I think shame is the opposite of gratitude. The thing about shame is that whatever you have, whatever good happens to you, you are unable to own deserving it, of being worthy of it, and if you can’t do that, how can you consciously express and feel gratitude?
I wonder sometimes about the social and cultural effects of the Christian and to a lesser extent Jewish insistence that we are all worthless pieces of shit who can only claim to be worth anything through the intermediation of a third party, a party historically “represented”–certainly, spoken for–by a powerful political organization.