5 ms·
The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
- nephihaha 23d agoI was discussing this the other day. Shame and shaming are alive and well. Especially if you do not agree with whatever paradigm is being pushed, like supporting sports team X or not holding the prevailing opinion.
- dude250711 23d agoThe "-phobic" seems to be the suffix to use these days. Just slap it on your favourite term and hurl it at the opponent.
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- mawadev 23d agoAre you load-bearingophobic?
- fc417fc802 23d agoHN is rife with slopphobia.
- account42 22d agoYou sound phobiaphobic.
- WorldIQ 23d agoAgree. Shame is very much not dead. Gen Z is an entire generation paralyzed by social anxiety.
- layer8 23d agoShaming being alive and well doesn’t imply that shame is.
- shoobiedoo 23d agoI don't really know if I would call that shame, though. In Japan if you wear your shoes into someone's house you'll be lambasted with shame, but that's got a deep religious and cultural foundation behind it-- the person being shamed gets their nose rubbed into their mistake so that they don't do it again. There is a "re-centering" of the person so they get another chance. Nowadays in the west, holding an option contrary to whatever herd you find yourself in falls into a binary label. There is no redemption for you, there is no second chance. "You voted for X? You're nothing but evil thoughts and vacuity where a human could have been".
- iamnothere 22d agoI do love Japan, but it also has serious problems with public shaming, particularly in schools (shame bullying) and with people who have media attention (idols, celebrities, influencers). It’s worse than in the US because people seem to internalize the shame more, so they will sometimes get bullied out of public life because they have too much debt, go through a messy divorce, or something like that. Japanese media companies also seem to treat shamed people as “toxic” and will drop them at the slightest hint of a scandal, which makes things worse. OTOH Japan is generally very functional, despite this problem, so perhaps this is their homegrown Omelas. The few suffer greatly and unjustly so that the social order doesn’t break down. Hard to say. I hope it is possible for them to fix the problem without losing their culture.
- Melatonic 22d agoPeople care that much about sports ?
- nephihaha 22d agoPeople kill each other over sports allegiances. Someone had been stabbed to death outside my workplace in Glasgow for wearing the wrong football top.
- plantain 23d agoSit on public transport and listen to everyone playing music / watching tiktok without headphones. Shame is dead.
- dmd 23d agoI think there’s a difference between knowing you’re doing something wrong and not caring, and not even knowing you’re doing anything wrong. What you’re describing is usually the latter.
- alpinisme 23d agoThey definitely get glares and annoyed looks from fellow passengers. And they must be oblivious if they’ve never noticed other people distractingly listening to music next to them or whatever.
- jhbadger 23d agoThat I really don't get (and I experience it a lot using transit for my commute) . It seems more common now, but you'd think it would be less common. Headphones used to be bulky things, now Bluetooth earbuds are tiny things easily put in your pocket -- why not use them?
- TFNA 23d agoBecause fuck you, that's why. More seriously, whenever I ask a young person on public transport to use headphones (and luckily I live in a region where I can safely do that and enjoy some authority as an older person), the response is usually that the youth doesn't have headphones on him for whatever reason (doesn't own any, left them at home, whatever). But with the breakdown of this taboo, people don't feel that not having headphones should stop them from sweet TikTok dopamine.
- Melatonic 22d agoiPhones also have a horrible sound management system which is just finally getting better. People keep their phone on silent at all times for this reason. If from the start they had simply had separate volume controls for alarms / phone calls / media / alerts then I think this would not have become a trend.
- amiga386 23d agohttps://archive.is/5ROzC https://archive.is/5ROzC
- pfdietz 23d agoShame is also a form of social control. Be ashamed you don't know your place, lower class person. Lack of required shame used to be called being "uppity".
- passwordoops 23d agoLike most things in life, moderation is key
- pfdietz 23d agoConsistency is also important. Making arbitrary distinctions just to cloak personal preferences is hypocritical.
- toasty228 23d agoI'll tell that to the dude who pees in my staircase every other week, I must be just confused and too rich to understand.
- pfdietz 23d agoThat's causing objective damage. We don't invoke shame for behaviors that cause that.
- classified 23d agoYou don't? Shame on you.
- belorn 23d agoDifferent countries must have different standards for that. Here, the result would be that the person owning the staircase would call a cleaning firm and then send the bill to the person, in combination with a warning that eviction may happen if further misuses of the property occur. If it happened every other week, the person would be evicted, and I suspect the bills from the cleaning company would be enough to make that happen regardless. If they couldn't identity the person they would setup cameras or a passage system to identity who uses the staircase until the problem can be solved. The law here allows apartment owners to setup cameras in the case of resolving problems with property and shared spaces. For example, in my building there are cameras in the garage and the garbage room, and entry require tags that get recorded when opening the door. Those intrusive actions where done to address past theft and misbehavior which in turn cost money to the company who own the building.
- skybrian 23d agoCould they change the rules so that there’s no or less incentive to “tank?”
- layer8 23d agoFrom the article: “And so, this past summer, the N.B.A. announced a full revamp of the system, with a new approach that penalizes the worst teams in the league. We will see how long this remediation lasts.”
- kleiba2 23d agoI assume by "shame" they mean "manners".
- functionmouse 23d agoand by "manners" they mean "people acting how I think they should act"
- anonreplier 23d agomaybe they just mean consideration for others
- fc417fc802 23d agoYes, a shared understanding of the rules. Common context. Culture. There are in fact expectations of your behavior and that is not a bad thing, despite western popular culture attempting to tell us otherwise.
- functionmouse 23d agoIn an industrial society, too many rule followers results in people being reduced to cattle. We need a subset of our society to be ungovernable in order to stave off tyranny, because historically, smart people aren't trying or succeeding at that. As another commenter in this thread stated, though under different context, our bodies wouldn't make the venom if we didn't need it to survive.
- anonreplier 23d agoeating a smelly pizza in a cinema doesn't make you one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs
- account42 22d agoEnd stage capitalism is itself a result of shamelessness.
- tbrownaw 23d ago
- mxmilkiib 23d agofuck shame, attend to guilt
- layer8 23d agohttps://archive.ph/5ROzC https://archive.ph/5ROzC
- manapause 23d agoShame us what you lose when your turn to someone or something you trust for empathy and instead receive the opposite. Our body-personality would not produce venom if we didn’t need it to survive.
- shib71 23d agoShame was more effective in the past is because it came with consequences - lost business, lower standing in the community, fewer romantic prospects. It used to be part a healthy survival instinct. Without repercussions, shame is just a handicap and those who don't have it have a massive advantage.
- scotty79 23d agoI don't get it. On one hand people are lamenting departure of shame, on the other they complain how easy it is to get your life ruined by becoming a target of internet hate for a minor transgression. Maybe the shame didn't disappear, just fell prey to increasing inequality where one end of the spectrum has very little where the other gets absurd amounts?
- fc417fc802 23d agoIf the consequences become a step function it makes intuitive sense that the gradual downstream behavior would go away.
- fyredge 23d agoI think these two concepts go hand in hand. Perceived cancel culture is the thing that pushed some people to disregard the concerns of others entirely and live without shame. Another example is the concept of involution and lying flat in China. You can't have both if you assume that the entire population is equal. Too much involution breeds lying flat. Too harsh of a cancel culture (for minor faux pas, not sexual assault) breeds contempt.
- AnimalMuppet 23d agoWhat's your definition of "involution" here? I looked it up, but I don't understand how it relates to lying flat.
- matheusmoreira 23d ago[dead]
- gnz11 23d agoRegarding the article's example of "tanking" in NBA games in the opening paragraph, what would solve this is a switch from the franchise system to a promotion/relegation system. No team would bench their best players or throw a game when relegation to a lower division is on the line.
- dguest 23d ago> Evil genius is just a lack of shame. -- Cory Doctorow https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-04-11-obvious-terrible-ideas-bayesian-terrorism-0027f67469cf https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-04-11...
- roenxi 23d agoThere seems to be a bit of a gap vis a vis solutions in the article - someone could set the system up so it doesn't incentivise tanking. The punishment for tanking should be that the teams performed poorly for no compensation. It's all very well to set up a system to encourage poor behaviour then shame the people who behave rationally. But it is much more sustainable in the long term to make good behaviour also strategically optimal. > Post-Hinkie, the league experimented with variations of the lottery, but none of them could deter teams from losing on purpose. I struggle to believe they've tried everything unless they're also talking about players betting against themselves (which probably is impossible to overcome without bans). Incentives aren't easy things but there has to be some system where winning > losing. On that topic we're actually pretty lucky - in the real world, the winning strategy over long time-frames is almost always talking, prosperity and cooperation. Not obvious why the powers that be are so keen to involve other strategies that routinely deliver worse material and moral results.
- jimbokun 22d ago> someone could set the system up so it doesn't incentivise tanking It's called promotion and relegation.
- zetanor 23d agoStrange that this short article mostly focuses on the absence of shame in business and politics, which has been a constant for many times my lifetime. And we should blame social media for this, too? The only difference now is that everyone knows about backroom dealing. If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism, I feel like he'd be a step closer to an interesting observation.
- pessimizer 23d ago> If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism They awarded themselves Pulitzers for publishing false stories. They don't go back and correct them, they just pretend like they never existed (and one day will silently delete them from the archives.) They showed some shame after the Iraq War over continuously lying about WMD on behalf of the state, there was a little shame expressed after trying to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and I guess they decided that they were never going to do that again. They in fact put one of the largest spreaders of disinformation in charge of The Atlantic. The Atlantic is supposedly the leading magazine for the opposition. Every day that the Washington Post kept the PropOrNot story up, even taking into consideration the lengthy corrections that kept being appended to it, made me realize that these institutions had no shame at all. I'm not sure if people are connected enough to particular institutions to have shame about what they do - they have backers, who will find them another place if the place they're at now becomes too hot for them. Straight from politics into being a lobbyist into journalism into a think tank into a consultant for a Middle East dictator into head of ethics for a tech company into head of ethics for a hedge fund, then back into politics again.
- dmje 23d agoHow is shame different from "just being a decent person"?
- layer8 23d agoI believe all four combinations exist in practice.
- dguest 23d agoIt's the same thing, and both are vulnerable to disingenuous applications of cultural relativism. You'll see similar arguments on this thread: "shame is just what you don't approve of", etc. Yes, it's just about being a decent person, and no, scientists still haven't discovered a moral axis in the universe that says what that means. Unfortunately we're in a position where we have to explain that "just be a decent person", which is an inclination shared by 95% of people anyway, isn't some vestigial instinct that modern humans should be ridding themselves of.
- xelxebar 23d agoShame is a feeling, "decent person" is a moral characterization. The former might be part of an insentive structure leading to the latter.
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- Frieren 23d agoShame is only effective in a society of equals. If one day you may become my boss better treat you well. If one day anyone may become my neighbor better treat anonymous people well. If my kid may end married with yours then I better treat you well. For billionaires shame makes no sense. They will never have to confront the people that they abuse. Inequality makes consequences go away. The powerful have not shame because they feel entitled to not need it. Even average people knows that they only need to care about the powerful. It is better to wrong your neighbor than the powerful politician that will retaliate against you. Eliminate inequality and people will care again.
- TFNA 23d agoShame is deeply entrenched in societies of great inequality and social hierarchy. There's a lot of reading within anthropology on honor cultures.
- tbrownaw 23d ago> For billionaires shame makes no sense. They will never have to confront the people that they abuse. This sounds like you're agreeing with the article about consequentialism / "optimization culture" being the cause.
- Frieren 22d agoFor me the reason is economic.
- coolThingsFirst 23d agoShame for what? OF prostitutes and iShowSpeed make more money than neuroscientists. There are more incentives to be a bozo than an educated “pillar of the community”.
- tbrownaw 23d agoI thought that was only the top <very few>, and most just made pocket change?
- dguest 23d agoFootball / Soccer had "flopping" [1], which anyone who watched it in the early 2000s would recognize: every foul was accompanied by a "victim" writhing on the field in agony, in excess of anything you'd see in much more violent sports. Apparently it's diminished a bit in recent years, but not because it's clearly shameful behavior: the leagues started issuing bans. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_(association_football) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_(association_football)
- sdcfgy 23d agoApart from Argentina in the World Cup.
- igsomething 23d agoIt wasn't about diving in particular, but rather post-match revisions and sanctions becoming more common to punish unsportsmanship. Add VAR in recent years, and the newest "1 minute out" rule for fake injury, and today players don't gain anything from diving.
- red-iron-pine 23d agobut the lesson is clear: there needs to be consequences for shameful behavior. introduce a meaningful sanction and the behavior stops.
- jrrv 23d ago45% of this article is about the NBA
- stego-tech 23d agoShame isn’t dead. Specific kinds of shame are increasingly on the way out, particularly when it comes to individuality and self-expression, but shame itself isn’t dying or dead so much as accountability flatly does not exist anymore. When the author bemoans a lack of shame in how the NBA teams tank games to improve later draft odds instead of playing out every game with ferocity and pride, what they’re actually bemoaning is the lack of consequences for such negative behavior - and misattributing that to a lack of shame by fans towards the team instead of a lack of consequences from governing bodies. It’s a naive fantasy of how the world works rather than a stinging critique of real problematic behavior. It also ignores the grim reality that many people simply have no concept of shame in any sense that could correct their behavior. Zuckerberg absolutely has no shame, nor does Musk or Thiel or Bezos; it is impossible to shame them into better, healthier behavior, just as it’s impossible to shame Sony into manufacturing physical media again, or shaming the driver that just cut you off in traffic without a turn signal and used their vehicle as a missile to get their way by honking your horn or flipping them off. Shame alone means fuck all absent consequences. And the thing about shame is that it too is a weapon that has been wielded to horrific ends in the past. Relying on shame alone is how you get McCarthy and the Red Scare, how you repress LGBTQ+ identities, how you segregate people based on skin color or ethnicity or national origin. Shame is toxic, and the few areas we rely on shame as a weapon are also areas of some of the greatest societal harms at present: homelessness, malnutrition, poverty, convicted felons, all are shamed for existence to the point they’re encouraged to disappear from society by any means other than improvement, like a one-way gate rather than a crisis to be addressed. In light of how we currently weaponize shame, I don’t think relying on expanding its use to address grievances is the right call.
- alpinisme 23d ago> the lack of consequences Not saying the article is right, but the point is supposed to be that social norms used to (or should) be sufficient. People should feel and be made to feel shame for flagrant disrespect of core principles that their participation in a system would seem to entail (like playing to win). Speaking for myself, shame has certainly sometimes been enabling, sometimes disabling. Wanting to live up to an image I have of myself and what I should be (and feeling ashamed when I don’t) is a pretty core part of how “I” work. I agree shame can certainly turn toxic, but there are times when it is fair to say, “you should feel ashamed of yourself” (including in some circumstances, “for driving that kid to suicide by making him feel ashamed of who he is”).
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- rotringlvr 23d ago[dead]
- mmillin 23d agoI think a lot of the loss of shame is a result of multiculturalism. The more cultures you accept, the fewer behaviors you can openly shame. As a benign example, eating food with your hands rather than utensils. In some cultures this is rarely ever tolerated, in others it depends on the food item, and in others still you might always eat with your hands. These will be at odds and you have to decide what is OK to shame and what isn’t. I think we as a society bias against shaming in seeking inclusivity, but some things can be lost along the way as well. To use the eating example again, eating with your hands instead of utensils may be more likely to spread disease (or maybe it needs to be coupled with a stronger shame against _not_ washing hands). I don’t know what the right approach is to strike a balance here in a multicultural society.
- K0balt 23d agoThat is an interesting possibility, and seems plausible. When in Rome… becomes not so much about getting along, and more about maintaining social coherence, fostering prosperity and security.
- tbrownaw 23d ago> As a benign example, eating food with your hands rather than utensils. In some cultures this is rarely ever tolerated, in others it depends on the food item, and in others still you might always eat with your hands. I know there are some strange people who eat pizza with a fork, but is there actually anyone who does that with say hamburgers?
- account42 22d agoYes, there are people who eat burgers with utensils. It's more common in quasi-formal settings like business-organized dinners where people don't want to appear messy from my experience.
- Tsarp 23d agoMight have to do with a lot of thought leaders and influencers pushing this. In my own life/career I have seen that over a long enough horizon that lower shame seems to generally work out for people on the long run if you can back it up with some amount of confidence and competence.
- mrngld 23d agoMakes me think of my boy John Adams; "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Moral relativism is emptiness all the way down, we're reaping what we sowed.
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- iamnothere 22d agoThe overuse of shaming tactics has led to the death of shame. Funny how that works. People adapt.
- trescenzi 22d agoI recently heard the term _vice signaling_ and it’s very appropriate for this era. While in the past virtue signaling would be used to identify yourself as the member of an ingroup. It’s now common to signal that by doing things that would previously, and by many still are, considered beyond the pale.
- rdmuser 22d agoInteresting I've been calling it sin signalling. It can also be a sort of power peacocking, "Look at me I'm so powerful I can get away with this vile thing." type stuff. It's not a modern creation but it's certainly popular with certain highly visible political clusters atm.
- wartywhoa23 22d ago"If we don't do it, someone else will" is a perfect example of vice signalling. Such an apt term, thanks.
- Fr0styMatt88 22d agoI think it was Dr K of Healtgygamer that explained it something like non-toxic shame is a useful signal — “I did something wrong and this is a signal telling me so; I need to correct my behaviour” vs toxic shame as in “I am fundamentally a bad/worthless person”. We kinda got the two tangled together and in trying to reduce the second, we probably demonised the first a bit too much. Could be remembering wrong though.
- Melatonic 22d agoThat's a great point. And it goes probably both ways. The young person doing something annoying might also be annoyed by something different the older person does. Respectful communication is probably the key but why is it so elusive ?
- ButlerianJihad 22d agohttps://www.johnbradshaw.com/books/healing-the-shame-that-binds-you https://www.johnbradshaw.com/books/healing-the-shame-that-bi... John Bradshaw defined toxic shame as distinct from a healthy sense of dignity, manners, and modesty. Also, he addresses how toxic shame can be "carried" by people, and passed down in families, as a legacy, so that eventually those who are afflicted need to heal from it, to stop the cycle. I have personally read this book (found it in community college library) and I found myself wishing I'd paid more attention to his talks while he was active.