Are We All Guilty at Heart? (2024)

Have you ever been wrongly accused of a crime? Or even worse, have you ever been accused of a crime by someone who has committed that very same crime against you? If not, imagine someone accusing you of stealing their teddy bear after stealing your teddy bear. Sounds awful, right? But certainly not unusual.

Criminological statistics suggest that more than half of all false positives (wrongful convictions, that is) within all criminal justice systems are the consequence of deflections and strategies to cover and hide the crime by accusing the victim. Modern social media culture calls this “victim-blaming.” But why is attack considered such a prevalent strategy of defense?

In her musings on colonialism and its effects, Simon Weil anticipates what psychoanalysis after Melanie Klein will theorize as projection. The problem, Weil thinks, why colonialism and historical tragedy more generally can never be fully “worked through” (or what the Germans would call Entnazifizierung (de-Nazification) or nowadays Erinnerungskultur (literally “memory-culture”) “is that, as a general rule, a people’s generosity rarely extends to making the effort to uncover the injustices committed in their name.” Rather than shouldering the burden of guilt, we tend to rid ourselves of anguish by projecting the causes outwards. As Jacqueline Rose writes in her book The Plague, projection absolves the “human subject, regardless of what they may have done or what might have been enacted in their name,” of having to “shoulder the burden of guilt, whether historic or personal.”

Melanie Klein, the famous Austro-British Object-Relations Theorist, describes this psychic mechanism as follows:

In so far as we register the evil and ugliness within us, it horrifies is and we reject it like vomit. Through the operation of transference, we transport this discomfort into the things that surround us. But these same things, which turn ugly and sullied in turn, send back to us, increased, the ill we have lodged inside them. In this process of exchange, the evil within us expands and we start to feel that the very milieu in which we are living is a prison (Rose, 2023, p. 112).

Simon Weil herself was no stranger to projection. She is known to want to “besmirch the whole universe with her misery in order not to have to feel, or contain, the pain within her,” says Jacqueline Rose (ibid). The cause of her misery was a headache. “She also found herself wanting to hit other people on the head” (ibid.), but “like all enacts of projection or acting out, this would have made matters worse.” Weil, a devoted Christian, recognized this predicament: As Christ takes the burden of the world’s misery on himself, he interrupts a cycle of projection.

D.W. Winnicott, a contemporary of Klein, goes as far as saying that the hardest path for the individual to take is “to see that all the greed, aggression and deceit in the world might have been his own responsibility, even if in point of fact it is not.” That, and what is more, not all of us have the qualities of a Jesus. Remember, as I mentioned before, more than half of all false positives (wrongful convictions) within criminal justice systems are the consequence of deflections and strategies to cover and hide the crime by accusing the victim.

Research on the reactions of guilty and innocent people is interesting here.

Innocent people react to false accusations in a variety of ways. Common reactions include surprise and disbelief, denial of the accusation, anger and frustration, a desire to prove their innocence, and a willingness to cooperate with any efforts to investigate the situation. Most innocent accused display shock and confusion when wrongfully accused, and this disbelief can be further compounded if the accused does not understand the details of the accusation or why they are being suspected of wrongdoing.

This doubt and confusion usually turn into an effort to deny, as most innocent people will firmly deny any claims against them. Interestingly, this denial of being accused of wrongdoing is often based on the belief that their moral code and values would never lead them to act in the ways they are accused, regardless of whether these personal moral values align with the legal code. Imagine being wrongly accused of stealing a soft toy. You will most likely deny and protest your innocence on the basis of your moral apprehension for soft toy theft. You will focus on the moral quality of the act (“I would never steal a soft toy”) rather than the legal quality of the accusation (“I would never steal a soft toy”).

Often, the feeling of being disbelieved in one’s moral standards can lead to anger, which may be directed toward the accuser or toward anyone else involved in suggesting or fuelling the accusation. Interestingly, however, those expressions of anger do not usually entail projections. For that is a sign of guilt. Returning to the example at hand, innocents won’t usually accuse others of soft toy theft when wrongly accused of stealing a soft toy.

Now, what is criminologically considered a sign of guilt?

Most guilty individuals will, at least for some period of time, delve into protestations of innocence. However, certain signs may indicate guilt regardless. Common signs of guilt are the attempt to conceal evidence, evasion, and a refusal to cooperate. Another common sign of guilt is disproportionate panic and fear.

However, the most indicative sign of guilt is the attempt to deflect. A guilty person may try to shift the focus away from themselves and onto others, perhaps by making accusations or spreading rumors about someone else. This is what psychoanalysts have called “projection,” where the individual tries to transfer their own negative emotions and actions onto someone else. As Klein says,

In so far as we register the evil and ugliness within us, it horrifies is and we reject it like vomit. Through the operation of transference, we transport this discomfort into the things that surround us.

Jesus chose not to deflect. But arguably, he didn’t even deny the accusation as the innocent would do. In that, perhaps Jesus was a criminological anomaly. Since we can’t all be like Jesus, neither guilty nor protesting our innocence, Winnicott thinks we are all accountable, or in any case, we should all behave as if we were. Are we really all (a bit) guilty?

The proposition “guilty until proven innocent” is, of course, the Leitmotiv of Kafkaesque literature and horrifying precisely because of that. In Kafka, as in Albert Camus’ The Fall and The Stranger, guilt is administered seemingly universally and, chillingly, arbitrarily. The accused in Kafka and Camus are accused, but they don’t exactly know of what, precisely. It is this state of Limbo, in Dante’s sense, this state of unpredictability, of uncertainty, that makes the works of Kafka and Camus so unbearable, so unsettling. Camus and Kafka, I think, have proven why Dante’s Limbo, where everything is uncertain, where one is guilty until proven innocent, is actually worse than the Inferno, where, at least, I suffer for my innocence forlorn.

So, to think with Winnicott that we should act as if we are all just a bit guilty, I think, is being advised to self-flagellate, to live in constant torture. We can’t bear the guilt, and hence, we administer blame. We even blame victims to let off some steam, to escape the Limbo of being not yet proven guilty but not fully innocent either. Winnicott’s society is one that won’t go without the administration of blame, which includes the blaming of the innocent. I don’t think we should follow his advice and think ourselves at least somewhat guilty all the time––guilty of what, precisely?

The solution, rather, I think, is to rid ourselves of the compulsion to blame. This, I believe, is the lesson of Kafka and Camus: stop this morbid desire to blame, and we will no longer all be guilty until proven innocent. Importantly, this is not an advice for Christian self-flagellation, either, since to self-flagellate is to take on blame. The key is in suppressing the desire to blame, the desire to project. Integrity, perhaps, is what we call it. Integrity is to admit stealing the soft toy, even though that will make you look guilty.