Libertarian National Socialist Green Party

When life throws you a curve ball, you can either try to stop it, or you can catch it and fling it back in one motion, preserving its momentum and adding some of your own. People who like to talk about revolutions, terrorism, and giant wars are missing the point. We don't need to destroy society. We just need to redirect it.

For example, one simple change we could make would be to handle guilt differently. Guilt, or feelings of inadequacy and being "bad" for not having done something that someone else desires, is one of the predominant emotions expressed in our society and is a required emotion for someone to be considered "human" by the new and limiting terms of liberal democracy. There's guilt for every circumstance.

If you don't donate money to help starving African children (who will in turn breed more starving African children, thanks to food from the West) you are guilty. If you don't have pity for the right people, and don't say the obligatory things - "Of course, the Holocaust(tm) was terrible" and "At that time, of course, a black man couldn't get a job in America" - you are considered guilty. Even simple things, like leaving the toilet seat up if you're in a house with a woman, can be grounds for massive guilt.

You did not do what others considered "right," so you're supposed to blame yourself and feel bad about yourself and prostrate yourself before others so they can blame you too. This has the double advantage of both disciplining you, and bringing you closer to your controllers by making you want their pity, which says to you, "You're okay and approved by society again, so your suffering from guilt can cease."

Guilt can even take forms without anyone clearly in charge. If you're like me, age 17 and home on a Saturday night working, it is suggested that you're a loser by the social attitudes you see on television and in the movies. Guilt is mechanical, and occurs even if you're not "guilty," for example, if one chooses to work on Saturday night instead of following the herd.

Our lives are wracked by guilt, from our first consciousness to death. We feel guilty for being prosperous, if we are, and for being destitute, if we're not prosperous. We feel guilty for having more than any other person in this "equal" society, and we feel guilty if offend someone by actually having an opinion. If we're not popular with the people who declare it important that they be popular, we're supposed to feel guilt.

But guilt is a scam. Ever notice that the "popular people" at any high school are the ones who aren't good at anything else? Similarly, the Jewish people who invented religious guilt in a "Western" sense were failures at everything they did except trade and with it, swindling. They built no lasting monuments. Their religion was borrowed from others. Their culture was the hand-me-downs of trading tribes in the region. But what they did have was guilt.

I find taking a stand against guilt is like catching that curveball and sending it right back to the source. Instead of wasting my energy either convincing myself or others that I'm not "guilty," I put that energy into something with a positive, tangible end result, whether as simple as building my grandmother a back porch or as complex as helping run a political party. Our creativity is brighter than this dulled world, and there's no need for me to have the self-pity and guilt that afflicts the rest of this society. Maybe this will work for you too -- you're the only one who can control whether or not you feel guilty.