A person constantly made to feel guilty will in turn develop the habit of making others feel guilty in order to manipulate them - in other words, he or she will learn the habit of blame. What could be more antithetical to the ideal of self-reliance than the habit of blame, and by extension a surfeit of the emotion of guilt?
It seems to be in the State’s interest to maintain a strong habit of blame and an abnormally high level of guilt in the populace, because no other single emotional pattern more squelches and distracts from anti-State sentiment. People who feel guilty are easy to manipulate. They can be pushed in any direction. Their inevitable blame of others is then easily directed by the State and its media allies to any group but the State itself. Let’s take a brief tour of the twin forces of guilt and blame in the Statist machinery:
- When religion was more dominant, religion and the State were more intertwined, and I don’t think I need to go far into the connections between religion and guilt (and hence blame), but here are a few examples: witches blamed for social ills, direct use of guilt perhaps most blatantly in some forms of Catholicism, and blame on other religious groups
- Now that scientism has taken over as the new religion, Statists have been scrambling to reconfigure the engines of guilt to accomodate: now we have scientifically “proven” global warming, blaming financial crises on “greed” because some smart people say it’s so, and nearly every other Statist doctrine attempts to use science to back it up
- Progressive taxation is based on making rich people feel guilty, the other side of the coin being getting poorer people to blame the rich. People are guilted into paying taxes in the first place.
- By destroying self-reliance from all angles, the State ensures a perpetual sense of indebtedness to the State. Self-reliance can never flourish in an environment of blame and guilt; the two habits of mind are like oil and water.
- The whole notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) seems based on blaming corporations for various problems and also making capitalists feel guilty for not “contributing to society,” the implication being that their very business operations are not contributing to society, and that only direct donations and such can help the world (those being the only mechanisms the State has).
- The whole two-party system seems to thrive on blame. Blame is easily directed, hence the State can ensure that any blame coming its way can be rediverted to one or the other party, or of course an outside party like terrorists.
- Minimum wage laws, welfare, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Patriot Act, affirmative action, rent controls - it’s easy to see how all these rely on a heightened sense of guilt (and in many cases blame - like blame of rent “gougers”).
Now to be comprehensive, I should mention the other two emotional weapons of the State: fear and anger. Fear is an obvious one: terrorism, bailouts to prevent systemic collapse, global warming fallout, war propanganda. Anger is not so obvious, because I think all of us have felt anger at the State apparatus itself. Let’s look beyond that for a moment, and note that anger (like its seed blame) is easily redirected. Anger and blame are really part and parcel*, so the same trick of the two-party system and focus on individual personalities of leaders lets them take all the flak while the State itself retains its purity in the eyes of the people.
*In order to get angry you have to blame something or someone (including possibly your own self) - try to notice that flash of blame next time you get angry, or indeed next time you feel any negative emotion at all (beside the pure sadness of your puppy dying). If there is a tree of the negative emotions that the State feeds off, its trunk is blame.
Even among libertarians, there is tendency to blame the Fed and certain leaders and pundits, but I think this is just feeding into the State again. The whole monopoly apparatus is organic - a creature of its own - and although that creature is surely “to blame” we gain nothing by needlessly imbuing that fact with the very emotions that empower it! All we must do is determine and implement the most expedient, most calculated path to its dismantlement.