Laws can only make you do so many things. Even the busiest police states have only so many men in  black suits that fit badly around their shoulder holsters and sunglasses that don’t reflect the sun, only so many informers and so many operators to listen to wiretaps. The best stooges and informers are the ones that men and women plant in their own heads to threaten, intimidate and spy on their own actions, to censor their own words and thoughts, and to drive them to do what they do not wish to do.

The house of guilt is built on taboos. Acts and thoughts which should automatically inspire guilt. If they do not inspire guilt in you, then they will inspire guilt in your neighbors, and, if your neighbors catch you not feeling properly guilty about something in the way that they do, they will deem you a bad person. And that will make them feel virtuous.

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The dirty little secret of guilt is that it brings forth such feelings of virtue. Liberals need racism, not only because it is another crisis that vests them with the right to rule as protectors of the oppressed, but also because it reaffirms their virtue.

They need racists the way that they need people who don’t recycle, who don’t agonize over America’s foreign policy, who unironically wear American flags on their t-shirts, who think that violence solves things, who believe that taxes should be lower, who are so privileged that they aren’t aware of their privilege, who don’t care about the planet or about any of the other things that they we have all been duly designated to care about this decade. It makes them feel good about their own virtues.

The manipulators of guilt strive to create a United States of Guilt, a permanent state of guilt run for their own benefit that works by imposing so much guilt that the guilt-ridden population never notices how their guilt is being spun into gold. Their goal is not to assuage the conditions that bring guilt forth, but to exacerbate them. The worse the conditions become, the greater their power grows. As with all sociopaths, those who exploit guilt for a living are the guiltiest and yet feel the least guilt.

In the United States of Guilt, the social crisis has replaced the Constitution and legislatures, courts and executives casually rewrite that old yellowed document for the sake of the social crisis. The crisis, whether it is the heat death of the planet, racism, obesity or health care must be perpetuated endlessly because it has become the source of political legitimacy and national illegitimacy.

The political legitimacy of the presidents of guilt derives from that national illegitimacy, the heaps of books, articles, documentaries, wall graffiti, pamphlets, sociological texts, scatological poems, speeches and cave paintings that thoroughly and completely prove the past and present day criminality of the nation and the complicity of its people in that criminality.

This Constitution of Guilt, with its hundreds of thousands of pages, its multimedia apparatus and its glorious flag of guilt waving bleakly everywhere, is the true source of political legitimacy for the elite. It has displaced democracy and law with social crisis after social crisis whose very existence shames us all and makes all other forms of government, other than the emergency response to the crisis, irrelevant.

To protest anything that the crisis managers of the United States of Guilt do is to display racism, criminal selfishness, disdain for the planet, a lack of concern for the future heart problems of six year olds drinking soda; along with a legion of other crimes, all of which add up to being a bad member of society. A guiltless sociopath.

The social consensus determines who is and isn’t a good person. It says that good people feel a sense of responsibility toward others. Guilt is the emotion of failing to live up to those expectations and responsibilities. When it is universally cultivated, then everyone feels guilty for not living up to their social duties and guilt for not feeling more guilty about it; except those high-achievers totting back organic fair trade groceries in reusable Amnesty International bags on the way to prepare lunches for homeless gay illegal aliens while wearing buttons condemning the occupation of Afghanistan and Gaza, nuclear power, West Virginia, hunting wolves, drilling for oil, driving cars and not being more engaged with the problems of the world.

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Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ These opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Jewish Press.