Is It Good to Feel Guilt?

(What Debt Financing Can Teach Us About a Difficult Emotion)

In an obvious sense, it’s good for those guilty of wrongdoing to be found guilty—and to internalize the verdict.

Yet I ask not about guilt in the legal or even moral sense, but in the emotional sense. Is it good to feel guilty that we don’t do X enough or do Y too much?

If guilt is a motivator, then, like any negative emotion—say, anger or anxiety—it clearly serves a purpose. Maybe without guilt we’d feel less responsible and be more selfish. But naysayers argue that acting from guilt is unsustainable and detrimental in the long-run; we could be just as effective without bringing such “toxic energy” into the world? Great. “Now,” say the guilt-havers, “You’re telling me I should feel guilty that I feel guilty”?

What follows is a creative thought experiment:

The word guilt, in many languages, derives from the word for debt (in German, it’s the same word—Schuld).

Economists debate whether debt is good or bad (or which kinds of debt are good and which bad). On the one hand, it’s intuitive that it’s worse to owe than be owed. On the other hand, if you’re optimistic about the future, and believe you’ll have more tomorrow than today, borrowing against a sense of anticipated growth is wise.

If guilt=a sense of owing someone something (whether oneself or an imagined or real other), and you think that tomorrow you’ll be better than today, maybe guilt is a form of moral debt financing. On the other hand, if you prefer to keep a strictly positive balance sheet, you should never go to bed feeling guilty.

Paul, Kafka, and a handful of existentialist thinkers claim that we are born guilty, i.e., that to exist is to be on borrowed time, to owe God (or Mystery) something. Again—if guilt is a form of debt and debt is a sign of growth, this should be no cause for alarm. On the contrary—many growth companies have negative cash-flows.

A human on day one is like a venture—high start-up capital is required, but eventually we repay it. The sense that we need to repay shouldn’t entrap—it should motivate.

So the real question is what do you think of debt? And the question behind that question is what do you think of your future? Depending on how you answer that, perhaps you can then more accurately understand whether a sense of guilt is a form of emotional fiefdom or a sign of institutional backing.