"That's not justice. Not to me." | TYCD: Great Speeches in Ethics

Lee Adama's speech in the trial of Gaius Baltar from the show Battlestar Galactica leads us to reconsider what it is that makes someone guilty, and what guilt really is. We'll consult some good German philosophers - Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Jaspers - to see if we can't find a good answer to that question.

Thanks to Matthias Austin and Producer of the Show Meg for their voice talents on this episode!

18:45 | Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, p. 529.

27:05 | The Question of German Guilt, 41. 

30:00 | Ibid., 28.

37:10 | Ibid., 43.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

There are words that are spoken that reverberate past the ears and minds of those present into hearts far beyond the moment of their birth. Words that etch themselves into our collective consciousness and steer the threads that weave themselves into the fabric of a shared moral responsibility. These are great speeches in ethics. While president, Baltar surrendered the last surviving settlement of humans in the galaxy to the technologically and numerically superior Cylons, a group of artificially intelligent lifeforms that have recently found a way to transcend their metallic, mechanical bodies into ones that appear no different from ordinary humans. Though his testimony was made under duress and due to hallucinogenic drugs meant to accomplish his manipulation more easily, Baltar did admit to providing the Cylons with the secrets necessary to exterminate 99% of all humans on their homeworld of Caprica through tactical nuclear strikes. The nature of his collusion remains murky, however, and the trial has been rife with deceit, scandal, and false testimony. Lead defense counsel Romo Lampkin, still bearing the fresh marks on his face of a recent assassination attempt, approaches the man sitting at the witness stand. Why do you believe that the defendant Gaius Baltar deserves to be acquitted? The courtroom waits eagerly, silently, for a response from Lee Adama. In an unusual and unprecedented turn of events, Adama, co-counsel for the defendant Baltar, has been called to the stand. Lampkin has put Adama up there specifically to offer testimony that a member of the panel of judges and Lee's own father had made up his mind about Baltar's guilt before being presented with any of the evidence. Caught between implicating his father in judicial malpractice and failing his duty to his client, Adama speaks. Did the defendant make mistakes?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Sure, he did. Serious mistakes. But did he actually commit any crimes? Did he commit treason? No. I mean, it was an impossible situation. When the Cylons arrived, what could he possibly do? What could anyone have done? I mean, ask yourself, what would you have done? What would you have done? If he had refused to surrender, the Cylons would have probably nuked the planet right then and there. So did he appear to cooperate with the Cylons? Sure. So did hundreds of others. What's the difference between him and them? The president issued a blanket pardon. They were all forgiven, no questions asked. Colonel Ty. Colonel Ty used suicide bombers, killed dozens of people. Forgiven. Lieutenant Agathon and Chief Tyrell, they murdered an officer of the Pegasus. Forgiven. The Admiral? The Admiral instituted a military coup d'etat against the president. Forgiven. And me? Well, where do I begin? I shot down a civilian passenger ship, the Olympic carrier. Over a thousand people on board. Forgiven. I raised my weapon to a superior officer, committed an act of mutiny, forgiven. And then on the very day when Baltar surrendered to those Cylons, I, as commander of Pegasus, jumped away. I left everybody on that planet alone, undefended, for months. I even tried to persuade the Admiral never to return, to abandon you all there for good. If I'd had my way, nobody would have made it off that planet. I'm the coward. I'm the traitor. I'm forgiven. I'd say we're very forgiving of mistakes. We make our own laws now, our own justice. We've been pretty creative at finding ways to let people off the hook for everything from theft to murder. And we've had to because we're not a civilization anymore. We are a gang. And we're on the run. And we have to fight to survive. We have to break rules, we have to bend laws, we have to improvise. But not this time. No. No, not this time. Not for Gaius Baltar. No, no, you have to die. You have to die because well, because we don't like you very much. Because you're arrogant. Because you're weak. Because you're a coward. And we the mob, we want to throw you out the airlock because you didn't stand up to the Cylons and get yourself killed in the process. That's justice now. You should have been killed back on New Caprica, but since you had the temerity to live, we're going to execute you now. That's justice.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Order. Order.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

This case. This case is built on emotion. On anger, bitterness, vengeance. Most of all, it is built on shame. It's about the shame of what we did to ourselves back on that planet. And it's about the guilt of those of us who ran away. Who ran away. And we are trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame onto one man and then flush him out of the airlock and hope that just gets rid of it all. So that we can live with ourselves. That won't work. That won't work. That's not justice. Not to me. Not to me.

SPEAKER_02 7:08

What is guilt? Is it a feeling? Is it a state of mind? A state of being? A legal status? A metaphysical status? I think any conversation about guilt has to begin with a definition of the term, and this turns out to be actually really complicated. Early on in season one, we talked about what equivocation means, and how it can make it difficult to know what we're talking about. While equivocation is often the result of a sneaky rhetorical move, it sometimes just happens naturally when a concept gets used in lots of different contexts. It starts to cover too much ground and it gets stretched out beyond what the concept can really handle. I think that when we talk about guilt, we generally mean one of two things: either a feeling that we experience inside ourselves, or a state of being that one is put in by some authority that determines the subject in certain ways. So for the purposes of this conversation, we'll call these personal guilt and legal guilt, respectively. Personal guilt is an affect. It may be the result of a rational process, but we tend to think of it as so much more than just intellectual ascent, right? We think that when you feel guilty, you have these inner emotions that make you feel small, ashamed, weak, targeted. In high school, I had a religion class, and I remember very distinctly the lesson where we read the passage in the Bible where David, king of Israel, is confronted by the prophet Nathan about his adultery and murder. Nathan tells the king this little story about a man who stole the property of another and then killed him to cover up the crime. Show me this man, David says. But Nathan steps up to the king and says to him, You are the man. You are the one who has done this. Through this story, through the depersonalizing of his actions, David realizes that what he did was a crime. It was cruel and sinful. He was overcome with a realization that what he thought he could get away with, seducing a man's wife and murdering him to cover up the adultery, that was no different than someone else who wasn't a king doing the same thing. So in this context, we would say that David has experienced personal guilt. Now, the guilt here was a feeling that was activated by a rational judgment. He made the judgment about the story. This man did a terrible thing, but then he realized that that story wasn't just out there in the world, it was about him. So that second rational judgment elicited a feeling that caused him to realize, man, the prophet Nathan is right. I am that man. And that feeling elicited a third judgment. I have sinned against the Lord. I have done something that was wrong. We can see then that in this context, personal guilt is kind of like a tool. It's meant to be something that helps the subject realize something, that helps the subject come to a decision about what it is they've done and what it is they must now do in response to that. Like all feelings, this kind of guilt communicates something to us to protect us, to make us act, help us refrain from doing something that will hurt us. Personal guilt is a feeling that is simply a moment on the way to the subject realizing that they have to make a decision to change. Guilt is kind of like a quarterback in a running play in football. The quarterback gets the football from the center when the play begins, but it's his job to hand it off to the running back who runs the ball into the end zone or whatever. If the QB holds on to the football, that is, if all we do is just get stuck in that moment of guilt, well then we get tackled with the ball and the running back has no chance to score. Legal guilt works quite a bit differently, I think. Rather than being a feeling that's meant to make us change, legal guilt is a status that can help the subject change. It's also meant to maintain a series of relations. Now, I know that sounds a little jargony, so let me explain what I mean by that: a series of relations. If someone was convicted of vandalizing a beloved public space or robbing a store, but that conviction didn't have any kind of effect on the perpetrator as far as society was concerned, then it wouldn't really mean anything insofar as we would hope that people don't do things like vandalize and steal, right? You might hear people talk about how fining a rich person isn't really a punishment at all. They aren't going to miss the money and they can just pay to break the law. If I have tons of money, it may be worth it for me to say, park wherever I want for my own convenience, and then just pay the parking ticket. It didn't encourage me to act in a more socially cooperative way. I just had enough money to avoid the consequences of being antisocial. I think the same concept is at play here. If the status of legally guilty of this crime didn't have any kind of effect, well then there wasn't much use in declaring it. But in the United States, the purpose of a guilty sentence is presumably to say something about that individual that's guilty. That person incurs penalties. It could be a fine, but it could be probation or jail time or loss of certain social privileges. And that status also serves as a warning to others. Hey, don't do these things, or you might also get these consequences too. So while legal guilt creates a continuing status for the individual, that status is, like personal guilt, also meant to push people to change or maintain certain behaviors. We're gonna start with our old friend Kant. I know we talk about him a lot, but hey, if you don't like him, you're gonna have a bad time. He's gonna be around for the foreseeable future, at least until someone more prolific and influential crashes into the history of Western philosophy. Or I don't know, you could always hate listen to the podcast when I talk about him. Please listen to the podcast. One thing we know about Kant is that he doesn't think that feelings are the way to promote moral action. So the idea of personal guilt is for him a bit of a non-starter. He doesn't think it's bad or silly, but he thinks that to let it be the sole basis of proper moral action is kind of an imperfect way of becoming a morally upright person. Kind of like getting into med school to win a bet. You accomplished something great, but it feels weird because your motivation didn't really fit with what we expect from someone who obtains that accomplishment. Imagine that you step on someone's foot. You didn't mean to, but you didn't really realize it. The person says, Hey man, ouch, that hurt. Now you feel bad. Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to. Are you okay? Please forgive me. This seems like a completely appropriate interaction to most of us. From a social and also an evolutionary standpoint, the feeling of unhappiness, discontent, uneasiness, in short, a kind of guilt, that feeling we have when the other person goes, ow, is what can help us realize that we've done something that we don't want to make a habit. It compels us to check out our surroundings and find out what went wrong to address it. But for Kant, the real reason we ought to apologize isn't because we felt bad, but because we have a rational relationship to the moral law, in which we uphold the idea that we should act in such a way that we can want that our actions become a universal law. This is what's called the categorical imperative. And this sounds fancy, but categorical just means in every situation. So a categorical imperative is a thing that you must do, imperative, in every circumstance without exception. So let's try it with our foot smushing example. Can I will that people should step on someone else's foot whenever they want to and not care about it? Well, that seems pretty silly. At the very least, we'll have a lot of swollen toes and people with their heels sticking out the back of their shoe. Instead, we say, well, if I happen to step on someone's foot, then I should apologize and make amends. This takes us all the way back to episode one, when we talked about hypothetical imperatives, which are related to the idea of the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative, again, says, only act in a way that if you made a rule out of your principle of action, then you could wish for that rule to be a universal rule. Do you hear that if-then statement in there? Let's imagine that you stepped on this person's foot and they said, ow man, that really hurt. And you said, I don't care. Well, the principle or rule of that action would be something like, people should get out of my way, and it doesn't matter if I hurt them and going where I want. How do I test if that's a way that I should act? Well, turn it into a rule for everyone's action, not just mine. It's not hard to realize that the principle of get out of my way fails the test of the categorical imperative because, well, then everyone is just in a foot free-for-all and stepping on anyone who gets in their way. Now some folks might say, well, I don't care, I've got big, powerful feet. I'll be the winner of feet.

unknown 16:50

The feet will.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

Well, Kant's test isn't about would this be a nice thing to do. It's about can you build a functioning society on this principle? And a society in which the principle of everyone's action is I can steal if I want, or I can lie if it's not that bad, or I can stomp on anyone I please with my chunky boots. That's gonna break down really quickly and not be a functioning society for very long. So back to guilt. What does Kant think the purpose of guilt is? Well, a feeling of guilt fails the test of the categorical imperative. Why? Well, the rule, apologize to someone if you feel bad, leaves a lot of things out. Maybe I simply don't feel bad because I'm too far removed from the situation. Maybe the person I harmed really sucks and I hope bad things happen to them. Maybe I don't have a capacity for feeling guilt in that way. There are all kinds of things that can short circuit this process, so this feeling can't be what makes us act in a morally upright way. For Kant, it has to be a function of the rationality. I use my reason to come to a conclusion, and I make a choice of my own volition with my own will to act according to that reason. Because remember, for Kant, the only truly good thing is a good will. Kant talks about conscience in part two of his work, The Metaphysics of Morals. For him, the conscience is just a description of the ability to make a rational judgment and have that judgment affect our moral feeling. Moral feelings aren't useless, they're important in our formation as people and in leading us to make choices that fit with our sense of duty to the moral law.

SPEAKER_03 18:47

Conscience is including the human being of contemplation. So when it is said that a certain human being has no conscience, what is meant is that he pays no heed to its burdens.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

So everyone has a conscience, he thinks, but some people just ignore it. If you didn't have a conscience, you wouldn't have the rational faculties to be held accountable for your actions. And it would be silly for us to expect you to engage in any kind of moral reflection. You can't make a Venus flytrap feel guilty for eating a fly because, well, we tend to think that the flytrap acts on instinct, according to its nature, and not according to conscious choices that it can reflect on later. What kind of guilt are we trying to ascertain about Mr. Gaius Baltar here in our speech? Do we think? Well, the courtroom kind of gives it away. Nominally, the panel of five judges is attempting to ascertain Baltar's legal guilt. Did he or did he not do the things that he was being accused of? If he's guilty, well then we can apply that status to him as a way of demonstrating to him and others that those things he did should not be done and will incur certain social penalties. But what exactly is he being accused of? Treason, sure, but how? Well, he did something that presumably helped the Cylons nuke their planet. The evidence isn't really clear. Remember, if you've seen the show, we're watching from a third-person perspective that gives us more information than the judges and the public. The actual available evidence against him in the trial is scant. Baltar surrendered when the Cylons showed back up on the humans' new planet, and helped the Cylons establish an oppressive regime over the humans, a prison colony, for lack of better terms. He shouldn't have collaborated with the Cylons, and he shouldn't have surrendered. But he did, and these things are treasonous. Or so says the prosecution. We tend to think that to condemn someone for their actions, they have to have been able to do otherwise than what they did. Both Kant and 20th century German American philosopher Hannah Arendt agree on this. We don't chastise a baby for vomiting on their caretaker because, well, a baby doesn't have control over that, right? If there wasn't any way to do something different, it seems wrong to say, well, this is a wrong action and should have been otherwise. If someone says that you are guilty of negligence because, well, you should have known that there was going to be a meteor strike or a sinkhole or a tornado, well, that doesn't make sense because you predicting an act of God seems like something that just can't really happen. Kant and a Rand also agree that for guilt to be established, two other things need to be present. The ability for that choice to have been otherwise is what we would call freedom. So that's our first criterion. Second, the subject that did the thing has to have a kind of agency. If a choice could have been different, but the subject was mind-controlled or coerced through violence, we judge that their agency isn't working correctly, and we find that to be a mitigating circumstance. Third, we have to be able to connect the actions in that situation to that individual that we're attempting to charge with guilt. In law, this is called causation, and just means that the actions of the defendant have to be reasonably connected, both legally and in actuality, to the outcome. For example, if I punch someone and they go to the hospital to get checked for a concussion, and on the way to the hospital they are unexpectedly hit by a drunk driver, I don't carry any legal culpability for the death of the victim. Sure, they wouldn't have been on the way to the hospital if I hadn't punched them, but that doesn't mean that everything that happens to them on the way is my fault. In this circumstance, the drunk driver is at fault for the death. Just a little aside there, the idea is to think of this from a legal perspective. I wouldn't make a habit of punching people and then hoping that someone else like runs them off the road so that you don't get in trouble. I still think morally this is pretty problematic. So ask yourself, did Gaius Baltar's actions directly lead to the harms that were caused by the Cylons? Did his cooperation with the Cylon occupation result in the harm that the Cylons did to the humans? Did it result in the violence that erupted as a result of some of the occupied humans to choose to engage in guerrilla warfare and suicide bombing? Adama even says it, what would you have done? The Cylons probably would have wiped out everyone if Baltar hadn't cooperated. Is that what he should have done? Can we reasonably expect that someone in that situation would stick to their principles and say, yes, this human genocide is pretty bad, but at least I didn't collaborate with the enemy. That feels pretty desperate to us, and I don't think it's the conclusion that the court is hoping everyone listening takes away from the proceedings. I think what Adama's testimony does is throw this whole process right back not only on the court, but on the people watching and listening, on the whole ragtag band of human survivors, the last humans in the galaxy. So few that they wouldn't even fill a football stadium. Because what these last few humans are hoping to do by assigning legal guilt to Baltar is, in Adama's words, to absolve themselves of their own personal guilt. It's hard to figure this out because we kind of have to talk about humanity in terms of a collective. And feelings are the kinds of things that we seem to think that only individuals have. Sure, a whole collective of people can each individually have their own feelings and then associate those experiences with one another. There might be a support group for survivors of a tragedy or for people who have had the same kind of addiction. We think it's important that folks know that others out there have had those same kinds of feelings and struggles. But when it comes to a group feeling a feeling, well, I don't know that that really checks out. So we must mean something kind of different than personal guilt. But also it's hard to find a group guilty in the legal sense because that sort of elides the autonomy of the members within that group. Remember when you were in grade school and some teacher would say, Alright, next time I have to tell this class to be quiet, everyone loses recess. If you were like me, or my 11-year-old, you are absolutely outraged by this. How could you hold a group responsible for the actions of a few and then hand out a punishment that hurts the people who didn't do anything? In 1945, German philosopher Karl Jaspers, who had been kicked out of the faculty at the University of Heidelberg in Germany eight years before because of his Jewish wife, was reinstalled by the Allied powers as the rector there, a position similar to the university president in the modern United States. He gave a series of lectures that year that were later published as The Question of German Guilt, an honest reflection on what it was that Germans were supposed to do about the fact that the destruction that had enveloped Europe for the last eight years was unequivocally the fault of the German government and military. Jaspers opens his remarks by mentioning the signs posted all over towns after the Germans surrendered and the Allies had liberated the Nazi extermination camps like Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen.

SPEAKER_03 27:16

In December of 1945, who indicts me then from the human that's accused that's justly or unjustly charged, tries to defend himself.

SPEAKER_02 27:57

We Germans, Jaspers seems to say, are guilty. He acknowledges this even though it was largely by chance that he even survived being killed by the Nazis. He refused to emigrate because it meant leaving his wife behind, and the Allied armies liberated Heidelberg just two weeks before the two of them were scheduled to be deported to an extermination camp. Jaspers himself was certainly no friend of the Nazis. And common sense suggests that no, he shouldn't bear any guilt for this. And yet he's interested in this question because, well, he is German. And the condemnation of the international community casts long and dirty shadows over his homeland. So he decides to try to break down the nature of guilt. And he comes up with a few more distinctions than we've been dealing with so far. He says, first, there's criminal guilt incurred from breaking laws. Second, there's political guilt, which comes from being a member of the body politic or citizenry of government that acts unjustly in the name of its people. Third, moral guilt, in which I'm subject to the jurisdiction of my conscience. And fourth, metaphysical guilt, which is a kind of guilt of empathy, or a guilt that I can experience in the face of God when considering whether or not I did everything I could have done to prevent evil befalling my fellow human beings. Interestingly, Jasbers is doing this because he doesn't want the guilt the German people are painted with to become flat, indistinguished. A one-size-fits-all shame built for SS officer and child alike. That, it's clear, wouldn't really be helpful. A nine-year-old in 1945 couldn't possibly bear any guilt for Nazi atrocities. And yet they still see the signs. You are the guilty. Jasper says something that I think could be almost perfectly lifted up and placed into the court record in the trial of Gaius Baltar.

SPEAKER_03 29:59

Every human being is fated to be enmeshed in the power relations he lives by. This is the inevitable guilt of all. The guilt of human existence. It is cultivated by supporting the power that achieves what is right. The right of men. Failure to collaborate in organizing your relationship. In the sake of saving the world. Moral guilt in the sake of green. Political guilt turns into moral guilt when we chose to destroy the meaning of the achievement of what is great. The ethos and purity of one's own nation. For wherever power does not limit itself, there exists violence and terror, and in the end, the destruction of life and soul.

SPEAKER_02 31:03

The people vs. Gaius Baltar is proceeding as the largely sham trial that it is, because the remaining humans, desperate, cornered, gnashing teeth, and spitting scornfully, they feel the weight of the guilt they have incurred simply by being the victims of the circumstances that have placed them where they are. Remember that Arrent reminds us that the human condition is that we are conditioned. And if we're to take Jaspers at his word, it seems like that part of being conditioned in this way is to incur or experience guilt. Maybe guilt for something we didn't do. Guilt for something we did do but we hated doing. Guilt for what we were coerced into doing by the mere definition of what it means to try to continue to exist. But like Adama says, putting all that guilt and all that anger and all that shame on one man and executing him to appease our inner mob, that won't work. It's not justice and it can't erase guilt. It will only incur more. Jaspers tells us exactly what it is that can fix guilt, though. The outgrowth of moral guilt, he says, is insight which involves penance and renewal. We have to see what it is that caused us to enter into this guilty relationship with our conscience and decide that we're going to make amends and change into someone else. Metaphysical guilt, where we are guilty before God or the infinite or whatever cosmic power it is that installs our conscience. This has to result in transformation of human self-consciousness. We have to decide that we'll be humble before the existence of the universe in front of us. We can't control it all. We have to improvise. On July 20th, 1944, Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg of the German Wehrmacht, along with many other co-conspirators, attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler and institute a coup d'etat against the Nazi government. Ultimately, the plot failed because Hitler survived the explosion meant to kill him, and the conspirators were captured and executed or took their own lives before they could face a military tribunal. Colonel von Stauffenberg's last words, as he was executed by firing squad in the early hours of the morning of July 21st, were Long live Sacred Germany. Today in Berlin, at the very site where Klaus von Stauffenberg and others were murdered in the street, in the dark, without proper trial, there is the German Resistance Memorial Center, a museum and memorial commemorating the actions and bravery not only of the conspirators of the July 20th plot, but also anti-Nazi Catholic priests, the Confessing Church, secret dissidents who created and proliferated secret materials in defiance of Nazi censorship. Of all Germans who, in whatever way they could, resisted Hitler's murderous regime. In the courtyard of the museum is a statue of a man stripped naked, his wrists bound in front of him, standing in the exact spot the conspirators were executed. At the foot of the statue is a plaque that reads, You did not bear the shame. You resisted. You bestowed the eternally vigilant signal to turn back by sacrificing your impassioned lives for freedom, justice, and honor. It's difficult to know what the July 20th conspirators would have done had they been successful. Some historians suggest they would have had an incredibly difficult time instituting the coup, even if they had successfully assassinated the Fuhrer. Others are doubtful that they were motivated by anything other than saving face for the German government that was beginning to lose the war after the successful invasion of Normandy by the Allied powers. Many of the conspirators seemed indifferent at best to the treatment of European Jews, and to suggest they tried to kill Hitler because they wanted to wash their hands of the blood of German race science is to embrace an overly rosy view of their intentions. But I think the inscription on this plaque, and the words of Karl Jaspers, should cause us to look forward from Stauffenberg, not turn back to scrutinize him. Those who resisted Nazi control did so for all kinds of different reasons. Joseph Stalin, for example, is not absolved of his cruelty and crimes against humanity simply because his Soviet army drove the Nazis out of Eastern Europe. But I think the purpose of reflecting on this resistance is to say that, yes, there is something that we can all grasp onto despite the radically different positions that we come from. Sometimes that thing is the belonging and honor that comes from calling a nation fatherland, being a son of sacred Germany, the thread that catches up the various factions of communist, socialist, liberals, and conservatives that make up an ostensibly homogeneous people like the German folk. Freedom, justice, and honor. These words mean something, even when people use them as weapons. The Hitler youth, and numerous modern neo-Nazi groups, they use the phrase blut und erre, blood and honor, as their slogan. But hate groups don't get the last word on what it means to act honorably, to promote true freedom, to act justly. For those of us who live in countries where we might be struggling to come to terms with what it means to be a citizen of a nation with a government that does cruel, inflammatory, criminal, and immoral things, we might be thinking, what is everyone outside our country thinking about us?

SPEAKER_03 37:06

But to quote Carl Jaspers one final time, even more important to us is how we analyze, judge, and cleanse ourselves. We must clarify the question of our guilt. This is our own business. It is independent of outside charges. However much we may hear and use them as questions and mirrors.

SPEAKER_02 37:49

The solution to guilt is not more guilt. And it certainly isn't blind punishment or mob-initiated ritual sacrifice. It sucks to feel shame, whether you deserve to or not. To see someone or something that you identify with, that you love, that you care about, that you come from, and to know that it is the source of harm? It's ugly, and it bores a pit in the bottom of your stomach where it all threatens to gush out like sewage and ruin everything you've tried to hold above the torrent. When you scoop up all that guilt and all that shame, what will you do? What will you do when you hold that guilt and shame and fear and disgust and feel it running through your fingers like so much putrid stinking sand? Will you try to toss it into someone else's hands? Or will you try to become someone who isn't quite so guilty, who isn't quite so ashamed, who submerges a little more of their doings into the atmosphere of a world where arrogance becomes impossible. Thanks for listening. See you next time when we'll talk about some more things you can do. Things You Can Do is a production of Pete Plays. It's written by me, Peter Owens. For references and citations, you can see the show notes. The great speeches and ethics theme is History in the Making by Pastis. The outro theme, And Around the Sun Again We Go, was written by me. I also wrote Artemis Nebula, featuring selections from Oakwood Station's Four Better Times. Other music includes my cover of Stu Phillips' original theme from Battlestar Galactica, and other music thanks to Dylan Turner and LoFiGenerator.com. If you've got a smooth groove you'd love to have featured on the podcast, or you're interested in being a reader for a future episode, email me at thinksyoucandopod at gmail.com. Special thanks to Matthias Austin for his incredibly moving voice talents on this episode. In addition to being the probably award-winning host of the Lord of the Rings anime podcast, he's also a gifted actor and speaker. I'm really lucky to get to collaborate with him. Thanks also to producer of the show Meg for her excellent cameo as the lead judge, and yours truly doing his best Romo Lampkin impression.