The Moral Economy of Guilt!
The curious process by which notions of sin and guilt have become both illusory and omnipresent.
Wilfred M. McClay
In his grand and gloomy book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud identified the tenacious sense of guilt as “the most important problem in the development of civilization.” In fact, he continued, it seems that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.” Such guilt made for an elusive quarry, however. It was hard to identify and hard to understand, and even harder to counteract, since it so frequently dwelled at an unconscious level and could easily be mistaken for something else. [ ... ]
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