In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche seeks to show that what we call “conscience” is not a heavenly, self-evident gift, but a historical product forged through violence and the suppression of instincts.
Kabul 24: Instead of asking “What is conscience?”, he asks “How was conscience made, and what is it for?”In this horizon, Nietzsche distinguishes two fundamental forms of conscience: the resentful conscience and the guilty (tormented) conscience.
The resentful conscience is the structure of ressentiment: the weak human being, unable to discharge his aggressive force outward, organizes it inward as envy, hidden hatred, and moral judgment against the “other”—against the stronger, the successful, the joyful.By contrast, the guilty conscience turns inward.
Instead of accusing the other, it gnaws at the subject itself. It is the self-accusatory voice that whispers: “I am bad, I am guilty in myself.”For Nietzsche, this guilty conscience is the result of the internalization of cruelty.
He traces its origin to the long process by which the free, violent human animal was transformed into the civilized citizen. Humanity had to be taught to remember that it is indebted and must pay.At first, this debt existed on the juridical and social level.
Christianity then elevated it to the theological plane. With the doctrine of original sin, Adam’s transgression in eating the forbidden fruit became a hereditary, contagious guilt that stains his entire lineage. Human beings are born guilty simply by virtue of being human.
Here, the vague feeling of indebtedness becomes the unconscious experience of “inherent sin,” forming the very essence of guilty conscience: the subject experiences its own existence as already contaminated and culpable before any specific act.If we bring this Nietzschean logic into the present, the recent shooting near the White House by an Afghan immigrant—who killed one National Guard member and critically wounded another—becomes a crucial knot.
In response, Donald Trump called Afghanistan “hell on earth.” He demanded a review of every Afghan file admitted under Biden (treating everyone as a suspect), suspended all Afghan immigration processing, and announced a permanent halt to immigration from “third-world countries.”In this discourse, the crime of one individual is generalized into the nature of an entire nation and geography.
The migrant is pre-emptively figured as “the foreigner who should not be here”—someone who must be deported the moment he ceases to be useful.Vice President J.D. Vance rode the same wave, declaring: “They shouldn’t be in our country at all.” Some Republican politicians sarcastically ask: “What are Afghans even doing in Washington, D.C.?”This is classic herd-thinking: it is not the individual who is criminalized, but “the Afghan,” “the Muslim,” “the Third-World migrant” as an inherent threat.From the other side, when a Third-World citizen migrates to the First World, the displacement is not merely geographical.
It is experienced as crossing a sacred border.The First World—with its technology, order, wealth, and power—appears as a kind of promised paradise.
The migrant sees himself as an uninvited guest in that paradise: a second-class human being who has arrived from “hell” and must forever be grateful and silent.In such a situation, feelings of inferiority and self-contempt are easily internalized. He may have been highly educated back home, yet in the host country his credentials are often treated as worthless.
He is forced to wash dishes in restaurants or clean tables for people whose intellectual level is lower than his own.This is not simply occupational downgrading. It is symbolic humiliation that becomes the voice of conscience: “I really am lesser than them.”At the same time, the migrant feels permanently indebted—to the state, to its citizens, to the “opportunity” granted him. This very feeling of debt strips him of the right to criticize.
Even at the most trivial level, he cannot easily complain about the tasteless food in a restaurant he himself is paying for, because he has internalized that “a second-class human has no right to criticize the taste of first-class humans.”In Nietzschean terms, this is the creditor–debtor relation turned inward: the creditor (the host society) stands as moral judge, while the debtor (the migrant) must accept suffering, silence, gratitude, and humility as forms of repayment.
The migrant’s guilty conscience no longer experiences humiliation and pain as injustice, but partly as “what he deserves.” I came from hell, this is paradise—so I must pay the price of my presence.When one migrant commits a crime, the host society’s herd gaze ties the individual act to a collective nature.
Now every Afghan in America lives under a wave of suspicion, frozen files, deportation threats, and the discourse of “security risk”—although the overwhelming majority have for years quietly worked, studied, and lived ordinary lives. Many now fear even going to Afghan shops or mosques.Migrant children at school learn from the contemptuous looks of their “first-class” classmates to see themselves as truly lesser, uglier, worthless.
Here it is no longer just an external label. The label sinks into the deepest layers of the psyche and becomes precisely the guilty conscience Nietzsche described: aggression that could have been directed against global inequality or structural racism turns inward, and the migrant feels guilty simply for existing here.
A contemporary genealogy of morals faithful to Nietzsche must therefore see both poles simultaneously: the resentful conscience of the host society and the guilty conscience of the migrant, and how the two interweave to produce a world in which we either devour the other with hatred or devour ourselves with shame.When the President of the United States calls Afghanistan “hell on earth,” indefinitely suspends migration from the “Third World,” and his vice president says “they should never have been in our country,” what is announced at the level of policy is engraved at the level of psyche as an inner whisper of reproach in the soul of every migrant.
The text was informed by Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, Max Scheler’s Ressentiment, Gilles Deleuze’s reading of guilty conscience, and conversations with Afghan migrants in Iran, Europe, and the United States. ChatGPT 5.1 assisted with editing.
Jamshid Mehrpour – Kabul
