Interpreting Guilt: How White Guilt Becomes A Replacement For Religion

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s interview with The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh about his new movie, “Am I Racist?” In this segment, Walsh describes witnessing the real phenomena of white guilt when filming. He explains that without religion, people’s inability to interpret the feeling of guilt caused by sins becomes misplaced. In search of understanding, people are deceived by con artists who make money showcasing white-guilt subterfuge and the like, causing white guilt to become a replacement for religion. For more from Dr. Peterson, see his extensive catalog available on DailyWire+. You can listen to or watch the full podcast episode on DailyWire+.

Start time: 1:28:58

Jordan B. Peterson: What did you learn as a consequence of doing the movie, and why should people go see it, as far as you’re concerned?

Matt Walsh: I think there are several things. Maybe the main thing that I learned — and I don’t know if it’s learned so much as had illustrated for me — but a lot of people who fall for this… You know, there are the people that push it: the Robin D’Angelo types, the women who run the race to dinner we have in the film—

Peterson: Oh, yes. Saira Rao … She runs those dinners where the white women pay to be humiliated by two unbelievably narcissistic psychopaths so that they actually feel good about themselves without actually having to do any more or having to put in any of the moral effort.

Walsh: Exactly, exactly. And that’s the thing. Those types of people, the people who are running the show, that’s one thing. And I don’t know how much they even believe a lot of what they’re saying. I don’t think they believe all of it, certainly. And there’s not a lot to be learned about them. I think that they’re grifters. They’re con artists. They’re making a lot of money on this stuff. That’s a big part of the motivation. It’s not very complicated. 

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But what’s more interesting to me are the women who would sit around that table who are paying money to be there, or the people who would willingly attend one of these seminars that we have in the film, people who would willingly read Robin D’Angelo’s book. I’ve always been more interested in them. Like what’s going on with them? And what I found making the film is that, you really can’t overstate the guilt that these people are walking around with. White guilt. White guilt is a very real phenomenon. I knew that making the movie, but having it illustrated so profoundly was still pretty enlightening to me, that a lot of these people are just walking around with a lot of guilt.

And, for a sane, rational white person like myself and you, it can be hard to understand because I’ve never spent any time feeling guilty about slavery or Jim Crow. I had nothing to do with it. I’ve never spent any time feeling guilty about it at all. And so it’s hard for us to understand people who, not only have they felt guilt about it, but they’re overcome with guilt by this kind of thing. 

Peterson: How much of that, though, too, is that they want to signal how overcome by guilt they are so that they look like hypermoral agents? I see the same thing with mothers, in particular, who brandish their trans children like their flag of pride. It’s like, “Oh, look at how upset and confused my child is, and yet I’m still wonderful enough to love them no matter what.” It’s a really malevolent game. And that parading your self-flagellation indicates the profundity of your guilt, that’s a pretty bloody ugly game too. 

Now, I understand that there’s a fair bit of genuine moral confusion mixed in there, but the self-serving in public — you notice that those women go to those dinners in groups. It’s not Saira Rao and her pathological partner with one woman. They have to do that group so they can signal to each other the depths of their moral virtue.

Walsh: Yes, I think that’s certainly right. There’s a certain amount of virtue signaling that goes into it for sure. But the race to dinner — just using that again as an example — that’s seven or eight minutes in the movie, but, of course, you’re making a movie, especially a movie like this, they take a lot longer to film, and that was really two hours. I mean, that dinner went on for two hours, and you can see these women sitting around at this table at various points crying, seemingly very much overcome with emotion talking about their racism that they feel, given opportunities to talk about examples of when they committed racist acts, and then they share their examples. And it’s like none of the examples they give are actual racism.

And yes, again, some of that is them just showing off, but I do think that at the core of it, there is real guilt here. And we could spend another two hours psychoanalyzing this, but my own theory about how they can feel this guilt is that it’s a replacement for religion. Almost all of them are irreligious people. Even if they would call themselves Christian, they’re not really. And traditionally, religion has given us an answer for guilt. 

Now, I don’t feel any racial guilt, I don’t feel any white guilt. But I do feel guilt. I do experience guilt for things that I do that are wrong. If I commit sins, I feel guilty about them. But then, I turn to my faith and that gives me an answer for, number one, why I feel that guilt, what that guilt is from, and then what to do with it, what I do about that guilt. And I can turn to my faith and get an answer to all of that. 

But if you take religion out of it, well, now you’ve still got people that are sinning, that are doing evil acts, and so they’re still going to feel the guilt because of it. But they don’t have a way of understanding that guilt. They don’t have any way of interpreting it. And so they look around for someone to tell them what to do with the guilt. And then these racial husslers are there, and then they’ll tell you, “Oh, I’ll tell you why you feel guilty. It’s because of this.” That’s a big part of it. 

Peterson: Well, I think that’s a good analysis. When you were a somewhat profligate 24-year-old, you needed to channel the meaninglessness and the guilt that was associated with your unmoored life into something that was properly sacrificial. And you got married and you had kids. That provides a pathway where you can discharge your moral duty. That’s the thing. 

It’s necessary for human beings to discharge their moral duty; otherwise, they’ll be overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy and self-deprecation. That’s because we are communal and social creatures, and we have to live in relationship to other people. If we don’t do that, we violate our deepest instincts or our most divine calling.

As you said, for the typical person, you find that expiation of your self-centeredness in responsibility to your wife, like long-term committed responsibility, and to your kids, to your grandkids, and to that multi-generational endeavor. If we didn’t have that propensity for guilt, we wouldn’t be social the way that we are. And it can be exploited by the sadistic, narcissistic, histrionic psychopaths. And the women who run that race to dinner are great examples of that. Man, they’re something to watch.