You describe shame as both a key and a manacle, which makes sense to me because it seems to depend on what people do with it.
But in your childhood, shame seemed to condition silence. During COVID, grassroots movements tried to use shame as a social force, but they were outclassed by institutional propaganda that used shame to delegitimize those same movements. So when you reclaim shame through protest at the end, I’m curious how do you separate progressive shame from a new set of rules people feel punished for breaking?
If the force itself is neutral, the charge is what makes it good or bad. When I think about corrosive shame versus progressive shame, the outcome of the force is my metric. Does it make people act with less dedication to their own selfishness? Does it force us to reckon with our repressed feelings and uninterrogated assumptions or does it strip away our agency? Not to be overly utilitarian, but the outcome is the answer to me.
I agree that outcomes are often the best way to judge shame, but a just cause does not guarantee a just outcome.
Even if a movement is right about the injustice, shame still operates inside narrative control. The institution does not have to disprove the feeling behind the movement. It only has to find the weakest moral example attached to it, make that the story, and shift the frame from the original injustice to whether the movement itself is morally legitimate.
So I keep wondering if using shame as a weapon pulls movements into the exact battlefield institutions want, and whether there are better ways to bypass it entirely.
You describe shame as both a key and a manacle, which makes sense to me because it seems to depend on what people do with it.
But in your childhood, shame seemed to condition silence. During COVID, grassroots movements tried to use shame as a social force, but they were outclassed by institutional propaganda that used shame to delegitimize those same movements. So when you reclaim shame through protest at the end, I’m curious how do you separate progressive shame from a new set of rules people feel punished for breaking?
If the force itself is neutral, the charge is what makes it good or bad. When I think about corrosive shame versus progressive shame, the outcome of the force is my metric. Does it make people act with less dedication to their own selfishness? Does it force us to reckon with our repressed feelings and uninterrogated assumptions or does it strip away our agency? Not to be overly utilitarian, but the outcome is the answer to me.
I agree that outcomes are often the best way to judge shame, but a just cause does not guarantee a just outcome.
Even if a movement is right about the injustice, shame still operates inside narrative control. The institution does not have to disprove the feeling behind the movement. It only has to find the weakest moral example attached to it, make that the story, and shift the frame from the original injustice to whether the movement itself is morally legitimate.
So I keep wondering if using shame as a weapon pulls movements into the exact battlefield institutions want, and whether there are better ways to bypass it entirely.