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The Shame Game
“Shame off you,” he said.
It was the first time I’d heard that term, and I was a little taken aback until I realized that he was exactly right. Shame is something we wear, like a wet, smelly blanket someone dons for no good reason. Some bully at some point threw it over the person’s shoulders, and unless that person chooses to shrug it off, there it stays, and the bully wins.
If shame stays on that person, it will saturate everything in their life and leave an odor that eventually the wearer and those around them just get used to. Shame might become an excuse for failure, or a tool they use to manipulate others. Shame dominates the individual wearing it, or it’s a weapon in the hands of those who wield it. It’s more dangerous than a virus, more destructive than a riot, and more deadly than a bullet.
Has anyone been shaming you lately?
Perhaps you’ve endured shame for wearing or not wearing a mask. Or, have you been silent about world events for fear of being shamed out of the public discourse? Are you being shamed because you stand for the National Anthem and honor America and its history? Are you a doctor being shamed by the media because you dare to testify about your first-hand experience?
If so I have a word for you: Shame off of you.
Shame off as you stand with your hand over your heart, lift your eyes to that bright beautiful flag, honor all that it represents, and sing your heart out. You live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, even though your kneeling teammates may not understand that. Shame off them, too.
Shame off you as you walk into the grocery store and enjoy the benefits of plentiful and affordable goods, available because of a Capitalist system that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in history. As you walk the aisles with or without a mask, hold your head high, smile, and greet your neighbor, because only you get to decide how best to take care of your family.
Shame off you as you stand before the memorials of those who came before — moved and humbled by their sacrifice, and emboldened with the fortitude to do likewise in your own era against threats similar to the ones faced by the figures immortalized in bronze.
Shame off you as you gather together in worship, and lay hands on one another in love and obedience to a higher authority. Let the world know that no matter how many lies are allied against truth, no matter how forcefully the powerful attack liberty, and no matter how many people you care about are deceived into complacency, you will refuse to hang your head in shame.
Those who perpetuate shame have a distinct characteristic that may seem familiar to you. They’re just like the schoolyard bullies of days past. They mock, ridicule, lie and want nothing more than to feel superior in their own insecurity. They harbor pain, live in fear, and seek to diminish others to avoid being alone in their despair.
Not that long ago there was a universally recognized two-step process for handling a bully: Step 1, ignore them and move on. If they persisted to attack, one was forced to move on to Step 2: Stand up to them.
For the last four months, we’ve seen a lot of Step 1 playing out. It hasn’t worked. The bullies have become emboldened and fear neither reproach nor reality. They’re intent on winning and they’re using shame to do so. But though shame can be a powerful weapon in the hands of a bully, its effectiveness is dependent on one thing: Consent.
Which leads us to Step 2.
Nobody can shame you without your consent, and it’s high time the bullies understand that. Make no mistake. Standing up to the bullies may cost you everything, maybe even your life. This year many brave people have discovered that holding their heads high makes them easy targets.
Of course, the bullies also fear the truth. They combat it, distort it, and when all else fails…they delete it. To those who are standing in the fire of media elites, hell-bent on shaming those they disagree with: Shame off you.
The bullies will soon turn their ire toward the next target, because like a virus, shame needs a host to survive.
But also like a virus, there is a way to defeat it. You defeat shame by taking a deep breath of fresh air as you lift your smiling face to the shining sun. You defeat shame by taking obedient steps, walking in truth, and speaking it with your head held high.
In short, you defeat it by being shameless.
Published in General
Vince, I really like your post. Interesting point of view and very well written. We all ought to be saying what you said every day.
At my stage of life, I have very little to lose by standing up to the bullies, but I admire those who have something to lose who do stand straight and breath the free air and say, “Hell yes, I’ll say what I want and damn the consequences.”
Good on you.
It is not the shame that is the issue. It is authority’s joyful backing of the bullies. If you stand up most people can handle that challenge. It is the part where you employer will fire you for the littlest controversy and the government will jail you for protecting yourself. The bullies, the government, the companies, the employers are making common cause with the bullies to slam down on anybody that is just trying to live their lives.
Beautifully, powerfully stated. Thank you!
Splendid post.
Yes. I think there’s a very human tendency, when one is being shamed or bullied by the sorts of people you describe, to at first wonder what one did to deserve it, and then to feel humiliated and embarrassed about “what people will think.”
Eventually, if those being shamed hold their heads high, and hold their mouths right, truth will out, and the opprobrium will be directed where it rightfully belongs, onto he cowards and bullies doing the mocking, the lying, and the shaming. Because I most cases, their behavior, which is often just projection, says much more about them than it does about the target of their attacks.
Or so I believe. And so I have generally found. In my experience.
(All that being said, I think there’s a place for “shame,” when it comes to an internal reckoning and an acknowledgement of poor or bad behavior. It is not a bad thing, on occasion, to feel shame in ourselves and our failure to live up to our ideals. And it’s interesting that using the word the word “shameless” as a noun defines it in direct opposition to its common adjectival use. Fascinating all round.)
A great post! You said many things that need to be said — and said them very well. Thank you.
Unfortunately, both the Left and the Right have gone into the bullying business. Trump was elected to “own” the Libs, and gets raves from his base every time he strikes out at,… well, at anybody – on the left or the right.
If we really are against bullies, let’s stop putting them in office. Let’s stop sending our kids to public schools and universities where we’ll pay for them to be bullied into admitting that they’re racists and guilty of the crimes of slavery and Jim Crow. Let’s stop attending churches at which ministers bully their congregations into accepting the “Jesus was a Socialist” worldview. Let’s stop supporting companies that bully their employees and customers into accepting the anti-racist creed of the radical left.
Shame on all of us if we decry bullying from the Left and accept it from the Right. Shame on all of us if we support individual and institutional bullies.
Trump is the guy standing up to the bullies, which is why they hate him so much.
How does that explain Trump’s attacks on Anthony Fauci, Jeff Sessions, Alexander Vindman, and Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman?
Three of those represent the Deep State; one, caving in to the Deep State.
Since even before his inauguration, Trump has been pursued by a lynch mob. He occasionally lashes out at members of the lynch mob, as well as feckless “friends” who assisted the lynch mob out of personal pique or cowardice.
Trump also attacked Dr. Deborah Birks, Ted Cruz’s father, John Lewis, Paul Ryan, Fox News, Ben Sasse, …
And your point is that … Donald Trump isn’t Albert Schweitzer? (No doubt a Schweitzer biographer could tell us about all the nasty remarks Schweitzer made about other people!)
Trump is not big on turning the other cheek. If you criticize him, he will respond in some fashion.
Also he loves to needle his political opponents.
It took me a long time to figure out why he kept on and on with the issue of whether Barack Obama is a natural born citizen. After all, as I frequently pointed out, Barack Obama could have been born in Timbuktoo or on Mars, and he would still be a natural born citizen.
But Donald Trump had noticed that the questions annoyed Obama, who wanted as little attention paid as possible to his bizarre and un-American upbringing. That made it worth doing.
My point is that Trump is not just a counterpuncher. He’ll go after people who haven’t criticized him. And you’ve made my point for me. We decry bulling from the Left and excuse it when “our” people do it.
Left-wing bullying: lives and livelihoods destroyed; followed by ostracism.
Right-wing bullying: subjects defended and canonized by the Left; followed by a multi-million-dollar book deal.
(“Well, you know, the Tutsi were guilty, too!”) It’s absurd to compare the two.
Your argument has gone as follows:
I think on balance you’ll find Trump is reactive rather than active with regard to what you term bullying. otoh, he doesn’t hold back when he hits back, so that can definitely look like bullying.
Well this ‘our’ people. This time. I don’t know that this means we’re going to look for more Trumps in the future (I don’t mean literal scions), but is hard to dispute that the political arena has become more tolerant of below-the-belt boxing, lead gloves, and eye-gouging, or that the referees have been bought off.
A word about our referees the press; they want their guys to win, but what they really want is spectacle. And that is why Trump succeeds and continues to succeed. He is a story. They can hate him and boo him and all of that, but they cannot stop talking about him.
I’m gonna go and take an anti-anti-bullying stance.
Being a bully or being in favor of bullies is a bad thing.
The utter absence of bullying, however, is a ticket to Soysville and we won’t like it when we get there.
Right Wing Bullying? Will those who allege this please cite examples. Such a charge rings very hollow. Few on the Right even dare to speak up, so I guess maybe silence is now defined by all the Right People as bullying.
Yes, Trump dares to speak the truth which few on the Right in public life dare to do. If that is how bullying is now defined we are in a terrible place. The Left now bullies millions just for speaking the truth. That is what the Cancel Culture is all about . The Left’s Cancel Culture has intimidated and bullied tens of millions for speaking out and are now very close to eliminating the right to Free Speech as a result.
That is just one of the sources of their bullying. Their are so many other instances of the Left bullying it is hard to count them all , but what about the now thousands of physical attacks, are they not extreme bullying? It is very hard to find equivalent physical attacks by the Right.
While we are at it, one could also throw in the whole Russian Hoax, the thousands of instances of FISA spying on American Citizens , the entire phony Mueller Special Counsel Investigation and finally the Impeachment process where the Dems were impeaching a President without actually identifying a crime committed by the President as required by law.
Using government processes to bully American citizens has almost become standard operating procedure for the Democrats and the Deep State. To try to allege some sort of equivalence with some incredibly minor bullying by those on the Right is too condone the massive amount of bullying and much of it violent bullying by the Left. Not that there are not bad guys on the Right who commit crimes, but there is nowhere near any equivalence and it’s not comparably in the same Universe of bullying by those on the Left .
Trump is the last one I’d characterize as a bully in the current climate. There are so many other glaring examples, let’s focus on those who aren’t defending individual liberty every chance they get. Trump is far from perfect, but he’s very much on our side on this one.
I doubt anyone on Ricochet has felt shame over any of the things listed in the OP. I’ve got actual sins and failings to feel shame over.
But I’ll bet you know people who do.
I love shame. Shame makes people act good without the need for big government to control them. It’s super useful. But shame isn’t as good as guilt. Shame is society making you feel bad for something you did or said. Guilt is when you yourself feeling guilty for not being as good as you should be. Shame is society making you feel bad, guilt is when you feel bad.
To clarify, you can feel shame for doing good things when society is bad. Like voting for Republicans and judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. But you can feel guilt for failing to say something that you know is right but don’t have the courage to say. Like going along with your companies SJW agenda even though you know it doesn’t do a damn thing to discourage bigotry and wastes time and money.
Guilt and shame are often at odds.
Shame is not in itself a bad thing. Sometimes it’s deserved. But today those who have reintroduced shaming have inverted morality to shame the good behavior.
A shameless society is not worth living in. Public shaming was a very common, and at the time, relatively benign form of punishment for a very long time. Would Antifa behave the way they do if they were placed in stocks until they soiled themselves? Not all progress moves forward.
There is a distinction between someone living in a shameful manner and society meeting that behavior with scorn and ridicule (Burn her!! Stone her!! Put them in the stocks!) versus confronting that person with the truth in love, seeking their repentance. The former leads to a tribal culture predicated on hate and absent any notion of restoration. The latter, a civilization. If I perform a shameful act (say voting for Bill Clinton for instance…) and feel terrible about it, that would be better characterized as remorse that leads me to make better choices in the future. I shouldn’t hang my head over it, not anymore that is…I mean…hypothetically speaking, of course. It’s also not effective. It’s kindness that leads to repentance.
In ancient times, when the Jews were accused of adultery, they could be forgiven and let back in the tribe. Or they could be stoned or exiled. It’s important to remember that shaming can go very different ways.
I think that you are saying we should shame people and then forgive them?
There are different qualities of shame as well.
Someone posting something on facebook and getting shamed for it from his friends is different from being put on blast, from being doxxed, from being fired, from having his house surrounded by protesters, from being beaten by a mob.
Oh…hypothetical.
~cancels Amazon order for DIY Locking Stocks kit.
My wife
holdswould still hold it against me, though.Not so.