Mock Guilt and Vitality

Much guilt is mock guilt.

Fake guilt. Scapegoat guilt. 

Some guilt is fitting guilt. The other day I saw a person choke-chain a doberman

so it made a pained choking whelp. Like a grunt. 

Dobermans have a reputation for being "velcro-dogs."

The doberman was at the hip, being attentive.

So if that person feels guilt for the act, seems fair to call the guilt a fitting guilt. 

The mirror of consciousness shows the bad act as bad. The mirror is accurate.

Mock guilt is different. 

Most guilt is mock guilt. Mock guilt is the doberman feeling bad. Feeling bad for being mistreated, that is mock guilt. This mirror is a carnival mirror, reflecting back a distorted image, a grotesque of the reality. It is a survival mirror, this mock mirror. Our consciousness chooses to create this mock mirror. To play ourselves back to ourselves as bad. As the cause of the bad. And so, as bad. Seems to bring up the question of why? Why would a person choose to do that?

The mock mirror is a survival mirror. If something goes wrong and the doberman is mistreated, the doberman knows it doesn't want to be mistreated like that again because the feeling is bad. So it will get creative, see if it did anything wrong, and if that is no solution because it can find nothing wrong in its own behavior, it will need to make sense of being treated badly. It will try to read the mind of its owner, to anticipate cause and effect - if I do this my owner will do that, and I don't want that to happen so I won't do this. Thus limiting his behavior. 

And meanwhile  he leaves behind his own nature - in order to anticipate the behavior of the other. He is the one who causes the bad thing to happen, he knows it. He creates the mock mirror to make sense of things. Because the other is unfairly responsive and things keep going wrong. The other does not change no matter what he tries, and his conclusion is that he must be the source of the problem. And if so there must be some unseen thing he will happen upon if he just keeps trying. 

The doberman depends on the owner. The owner has him on a choke chain. The owner feeds him. The doberman's mock mirror is a survival mirror. Navigating having a choke chain on his neck while he needs food. This is not to mention his emotional need for care from his owner. And his owner doesn't choke him all the time, and does feed him, so really being unfairly choked every so often isn't so bad. 

In order to think this way he must find something to do with his anger for being mistreated. His anger is turned on himself and he sees himself as distorted, a grotesque. His anger was needed for clarity, but it has been defeated by the circumstances and his needs. His anger is now used to create the mock mirror out of survival.

A child who learns to live with mock guilt becomes an adept at self blame. They have to turn off their thinking and side with the other, on whom they depend. The other who is the authority. And so authority is lost, forfeited under duress. Authority is resigned from, the mock mirror is complete, authority reappears outsourced in the other. Anger is pushed away, into unconsciousness, but building. Moral orientation is confused. A power vacuum exists in the person after this abdication. The person does not want to look at the source of their confusion.

Enter the media and social media. 

Well-studied tropes of authority. Well studied of Milgram. The media, made shiny and  convincing as possible. Preying on the epistemologically vulnerable - those who are distanced from their own knowing. Preying on the ontologically vulnerable - those who are unsure of the worth of their own being. The media, eager to apply for the job of Authority. Using fear, and mock guilt, and tapping into that unconscious anger that continues to build.