Seeing as we closed the chapter on Semester I studying EMOTION, it would be nice to refresh our mind on this topic. Accordingly, this excerpt on Pascal Bruckner’s book, The Tyranny of Guilt, suggests that the Western world’s expression of guilt in certain instances allow us to infer certain truths about them. However whether this proposition about emotion ultimately revealing inherent truths about people or societies is true or not is up for discussion:

With slavery, the Holocaust, and colonialism behind us, we in the west like to lay claim to all that is corrupt and evil in humanity. "The Euro-American is simultaneously cursed and indispensable," writes Bruckner. "Thanks to him, everything becomes clear, evil acquires a face, the dirty rat is universally designated. Biological, political, metaphysical guilt."
Thus it was that so many fine minds could greet the incineration of 3,000 people live on television in 2001 with cries of: "We had it coming"; "What did we expect?"; or, in Baudrillard's case, something close to jubilation.
But, Bruckner argues, this self-recrimination amounts to little more than delusional narcissism, a means of sustaining a sense of our own importance not through the exercise of power but through the expression of remorse. As European influence contracts, so do our claims on responsibility expand. "Our superiority complex has taken refuge in the perpetual avowal of our sins," writes Bruckner, "a strange way of inflating our puny selves to global dimensions."