Guilt is a Signpost of Consciousness

Guilt is both an absolute and relative experience of truth. A person or society feels guilt based on definition of what's right and wrong, appropriate or otherwise, good or bad – created as paradigms, practiced as behavior, expressed as culture and laws.

If in a relationship, a person cannot recognize a wrong done or said, how can he or she admit it, say sorry and repair the damage of an offensive word or action? If these persons handle important jobs in judiciary, education, government, what's the result? Liberalized drugs, sexual promiscuity, homosexual marriages, accessibility to guns, pornography, destruction of natural resources, exploitation of women and children, organized murder and kidnapping that all violate the law of human life and nature. As a society, people create these through condonation by indifference and patronage.

There are events that elicit universal and absolute guilt; while some as relative guilt reference to a specific cultures or norms.

Killing people is supposed to elicit absolute and universal guilt. Some cultures justify killing as preservation of faith or ideology. Hence occurence of war for political supremacy. In the hallmarks of psychology, the absence of guilt in situations warranting remorse as in fraud, infidelity, libel and the like is defined as sociopathic deviation; and to some degree, psychosis-driven for heinous crimes as murder, rape and the like.

In a culture where men are given supremacy of decisions or dominance, a man will not feel guilty that he did not consult his wife/partner on what affects her financially and emotionally; let her make a decision to advance her development. By human equality, it should make society feel guilty they created laws that don’t allow women to make decisions without consent of spouses, when separated or divorced women are ruled out for leadership for typecast of emotional instability.

Shouldn’t society be guilty of typecasting assertive women as dominant, not marrying type or unattractive? Or branding sex as a physiologic function more than an expression of intimacy in love?

For guilt to be experienced by an individual or society, a sensor rings a bell in the mind and heart of each person that censures a wrong action being done or resultant damage. It comes from values aligned to principles. Values are relative, what is chosen by people as good for the preservation of goals.

Even if that sensor rings loud and repeatedly, but is not heeded by the mind to halt the action or to rectify the damage based on belief, no guilt can be experienced.

Guilt is a signpost of consciousness – of what is right, productive, good, empowering, balancing and healthy that need to be (re)defined universally first -- not by relative values but by principles. Then we can understand what, how and why we experience guilt; and worry if we don’t in situations where we should have had. It starts with deep examination of conscience in consciousness.