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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

> 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.

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...

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

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