The Guilt Economy
Reparations are the perfect con rooted in selective history, enforced through guilt, and paid for by people who did nothing wrong.
In late 2023, California’s Reparations Task Force made headlines when it proposed cash payouts of up to $1.2 million per Black resident.
The proposal was legally unworkable, fiscally impossible, and intellectually unserious. But none of that mattered.
“This is about dignity,” said one state official. That word — dignity — was doing a lot of work. Because the point wasn’t policy. It was ritual. Public grief, staged guilt, and political theatre designed to extract moral leverage from a compliant elite class that no longer believes it deserves to exist.
We are witnessing a transformation of the Western moral economy.
Not just a reassessment of the past, but a revaluation of the self. A civilization that once abolished slavery, industrialized the world, and created the norms of international law now finds itself indicted. Not by its enemies, but by its own institutions. The charge: original sin, payable in perpetuity.
Reparations aren’t just a demand for justice. They are a mechanism for civilizational inversion, the reordering of legitimacy, virtue, and power.
They say that you owe us not because of what you did, but because of who you are. Not because of what we suffered, but because of what you represent. This isn’t a debt. It’s a ransom.
Slavery was not invented in the American South. It was not uniquely British. It was a universal feature of human civilization.
African empires like Dahomey, Kongo, and Asante enslaved millions. Muslim traders ran vast networks across the Sahara and Indian Ocean for over a millennium. Castration of Black boys to produce eunuchs for Ottoman courts involved razors and boiling oil. Barbary pirates captured more than a million white Europeans. The Maroons of Jamaica — icons of Black resistance — owned slaves themselves.
But you will not find a reparations movement targeting Ghana, Morocco, or Saudi Arabia. There is no Nigerian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, no call for atonement from the descendants of African slave merchants who built their kingdoms on human trafficking. Why? Because the point isn’t universal justice. It’s targeted guilt. It’s not about the history of slavery. It’s about the utility of blaming the West.
Because only in the West, and especially in Anglo societies, does guilt have liquidity.
Here, guilt moves markets. Guilt funds departments, wins grants, secures speaking tours.
Guilt is monetized into consulting contracts and DEI budgets and institutional land acknowledgments. There is an entire industry built on the presumption that inherited shame is a moral asset to be redistributed. A social currency that must be spent to prove legitimacy.
And the institutions? They’ve caved.
Oxford and Cambridge race to rename buildings. Museums hire “decolonization consultants.” Banks fund panels about the moral costs of empire. Entire city councils adopt policies to “explore reparative frameworks.”
Not because the numbers make sense, they don’t, but because the performance must go on.
To refuse is to signal heresy. Better to confess and pay tribute than to resist and be branded reactionary.
The Brattle Report — the intellectual centerpiece of CARICOM’s $26 trillion claim against Britain — inflates imaginary debts, ignores African complicity, and erases any benefit gained from British governance. It treats history as a ledger where only one side accrues moral credit. The other, born guilty, must pay.
And if they don’t? They’re racist.
The genius of the reparations narrative is that it works even when it fails.
When payouts are denied or delayed, it becomes further proof of white indifference. When payouts are approved, even symbolically, it validates the moral claim. The act of debating it is a concession. The terms are set: your role is to feel bad, ours is to collect.
There is no off-ramp. No acceptable answer except capitulation. And no burden of proof required from those demanding payment. Reparations are not earned. They are owed.
But what does that say to everyone else?
To the poor white worker in Appalachia? To the Asian immigrant who arrived with nothing and built a business? To the Eastern European family that fled pogroms? What historical calculus tells them their struggle counts less? That their pain is not priced into the narrative?
The answer is brutal: your suffering has no utility. You do not fit the script. You are inconvenient to the moral economy.
The truth is, reparations aren’t about healing. They are about hierarchy. A new moral caste system where victimhood confers status, and guilt justifies redistribution.
But redistribution of what?
Wealth? Maybe. Power? Definitely. But most dangerously: legitimacy.
The West’s institutions — its legal systems, universities, governments — were once confident in their civilizational foundations. That confidence is gone. Now they cling to symbolic gestures, hoping to appease the very forces trying to dismantle them.
This is how a society dies with confession.
History is not a crime scene. It is a record of human complexity — triumphs and failures, cruelty and courage, often within the same story. The demand to flatten that record into reparative cash flows is not just wrong. It’s incoherent.
Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, slavery itself in 1833, and spent the next 50 years patrolling the Atlantic to suppress it. It was not perfect. But it led the world in doing something no civilization had done before: abolishing slavery on principle.
That moral revolution did not happen in Dahomey or the Ottoman Empire or in Meiji Japan. It happened in the West. And now the very civilization that ended slavery is told that it was built on it and that its only moral option is to surrender.
No. The way forward is not guilt. It is clarity.
Reparations are not owed. They are extorted.
The past cannot be paid off. It must be understood.
The future cannot be inherited. It must be earned.
And dignity? Dignity does not come in the form of a government check. It comes from work, agency, truth — and the courage to say no when the mob demands your silence.