Reflections From a Murky Pond

Eric Brown has posited on his blog, WeirdGuy that the Principle of Reciprocity applies to the act of giving. While this is a wonderful idea, I believe it falls into the realms of fantasy instead of fact.  I do not concur with his assessment that “giving is infectious“.

Altruism has its place and that place is good in that it serves the Good. It does not engender similar behavior in the beneficiaries of such kindness. Many people do not even recognize that they have been given a gift; they take the gift as their due – fair recompense for some past act of theirs. Others live under the delusion of Entitlement – the self-serving surety that they deserve such gifts because of some accident of birth or upbringing.

Most of us in Western cultures are familiar with the Seven Deadly Sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride. These Cardinal Vices were enumerated by the early Christian church as a way to educate and instruct followers concerning man’s tendency to sin. I believe we must add an eighth Deadly Sin to that list – Guiltism.

Guiltism:

Guiltism is a mindset or belief system that espouses that an individual or group is inherently “evil” because they are possessed of some innate benefit that they did not earn and must be ashamed of. At guiltism’s core is the mandate that since someone or some group has privilege, they must pay reparations to all others who do not possess that privilege. Failure to pay without complaint absolves all others who harm the privileged person or group from some or all responsibility for their actions.

This is an insidious and pernicious belief structure. Guiltism it is on both the idea of collective guilt, which is guilt attributed to someone who has some sort of relationship – familial or societal – with someone else who perpetrated some transgression, and upon the idea any privilege automatically incurs an individual or group the burden of guilt and the need to offer both apology and recompense to diverse strangers.

Guiltism is an extremely damaging “sin”, possibly worse than the original seven combined. It corrupts the Seven Contrary Virtues: chastity, abstinence, liberality, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.

• Guiltism corrupts Chastity by causing a beautiful person to hate their own bodies – an unearned privilege, which detracts from successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of a human person in his or her bodily and spiritual being.

• Guiltism denies Abstinence because the virtue of abstinence is intended to be a conscious act, freely chosen to enhance life, and guiltism twists this into repressive self-denial.

• Guiltism counters Liberality by denying any act of charity. Guiltism would claim that any charitable act was actually nothing more than rendering partial payment due.

• Guiltism perverts Diligence. Diligence requires that a human being freely to direct himself to conform to the good promised by God and attested by moral conscience. Guiltism both adds a goad, which precludes the person’s freedom of action and supplants the purpose of a vocation to divine beatitude with the assuagement of guilt and reduction of personal tribulation.

• Guiltism defies Patience by forcing a person to defy the existence of a divine plan and divine wisdom in favor of acting at their own pace to correct perceived injustices.

• Guiltism refuses Kindness by making all good acts towards others who carry this burden of adopted guilt an exacerbation of their condition, and any good act to the less privileged being recompense as opposed to kindness.

• Guiltism contravenes Humility by causing a person to aggrandize themselves and their self perception of their power and influence. To carry guilt implies the belief that one had the power to enact either harm or good.

Guiltism is by far the most deadly and corruptive of “sins.” It’s corrosive effects upon the human soul are unequaled in Man.

While it is a truism that a man without fear is a man without hope, it is a truth that a man without hope is a man without fear.

— jonolan

Hope is the belief or faith that an individual’s circumstances will improve, or at least not deteriorate further. This allows for the existence of the awareness of- and concern about consequence. A man who possesses some hope for his future is necessarily concerned about the potential negative impacts of his actions; he will not make a habit of engaging in potentially self damaging acts without at least some concern and trepidation. The lack of such hope removes the specter of negative consequence from a man’s mind and leaves him free to take such actions as he will without restraint.

Most men who lack hope are sunk in apathy; the lack of fear is concomitant with a lack of motivation, so that the individual tends to initiate few activities. These people are essentially passive, but may respond in unexpected and unrestrained manner to externally imposed stimuli. Some men however respond to the lack of hope with perilous vigor. They undertake courses of action that engender great change and greater danger to all those unlucky enough to surround them.

Do not fear strong men. Fear weak men; they will cause more harm through their failures than the strong will ever cause by their successes.

— jonolan

While strong people have the will and the powers to directly effect change their strength has a basis in action and therefore must be brought to bear on a subject to be effective. The actions of the strong can be tracked and in most cases predicted. This allows a person to either adapt to- or mitigate any personally harmful effects from the actions of the strong.

Weak people do not have the will and the powers to directly effect change, but they have a nearly immeasurable capacity to cause harm to those around them through either their attempts to take action or their complete failure to take any action at all. Attempting to predict or mitigate the harmful effects of such failures is exceedingly difficult and consumes much of the efforts of any society.

Strength must be measured by both will and power and must always be viewed within the context of the given situation and environment. A thug with a handgun and the will to use it may well be considered strong in the immediate context of a mugging, but that same thug must be considered weak in the context of his society because he lacks the will and power to effect any changes on that scale.

In the alley the thug’s power can be adapted to or mitigated in many ways depending on the training, fitness and preparedness of his potential victims. On the other hand, the negative effects of this thug’s weakness and resulting failed actions and failures to act on the society as whole are far harder to accurately predict and to mitigate.