Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds

"I once interviewed a prison psychiatrist, James Gilligan, who told me that every murderer he treated was harbouring a central secret – which was that they felt humiliated. 'I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed,' he said. His conclusion: 'All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.'"

It's things like this that make it really obvious that we're primates, hardwired for status. Not that we can't overcome it, of course. But it takes work.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/18/katie-hopkins-j...

Or maybe it's an indicator that our incredibly hierarchical society inflicts psychological violence on people because it holds them to conform to impossible shapes in order to fit into the system.

I have a lot of contempt for any abductive reasoning that explains Western Capitalist society with unobservable primordial determinism. Anthropologists and primatologists both observe numerous counterexamples to the idea that we are hardwired to vie for status.

What is true is that we would like to be valued as worthy by the people we invest a lot of importance in. Shame and humiliation is not the absence of status, it is a response to a positive situation of being socially attacked in some way. In a society where status is governed by intricate, interlocking, alienating systems of rules and violence, no one but the very few priviliged (and even then) can escape feeling shamed by their social surroundings.