In medieval Germany, a “schandmaske” was a punishment for social transgression
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
With that in mind, a "gossip" might be someone who speaks an unflattering truth about an upper class person. A "narcissist" might be someone who presumes to affect some symbol of an upper class, or otherwise disrespects an upper class person.
How times have changed, or rather should that be definitions?
Now where does royalty and politicians fit into all of this?
That's simple - the admiration that royalty gets is appropriate admiration for their status; but when someone who isn't royalty wants the same level of admiration, that's a need for excessive admiration.
This isnt a Rorschach test.
>Life is way more fun if i get along with others
Not in my experience it hasnt, but maybe thats the people I attract and forced to work with.
Is it because the peasants had internalized oppression? Or could it alternatively be because working together as a community was important to their very survival then, and so punishing subversive members creating discord was a matter of community survival? Which seems more reasonable: that the peasants had so much time and mindspace to focus on trivialities like making sure poor people didn't dress like rich people, or that they dedicated time to it because a raging narcissist actually posed a real threat?
I guess I'm trying to say: maybe the people of the past weren't just all assholes preoccupied with making sure poor people knew their place and were instead much like us in that they focused on getting through the day (and their intentions aligned with that). That they spent inordinate amounts of time making fancy garbs just to humiliate random people in their village because "they're too poor to dress that way" just sounds like a fantasy we place on them because to take them seriously would run against a lot of cultural vogues (like that shame could have any possible value in society).
That being said, I think that it’s hard to devise punishments that let the transgressor continue to function in society. You can’t put the blacksmith in jail or they can’t work. And finding people with limited means is extra cruel or ineffective.
I wonder if some version of this schandmaske can apply to social media where you want to have some formal notice and punishment but don’t want to cut them off from their livelihood or connection to social relationships.
Although I doubt that our society can agree on transgressions that would warrant the mask. Saying someone is ugly is a big deal to some people and less so to others.
> Although I doubt that our society can agree on transgressions that would warrant the mask. Saying someone is ugly is a big deal to some people and less so to others.
We kinda do, but because the community is global, the standards against which you're measured for shame are so broad you can't avoid saying something that someone considers appalling (recent examples "vaccines are a good idea" and "I like the idea of my local shops being a 15 minute walk away"), and yet the opposite side of the same coin is that you're always going to be able to find people who think you're speaking truth to power, that you have no need to be ashamed, and that any attempt to criticise you is just "cancel culture".
So, massive pile-ons no matter what — even when your action is to block someone so you don't have to deal with them any more.
Statistically nobody considers those things offensive on face value. It's the nuts and bolts of the implementations and adjacent more extreme positions they can sometimes be dog-whistling for that piss some people off.
You're complicating things that don't need to be complicated by picking examples like that where something that is potentially offensive or not on its face value would have sufficed.
Even if this were the case (and politicians repeating them indicates otherwise) the absolute number is what actually matters for human interactions — over Dunbar's number and it "feels like" everyone's against you, and that's less than 200 people.
With that in mind, I always wondered if there was someone who would get paddled in school and would mock the principal for doing it, "You like spanking me big boy?".
They aren't going up to each other and being as obnoxious and loathsome the same way they go up to everyone else. That's the only way to make sense
People proudly do things that piss you off because negative cred with your tribe is positive cred in theirs.
You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as we are.
You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
You're not to think you know more than we do.
You're not to think you are more important than we are.
You're not to think you are good at anything.
You're not to laugh at us.
You're not to think anyone cares about you.
You're not to think you can teach us anything. I WAS MADE TO WEAR THIS HORRIBLE MASK: LOOK HOW THIS OLD LADY REACTS!Elizabeth Warren made a lot of hay off her false heritage claims - a punishment like this seems more appropriate than what's currently available.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/31/public-shaming...
That being said, the masks would still fulfill their purpose of highlighting criminals out on the street. At least until social media turns it into a trend and people willingly start wearing the masks to be edgy.
Then think of the punishment as essentially house arrest, with the small relaxation that you may leave your house if you wear something humiliating.
In a modern society with a high degree of anonymity the after effects of having to wear a mask would be minimal. Unless you have some kind of a formal “social credit” system. But even these it would only affect certain stratums.
Bots and bad behavior will be quickly tamed.
Reddit gold lasts a week.
I wold propose a "Reddit pot metal" to last 1 day.
They still do it but they don't use masks now.
Which basically ment baby murdering and rotting from the inside out from sexually transmitted diseases. Its a good thing, todays civilized society left the moral compass from that era far behind. Can anyone even imagine somebody being so barbaric, as to be still stuck in the late middle ages, in a time of contraceptives and anti-biotics.
Also coincidentally noblemen…