Individual guilt occurs when something bad happens, you know you are responsible, and you wish you had not done it. Especially when you somehow affect others with your actions. It is a very valuable social tool in all communities.
Collective guilt, on the other hand, is much more amorphous. How much am I responsible for the bad actions of others in my tribe? How much for the evil past actions of my ancestors? How much is my tribe guilty and what should I do to make my tribe act on that guilt?
In smaller communities like families, or the imagined hunter-gatherer bands of yesteryear, one might answer “a lot.” But in today’s humongous collectivities, that seems less and less true. As an individual, I am all but helpless, hardly responsible for social actions beyond my immediate touch.
Yet I do receive benefits from such collective evils or even simple wrongs. I have a lot of good things because my earlier culture killed off natives, enslaved others, destroyed chunks of ecology. What do I owe, what should I pay back, and how?
The earlier actual victims are far away, dead, amorphous, and anonymous. I can’t do anything for them.
So I wonder. I try to do right here and now. I strive to balance those afflicted by bad luck. But am I really guilty of anything?
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 