Shame has severely lost its potency for a lotta logical and logistic socio-emotional reasons.
Old paradigms based off shame don’t last and give rise to chaos because 1.) the shame is usually one-sided, hypocritical and coming from those in power towards those who have less agency and 2.) when it has no basis in reality due to increased mobility and agency of those under your influence.
Shame is often a social tool of support for dominant power structures. But once people pull back the veil and expose the hypocrisy of the actions of those trying to check others, then the power of shame becomes obsolete. Also once people try things for themselves and their lives don’t fall apart the way shamers initially claimed, it makes shame even less powerful.
To use shame sustainably, those shaming others have to be reasonably above reproach themselves. That’s just the way our brains work. Otherwise, the mechanism is rendered obsolete. In other words, the whole “do as I say not as I do” mentality makes people disregard the judgement of others as hypocritical and something no one cares about. And for shame to work, you also need an unrealistic amount of control over certain parameters such as how big your group is, how many are in your group, where they can go or travel and ect.
Because if the person you are trying to shame into doing something has other options more favorable than your vision and room or space to thrive outside of your vision, then they don’t care about your shaming them.
It’s like a blind person trying to shame somebody else for having poor vision. Or trying to shame somebody into staying in a small town.
If the shame is not tied to real negative consequences that can’t be mitigated by making different life choices and it’s coming from hypocrites, it’s power is nil. So if you want to leverage the real power of shame, keep your own community small and isolated and ensure that those seeking to shame others are of good character or manipulative enough to ensure they are never questioned. This is why cults are so powerful.
Personally, I think shame can be useful but it’s not gonna work in today’s society and we need to move beyond reliance on it to heal our society.
Without making a sound and went to bed..next day I dapped up her husband wit the hand I beat off wit when he came to pick her up. ...nikkas ain't got no shame smh
