What is a drug? Something that gives a temporary boost without lasting or genuine value and whose price is a greater cost, beyond the price of self-deception and the disorientating indulgence of folly.
How is guilt a drug?
My own guilt is a signal that I have misbehaved morally. If I indeed have, the signal is right and proper, and, when I have recognised the signal, I can act promptly to rectify damage caused and correct the course. This is to be distinguished from persistently recurring, generalised, unattached guilt, which slops around looking for a container to be caught in. This is the guilt that the reading is talking about.
In this state, I am mesmerised by the feeling and fail to proceed to analyse correctly my attitude or behaviour and to correct it accordingly. The guilt is cast as a virtue, a corollary of my own moral state (oh what virtue I must have to be so sensitive to my own failings!), and the practice of this ‘virtue’ is a smokescreen for my failure to act.
Another feature of this form of guilt is its habit of exaggerating my responsibility, predicated on the idea that I have more power and influence over myself, my circumstances, and others than I actually do. This feeds vanity and can swell into delusions even of a clinically relevant scope, depth, and magnitude. The guilt discourse is kept sufficiently vague to mask the clear absurdity of its propositions. If one were forced to spell out how precisely one believes one’s actions brought about the asserted ill effects, one would immediately see the hubris.
The guilty party stands out. They take up more room, garner more attention, than the innocent. To be centre-stage is flattering, ego-boosting. There is no room for others, for pity, for compassion, for the design of constructive action. There is only the tear-sodden wallowing of the inconsolably self-reproaching.
Such guilt furthermore constitutes attack. The self is split into persecutor and victim, and neither produces a basis for connecting with another person. When in that state I remain quite inaccessible.
Finally, floating, amorphous guilt is really a resurgence of the ur-guilt, the guilt at having committed the ‘crime’ of shattering the peace and unity of heaven by setting myself up as a separate entity, in competition with God for the role of my creator. Accordingly, if I’m guilty, I’m real. I, literally, am.
This explains the tenacity with which I would once hold on to guilt and related forms of suffering, holding out bravely against any system that suggested I did not need to suffer because of the past, I did not need to remain emotionally crippled because of the Bad People who did Bad Things a Very Long Time Ago. If they were right and I was wrong, if I were simply part of a seamless continuum, and those events—disagreeable but been and gone—were meaningless, powerless intrusions, healed fractures that left no scar, the I, the victim, with my trauma, my specialness, my brokenness, my conditioned responses, would cease to exist.
In short, I would, in the past, rather have been broken than not exist at all.
Guilt, as a drug, is really one aspect of an entire thought system that is a drug, the thought system of the ego. It cannot be understood except as part of that bigger system. Accordingly, it cannot be given up except as part of a renunciation of the whole thought system itself. It cannot be jettisoned without destroying its carrier: the self I falsely believe my true self to be. No wonder people viciously resist, as I did: it is as if the doctor is going to boil the patient alive to eliminate the pathogen multiplying in every cell of the body.
Of course, the reason that this is so compelling is that it is, in a sense, accurate. The patient, the false self, must be eliminated. Then the person, the real person, is free, free of their patienthood. The patient must indeed die.
What is the way out?
The release mechanism is activated by hitting the pain threshold. At some point everyone says, ‘there must be a better way.’