Output 37—On Shame
I am finishing up reading Jon Ronson’s 2015 book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.” I had been meaning to read it for years. Ever since I began to feel a sense of deep unease about what the internet is doing to us all.
And I come away from reading it with a deep commitment not only to stop feeling shame about my own life—my appearance, my beliefs, my desires, my work, my age, my intelligence, my dark sense of humor, but to return to a non-conformism that is, essentially, a turning away from the phenomenon of shame.
In Ronson’s book, he tells several stories of people who wrote ill-advised things, whether intentional or accidental (a journalist who casually but prolifically committed “small” acts of plagiarism because he’d gotten lazy; a publicist who made a really dark, stupid joke that was misread as terrible racism, got on a plane, and lost her job before she landed) and were piled-on by anonymous commenters and tweeters. They had their lives decimated by people who truly believed they were doing the right thing by commenting anonymously about what pieces of shit these people were.
Ronson also writes about public punishment and how it has mostly been abandoned as being excessively cruel; but that the new phenomenon of internet shaming is basically that, except now, instead of being a community event, the public punishment can be enjoyed and participated in by the entire world if they care to log in.
He writes that at first, he was thrilled about this. As a journalist he had exposed some bad actors. He was doing good in the world. Now, any internet user could experience that sense of having brought down bad people, and doing good in the world. And how do they do this? By using the only weapon an anonymous person with no actual role in the drama except as an observer can use in these situations: words. Punishing words. SHAMING words—you are a piece of shit; you should be fired and no one else should hire you, you piece of shit; why don't you kill yourself, you piece of shit?
Like everything else on the internet, it’s the very question of scale that makes this sort of public shaming such a massive, universal phenomenon. The problem is the anonymity. The punisher is judge, jury, and prison warden. But the punisher is almost always anonymous, which gives them permission to enact punishment that is much crueler and meaner than they ever would if they were in a room with a human. And worse, many people who contribute to these pileons are not even really aware of the details of the supposed crime committed. They don’t need to be. Might makes right.
Ronson very convincingly makes the case that shame is one of our most fundamental states. It’s not a feeling. It’s a state of being. It is created inside a child when they are bullied; when they are abused; when they are de-valued; when they endure acute trauma, but also when they live for years in a house or within a system of chronic, long-term trauma. It doesn’t just “make a person feel bad.” It makes a person question the value of their existence. Shame creates an ontological sense of worthlessness. Which eventually can lead to emotional numbness, depression, suicidal thoughts, and in some cases, violent crime. A childhood or adolescence in which shame is one’s primary state saps an individual of their value as a human being.
Why is it that the LGBTQ+ movement took on PRIDE as their banner? Because their very existence had been negated, devalued, and shamed. Why does the US need policies like DEI and Affirmative Action? What are they repairing? Centuries of devaluation and shaming. Why are feminists “rabid?” Because women have been shamed and shamed and shamed for wanting… anything, really.
When God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden for disobedience, what was their punishment? They became ASHAMED of their naked bodies. SHAME IS THE PRIMAL PUNISHMENT.
At the end of the book Ronson speaks to a psychiatrist who pioneered programs for the most violent offenders in psychiatric wards of prisons which had the express purpose of removing the shame experience from incarceration. He worked with the inmates as well as with the guards. The results were transformative for everyone involved. Naturally, his program was shut down by a Governor who believed shaming prisoners is the point and that brutal guards are preferable.
I say all this because I identified with this book on several different levels. I was a child of shame. It was my primary state of being as a kid—exposed by my mother because I was talented, and then bullied and shamed into submission by my father, as well as by the kids in my grade school, which also happened to be the poorest Catholic school in town with a student body bearing the wounds inflicted by the stress of poverty (lots of my classmates told stories of horrible parental abuse; at least one was having sex with her brother). PTSD involving shaming is what’s brought me to this little nervous breakdown I’m climbing my way out of.
I think PTSD involving shame, along with a halfway decent Catholic schooling (I’ve never admitted that before, but perhaps because of the economic profile of my school, we generally were preached at by pretty Progressive priests. Very much the Socialist Jesus I heard about, not Second Amendment Jesus), made me a more empathetic person, thankfully. Shame definitely had the opposite effect on people like my father, who took up the mantle of “shamer” from his parents and employed it to break me and my brother down until we either rose above it or didn’t.
I’ve always felt compelled by empathy to think a lot about compassion and cruelty. It’s led me to a political position that’s probably so far Left as to be irrelevant at the moment. It even led me to attempt to be certified as a mediator (I showed bias in a mock mediation, so I wasn’t certified).
Mediators are taught that arguments, prosecutions, crimes, disagreements, etc., almost always boil down to a conflict of POSITIONS, or wants. But that beneath the hard positions or intractable list of “wants,” what people really have are NEEDS. And that all humans have the same basic needs. If positions and wants can be put aside for a couple of hours, it may be possible for two sides to recognize and empathize with the NEEDS of the other party. And that’s where understanding begins. And I believe this. I believe that allowing oneself to be vulnerable with another person, even with another person you hate, can lead to resolution.
I wanted to be a mediator, specifically in juvenile justice situations, because I believe that shaming is wrong. Period. It hurts worse than physical violence. It is why sexual violence is almost always more damaging than non-sexual violence. Feeling shame makes people panic. It causes more trauma than most other things. Eventually it causes a host of psychological problems. In some people it leads to sociopathic, emotionless states. I’ve always been against it.
Supposedly.
Except that I do it. All the time. Online. Mostly in threads with people I have never met and never will meet. Always with people who hold different political views. My words, my intelligence, are the only “weapon” I have and when I see someone expressing something that I think is wrong, I will go for the jugular. Sometimes I “win.” Usually I don’t stick around to see the response because I don’t want to “get into a flame war” but really it’s because I can’t defend my position in any real way. There is no position. There’s just “you believe X so I hate you.”
I’ve always been proud of my intelligence. When I was bullied in school, I just told myself a day would come when I could use my smarts and the ones who “peaked” in high school would be sorry! I used to be able to use my words to shame “stupid people” all the time. My only prejudice was against “stupid people.” And as someone who was a child and adolescent in the 80s, my pride was reenforced by American culture. Worthy people ALL went to college. Unworthy people took shop and worked in gas stations, ha ha ha. Again, THIS WAS THE CULTURE. You either did college prep, or you amounted to nothing in terms of the future.
Who knows why this culture prevailed. Was it an actual decision by the US Government to steer people toward Liberal Arts degrees and an academic or business career to cover the fact that most of our manufacturing and farming infrastructures were being purposely decimated? Was it because after WWII college was suddenly affordable for almost everyone? Was it because we were in thrall to French Intellectualism? I don’t know. But I do know I was encouraged to think of people who weren’t college-educated and who didn’t want to live in cities and who preferred country music to post-punk as worthless idiots.
I carried this attitude, which I never really questioned, into my adulthood. I even committed the unforgivable (to me, now) crime of joining a Revolutionary Socialist group made up of rich college students and professors (I left, to my credit, when I realized working people were not buying the Socialist newspaper I was forced to sell because it was completely irrelevant to their lives). I happily read Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, all the while continuing to look down on or fear “stupid people."
Of course, after Trump’s first election, I became an internet warrior like everyone else. I loved the internet before 2016. It really did feel like a community. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. And I was never really on Twitter, so I probably missed the beginning of the online culture wars. But Facebook started getting more and more contentious. I found myself winning many arguments with “stupid people." And then the “stupid people” learned to use their computers to wound, as well. They got scary. We got scary. Scary became a way of life.
I am deeply unhappy with this state of affairs. I’ve already written a lot here, more than anyone will read, probably; and I haven’t even gotten to my main point—why I refuse to use shame as a weapon anymore. Next time.