The Beauty of Guilt

Do you remember Lance Armstrong sitting at Oprah, feeling all guilty about his former doping usage? I couldn’t help but asking myself: why would he admit that? Why would he, after all those years of denying doping usage, suddenly declare to the world that he has indeed been using doping in order to win the Tour de France seven times? What did he believe he would gain by admitting this? He must have been aware of the consequences – the returning of prize money, lawsuits and loss of status – that were likely to result from him confessing? So why did he confess?

Armstrong is a smart guy. If you have seen video clips in which he is lying about his doping usage, you must have noticed that he is an excellent actor. He might have confessed because he would hope that by telling what had truly happened he would somehow gain the support of the crowd, and maybe even improve upon his current situation. Or maybe he is planning on writing a autobiography, titled The Fight or so, and the confession would make for an excellent ending chapter. All of that could very well be possible. But I want to look at another potential reason for him confessing. And that is the reason of guilt.

As you surely know, experiencing guilt is terrible. Knowing that you have done something wrong through which you harmed others, even though these others might not even know what you did, hits you in your dignity like nothing else. You are confronted with a version of yourself that you are disgusted with. You know that you should have known better and you will try to prove towards others, but mainly towards yourself, that you are the good person you know you are. That you, after all that happened, decided to stay true to the good version of yourself. And this realization leads you to apologize and say that you will never, ever do it again.

Guilt is nature’s very own mechanism for unveiling the truth despite us being the hedonistic pain-avoiding creatures that we are. Just like we feel physical pain by hurting the outer part of our bodies, so we feel emotional pain by hurting our ‘inner self’. That is: by not staying true to who you think you truly are. And just like you want physical pain to stop as quickly as possible, by retreating your arm from a fire for example, so does nature wants you to avoid not staying true to yourself by endowing you with a sense of guilt. Nature seems to have programmed us with some sort of universal judgmental capability, guarding us from stepping away too far from the comforting warmth of ourselves and society.

Ah well: let’s be glad that nature tries to keep us on the right track, right? That we are inclined to be nice to each other because we don’t want to experience that nasty feeling of guilt. Or do you rather think of guilt as just another irrational byproduct of thousands of years of social and biological conditioning? A burden evolution forced upon us?

What do you think about it?

Teaching Anti-Bully Classes at School

How to prevent bullying?

How to prevent bullying?

Bullying: an ever repeating and all destructing phenomenon. Every year, millions and millions of lives are irreversible damaged. And it is not like bullying is just a temporary problem; a problem that will resolve itself as time goes by. It is structural, in the sense that it seems to be deeply ingrained in human nature. So the question is: what can – and what should – we do about it? Should parents teach their children about the negative consequences of bullying? And what about schools; should they too make a (more profound) effort to stop bullying?

But before we start, let me ask you something. When you look back at your time at school, what are the first memories that come to mind? Is it the Latin vocabulary you were forced to remember in the first year of high school? Is it the utterly useless, but sometimes amusing, gym classes you had to take? Is it the list of historical facts that you had to recall? I can only speak for myself, but I would respond with a firm ‘No’ to each of these questions.

Self-development
Looking back at my years in school, I can only remember the social bonding we, the children, had. I remember us kids playing together, trading collector-cards and chasing girls. Those are the experiences that – I believe – anyone is likely to remember about his childhood. Those are the experiences that have made you into the person you are today. It is because of these experiences that you have learned that it is not okay to steal someone’s football, and that it is no fun to kick your little brother. It is because of these experiences that you came to know that you were accepted by society. These are the experiences that proved to be truly important later on in your life.

But what if you would not have learned these lessons? What if you would not have learned what it is like to play with friends, trade cards, play hide and seek, or be in any other way involved in the social interactions that are of such great importance in the formation of any child’s identity? These are the lessons that get down to the core of what it means to be a human being. Of what it means to be wandering around on this earth of ours with your fellow species members. And let’s be honest: if you would have missed these lessons in your childhood, do you truly think that your life would have been any better if you would be able to remember the exact year Columbus reached America? I do not think so.

Schools
I believe that schools should, next to the regular classes, include a course about social dynamics, in which children are taught how they could – not should – interact with others. A class that teaches children the pros and cons of treating people in a certain way. A class that teaches children what the consequences of being bullied might be in what might very well be the most important years in a person’s self-development. A class that might make use of acting and little role-playing games in which the bully and the person being bullied repeatedly switch roles. Make it realistic. Make it tangible. Make it painful.

Because let me ask you the following: is it fair to put the blame on those that are being being bullied? To urge them to stand up for themselves and promise them that, if they don’t do so, things will only get worse? Is that how you truly help a child? And, on the other hand, can you blame the bullies for bullying if they have never been taught why it is wrong to bully? If they think they are just fooling around and that their behavior is simply the way you should behave among classmates?

Shouldn’t the responsibility lay with the adults? The ones who are supposed to know how to behave? And with the schools, the place at which children are present most of their time? And sure: schools might say that is not their responsibility to teach children how to behave. That it is the parents’s duty. But note that I am not saying that schools should teach children how to behave. I am only saying that schools might teach children what it feels like to be bullied, and what the consequences of this behavior might be. After taking these classes, children are totally free to decide for themselves how they want to behave. And if that doesn’t stop them from bullying, maybe more drastic measures, as in lowering bullies’s grades, might be necessary.

But what do you think? Should schools be more proactive in preventing bullying from happening? Or is it fully the parents’s responsibility to do so? And why?