This essay outlines my belief that modern liberal discourse around “privilege” is counterproductive. It discusses how certain ideas (or idea archetypes), like “White Guilt”, can end up producing their own worst enemy, that is, “White Pride”. Finally it discusses how these ideas come about.

Foundational to my argument is what I call “Utter Guilt”.

Within the criminal justice system, certain people are deemed “Guilty” for an alleged action. Despite this, the people that are deemed “Guilty” rare think of themselves as being Guilty. They might agree with the verdict being handed down, but will almost certainly not accept it as a state of being, but rather as at most a descriptive label.

This has a lot to do with Cognitive Dissonance Theory, which says that individuals do not enjoy being a state of limbo between contradictory ideas, and will seek to alleviate the contradiction. In this case, the contradiction is between a person's values and their actions. People must rectify their beliefs about morality with the unmoving fact that they acted against that moral system.

The most obvious way to alleviate cognitive dissonance is to deny that they committed the crime. They might even convince themselves that they didn't commit the crime.

Another thing is to justify the crime, or deny that their actions were criminal. In some circumstances this is true, of course, but in others it is might not be. For instance, most people think murder is wrong. However, after murdering someone, they might justify it by saying that there is an exemption in the moral duty not to murder. For instance, maybe they think that since the other person “disrespected” them, it was okay to kill them.

Still another thing a person might do is concede that the crime happened, and that it was immoral, but assert that they are a changed person, that the person that they were in the past is gone. I think this is probably why there are so many Christian converts in prisons.

Finally, a person might fall into a deep depression and state of self-hatred, wondering why they were so evil that they did this action. This is the closest thing to existing in a state of true cognitive dissonance, but it isn't exactly true cognitive dissonance. I don't believe that a person can truly hate themselves, because what system would be performing the hatred? Instead, people that “hate themselves” divide themselves into an “perfect self” and a “flawed self”, and it is the “perfect self” that hates the “flawed self”. This is similar to the Christian concept of the “New Man” and the “Old Man”.

In none of these cases does a person exist in a true state of guilt, where they believe that they, acting in the totality of being and present conviction, did something wrong. I call this state “Utter Guilt”, but I do not believe that anyone actually exists in this state. If someone can have Utter Guilt, I don't think they can have it for long, and eventually they will exist in one of these other forms.

There is a modern archetype of idea that says that white people are inherently bad. The problem is not the conscious action of racism, but rather the state of being white itself. White people are inherently prone to evil actions by their nature, the theory goes, and cannot consciously resist them (we call these actions “microaggressions”). Furthermore, their ancestors did innumerable evil things, which they themselves benefit from and therefore are accountable for. This is what I call “White Guilt”.

Some liberals will disagree that this is a real idea, but it rather clearly does, or did, exist. At best I will give them that rather than being a specific idea, it is a group of related ideas.

This was laid bare during a trolling campaign, in which participants hung up posters saying “It's Okay to be White”. There was a great deal of dissonance within the liberal community as a result of this campaign. Why would such a banal statement create such a firestorm? The posters didn't say “It's not okay to be black”, which certainly would be racist.

For white people, what is demanded by acceptance of this idea is Utter Guilt. For liberals that hold this idea, whiteness means total deficiency - the problem is not your actions, but you, personally. I argue that there is no way for a white person to actually have White Guilt, based off of my theory that Utter Guilt does not exist.

Firstly consider white people that claim to be against whiteness. Such people will agree with the conclusions of this idea, and claim to have White Guilt. They might be careful not to do anything that would be considered a microaggression, be excessively self-critical, and criticize other aspects of whiteness. This seems similar to the redemption… but it isn't redemption at all, actually, because at the end of the day the person hasn't really changed. They are just acting as if they changed. After all, they are still white, and thus, the dissonance persists. This is a form of duplicity, a lying about being better than one actually is. It's the equivalent of

Inevitably, this leads to a sort of suicidal depression, whereby they become distraught at the problem of their own whiteness. If you follow the logic of White Guilt, it would seem that suicide is the only moral action that a white person could take. Yet even this darkest of actions is duplicitous by nature, because the decision to commit suicide would be predicated on your own (white) thought process.

Now, no sane and well-adjusted person would commit suicide, I think. Or, at the very least, I don't believe that they could reason themselves to suicide. People are not well-adjusted and reasonable because they reason themselves into this state, they are well-adjusted and reasonable because they are born well-adjusted and reasonable. Normal humans don't kill themselves, nor do they believe things that would cause them to kill themselves. They are naturally averse to such things, perhaps even fearing them in the same way that one would fear a suicidal cult such as Jonestown.