Guilt

Guilt is a quantity rather than a feeling, and the two sentences of the definition do different jobs. The first identifies it: guilt is the debt left by an unbalanced interaction, which is the same debt anima accounting tracks, so guilt is the awareness of anima debt rather than a moral verdict. The second is the one with consequences. Guilt is transferable, which means it does not stay with whoever incurred it and can be moved to somebody who did not. Nearly all of Marsh's account of power runs through that clause. Every powerful person devotes great energy to deflecting guilt, and negative images exist to absorb it, since under the laws of endoreality guilt is only assigned to a negative image. Her reading of the crucifixion follows the same rule. If Christ had not been an endo-ideal he would have been just another unnoticed negative image sacrifice, and the significance lies in an endo-ideal accepting guilt rather than in the death itself. Two features guide guilt behaviour and both are structural. Those inside a strong endogroup feel no guilt for interactions outside it, since without an empathic or euphoric connection there is nothing to register the debt. And the steps an endogroup takes when its endo-ideal is accused, from asserting exceptional victimhood to downplaying the effect on victims and exaggerating the effect on the accused, are all attempts to move or reduce the same quantity.

Psychology distinguishes guilt from shame by whether the act or the self is condemned, following Helen Block Lewis and June Tangney, and treats guilt as generally the more adaptive of the two. Nietzsche traced the concept to material debt through the German Schuld, and David Graeber built a history of debt on the same observation. Anthropology has the contested distinction between guilt cultures and shame cultures, from Ruth Benedict onward. Marsh takes the Nietzschean etymological point literally rather than as an origin story, since in her framework guilt is debt now and not merely descended from it, and she adds transferability, which the psychological literature has no place for because it treats guilt as a state of a person rather than a quantity in circulation.