Shame is an emotion associated with viewing yourself negatively. I’d like to contrast it with guilt - the regret of an action or actions you have taken. Shame is when you believe your person is flawed or bad or wrong in some way. So you may feel guilt for having cheated on someone, and independently of that you may have shame for viewing yourself as a cheater.
What someone feels shame for is socially contingent. A puritan society, for example, is associated with regularly making people feel shame. The society is utilizing shame to enforce a social contract. Indeed, shame plays a part in my own vision of a society that enforces pro-social behavior via free association. Of course, society is not some objectively good evaluator of pro-social behavior, though, and this shame can be used to suppress people’s natural diversity. Because of that, I wish for a society that becomes more tolerant, less prone to enforcing normativities, and ultimately produces less shame.
A lot of my position on shame relies on my strongly-held beliefs that humans are messy, internally inconsistent, and ever-changing. We make mistakes and disagree on decisions and act irrationally, for we are human. Shame, like all punitive forms of justice, is not effective at deterring behavior. It is, however, great at encouraging concealment, conformity and self-loathing.
As a leftist, I believe we’ve largely grown in an individualistic, patriarchal, white supremacist society and for the most part people who find themselves on the left had to “unlearn” these biases reinforced by the society we grew up in. Everyone’s exact journey is unique and may be slow or include setbacks (much like combating addiction), and also similar to addiction, is deserving of compassion and understanding and forgiveness from those around them. Leftists are still able to be prejudiced and, while that should be called out in order to help the person continue their journey of growing, it is unhelpful to write the person off as bad or beyond help. That writing off is what contributes to a shame-heavy society, where people are simultaneously purity testing each other and suppressing their own thoughts and feelings lest they be found unpure.
The internet has created such a shame-heavy society. It is full of strangers, where you can interact with so many people for such brief periods that it’s inevitable to place them in a mnemonic bucket, no one is worth the benefit of the doubt, and it’s so much easier to mentally write-off or even block people over mere bad takes. Everyone must be perfect, all the time, or be judged and shamed. Simultaneously, with your actions legible to so many people, everyone faces a Venn diagram of expectations with no center. It’s why I want to see social media become virality-resistant, show you the same (non-celebrity) faces regularly, and otherwise be designed to encourage connection and relationships, where we can once again learn each others’ nuances, see each other grow, and work through issues. Forgiveness is an emergent property of repeated interaction.
In the same way we must “unlearn” the biases holding up society’s unjust hierarchies, we must “unlearn” our shame of being ourselves. This is the basis of the pride movement for queer folx, unmasking for autistic folx, and so on. This also means letting go of certain expectations, which are another form of shame. Gifted child syndrome is an excellent example of this, where a child internalizes the expectations placed upon them in childhood, which can turn into large amounts of shame later in life, despite not necessarily having done anything to be ashamed of. To put it another way: expectations can create a dissonance between who we want to be and who we feel we are. That dissonance is where shame comes from, and demonstrates how shame is at odds with being “true” to one’s self (although there’s a whole separate discussion to be had on Identity here - I do not subscribe to the inherently essentialist idea of a “true” self).
I think it is bitterly ironic the catholic church has been so intertwined with shame, as my reading of the bible is filled with themes of forgiveness and explicitly telling humans it is not our job to judge one another.
Further Reading
There is also many, many pieces of media focusing on self-acceptance. I’ll personally recommend an indie game called Leila.
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