On Good Guilt and Bad Guilt

Last updated on: June 20, 2016 at 7:27 pm by Marc

On Good Guilt and Bad Guilt 2016-06-20T19:27:59-04:00 Marc

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crookedhart_final

Dear Rothoof,

I see you’ve been reassigned to another human. Officially speaking, I’m looking forward to your new attempts at tempting (no pun there, Rothoof, do contain yourself), and I admire the bureaucratic process that brought you back into active service. I must say, however, I am a little bemused as to why Our Father Below saw it fit to pull you up from the re-education chambers so soon after your last debacle. I don’t bring it up to hurt you (Hell knows, there’s enough of that in the battle against the Enemy). I only wish to motivate you. I don’t need to remind you, of course, that my reputation is roped to your own (you and I rebelled against The Enemy as a pair, remember?) and that I have suffered three examinations over your ineptitude.

So let’s go over it once more, shall we? You had a human in your care, a real nugget of possibility. Grubtongue himself, with all his veteran experience in childhood-education, could hardly have provided a meal more instantly microwaveable. She had a high rank in a cartel, distributing (admittedly crude and distasteful) narcotics to the poor in accordance with our General American Campaign. She kept a new lover every month, and indulged her taste for debauchery with satisfying combination of frequency and a gradual decline in those repulsive side-effects of pleasure, joy, and affection. She even killed a man. The only reason you were granted such an idiot-proof opportunity was a silly ordeal involving a late-life baptism, demanded by her grandmother, that put your human’s original guardian into the Burn Unit (our Research Department is still looking into how Our Enemy, with his shameless, opportunistic fascination with the material world, managed to weaponize the human’s water). So why, Rothoof, is such easy prey now ridiculously exalted, full of enough vinegar to laugh at us, peacefully conversing with the man she murdered in the kingdom of Our Enemy?

Stupidity, Rothoof. Your sublime stupidity is the efficient cause of the whiny, self-indulgent cheers of the Enemy horde. You grew so intoxicated by your subject’s evil actions that you neglected to pay close attention to the unique savor of her guilt.

It’s true, of course, that guilt can be weaponized. The Manual recommends repressed guilt, self-indulgent guilt, crippling guilt, and resentful guilt as effective means of keeping humans away from any accurate picture of Our Enemy — who, degrading his own spiritual nature, forgives these worms any sin, any time they apologize, and at any stage in their life. But your human’s guilt was neither repressed, indulged, nor aestheticized. It was simply the felt awareness that she was living a life beneath the life she ought to live. She held held it frankly and candidly. She was forever reminding herself that she knew each of her sins was wrong. It became of point of pride, really, that whatever she did, she “at the very least had no illusions.” After every explosion of violence, even as she listened to her family justify themselves with stock phrases like “they were asking for it,” and “it was us or them,” she would sing a little song to herself — “this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.” After every illicit sexual act, she would allow the immense distance between her attempts at communion and those that really attain unity to fill her attention — and again, that horrible song.

Oh, how easy it would have been to pry her guilt from her! You could have infected her with a disdain for her grandmother, who already annoyed her, and then, by simple transference, have her think of the moral code that so haunted her as “coming from Grandmother.” Voila! Now her guilt is no kind of insight into the moral universe — it’s merely the thin, warbling voice of a dying old woman. Never mind whether her grandmother’s insights were genuine or not. Humans are notoriously bad a distinguishing the source of a moral statement from the question of whether the statement is true. I once had a man advocate the torture of enemy combatants simply because he had heard the contrary position, that one ought not torture, from an annoying leftist politician. It suffices to give genuine guilt some alternative explanation: if not a grandmother then a morbid disposition, an excessive Catholicism, old movies, bad novels, an evolutionary trait, some quirk of psychology, anything besides the plain voice of conscience your subject took it for.

But by letting her hang on to such a guilt, you let her feed a lion. By letting her maintain the awareness of the contradiction between the facts of her life and the way her life ought to have been lived, you kept its cage unlocked. By failing to see that as sin grew dry and stale, the moral ideals she kept preserved would grow all the more tempting — you might as well have baited it with a raw steak. Well, the Lion devoured you in the end. Good riddance, I’d say, if not for our devoted and respectful business relationship, of course.

As you begin again, demoted and humiliated, do try to remember the directive of Our Father Below: What profits it a Spirit to tempt a human into a thousand evil acts if their basic moral beliefs do not change, and conversion stands, as it were, like a battering ram at their door? To safeguard those evil actions, to assure their habitual performance, and to keep the door firmly barred against Enemy invasion, one must silence the song — no matter how deep it sings — that “this is wrong.” One must supplement every immoral, selfish action with a gradual shift of moral code, so that the ideals and beliefs of the human no longer threaten evil actions with conversion, but actually come to confirm and justify them.

I’ll send more on this. In the meantime, keep your horns down, and don’t let on that we are acquaintances. Your incompetency brings us all down.

Affectionately,

Crookedhart

Hey Dear Readers, it’s not-demon me, Marc. I’m trying to motivate myself to write for you. So I’m hereby making a rule. If I get any donation, no matter how small, I will regard it as a challenge, and post again within the next 33 hours. Follow my Facebook page to see if someone has already challenged me to post!

Crookedhart

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