https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwbc_v1xBAU
I found this amusing. I actually showed it to my kids, who thought it was funny. And they went to a high school with a lot of Chinese and Indian kids, who ALSO thought Peters was hilarious.
What I logged on to say, though, is that there actually IS some wisdom in this. My reasoning is this: Shame is a product of trauma. And people without shame are not fully socialized. This means mild trauma is virtually a necessity in some respects.
Look at Asian cultures, the stereotypically “wise” ones. Mild physical abuse is very common. In Tibet, in the monasteries, Alexandra David Neel reported that in the public gatherings she witnessed, there was a monk whose job was enforcing order, and he carried a stick he did not hesitate to use to beat anyone misbehaving.
What got me onto this was the opposite thought: that people so abused that they have no way NOT to feel shame are doomed to lives of failure. Maybe not absolutely: they may be fantastically successful by all reasonable standards. But to FEELING like failures. There have been a number of CEO’s of successful companies who killed themselves at the height of their success. That is unredeemed shame. They hoped that major success would relieve it, but it didn’t.
As one recent example, the CEO of Texas Roadhouse–you most likely have one in your community–got a bad case of tinnitus from COVID, and blew his brains out. I’ve had tinnitus all my life. I don’t remember not having it. You don’t kill yourself over tinnitus. Tinnitus was just the last little straw that pushed someone who was on the edge off into the abyss. He could have bought any therapy he wanted. He could have done Ayahuasca down in Peru. He could have spent a year travelling around the world. He had options. But in the end, he was a prisoner, most likely of a shame whose genesis he could not remember, which was just a part of his life and always had been. He probably could not do anything right, despite having started and being CEO of a very large, very successful corporation, which is the American Dream we are raised to believe in.
Many such people, of course, become criminals. Because why not? The shame is no worse, or at least not much worse.
So you need to spread the emotions, like rolling out bread. You need on the one side a capacity for shame, but not too much. On the other, you need a capacity for earned happiness and sense of accomplishment. Between those two poles, you can live a good life.
And of course on the positive side what is needed is positive attunement, which amounts to effective love. The child needs BOTH to be loved unconditionally and conditionally. I actually told both my kids I loved them for two reasons: they were my kids, and they were loveable. I told the first one would still hold if they became, for a period of time, unlovable in their teens. Fortunately, that never happened.
I will add, too, though, that many of what have become cliches we think we have “progressed” beyond actually had and retain wisdom in them. I read potato salad has something called Resistant Starch in it, that is good for you. Who knew? Our grandparents knew. They understood the importance of pickles, apples, and vegetables too.
And remember “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you”? No child who is getting spanked believes that.
But that is arguably the most attuned means of delivering the medicine of shame. On the one hand you are putting into the physical body of the child a negative association with undesirable behavior, which will support good habits until the kid figures out the reasons for the rules. And on the other, you are pointing out that the need to deliver this medicine does not mitigate your love for them. And obviously physical abuse delivered out of rage and unhealthy emotionality on the part of the parent is always harmful.
Indeed, though, arguably mild corporal punishment might perhaps be something we reintroduce. I have often seen the meme of some blue haired kid screaming something incoherent in support of idiotic and socially damaging politics, which says “this kid was not spanked. You know it, and I know it.” That’s not verbatim, but it’s close in spirit.
And of course establishing good habits is most of it. Once you have done that, you won’t feel shame very much at all, if ever. No need to, if you are living according to your own standards, and have no underling unresolved fight/flight/shame energy.
And I have commented for some time in various discussions and dispute on the internet that the people yelling at me and insulting me lack shame. They lack a sense of remorse and guilt when they make strong claims they can’t back up, and don’t try to back up.
The way I was raised, if you want to argue something, and you are educated, then there is a process. You state your facts. You offer your logical extrapolations and conclusions based on those facts. To dispute an argument, then, involves attacking either the facts or the logic. Most of the disputants I meet–virtually ALL of them, and this number by now is certainly in the hundreds, and most likely the thousands–feel no need whatever to justify themselves, or to base their objections to my arguments in anything other than ad hominem and what amounts to the Bandwagon argument, which is the argument from conformity, that because everyone they know believes something, it must be true.
These people need shame. They were most likely in most cases raised like the kid Ryan Russell Peters mentioned. They were little demons, who got away with everything, who were given everything, and who view the world with contempt now. They feel no need to justify themselves. Their very existence is their justification.
Now obviously some of these kids are Republicans, if they grew up that way. They are not principled, but habitual Republicans. But Leftism is their more obvious natural home, particularly if they were raised without religion. Christianity, too, teaches shame.
So I would like to introduce this nuance, that we need shame in the world. Without it, our social world will dissolve. What the best means of delivering this medicine is, what the best dose is, I won’t pretend to be able to say. Less than what I got, but more than many kids nowadays get.