I would assert that no one incapable of shame is capable of earned dignity. What they substitute is an assumption of privilege and superiority.
Many American children assume that because they feel important that they ARE important, and that since everything has always been given to them, that they deserve it. It is much like, say, British aristocrats used to feel, but without any noblesse oblige, or felt need to behave in a dignified and befitting manner.
To my mind, no more obvious indication of this exists than when I see the moron emojis–the laughing emojis–used by students at elite schools in response to coherent and well intentioned posts I make.
Never, never, never when I was that age would it have occurred to me to do anything with a properly presented argument but respond in kind with counterpoints of my own. It is an interesting exercise, and a salutary one. It is the sort of thing people who called themselves intellectuals used to do.
But we are in a post-intellectual era, are we not? Sartre felt the need to say original things. Our “hero’s” of today content themselves with figuring out how to get the power they need to reduce the world’s spirit to a size they can control with violence and manipulation. The whole of their intellectual output takes inanities, insanities and intellectual monstrosities as givens, and never gives them a second thought.
It is jaw dropping. I look at my world every day and wonder how, with so many gifts given, we crap on everything that our betters built for us, and seek daily to tear it all down.