Shame is an important aspect of behaviour moderation, a negative emotion usefully experienced when doing something that breaks the social contract.
Devaluing shame instad of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed has cost us a critical tool for self moderation and has created a significant subclass of infantile or openly hostile actors.
Without shame, many people unfortunately need an authority figure to step in and moderate their behaviour. It is an unfortunate side effect of what I can only describe as the infantilisation of society that I have watched happen over the last few decades.
It will likely result in people reaching for a paternal “strongman” figure and a subsequent slide into (probably) fascism.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
We want thoughtful, substantive, and above all curious conversation on HN. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
From my perspective it was an observation of my experiences in a variety of cultures and how certain social problems don’t flourish in those environments because people are more conscious about the perceptions of others, and how I see a tendency to replace those social mechanisms with “strong” authority figures as problematic for a functioning democracy… but… it seems I really hit a nerve for some folks and it got taken way out of the intended context. Sorry about that!
An astonishingly large number of people got hooked on legal prescription drugs which were pushed by billion-dollar pharma companies and the medical profession as a whole. Shame is what drives people away from admitting their addiction and seeking treatment towards illegal means of procuring a fix.
The mind boggles at just how phenomenally stupid this thread is.
Your story is a good example of how shame can be harmful, it may have kept her from seeking help. That is certainly a negative effect of shame as a behaviour moderating factor, and I’m sorry that it affected your family in the way that it did.
I think your response is the only valid counterpoint I’ve seen here, since most people seem to think I was talking about shaming people or that shame would somehow prevent addiction… none of that was my point. But your story is a good example of how exactly what I was talking about can also have harmful effects, and that is an excellent point.
People should never be led to believe that seeking help is shameful.
Perhaps if you thought about it just a little bit more you'd understand that treating addiction and substance abuse as a normal medical problem as opposed to a shameful sin to be hidden actually results in positive outcomes.
Hell, look at Indonesia, a nation which has a huge amount of shame-based societal pressures including the death penalty for drug smuggling and in some places corporal punishment for sex out of wedlock. They have one of the highest rates of smoking. Want to guess why? Thats right, Tobacco companies have practically zero restrictions in terms of who and how they market, including to children.
How about instead of shaming people we treat public health issues as health issues and stop allowing corporations to subject millions of people to catastrophic addictions.
I dunno, seems to me the effective thing wasn’t “shame”, but:
(1) Making it progressively more difficult for tobacco companies to recruit new customers by prohibiting many forms of advertising/marketing and forcing countermarketing about harms to be included in what marketing (including product packaging) is allowed, and
(2) Driving up costs with targeted taxes, and
(3) Prohibiting smoking in most workplaces and other public places, limiting environmental exposure to the addictive substances for people not actively choosing to participate and narrowing the contexts where people who do choose to partake are permitted to do so.
It's also extremely divorced from reality. Even if you've never met an addict and seen how many want to get off the drugs (maybe you've met someone who is addicted to something else, like food, alcohol, or bad habits), but that the very fact that people don't flaunt it is proof of that shame. Now maybe some are unabashed now, especially in big cities, but similarly if you call someone "a fatty" enough they'll either: fix themselves (lol), hide their eating while trying to show effort or justify their weight, or just stop giving a fuck.
> people got hooked on legal prescription drugs
I want to address this, not because I think you're making this argument (your wording suggests not), but because it can be common. Many people set up the situation as if there are one of two directional graphs. Drugs -> homelessness or homelessness -> drugs (with variations on paths and some other nodes). But the effect in reality is coupled. Both can be true. It's a clique to drink your sorrows away and everyone knows the call of a stiff drink after a hard breakup or the call to eat a tub of ice cream. Of course losing your livelihood and having difficulties putting it back together can lead to that kind of addiction. But similarly we've seen people go off the deepend and take a bender too far, so of course that can lead to losing your livelihood. Most things in the world are not DAGs. There's lots of complex and coupled phenomena with feedback loops and many paths to reach certain steady state solutions. The danger is oversimplifying it and pretending these are trivial to avoid or trivial to escape. But the nature of their existence is proof of the lack of triviality, while a single counter example is not proof that they are.
Similarly it boggles my mind that a comment about shame is the solution. As if the Victorian times were well known for their safety and high prosperity. As if highly religious cultures have demonstrated exceptional prosperity (Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever). That we're seeing similar comments about punishment, as if North Korea, Russia, and Iran are pinnacles of prosperity, wealth, and morality. How people are unabashedly hand waving away any nuance and pretending that the solutions are simple. But if they were then the examples before would be utopias, and that we'd speak of the many historical draconian eras in high regard.
I’m not even addressing addiction, but rather the socially disruptive manifestations of drug addiction related activities that are becoming increasingly common, especially in the United States.
Obviously my (now suppressed) comment was poorly written if it gave that impression.
I was suggesting rather that the disruptive social circumstances that we are seeing in the USA surrounding drug addiction are partly a result of people not feeling that they need to keep disruptive behaviours to a minimum out of a sense of personal discretion.
I have lived all over the world, and in many areas with serious addiction problems, but the kind of overt behaviour common in the last decade in the USA is uncommon in most of those cultures, and i posit that is a direct extension of the addicts themselves retaining a sense of personal dignity.
The idea of personal dignity and it’s corollary, shame, seems to be conspicuously missing in the subcultures where these kind of problems are recently erupting compared to subcultures with similar base problems where the public presentation tends to be more benign. But that is just my empirical observation from living amongst different peoples and cultures.
Furthermore, I think that replacing personal standards and self moderation with stronger regulations and reductions of civil liberties is a dangerous path that can jeopardise the functioning of a healthy democratic society.
In summary, I see shame ( not being shamed by others, but rather feeling shame in oneself) is an undervalued component in the moderation of behaviour and has utility that we ignore at our peril.
Some commenters have pointed out that shame sometimes prevents people from seeking help for addiction or other circumstances. I think that is an excellent example of where a usually useful thing can sometimes be tragically harmful. It’s an excellent counterpoint, though I never meant to suggest that shame was universally a good thing, only that it is often a useful thing. It’s definitely worth mentioning though, since my examples do tend towards being unreasonably rosy in that regard.
Personally, I strive to be able to look back at my actions and words of 5 years ago and feel a deep sense of shame- this is an indication that I have grown as a person and have transcended behaviour that I earlier would have thought of as being nominal. That’s just one example of how I find shame to be useful in my own growth.
It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. It's appalling that a positive openness to alternative lifestyles has extended to an absurd dropping of ALL standards. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
Sean Carroll has a recent podcast episode descrying the "crisis in physics", which he (partially) articulates as a problem of perception. As much as he himself always wanted to be a science heretic, he notes that all previous successful heretics were experts in the established state-of-the-art, and now if a member of the public researches physics, ALL they hear from are "heretics" who don't know the first thing about established physics. It's like the act of rebellion itself has eclipsed the utility of the specific act.
Using the idea that millions of people are just morally deficient as public policy is a proven failure. There’s always a reason when millions of people are doing the “wrong” thing, and the job of public policy is to assess the return on investment to society of removing those reasons or otherwise disincentivizing the behavior.
Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate
In some aspects of our culture, shame still exists to great effect. For example, drunk driving is a behavior that never gets a pardon. Words never spoken: "We shouldn't judge Joe for his DUI, for if we were in his shoes, we may have done the same."
The drunk driver may deserve all sorts of considerations: They struggled with alcoholism, their judgment was impaired at the time, they needed to go to work in the morning, they couldn't afford an Uber, their designated driver didn't show, they didn't speak English well enough to coordinate another ride home. In function, no excuses are allowed. As a culture, we believe that no matter your situation, you must always make plans to avoid driving drunk.
What if this same type of intense shame existed towards other behaviors we wished to not see? To name one: What if we intensely shamed parents who let their young children become obese? Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?
but they do. All those "eat healthy", "don't do drugs", "play outside 2 hours a day"? They were all funded by some government if they were displaying in public schools. It's not the only nor even primary pillar, but it is a big one.
And of course I don't need to specify how they indirectly teach/punish personal responsibilities with subsidies. Slashing the subsidies on corn would cause more radical changes than any sort of propganda they show on ads.
You are conflating a flawed justice system (prison) with teaching morality. They are not the same.
Asian and other immigrant groups have done that and you can see the results. (In a country overrun by “white supremacy” poor Asians have almost three times the income mobility from the bottom quantile to the top quantile as poor whites in the US.) It works, so long as you can keep your kids from becoming Americanized.
Another example is Mormons. They should be poor like Appalachians. They fled persecution to arid parts of the country nobody else wanted. But Mormons today are disproportionately likely to be middle class or upper middle class.
Well, many don’t believe in personal responsibility. Some argue individuals are inextricably bound by the shortcomings of society and society must account for that.
Its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.
For one thing he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory to make good on its initial promises nor the murky waters of anthropic claims and metaphysical notions of beauty, etc., used to keep it suspended like Wile E Coyote after running off the cliff of empirical support.
As non-crackpot physics profs and postgrads (e.g. [1], [2]) have pointed out, this has not engendered public trust and is a key ingredient in whatever "crisis" the discipline is undergoing.
Not that Carroll doesn't make plenty of good arguments to support his views, but his seeming equation of any criticism of the field with crackpotist heresies is a cheap trick for a philosophy prof.
I'd argue that implies you don't know where string theory fits in the "pantheon" of physics. It applies to the realm well below the radius of the proton, required to explain only the most exotic times and places (like the moments after the big bang, or the boundaries/interiors of black holes). Carroll's point is that basically ALL of "everyday physics" is known - everything above the radius of a proton, which governs all the stuff and signals we are and deal with in our solar system and local chunk of galaxy. String theory is an example of a "weak" theory because it's not unique, but it also applies only to exotic things and it's haziness does not affect our understanding of the larger regimes.
Can you clarify who you actually mean here by neoliberalism? It seems a very loosely defined ideology. Do you just mean ‘the mainstream West’, or something more specific? It’s a strange -ism. It’s very vague in definition, and no one ever professes to be a member of it, yet it is ostensibly an ideology. And I only ever hear it used with a pejorative subtext, which is interesting.
Is there a name for the phenomena? Its almost like a strawman but not really.
I actually think the OPs comment was fair a d not maligning, but this is a real rhetorical trick. Perhaps not exactly the same but it makes me think about how many Atheists read the bible like fundamentalists.
> For instance, Corey has fun rebutting an atheist who accuses a “devout” Christian girl of hypocrisy for having tattoos, because those are supposedly forbidden by the Bible—if you read the Bible like a fundamentalist. As a Christian myself, I’ve been accused by atheists of inconsistency for holding that neither Christians nor theists in general need believe that God created the universe in literally six 24-hour periods, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. It’s as if I can’t be a creationist at all without being what’s called a young-earth creationist. That would be news to St. Augustine as well as to many respectable contemporary Christian thinkers
https://intellectualtakeout.org/2017/08/why-atheists-read-th...
In this case, you have someone who disagrees with an ideaology insisting on what the ideology is, in spite of many genuine believers espousing less extreme ideas.
Go to reddit.com/r/neoliberal, there are lots of people claiming to be neoliberals there.
How can culture not be an aspect of a social creature’s systemics?
That has nothing to do with neoliberalism, which is an economic ideology. I guess its metaphorically connected if you interpret it as a market of subcultures, but that's a pretty strained metaphor, not a real connection to the ideology.
> It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. It's appalling that a positive openness to alternative lifestyles has extended to an absurd dropping of ALL standards.
Its apalling that public discourse has seen grounded criticism and fact-based debate replaced with ludicrous strawmen and hyperbole in which any connection to reality is so distant and minute as to be undetectable like this.
I don't need more people being shamed for being gay, for wearing the wrong outfit or for not fitting in. Shame just doesn't work well at a practical level. To say nothing of the superpower that gives the shameless.
Meanwhile, I find your alternative of "well if we don't have shame, we'll just have to make explicit laws about it" to be not a bad thing at all. You called it fascism with no real reasoning. Explicit laws that we can change and discuss seems like a good way to manage things!
> I don't need more people being shamed for being gay
Well he never said anything about being gay. Perhaps you’re reading some other concerns into his comment.
Imagine two worlds where there is no murder. The first has no murder because no one feels inclined to murder. The second has no murder because there are very strong rules which stop people who feel inclined to do it. Can there possibly be any case made to choose the 2nd over the 1st?
Japan is a good example of this principle. Things are a lot more orderly despite a lot weaker enforcement mechanisms.
You know why talking about gay people _is_ a good example? Because you probably forgot that not even 10 years ago gay marriage wasn't legal in the US, or most of the world. In fact, only 10 countries did. 10. You probably forgot how heated that topic was. How people would try to shame two men for holding hands in public. We're not talking about some super flamboyant guy like that Key & Peele skit, but the other side of that. I mean just ask any Catholic how well shame works. Cultures change fast. Far faster than just the old people dying. But you don't get to be selective about what should be shameful or not. Times change and what was shameful in the past is considered fine now. In fact objecting to some things, such as gay marriage, have now reversed. Shame isn't defined objectively, just like our morals. So the argument doesn't work without this condition.
Speaking of Japan, you know where gay marriage is illegal? Japan. Just June the courts ruled that the ban is constitutional (but other courts have said it isn't). Which just became legal in Korea this year. Didn't even recognize the marriages of foreign diplomats till 2019. In fact, there are only two countries in Asia that have gay marriage: South Korea and Taiwan (2019 but not full rights till 2023). You can probably ask these people about how good shame is too.
You're going to need some strong evidence to convince me that Japan's low murder rate is because of its laws.
In my society not valuing individual freedom girls have/had been shamed into not wearing jeans/skirts, going out for night movie show or even cutting hairs.
There is a show on Netflix called "Old Enough!". It's worth watching to see how some of the high-trust works in practice, and also to perhaps think through if we could be comfortable with the same in our own neighbourhoods and countries. My guess for most people in the Anglo West, the answer would be "No".
You'd think no one wanting to murder you is the best state, but practically people will have strong feelings about a lot of things in life, and it's hard to imagine a healthy society where "that would look bad on me" is enough to restrain you from your deepest anger moments. Having no immediate way to murder you + an active police to protect you should be the barrier to avoid a tragedy.
Japan is no exception. People get murdered everyday, but there is a lot of prevention and arrangement to limit the impact of a single individual going berserk. Police patrol will catch you walking down an empty street at 3 AM with a kitchen knife in hand.
This is a strawman argument. I think what we're talking about is shame for having a reckless disregard for others. The way I think of it is we are increasingly living in a world where people are viewing other humans as "NPCs".
I get it — let’s have shame for the things that “we” want there to be shame about. I just don’t think there is good consensus on what that is.
And let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today. Our relative decline in economic importance is probably caused by other economic trends, but it’s pretty wild to say “shame doesn’t work” despite the evidence to the contrary.
this is absurd, there are plenty of countries who have high levels of shame where aids is still running rampant. and to even imply that we (the us) didn’t have high levels of pre-marital sex in “the good old days when we could shame people” is naive to an extreme.
> let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today.
if you’re suggesting that i should intentionally live under rigid repression to “be a world power” i say nah, thanks tho. i’d rather we were a middling country where people are free and not living under some authoritarian religious kooks or whatever power would be repressing me “for my own good” because they have deluded themselves that they “know better than we do” what will make us happy.
Are you serious?
Pre-marital rape is a massive issue there, as is underage rape, and rape "to just teach those women a lesson".
Not sure why you are trying to invoke shame for something that is a well-known effect of economic conditions, and which has been observed to change with those conditions much faster than (and likely driving rather than driven by) cultural change.
> America had 100,000 people die of drug overdoses last year, whereas societies that shame people for drug use have far lower rates of overdoses.
So do countries that shame people less, like most of the rest of the developed world.
> Middle eastern and south Asian countries that shame people for pre-marital sex largely managed to avoid the AIDS epidemic that gripped similarly poor countries in other regions.
Which is some good luck for them, but one of the reasons it spread so much and i nterventions were so difficult jn Africa was strongly shame-centering cultures interfering with both prevention and treatment (and even acknowledging the fact and nature of the problem.) So, kind of not helping your argument.
> And let’s not forget that we live in a country that became a world power under a social structure that was much more rigid and repressive than the one we have today
Great point, it’s interesting how eager people are to perform large scale social experiments in rapid succession and with no roll back button.
Was it significantly more rigid and repressive than in other countries at the time? I don’t think so.
Also your AIDS and sex related crime statistics seem to be imaginary?
These sound like the arguments I hear from people that wish BD should have stayed East Pakistan.
> Devaluing shame instead of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed
As the other comment said, you’re also discussing “being shamed” whereas the original comment is about “feeling shame”. Similar but far from identical.
No, not really. OP clearly advocates for "the need of an authority figure" to force his personal views onto others he feels are lacking in the way of morals. OP's puerile take on "shame" is just a thinly veilled desire to oppress everyone and anyone around them that does not comply with his personal views.
You're introducing these things into a thread about shame and drug usage. It's a complete non-sequitur.
The original commenter is more right than any of us can conceive. So many societal problems would be solved if people had raised their kids to learn to feel shame. Trumpism, gun worship, climate change denial, post-truth mindset, anti-vaxx, treason, insurrection, racial hatred and discrimination,etc... the thing so many of people with these views have in a common is they feel no shame about the harm they are causing.
If in your own opinion you did something wrong, you should absolutley feel shame. What is more evil than being proud of doing wrong by your own standards? You can debate what is right ir wrong or even what morality is but refusing to feel shame is embracing evil.
If society only used shame for truly reprehensible, amoral, antisocial behavior, then sure, the original commenter is making a great point. But shame has been weaponized. Look around you. People are being shamed for being poor, fat, disabled, lazy, oversexed, undersexed, voting wrong, not voting, you name it. So some of us live in a state of constant shame for innocuous behavior and others of us cope by becoming shameless. Even here, you're trying to cast shame upon the shameless, with "refusing to feel shame is embracing evil".
Meanwhile, I used "gay" as an example because a lot of gay people feel shame about it and it's very bad for those people. It's an example of something with shame attached that clearly shouldn't.
As you say, shame works very well. I'm baffled as to why you would assume that people who hold beliefs different from your own would raise their children without leaning upon the very effective "shaming" mechanism.
I'm also baffled as to why you would think that anyone would be ashamed of their beliefs when they were raised to believe those things. It appears that the left side of your argument isn't aware of what the right side just said.
Edit: In conclusion, your argument does not hold water. It assumes that your opponents do not think deeply upon contentious matters, and only you and yours do (and so, by your account, anyone who shares your beliefs should never feel shame, because they are simply correct). You are dismissing the beliefs of your opponents without bothering to look into the nuance of any single individual's personal stance, and instead painting half our population as extremists. You label all Republicans as "Trumpists" because they didn't vote for Biden. Give me a fucking break. Even the "Bidenists" aren't happy with Biden.
You are the one who should be ashamed, but you know all about that, right? Maybe you should take a break from trying to save everyone else, and talk to a therapist about your savior complex. You might discover that you need some saving yourself.
Anyway its making me wonder, has the US ever been strongly rooted in shame as a non-homogeneous nation? If so when and why did we stop? Growing up in the bay area I feel like I might have a pretty warped view...
> the thing so many of people with these views have in a common is they feel no shame about the harm they are causing.
> If in your own opinion you did something wrong, you should absolutley feel shame
It implies that the list of people you don't like think they did something wrong but refuse to feel shame about it.
To me, all those people are not shameless - in the sense that they don't feel shame _at all_ -, but don't feel shame because they don't feel like they did something wrong (how can you think you're wrong when you don't _believe_ in climate change ?).
So shame in itself is not the problem.
Someone please explain to me how sexual degeneracy doesn’t exist. Its by definition bad, right? So if its not a problem doesnt that mean it doesn’t exist?
indeed, your conclusion appears to desire the very thing OP was calling in to question without justification - the existence of that authority figure.
why do you think people should be told how to be? remember it’s more frequently been the law that has outlawed being gay, or say, more recently in florida, wearing the wrong thing.
This individual has always been self absorbed and useless. His daughter asked him to change for her, he wouldn’t. His daughter’s counselor basically told her to decide how to remember him, it’s unlikely he will make it a year.
Personally, I feel the individual is a PoS and hope he suffers but it’s heart wrenching to see the affect it’s having on his daughter.
Addition: this is happening in one of the more permissive and “progressive” communities in CA.
Well, some people will choose, willingly, to waste their life away living on the streets from one high to the next. The difference between most types of poverty and this, is that they *chose* this path.
Bodily autonomy has powerful upsides, as well as downsides. Here's one of the downsides.
If they wanted to 'get out', I'd be there to help them if I knew them. But they have to want to. Forcing your viewpoint on them makes you just as a horrible person as the judges throwing people in locked boxes for decades for a bit of white powder they injected.
In an ideal world, I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves, of course, so as best to preserve bodily autonomy. I think you can make the case that the Oregon experiment is showing how in practice that doesn't happen.
Someone needs to be of sound mind to make a choice. Clearly you can't sign life-changing legal documents, or testify in court while drunk.
A range of other conditions, like deep depression, state of shock, etc. count. Does addiction?
Surely a definition of addiction is that you cannot stop, i.e. its a mental condition.
Like if someone ia diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, do we ask them if they want treatment? No, we have to treat then anyway.
I do not think this is a slippery slope, the conditions are fairly well defibed.
Externalities: the costs of caring for the addicted are high, and the quality of life in neighborhoods where addicts congregate is horrendous, between violence, insecurity and insalubriousness. I don't think a lot of people feel comfortable raising kids in places where there's public defecation on the daily. So yes I feel somewhat entitled to force that much of a "viewpoint" on my fellow citizens.
That addicts "chose" the path that they're in, I think reasonable people could disagree about it. To some folks, all behavior is the responsibility of the individual, and claiming otherwise is paternalistic overreach. Personally, I think it's fairly well established that some substances cause powerful long-term addiction in some people, well above the person's willpower. I don't care for locking up users, but I do think dealers and traffickers deserve the worst punishments for knowingly causing long-term harm to users.
Are you an anarchist? If not, then please explain how every law you support is not forcing your viewpoint on others?
In this case, the individual forsake his parents and his kid. What about the rights of the teenager having to watch / know their father will likely die because the powers that be will do nothing?
I never thought of it this way but it gelled with me immediately and I really think it's true, the body supports the mind which supports the concept of self. So if the self decides to trash the body, something isn't right about that contract.
There's been plenty of evil done by do-gooders, who are so certain in their rectitude about what's best for others, that they feel justified in imposing that rectitude upon them.
It's better if people who are suffering from issues that have no chance of relenting continue to suffer indefinitely.
No it doesn't. Not even a little bit. This is complete nonsense and without it, your entire argument breaks down.
Can you share the objective criteria you use to judge things? Also can you send me a list of everything you eat, drink, and do, so that I can make sure you are doing only "objectively good" things?
Yes
In places with diverse people from different backgrounds and cultures (i.e. all modern cities) there is no social contract. Apart from murdering people, there are very few things that people agree are universally good or bad, and thus the behaviour moderating effect doesn't exist either.
As someone who was raised in a very small town with sort of strict culture (didn't really seem like that to me at the time, but by modern urban standards it was that), I can very easily see how the cultural relativism leads to all kinds of social problems in western urban world. In my town no-one did drugs, because that would have been shameful. People around you (all of them to some extent) are important, you are important to them and you care about what they think about you, and as a result you don't want to do stuff that will look shameful in their eyes. Without this guidance from other people, (some) people end up going down into rabbit holes of drug habit, alt right, etc.
I lived in a town of 20k people that was BY FAR the largest for an hour drive in any direction. Lots of drunks. First place I lived there, my neighbor was selling meth, put up a confederate flag in their window when a black lady moved into my duplex, and was shot 6 times later than year (survived, since we was shot by a shaky meth head who used a 22). They were banned from the place and police wouldn't do shit whenever they were back and they got mad at me when I demanded they take care of the screaming meth head at 6am on a Saturday. They stole parts off my truck. There were meth heads climbing their fence all hours and days. I literally watched a different neighbor get arrested by a cop who said "hey, don't we have a warrant for you?" (neo nazi guy, who just turned around and the cuffed him). When I moved later that year? Heard nothing. Wouldn't have known. Only thing was you'd still see grown men riding children's bikes because you know they lost their license. No one rode bikes there. Shit was dangerous as hell.
I went to college in a non-college town about twice that size (college was <2k people), and again, lots of drunks. Different sides of the country but both were very Christian and even had strict drinking laws. The uni didn't allow alcohol so a lot of kids were just drinking and driving (closest bar was a mile away and downtown was a 15 minute drive).
Look at a heat map of opioid deaths. Then tell me again how this is a problem exclusive to big cities. If it wasn't in small cities, you wouldn't see a looming crisis in The Blue Ridge. If it were shame, Utah wouldn't be an epicenter.
The thing is that humans are really fucking bad at statistics. We internalize them by total samples of the event, unnormalized. Which is already an incredibly biased lens. I guarantee you that several people in your town were doing drugs, you just didn't know. Just take a minute and ask your self "do I know what I'm talking about or did I just pull this outta my ass?" We need a lot more of that if we're being honest.
Reads: People hid their drug use successfully. How much history do we need to experience before we accept that shame only leads to everyone pretending that something isn't a problem instead of addressing it head on.
I suppose it's possible that there were some other people besides this three people gang at least trying illegal substances, but it was still marginal enough to been a complete non-problem. Alcohol, however, was different; it was legal and socially accepted and many people had a problem with it.
Reads: Someone who can't comprehend that a lot of people actually don't want to do drugs.
I've noticed as well that when I've spoke to friends and family about open drug use and markets I become the one who's "out of line."
Do we as a free society have no shame left to express?
I brought my kid to a pumpkin patch for Halloween last year and this lady told her kids to simply cut in line so they can go do some fun thing first. I thought to myself "crap, I can't say anything because you know what'll happen." My elderly father didn't have that inner voice and told the lady to get her kids to the back of the line. Well, as I expected, lady totally went bananas, whipped out her cellphone, shouting "you don't talk to my kids!" calling my old man a racist... everything under the sun.
We're expected to simply sit back, mind our own business, and ignore bad/destructive behavior. If you believe in the social contract you're out of line.
I think people “mind their own business” out of concern for their own safety. The increases in gun ownership, road rage incidents, and mass shootings has certainly impacted my impulse to correct someone in public.
You're essentially "victim blaming" here, shame is not a healthy motivator. The "social contract" has been eroded in favor of "if you're wealthy/beautiful/healthy/etc you're a more important member of society". "If you can provide more money to the corporation, you are more important"
The US is filled with so many contrasting opinions that it's a survival skill to be able to ignore people trying to induce feelings of "shame". Whether you're a liberal who doesn't want to feel shameful that you're a feminist, or gay, or want healthcare for everyone, or a republican who doesn't want to feel shameful that you're against gay and trans people existing, want to ban abortion, throw the economy to the war machine etc.
I don't think your argument extends at all to a hard drugs problem, though. As a gay man who has learnt to ignore the "shame" of being gay and to ignore the (surprisingly still high number of) people that shoot me disgusted looks if I dare to hold a man's hand in public, I'm not also going to suddenly _not_ feel shameful if I get into hard drugs.
Also, I don't think you understand hard drugs at all. Pretty sure "shame" isn't even a blip on the radar of the awareness of the hard drug user, across all cultures and all of history, such drugs have been so potent that the addicted can only focus on the next fix; things like shame and morality sink into the background as effects of withdrawal from the drug take hold.
For example, China has a strong, stroooong culture of shame and societal shaming, but they still had that trouble with Opium, by your logic enough shame would've stamped that out immediately. People on those drugs don't work like people not on those drugs.
If one chooses addiction - well, it is an authority that moderates his behavior – the substance. Any shame will only make its rule stronger.
The infantilization of society is a myth, society never really grew up to the point of understanding the universal truth - that kindness, support, re-integration, participation, gratitude - these are our allies to fix the society problems - not shame, guilt, isolation and indifference.
I also think there's a point where things have slid so far that we need some measures that appear inhumane on the surface, but solve the problem more meaningfully. I think of the protesters in Toronto hoping to permanently protect the tent villages established in Trinity-Bellwoods inner city park, even blocking the police from clearing people out of their "homes". If we go on with policies like "give out free tents" that are the epitome of band-aid emotionally driven ideas It's hard to see how we aren't simply incentivizing the problem to grow.
It's as though some people genuinely think the permanent slums as in india or brazil are a solution and not a problem.
I agree that the solution is in balance, except the polarities are infinite points on the circle, and in the center is you. Everything you radiate will be mirrored back exactly there. The world contains all of us, and at the same time, we contain the world connecting us in this beautiful way. Emotions are our best allies here to understand self and propagate the finest.
Society is itself addicted in a way to sustain some illusions of a stable world, bringing addicts to it. And we and all artifacts we brought to this world are all parts of a progressing nature. So in my best dream, the growth of the individual and technology will eventually open the way for society to mutate out of the ugly form it temporarily took. I believe it would be a world where radically smaller groups of people are in full control of their living and their community's well-being; something makes me hope that it will be possible if one day it will appear there is no need to fight for your life anymore
The thing is, peers aren't always right. In many cases the masses impose their self-centered views on arbitrary topics. It's not always about something as self-destructive as hard drugs, or even self-destructive at all.
You might live in a highly religious community but have LGBT+ feelings. You might wish to enjoy playing games though your community feels those are for kids. You might like particular kinks that others are frowning upon.
Feeling ashamed because of others' judgment in those cases is purely self-deprecating and holding the person back from truly finding themselves.
In many cases resistance to shame is a great thing and promotes diversity. Avoiding hard drugs is not even a matter of shame but the lack of realisation that a person is destroying themself.
Anything can go both ways.
In the past you can go to jail for being gay (and still in some parts of the world).
Of course if someone commits premeditated murder, they are well beyond shame being an influence on their behavior anyway. There are much more forceful consequences like a prison sentence that they also ignored.
Religion? CNN? Fox News? The average person?
America already has an epidemic of loneliness. Chemical numbing is a symptom of this.
Yet Germany does not have the drug problems which Oregon has.
USA has a big shame problem (just look at IG) in sense of nudity and nipples (which is spreading around the globe thanks to US tech) yet you say shame is devalued in USA.
I think I just debunked your theory (sorry for that) but it's not shame.
America is a very individualistic society—people can violate social norms and they don’t feel shame, because they say “who cares what other people think?” My impression of Germany—which is second hand, my wife lived there and I know lots of Germans—is that it is a less individualistic society. Society might allow certain things, but where society doesn't allow those things, there is strong shame-based social pressure.
At least when my wife was living in east Germany in the early 2000s, drug use was one of those taboos. When she mentioned smoking marijuana—something that didn’t raise eyebrows among other teenagers at her rural Iowa high school—the reaction from German students was very negative.
My thinking is that shame is a very broad term and there are many societies on Earth which are more shameless than USA with relaxed drug laws and DO NOT HAVE that drug problem.
Of course there is also some value in your proposition but saying that a society is totally shameless yet keeps cultural norms very high (like USA with nudity) does contradict the initial claim. It's something else then.
There's another form of shame culture that isn't codified into law but constrains behavior due to the potential reduction in social status for breaking various taboos. Essentially part one's feelings of status is sourced externally and this provides a moderating effect on one's behavior. The problem is that modern society has seen a stark reduction in the effectiveness of this kind of shame culture. We've essentially devalued the prevailing culture in favor of various sub/counter cultures. Now every degenerate interest has a sub-culture formed around it that insulates anyone who identifies with it from the shame of going against the prevailing culture. The usefulness of shame for reinforcing social norms has been eliminated to disastrous effect.
You didn't. It is even somewhat irrelevant, as being shamed for sexual perversion is utterly unrelated to not being ashamed of using drugs.
The big change recently is the me-too movement to change from shame into consequences, which is good for people with something to lose
But, with the moves towards feudalism in the states, there's too many people with nothing to lose, and both shame and consequences depend on having some status to maintain
Unfortunately our instincts about addiction lead us pretty far from the realities of addiction, as OP demonstrates.
Wait, are you talking about "personal" shame, or "corporate" shame. Cause if anything, corporations have none, and people are *learning* to also have no shame. Doesnt get you anything. Just makes you feel bad for no good reason, cause others are pointing a finger at you.
> Shame is an important aspect of behaviour moderation, a negative emotion usefully experienced when doing something that breaks the social contract.
Simply put: fuck the social contract. I didn't sign it. It doesnt get me any benefits, and all it is a whole lot of "costs", all of which are ill defined.
So, no.
> Devaluing shame instad of targeting the parts of the contract that needed to be changed has cost us a critical tool for self moderation and has created a significant subclass of infantile or openly hostile actors.
Being my username, a "pierat", has actually gotten me standing in communities. I democratize content access to the low common denominator of 0. I help others get the content they need or want. Im doing a lot better than capitalists slapping bills on access to everything... even if it does actually cost me money.
> It will likely result in people reaching for a paternal “strongman” figure and a subsequent slide into (probably) fascism.
We already are. Its not like anything I can do will affect that. I mean, whoop-te-doo, I make a pile of votes for even worse sycophantic leeches than myself every 2 years. And being in the "other party's state" (I mean, does it really matter?) my votes are effectively wasted. But it costs me 15 minutes.
I mean, this is what happens when you decide that the contract is one-sided. If a company dump toxic waste into a river you use, you must pursue them through the courts like a civilised man. Years in courts and millions in costs to get justice.
If you take their waste and try Tom dump it in their office you will be arrested withing 20 minutes
All of your "polite" behavior is modified by shame. To use an extreme, contrived, example if you shit on the floor your parents probably shamed you into using the restroom properly. You can, of course, continue to shit on the floor but you also can't act with such righteous indignation when no one wants you around. Perhaps you find a group of people who shit on the floor. But then they, too, will have their own shame-based norms that will you either comply to or be ostracized from the group.
Now, scratch the example of shitting on the floor and replace it with any other behavior. Depending on the group you belong to (or are trying to belong to) shame is an effective way in enforcing expected behavior. It's one of the things that separate us from other animals. If you don't respond to shame (rather than just acting like it) you are not quirky and original you are likely a sociopath.
When a child had an accident, we acknowledged it, cleaned up, and moved on. No punishment, no shame.
If the kid knows that they're not supposed to do something, that's enough - they experience their own internal feeling of failure strongly. I've found that the opposite is usually true, that kids never understand that learning things always involves failing a bunch of times, which is the imore important meta-lesson
Flipside, if they don't care about doing something wrong and you shame them, in my experience they often simply don't give a fuck. Maybe that's my own genetics though. Admonishment and punishment is more useful.
It sounds like you are advocating for the virtues of oppression and the subjugation of anyone or anything that does not fit your norm.
> (...) many people unfortunately need an authority figure (...)
Let me stop you right there, and make it quite clear to you how profoundly idiotic and prejudicial your personal opinion is.
As you seem to advocate that people unfortunately need an authority figure, I'm sure you will acknowledge your need to be put in your place when you step out of line with this blend of nonsense, and simply succumb to the shame you should be rightfully feeling for your regrettable opinion.
If not, perhaps you can start to understand why your opinion makes absolutely no sense.
A lot of individuals get lost in this cultural transitional period, but I think this always happened. A good example was the hippy movement, they where very drug and free sex positive too. Society as whole will be OK I think, other non-legal checks and boundaries are being set up to prevent a major collapse. Collectively we learn from mistakes and correct for extreme behaviors.
There is no true addict on the planet however (of any substance or behavior) who will hit "rock bottom", as they say, and moderate their addictive behavior due to shame. So I feel that some of the blowback you are receiving here is related to the notion (true or not) that public shame applied to addiction for the purpose of influencing non-addicts is equvalent to "giving up" on addicts themselves (and therefore not worth that cost).
I think this article is relevant - shamelessness as a strategy
I’m not a fan of the many culture either but dignity and positive inner dialogue is better for resilience than negative inner dialogue.
Like shame. Shamers usually are insecure or impatient to some.
Valuing one’s self is reason enough.
Learning to get better, or sleds order at something one day at a time doesn’t come from a negative spiral of solely living by what others think.
I think people are right to have a healthy dose of doubt and even disrespect for authority figures. That's far from infantilization. It's learning to think for yourself and to choose carefully who you take as an authority.
As far as addiction goes, the US had a pretty long experiment with authority figures telling people to just say no. How well did that work out?
A culture based on shame and guilt IS fascism.
Shame is admittedly a very powerful tool for social conformity. During the few centuries that you seem to view as the good old days, it was used to great effect for blocking many different behaviors. Among those: not dressing in quite the right way; having dark skin; insufficient patriotism; insufficient aggression in men; the desire for autonomy in women; homosexuality, or for that matter basically any acknowledgement that humans are an innately sexual species.
And then society broke, gosh darn it!
The problem with bringing back those good old days of shame, but of course just in the way that's nice and beneficial, is that a huge number of people believe that all of the above listed shameful behaviors of yesteryear should still be shameful. Shame is the mechanism that various conservatives are using, at this very instant, in trying to brand all gay people as groomers, or all people who get abortions as murderers and/or worthless sluts.
So, in my humble opinion, it ain't happening; how are you going to get any kind of agreement about what behaviors are good to shame? Pandora's box has been opened for half of humanity, who all generally agree that non-harmful behaviors should not be shamed, while things like flagrant violations of election law or finance law should be; while the other half continues to vociferously insist that non-harmful social behaviors are the only real priority and the golden days would come back if only we could all hate the deviants again.
Shame makes people live lives of quiet desperation; it isn’t a building block in a healthy society.
Shame is making a comeback in a big way with restorative justice. Hopefully enough of us get there so we can see meaningful change.
