Send in the “Shame Clowns”

Cathy O’Neil convincingly argues that today’s pervasive public shaming metastasized with the advent of digital media and that it continues to multiply and spread via marketing, social policy, and social media. She is also the author of Weapons of Math Destruction and the CEO of ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing firm.

Shame

Since prehistoric times, communities have used shame to enforce group cultural norms and to discourage behavior – such as selfishly hoarding food – that may harm the group.

In some rarified circumstances, O’Neil notes, shame can lead to redemption, as illustrated by a shaming ritual practiced by the Native American Hopi tribe. Tribe members playing the role of “shame clowns” dress in outlandish costumes and shame those who flouted tribal rules or customs. However, the clowns shame the behavior, not the person and show him or her how to win the tribe’s forgiveness.

In its myriad forms, modern shame consistently flubs its unifying mission, succeeding only in delivering pain and driving us apart.
Cathy O’Neil

Businesses profit by targeting people’s insecurities. Advertising insinuates that your looks, weight, age, or apparel are inadequate and that people have noticed it and are laughing at you.

Antidotes to cure facets of your life that supposedly induce shame appear as diet plans, self-help programs, plastic surgery, supplements, cosmetics, and more. Entrepreneurs such as the Kardashians and Gwyneth Paltrow sell products and treatments – for example, lollipops that diminish your appetite – for reaching their concept of an ideal physical state. Customers feel they forever fall short of the marketed ideal, and that induces more shame and promotes repeat purchases.

O’Neil warns that shaming the downtrodden – such as by asserting that their problems are their own fault – can seem to absolve society from engaging in solutions to social problems. The crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s illustrates this dynamic. Drug dealers responded to a surplus of cocaine and falling prices by developing a smokable form of cocaine – crack – that was cheap and extremely addictive. Crack unleashed an addiction crisis.

Then, as the author reports, politicians, business leaders, and middle-class Americans subsequently shamed crack addicts. The nation imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people for crack-related offenses.

It’s far easier to blame than to help.
Cathy O’Neil

Shaming manifests as blaming victims in other instances. For instance, when Purdue Pharmaceuticals launched the pain medication OxyContin, it falsely marketed the drug as nonaddictive. Over the next two decades, the epidemic of Oxy addiction killed some 400,000 people in the United States. Shunning accountability and facing public scrutiny and health officials’ inspections, Purdue shamed the people who became addicted, portraying them as “abusers” and “reckless criminals.” 

Note that the law eventually caught up with Purdue, which filed for bankruptcy in 2019 in the face of massive OxyContin-related litigation. Purdue’s owners came in for plenty of shame and paid in the range of $4.3 billion to settle opioid lawsuits.

User Engagement

Social media platforms derive their profits from advertising, which they sell based on user engagement. Conflict, outrage, and shame have proven to be powerful magnets for social media users, so, as O’Neil shows, these sites train their algorithms to identify and promote such content.

Shame thrives online because society has fractured into numerous subgroups. Digital media fuels this fracturing. Subgroup members who might interact only with their own cohort assume that their group’s values are universal norms. This makes the behavior of people in other groups seem bizarre and worthy of outrage and derision.

Social media platforms are highly successful at stoking outrage and ill-adapted, to say the least, for reaching peaceful consensus.

For a person at the center of a social media storm, shame provokes extreme cognitive dissonance. Consider the meme that emerged about the name “Karen.” It began when videos popped up online showing a Caucasian woman named Karen calling the police to rant about a Black person’s innocuous behavior. The online community dubbed all such women “Karens,” a label signifying bias and white privilege. Videos of the inciting events evoked a torrent of judgment and shaming.

Some Karens dealt with being shamed by declaring that their shame was a source of pride. People who are shamed for belonging to a particular category may band together for reinforcement.

Punching Up

“Punching up” is a term for shaming the most powerful people, instead of the most vulnerable. For example, O’Neil explains that India’s Mahatma Gandhi, an international pioneer of nonviolent protest, led the 1930 Salt March to reveal the disparity between an adversary’s words and its actions. 

At the time, India was a colony of the British Empire, which controlled the salt market. Even though millions of Indians faced starvation, the British government prohibited Indian citizens from collecting salt. Gandhi led a 240-mile march to the coast of the Arabian Sea, where the marchers harvested salt. The British Empire claimed it believed in human rights and presented itself as virtuous, but the march exposed its brutality. Officials jailed Gandhi, and police attacked the peaceful marchers, beating them with bats and attracting negative press coverage — shame — worldwide.

The Nigerian public shamed its government for supporting a violent police unit, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), which terrorized the populace with torture, rape, and murder. Nigeria’s president had made a public commitment to the constitutional principles of “freedom, equality, and justice.” Shaming exposed how he had violated these principles by failing to restrain SARS’ activities. The campaign attracted international attention, and the government disbanded the squad in October 2020.

Everyone in Hollywood knew that movie producer Harvey Weinstein, a prominent power broker, routinely abused women. However, their stories remained in the shadows because Weinstein’s behavior had been the status quo in Hollywood, and he made profitable movies that employed many people. Shame kept his victims quiet.

However, when a few women broke their silence, others followed. The status quo underwent a tectonic shift that gave rise to the #MeToo movement, which exposed abuses by numerous men in business, politics, and entertainment.

We’ll fare far better as a society, in terms of both happiness and justice, if we succeed in redirecting shame from its current victims, who are disproportionately poor and powerless, to people who are taking advantage of the rest of us and poisoning our lives and culture.
Cathy O’Neil

Empathy is necessary, but challenging. Before you judge someone’s character, O’Neil advises, look for a reasonable explanation for his or her actions. To avoid shaming others, give them the benefit of the doubt.

The Utility of Shame

Cathy O’Neil applies her wit, intelligence, and well-placed outrage to parsing the self-renewing universe of shame – where everyone lives now. Hers is an unusually perceptive and layered unpacking of various aspects of the “shame machine,” a mechanism so entrenched, she reports, that you may not even notice its gears grinding. O’Neil describes how the shame machine generates such heavy profits that it has become a feature of daily life, especially online, and is perhaps as invisible as the air you breathe. She seeks to impede this pernicious onslaught and offers superb tools for detecting imposed shame and blunting its impact.