Pregretting

Poor, criminalized drug users are blamed for choosing not to say “no” to the one thing that keeps them comfortable sleeping on the street and night. Black people’s cries for justice are ignored, and they are criticized for not outlining a flawless, easy plan for attaining racial justice in a positive-enough tone. Legions of sexual assault survivors are challenged on how they dressed, where they walked around at night, whom they dated, and how they identified, as if their choices created the circumstances of their mistreatment. And vulnerable, statistically tiny populations such as Autistics and transgender people become the scapegoats for conditions of mass economic injustice and political disenfranchisement.

The impact that shame has on the psyches of the powerless is massive. It is consistently the people who are pushed most to the margins of the world who are most likely to hate their bodies, lack self-esteem, report social anxiety, experience extreme tension in their relationships, and feel incapable of asserting themselves.

We know from a rich scientific literature going back decades that shaming individuals does not work at motivating them to take action, or to change behaviors that might be hurting them. Yet as a society, we keep reaching for shame as a cudgel against the fat, the disabled, the Black, the queer, the elderly, and the feminine. The goal of all this shame has never been to help anyone. It has been to maintain their low-status, powerless position.

Activists often push for leaders to feel more shame, and liberals in particular wonder why the likes of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon Musk, Jeffrey Bezos, and so on do not feel more shame. But why would they? What risk of social rejection do they ever face? Even if the majority of the world were to turn against them (and most polling suggests that people all over the world do loathe them in great numbers), what consequence would that bring? With their access to wealth and military might, they feel they have little reason to fear the judgments of others.

The immensely wealthy and powerful are often described as shameless. It seems intuitive to me now that it is their power that renders them incapable of feeling shame. Shame is a social emotion that appears in circumstances of low power and threat. There is no need for such a sensitive and responsive social emotion when you bear no social responsibility to anyone at all.

When activist movements attempt to direct shame toward politicians, such as when ACT-UP activists draped a gigantic condom over Senator Jesse Helms’ house, or pro-Palestinian organizers gather in the streets declaring shame on the genocidal state of Israel, they are attempting to make powerful, insulated figures accountable to public censure.

It’s an idea that’s philosophically headed in the right direction — take those with wanton shamelessness and try to force them into a state of shame. But without upending the structures of power that insulate them, symbolic attempts at shaming do not fully connect. We cannot appeal to the emotions or morals of large institutions that exist only to gather resources, claim land, and bulldoze over anyone in their path. They are indifferent to our feelings, and speak only the languages of violence and forcible theft.

Think of how many public figures had their names briefly dragged through the mud during the era of #MeToo only to rise back into cultural prominence with their careers barely scathed a few years later. Celebrities, politicians, and other figures with a high degree of social status were briefly incensed that the public could rally against them on platforms like Twitter to try and shame them, and decried the violence of “cancel culture” because they hated seeing the masses presuming to have more power than they actually had.

But in practice, these mass shaming rituals were often quite toothless. For the most part, the public outcries that have been the most successful have been the ones directed toward the already powerless — small creators, random trans women internet micro-celebrities, and people whom the public were already primed to hate. When a celebrity has been effectively shamed into the darkness, they often had some social vulnerability that made it easier for their power to be taken away — they were Black, or disabled, or had a mental illness that prevented them from fully reaching the highest echelons of power. They still had weak spots. And so they could still be shamed, to some extent.

If shame is merely a reflection of the power that someone holds, then the only way to properly take down the shame-worthy is to remove their power with force. The United States government, Israel, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Amazon, Elon Musk, Sean Combs, every fascist politician or moneyed alt-right thinker that has wrought destruction and imposed their order across the globe— there is no appealing to their human natures, no forging any kind of mutual relationship of the sort equals might form. They feel no shame because the power they hold over us is so utter, and we can only bring them down to our level by taking their power out.