I had always understood guilt to be a major tool in manipulation. The weight of conscience was always powerful enough to bring the strongest of men down on their knees begging for mercy, desperate for escape, yet never to find refuge as the enemy resides in their heart. A truly free man is free from his worldly ties. Yet the statement only makes sense if one can give up the weight of one’s conscience as well. Our morality, our sense of justice all holds us to this world through one string called guilt. Guilt holds us from what we want. Guilt makes us bend our desires to meet the expectations of those we live to serve. We live to serve our righteous ideal of mankind. Yet guilt however minor or remote in our being is what drives us. Why do we love our friends, family and spouses? Why do we believe it is our duty to stand by them? Loyalty, honesty, aid all come from various forms of guilt. We believe it is our duty to bend over backwards and take care of our parents, our loved ones. We feel like the responsibility of making their dreams come true make us better human beings. What makes us fulfil our duty? Our conscience? How is duty tied in with conscience? Through guilt. I once heard someone say the words ‘be wary of people who advocate duty…it is always at the demise of your wings’. I loved the words. They resonated deep within me and in the idealism of having found a new motto I revelled in its meaning. But you’re never free. You choose to tie yourself to certain perceptions of who you think is a good human being, who you think is leading a life worth living, who you think is socially responsible, who you think deserves respect. You want to live up to that image. These aren’t conscious thoughts that guide you but they form the basis of all your actions.
Guilt however small can hold you back so no amount of confidence, enthusiasm or love can overcome it unless you choose to let it go. It can engulf you and make you afraid in a way far far more horrendous than being afraid of a terrorist or a rapist or a ghost. It makes you afraid neither of the world nor of consequences of actions, but of yourself and of drowning within your low self esteem. It makes you realise your own lack of worth egging you to want to hide, disappear or simply give up and stop fighting. It makes you believe that you deserve all the bad things that happen/happened to you. It screws up your sense of justice in terms of understanding that punishment should equal the crime. It allows you to accept any kind of abuse because you think you deserve it.
This is at all levels. Superficial levels of allowing friends and family to take you for granted, people to take advantage of you to intense levels of accepting domestic abuse and other forms of punishment.
Guilt perhaps is the most powerful way to hold a human being slave to you and to your will. But that is drastic and might seem long term at the moment. Even the perception of guilt unmans you in the most shocking of ways in a small situation. I had always believed that when innocent, a man is the strongest. He knows he has done nothing wrong and he can stand up straight on that knowledge and fight the world. But supposing he has done 1/100th of what is wrong in a particular instance and has been penalised for it? What if that teeny tiny mistake holds him because he truly believes he needs to be punished because of that? Then he ceases to see justice or understand even a semblance of it. Then he allows you to take over control and lets you tell him that he is wrong and he needs to be punished for it. He bends over backwards to make right that teeny tiny wrong he thinks he has committed. There are so many people in jails today for crimes that are very pardonable. People who think they deserve to be punished because their teeny tiny mistake contributed to 1/100th of the crime. And the system punishes them because they didn’t have enough faith in themselves to fight.
The character of Sirius Black in Harry Potter was perhaps the most brilliant examples of a man who fought himself. It wasn’t easy being kept in prison in isolation for 13 years with the guilty knowledge that somewhere because of him his best friends died. His connection with their death was remote and very coincidental yet he blamed himself. It is very difficult to convince oneself that one’s guilt is only so much and to restrict it. He had to fight himself and continuously remind himself day in and day out that he was indeed innocent, that he did not deserve to be in prison. It is so easy under abuse and isolation to believe that one might have truly done something wrong to be in there. Even through his struggle against allowing his own morale to disintegrate, what kept him alive and pushed him out was the urge of revenge. The guilt remained.
There could be various arguments against my understanding stating that I am exaggerating the effects of guilt and its permeation in our psyches. But I haven’t met one human being free from its grip whether minor or major. I still don’t know how we fight it because that could be another long debate between rationale and feelings. But it is a rare person who accepts only as much as was meted out by him.
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