UrbanUpdate

Shame is not a pleasant emotion. It can make you feel isolated, unworthy, and guilty (as you may well know). But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. In fact, it’s precisely because shame is so painful that it’s such an essential part of our hardwiring. Shame is meant to alert us to the fact that we’re not acting in accordance with our communal values—in our more primitive days, this might have meant expulsion from our tribe and, ultimately, death. Not great!

Fortunately, most of us no longer live in such life-or-death circumstances. But as we’ve evolved, so too has our shame. In fact, these days being shamed can look a lot more like being manipulated—in the case of the many booming industries intent on selling you the solution to your feelings of inadequacy (beauty, fitness, and self-help, to name a few). It can also look like being humiliated, in the case of the daily social media dogpiles.

“In its myriad forms, modern shame consistently flubs its unifying mission, succeeding only in delivering pain and driving us apart,” writes Cathy O’Neil in her recent book The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the Age of Humiliation.

A mathematician by training (her first book, Weapons of Math Destruction, was longlisted for the National Book Award) who works in data science, O’Neil came to the topic of shame partly through personal experience: both a “lifelong battle with fat shame” and her participation in Occupy Wall Street, a movement built on shaming banks. She developed an interest in building what she calls a “principled taxonomy of shame” to try to answer two questions: When is shame appropriate? And when does it work?

The answers to those questions are wrapped up in other knotty dilemmas: How do we think about using what she calls “healthy” shame to nudge people toward shared norms and values when we can’t even agree on communal norms and values? Is social media vilification an acceptable way of improving someone’s moral behavior? (Hi, Karen.) Who decides what appropriate moral behavior is anyway? Here, O’Neil tries to answer those questions and give us all a better sense of how to best wield the “hot iron” of shame.

GQ: How is shame different from guilt?

Cathy O’Neil: Guilt is like, “I did something wrong and I feel really bad about it.” You can have pretty serious feelings of guilt, but shame is like, “I am wrong. I am a bad person.” Shame makes you feel inherently unworthy, whereas guilt makes you feel like you should amend your behavior. Guilt is inherently a behavior-related issue rather than about who you are.

What is the opposite of shame?

I would say dignity, or conferring dignity. When you’re shaming, you’re saying, “You’re worthless, you’re unsalvageable.”

So who does profit in the age of humiliation? Who are the shame machines?

I’ll distinguish between two types of profiting: the old school shame industry, and the new big tech shame industries. The old school shame industries are cosmetics, anything to make women feel unpretty or too old, the weight loss industry, rehab centers that are based on shame and don’t actually work. The old school is based on: Shame the victim and then offer them a product that they can buy to get rid of the shame. Then there’s the new form of the shame machines: social media platforms. [These companies] build platforms designed to make us shame each other, and they profit off of us doing that. They make the perfect ecosystem where we are with our like-minded friends. The algorithm filters the most outrageous thing that happened to us so we can be outraged and performatively shame the people or the person who that story is about. Then we get liked and retweeted by our little group, and we hate on that other group, that other group gets outraged that we’re trying to shame them. It’s a shame machine because it was designed to be like that, and when we get involved, we are working for free for Facebook. We’re making them profit by jumping on the shame train.

You also write about healthy shame. In what situation is shame helpful or useful as a societal force?

I don’t think there’s much profit in healthy shame. That’s one way of deciding whether shame is healthy: asking, how much money is being made? It’s not profitable to be a civil rights activist, or to punch up. Healthy shame is not always punching up, sometimes it is community-oriented. You’re trying to enforce pro-social norms, whether it’s forcing the authorities to be accountable to the norms that they claim that they hold. It’s tricky because [you might think] that you’re healthy shaming, but if you’re doing it in a taunting, mocking manner, that’s not healthy shame. It is when you’re having a conversation and you’re appealing to someone’s sense of responsibility to their community.

It seems like we have less of those shared pro-social norms now. For instance, when you shame someone for not wearing a mask, there are a lot of people in our country who don’t find that shameful.

Let me back up. When does healthy shame work or when does any shame work? When I say “work,” I mean, when does it actually make their behavior conform to the norm? The number one thing is, do they agree with the norm? Mask-shaming couldn’t possibly work with somebody who just doesn’t care about that norm, who’s outside that norm. You have to have an agreed-upon norm. You have to have to be able to conform. And then even if you have those things, you still have to have a certain amount of trust. You have to feel like you’re being respected as a human being, except for this one thing, and that if you change your behavior, then you’d be forgiven and given a second chance. There are so many ways that we are just never given the benefit of the doubt, or a second chance, or dignity, in many online venues. Which is why those online platforms are so rife with shame.

You call social media platforms “the most prodigious shame machines ever devised.” Why?

Social media platforms are like, “Put everyone in a drunk cocktail party, give everyone a Molotov cocktail, then tell everyone the worst possible thing to know about some woman they met today at the party, and see what happens.” That’s how I feel those things are designed. It brings out the worst in us, and addicts us to that. I talked to Molly Crockett, a psychologist who studies outrage. She said that people actually get a boost to their pleasure center by being outraged. That’s what social media platforms do for us. They bring us outrage in small and large doses. Even though it feels kind of bad to be outraged, it also gives us this kind of jolt of electricity in our pleasure center. There’s a real sense that we get addicted to that kind of shame-outrage cycle.

We’re so fractured that we don’t have that many containers for community any more. And if you are shamed, instead of adhering to the community norm, you can just go find your own community—as incels do, which you talk about in the book. Instead of changing behavior to fit the community, you just change the community to fit your behavior.

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The incels are a great example of that. It used to be really hard to find like-minded people at that level of fringe. But it’s not hard at all now. Of course, I could have chosen a different freakish set of norms, but the point is that finding each other online is never going away. It’s important to realize that. We have to figure out a way of dealing with it when our loved ones fall into those corners because shaming pushes them further into those corners. Shaming makes them feel like, “Oh, you’ve rejected me. You’ve called me unlovable. But I have a community over there of like-minded people who are fine with me. In fact, they celebrate those things about me.” Shame backfires, and will continue to backfire until we stop weaponizing it.

You have a line in the book where you say, “There’s no greater power than shame to bring people into line.” How do we know where that line is, and who decides it’s right?

That’s a really good question, and it is a question I cannot answer. I certainly agree with many of the newer norms like gay rights and that we shouldn’t sexually assault women at work with the #MeToo Movement. So it’s impossible for me to think those are wrong, but it’s also impossible for me to not admit that I’m a creature of my environment. Sometimes, there is a relationship to a moral sensibility, like “Don’t hurt children.” If it’s a universal norm in every culture and every time, then you’re starting to feel like it’s a moral issue. But there are other things where you’re just like, “It’s hard to know.” What I try to do in the book is I try to talk about how shame works a little bit more abstractly than saying whether a certain thing is right or wrong. That’s where the mathematician in me comes through. I’m trying to understand it with principles. What is the principle at work here? In principle, when is it punching down? In principle, when is it punching up? Sometimes I agree with the norm, sometimes I don’t. But, more importantly, I want people who are considering shaming someone to have principles to lean on whether or not I agree with their norms.

What are those principles?

Inappropriate shame is when you’re shaming somebody for something they don’t have a choice about. So you are saying, “Oh, you’re addicted to something? You’re just an addict.” You throw them away because they have a problem. That’s not really a choice. Once you’re an addict, it’s really hard to stop being an addict. So you have to consider, before shaming somebody, to what extent do they have a choice? The second thing is, to what extent do they have a voice? Do they have a chance to defend themselves? Do they have due process (which they often don’t on social media)? They’ve made a mistake, maybe, but are they just going to be in a viral shame storm and are their lives going to be destroyed without a chance to explain what was happening to them when they made that choice? I would go even further: To say somebody has a voice doesn’t just mean they can explain themselves once, but that they can be seen being better in the future, that they have a sort of ongoing existence where they can redeem themselves. Basically, the chance for redemption. That’s what voice means.

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The principle is you shouldn’t shame somebody who doesn’t have a choice, and you shouldn’t change somebody who doesn’t have a voice. If you do one of those things, that’s punching down. If both the voice and the choice are present, that’s punching up, so that’s appropriate. But that doesn’t mean it works. So the second question I had—the big one—is, when does it work? And that’s harder, but it comes down to: It has to be appropriate, and, secondarily, you have to make sure the person agrees with the norm, or at least can be forced to admit that they said that norm. If it’s a person of power, it’s like, “When you were campaigning for office, you said such and such, and now you’re not doing that.” That would be a great example of punching up.

There are certain people that are unshameable. Putin is unshamable. He is a sociopath. If you don’t have any pro-social bones in your body, if you’re just about power and you don’t actually care about the community at all, there is no universal norm to appeal to, to get you to change your behavior. So there, you’re not really trying to shame Putin. You’re trying to shame the people who support Putin. You try to break his support system, and that’s also a form of punching up.

Has writing this book changed how you talk to your sons about shame, and how you think about parenting?

I spent a lot of time trying to make sure that the book didn’t come across as a self-help book. I’m not suggesting that I know how to get rid of shame. I went to some effort to say, “I’m still ashamed.” Because self-help, as an industry, is a shame machine. It’s saying, “Do you have a problem? Here are six easy steps to getting rid of your problem. If it doesn’t work, you didn’t do it right.” That’s exactly what a shame machine is. Having said that, building this lens of shame—it’s like a taxonomy of shame: when does it work, and when is it appropriate?—has really helped me. To your question about parenting, shame tends to run from generation to generation. It tends to be handed down like a dowry, a family heirloom. We can stop that. I did not fat shame my kids. People don’t even think twice before commenting on their child’s bodies. You have to wield shame as a hot iron. You have to think to yourself, do I need this? Can I work with tools that are safer?

In the book you say that people should ask themselves, before jumping into an online shame storm, “Is your participation focused on improving that person’s behavior or on signaling virtue to friends?” How do we navigate that line?

Sometimes you can make the case that performing shame for your friends is useful, but it’s not often. It is often just like, “Oh, another Karen video. I could retweet this and people would agree that person was racist.” But I would ask, how can you aim higher than that? I want to raise the discussion. If all we’re doing is saying that Amy Cooper shouldn’t have called the cops in Central Park, that’s too low a bar. When we’re performatively shaming, we’re often shaming a person that’s an unnamed nobody instead of the system that has allowed them to be this way. So the system in that Amy Cooper example is the system of police that profiles and harasses Black men. We should be shaming that system. That’s an appropriate target. They do have the choice to do that or not, and they do have the voice.

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I don’t think I’m going to stop people from retweeting Karen videos, don't get me wrong. I’m just saying that I would like us to hold ourselves to a higher level of accountability than that. And not just perform something for our friends.

You write that “empathy requires time and attention,” and it calls to mind capitalism’s scarcity mindset, where we have too much to do and not enough time to do it. And then there are ideas of meritocracy, and our Puritanical roots, too: If you got it wrong, it’s because you’re wrong. The shaming is all very wrapped up in the American dream.

One hundred percent. Meritocracy is about worth. Shame is about feeling unworthy. So it’s this notion of, what makes me worthy? Is it my SAT score? Is it where I went to college? Is it how much money I make? Is it how much debt I’m in? Is it how much I’m liked by my boss? There are so many different competing ways of thinking about success and worthiness, and they’re all wrapped up in our self-evaluation. There’s a huge amount of shame and self-recrimination happening on a daily basis.

But I want to go back to what you said earlier about the attention economy. One of the things I would say—and Karen videos are a great example, but they’re not the only example—is that we are being so distracted by these shame spirals that we’re watching happen online. We’re punching at each other instead of working in solidarity to improve any particular actual system. We’re just getting into stupid, ridiculous, online fights about it. We’re not actually solving the big problems that we could be if we had some head space. It’s very loud. Shame is meant to be loud. It’s meant to signal that something very important and possibly very threatening is happening. You can get kicked out of the village and die of exposure. So it is like a panic button. We’re going in and just jamming the panic button—of course we can’t get anything else done with each other.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQBooks