From the time of my adolescence I was always prone to feelings of guilt, even though I did little to feel guilty about. I felt shame, early on, about masturbation. I sometimes gave sizeable donations to Third World charities because I felt guilty about having more money than I needed. I’m sure these were fluctuating phases. I was also prone to deep depressions.
When I read Jeremy Griffith’s first book Free : The End of the Human Condition, I resonated with it because of my guilt. It said that “sex is an attack on innocence". It related our extravagant lifestyles to the starvation of people in Africa.
It also promised redemption from this state. It promised to explain why we had had to be the way we were and shouldn’t feel guilty about it. I was glad that such a thing was promised, but I didn’t feel it as strongly as I felt the guilt.
I’m not sure how much I came to feel his work as a defence. I certainly championed it, and I did some work transcribing for him. While I was doing that I was throwing the responsibility for whether he was right or wrong to him. I knew that it was good for ideas to get out into the public sphere where they had a chance to prove themselves. If Griffith was wrong on some things, it would come out in the public debate which would eventuate.
My immediate break from supporting Griffith’s work came when I had a mental breakdown. The worst point in that experience was a confrontation with the worst feelings of guilt I ever experienced. I felt that the whole of human history was going to come to nothing only because of my lack of courage.
Later I tried buying copies of Griffith’s new book and donating it to libraries. By now I felt he was wrong on at least a few things, but again I thought the best way for that to be sorted out was to submit it to the attention of the world. There was need for debate.
It’s hard to be in a situation where you recognise that there is some key problem at the heart of human psychology which is not being addressed, but you’ve ceased to trust the one attempt you have come across to articulate it.
If an explanation for the human condition is going to solve that problem it has to bring positive feelings to the bulk of humanity.
What if it works the opposite way? What if we all have our ways of keeping the guilt at bay, and this book promises a better way, so we grab it, but then it dissolves in our hands and drops us into undiluted guilt?
I suspect this is why it has been a slow process for Griffith getting many people supporting his work. Most people can probably sense where guilt lies. I was early to open to his work because I was already wallowing in the pit.
Griffith’s advice is that, once someone has been convinced that what he says is the truth, they should support it without grappling with it intellectually too much, lest they become destabilised. That they should live off of what it can do for the world.
But that is only possible if you believe it will have a liberating effect on most people. If you believe the “confronting” aspect of it will connect harder than any defence, it would be hard to be so enthusiastic, especially if being confronted by idealism is what drives the progressive worsening of that condition in the forms of hostility, alienation and egotism.
My response, such as it was, was to express the ideas I did in How to Be Free. How might we heal from the human condition without running the risk of increasing any feelings of guilt?
No comments: