Some people are trained to experience painful guilt aspenance. Authority figures sometimes end up training people that if they’ve done something wrong, they ought to suffer, and then the guilt is expunged. This distracts them from actually doing a fault analysis, but it can still work as a disincentive to do the bad thing if it’s sufficiently simple and avoidable.
I think this pattern develops when the problem of whose interests are more important predominates; it seems like the sort of thing that wouldn’t develop if people perceived their interests to converge. Guilt as penance is a form of submission. Like all submission, it’s based on a fundamentally adversarial paradigm.
Some people are trained to experience painful guilt as penance. Authority figures sometimes end up training people that if they’ve done something wrong, they ought to suffer, and then the guilt is expunged. This distracts them from actually doing a fault analysis, but it can still work as a disincentive to do the bad thing if it’s sufficiently simple and avoidable.
I think this pattern develops when the problem of whose interests are more important predominates; it seems like the sort of thing that wouldn’t develop if people perceived their interests to converge. Guilt as penance is a form of submission. Like all submission, it’s based on a fundamentally adversarial paradigm.