18 ms·

“Put on the Diamonds”: Notes on Humiliation

74 points by ryanf 5y ago

eutropia 5y ago
It's so much easier to value yourself when someone else genuinely shows that they value you too. Make sure the people you love know that you value them. Make it a habit to greet them at the door when they come home, and to always tell them sweet dreams when you go to sleep. These affirmations build up an ablative layer that protects against life's daily indignities, I think.
- lazide 5y ago
  It is easy however to become dependent on this affirmations (and hence other people and their sometimes fickle approval). when people find themselves in this type of situation, sometimes they lash out, or try to be controlling/manipulative when they stop getting them, instead of being self reflective and figuring out why and addressing. Sometimes there IS nothing that can do to address it - a bogus accusation from someone else, or affirmations built on some material wealth that disappeared, or whatever. Many people believe the affirmations they see are genuine, but when tested they turn out not to be. It’s also easy for it to be a kind of hedonic treadmill, with someone chasing ever strong and strong affirmations to make up for a pain or fear that won’t go away, and is not faced, overdoing what you are describing to the point it is hostile and toxic. If you look in the media, these patterns are very, very visible. And inevitably, for any number of reasons, the affirmations will stop or reduce in number or impact - even if just due to normal variation - even if 100% genuine and healthy. Kids go to college, or partners drift apart, or everyone gets so used to it they stop noticing. Some of the discussion from others above can be helpful here, as being ok just ‘being’ is a much more stable place, and requires only that which the person themself has (somewhat) control over - themselves.
draw_down 5y ago
I feel sorry for this person.
e40 5y ago
Anyone else disappointed not to hear more about the Sheila interaction?
- LukeEF 5y ago
  Interesting you said that - i read the first part, scanned the rest looking for continuation of the story and then searched for 'Sheila'. Really wonder what happened next - was there a reconciliation, did the hurt run too deep, did Sheila even remember or did she think they just drifted apart?
- legohead 5y ago
  I asked myself how a 63 year old would recognize a childhood friend on the street. My assumption is Sheila found her on purpose, because she had lived her whole life with this burden of regret, and wanted to apologize. I have a similar burden, and occasionally try to look up an old friend, but his name is too common.
  - optimalsolver 5y ago
    What did you do?
- ntxy 5y ago
  made me read to the end. brilliant!
  - russh 5y ago
    Made me stop after searching for her name and not finding it in the rest of the article.
- Wistar 5y ago
  Absolutely yes. For me, it somewhat upstaged the rest of the essay.
- leroy_masochist 5y ago
  One consequence of this essay being published in a high-profile literary magazine such as Harper's, whether intentional or not, will be Sheila's sense of humiliation upon reading it. I bet it's intentional.
jes 5y ago
I have found looking into practices around what ancient Indian religions refer to as "no-self" or "non-self" to be helpful in learning to respond better in situations where I have acted wrongly or otherwise felt ashamed.
oh_sigh 5y ago
https://outline.com/Dbc5Mc https://outline.com/Dbc5Mc
motohagiography 5y ago
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 muderers showed their decision to kill someone was often over a related issue of respect. Being witty or funny gives you the power to shame, and often it's unintentional, to where we might consider the target of a well aimed observation to be fragile for being offended. And yet, we wouldn't blame someone or hold them morally culpable in a disadvantaged relationship for turning the tables, even with a pair of scissors in the back. I don't have answers, but I'd wonder if there is a more general idea of where the responsibility for humiliations and their consequences lie.
- warent 5y ago
  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.
  - motohagiography 5y ago
    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.
- sorokod 5y ago
  I'd say about half of the responsibility. Humiliation us about the percived damage inflicted on the self constructed self image. One is responsible for one's perceptions and constructs.
popcube 5y ago
good introduction, do we have any way to end humiliation of a country? this will be best way to end wars.
- adventured 5y ago
  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).
- lazide 5y ago
  Most wars are fought due to resource scarcity - either commodity materials, food, or something else scarce. Humiliating a country is often done through extreme resource extraction and/or subjugation (where existing resources are controlled, at a minimum, if not directly extracted). Adding ideological humiliation on top of it can make the fire burn hotter once lit, but is rarely the direct cause. WW 2 was a good hexample of this - the crushing penalties on the German economy + the ideological humiliation fed a fire the world has not seen for a long time. But if Germany had been allowed to prosper, but been humiliated? Unlikely they would have been the aggressor. For evidence, see what happened Ww2, where that is essentially exactly what happened. If they been made poor the way they were, but otherwise treated well? Hitler may not have been the figurehead, but someone would have, and a war would have been inevitable. It probably would have been less vicious and pointlessly destructive of lives and property - but not by that much.
  - cardosof 5y ago
    I disagree with your first sentence - resource scarcity may happen and a country may be impoverished, but deciding to go to war is not an economic decision but rather a very personal one. Negotiations and deals are about resources, wars are about egos and beliefs.
ajkjk 5y ago
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 _suck_. They need to get over themselves. I'm sure there are new people like this still coming of age, but probably not at the rate they used to... These sound like very 'boomer' problems, and I think a larger part of millennial culture is collectively rolling our eyes at this brand of arrogance. All over the country younger people grew up with parents and grandparents who were more concerned about pettily defending their pride than being good parents or doing good in the world, and understandably their children grow up with nothing but contempt for it.
- hairofadog 5y ago
  Everyone grew up conditioned by a different context, and every generation has their idiosyncrasies. I'm sure millennials and gen-z folks have things that are humiliating to them which older folks would roll their eyes at (say, something that happens on Twitter or in a video game). I'm not meaning to criticize you; just saying it's good to remember that each person has their own story shaped by the environments they spent time in.
- elefanten 5y ago
  I'm a millenial and as I read this, I got a strong visceral feeling like the one you're describing but about you. Not you personally, but the narrative you just posted. Do you really feel confident that millenials don't have any culturally systematic pettiness and arrogance? The social media generation, the neurotic depressed generation, the generation that has originated no novel politics... they are categorically more serious and more humble than the previous couple generations? The minute details you point to seem essentially irrelevant, exactly the kind of thing that varies generation to generation as culture changes -- anachronistic, as you say.
  - ajkjk 5y ago
    Oh, I'm sure millennials (as a generalization) have their own new varieties of petty pride. Just, the particular brand described the article feels like its age has passed and I'm glad for it.
bsanr 5y ago
>The problem is that the consciousness bestowed on us is just barely sufficient; if we are to achieve inner freedom, it is necessary that we become more (much more) conscious than we generally are. If men and women learn to occupy their own inspirited beings fully and freely, Fromm posited, they will gain self-knowledge and thus no longer be alone: they will have themselves for company. Once one has company one can feel benign toward oneself as well as others. Then, like a virus that had been stamped out, humiliating loneliness would surely begin to wane. Oh, hey. Furries.
pmoriarty 5y ago
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.
- xyzzy123 5y ago
  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...
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Does Buddhism talk at all about the difference between acquiescence and forgiveness? I think that's usually among the thoughts on the minds of people who might hesitate to forgive, and I'd imagine it's come up before.
cafard 5y ago
Well, the action of the Iliad kicks of when Agamemnon disrespects first the priest Chryses, then Achilles. The verb shows up in line 11 of the first book of the Iliad.
mcbishop 5y ago
>Whose humiliation did [NY Times columnist] Bruni have in mind, Weinstein’s or the women’s? The answer is both. Think of all the taunting rejections Weinstein must have endured before he found himself in a position of power. The article doesn't substantiate that Weinstein experienced past humiliation (let alone that this partially motivated his evil). This seemingly-speculative humanization doesn't seem fair to his victims.
mitchbob 5y ago
https://archive.ph/WfKO6 https://archive.ph/WfKO6
mcguire 5y ago
Coincidentally, I just finished reading Under an English Heaven by Donald Westlake. It's the story of the British invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla, and the invasion itself turns on an incident where a British diplomat (delivering more-or-less what the Anguillans wanted) humiliated the leaders of the 6000-person island, who in turn kicked the diplomat off the island, humiliating him. (If you're interested, the book is in the Internet Archive freely. It's hilarious.)

74 points by ryanf 5y ago

It's so much easier to value yourself when someone else genuinely shows that they value you too. Make sure the people you love know that you value them. Make it a habit to greet them at the door when they come home, and to always tell them sweet dreams when you go to sleep. These affirmations build up an ablative layer that protects against life's daily indignities, I think.

lazide 5y ago
It is easy however to become dependent on this affirmations (and hence other people and their sometimes fickle approval). when people find themselves in this type of situation, sometimes they lash out, or try to be controlling/manipulative when they stop getting them, instead of being self reflective and figuring out why and addressing. Sometimes there IS nothing that can do to address it - a bogus accusation from someone else, or affirmations built on some material wealth that disappeared, or whatever. Many people believe the affirmations they see are genuine, but when tested they turn out not to be. It’s also easy for it to be a kind of hedonic treadmill, with someone chasing ever strong and strong affirmations to make up for a pain or fear that won’t go away, and is not faced, overdoing what you are describing to the point it is hostile and toxic. If you look in the media, these patterns are very, very visible. And inevitably, for any number of reasons, the affirmations will stop or reduce in number or impact - even if just due to normal variation - even if 100% genuine and healthy. Kids go to college, or partners drift apart, or everyone gets so used to it they stop noticing. Some of the discussion from others above can be helpful here, as being ok just ‘being’ is a much more stable place, and requires only that which the person themself has (somewhat) control over - themselves.

draw_down 5y ago

I feel sorry for this person.

e40 5y ago

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

LukeEF 5y ago
Interesting you said that - i read the first part, scanned the rest looking for continuation of the story and then searched for 'Sheila'. Really wonder what happened next - was there a reconciliation, did the hurt run too deep, did Sheila even remember or did she think they just drifted apart?
legohead 5y ago
I asked myself how a 63 year old would recognize a childhood friend on the street. My assumption is Sheila found her on purpose, because she had lived her whole life with this burden of regret, and wanted to apologize. I have a similar burden, and occasionally try to look up an old friend, but his name is too common.
- optimalsolver 5y ago
  What did you do?
ntxy 5y ago
made me read to the end. brilliant!
- russh 5y ago
  Made me stop after searching for her name and not finding it in the rest of the article.
Wistar 5y ago
Absolutely yes. For me, it somewhat upstaged the rest of the essay.
leroy_masochist 5y ago
One consequence of this essay being published in a high-profile literary magazine such as Harper's, whether intentional or not, will be Sheila's sense of humiliation upon reading it. I bet it's intentional.

jes 5y ago

I have found looking into practices around what ancient Indian religions refer to as "no-self" or "non-self" to be helpful in learning to respond better in situations where I have acted wrongly or otherwise felt ashamed.

oh_sigh 5y ago

https://outline.com/Dbc5Mc https://outline.com/Dbc5Mc

motohagiography 5y ago

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 muderers showed their decision to kill someone was often over a related issue of respect. Being witty or funny gives you the power to shame, and often it's unintentional, to where we might consider the target of a well aimed observation to be fragile for being offended. And yet, we wouldn't blame someone or hold them morally culpable in a disadvantaged relationship for turning the tables, even with a pair of scissors in the back. I don't have answers, but I'd wonder if there is a more general idea of where the responsibility for humiliations and their consequences lie.

warent 5y ago
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.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  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.
sorokod 5y ago
I'd say about half of the responsibility. Humiliation us about the percived damage inflicted on the self constructed self image. One is responsible for one's perceptions and constructs.

popcube 5y ago

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

adventured 5y ago
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).
lazide 5y ago
Most wars are fought due to resource scarcity - either commodity materials, food, or something else scarce. Humiliating a country is often done through extreme resource extraction and/or subjugation (where existing resources are controlled, at a minimum, if not directly extracted). Adding ideological humiliation on top of it can make the fire burn hotter once lit, but is rarely the direct cause. WW 2 was a good hexample of this - the crushing penalties on the German economy + the ideological humiliation fed a fire the world has not seen for a long time. But if Germany had been allowed to prosper, but been humiliated? Unlikely they would have been the aggressor. For evidence, see what happened Ww2, where that is essentially exactly what happened. If they been made poor the way they were, but otherwise treated well? Hitler may not have been the figurehead, but someone would have, and a war would have been inevitable. It probably would have been less vicious and pointlessly destructive of lives and property - but not by that much.
- cardosof 5y ago
  I disagree with your first sentence - resource scarcity may happen and a country may be impoverished, but deciding to go to war is not an economic decision but rather a very personal one. Negotiations and deals are about resources, wars are about egos and beliefs.

ajkjk 5y ago

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 _suck_. They need to get over themselves. I'm sure there are new people like this still coming of age, but probably not at the rate they used to... These sound like very 'boomer' problems, and I think a larger part of millennial culture is collectively rolling our eyes at this brand of arrogance. All over the country younger people grew up with parents and grandparents who were more concerned about pettily defending their pride than being good parents or doing good in the world, and understandably their children grow up with nothing but contempt for it.

hairofadog 5y ago
Everyone grew up conditioned by a different context, and every generation has their idiosyncrasies. I'm sure millennials and gen-z folks have things that are humiliating to them which older folks would roll their eyes at (say, something that happens on Twitter or in a video game). I'm not meaning to criticize you; just saying it's good to remember that each person has their own story shaped by the environments they spent time in.
elefanten 5y ago
I'm a millenial and as I read this, I got a strong visceral feeling like the one you're describing but about you. Not you personally, but the narrative you just posted. Do you really feel confident that millenials don't have any culturally systematic pettiness and arrogance? The social media generation, the neurotic depressed generation, the generation that has originated no novel politics... they are categorically more serious and more humble than the previous couple generations? The minute details you point to seem essentially irrelevant, exactly the kind of thing that varies generation to generation as culture changes -- anachronistic, as you say.
- ajkjk 5y ago
  Oh, I'm sure millennials (as a generalization) have their own new varieties of petty pride. Just, the particular brand described the article feels like its age has passed and I'm glad for it.

bsanr 5y ago

>The problem is that the consciousness bestowed on us is just barely sufficient; if we are to achieve inner freedom, it is necessary that we become more (much more) conscious than we generally are. If men and women learn to occupy their own inspirited beings fully and freely, Fromm posited, they will gain self-knowledge and thus no longer be alone: they will have themselves for company. Once one has company one can feel benign toward oneself as well as others. Then, like a virus that had been stamped out, humiliating loneliness would surely begin to wane. Oh, hey. Furries.

pmoriarty 5y ago

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.

xyzzy123 5y ago
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...
TameAntelope 5y ago
Does Buddhism talk at all about the difference between acquiescence and forgiveness? I think that's usually among the thoughts on the minds of people who might hesitate to forgive, and I'd imagine it's come up before.

cafard 5y ago

Well, the action of the Iliad kicks of when Agamemnon disrespects first the priest Chryses, then Achilles. The verb shows up in line 11 of the first book of the Iliad.

mcbishop 5y ago

>Whose humiliation did [NY Times columnist] Bruni have in mind, Weinstein’s or the women’s? The answer is both. Think of all the taunting rejections Weinstein must have endured before he found himself in a position of power. The article doesn't substantiate that Weinstein experienced past humiliation (let alone that this partially motivated his evil). This seemingly-speculative humanization doesn't seem fair to his victims.

mitchbob 5y ago

https://archive.ph/WfKO6 https://archive.ph/WfKO6

mcguire 5y ago

Coincidentally, I just finished reading Under an English Heaven by Donald Westlake. It's the story of the British invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla, and the invasion itself turns on an incident where a British diplomat (delivering more-or-less what the Anguillans wanted) humiliated the leaders of the 6000-person island, who in turn kicked the diplomat off the island, humiliating him. (If you're interested, the book is in the Internet Archive freely. It's hilarious.)