...it was the one trick my mother always had up her sleeve, that way she had of making me feel guilty. She made no bones about it, either. "You can't help it," she told me once. "Slipped it into your baby food. Don't worry, though," she added, smiling like a Cheshire cat. "A healthy dose of guilt never hurt anybody. It's what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.
President Barack Obama in Dreams from My Father.
More like this
I cannot embed the official video but here's another version:
A new study suggests collective guilt can inspire action, but only if people feel reasonably hopeful that things can get better. The study, based on questionnaires to ~150 undergraduate students, also found that guilt was a more effective emotion in encouraging mitigation behavior than anxiety.
Call it religious, call it effective (or ineffective), call it trite. The fact is, there is a lot of guilt-laden language in the conservation movement. Because this will help lay the foundation for future discussions, I wanted to present some examples here.
Huh. I've always considered guilt to be a very unhealthy and diseased emotion, but then again I suppose it's like stress: Too much willl maim and kill you, but a little is good for you. Must be luxurious to be subjected to only logical and tiny amounts of the vile stuff while growing up.