundamentally the money was being given to me.
Because if they wanted to give the money to the priest, it didn't make any sense why they would give it to a four-year-old first, right?
Who's bound to lose it or put it in his sock or something.
It just didn't make a lot of sense to me, if you sort of see where I'm coming from.
It just didn't make any sense.
If you want to give something to someone, give it to them, and don't give it to a four-year-old.
But of course, it was around presenting...
This was my aunt and uncle, who I lived with for a while.
I first went to kindergarten.
I have no idea why.
I was living with my aunt and uncle for, I gotta think, at least six months, perhaps a year, when I was five or so.
Just another part of the random chaos nonsense of my family history, just bouncing around like a pinball from place to place.
And I sort of noticed this later, that as long as you got mad at yourself or appeared guilty, that people wouldn't get mad at you.
The purpose was that they were satisfied as long as you felt shame, as long as you felt guilt, as long as you felt remorse, they were satisfied.
Whether you understood the principle that their moralizing was contained or not, as long as you attacked yourself, they were satisfied.
And I'm not saying this occurred to me much particularly at four.
I can't really remember.
I do remember thinking it was rather curious, but I'm not saying I sort of spun all this out from there.
But I remember thinking, well, at some point in my childhood, and I can't remember exactly when, I think I was at boarding school.
And I remember thinking, well, if I break a moral rule and I get mad at myself or appear to get mad at myself, then nobody explains the moral rule to me or anything like that.
They're satisfied if I self-attack.
But then what is the purpose of the moral rule?
It's certainly not for me to understand it.
It's certainly not for me to obey it.
The purpose of the moral rule must be to cause me to self-attack.
I mean, it had to be, because I couldn't understand why nobody explained these moral rules to me.
They were just commandments, don't do this, do that, don't do the other, and some of them made sense, like don't steal or whatever, and others made no sense, right?
Don't hit other kids or we're going to cane you, right, in the butt.
Don't cross this white line.
Don't climb this low fence.
Just stay on these bounds.
Don't make a paper airplane.
Just all stupid shit that was going on, because we were all subject at boarding school to the mass hysteria of confined animals, right?
And so I just remember thinking that nobody seemed to have any consistent moral rules.
And nobody sort of cared to explain to the children why the rules were what they were.
But if you self-attacked, they would leave you alone.
And therefore, the purpose of the moral rules had to be to inculcate self-attack, because that's what they were satisfied with if that's what the rules achieved.
If you self-attacked, then that was enough.
They were satisfied.
So that had to be the purpose.
If you stop, if you're going to walk from 20th to 10th Street, and you stop when you get to 10th Street, it's because you want to get to 10th Street, and therefore you stop.
And so when someone self-attacks, and the moral rules then cease, or the moralizing or the punishment then ceases, then clearly the purpose of the moral rule is the self-attack.
Like, that's not the case in something like therapy, where self-attack is merely the beginning, or even a philosophical examination of the issue.
Self-attack would simply be the place where you would start, or what thoughts would go to you before the self-attack, and the philosophical examination of the self, right?
Using sort of reason and evidence.
Or intuition and gut.
Whatever, right? But I remember thinking that really...
I got this really creepy feeling, you know, like I was in a horror movie.
Literally, like I was in a horror movie.
Like I was surrounded by the shuffling, fungus-breathing dead.
Because it just made no sense to me.
Why would they be... If they were so interested in moral rules, they should explain the moral rules to us, right?
Like when I was being taught the times table, the times table was explained to me over and over so I could actually understand it.
Grammar rules were explained over and over.
Science was explained over and over.
How to write an essay was explained over and over.
So... If they were more than happy to explain everything except what they claimed was the most important, which was moral rules, but they would stop moralizing and punishing if you would self-attack, then clearly the purpose was to provoke self-attack in people.
And that was something I couldn't swallow.
It just seemed like too outlandish a theory.
It really did. Like, can't be.
can be, right?
And so even before I read about Socrates, and I don't claim this is unique to me, I think most people who are curious go through this phase, he started asking people about the moral rules, you know, well, how come?
And why?
And what's this for?
And how does that jive with that?
And how does this jive with the other?
And so on, right?
I mean, all children, when they first learn about war, fall into a grave suspicion of their elders, right?
Like, Like, y'all are running this show, and 40 million people just died in a war, right?
And I'm not supposed to use violence, right?
So, what, oh what, oh what could this mean, right?
I can't use violence.
Violence is bad. Violence is wrong.
You all just got 40 million people killed in a war.
Something is not right.
Something is rotten in the state of adulthood.
Lots of things just didn't make any sense.
Killing in a war, you get a medal.
Killing in the street at home, you get a prison sentence, you put on a costume.
The whole adult world just seemed like a I couldn't fit any of that jigsaw puzzle together.
It just didn't work at all for me, logically.
But, you know, I heard about things like sex when I was a little kid, and I don't know what the hell it meant.
And so I assumed that there were just some explanations that you got when you were older.
It's not going to make sense to you.
You're a kid, but don't worry.
There's this dazzling and brilliant explanation that makes sense when you get older.
And I was willing to accept that.
I mean, I certainly got that I hadn't understood certain things when I was younger, and I'd been given cheesy explanations or non-explanations or no explanation.
And then later, I had received a better explanation.
And that made sense to me.
I was okay with that.
I mean, for instance, when I was first taught about brushing my teeth, I think my dentist said something like, little fairies or little elves dance on your teeth, and their footsteps make your teeth crack, their dance steps.
Make your teeth crack, and so you have to brush them up.
It was some nonsensical explanation, but it certainly had some impact.
Who wants gremlins dancing on your teeth at night?
Not I, I said, and therefore I brushed my teeth.
And all of that, I was willing to, you know, later on, of course, I understood it better and brushed my teeth.
Because I understood, you know, the bacteria and the plaque and all that kind of stuff, the gum recession and cavities and all that nonsense.
So it was like the early silly or non-explanation was fine for, I guess, I'm not sure I couldn't have understood that stuff, but it was fine.
Anyway, I think you sort of understand the general idea.
So... I just kind of assumed that there was this logic, because people were so damn certain about rules when...
Oh, and for those who wonder what the hell I'm doing, I am at the gym.
It's really hard to find the time, so I'm trying to combine.
And I hope that makes some sense, and I hope you forgive me for any background noise that will inevitably show up.
No, it's on yours. So, yeah, I kind of assumed.
I thought, okay, well, we're going to have the explanations.
It's all going to become clear. All the explanations are going to show up.
Everything's going to become clear.
And so that's, you know, and that's why I started, I'm not saying all of this was conscious, but I really wanted to know because, you know, when people are dealing with children, because children are sort of so naive and trusting and they don't know anything, right? It's really easy to mislead children, right?
Yeah. That's one of the reasons why I'm kind of ferocious against people who mislead children, you know, like statists, educators, and priests, and so on.
Because it's so damn easy to mislead children.
You have such power over them.
There's no comparison to Watch for Children, really.
That's the invisible Apple stuff.
Was it Podcast 72? So I'm pretty ferocious towards those who mislead children, because it really is.
It's pretty cowardly. It's not pretty cowardly.
It's disgustingly cowardly to mislead children, to tell them lies.
And you can...
Because children are so inherently uncertain, right?
They are inherently, by their very nature, can't ever be any different.
Children are inherently, fundamentally, completely uncertain.
Of course. Because they don't know anything.
New to the planet and so on, right?
They don't know anything.
And so they are fundamentally uncertain about things.
And because of that, you know, the sane, healthy children, because of that...
They sort of accept and swallow what people tell them.
Because they have to, right?
Not have to, like, compel to, but in order to survive, right?
I mean, you adapt to the bullshit of the tribe.
That is a fundamental survival mechanism for children.
And so, because I was uncertain of things, and I'm still uncertain of a lot of things, but I was just so fundamentally uncertain of things, because things didn't make any sense to me.
But to the adults, to the adults in my life, everything was just certain.
They were so certain they were willing to yell at kids, hit kids, punish kids, withhold food from kids.
They were that certain about ethics that they were willing to use violence, aggression, punishment, starvation.
Well, starvation is too strong, right?
Hold a meal or two. And I thought, well, I'm not certain of what the hell you people are doing.
I'm not certain of what the hell I'm doing or thinking.
It seems to me that my thoughts are incredibly uncertain.
My certainties are just not there.
And yet you people are so incredibly certain about everything.
So certain that you have gold clothing and big stone houses and stained glass.
The boarding school was a pretty impressive structure on a very large estate.
And so you all had statues and monuments and statues of men with guns on horseback.
You know, you're so certain of war that you'll make statues towards the best killers, right?
You're so certain of everything.
Everybody's so goddamn certain of everything.
And I'm not certain of anything.
And that really was, I know this may sound a little tangential relative to shame, but I think this is the experience of a hell of a lot of children.
Really, I really do. I think this is the experience of a hell of a lot of children.
This sense that, like, how the hell can adults be so certain when I'm not certain, when I'm fearful, when I'm insecure, when I'm confused, when I'm baffled, when I can't get a straight answer out of everyone, anyone.
So... And I thought that they had to substitute aggression for reason.
Because it was essential that I understood ethics.
They were completely certain about ethics.
And I could not be reasoned into ethics.
That was my sort of theory, right?
So if you look at an analogy, an analogy would be something like this.
A blind man about to wander into the street, you just grab him by the arm and pull him back, right?
Which would be, you know, pretty rude if not, you know, wrong in a normal situation.
But he can't see the traffic that's coming or hear it or whatever, right?
He's about to get really hurt and therefore you pull him back, right?
You don't reason with him.
You use force, you could say, or restraint at least, in order to prevent him from hurting himself because there's no time to reason with him and he's an imminent danger, right?
I mean, a child does not have to know the physics of fire in order to be kept away from a stove or a fireplace, right?
They don't have to know the chemical properties of the matchsticks and why they burn in order to be kept away from matches.
You just take it away, right?
Like Isabella loves grabbing leaves, and I love when she grabs leaves.
She's even welcome to pull them apart.
She just can't put them in her mouth, right?
If she doesn't know why, I just take them away from her, right?
Give her something else. So, that's what I thought it was with ethics.
I really did. I really, you know, I just was like, well, I'm really freaking confused about all this shit that people are telling me.
It makes no sense to me, but...
I'm sure, because they're so certain, I'm sure that there is some answer that I'll get when I'm older, right?
That ethics is so important that I just can't understand it as a child, but it's essential that I act ethically.
Yeah, like nutrition. What the hell do you know about nutrition when you're a kid?
But you still should eat some veggies, right?
And not everything that you want, right?
So I was fine, right? Confused as hell, but I'm sure there's an answer.
And when I got older, right, I began to...
I began to kind of go and hope to see what did that answer, right?
So let's start cuffing up some furballs of reason, Mr.
and Mrs. adulthood, right?
So you start asking questions, right?
Oh, what's the story with war?
How do you put on a costume and blah blah blah, right?
And what's the story about theft and what's the story about force and what's the story about fraud and so on, right?
And you start to...
See, you'll come up with these very large and very powerful and very horrifying inconsistencies, right?
And that really began to mess with my head.
I felt terrifying.
Because here I'm waiting for this big explanation, right?
Here's why, here's why, here's why.
We're sorry you couldn't understand why you had to be good in the past, but here's why you have to be good.
And we're just going to start asking questions, start reading, start looking at movies, start looking at all these things.
Talking to the wise people, reading the newspapers, listening to the teachers, listening to the professors, reading the books.
And what comes up is a big fat goose egg, right?
It's the same bullshit.
That's when Socrates did exactly the same thing.
I still has questions.
And got nothing.
And this to me is really central to the question of shame.
Because there's a difference between shame and guilt, right?
Guilt is when you transgress rules that you agree with and understand, right?
So if you get married and you promise Fidelity, monogamy, and you accept that as a value and you have an affair, you're going to feel guilty because you are transgressing a value that you accept and understand and which you would be very upset if other people Did not follow that value,
right? So, if your wife has an affair, you'd be outraged, right?
So, that's guilt, right?
And you accept the values, you understand the values, but you break them, and you feel guilty because of the contradiction between your actions and your understood and accepted values, right?
It's a very important distinction, right?
But shame is quite different.
Shame is quite a different animal.
Because shame is what happens.
I'm sorry, six million people at the gym today, I have to murmur.
Because, you know, I don't want anyone getting these shows for free, man.
But shame is when you fear attack for breaking rules that you do not understand, right?
Right, so, shame is the attack, is the reproduction or the fear of attack for breaking a rule that you do not understand, whereas guilt is the feeling that you get when you break a rule that you do understand and accept.
In other words, guilt is what happens when we break UPB, and shame is what happens when we break arbitrary commandments.
That's a very, very important distinction.
I think guilt is actually a very healthy feeling, as long as it's not just sort of pathological masochism, as long as the guilt is actually designed to have you change your behavior.
If guilt is something which allows you to understand the disparity between your actions and your values, then great!
Guilt is serving its purpose.
The feeling of eating too much food, the feeling of overstuffedness, is serving its purpose of helping you reduce your food intake.
So that's a very important distinction.
guilt is breaking UPV, shame is the fear of being caught and punished for breaking arbitrary and brutal, or arbitrary commandments brutally enforced. or arbitrary commandments brutally enforced.
And shame is one of these feelings that has a really I mean, almost admirable, deep and complex double layer.
Because... We feel guilt when we accept a universal rule.
Like, say, keeping the promises about monogamy or whatever.
We accept it. And then what we do is we act as if it's not true.
In other words, we'll have an affair. But we won't renege our commitment.
So we don't go to our wife and say, I'm going to have an affair.
And I am officially...
Canceling our contracts vis-a-vis monogamy, right?
Because you're hoping other people are going to keep their contracts while you have the intention of breaking yours, but you can't logically overthrow the rule, because you need other people to keep Their contracts.
If you're going to cheat someone on eBay, you require him to pay his side in order for you to cheat him.
He's got to keep his end of the bargain in order for you to not keep yours in profit thereby.
Neither of you do.
Nobody just wastes some time, right?
But, I mean, so guilt is the feeling that arises from the contradiction of both needing and rejecting a universal, valid, and logical rule, right?
you But shame is quite different.
Because with shame, shame is the unconscious knowledge that the rule in no way is universal.
I mean, maybe it's claimed as a universal, but it's not a universal.
We kind of understand that deep down.
And so we're submitting not to The impersonal authority, if you want to call it that, of reality and reason.
No, no. What we're doing is we're surrendering to a bullying and aggressive authority.
Right? It's a very different proposition.
It's a very different emotional thing or emotional process to deal with.
It's the difference between falling off a wall and being pushed off a wall.
If you're falling off a wall, you're just surrendering to the authority, in a sense, of gravity.
But if you're pushed off a wall, you're just being compelled, in a sense, by someone else, someone's arbitrary authority, i.e., their hands pushing you.
Shame is what happens when we submit to a rule for fear of punishment.
Right? It's not a rule that we accept.
It's not a rule that's universal. It's not a rule that we have agreed to out of, you know, positivity.
Right? Like the, thou shalt have no others and will be monogamous and so on.
That is a rule in marriage that people don't submit to out of fear of punishment, generally, in the marriage ceremony.
There's nobody there with a machete, at least not often.
Right? But we submit to those rules out of desire, right?
I mean, people who get married, we assume, are largely down with the whole concept of monogamy.
They just fall off the wagon later, right?
Again, I'm talking generalities.
I'm sure you can come up with exceptions, but let's work with the vast majority, right?
So... That's different, though.
That's different from a non-UPB rule that is inflicted through aggression, right?
So, if you can imagine some guy marries a woman and she says, Let's take the stereotype.
He says, after six months of marriage, he says, I'm allowed to have affairs, but if you have an affair, I'm going to kill you.
Now, she would submit to that rule, if she were going to submit to it, right?
She would submit to that rule out of fear, not out of respect for the rule itself, because it clearly is a subjective and arbitrary rule, but it's violently enforced, and so if she ends up subjecting herself to that rule...
Then she would feel shame.
Why would she feel shame?
Because she's submitting to violence.
Because it's cowardly. Right?
She's not submitting to a noble hero.
She's not submitting to a guy with superior reasoning.
She's not submitting to logic or evidence or reality, which we should all do, in my opinion.
Actually, that's not just my opinion.
We should all do it. But she's submitting to hypocritical, brute force, aggression, punishment, violence, right?
That's a very different situation.
It's really humiliating to submit to brute force.
It's even more humiliating to submit to brute force that calls itself universal and moral.
Because then it's your desire for good, as I've talked about, that is used to further enslave you.
And that's really, really humiliating.
And that, I think, is the root of the shame that we feel, particularly as children or when we're in these kinds of non-universal bullied submission situations.
Now, shame is something that also is more easily transmitted or more inevitably transmitted than guilt.
So a husband who is cheating on his wife may attempt to make her feel guilty for particular transgressions in order to throw her off the scent, but of course not every husband cheats on his wife and vice versa, and it's not such a universal phenomenon or near universal phenomenon, that sort of transmission.
And there are other strategies For dealing with guilt, not effectively, but dealing with guilt in the short term.
In the short term, which are things like, you know, be overkind towards your wife, buy her flowers, and so on, which has roused the suspicion of many an unloved wife.
So there's lots of different ways to, quote, deal with guilt, but shame is a different kind of animal.
The reason that...
Again, as you know, this is all theory.
No proof. All theory. But the reason that adults are so universally ashamed, and it sometimes can be tough to see the shame in the sort of blazing napalm fireburst of aggression, but the shame is behind it many, many times, is that all children...
Are born ignorant and skeptical of the ethics of their society.
Right? We don't know what our culture is.
We don't know what the ethics of our society is.
And we are naturally skeptical.
Children are skeptical.
Just, again, try to tell a kid that there's a toy in a box with no toy in it, but the toy is invisible.
The child will be skeptical and roll their eyes and, oh, come on, right?
Daddy! I'm just waiting for it.
So, because children are skeptical and adults have no answers, bad answers, anti-answers, and because adults cannot practically practice The ethics that they preach to children,
honesty, integrity, consistency, reason, not making things up, not lying, and so on, because philosophers have not been kind enough to give or considerate enough to give parents ethics that can be explained to children.
So, because parents haven't had good answers, They have had to lie to their children and make up stuff and misdirect and redirect and show aggression or show irritation or why so many questions and blah blah blah.
And they're ashamed of that.
Furthermore, when those parents themselves were children, they bowed down to the irritations and aggressions and eye-rolling and sometimes violence of the elders that they questioned about virtue.
And they're ashamed of that, and they're ashamed of their elders, and their elders are ashamed of themselves.
So shame and falsehood, shame and lies, shame and mysticism, shame and culture go hand in hand.
Because culture is obey the prevailing prejudice.
But nobody says it's good to obey the prevailing prejudice, because that is too obviously It's good to obey the prevailing prejudice, but for each group within society, there is a prevailing prejudice.
Jamaicans and Koreans and Scotsmen, there's a prevailing prejudice.
So, a Jamaican living in Canada, whose prejudice is he supposed to be?
It's impossible. It's so clearly anti-rational that you can't say that.
So you can't talk about culture as obeying the prevailing prejudice.
You have to talk about it as virtuous and true and noble and good and objective and universal and blah blah blah.
But of course you know that it's not.
Everybody knows that it's not.
And so this fundamental lying to children to avoid the anxieties and shames of your own past bullied acquiescence to irrational rules is the cycle that continues.
And when you point out that we don't have the answers that we claim to have, that we don't have The basic integrity that we preach to our children, we don't have the answers that we claim to have about truth and virtue and goodness and right and wrong.
Well, that's very shameful for people because they've been pretending, of course, since about 10,000 years ago that they do have these answers.
And they've been pompously inflicting their bigotries on children under the guise of objective, moral, rational truth.
And they've been teaching children to be honest and moral and rational And they've said obey authority in the abstract, though they actually mean the authority themselves in the present, because there's lots of authorities in the world, right?
Obey your elders? Well, which elders, right?
There's an old rabbi, there's an old imam, there's an old priest, right?
There's an old teacher who teaches communism.
There's an old teacher who teaches capitalism, right?
But your elders is so completely irrational because elders teach contradictory things, right?
So everybody knows that it's complete shovelful, face-blast, sand-blast, brain-scouring bullshit.
And the fact that nobody sort of pauses to say, well, come on, this is all nonsense, right?
The emperor has no clothes is part of the shame of society.
And it's the precarious...
This gossamer spiderweb bridge that everybody dances on, knowing that it could give way at any moment, the moment someone comes along and asks the essential question of innocence, which is, how do you know?
How do you know the world is round?
How do you know? The sky is blue.
How do you know? How do you know the sky is blue everywhere, not just where we are?
When we say the sky is blue, we don't actually mean that.
We mean the wavelength coming from space comes through the sky and lands roughly as blue for the majority of the Earth, not at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and I don't think at the top of Mount Everest either, in the Himalayas.
So the essential question of innocence, how do you know?
Why is it true? How does this fit with that?
You say that I should...
And so when I apply clear logic consistency to the school that I'm in, I discover that it's immoral because it relies on theft, which it tells me is wrong.
Right. I understand that everybody has these questions already floating around in their heads, which is why they get so tense and angry, as we talked about in last Sunday's show, when these questions come up, why they get so angry towards the philosophers, to the curious, to the simple.
So the simple questions of deep wisdom, which reveal...
A shallow and almost omnipresent, shameful, bullying, manipulative ignorance masquerading as knowledge.
Culture is to philosophy as religion is to science, as violence is to love, as evasions are to truth.
So shame is so deeply woven into our culture because we lie to children.
We bully children because we will not be honest and admit that we lack answers.
Or the answers that we have are entirely wrong.
And obviously wrong.
You understand, it's the obviousness of the errors that is so shameful to the species.
This is not rocket science.
This is not the theory of relativity.
This is not N-dimensional quantum mathematics, right?
Taxation equals force.
Violence is used to solve almost every social problem and is praised as virtuous, but violence is praised as immoral.
This is so simple that everybody is ashamed to believe it and is ashamed to have acquiesced to it, is embarrassed, is enraged, is humiliated, is broken.
And that's why shame is so contagious.
It's the shame that parents feel teachers.
And it's not all parents, not all teachers, right?
I mean, hopefully I'm a parent and a teacher of kind.
I hope that I'm not ashamed of this stuff.
I don't believe that I am.
And I'm sure there are others out there.
But those who teach the young are ashamed of the bad information, right?
Most of those who teach the young are ashamed of the bad information that they give.
And they're even more ashamed because they're teaching respect, curiosity, honesty, intelligence, integrity, and yet the moment that those virtues are required by the child of the parents or of the teacher, the shame and humiliation of...
That's more guilt, right?
Because... Those are standards which are accepted by parents and teachers and politicians and priests, but are not practiced by them, right?
So that's more guilt. But the guilt arises out of the original shame of having been bullied into acquiescence, into believing the lies of culture.
And those kinds of emotions, right?
Self-attack is so eminently transferable to someone else, in a way that guilt isn't.
Because guilt requires a kind of confession to transfer itself.
But shame does not.
Shame is the avoidance of a confession, right?
It's the desire to keep the bad or guilty secret hidden.
In plain view. And that's why it so slithers into the minds of others.
And that's why self-attack is so predatory.
That's why it stalks from person to person like one of those invisible demons in a bad science fiction film or a bad fantasy film, right?
It jumps from person to person and multiplies.
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