When you are young, you can take up guilt like a sponge, and expect forgiveness just as easily. Not only your own sins, but the sins of Adam, the Athenians, the Atlantic slave traders, and others — sure, “we are all guilty!”
I know I was susceptible to collective guilt arguments.
But as I aged, anyway, the absurdity of such “guilt trips” became evermore apparent. Indeed, the difficulty is not merely ignoring and ridiculing my responsibility for past crimes and “my” government’s ongoing enormities, but feeling guilty for my own failings can become a tricky thing.
In a world filled with so much fake guilt, real guilt can even seem like an excess.
Indeed, maybe that effect is one reason so many folks push for their favored implausible guilts: easier to forgive Original Sin or Ancestral Vice or Systemic Racism than one’s own failures and betrayals.
twv
Wirkman Comment 