A lot of people both here and elsewhere shame people for being liberals, doing certain things, being an american, etc… And I don’t have a problem with that morally. What I mean is…I don’t really get it?
For me, I grew up in an abusive home. Shame made me compliant, but it didn’t make me a better person. In reality, IMO, it made me worse. It made me justify or hide my activities, both good and bad.
I became a communist just because it was the logical thing to do. Every other political-economic system wasn’t working and Marxism-Leninism was the only successful and advancing ideology that had real answers to problems.
So…idk. I’m not judging i suppose, it’s just one of several things that, even among comrades, I feel…alien about. Like, for instance, I generally don’t like calling normal people stupid. If it’s their job, I’ll say they’re incompetent [i.e, if they’re a professor or a documentarian on yt, then I’ll gladly say its dumb if they are] but that’s a credibility thing. I generally avoid calling the average person stupid because it’s reductive, but I mean…if someone could explain to me why they do it maybe i could understand.
I’m with you on both points I think.
With regards to “stupid”, there’s some unlearning for me because of spending a lot of time around people who reach for stupid like it’s the catch-all explanation for everything. But as a principle, I think it’s kind of reductive and thought-terminating most of the time. For example, is Trump “stupid”? He’s very easy to make fun of, but he’s also extremely powerful and though it would be silly to say he lifted himself up to that position, he did sufficiently act the part to get the job. So I think it’d be kind of a cope to look at that and explain it away as stupidity. He does things toward advancing imperialist interests, like every US president that came before him. He might not be a killer tactician, but the apparatus is powerful and complex enough, he doesn’t need to be. What he more needs to be is brutal enough to say yes to whatever horrible thing the rest of the apparatus wants to do.
As to shaming, I think there’s a distinction to be made between it and guilt. Feeling guilt can lead to remorse, which can lead to behavioral changes due to believing that one did wrong and needs to correct it in the future. Shame, as I understand it, is more like “I am wrong” rather than guilt’s “I did wrong.” Shame seems to have more in common with a static view of who a person is. “If you do X, you are a ‘piece of shit’.” You cross over a point of no return. So it would stand to reason that some people believing a view like this are going to go, “Okay, yeah, I’m trash then and always will be.” And then keep doing what they’re doing.
In order to get people to change, they also need to believe that they can change and shame may run counter to that. Guilt could happen as a result of a change in belief they have, crossing over from one belief to another and in the process revisiting things they did and recontextualizing them as wrong, but by this point, the guilt is a result of them believing something, not a result of others believing it about them. It is likely, though I don’t have direct proof of it on hand, that positive belief in something is more motivating than feeling guilt about doing the wrong thing. Guilt should, I would argue, be a stop sign, not a hair shirt. It should be rehabilitation and resolution, not identity. “I am bad” will not fix problems for someone or something who is wronged. “I shouldn’t have done that and can do differently from now on” can make a difference.
So when it comes to shaming others or trying to make them feel guilty, I would say we circle back to belief as the underlying important part. And getting past that obstacle often means having the patience to investigate why a belief exists as it does and how to change it. As we know with dialectical materialism in mind, the causes are never going to be only internal, but will have an external influence too. Not just in the sense of what others think or say, but in the sense of what is materially beneficial to believe and how it ties into basic survival in the world.
For me, I grew up in an abusive home. Shame made me compliant, but it didn’t make me a better person. In reality, IMO, it made me worse. It made me justify or hide my activities, both good and bad.
This is the typical reaction, as far as I have observed, personally or through someone else’s recounting, and as far as I can tell, isn’t specific to one’s physical location on a map.
