We dont need to all agree on what is shameful before agreeing that shamefulness exists. Sure there are differences of opinion but perhaps the worst conclusion to draw is that we shouldnt tolerate shame of anything because we fear shame of 1 specific thing.

Honestly I think this whole argument is wrong on its head. The issue is that those strung out on these drugs have no shame regardless of any social norms beyond it. Almost no one I know wants to be on meth. And those I know who are on meth don’t care what you think about most things. This whole discussion about shame plays little role for them.

That is actually my entire original point. In other cultures I have lived in, addicts moderate their externalities more successfully because of a sense of personal standards / shame. They still care how they are perceived.

My whole point is that to a surprising degree of divergence, addict culture in the USA particularly has abandoned those norms in favor of overt caustic social interaction.

You’re overlooking the economic context in which that social norm arose in subsistence agriculture societies. In the third-world village where my dad grew up, survival required getting married and having a couple of kids to make ends meet on the farm. The under-5 mortality rate was 1 in 5 so the adoption market was virtually non-existent. And there was little surplus generated by the village that could be used to support childless couples doing non-agricultural work. That was the reality of human history from the advent of agriculture until the 20th century (and in many parts of Africa and Asia, that’s still the reality).

So what function did shame serve in that society?

First to clarify I do not mean shaming others. I mean a personal sense of shame.

Shame in third-world societies (like the one I have lived in for the last 15 years) serves many important functions.

In my case, it is a matriarchal culture. The worst thing that can happen to a person is that your mother would feel ashamed. So people go out of their way to not do shameful things like stealing, lying, being disorderly intoxicated, and other socially hostile activities. I find that it is effective at keeping social order, and one of the worst insults is to imply that someone was ill - raised.

The discussion is about taking hard drugs and being ashamed of that, not about coming out of the closet. Stop changing the subject.

No subject is being changed. The assertion introduced in the root comment is about the effectiveness of public shaming as a means to sustain social order. There are many good replies arguing against that notion.

It is also the peak of naïveté to assume any mechanism of social control will remain restricted to our pet favorite cause. Isn’t that what every discussion here about encryption backdooors ends up concluding?

Then law and order should be subjected to the same scrutiny. Indeed, it has been and still is illegal to be gay in many jurisdictions.

If shifting social mores was able to change laws in some places, I see no reason to assume that the shaming system cannot.

My (now suppressed) comment was actually about a sense of personal shame, not public shaming, (which I see as most often destructive)

Unfortunately, my writing was unclear and many people (understandably) misunderstood the context. Sorry about that.

Actually my writing was bad, I didn’t even mean being ashamed of taking drugs, I meant being ashamed of doing socially harmful things that are often drug-abuse-adjacent in the USA.

Being ashamed of being an addict could lead to avoidance of treatment, so that might be a better example of a negative outcome of shame.

> Isn’t that why we had the whole notion of being in the closet, to avoid shame to yourself and family?

That was fear, not shame.

Shame (especially as a thing one might cultivate for social engineering purpose) is always tied to fear, though, you can’t really separate them.

Shame is social stigma, and sure you can be fearful of it, but it's not the same thing: being in the closet is/was mostly about fear for yourself of hard repercussions - disownment by parents (if young), getting physically attacked, that kind of thing.

> Shame is social stigma, and sure you can be fearful of it, but it's not the same thing:

Fear (of shame itself, and/or of the concrete social consequences for yourself or others of shame that you might be subject to) is the entirety of the mechanism bt which shame acts as an influence on behavior.

> being in the closet is/was mostly about fear for yourself of hard repercussions - disownment by parents (if young), getting physically attacked, that kind of thing.

Yes, that's how shame as a social constraint works. There has never been a society in which shame worked as a social constraint without there existing hard social consequences, from ostracism (including exclusion from the material support mechanisms available to others in society) to outright honor killings, for having shame attach to you.

Not sure why people in this thread are romanticizing societies that center shame more than the modern West.

I'm not romanticizing anything, I'm saying this specific thing was directly about fear for your own safety/security, it wasn't shame-based.

Fear of the material consequences of social stigma is part of how shame in culture constrains behavior. It may not always involve the subjects of those consequences sharing the cultural indoctrination on which the shame is based (though, contrary to your description that tried to nearly separate it, LGBTQ people being closed often did—and still does, that phenomenon isn't purely in the past).

So is people imposing those material consequences because shame also attaches to those in social proximity to the trait to which society attaches primary shame, such as family members of those openly tolerant of it. Which is a big part of the source of the fear of consequences.