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“Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

harpers.org

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Re: “Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

#21

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

ajkjk wrote: post #13

I guess this is kinda judgmental on my part, but I feel like a lot of the personal anecdotes you hear about from.. older Americans.. seem totally anachronistic and bizarre. Like: > On the other hand, I have a cousin, a doctor, who feels humiliated if he’s shortchanged in a grocery store. His wife, too: if another woman is wearing the same dress at a party, she feels humiliated. Like -- who are these people? They just…

Some people are very self-conscious. As a doctor, he recognizes the amount of change is minuscule, the effort expended to point it out is barely worth it, the clerk may have done unintentionally, because schools suck and this is the best the market could get at the wage they are willing to offer.. all sorts of reasons not make a big deal.

But.. deep down, internal scales are off. Because it is not about the money. It is about balance. it is about principles. It is about getting what I am god damn paying for, which includes courtesy of getting the right change.

It is insignificant in the long run, but it isn't completely without merit.

Re: “Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

#22

Post by adventured »

popcube wrote: post #10

good introduction, do we have any way to end humiliation of a country? this will be best way to end wars.

The ending of wars remains the same as always and will never change: the imposition of tremendous cost on the aggressor. That cost can come in numerous forms, including financial and domestic social (eg from human losses in the field), but that cost is overwhelmingly the primary thing that ends wars.

Covid plausibly more rapidly ended the US occupation of Afghanistan for example. It became increasingly politically untenable to disregard the cost of remaining in Afghanistan, while the US looks at raising taxes, deals with soaring budget deficits and mounting public debt (an ongoing context made sharply worse by the pandemic).

Re: “Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

#23

Post by elihu »

ajkjk wrote: post #13

I guess this is kinda judgmental on my part, but I feel like a lot of the personal anecdotes you hear about from.. older Americans.. seem totally anachronistic and bizarre. Like: > On the other hand, I have a cousin, a doctor, who feels humiliated if he’s shortchanged in a grocery store. His wife, too: if another woman is wearing the same dress at a party, she feels humiliated. Like -- who are these people? They just…

People vary, and some people are offended by things that others aren't.

I do wonder if there are lessons to be learned regarding climate change specifically. I'm thinking of my parents, but there are a lot of boomers who would never think of tossing a pop can or candy bar wrapper out their car window, and who regard that sort of thing as absolutely inexcusable. And yet they're now being told that burning gasoline is far worse than lowly littering. And it's a thing they've been doing most of their lives, thinking it's normal and doesn't cost anything beyond what it costs at the pump and maybe (if they're reasonably self-aware) the geopolitical issues around being dependent on a few major oil producers in the middle-east.

Accepting that climate change is a serious issue implies acknowledging their role in creating it, which is a kind of humiliation. Just saying "fine, get over it" may be satisfying, but in order to get them on board maybe we need a kind of messaging that isn't moralistic and doesn't assign blame. How would that even work, though? I don't know.

I think most younger people have grown up in a world where climate change is an acknowledged fact and that burning gasoline is known to be problematic even if there isn't a practical alternative if you need to get to work or whatever. So there's no mental transformation that has to happen.

Re: “Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

#24

Post by pmoriarty »

There is such a thing as forgiveness.

In Buddhism there is a form of meditation called "metta", sometimes translated as "loving-kindness" meditation. The way I've been taught to do it is to wish sincerely to yourself, "May I be happy, may I be healthy, may I be safe." Then bring one's attention to those one most loves and think, "May they be happy, may they be healthy, may they be safe." Then repeat that for the people around you, then your neighbors, then your town or city, your country, then the world. The most advanced form of the practice is to sincerely wish this for one's enemies and people one most dislikes or hates.

In Buddhism it is often taught that hatred and ill will towards others is a poison that hurts oneself. It is more constructive and healthy to forgive and move on, rather than fixate or seek vengeance.

In many other traditions also, forgiveness is greatly valued.

In the article, the author writes:

"There are many things we can live without. Self-respect is not one of them. One would think the absence of self-respect would resemble much of a sameness, but the circumstances that can make people feel bereft of it are as variable as persons themselves. A psychiatrist who interviewed a group of men imprisoned for murder and other violent crimes asked each of them why he had done it. In almost all cases the answer was "He dissed me.""

I wonder if the outcome would have been different had these people been taught the value of forgiveness and how to detach and let go from their negative thoughts, rather being in environments where lashing out in violence is modeled as the norm for how one reacts when faced with humiliation.

Also, obviously most people don't react to humiliation with violence. There is something unusual going on with the minority that do, and I wish the article had explored that.

Re: “Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

#25

Post by 7402 »

ajkjk wrote: post #13

I guess this is kinda judgmental on my part, but I feel like a lot of the personal anecdotes you hear about from.. older Americans.. seem totally anachronistic and bizarre. Like: > On the other hand, I have a cousin, a doctor, who feels humiliated if he’s shortchanged in a grocery store. His wife, too: if another woman is wearing the same dress at a party, she feels humiliated. Like -- who are these people? They just…

This does bring up the general question of who is sensitive or insensitive to humiliation.

I am reminded of something Michael O. Church wrote a few years ago [0] in connection with agile/scrum and the issue of intense observation of an employee's work process:

"Another topic coming to mind here is status sensitivity. Programmers love to make-believe that they’ve transcended a few million years of primate evolution related to social status, but the fact is: social status matters, and you’re not “political” if you acknowledge the fact. Older people, women, racial minorities, and people with disabilities tend to be status sensitive in the workplace, because it’s a matter of survival for them. Constant surveillance into one’s work indicates a lack of trust and low social status, and the most status-sensitive people (even if they’re the best workers) are the first ones to decline when surveillance ramps up. If they feel like they aren’t trusted (and what else is communicated by a culture that expects every item of work to be justified?) then they lose motivation quickly.

Agile and especially Scrum exploit the nothing-to-hide fallacy. Unless you’re a “low performer” (witch hunt, anyone?) you shouldn’t mind a daily status meeting, right? The only people who would object to justifying their work in terms of short-term business value are the “slackers” who want to steal from the company, correct? Well, no. Obviously not.

The violent transparency culture is designed for the most status-insensitive people: young, usually white or Asian, privileged, never-disabled males who haven’t been tested, challenged, or burned yet at work. It’s for people who think that HR and management are a waste of time and that people should just “suck it up” when demeaned or insulted."

[0] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-an...

Re: “Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

#26

Post by motohagiography »

warent wrote: post #11
motohagiography wrote: post #9

Does a humiliated person bear any responsibility for their feeling? I ask because while I sympathize with her examples, I can also think of many unsympathetic examples of humiliations, and the person's response to it, and I'd wonder whether humiliations are the result of power shifts. Many people I know are sympathetic to violent responses to humiliation, and even in the article, the interviews with convicted muderer…

Communication is a two-way road. We need to be tactful and mindful of how we're communicating and empathizing with people. Simultaneously we need to work on ourselves so that we don't spontaneously react when we're triggered. When conflict arises, often times more than one person is at fault.

Indeed, the empathy piece I'm often suspicious of because the personalization of an interaction causes at least as many problems as it solves. We can't fake empathy, we can't empathize with everyone, and it's presumptive to expect others to treat us as a peer, so I err on the side of civility over empathy. The conventions of civility are designed specifically to avoid humiliating people unintentionally, where empathizing can get into personal business where humiliation and its conseqeunces become inevitable.

Re: “Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

#27

Post by drewcoo »

motohagiography wrote: post #9

Does a humiliated person bear any responsibility for their feeling? I ask because while I sympathize with her examples, I can also think of many unsympathetic examples of humiliations, and the person's response to it, and I'd wonder whether humiliations are the result of power shifts. Many people I know are sympathetic to violent responses to humiliation, and even in the article, the interviews with convicted muderer…

I would say all of the responsibility even if they're not the cause.

Unless we want some kind of thought police making sure we don't think the wrong things or - worse - cause bad thinking in others.

Re: “Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

#28

Post by lazide »

allturtles wrote: post #20
e40 wrote: post #3

Anyone else disappointed not to hear more about the Sheila interaction?

I think she should have left it out. As anecdotes about humiliation go, it's not much. There's no mention that Sheila publicly shamed her (as the author, by the way, has now publicly shamed Sheila), she just didn't want to be friends anymore. And she's still holding a grudge against her erstwhile friend from when she was 13? People grow apart, especially around major life transitions like adolescence.

As noted in a upvoted comment above - resentment, hate, anger all poison/burn the one who holds it. The stronger it is held, and the longer, the more damage it does.

There is a lot of poison here, and I don’t think it is in Sheila.

Re: “Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

#30

Post by xyzzy123 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #24

There is such a thing as forgiveness. In Buddhism there is a form of meditation called "metta", sometimes translated as "loving-kindness" meditation. The way I've been taught to do it is to wish sincerely to yourself, "May I be happy, may I be healthy, may I be safe." Then bring one's attention to those one most loves and think, "May they be happy, may they be healthy, may they be safe." Then repeat that for the peop…

Basically the entire luxury goods market is about purchasing status.

If you think about it, lowering or threatening someone's status ("dissing them") is robbery, from a certain point of view.

Alexander Hamilton died in a duel with Burr, after Burr "dissed" him at dinner...

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