How is shame different from "just being a decent person"?
I believe all four combinations exist in practice.
The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
51–60 of 109 posts
Re: The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
#52Sit on public transport and listen to everyone playing music / watching tiktok without headphones. Shame is dead.
In my experience it's dominantly teen-aged kids who are just figuring the world out, or in more unfortunate but very rare cases 30-somethings who never quite grew up.
I was that shameless annoyance once too. It doesn't mean shame is dead.
Re: The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
#53Strange that this short article mostly focuses on the absence of shame in business and politics, which has been a constant for many times my lifetime. And we should blame social media for this, too? The only difference now is that everyone knows about backroom dealing. If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism, I feel like he'd be a step closer to an interesting observation.
> If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism
They awarded themselves Pulitzers for publishing false stories. They don't go back and correct them, they just pretend like they never existed (and one day will silently delete them from the archives.)
They showed some shame after the Iraq War over continuously lying about WMD on behalf of the state, there was a little shame expressed after trying to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and I guess they decided that they were never going to do that again. They in fact put one of the largest spreaders of disinformation in charge of The Atlantic. The Atlantic is supposedly the leading magazine for the opposition.
Every day that the Washington Post kept the PropOrNot story up, even taking into consideration the lengthy corrections that kept being appended to it, made me realize that these institutions had no shame at all. I'm not sure if people are connected enough to particular institutions to have shame about what they do - they have backers, who will find them another place if the place they're at now becomes too hot for them. Straight from politics into being a lobbyist into journalism into a think tank into a consultant for a Middle East dictator into head of ethics for a tech company into head of ethics for a hedge fund, then back into politics again.
Re: The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
#54[dead]
Re: The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
#55Shame isn’t dead. Specific kinds of shame are increasingly on the way out, particularly when it comes to individuality and self-expression, but shame itself isn’t dying or dead so much as accountability flatly does not exist anymore. When the author bemoans a lack of shame in how the NBA teams tank games to improve later draft odds instead of playing out every game with ferocity and pride, what they’re actually bemoa…
> the lack of consequences
Not saying the article is right, but the point is supposed to be that social norms used to (or should) be sufficient. People should feel and be made to feel shame for flagrant disrespect of core principles that their participation in a system would seem to entail (like playing to win).
Speaking for myself, shame has certainly sometimes been enabling, sometimes disabling. Wanting to live up to an image I have of myself and what I should be (and feeling ashamed when I don’t) is a pretty core part of how “I” work. I agree shame can certainly turn toxic, but there are times when it is fair to say, “you should feel ashamed of yourself” (including in some circumstances, “for driving that kid to suicide by making him feel ashamed of who he is”).
Re: The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
#56Shame is also a form of social control. Be ashamed you don't know your place, lower class person. Lack of required shame used to be called being "uppity".
The article is all about people in positions of power, not lower class people.
Re: The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
#57Sit on public transport and listen to everyone playing music / watching tiktok without headphones. Shame is dead.
That I really don't get (and I experience it a lot using transit for my commute) . It seems more common now, but you'd think it would be less common. Headphones used to be bulky things, now Bluetooth earbuds are tiny things easily put in your pocket -- why not use them?
In some places it's shameful to show one's hair, or to eat while you walk in public. In some, people don't think about those things at all. In others, the ability to do those things can be an expression of personal freedom.
What you experience is a cultural difference.
Re: The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
#58I assume by "shame" they mean "manners".
and by "manners" they mean "people acting how I think they should act"
Yes, a shared understanding of the rules. Common context. Culture.
There are in fact expectations of your behavior and that is not a bad thing, despite western popular culture attempting to tell us otherwise.
Re: The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
#59Shame is also a form of social control. Be ashamed you don't know your place, lower class person. Lack of required shame used to be called being "uppity".
Shame is an internalised negative emotion that is a negative anticipation of social stigma. In general, it is a usefulness in thing. If you can’t look back at your behaviour a few years ago and find a source of secret embarrassment, you probably aren’t growing.
The framing of shame as a bad thing instead of an important mechanism of self regulation is destroying maturity and social cooperation at an obscene rate, and future generations will be the ones that pay the price in a society where government has stepped in with coercive force to moderate behaviour at a much more granular level in a society that no longer governs itself.
In this it is important to distinguish between shame and shaming. Shame is the useful mechanism of self regulation. Shaming is social aggression and is all too frequently hijacked by astroturfed “social movements” and vile and petty narcissists to project power. Shaming has its place, but needs to be legitimate social sanction or it’s just another form of unregulated violence.
Unfortunately, the reaction of society has been to reject shame, which is about as useful as rejecting fear, for example. Fear is a useful and necessary mechanism of self regulation, and people that lack it entirely tend to live short lives. That said, too much is crippling. Shame is much the same, but is a social contract. Societies that lack it tend to fail. Societies with too much are stifling.
Fortunately, now we have the CCP and Palintir, so we can shrug off the yoke of shame and give up over that mechanism of self regulation to social credit scores and surveillance capitalism. I’m not sure that will be so much better.
Treasure your shame. I’ve lived in societies where it has been replaced by violence, and it’s not better.
Re: The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
#60How is shame different from "just being a decent person"?
Shame is a feeling, "decent person" is a moral characterization. The former might be part of an insentive structure leading to the latter.