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Shame is a powerful moderator of behaviour considered marginal or taboo in society, likely it forms an essential role in group cohesion. However, it may well b

Shame is a powerful moderator of behaviour considered marginal or taboo in society, likely it forms an essential role in group cohesion. However, it may well be maladaptive at the scale of global society, where the mechanisms of shame - the 'calling out' of transgressors, the dogpiling that ensues following a successful call out - are chaotic, following no process or moderation itself. The inevitable result is self censorship, in order to mitigate risk, leading to the decline of the health of public discourse, and emergence of a 'self-police state' by stealth

jsnk 5y ago
It's maladaptive for some, but also effective for some others. It can be wielded as a weapon to destroy one's competition and enemies. It works especially well against whichever group of population that has more tendency to self-reflect and have capacity to feel shame. Whereas if a population doesn't feel shame or less shame or construct the standard so that the shaming only applies to one group but not the other, it can thrive in this kind of environment.
- hunglee2 5y ago
  yes quite right, it even seems to be the case that being entirely shameless is a political advantage in a representative democratic system. Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Modi - distinct politicians but all share the common theme of being able to avoid the penalty of shame but being conspicuously shameless
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  That’s the kind of reasoning people want to be true, as in „I’m not lazy, it’s just my perfectionism…“ Can anyone tag some name onto these shameless and shameful tribes? Because I can’t come up with anything that I would want to be associated with.
  - visarga 5y ago
    Guilt–shame–fear spectrum of cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fear_spectrum_of_cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe...
    - KarlKemp 5y ago
      That's really interesting, thank you. I'd always considered guilt and shame to be correlated, as two sides of the same medal. And believe the person above also conflated the two, since their "shamelessness" is really an inability to experience guilt. So maybe the problem is that guilt (felt by the person without specific external input) stopped working, and shaming is taking its place?
      - krageon 5y ago
        Why do you believe a lack of (feelings of) guilt is a problem?
    - akomtu 5y ago
      This looks a lot like one occult classification of souls: there are 3 positive types (those driven by action/will, love/compassion and wisdom/knowledge) and 3 negative types (posturing, vanity and fear). Every cycle of civilization is started by the former types, and are gradually replaced by the latter types. This wiki page describes the 3 negative types, and the 3 different cultures they create. The posturing types want appearance of being strong and wise, they are those pseudo-scientists and fake saints, so they create a guilt society. The vanity types want to feel morally superior to others, they enjoy creating contrived dogmas and making others navigate these dogmatic mazes, and they create a shame society. Finally, the fear types create a fear society: in the final stage of every cycle, when the strongest of the fear types are ruling the world, they create a death cult, with dark temples and other attributes. The wiki page doesn't mention societies created by the 3 positive types, aka the "golden age" of every civilisation.
roenxi 5y ago
> However, it may well be maladaptive at the scale of global society There is a pretty good argument that it is maladaptive in any community bigger than a few hundred people. The most successful political innovations - legislative bodies & courts - have both taken strong measures to make it difficult to shame people into cooperation or provide effective ways to fight back against a shaming. Good political decisions come from getting representative of the relevant people in a room, enumerating the issues and engaging in just enough give and take that nobody is grinning when they walk out. That is the only way. Any other process doesn't reach the same standards of quality.
- hunglee2 5y ago
  yeah I broadly agree. Shame is a good small group policing mechanism, in my imagination I see a homogenous kinship group in a hostile environment. Shame works there, but not necessarily for anything larger scale.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > The most successful political innovations - legislative bodies & courts - have both taken strong measures to make it difficult to shame people into cooperation ?!? Legislative bodies used to rely on shame (the opposite of honor) as a means of enforcing unwritten rules. It used to be possible to shame politicians into resigning when they'd crossed a line. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” -- Joe Welch cancels Joe McCarthy Remember that Nixon resigned. He wasn't impeached out of office for his crimes, he was shamed into resigning when they came to light. > provide effective ways to fight back against a shaming Please list some court sanctioned ways to fight back against shaming and how these are not an infringement of free speech.
  - NhanH 5y ago
    Nixon met with Congress members and was told that he would be impeached with certainty, so he resigned the next day. He was decidedly not resigning over shame. Without the pardon from Ford, it’s possible he would be charged and indicted with a felony even. So yeah, there is a whole lot more to him resigning than shame
Razengan 5y ago
And it carries over to the glorious new age of technological empowerment, where systems that was supposed to mitigate human ills instead perpetuate them: All forums, even vote-based ones like Reddit and HN, devolve into echo chambers where any dissenting opinion is buried before many even get to see it.
- hansworst 5y ago
  Although at least on platforms like Reddit (and I suppose the internet as a whole) it’s possible to create your own echo chamber where your opinion that was shunned elsewhere is allowed to exist and can gather a following. The echo chamber effect of these platforms is often called out as a bad thing, but in my opinion it may also be useful as a way of nurturing ideas that would’ve otherwise been squashed early because they’re too contrarian. The problem is, you can only find out whether an idea is good or not by exposing it to an increasingly large audience. And then I guess there’s the risk of allowing “dangerous” ideas to gain such a large following that they’re hard to stop.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >Although at least on platforms like Reddit (and I suppose the internet as a whole) it’s possible to create your own echo chamber where your opinion that was shunned elsewhere is allowed to exist and can gather a following. AKA the Toaster Fucker Problem! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362
    - sacrosancty 5y ago
      Is that really a problem? Even if toaster fucker is a euphemism for gay? Why shouldn't everyone find like-minded people to feel non-isolated with?
      - AussieWog93 5y ago
        It's not really any of those things. It's nothing more than a whimsical way to think about certain types of cultish online communities.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
But this always happens. There is no culture which doesn't have a strong element of self-censorship for at least some of its members. But equally some groups/individuals will get the benefit of the doubt, while others will be aggressively bullied and scapegoated. And some groups/individuals will aggressively claim victimhood and martyrdom while actually being comparatively privileged. The question is more the extent to which social dynamics are influenced by dark triad morality. Cultures with very little are far less inclined to public bullying than cultures where it's foundational.
- forum_ghost 5y ago
  What are the examples of these shameless cultures? I'd like to join them.
  - tetromino_ 5y ago
    Traditional American culture (as compared to traditional Japanese culture, for example). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fear_spectrum_of_cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe...
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      [flagged]
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        I mean sorry but the Japanese have a pretty strong shaming culture according to most of the world, that the things you think they should be ashamed of are not those they are shamed by does not prove any different.
    - erikpukinskis 5y ago
      Traditional American culture is rife with shame. The concept of “manly men” is based on shame. The concept that women are responsible if they attract unwanted male attention is based on shame. The concept that anyone can succeed so if you don’t it’s because you didn’t try hard enough is based on shame. I could go on?
KennyBlanken 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- yunohn 5y ago
  I’m not sure why you’re so heavily downvoted - this is common sense.
  - ThrowawayR2 5y ago
    They desire that those having bad opinions should be shamed and are therefore being given what they desired, in a classic demonstration that one should be careful what one wishes for.
- janto 5y ago
  We are now at a stage where a twitter mob would see "men should not be allowed to compete in women's sports" as a bigoted statement. To the vast majority of people there are important differences between men and women, and will now have to awkwardly self-censors their speech. Or they will worry whether they are actually bigoted and attempt to signal that they are not really a bad person by relenting to the group. We are also at a stage where a US Supreme Court nominee under questioning was unwilling to hazard a guess at a definition of Woman. The risks for them personally was just too high. We're also at a stage where I (not American) get bombarded by this ideological pathology of the American Left when I end up on Twitter. How do I opt out?
  - yunohn 5y ago
    - bavell 5y ago
      Why do you think biological men should be allowed to compete in sports against biological women at a professional level? Is that fair to those women? We can acknowledge and accept trans people without bulldozing millennia of human culture. This has nothing to do with "speech", free or otherwise.
dalbasal 5y ago
A lot of shame relates to things outside of one's immediate control. "Son of a whore" is a old shame accusation. Shame by familial association is a very "traditional" part of shame. People who have suffered attack, especially rape, often feel ashamed. Failure is shameful. STDs are shameful. Being illiterate or inumerate. Etc. Shame in these cases isn't about altering behaviours directly. It is about creating social hierarchies, structures and such. It results more in hiding. So sure, shame has always been a part of culture and has good, along with bad effects. I don't agree that the internet "broke shame." Shame was always pretty broken. The internet just delivered it to new places.
danielvaughn 5y ago
It also requires a society to be fairly well-aligned on where the margin lies. In the USA, at least, that is decidedly not the case.

jsnk 5y ago

It's maladaptive for some, but also effective for some others. It can be wielded as a weapon to destroy one's competition and enemies. It works especially well against whichever group of population that has more tendency to self-reflect and have capacity to feel shame. Whereas if a population doesn't feel shame or less shame or construct the standard so that the shaming only applies to one group but not the other, it can thrive in this kind of environment.

hunglee2 5y ago
yes quite right, it even seems to be the case that being entirely shameless is a political advantage in a representative democratic system. Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Modi - distinct politicians but all share the common theme of being able to avoid the penalty of shame but being conspicuously shameless
KarlKemp 5y ago
That’s the kind of reasoning people want to be true, as in „I’m not lazy, it’s just my perfectionism…“ Can anyone tag some name onto these shameless and shameful tribes? Because I can’t come up with anything that I would want to be associated with.
- visarga 5y ago
  Guilt–shame–fear spectrum of cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fear_spectrum_of_cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe...
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
    That's really interesting, thank you. I'd always considered guilt and shame to be correlated, as two sides of the same medal. And believe the person above also conflated the two, since their "shamelessness" is really an inability to experience guilt. So maybe the problem is that guilt (felt by the person without specific external input) stopped working, and shaming is taking its place?
    - krageon 5y ago
      Why do you believe a lack of (feelings of) guilt is a problem?
  - akomtu 5y ago
    This looks a lot like one occult classification of souls: there are 3 positive types (those driven by action/will, love/compassion and wisdom/knowledge) and 3 negative types (posturing, vanity and fear). Every cycle of civilization is started by the former types, and are gradually replaced by the latter types. This wiki page describes the 3 negative types, and the 3 different cultures they create. The posturing types want appearance of being strong and wise, they are those pseudo-scientists and fake saints, so they create a guilt society. The vanity types want to feel morally superior to others, they enjoy creating contrived dogmas and making others navigate these dogmatic mazes, and they create a shame society. Finally, the fear types create a fear society: in the final stage of every cycle, when the strongest of the fear types are ruling the world, they create a death cult, with dark temples and other attributes. The wiki page doesn't mention societies created by the 3 positive types, aka the "golden age" of every civilisation.

roenxi 5y ago

> However, it may well be maladaptive at the scale of global society There is a pretty good argument that it is maladaptive in any community bigger than a few hundred people. The most successful political innovations - legislative bodies & courts - have both taken strong measures to make it difficult to shame people into cooperation or provide effective ways to fight back against a shaming. Good political decisions come from getting representative of the relevant people in a room, enumerating the issues and engaging in just enough give and take that nobody is grinning when they walk out. That is the only way. Any other process doesn't reach the same standards of quality.

hunglee2 5y ago
yeah I broadly agree. Shame is a good small group policing mechanism, in my imagination I see a homogenous kinship group in a hostile environment. Shame works there, but not necessarily for anything larger scale.
pjc50 5y ago
> The most successful political innovations - legislative bodies & courts - have both taken strong measures to make it difficult to shame people into cooperation ?!? Legislative bodies used to rely on shame (the opposite of honor) as a means of enforcing unwritten rules. It used to be possible to shame politicians into resigning when they'd crossed a line. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” -- Joe Welch cancels Joe McCarthy Remember that Nixon resigned. He wasn't impeached out of office for his crimes, he was shamed into resigning when they came to light. > provide effective ways to fight back against a shaming Please list some court sanctioned ways to fight back against shaming and how these are not an infringement of free speech.
- NhanH 5y ago
  Nixon met with Congress members and was told that he would be impeached with certainty, so he resigned the next day. He was decidedly not resigning over shame. Without the pardon from Ford, it’s possible he would be charged and indicted with a felony even. So yeah, there is a whole lot more to him resigning than shame

Razengan 5y ago

And it carries over to the glorious new age of technological empowerment, where systems that was supposed to mitigate human ills instead perpetuate them: All forums, even vote-based ones like Reddit and HN, devolve into echo chambers where any dissenting opinion is buried before many even get to see it.

hansworst 5y ago
Although at least on platforms like Reddit (and I suppose the internet as a whole) it’s possible to create your own echo chamber where your opinion that was shunned elsewhere is allowed to exist and can gather a following. The echo chamber effect of these platforms is often called out as a bad thing, but in my opinion it may also be useful as a way of nurturing ideas that would’ve otherwise been squashed early because they’re too contrarian. The problem is, you can only find out whether an idea is good or not by exposing it to an increasingly large audience. And then I guess there’s the risk of allowing “dangerous” ideas to gain such a large following that they’re hard to stop.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >Although at least on platforms like Reddit (and I suppose the internet as a whole) it’s possible to create your own echo chamber where your opinion that was shunned elsewhere is allowed to exist and can gather a following. AKA the Toaster Fucker Problem! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362
  - sacrosancty 5y ago
    Is that really a problem? Even if toaster fucker is a euphemism for gay? Why shouldn't everyone find like-minded people to feel non-isolated with?
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      It's not really any of those things. It's nothing more than a whimsical way to think about certain types of cultish online communities.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

But this always happens. There is no culture which doesn't have a strong element of self-censorship for at least some of its members. But equally some groups/individuals will get the benefit of the doubt, while others will be aggressively bullied and scapegoated. And some groups/individuals will aggressively claim victimhood and martyrdom while actually being comparatively privileged. The question is more the extent to which social dynamics are influenced by dark triad morality. Cultures with very little are far less inclined to public bullying than cultures where it's foundational.

forum_ghost 5y ago
What are the examples of these shameless cultures? I'd like to join them.
- tetromino_ 5y ago
  Traditional American culture (as compared to traditional Japanese culture, for example). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fear_spectrum_of_cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe...
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      I mean sorry but the Japanese have a pretty strong shaming culture according to most of the world, that the things you think they should be ashamed of are not those they are shamed by does not prove any different.
  - erikpukinskis 5y ago
    Traditional American culture is rife with shame. The concept of “manly men” is based on shame. The concept that women are responsible if they attract unwanted male attention is based on shame. The concept that anyone can succeed so if you don’t it’s because you didn’t try hard enough is based on shame. I could go on?

KennyBlanken 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yunohn 5y ago
I’m not sure why you’re so heavily downvoted - this is common sense.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  They desire that those having bad opinions should be shamed and are therefore being given what they desired, in a classic demonstration that one should be careful what one wishes for.
janto 5y ago
We are now at a stage where a twitter mob would see "men should not be allowed to compete in women's sports" as a bigoted statement. To the vast majority of people there are important differences between men and women, and will now have to awkwardly self-censors their speech. Or they will worry whether they are actually bigoted and attempt to signal that they are not really a bad person by relenting to the group. We are also at a stage where a US Supreme Court nominee under questioning was unwilling to hazard a guess at a definition of Woman. The risks for them personally was just too high. We're also at a stage where I (not American) get bombarded by this ideological pathology of the American Left when I end up on Twitter. How do I opt out?
- yunohn 5y ago
  - bavell 5y ago
    Why do you think biological men should be allowed to compete in sports against biological women at a professional level? Is that fair to those women? We can acknowledge and accept trans people without bulldozing millennia of human culture. This has nothing to do with "speech", free or otherwise.

dalbasal 5y ago

A lot of shame relates to things outside of one's immediate control. "Son of a whore" is a old shame accusation. Shame by familial association is a very "traditional" part of shame. People who have suffered attack, especially rape, often feel ashamed. Failure is shameful. STDs are shameful. Being illiterate or inumerate. Etc. Shame in these cases isn't about altering behaviours directly. It is about creating social hierarchies, structures and such. It results more in hiding. So sure, shame has always been a part of culture and has good, along with bad effects. I don't agree that the internet "broke shame." Shame was always pretty broken. The internet just delivered it to new places.

danielvaughn 5y ago

It also requires a society to be fairly well-aligned on where the margin lies. In the USA, at least, that is decidedly not the case.