h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

People feel guilty, because they take the responsibility for what they've done.
They do so, because they are aware or at least think, they had complete control of their actions. Whatever led them to these actions is secundary to their feeling. If something bad results from their actions, they also take responsibility of this evil, this is the feeling of guilt.
One can also impose guilt on somebody else, this is then called blaming somebody. The blamed Person can either accept or decline, this depends on the arguments brought forward to make him see the evil as a result of his action.
Most commonly the blame is accepted, because action and result is mostly very easily linked to another. Almost anybody can link events most improbable this way. These linkings are a matter of personal belief.


to be continued tomorrow...

Why do you feel compelled to write about guilt? Do you think we should be more uninhibited about it? It's something I think about a lot, too.

OK, Malchut, you did good on explaining the link between GUILT and one having control of his actions.
First of all, I agree with that:
- You cannot feel guilty because you killed an ant on your way home, by smashing her with your foot, not seeing it. You didn't know of this, you had no control, you are not guilty...
- With the same logic you cannot be held guilty because some action of you randomly had a bad effect on someone else later. You had no way in predicting this and had no control on the bad thing that happend to that somebody else.

OK, so by this way of thinking we could build a 'rule': One is not guilty if one doesnt do s**t on purpose. *OR* If you have no control of a certain action you cannot be blamed.

RESPONSABILITY is, thou, another thing. Every reaction has an action which is responsible for that reaction. Since 'every little action has a reaction' (Bob Marley), ONE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERY REACTIONS THAT OCCUR OF ONE'S ACTIONS. So, the death of that ant is my responsibility. Thou I'm not guilty.

So, by this, one could conclude: RESPONSABILTY is a universal concept. It has to do with action-reaction. Atrbuting GUILT to something where one is RESPONSIBLE depends on lot's of social/religiou/political/personal belives.


* PLEASE REPLY TO THIS, PLEASE DISAGREE, PLEASE LET US GET wiZer. *
TRAVELER

Hi Trillians child,

It's hard to explain why I think about guilt. It's a very complex and important element of life, isn't it? And you're right when you say that people are far too inhibitet about it.
And it causes lots of problems in interaction with other humans.
I truly believe there is no such thing as guilt, we're stuck in a chain of events that occur to us when we interact with the world in any way.
Sartre once said: "l'enfer ce sont les autres." Hell is other people. I think guilt is produced in the action of blaming, think about children, they are our symbol for innocence, why are they innocent? I think that's because nobody can blame them (at least they'd still not understand).

Oi!

Responsibility and guilt are connected though. You are responsible for your actions, because you can reflect them intelectually, you can only accept guilt for an action, for which you can take responsability as well.
Alright, you'll probably not disagree, but tell me, what do you think about responsability, what IS that? When am I responsible? When I act responsibly? What IS to act responsibly?
Isn't that acting in a way, that you can't be guilty of anything?

I think we should learn to take responsibility for the things we do, even if we were not aware at the time

- that we were doing them
- or that they were wrong

This applies to most things in everyday life. And it is always better to tell the truth - i.e. "I sent off that fax because it looked urgent to me, I am sorry, but I didn't realise it was not to be sent off yet. This mess-up is entirely my fault."

(Usually this should also pass the guilt on to the person who did not tell you the whole truth, but I would not want them to take the blame entirely. I would expect them then to react with a similar disarming honesty and share the responsiblity for the messup)

I wasn't explicit enough. GUILT and RESPONSABILTY are two completly diffrent thigs (linked though).

RESPONSABILTY means that for every reaction there is a responsible action.
You know, when you build that domino game and one domino falls after the other - one domino is responsbile for the other to tomb.
Or another example would be 'because I spoke for too long with somebody I missed the train, which crashed and because of me not beeing in the train I didn't die. So the fact that I spoke for too long to that friend is responsible for me still being alive.
OK, I think you got the point. RESPONSIBILITY has to do with the connection between action and reaction.

GUILT or BLAMING is another thing: it's associating to that action-reaction connection a certain negative belive.

In life there's a connection between everything. Blaming peolple because of that connection is a completly diffrent thing.

4 Malchut and Trillian's Child:

Now something diffrent:

This is a true psichology test, read on:

Sarah a 25 years old lady is maried to Tom. Her housband though loving her has very little time for Sarah, works usualy till very late in the night and goes often to buisness trips over the whole weekend.

One one of those weekends Sarah falls in the hands of a lover and has a night of sex with him.

This happens in a motel on the other side of the town, on the other side of the river.

In the middle of the night Sarah decides to go home, so she gets in the car and starts driving. While she is trying to cross the bridge an armed guy with a mental dessease stops her, not letting her cross the bridge.

Afraid, Sarah drives back and tries to cross the river by boat. Ariving at the boats she realizes she has no money and tries to convince the boatman to let her pass for free. The boatman explains her that if she has no money there's no way he will let her pass.

Knowing that, Sarah decides to drive back to the lover to ask him for some money.

On her way to the motel she meets an old friend of her who once was in love with her - o love to which she didn't reply. She explains the situation to this friend, asking him for money. The friend, because of still being hurt with her, because of the way she treated him in the past, doesen't give her the money.

Sarah keeps driving and arives, after a while, at the motel. There she asks the lover for some money, which he declines, giving no explenation at all.

Sarah decides to try to cross the bridge one more time, and starts driving. On her way she finds the mental deseased guy who kills her.


WHO IN YOUR OPININION, WHO IS MOST GUILTY FOR SARAH'S DEATH? Make a list (from 1 to 6) putting in the first place the most guilty character and in the last place the less guilty one.
The characters are:
- Sarah
- Housband
- Lover
- Mental Deseased Guy
- Boatman
- Old Friend

There is no right answer for this test.
The way you answer and the arguments you give, show the way attribute responsability.

One rule though: you have to include all characters and two characters can't bee in the same position (you have to make a decision).

Go ahead, answere.

1 The lover on two counts: he didn't accompany her home, he didn't give her the money
2. The husband. He should have given his wife more time and TLC
3. Sarah - she was committing adultery after all, and she should have planned her escape better
4. The old friend - he could have been the one involved, after all, and can't have felt much for her if he didn't take her home or help her out.
5. The boatman. He was in his right mind, and could have got his money later.
6. The mental guy - provided he really was mental and not capable of responsiblity for his doings - including shooting her.

Alright, let me start backwards:

6: The mental, for the same reasons as Trillians child stated.

5: The boatman, he was only following the rules given to him by a higher instance (his boss), which isn't the most sensible thing to do but, to me, is understandable (he's only trying tokeep out of trouble)

4: The new lover, who never claimed Sarah meant anything to him.

3: The old lover, because a person dies for You in a way after you stopped loving him/her.

2: The husband, because he did not force Sarah to cross that river.

1: Sarah, because she had to get the love she needed from somewhere.


I did my best not to blame anybody, though you can sense what each person of your little test would blame the others of. I got to this conclusion, after it took me Minutes to find an answer for sarahs case. After all it was easy, I just had to shift my point of view, I was still too stuck on the husbands point of view.

Now, what do you make of this?

Sorry, I missed a detail of the test.

Sarah is guilty, because it's plain stupidity that makes her go back. I thought her husband would be coming back that night, and that's why she wanted to go. But in the text is no reason for her to go back. Everyone else had some reason for their action, wich makes them understandable. We can only excuse what we understand, what seems in some way responsible. (So, traveler, still didn't answer my question, what about ACTING responsibly?)

So, lets get to the first conversation:

Traveler,

you are moralising, I'm not saying that you SHOULD blame people for the interconnections. My point is, it's possible, if you do it in a clever way. That's one of the reasons I think that guilt doesn't exist.
Responsibility is the basis on which you can blame somebody, if he isn't responsible he can't be blamed, OK?
Believing that responsibility is interconnected you can make anybody responsible. If you bear that in mind, the idea of guilt will dissolve, because guilt is always a division of guilty and innocent, if everybody can be blamed for something, NOBODY can. Actually, there's nobody left who could blame anyway, because you have to be innocent to blame.

(Stop me, I'm getting megalomaniac, thinking I'm a enlightened Zen philosopher!)

Problem in the world as it is, is that nobody realises this, so people keep on blaming each other.

Trillians child,

I think we basically agree on this, would the other person in your example explain, for example:

"I was a bit tired that day, that's why I forgot to tell you the fax had to be send tomorrow. I was so tired because I went for a drink with some old high school mates and afterwards had a fight with my wife until 6am, because she doesn't want me to drink."

One could then talk to the wife and the highschool dudes, which would then explain their actions, and the guilt would just evaporate in yellow smoke. Everybody would then be responsible (an endless chain) and nobody could be blamed.

Chew on this. What do you both say?
Be hearing of you and thanks for bringing me forward in this.
Malchut.

Can't stop and philosophise - am at work and don't have the peace and quiet for it. But how can you say guilt doesn't exist? If it didn't, why do we have a word for it - and what is that funny feeling I get when I've done something wrong or I realise that something I did was wrong after the event.

Sory guys, had no time to wriet ein the last two days.
Now about that psychology test:

Both of you, Trillians child an Malchut, show more or less the same type of response, with which I agree. Let's see:


You seem to give great importance to family values, since both Sarah and the housband are ranked as pretty guilty.

One could almost say that you give importance to tradicional values, which is not true though. Since you placed the mental guy and the boatman in the last places, you seem to value a lot an intectual analise of the problem. The mental guy was the one who fisicly killed Sarah, but beacause your intelectual analise you see him as almost having no fault.

Friendship values are also of great importance to you, maybe even more important than the family ones, since you understood that both the lover and the friend should have helped Sarah, even though the lover had no deep relationship with Sarah and the friend was pissed with her.


HAHA, now I feel like a shrink with a strage beard, who pretends to know people by aplying a test to them.

About the main conversation:

Malchut, I'm NOT moralising. I'm just saying that everything in life is connected. One thing happend's because something made it happen.

So, ALWAYS, something is responsible for what happend.

I belive that up to this point we all agree, don't we?

Now, because there's a responsability for everything society built rules by which they blame people if they are proven responsible (linked) of a certain action.

Religion did the same thing: Budhist translated this in carma, saying that you have to take care of waht you do since 'what comes aroud goes around'.
Catholics say that if you f**k up you go to hell, which means exactly the same thing.

OK, so there are two diffrent things:

RESPONSABILITY: if s**t happend, it happend because samething made it happen. There's a link between everything.

BLAMING: to find that link, saying that somebodies action made s**t happen.


Now, If I agree with blaming, is a completly diffrent thing:
At least in theory I don't. Since one is never innocent (like Malchut sayed) one can never blame others.

Now, GUILT, yes guilt does exist. One feels guilty because he realizes the way his action from the past influenced the present.
Maybe noone should blame nobody, since one feels guilty on his own because of the way stuff is linked.

I now Malchut's not gonna agree with this, saying that one doesen't have that much control of his action, so there's no real link and there's no guilt.
But tell me, do you really think that we have absolutly no control on our actions? Can't you predict that what you are doing is gonna have some sort of efect in the future?
Of couse one can predict stuff and make a link between action-reaction. So there exists guilt. Or maybe we should eliminate this word, since it's related with 'blaming' (which is inapropriate, since noone is innocent), and substetute it with responsability.
So, since you can predict stuff, and since you can link it, you know the responsability you had in the reaction that occured.

So, what do you make out of this, wize men?