We all know shame. It’s a totally universal feeling. For the most part, shame is a feeling that we inflict on ourselves for no good reason, it’s a self-harm addiction. Assuming that there is any sense to it, the purpose of the feeling of shame would be some kind of warning against a social danger, in the same way that physical pain is an alarm to prevent strong harm. For example, a teenager might feel ashamed if they have the wrong clothing or hairdo according to their friends, meaning that they feel at risk of being rejected by the group. For somebody who feels insecure about their identity, this is a serious threat. It may feel like a personal aggression, potentially something as hurtful as physical pain (or even more). What is real and hurtful is not any actual rejection but the feeling of shame, interpreted as a virtual or anticipated rejection. This feeling alone might lead to serious mental health issues, especially if the person is vulnerable.
Honour killings are extreme consequences of the feeling of shame. “Protecting the honour” of the family, the country or any other social group has always been a solid excuse for people to slaughter each other in the name of shame. In the same spirit, in the past it was considered normal for a person who “lost face”, for example got involved in a public scandal, to commit suicide. In some cases, suicide was even considered the “dignified” option, as opposed to keep living in public disgrace. Not so long ago, people were shamed for their race, gender, sexuality or physical traits, sometimes so cruelly that they would be driven to suicide. This kind of thinking is not extinct, at least not everywhere, and shame is probably still a major contributing factor to suicide.
In a more casual and less traumatizing way, we are all influenced by the norm: buying a gift for somebody we don’t like to comply with a group, wearing a lot of deodorant by fear of exuding any body odour, pretending to enjoy something supposedly fun that we hate, doing a diet just to get closer to the body norm (or to pretend to)… We often do such things as pledges of loyalty to the group, in order to reinforce our membership to it by our clear acceptation of its norms. We can notice that, in our mind, not complying with the norms of the group is often unthinkable, it’s an unbearable thought. Imagine a strongly shameful scenario for you. it might be hard to think about it because your brain wants to avoid the shame at all cost, shame equals danger or even death, something to keep as far as possible. You might even feel some shame just at the thought of this hypothetical scenario, it’s your brain telling you “danger! danger!” in big red blinking letters. The real danger that the brain is warning us about is social exclusion, because this is interpreted as death for the social animals that we are.
One could probably assume that this fear of social exclusion makes sense from an evolutionist perspective: human beings used to be very vulnerable and their life used to depend on belonging to the tribe, so being excluded was like a death sentence.1 Anyway, there’s hardly a justification for it nowadays, and definitely no justification for the apparently increasing range of situations where humans feel shame.2 In fact, shame has become more of a threat to human life than a shield, by far. It looks as if we are collectively addicted to it, as if we believe that we need it. Most of us do not realize that this belief is misguided, in the same way that any drug addict thinks they can’t live without it.
In fact, shame seems to work backwards: some people often feel ashamed for ridiculously normal things, and this shame makes their life pointlessly hard and violent, causing self-harm, misery or worse . On the other hand, a lot of people who actually cause harm to others make up excuses to shield themselves from shame.3 As a social mechanism, shame is not fit for purpose (assuming there was ever a purpose). So we should ditch it, right? We keep it because we still have a lot of confusion between shame and socially harmful behaviour, between honour and socially well-meaning behaviour, between etiquette and respect, between pride and dignity.
The pride/shame dimension appears to be a source of meaningless violence, whereas living in dignity is accepting ourselves and others as we/they are. Humans are imperfect, and this is truly beautiful: “you like people for their qualities, you love them for their flaws.” Perhaps we could learn to be proud of our flaws; perhaps we could even embrace shame, that is, learn to live with it rather than resisting it so violently.
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Note that this kind of origin story satisfies our need for logic, but actually we don’t know anything. ↩︎
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The same can be said for stress. ↩︎
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One conclusion from this is that a lot of people could use a psychotherapy. By the way, there is still a lot of convincing to do to make people understand that there is nothing shameful in doing a psychotherapy. ↩︎