The Projection Of Guilt

THE PROJECTION OF GUILT

This problem is of infinite importance. We human beings have developed the habit of attributing everything disagreeable to causes in the outside world. Society, relatives, the government, the circumstances of the time – these are among the host of scapegoats that the individual uses to avoid responsibility for his own fate. This projection of guilt has even been given scientific status and, in the form of psychology or sociology serves to sanction a collective error.

Everyone speaks of how human beings are influenced and marked by factors in the environment. Psychoanalysis and Primal Scream Therapy try to explain a neurotic condition by looking for the causes in childhood, in the method of upbringing or in traumatic tensions between parent and child. It will not be long before psychotherapy officially adopts regression techniques, and then people will suddenly believe they can find the causes they are looking for in pre-natal experiences.

However different the various theories and methods of treatment may be, they all have one thing in common: namely, they all seek in the outside world the causes of a malaise or complex. Ask an individual to talk about the course of his life, and he will always be able to say which person or circumstance was responsible for a given situation.

It will be difficult, in this sociology-ridden age, to get rid of the myth of environmental influences, for any theory that permits the projection of guilt will inevitably find majority support. What esotericism has to offer here is much less palatable and practical, but on the positive side it does teach the individual how he can actually change his fate. It shows him a way out of illness and thus delivers something that other systems can only promise.

Human beings are not formed by an environmental influences. The adult is not shaped by his upbringing, and no one is to blame for the fate of the individual. Illness is not caused by any bacteria or viruses. Those who believe they can disprove these controversial statements overlook an important point: all so-called proofs are in fact merely correlations. Such a correlation exists, for example, in the case of an infectious illness where a certain virus is always present. Similarly it can be shown that definite characteristics are found in the family background of juvenile delinquent and that a certain kind of neurotic individual is liable to have had problems in relation to his mother. All that these correlations tell us is that when a particular phenomenon is present another phenomenon is also to be found.

Now comes the next step, so beloved of science and yet so totally unscientific: namely the step from correlation to causality. Starting with the observation “When there is phenomenon a, then phenomenon b is also present”, science inserts on the sly the proposition “b is the cause of a”. But this step is false. That certain viruses go together with certain illnesses in undeniable, but to deduce from this that the virus is the cause of the illness is to draw a conclusion that later generations will find as laughable as we find the flat-earth theory. So it is not so easy after all to disprove our assertion that there are no influences from the environment.