“nobody can rule guiltlessly” -Saint just
This is the opening quite from Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at noon” and he was mentioning it in the context of the horror and The absurd of a totalitarian regime, the guilt in that sense is a strong psychological mechanism that is related to political ethics or political morality.
Guilt and shame are senses of anxiety that are related to our recognition of violation over rules of morality or hurting other people. Conscience is our sense to tell things good from bad. It exists (on a very developed level) only on humans, only we have conscience which means we are responsible for our doing, because we have judgment and we can tell things or actions good from bad.
Religion expresses shame as the first notion of Adam and Eve when they became aware of good and evil, meaning they could make judgement in contrast to the state of innocent and obedient. So, shame became an expression of consciousness. The same as in the period of infancy and early childhood, without conciseness and awareness of consequences there is no moral judgement, among the rest, nudity is acceptable, just like the primal state in the Garden of Eden, it is a state without moral judgement but a relaxed and balanced one and without the distress of wrong doings.
Freud thought we can experience the exact state of being, in our dreams, our mind and soul gives expression to our desires to be free from limitations. Just like Adam and Eve, a baby must grow up at certain point, and when he or she are capable, they would start to establish a sense morality through shame, through education and habit. These morals and habits are being learned as a social agreement of society, it is necessary for one to restrain his impulses and physical needs to exist in the adult world. Society established rules in order to exist in an organized way in which one’s animalistic desires are contradicting the interest of the whole group. The group or society will try to compensate [see Herbert Marcuse in that sense] but the group will always realize the collective desires on the expense of the individual. The individual must to deal with his unrealized desires with restraint, repression and submission.
The main problem with the establishment of social order when looking at it from an infant point of view as well as an adult in society is that the control mechanism is mostly shame and guilt which can express itself only in pain, distress and sorrow. When a man is exposed to repression and distress, they can create pathological patterns as a reaction, which will manifest themselves through anger and hate and other various internal or external expressions. Repression of one’s desire can become tolerable if there hope to get a reward from a different angle or point of time, it is the basic way adult people run their lives, keeping the social order, repressing their intimate desires and rewarding themselves with alternatives.
Another problem with this type of mechanism of social control is that a man can only judge himself by the standards set up by other people, social norms are always collective, it has an organic development of its own, and drastic measures will have to be taken to make a change in that system, meaning its progression if such a thing exists can only be slow and hard to control.
This mechanism in nothing more than the establishment of control between the individual and society, control always includes surrender and repression, which makes this mechanism valuable and vulnerable for individuals, groups and establishments who have the ambition to gain power. This mechanism includes our norms, culture, political regime, education system, ideology, religion believes etc’, it has a way to impose itself on the collective with little or no attempt to undermine its values, may it be law, wage, social status etc.
Then it is not really a surprise to find this mechanism of guilt and morals as one the first establishing narratives of religion, because religion was one of the first old primitive means to successfully establish order in a group bigger than a tribe, which later globalized. In religion you can find countless references for the primitive way of living before religion, from human sacrifice (the eldest son as a burnt offering) until non-heterosexual polygamy etc. but religion finds a solution to all that, the problem is that it is based on a primitive, childish, non-progressive perspective of the world, I call it childish not as an insult but because religion promotes repression instead of mutual understanding, acceptance, tolerance and progressive thinking. The believers are not eligible to think for themselves outside the boundaries of religion. A prominent example of this way of thinking we see in the concept of sin which is one of the main concepts of religion, it represents, starting from the Garden of Eve, the break of agreement between man and god – the fall of man. It is comparable to another man-creator identical relationship which is an infant-father relationship where the father (not for nothing using the same name for a priest or god) is the undisputed authority given by its status of creator, which carries the duty of imposing the existing order on the infant as he becomes older and aware, for his own good. The means of imposing such order is again only through shame, guilt and fear of punishment. Sometimes the way we deal with repression which is the result of shame and guilt is very creative, you can claim that heaven and hell were created just in this manner, in heaven you would be able to realize unfulfilled desires – think about the Islamic ‘houri’, heaven is a place with all desires fulfilled with a state of balance and hell is a place of constant pain and absence of relief. For the people on earth the could be a reason to live without fulfilled desires which is a huge sacrifice, and it is the reward of heaven, the dark side of it the fear of suffering in hell [being perfectly expressed in the speech of the priest in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man], in the Last Judgement justice will be made, the earthly sacrifice, the denying of desires will be worth it because the believes and saints are going to be rewarded, with what ? with the exact same thing they were denying themselves on earth – their desires [“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. -Oscar Wilde]. You would be surprised how many people, ever secular or ‘progressive’ still believe in one form or another of the narrative above, Karma is one of its forms and also certain secular ideologies that are based on irrational thinking, meaning that they are based on moral behavior or absolute values. Sometimes people who believe in the reward of heaven wouldn’t mind the start giving the sinners a piece of their punishment already on earth, they will get it anyway right? think about totalitarian regimes and crusades in the sense of authority, ideology, morality, judgment of right and wrong, shame, and the relation to the other.
If we are to put some basic models of development of a human from infancy to adulthood we can compare those to the mechanisms of social control, we can see the psychological link between the two, for example god might be a psychological projection of father figure that establishes our relation with our life and social surroundings through reward and punishment (real or imaginary). The basic models are :
Infancy : ‘paradise’, no morals, no right and wrong, all basic desired being attained
Childhood : attaining morals and social order through learning, reward and punishment, repression is the mean to deal with unattained desires.
Teenage : Internalization, the teenager must except social norms and morals, but it happens usually not without a rebellion, this is a critical stage where society puts the pressure of conformity through schools and institutions, teachers and other adults. This is the repression of all elements that oppose social order and impulses and desires that are not socially acceptable, shame plays a bit part of it, because the teenager also want to fit in.
Adulthood: the adult should have attained the social norms and function within society, if not, there are institutions who deal with non-conformist individuals : a jail, a sanatorium, etc.
As for religion as a good example we can say that it is stuck in the phase of childhood because religion regularly exercises repression. A big aspect of religion is an exercise of avoiding things that are bad throughout mechanisms of self-justification like morals and belief. The belief create an imaginary world which balances the earthly world, a believer goes to heaven to sinner goes to hell, from the perspective of religion the earthly world is not in balance (otherwise no balancing world would have to be invented), there is a sort of condemnation in that. The way to deal with reality, like a child, is through repression, an invention of an imaginary world, which is not dealing with the problems of unfulfilled desires directly but indirectly, a sort of a dream, a bypass.
How does an adult society look like? which kind of mechanisms would be then employed? The ancient Greek society tried to develop this model and gave more place for the fulfillment of desires: theatre, mysteries (rituals), orgies, side by side with the first democracy 500 years before Christianity and Islam. The ancient Greeks believed in a country that a collection of individuals rather than a line of simple men, that was the period where Socrates, Plato and Aristoteles lived, a period which attained a relatively high degree of control (compared to that age), without having to exercise a high degree of repression, or at least one that doesn’t use the same mechanisms of today primarily through shame and guilt.
We can associate the exploitation of the mechanisms of control through shame and guilt with Religion and totalitarian regimes, even with modern western democracies, we can even associate it with smaller groups such as families, teachers, politicians. How big is the influence of these mechanisms in our daily life? What will happen to a person who refuses to accept shame and guilt? Through intelligence, learning and a high degree of taught self-control a man can overcome these types of feelings. The ancient stoics already dealt with those topics, a man can search for other ways of resolve the interest of society to repress his desires by channeling those through music and art and philosophy, for example. Finding a replacement for shame and guilt could be done by the means of high intelligence and high self-restraint, also accepting the fact that an individual can never settle which society (maybe through a small rebellion) and develop a sense of overcoming which comes from a place of higher-meaning and responsibility for other people instead of a system of reward and punishment.