Introduction: Guilt and Utopia

Nietzsche's and Freud's views of guilt provide a useful theoretical context for understanding the relationship between guilt and Utopia we have outlined in Utopia and Those Who Walk Away From Omelas. Both of them speak of guilt as the internalization of cruelty or the instinct of aggression, and see it as an inward turn that reflects a historical context. Nietzsche views guilt and “bad conscience” as a kind of illness. In The Genealogy of Morals (1887/trans. 1989) he writes, “[I] regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced – that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the wall of society and of peace” (Nietzsche, 1989, p. 84). In Nietzsche's view, when faced with peace (the absence of an enemy upon whom one might inflict cruelty) and social mores (proscriptions against being cruel to one's fellow citizen) a civilized human is left with only one subject upon whom he may express his aggression and satisfy his appetite for cruelty: himself. “[He] turns himself into an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness” (Nietzsche, 1989, p. 85). Deprived of the possibility of expressing his aggressiveness externally, man turns inward and expresses it internally, upon himself. Thus begins the age – and for Nietzsche it is our age – of “man's suffering of man, of himself” (Nietzsche, 1989, p. 85).