The shaming fallacy [Part 2]

Unnecessary abuse from desperately weak convictions

Sanctimonious moralists and smug pontificators take to the internet to promote shaming as a “last stand for morality,” or - more accurately - a desperate attempt to push their brand of desired behaviour as if theirs were the one and only.

So convinced and self-assured are they of their moral superiority that they are willing to stoop to the level of emotional blackmail (shaming)… And all this to coerce people into reluctantly and indignantly pretending to fall in line. In reality, all shaming accomplishes is the creation of resentment and hatred for the desired behaviour.

Dumb people shouldn’t be educated lest they become dangerous. (See how shaming works?)

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”

Shaming, as a measure of social regulation, is counterproductive and accomplishes the opposite of what it aims to achieve.

If the objective is to shame the already shameless, it is pointless. If it’s to preemptively shame, shame becomes the reason they turn shameless in the first place.

All destuctive behaviours are shame-based. Where else could a behaviour driven by self-loathing come from?

Shame is what made them that way in the first place. All degenerates are shame-based to the point of acting out. Relentless shaming was why they internalised humiliation to the point of identifying with it, and so, their deliberately shameful behaviour is simply a validation of self.

By shaming them, you are validating them. Good job, genius! YOU are to blame for the shamelessness around us.

The shamer’s psychological profile

“Bring back shaming!” they mindlessly chant… Shaming… a cruel schoolyard practice, a childish convention of social control over peers, without reason, without incentive, and without humanity. What a pathetic juvenile behaviour to adopt! Doesn’t the archaic act of shaming merit shaming itself?

“Shaming for the greater good” is their excuse to be abusive without repercussions. They don’t really care about the people they shame or society as a whole; they just care about cowardly satisfying their sadistic power trip when it’s most convenient.

Hypocrisy

The irony is that these shame-promoting moralists tend to also be Christian, spitting in the face of Christ who sat with the degenerates without shaming them, without having to threaten them with psychological abuse. And perhaps that’s all that is needed for them to change: compassion. If anything, Christ was shamed for this humane acceptance of the degenerates, which was all Christ needed to change them. Yet the shaming apologists think themselves better than Christ, their own god no less.

The proponents of shaming also tend to be “Western culture revivalists,” somehow romanticising the barbarity of our ancestors, assuming the old West had had it all figured out, and that we have lost our way. This ignores the fact that shaming is a defining trait of matriarchal Eastern cultures, thus eroding Western values of individual sovereignty, self-reliance, and freedom of mind. (Check my series on ‘Why the West is NGMI’).

Shaming is toxic femininity, guilting is toxic masculinity. Shaming is Eastern, guilting is Western. Both are abusive. But if you’re going to be abusive, at least know your audience.

Here’s a true story

Years ago, I attended a business meeting involving negotiation with potential third-party partners. We were on the premises of this one potential partner: this vapidly uber-macho powerlifter-turned-businessman with a needy faux-toughness attitude desperate for validation, and with self-delusions of bravado. The meeting started well, even though I could see he needily projected the faux image of a super-tough guy.

His wife had just brought the kids from school, and we could hear the kids enter the premises, just fooling around and running and playing - as kids do. The son, who must have been 7 or 8 years old, barged into the meeting room wearing his mother’s scarf, making a joke of it. The kid found it funny. Sure, the scarf was feminine in design, but the small boy found it amusing and funny to wear. If anything, he was making fun of it, not glorifying it.

But the father snapped at his kid. This shamed-based “tough” guy felt embarrassed. He was insecure in his own masculinity, knowing it wasn’t strong enough to make him a solid role model for his son. So he screamed at the kid and humiliated him in front of strangers no less:

“Don’t ever let me catch you wearing that again! I’m not raising a sissy! Where is your mother?” And he carried on babbling.

The kid stood shocked and terrified; his innocent enthusiasm brought to an abrupt end to mitigate the fears and insecurities (and shame) of the father. There was no evil intent in what the kid was doing, no deviance, no “sissiness.” Kids are innocent. There is no way the son had any deviance in mind while playing with the scarf. There was no need for shaming.

Healthy modesty is not the same as shame. Modesty comes naturally and it is reinforced by positive examples from parents. Shame is the twisting of healthy modesty into a psychologically abusive punishment that aims to mindlessly submit rather than to meaningfully teach.

If anything, it was shaming that humiliated the child. Shaming was the humiliating and emasculating experience that the boy was forced to endure. If anything was to “make him a sissy,” it would have been his father humiliating him (likely due to the father’s fear, a projection of his own masculine inadequacies).

If I weren’t immature and weak at the time, and if I knew what I know now about how traumatising such shitty parenting can be, I would have had a very different conversation with him. And I bet you that kid was scarred for life; who knows to what degree? It is possible he turned out the exact way his father feared he’d turn out, precisely because of those fears and shaming.

Dissociation =/= actively shaming

Dissociating is not the same as shaming. It’s your moral right to choose to dissociate from people you find reprehensible. They find you reprehensible too, as they also find desired behaviours shameful or destructive. Have some humility to accept that you may not always be right.

I’ve been relentlessly shamed for my shameless conviction that centralised coercive government is an unnecessary evil by people who presume that government is somehow an omnipotent benevolent entity, like a god. Shaming is just an admission of a lack of logical argumentation.

You have no right to go out of your way to INITIATE psychological aggression against people. You have no right to hold signs in their face unprovoked, calling them f**gots (I too use that word frequently, mostly as a response to aggression against people who like to see themselves as anything but that).

You don’t have a right to initiate the psychological aggression of shaming just like they don’t have a right to cancel you as a homophobe. You don’t have a right to regulate what substances free consenting adults consume in the privacy of their own spaces just like they don’t have the right to force-inject those substances in you.

Do you see the pattern here? Shaming and coercion in general go both ways. But you can both have the right to keep to yourselves. Shaming is not keeping to yourself, just like when the shameless stick their shameless behaviours in your face, it isn’t them keeping to themselves either…

Oh? Do you only want to shame people when they engage in shameful behaviour in public? Or when they push their behaviours on school kids?

First off, schooling is institutionalised child abuse by the government; if you allow your child to be indoctrinated and conditioned into passivity in schooling concentration camps, then you shouldn’t have the gall to be demanding.

Second, what’s considered “shameful behaviour in public” has already been established and regulated. The fact that the government turns a blind eye to sexually explicit and suggestive acts in public is a problem of the government you tolerate; the same government you imagine will help you to enforce your desired behaviours. Yes, your government thrives when it sows division; it keeps people busy with trivial nonsense while politicians get away with literal atrocities.

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But how do you treat the shameless? You can’t shame them because you only validate their shame-based identity, which is like pouring fuel into a fire.

Shaming doesn’t accomplish anything. It only makes things worse.

On a personal level, you can dissociate. You have the freedom of association. You can calmly - without the estrogen-fueled temper tantrum of unhinged shaming - that you don’t partake in their behaviours, so you choose to stay away. Your company is not their right - it’s a privilege.

Shaming is a rebrand of virtue-signalling and unhinged temper-tantrum cancel culture.

Deprive them of the privilege of your company, which is not by default. They thus have an incentive to win it, as long as you make yourself valuable enough to them.

Shaming, on the other hand, aims to deprive them of their self-esteem, which is something they should have by default. So, if they are to succumb to your shaming abuse, they will at best indignantly respond to a threat. All you accomplish is create resentment for your desired behaviour.

What are you shaming anyway?

Every public street, common property, business, or venue of various uses has its own rules detailing specific conduct. Anyone who deviates from that desired behaviour is asked to remedy or lose their privilege of using that venue. So the justification of “shameful behaviour being shoved down your neck” doesn’t hold. If you don’t like gays, don’t go to gay clubs. If you don’t like topless women, don’t go to topless-allowing beaches. If you don’t like gambling, don’t go to casinos. Funny how no one seems to want to shame gambling - one of the most destructive degenerate behaviours out there. So shaming is not about mitigating destructive behaviours; it’s for sanctimonious moralism.

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So what exactly are we willing to shame that isn’t already regulated by private initiatives, and even useless government no less?

Here’s another reason the shamers use to justify their cruel sadism:

They pretend to shame supposedly for people’s own good, which I find sanctimoniously malicious, hypocritical, and a damn lie. If you truly care about someone, you don’t psychologically abuse him to submit to your arbitrary desired behaviours.

You can evoke your brand of “objective morality” all you want. Guess what: most people on the planet have their own “God-given objective morality” that is antithetical to yours.

Fat shaming

Fat shaming is presented as a “virtue” by truly evil people who pretend to care about the health of strangers; strangers whom they despise, and whom they gleefully attack with shaming. They justify their sadism with the vapid socialist mantra like “the greater good;” the utilitarian excuse that is the cause of every atrocity in history.

Let’s be real; you don’t care about the health of fatties. You care about finding a way to be mean without consequence while pretending to be moral on top of your psychotic malice.

Who the hell appointed you responsible for other people’s health? This is the same mindset of enforcing experimental injections into people supposedly for the “greater good” because “we’re all in this together.” Utter psychotic god-complex nonsense.

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I am extremely pro-health and fitness. When I see fat or unfit people, I try to figure out what kind of bad parenting they had which led them to disrespect their bodies (and themselves) so much. Do you think further humiliation and disrespect will lead them to respect themselves enough to want to change? A decision to adopt a healthy lifestyle takes a long time, and it comes from witnessing the benefits of such positive behaviour. The decision to be healthy will not come from sadistic online psychopaths with a desperate need to glee over the torment of others.

Here is something I just read on Substack from a shamer trying to justify his self-righteously malicious intent: “To shame destructive behaviors is not to devalue the person; it is to call them to a higher standard.”

Absolutely false.

I’ve studied motivation psychology at the university level, and I can tell you that this is false. We must first understand that it is a false dichotomy to presume that ‘not shaming’ a destructive behaviour somehow means enabling it or glorifying it. Second, if someone chooses to engage in destructive behaviours, it’s their choice and no one has the right to offer their unsolicited opinion. The common justification of “but they will influence my children” is just an admission of horrendously bad parenting. Imagine being such a shitty parent that a random fat guy on the street will have more influence on your kids than you.

Shaming a destructive behaviour has two possible outcomes:

1. Shaming entrenches people further in their destructive behaviours (this is why we get fat acceptance - it’s because of people who shame them).

2. Shaming may bring a short-lived drive to abandon the shamed behaviour, and to perhaps even adopt a desired behaviour. But this is done for the wrong reasons. The abandonment of the destructive behaviour won’t be sustainable because the sole motivation was avoiding the punishment of shaming, rather than gaining the benefits of the desired behaviour. What shamers don’t seem to comprehend is that showcasing what you are for is much more powerful than brandishing what you are against. The shamed person will then end up hating the desired behaviour that brought so much anguish for nothing; no reward, just pain avoidance at best. And he will fall back into the destructive behaviour, possibly even harder.

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If you want to promote a desired behaviour and make it sustainable, try to sufficiently demonstrate the benefits of what you are for rather than the punishments of what you are against. This is basic negotiation and basic humanity.

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So cut the crap when you sanctimoniously pretend to be virtuous by shaming destructive behaviour. You’re not fooling anyone. You don’t care about the people you shame. You just care about satisfying your sadistic needs but you are too cowardly to do it without a plausible excuse.

Shaming is counterproductive

Shaming is the cure that is actually the disease itself. If you drill down enough to find patterns and causation, degenerate behaviour is always - without exception - the result of psychological trauma, whether from physical or psychological abuse. This is not an excuse; this is an explanation. Look into the lives of every single degenerate and you’ll find abusive fathers, shaming mothers, neglectful families, and an overall degrading environment that conditioned them to think very lowly of themselves. This is why they engage in destructive behaviours. Do you think shaming will improve such people or further entrench them in their shame-based conviction? Do you think perhaps compassion and a genuine non-judgmental effort to understand and help would be more effective? Understanding might seem like counterintuitive enabling, but it isn’t, as long as you make it clear that your compassion is not condoning.

Shaming only exacerbates their shame-based trauma to the point where they internalise it. They therefore want to narcissistically feign pride for it in an effort to compensate for their self-loathing. Pride is crippling insecurity to the point of a delusion of faux self-esteem as an overcompensation. Why do you think they named as “pride parade” their ceremony of willing self-humiliation and provocative public displays of deliberately shameful behaviour?

Pride is a cry of desperation: the more you shame them, the more desperately prideful they become.

Their flamboyantly shameless behaviour is also a way to get back at you and show you that, the more you push, the more they will react. The more they get a reaction out of you, the more they will feel the need to act this way. The more you shame them, the more you will be overwhelmed by shamelessness.

Felix Rex made an interesting video in 2019 about the civility and absence of provocation that characterise the pride parades of Japan.

The reason they are so is that Japan accepts people as they are without having to shame them, but without glorifying them either. Society is simply indifferent. You’re not a monster for being gay, but you’re not a hero either.

The most flamboyant and reactive degenerates are found where they are most shamed. Remember when Google found the vast majority of “gay porn” searches coming from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other Muslim-majority countries? And that’s without considering that VPN is a norm in those countries. Go figure! And if you’ve lived in the Middle East, you’ll know that a large percentage of males are obvious and unapologetic homosexuals… as long as they don’t express their behaviours publicly.

The psychodynamic here is that the greater the shame associated with a behaviour, the more it becomes a taboo… and for the psychologically broken, the greater the taboo, the more the shock value and twisted desire for it.

Whatever you resist persists.

- Carl Jung

Indeed, whatever you bottle up twists under pressure and eventually erupts. If it weren’t as shamed, it wouldn’t have been as rampant. This is why I am extremely suspicious of those desperate to forcibly enforce morality via shaming and violence. What are they compensating for? Why are they so obsessed with what they claim to despise? Why do all these “conservative” accounts on Xitter have a fetish of constantly posting videos of transexuals?..

False dichotomy straw man

Punishing something and not celebrating it are two different things. Not punishing something does not automatically mean glorifying it. Refusing to show respect for or associate with someone is not the same as going out of your way to psychologically abuse him, especially if he hasn’t directly provoked or threatened you.

This is what these self-aggrandising moralists, these “shaming warriors” fail to comprehend. They push shaming - this childish matriarchal tactic - because they imagine indifference to be the same as condoning. It is not. This is simplistic binary thinking, and a gross false dichotomy of a mind unable to think beyond two extremes.

Confessions

Shaming people to adopt your moral standards is an admission that your value proposition for your desired behaviours wasn’t strong enough to offer an incentive to be voluntarily adopted. Therefore, your lack of conviction in your own behaviours and morality compels you to enforce them onto others as a desperately needy way to validate your insecure moral constitution; a constitution you admit is being threatened by “degenerates” and “immoral people.” How weak is that?

The irony is that this confession of yours infers that your moral framework is weaker than immorality when competing face-to-face on an even playing field. So you need to stack the odds in your favour via the unfair advantage of shaming manipulation - a form of psychological abuse and emotional blackmail.

How do you like it when done to you? “Homophobe! Transphobe! Racist! Trump supporter! Redneck!” You see the weakness behind those shaming labels. So why don’t you see the weakness in yours?

Accountability

If anything, you are doing your moral principles a disservice by associating them with the coercion of shame-based emotional blackmail. Your shaming makes your victims resentful of your moral principles. They then want to attack your morality, and even worse, devise all sorts of contrived and antithetical behaviours out of spite alone. You were the first cause here. You were the catalyst promoting immorality.

You failed to adequately promote the benefits of your desired behaviours, and you pushed people away from them by associating your desired behaviours with abusive shaming.

Psychological violence

Some claim that only physical violence exists, and therefore, shaming cannot be treated as violence. They claim the “sticks and stones” axiom. I call bullshit.

While a “sticks and stones” mindset is ideal (not letting mere words my people who don’t matter affect you), it is rarely the case. The majority of people are emotionally affected when publicly humiliated and shamed. And I bet the shamers are affected too, otherwise, they wouldn’t know that shaming has a negative psychological effect.

They already know that shaming is abusive enough to influence people, otherwise they wouldn’t be using shaming to coerce people into involuntarily adopting their desired behaviours.

If shaming wasn’t emotional violence, then what would be the point of using it anyway? If you claim that psychological violence is not violence, then what effect can shaming have? So, we can agree that shaming is indeed traumatic psychological violence enough to coerce unwilling subjects into reluctant submission.

However, shaming can induce behaviour change, just not the change you think. As we saw above, shaming is counterproductive.

Betrayal of self

Shaming, just like any other type of violence, means that you’re desperate to influence people because you couldn’t influence them by only using incentives. It means your value offering was so worthless that you weren’t convincing enough to invite others to willingly adopt your desired behaviour. You therefore have to resort to emotional blackmail (shaming) to force unwilling people to pretend to adopt your desired behaviour, but only when you’re looking.

But don’t we already have dissociation for that? Public places, venues, businesses… they all have their own rules. If you don’t like a strip joint, don’t go to a strip joint. Shaming strippers or their clientele just makes you the degenerate here.

This desperation of yours is evident, so the people you were trying to shame see you as someone in need of validation, and thus, unworthy of their respect. And then you presume to wonder why your shaming tactics don’t work in forcing them to adopt your desired behaviour.

Why would they adopt your desired behaviour? You are desperate enough to impose it. You admit that you couldn’t win them over with reason and incentive. So you project that your desired behaviour is worthless. Granted some people are beyond the reason and incentive. But if they are beyond reason incentive, then what do you think shaming would accomplish with such people? What possible effect would you reasonably have?

Utopia

Shaming is social engineering to make society perfect. Eastern shame-based societies tend to be super-idealistic to the point of fantasy. In their deluded perfectionism, they miss the one moral principle that matters: non-coercion.

There can be no morality if moral principles are enforced. At best, enforced principles become a performance of morality only when others are watching. True morality must have the option to be rejected without punishment, and still be freely chosen.

If you can get away with immorality and you still choose morality, then that’s the only morality that matters.

“Morality” predicated on fear of shaming and punishment (or the bribes of degenerate hedonistic rewards in an orgy of a debaucherous afterlife) is not authentic morality.

Yes, you will not “get them all” by letting them choose their morality freely. But you won’t get them with coercion either. Coercion only brings a reluctant faux performance, but only when you’re looking. If anything, coercion makes things worse for your desired behaviours, as it makes them detestable to the unwilling.

Nobody loves being forced to do anything.

Your job is to convince, not coerce.

“Tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.”

- Thomas Sowell

Trust me, you wouldn’t want to live in a world where the enforcement of “desired behaviours” was normalised. This is exactly what the left is doing with their “drag queen story hour” and their preachy force-fed wokeness.

The bottom line

Resorting to shaming proves that you failed to make your desired behaviour attractive enough - you failed to showcase its rewards and how it worked for you. Why can’t you do that? Why can’t you show the benefits of adopting a behaviour rather than the punishments for refusing it? Is your faith in your own desired behaviour so weak?

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Shaming is the stick (threat). Reason is the carrot (incentive). Whatever you accomplish with threats is not meaningful. At best, it generates a reluctant indignant performance of faux compliance when you’re looking, and it promotes the undesirable behaviour out of an indignant opposite reaction when you’re not looking.

Stop shaming to coerce people into pretending to adopt your preferred behavioural standards.

Have some fucking empathy.

If anyone deserves shaming are people who presume they have some moral right to initiate aggression (emotional violence) to get their way. And yes, shaming is indeed emotional violence; shamers exploit the regard their victims have for them. So shamers deliberately withhold their approval - and dish out qualified disapproval - to manipulate. But the recipients of shaming soon lose their respect for those desperate enough to use aggression rather than reason.

When shaming occurs, the same emotional violence can and will be used in self-defence against the initiators of shame. Then the initiators of shaming will pretend to be the victim.

Shame the shamers.

Key concept

No matter what degenerate behaviour you oppose, there is nothing more degenerate than imposing your will on others; no matter how “virtuous” your intent may be.

If something is indeed virtuous, then it doesn’t need coercion to be validated. If you feel the need to coerce others into adopting your desired behaviours where it doesn’t concern you, then you are the villain, you are the immoral, you are the degenerate. Don’t you see how you become the straw-man villain used by degenerates as justification for their acting out? Don’t you see how you are the one motivating them to promote their shamelessness out of spite for you?

Don’t you see how you give your desired behaviours a bad name by resorting to shaming in a needy desperate attempt to promote them, thus betraying your lack of conviction in them?

If you feel the need to shame others into presumably adopting your personally desired behaviours, then you should look inward and ask yourself why that is.

To be continued in part 3 where I’ll address straw-man objections…

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References

1. Shaming Is An Aggressive Act - Shaming can guide us toward social norms or impair our self-worth

2. ‘Healing the Shame that Binds You’ by John Bradshaw

3. ‘Bradshaw on: The Family: A New Way of Creating Solid Self-Esteem’ by John Bradshaw

4. ‘Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child’ by John Bradshaw

5. ‘Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners’ by Kenneth M. Adams

6. Shame-culture and Guilt-culture

7. Understanding Guilt, Shame, and Fear Cultures

8. The Data on Global Culture Types

9. Guilt-shame-fear Spectrum of Cultures

10. Guilt–shame–fear spectrum of cultures (Wikipedia)

11. “The origins of war in child abuse” by Lloyd DeMause

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