Emotions are:
- Eight, basic, for Plutchik
- Defined through valence and arousal for Russell
- Six, shared universally, for Ekman
And these are just three theories of the ones Claude gave me when I prompt it to summarize them. I asked the AI because these theories are not what’s important here. Since we were already talking, I also asked it how they treat guilt — which is the reason I’m writing this post.
It told me that none of the theories concerned with basic/universal emotions insert it in the list, since it’s a heavily culture-loaded one, but it added that for Plutchik it’s a combination of fear and joy. When I asked it to provide the source, it recognized it should have been careful with saying that because it’s not sure it really comes from Plutchik himself.
Was Claude… feeling guilty? I didn’t investigate, I went to download the article instead.
But at this point I was deep in a rabbit hole of vague yet intriguing statements. And I let go of any resemblance of accuracy, because I mean: how cool is it to imagine guilt as a mix of fear and joy?
As with anything unpleasant (all things we call “bad” when we’re not yet emotionally literate) there are hidden spots of pure perverse pleasure. I don’t have to trust Claude to know that. If we get so attached to guilt that it becomes our default reaction, there must be a good reason. Right?
I hear you say: “Well, people make me feel guilty. It’s not me, it’s them who recriminate me.”, but deep down you know as much as I do that people don’t have that much power.
Guilt is a price we pay for having done something we wanted to do. We punish ourselves, so we pay no other price. There’s the joy! I get to do the thing, and I make sure everyone knows I feel bad about it. “I’m not usually like this”, “I don’t know why I acted this way”, “That was so stupid of me, I feel so bad”. Crocodile’s tears, although no crocodile deserves this definition. Guilt is purely human, it stems from having both a body and a very self-aware brain inside and above that body.
Guilt is how we make sure to pursue something we desire but without the responsibility of it, without saying, proudly: “Yes, I did it. I wanted to.”. Nobody can make us feel guilty unless we do.
The beauty of this sneaky emotion is that it’s so many things at once. It is also company. Desires have a lot of power: they invigorate us but can make us terribly lonely. Expressing and pursuing them leave us stranded. How embarrassing, how awkward, how intense. HOW DISGUSTINGLY HUMAN. With guilt we make a little space of comfort where we gain back control: it was me, it was my fault, I made a mistake. It’s not that life is incredibly chaotic, it’s not that things happen with reasons I can’t grasp. No no. It’s me. This time I failed but watch me next time.
A sort of emotional perfectionism, guilt is also how we live in an eternal yesterday. A day where things hadn’t happened yet and we can still ruminate over and over and over and over and over on how they could have been different. Like in trauma, a way to never process, to never move, to avoid the future.
Guilt engulfs any emotion that would allow us to wake up one day older tomorrow. Grief, sadness, anger, fear. It all gets eaten up, never digested.
And with it, nothing transforms. Tomorrow, and in ten years, I will still hold no responsibility over my decisions (I feel too bad to even consider something as complex as accountability) but will feel the guilt for all that’s happened in the world beyond my reach. This way I make sure me and reality never meet, because that’s where the scary things happen.
Or is it?
Empatherapy 