By trying to understand the past, historians enrich our cultural heritage and help us to build on the achievements of our predecessors while, hopefully, avoiding their mistakes. History is, of course, a vital component of understanding the world in which we live today and the goals to which we should strive. But many of the debates now styled as "historical" are not about history at all—although they may seem to concern historical facts, the selected facts are those that can be used to induce guilt. In his 2002 book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, Paul Gottfried explains how guilt serves as the weapon of the "therapeutic state." The therapeutic state identifies our iniquities and informs us of how to make expiation and transform ourselves into model citizens. Gottfried gives the example of the role of the state in "modifying social behavior," and "socializing 'citizens' through publicly controlled education and wars against discrimination."

The function served by guilt, in assisting the efforts of the state to re-educate citizens, is to persuade people that they are indeed truly wicked and can only be redeemed through state interventions. Guilt plays a key role in persuading people that the "thought police" who restrict individual liberty are not the sinister tyrants depicted by George Orwell, but are really just there to help everyone avoid being as sinful as their forebears. History is mined for examples of collective guilt for the sins of the past. Gottfried observes that "such sins include, but are not exhausted by, sexism, homophobia, slavery, and a by now multifunctional Holocaust, guilt for which has been ascribed to Jewish indifference as well as to Christian malice." Gottfried observes that the correction of these sins has resulted in widespread cultural acceptance of extensive restrictions on liberty:

"Today in most Western countries, public speech and written publications that unsettle ethnic and racial minorities have undergone the process of criminalization. Among Americans the outlawing of environments and behaviors believed to offend women, gays, and other "minorities" has achieved the same repressive result as the numerous laws enacted against "crimes of opinion" in Europe."