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How do they sleep at night? Lack of collective guilt over systemic wrongs leads to moral, structural fallout

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South Africans have lost their sense of shame, said former finance minister Trevor Manuel during his keynote address in 2017 at the 7th Annual Conference of The Ethics Institute. He explained that South Africans, and politicians in particular, have lost their ability to feel guilty about having done bad things. It is universal that people have an innate sense of shame and experience guilt or remor...
The strongest version of this narrative is its diagnosis of South Africa's moral crisis as a systemic failure, not just individual corruption. It credibly links the absence of guilt to tangible harms—economic decline, service delivery collapse, and normalized lawlessness—while proposing structural solutions like collective action and institutional reform. The argument gains weight by acknowledging the complexity of human behavior, categorizing people as "unbendable," "bent," or "bendable," and f...