Our Guilty Conscience   by Josh

in Society / Culture    (submitted 2012-01-09)

Guilt free treat - meaning a treat that won't blow your diet. I felt guilty because I didn't get my morning run in yesterday. Aren't these misuses of the word guilt? I guess you can be guilty of a lack of discipline. I guess I could feel guilty that my gluttony or sloth got the better of my vanity. Guilt implies a crime or a sin. Assuming most of us are committing a range of them across the spectrum of seriousness then what does it say about us when we talk about the guilt of messing up our diet? I think it says we've become comfortably blocked out about what our conscience would really want to say to us about the myriad of hypocrisies and indulgences that wash through our lives. For example - I drive a car which could feed a starving Sudanese village for a year but I feel guilty that I don't look as good as I could in my board shorts after Christmas eating.

We take this theme further when we talk about saving the world without compromising our capitalist principles. "Go green and save some green (money)". A ten year old's conscience can see that at no point in that slogan is the selfishness at the heart of such world problems like the environmental destruction is being addressed. As the world becomes smaller via advances in communication - aka the World Wide Web, there is a homogenising effect, a shared sort of psyche emerging, a global village in which the ten year olds voice of conscience gets pretty well drowned out. A ten year old might be innocent enough of the hypocrisies of life to still be inclined to point them out but by adulthood we're well and truly sick of the guilt and it is the adults who run the internet and it is the internet which homogenises the shared psyche global village of the world. The internet in turn becomes the authority which the ten year old turns to for real answers to questions about the apparent hypocrisies of life but in general it is a false authority because on a subject like conscience the internet is an inane tidal wave of wishy washy slogans like "guilt free treats" and "go green and save some green".

Democracy seems to have a down side and an upside on the internet. We can blame democratic non-discrimination for the volume of nonsense on a fundamental subject like conscience but we can thank democratic freedom of speech for the hope that sense and insightful authority might have a chance to emerge if a worthy philosophy is ever put forward. Current expressions of our "global village" conscience such as "Go green and save some green" have little to offer though in my opinion. And as the global village becomes a "global mega city" the internet amounts to a deafening din of noise that by its shear volume serves as an ominous impediment to any new and potentially more worthy philosophy emerging and attracting due consideration.

But I'll trust in trust that our democratic principles will fulfill their purpose and somewhere, sometime, someplace in the inane tidal and deafening din an answer to the hypocrisies of life will be understood.

About the Author

Born in Australia I graduated from University with arts and philosophy degrees. I now work in a large family business but continue to have a keen interest in world affairs and humanity in general. At present I am interested in an organisation founded by an Australian Biologist, Jeremy Griffith called the World Transformation Movement, whose explanation of our conscience is very interesting.