On Shame

J has been reading a series about shame and we talked about it the other day. It wasn’t until we started talking about it that I realized that I needed a definition of what shame is and how it’s different than guilt. To simplify the way these books discuss shame, it’s basically the feeling of being a bad person, that you yourself are wrong and broken and unfixable. In workplaces, bad bosses can cause employees to quit because they create an environment that promotes shame rather than an environment of support (eg a workplace where each quarter people are allowed to choose new offices – and can kick people out of their office – based on performance, or positions where performance is made publicly available in some way). It makes employees more likely to quite because they’re made to feel like there’s nothing that can be done because they themselves are the problem. J explained that it wasn’t until he started reading these books that he realized there was a name for the kind of business environment he experienced in one of his past jobs, and that got me thinking. Have I ever experienced shame?

My initial answer was no, I have not. I have never thought I was a bad person. This is true. I haven’t, and I don’t. I’m not a great person, but I’m not a bad person, either. I’ve never thought that there was something abhorrent about me that I couldn’t correct with education… and then I stopped. Yes. I have. It’s been relatively recent, but yes, I’ve felt shame. I’ve felt it deeply, and I try to block it out, but there it is. Gnawing.

In 2016 Trump was elected president. I hoped that my well-researched hypothesis of how that presidency would go would be horribly, horribly wrong. Those were the early days, where there was still some semblance of hope. Ha! I was proven right. But being right did not make me feel better. It made me recoil. I recoiled because now I was ashamed to be a US citizen. I was ashamed because I knew people who voted for a racist, lying, misogynist, and objectively poor businessman without an iota of qualifications to actually perform the job they’d just elected him to do. And they believed they were right. I’m not sure why. Maybe they wanted to shakes things up in government. I certainly understand the sentiment. I felt ashamed because I was, despite my research, unable to convince these people from picking the lesser of the two evils.

We just had another election. This centrist is thrilled that Biden is president-elect, but shame still persists. Why? Because those same people I know who voted for Trump last time did so again. They did so because they have continued to move directionally rather than truthfully. That is, they have moved increasingly in the ideological direction of the right, and they have done so by (1) incorporating “conservativism” into their identification with a disregard for what that means in practice, (2) becoming increasingly entrenched in echo chambers to the point I’m not entirely sure they can navigate their way out, and (3) doing little, if any actual research of their own. Pundits and opinion sections are not valid sources of information. Pundits have motivation to contort the truth; think tanks are only useful if multiple views from multiple think tanks are being used, and even then they should only be used as a starting point; opinion sections are largely useless, regardless of source, but if you want to read them, fine (*cringe*), but do your own damned research.

Regardless of source, certain things need to happen:

1. Stop thinking you know things. Ego and opinion have absolutely no place when trying to learn and evaluate things objectively. Assume you know nothing.
2. Please review the list of bad arguments and use this list when evaluating a source’s argument and conclusions.
3. Whatever argument/conclusion you’re evaluating, consider how it might be wrong. Then earnestly look for evidence that it is wrong.
4. Evaluate balance of sources: perspectives, document/source type (first, second, third source, as well as balance of books, journal articles, etc), year of publication, author and their credentials, who commissioned the study, how you came across the source, etc.
5. Exit the echo chamber. If the majority of your sources are from a single viewpoint – no matter which viewpoint – you’re doing it wrong. If you aren’t uncomfortable when doing research, you aren’t doing research. And while you’re feeling uncomfortable, objectively consider why you feel that way.

I have failed. Twice. I am not dumb. But I am neither patient nor persuasive enough to hold someone’s hand to explain all this to them simply enough that they listen and act, or maybe they don’t care, I don’t know. I am ashamed because I have repeatedly made the assumption that certain people, at least, are wise enough to actually look fairly on all sides of an argument to come to a rational decision. I understand that there tends to be more value judgements in politics than in science, but one can still approach political decisions scientifically. I assumed these people would. They did not. Twice. I believe this is the only thing I have failed at more than once. Perhaps in this I am a bad person, a broken person, and a worthless person. But maybe now I’ll struggle marginally less with the shame of being born where I was and of living where I do.