This is a true story. It sounds like I’m making it up. I’m not.
While working on my Master’s degree over 20 years ago, I went to my psychology class. The first hour was dedicated to discussing an assigned reading from a book called “The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct,” by Thomas Szasz. The first paragraph on Chapter 6 discussed the relationship between Catholic guilt and Italian guilt, and mental health. The seminar started with the Professor lecturing that cultural guilt is prevalent among Catholics and Italians. Less than one minute into his lecture, I raised my hand.
I asked him, “Are you Catholic?”
He said, “No.”
I asked him, “Are you Italian?”
He said, “No.”
I asked him, “Is the author Catholic?”
He said, “No.”
I asked him, “Is the author Italian?”
He said, “No.”
I asked him, “What makes the author qualified to talk about Catholic guilt or Italian guilt?”
He said, “He studied it.”
I asked him, “What makes you qualified to talk about Catholic guilt or Italian guilt?”
He said, “I’ve studied it.”
I said, “I lived it. So I’m more qualified than both of you. I should teach this class. And I should have written this chapter.”
He laughed. The class laughed.
I said, “I’m not joking. No one who hasn’t lived it, is qualified to teach it or write about it.”
Another student said, “I disagree. I think anyone can study it and teach it or write about it.”
I asked that student, “Where do you work?”
She said, “A bank.”
I said, “What if I study banking but never work in banking or live in banking. Would you take a class with me teaching it?”
She laughed and said, “Probably not.”
I said, “Then what makes anyone think they can teach about Catholic guilt and Italian guilt without living it?”
The professor changed the subject and assigned an essay about Chapter 6 to, “prevent further controversy.” I handed in my essay that explained the following:
- Guilt is what you feel when your suffer Cognitive Dissonance.
- Guilt is an outcome of knowing better but having not done better.
- Guilt is your conscience working when you don’t work.
- Guilt is how your conscience prevents you from normalizing the abnormal.
- Guilt is your conscience’s First Response when you fail to act in accordance with your Family Values and beliefs.
- Guilt is psychological pain suffered as a consequence of causing pain.
- Guilt is a consequence of absence, negligence, and incompetence.
- Guilt is a strategy used by the conscience to naturally induce the truth.
- The truth is a natural pain-reliever—it relieves the pain of doing the unnatural.
- The truth prevents lowering the bar. Every time we’re rewarded for lying, alibying, and denying, we lower our standards. We lower our values and beliefs, making it easier to contradict them again and again and again with less pain and less pain and less pain.
- Degree of guilt is determined by your Bad List—the list of what you believe is bad to do and bad not to do.
- Your personal Bad List is influenced, shaped and determined by culture. It’s a product of nature and nurture.
- Strength of Culture, like strength of mind-body-soul muscle, doesn’t grow in the dark or without practice or without working on it.
- Your Bad List is in a constant State of Flux. It changes in direct proportion with how Strength of Culture changes.
- Strength of Culture is not guaranteed from one generation to another. Like strength of muscle, it gets stronger or weaker depending on use.
- Strength of Culture is either strengthened or weakened by a ruthless, Darwinian-Selection Process determined exclusively by practice.
- Culture multiples or culture dies. So does guilt. They’re connected.
- Culture dilutes from one generation to the next when the culture is allowed to be watered down.
- What you practice, strengthens. What you don’t practice, weakens.
- If you haven’t lived it, you can’t teach others how to live it. The best you can do is when you haven’t lived, it is resort to opinions.
- Guilt forces humans to show up.
- The threat of guilt forces humans to show up.
- The need to avoid guilt forces humans to show up.
- Guilt legally forces humans to confess to crimes and sins.
- It’s impossible to feel guilt if you don’t feel bad.
- It’s impossible to feel bad if it’s not on your Bad List.
To prove my point about how humans add to and subtract from their Bad List, I included a true, real-life case study, below. I called the case study “Code-name Pat.”
I can’t count how many hours I spent inside interrogation rooms trying to get confessions from dangerous criminals, violent psychopaths, and opportunistic sociopaths. My training started in The 60s going to weekly confession every Saturday at 4 pm at St. Patrick Church, Port Colborne, Ontario, Canada. I learned that Priests had it easier than cops. Priests had a lot of help getting confessions, especially from parents who forced you to tell the truth, whether you liked it or not. Cops legally can’t force confessions from criminals. And cops can’t enlist parents to force their kids to confess crimes to the cops. But confessing sins to a Priest or confessing crimes to cops happens the same way—by making the conscience work. Triple meaning: make it work out; make it work right; and make it do all the work.
Back then, there was consensus about the Bad List… about what was bad, what you should feel bad about, what made others feel bad. Alignment & Assignment. Society was aligned and focused on their assignment. There was only one cultural Bad List. That list had been formed centuries ago. It wasn’t optional or discretionary. The Bad List was the same at home, at school, at work, at Church. It didn’t matter if you sat at a desk or built the desk or moved the desk. It didn’t matter if you dug ditches or filled in ditches or paid some to do it for you. Back then, there was “Bad List consistency.” There was no “Bad List confusion.” There was unanimous decision about what was on The Bad List. And about what you had to feel bad about. And no one felt bad that you felt bad. Feeling bad was good. It made people feel good that you felt bad because it was evidence of a strong conscience. When the conscience worked, you worked. And vice-versa.
Confessing my own sins taught me that you don’t need Outside Help to force a confession. The conscience legally forces a confession, if the conscience is strong, healthy, and working. The conscience that works, works for you. And you work because of it. Everyone has a conscience. No exceptions. If you’re alive, you have a conscience. The myth of “no conscience” actually means “weak” or “dysfunctional” conscience. The conscience, like muscle, is either strong or weak. It depends on how may Reps you invest. Building a strong conscience depends on winning the fight with Reps. What kind of Reps? Reps working with your conscience versus reps working with temptation. Also, your Conscience Reps that work on you versus your Temptation Reps that work on you. You can’t hide from inner demons. They release unconditionally.
Good news. The power of a strong conscience has limitless lifting capacity. The key is appealing to the conscience to make the conscience functional and work. Make it work out, make it work right, and make it do all the work.
Bad news. The Bad List consensus changed. It became personal. Instead of a uniform, universal Bad List, the list became customized to fit individual convenience, individual comfort, individual wants instead of individual and cultural needs. When did it happen? There’s no direct, hardcore evidence of an exact date and time. But there’s circumstantial evidence that it started in 1975. That’s when the movement started… the movement when people Moved Away. It’s when Culture Erasure gained momentum. The Bad List became individualized and customized—for selfish reasons—to fit whatever prevented an individual’s personal guilt.
“Codename Pat” was the best at it. He was a leading expert in the science of customizing a Bad List— what he defined as bad and what he felt bad about—to fit the situation, to fit his mood, and most of all, to kill the guilt before it happened. Codename Pat was #1 on my list of top 26 best informants of all time. If he was standing in line behind you at the grocery store, you would never guess he was 1 of the top 3 most dangerous, violent criminals I had ever arrested and interrogated, repeatedly. If he was pumping gas next to you, you would never suspect that he was checking out how much money you had in your wallet—so he could rob you. If you dug ditches with him at work, you would never suspect he would likely threaten you with his shovel or attack you with it. If he was stopped next to you at a red light, you would never suspect he would follow you home to plan a break & enter at your house and steal your car. If you saw him when he was an Altar Boy in The 60s, you would never guess that he would end up using hard drugs, selling hard drugs, robbing people to buy more hard drugs, and rat out violent hard drug dealers to the cops. If he gave you the peace sign at Mass, you would never think that he stole guns, sold guns, then ratted out stolen-gun dealers because, “you know, you gotta pay off the mortgage, right?” And you would never think that he would stop going to Mass. And you would never, ever think he would move away from his Culture and Family Values.
Codename Pat chose “Pat” as his informant codename because no one ever called him Pat. He bragged about being a fast learner. “I mean, I can figure it out quick, you know?” He figured out how to become the best Gaslighter before the word “Gaslighting” became popular. Codename Pat wrote the “Gaslighting Playbook.” But he stuck to the basics. He always started on Page 1—“You got it all wrong” despite mounds of hardcore evidence of his guilt. And he stuck to Page 1, trying to break your confidence, by making you doubt the volume of compelling evidence.
“You’ve got it all wrong.” Simple, easy to remember. Add the right (or wrong) body language and tone of voice, and, “You’ve got it all wrong” fuelled the Gaselight fight that escalated your belief—about the truth that you were certain of. Codename Pat’s professional Gaslighting made politicians look like amateur Gaslighters. If Codename Pat ran for office, you’d be tempted to vote for him. His expert, professional Gaslighting campaign was tempting. His Gaslighting sounded exactly like the voice of temptation that you and your Family were used to hearing 365-24-7. That’s why he sounded familiar. Codename Pat became a victim of temptation while expertly spreading temptation.
What made Codename Pat the best professional Gaslighter? First, his Gaslighting worked on him. He had to believe his own lies with all his heart in order to Gaslight others. If you don’t believe your own lies, people will see you’re a Fake Liar. An amateur. Nobody believes your lies when you don’t believe them yourself. Different story when you believe your own lies, alibis, and denials. People accept what you perfect and project. Codename Pat practiced hard. His Bad List worked. Codename Pat didn’t feel bad doing what the rest of the world felt bad doing. He shrunk his Bad List to the size of your cell phone screen. He erased his own raising. How? He lost the Second Generation Fight… the 2-front Cultural War that you’re stuck in the middle of if you are Second Generation. There’s a body of academic research that studies the extreme Cognitive Dissonance experienced by the Second Generation who are pulled in two directions while being stuck right smack in the middle of a Cultural Tug-of-War fighting for the mind and soul, 365-24-7.
Good news. Codename Pat confessed to his crimes but only when an appeal to his conscience flipped The Switch and made him feel bad. Getting a confession doesn’t just happen. You need to figure out the suspect’s Bad List. How do you figure out someone’s Bad List? Ask.
“Do all your crimes make you feel bad?”
“You got it all wrong.”
“Does robbing people make you feel bad?”
“You got it all wrong.”
“Does selling drugs make you feel bad?
“You got it all wrong.”
“Does using drugs make you feel bad?
“You got it all wrong.”
“Does it bother you that you’re facing jail?”
“You got it all wrong.”
“Does having a criminal record bother you?”
“You got it all wrong.”
But three questions bothered him and made him feel bad enough to confess:
“Does it bother you to beat up old people in their houses, for money?”
“Does it bother you that you’re putting your mother through this?”
“Does it bother you that you’re putting your father through this?”
After he felt bad enough answering those three questions, he confessed, and as usual, ratted out people who committed the same bad crimes he committed. Why? “They’re evil. Pure evil.” He never lied once when he ratted out other criminals. 100% honest truth. He never falsely accused anyone. He never felt bad about ratting them out. “Looks good on them. They’re evil. Pure evil.”
Here’s what never worked: scolding.
Telling Codename Pat that he was bad didn’t work.
Telling Codename Pat that he should feel bad didn’t work.
Telling Codename Pat that he had to stop being bad didn’t work. Telling Codename Pat that he would go to jail didn’t work.
Telling Codename Pat that you were mad at him didn’t work.
Scolding pushed him away. Scolding moved him farther away than he ever moved away before. The only two things that worked were: when his bad crimes matched his Bad list; and when he expanded his Bad List to include more Bad Things. You won’t confess about doing a bad thing until that Bad Thing is added to your Bad List.
The professor gave me a mark of 95% for my essay, just short of body temperature. My final mark for the course was 98%, just short of body temperature. Why is a body temperature mark of 98.6% important? I taught students and athletes for 40 years that 98.6% is normal body temperature for humans. But it’s not normal for humans to get 98.6% in school. When you get abnormally high marks in school, you separate from the rest. When you score high marks, they remember you, especially before, during, and after job interviews. No one will ever forget a 98.6% final mark. They put your name at the top of the list on Graduation Day and Hiring Day.
What’s this got to do with low attendance at Catholic Mass? Everything. This entire true story explains the cause and another big part of the solution to get more people to show up for Mass. But, finding the answer yourself, instead of having it handed to you, is essential for maximizing the potential of what is handed to you. If necessary, re-read this article. And re-read all my previous articles. Correctly interpreting evidence sometimes needs a second reading. Or third—to help unsettle a fixed, complacent Worldview & Workview. Test your investigation skills and don’t become complacent by ignoring evidence in Plain View. The human mind expects evidence to be hidden from view. And that which is in Plain View is too easy to see through. Reason? Complacent, narrow-minded, tunnel-vision, Worldview & Workview.
There’s a Canadian, federal election coming up soon. What’s that got to do with people not showing up for Mass? Everything. The Government communicates beliefs and ideology to your kids, to your entire family, to all your Loved Ones, every day in the media, on social media, and through education and curriculum. Here are 2 videos by Father Mark Goring from Ottawa that will help explain some reasons why the upcoming election is important. He also shares insights into getting more people to show up for Mass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe8BzHW3l94
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty2G9ueXJ7E
How did I find these videos? They found me. Synchronistic spiritual prompting. Pope John Paul II said in his book, Gift and Mystery: “In the designs of Providence, there are no coincidences.” I strongly recommend you read that book. It will change your life.
The rest of the solution to the crisis of low Mass attendance is a longer story. Continued in part 9.
#MuchLove
Blessings & all good things
#peace
Gino Arcaro
April 11, 2025