Guilt Deflection

Deflection is what the powerful do with a debt they will not settle, and Marsh treats it as one of the original categories of magic, alongside guilt allocation and punishment, now largely under the jurisdiction of law and economy. The mechanism named in the definition is the most consequential form. A population manipulated into violence, drug use and other self harming behaviour produces harm that appears self-inflicted, which moves the guilt for that harm from whoever engineered the conditions to the people living in them. That is why autogenocide sits inside a discussion of guilt rather than of violence, since the point of instigating destruction remotely is that the resulting deaths carry no attributable debt. Simpler forms work the same way. Observations that challenge powerful tyrants are accused of disturbing the peace or threatening public safety, which Marsh calls the ultimate in guilt reversal, since the person reporting the harm becomes the source of it. Reporting an atrocity by one endo-ideal is met immediately with the demand that the reporter must therefore support atrocities on the other side. Historically, early Protestantism transferred all guilt to god by holding that nothing happens unless it is god's will, which avoided the full sublation to an endo-ideal that androtheism demanded while also rejecting personal acceptance of debt. Economic ideology proved far more efficient at deflecting guilt than religion, which she gives as the main reason religion diminished under industrialization.

Moral disengagement, Albert Bandura's framework, catalogues the mechanisms by which people commit harm without self-censure, including displacement of responsibility, dehumanization and attribution of blame to victims, which covers much of the same ground. Just world belief research documents the tendency to hold victims responsible for their suffering. Techniques of neutralization in criminology, from Sykes and Matza, describes the same manoeuvres among offenders. All of these are psychological accounts of how individuals manage their own conscience. Marsh's version is an account of a transfer between parties, which means the guilt does not evaporate when it is deflected but arrives somewhere, and somebody carries it.