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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

I'd also like to point out that by resigning Nixon was assured his pension

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/08/10/archives/nixon-to-get-600...

You've just listed 100% of the presidents who's resignations could plausibly be linked to shaming tactics. It is a very, very short list compared to the number of presidents who have had shame deployed against them as a political weapon.

The two main tools the parliaments use is regular, time based election cycles combined with very formal procedures making sure everyone gets a chance to speak. In the ones I'm more familiar with (Australian, British, probably American) they also have well developed traditions against name-calling and insistence on respectful language and behaviours like using proper titles (which can be a bit off-putting seeing how politicians act outside parliament). If a politician has a solid faction backing them they can get away with some pretty extreme stuff and just shrug off the criticism. Trump is a more interesting case study, but realistically anyone in modern politics has to wade through a tide of abuse to get anything done. It is all but impossible to stop a politician getting a message out and sticking by it if there are votes to be had.

The main tools the courts use are having professional and emotionally unattached advocates who are aligned with the people they represent (aka lawyers) and extremely developed rules of evidence that strip out opinion and personal standards in an explicit quest to work out the facts and make sure any punishment is consistent with the law.

Those are arguments about shaming _inside_ parliaments and courts, which are obviously controlled speech environments; that has limited effect _outside_ courts, with the exception of sub judice rules.

> well developed traditions against name-calling and insistence on respectful language and behaviours like using proper titles (which can be a bit off-putting seeing how politicians act outside parliament)

Indeed. You can call your opponent a terrorist criminal just fine as long as you step outside the building first.

For a given dispute the court is certainly more likely to find a just result .. if you can afford to litigate. Or, in the case of criminal law, if the prosecutors will prosecute. If they won't, you can only resort to "the court of public opinion", i.e. shaming.

McCarthy was censured by the Senate.

I assume that argument excludes the legal/political/cultural institutions of the non-Western world? Because in particular in East Asia shame has a very long and central role, and a fairly successful one, in maintaining group cohesion.

We're talking about mechanisms here that have proven to stabilize societies for literally thousands of years, enumerating things doesn't quite have that history yet.

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.

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.

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

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.

Guilt–shame–fear spectrum of cultures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe...

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.

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?

Why do you believe a lack of (feelings of) guilt is a problem?

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.

Missing the point. It does "always happen" but it doesn't always happen to the same degree or to the same proportion of the population.

The Overton Window can be enforced to varying degrees and contain different percentages of the population.

Contrast the atmosphere during the Cultural Revolution to the atmosphere of a 1990s liberal democracy where the large majority of the population was within the Window.

"There is no culture which doesn't have a strong element of self-censorship for at least some of its members."

while this may be true, it does not necessarily reflect that it is right. often times throughout history shame has been used to control minority groups and people who are less privileged.

which sadly means that popular consensus may not always have the best interest in mind. oftentimes the masses overreact and get it terribly wrong if there is awareness outside of pure groupthink

What are the examples of these shameless cultures? I'd like to join them.

In anthropology, there's a concept of a guilt-shame spectrum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe...

Traditional American culture (as compared to traditional Japanese culture, for example). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe...

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?

Most of these aren't really "traditional", they're constructs of the post-WW2 era, where the government & mass media/advertising very consciously tried to institute strong "national unity" norms.

I suspect that the "traditional American" culture GP is talking about is frontier/immigrant culture from c. 1840-1929. There's a good case for that really being a "shameless" culture - you do your thing, I do mine, we'll grab up all the land and all the gold and all the prime industries and not feel bad at all for the natives we're genociding.

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.

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.

> supposed to mitigate human ills instead perpetuate them

May I differ. Technology was never meant to cure human ills. The tragedy is that technology was supposed to enhance human capabilities but instead stymied them. This is the difference between IA (intelligence amplification) in which technology is a bicycle, and AI (artificial intelligence) in which it is a crutch.

Why technology has its iatrogenic effect is a great question of our time. Does it always? Or are we uniquely misusing it?

With regard to amplifying shame, it merely acts as it does to amplify any human sentiments and ideas.

Technology giveth, and technology taketh away (Postman).

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.

>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

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?

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.

Meh, if anything voting systems accelerate the ride to echo chamber.

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.

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?

You can't. People in San Francisco control big tech, and they've decided the entire internet should reflect their own microcosmic perspective on the world. See the other replies to your comment as an example - they really can't see anything beyond their immediate surroundings.

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.

And yet, the commenter I replied to had not mentioned trans-people vs biological men, or anything. They just said men vs women and left it that. See my point?

So how you want the game to work is that you expect me to defend myself against being called bigoted or yield to your ideology. That's how you are propagating your perspective?

It’s not an ideology - acknowledging the nuances of the actual debate (trans vs women sports) is basic courtesy. Deliberately ignoring it multiple times is malicious.

Some would say giving a deliberately simple statement like the parent commentator's the interpretation most offensive to you is evidence of malicious intent.

What are you even talking about? Did you read OP's statement?

> 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.

This is clearly referring to the present day public debate of whether trans-people should be allowed to participate in men/women sporting.

If you think I'm wrong, could you point me to the ongoing non-trans-related debate regarding men vs women sports?

>What are you even talking about? We lack the shared language for me to explain it simply, but I might be able to get there if you're engaging in good faith. Unfortunately your response comes across as evidence that you're not. If you are engaging in good faith and actually want an answer, tell me whether you think men (by your preferred definition) should be allowed to compete in women's (by your preferred definition) sports.

There is no point to free speech unless it protects speech that offends.

> protects speech that offends.

Why are you beating this fake dead horse? Free speech is protected, offensive or not. There are no governmental consequences.

However, it also covers and allows for the replies, tweet storms, public shaming that occur when your free speech is racist, sexist, or bigoted and malicious.

That's what this debate is /actually/ about - you just want protection against backlash.

I call partial bullshit on your comments.

>In the case of Justine Sacco, here's a thought: if you don't want to be shamed "at the scale of global society"... ...don't fuckin' post an unfathomably bigoted comment on a public, global forum.

Who defines "unfathomably bigoted"? You? A small screeching mob of twitter warriors? A small but influential group of editors and writers for papers like the NY Times and others? You're prima facie assuming that a discourse labeled as bigoted is indeed horribly bigoted.. Given the number of VERY CLEAR examples many of us have seen of highly dubious and sometimes completely irrational definitions of supposed offensiveness (feel free to google search them, there are many), then no, things are not just a full-stop case of "you must be bigoted then if a group of people say you are". Aside from issues of free speech, definitions of bigotry, sexism, racism and so forth have in many circles gone completely off the rails of rational, reasoned thought.

>If you find yourself regularly worrying about whether something you say might be perceived as racist or sexist, maybe it's time to spend time recognizing that your bigoted attitudes towards others are wrong, and doing something about it.

I could repeat the point I already made above here. You make the same very shaky assertion that someone's attitudes are bigoted just because they question certain digital assertions about sex, gender or racism. Nope. Hijacking an argument by assuming a premise is simply dishonest.

Your stabbing argument is also absurd. By widespread practical and moral definition, people recognize that randomly stabbing others is wrong and socially damaging. The same definitely doesn't apply to someone wondering if a person who's biologically a man but had gender reassignment should then compete in women's sports. The latter is far less settled, not just philosophically but also biologically.

I’m not sure why you’re so heavily downvoted - this is common sense.

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.