That's the thing about shame, it's NOT your own standards, it's society's (your parents') standards that have been inculcated into you since before you were born. I remember a post by a guy on reddit who was waiting for his g/f in a gas station and tried on some sunglasses on the rack before he realized they were women's sunglasses. and he felt such an immense shock of shame that he almost threw them on the floor. He realized how ridiculous this was (hence the post) but it doesn't matter, that shame runs really deep and takes a long time and a huge personal effort to truly overcome. This is why people have had such a hard time coming to terms with being gay, and that leaks out in all kinds of terrible ways.

If society only used shame for truly reprehensible, amoral, antisocial behavior, then sure, the original commenter is making a great point. But shame has been weaponized. Look around you. People are being shamed for being poor, fat, disabled, lazy, oversexed, undersexed, voting wrong, not voting, you name it. So some of us live in a state of constant shame for innocuous behavior and others of us cope by becoming shameless. Even here, you're trying to cast shame upon the shameless, with "refusing to feel shame is embracing evil".

HN throttles me, so for other commenters I can't engage in a discussion with you but hope you see this.

You are conflating guilt and shame. You should feel shame when you do wrong just as much you should feel pain when your body is harmed. I have no desire to debate specifics of morality and get off topic, but if your guilt is correct then your shame is always correct.

A person who does not accept their guilt cannot feel shame.

It isn't society pressuring you to feel guilt, it is society pressuring you to use a specific way to measure right and wrong. You can reject that way and talk about other ways by using logic and reason. But ultimately, it is impossible to not have a means of determining right and wrong even that is only "unprovoked physical harm to others" unless you are a complete sociopath. And if you do have such a system, you should feel guilt when you violate that system.

You have a choice when encountering guilt, to justify your actions or find excuses or to feel shame. A healthy mindser in my opinion would not be imprisoned by shame but empowered by it to self-correct and make amends. That way, you can be at peace with yourself and others.

Guilt is about behavior, shame is about being (self). So you feel guilty over something you've done, and you feel shame over it being who you are.

I agree with your statement that "guilt is society pressuring you to use a specific way to measure right and wrong", and shame is similarly the internal effect of society's pressures to measure your very being against that same code of morality.

But whether society is pushing your emotional buttons from the inside or the outside doesn't matter. In the end, I know I have felt deep shame for being something completely harmless and acting accordingly. I've spent years working to overcome this, and I will say in no uncertain terms that this is not justification or excuses, but a definitively healthier mindset--and my therapist and partner and community would agree. And if you would say that it would have been healthier to use my shame to instead alter my behavior and/or self (if that latter would even be possible), I would tell you and all the homophobes and Pauline Christians to go straight to hell.

I actually think you're right, that guilt/shame can be huge opportunity to evaluate your actions and your habits and your self, and to ignore it completely is to become the amoral shameless sociopath that you're decrying. But it needs to be a balanced and holistic examination, which unfortunately is not possible from a position of feeling such shame. This is the value of having someone, a therapist perhaps, to hold space for you to examine your true values, detached from the electric shock of shame. Then you can decide with your whole being whether to ignore the shame and become inured to it, or to accept that it accurately reflects your values and "self-correct" as you say.

This way is how you can be at peace with yourself and others.

OK, now do pooping on a sidewalk

I don’t think conflating mental unwellness (which can imply an inability to feel shame) with an absence of shame in otherwise mentally well people does any particular justice to the situation.

Mentally well people don’t defecate on streets, at least not under anything less than extreme privation. Those experiencing that privation likely already feel ample shame over it.

People without shame are mentally unwell.

I’m pretty sure I said exactly this in my comment. You can’t pile shame onto people who don’t feel shame; social schemes that apply shame pretty much only hurt people who already feel shame.

> People without shame are mentally unwell.

Ok I'll bite.

How do you expect to treat mental illness through shaming?

Easy. There are days where I feel like staying home and drinking beer / eating junk food / playing computer games. It's only because I know that's not the right thing to do that I instead go to work and do something productive, hit the gym, help kids with homework and so on. Now granted, people can come to a stage where shame is not enough to keep them going and they need medicines, therapy and so on. But for someone lacking a moral compass in the first place, none of these things are going to work. We are biologically programmed to seek easy dopamine hits. It takes knowing that it's wrong to smoke fentanyl and get high to make use of available addiction treatment.

> Easy. There are days where I feel like staying home and drinking beer / eating junk food / playing computer games.

Wait, is that your definition of mental illness?

No idea, I assume most people are like that and that some go for pills/therapy and the rest just don't talk about it much? But I am pretty sure that if I indulged these impulses every time, I would have a big problem soon. And then to get out of it, I would need to rediscover healthy shame of being a drunk, an unfit slob and a loser.

That's not what they said, this has to be a bad faith interpretation. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) for example has lack of shame as one of its defining traits.

> That's not what they said, this has to be a bad faith interpretation. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) for example has lack of shame as one of its defining traits.

Read the thread. You're commenting on discussions you're ignorant and oblivious about. You're in a thread where GP talks about mentally unwell people who "defecate on streets" and you're now trying to pass it off as mere narcisists?

The person said "People without shame are mentally unwell."

You said "How do you expect to treat mental illness through shaming?"

My interpretation of the first statement is that lack of shame is a characteristic that is present in some mental illnesses.

My interpretation of your reply is that you were portraying the original statement as saying that people that are mentally ill should be shamed in order to get well. Which I thought was very far from my own interpretation.

Due to this I went to google and searched for lack of shame as a trait of mental illnesses to check if there were any, and NPD came up as one example. So it seemed like the original statement was correct while saying nothing about how to treat people which is what you implied.

For someone who leans hard into moral relativism, and specifically calls out moral relativism as the right way to consider shame, you have a very long list of things that shame will solve. What about the trump supporting gun worshiping climate change deniers who don't feel they are wrong? Is "the question not relevant to [them]"?

Meanwhile, I used "gay" as an example because a lot of gay people feel shame about it and it's very bad for those people. It's an example of something with shame attached that clearly shouldn't.

If we can agree that you should feel shame when you do wrong the reasoning with people (and ourselves) about what is wrong and why can have an effect. Right now, because the lack of shame, all sorts if mental gymnastics and alternate realities are fabricated by people for appearances sake.

> it's very bad for those people

I don't get it, are you saying shame is bad for gay people because their guilt is justified? I have to disagree with that, you can talk about the guilt that precedes shame but shame in itself is a corrective tool.

> So many societal problems would be solved if people had raised their kids to learn to feel shame. Trumpism, gun worship, climate change denial, post-truth mindset, anti-vaxx, treason, insurrection, racial hatred and discrimination,etc...

As you say, shame works very well. I'm baffled as to why you would assume that people who hold beliefs different from your own would raise their children without leaning upon the very effective "shaming" mechanism.

I'm also baffled as to why you would think that anyone would be ashamed of their beliefs when they were raised to believe those things. It appears that the left side of your argument isn't aware of what the right side just said.

Edit: In conclusion, your argument does not hold water. It assumes that your opponents do not think deeply upon contentious matters, and only you and yours do (and so, by your account, anyone who shares your beliefs should never feel shame, because they are simply correct). You are dismissing the beliefs of your opponents without bothering to look into the nuance of any single individual's personal stance, and instead painting half our population as extremists. You label all Republicans as "Trumpists" because they didn't vote for Biden. Give me a fucking break. Even the "Bidenists" aren't happy with Biden.

You are the one who should be ashamed, but you know all about that, right? Maybe you should take a break from trying to save everyone else, and talk to a therapist about your savior complex. You might discover that you need some saving yourself.

> I'm baffled as to why you would assume that people who hold beliefs different from your own would raise their children without leaning upon the very effective "shaming" mechanism.

It isn't an assumption, it is my observation. Those examples are types of people that typically (not always) know they are causing harm and even by their own standards their actions are immoral. The nuances of individual's beliefs matter, just not for my brief example. But also, these nuances end up being mental gymanstics created as a result of cognitive dissonance and self deception, to avoid self-confrontation that might result out of shame.

> You label all Republicans as "Trumpists" because they didn't vote for Biden. Give me a fucking break. Even the "Bidenists" aren't happy with Biden.

I did nor label all republicans anything but trumpists are either sociopaths or shameless people. Knowing the objectively observable acte of that man, you would have to create so many excuses and claim every fact before you as a conspiracy or "fake news" to avoid feeling shame for supporting him. Republicans as a whole (democrarts too in their own way) are quite the shameless insidious bunch, either willfully ignorant or intentionally malicious to their fellow man. Keep in mind, I am judging people here based on my own beliefs, but my argument is that any reasonable moral system (especially Christianity) that the people i listed hold agrees with my belief.

There are things, like cruelty for the sake of it or tormenting children that just don't give you any gray middle ground for excuses so you have to challenge reality and facts to allow your behavior to continue without shame.

> You are the one who should be ashamed, but you know all about that, right? Maybe you should take a break from trying to save everyone else, and talk to a therapist about your savior complex. You might discover that you need some saving yourself.

You don't know anything about me but yes, in my own way I have my own mountains of shame, I hope I am not being shameless about anything I did wrong. I am not saving anyone else, I only mentioned those groups you objected to because they cause harm to me or people i care about without feeling shame, I am merely reducing harm and danger to me and mine. Anyone that claims they don't need saving are too busy digging a hole they can't climb out of.

But why do you think people would / should feel shame with the things you listed just because you don't agree with them? I feel like most of what you listed is the type of people that do feel shame and actually incorporate that into their positions.

Those were people I strongly believe avoid shame. They cal everything fake news or a conspiracy. Every racist these days goes "i am not a racist? But..." these days lol.

They are very proud of their ways and proudly defend their self-deception.

What would fake news and conspiracies have to with shame though. They are rarely in the same vein. There are millions of statements that can be preceded by "I am not racist but" and that's because people use accusations of racism to avoid shame. Pointing out a factual but negative stereotype will have you called racism because the shameful and destructive behavior isn't being acknowledged.

I like the distinction between being shamed and feeling shamed. And although as a home owner in a northern california downtown area I couldn't agree more that shame feels absent in a lot of the behavior plaguing our communities in a multitude of capacities, Im reminded of the rumors I hear about how dysfunctional shame-grounded societies like Japan are for those who don't fit into normalized parameters.

Anyway its making me wonder, has the US ever been strongly rooted in shame as a non-homogeneous nation? If so when and why did we stop? Growing up in the bay area I feel like I might have a pretty warped view...

You are saying

> the thing so many of people with these views have in a common is they feel no shame about the harm they are causing.

> If in your own opinion you did something wrong, you should absolutley feel shame

It implies that the list of people you don't like think they did something wrong but refuse to feel shame about it.

To me, all those people are not shameless - in the sense that they don't feel shame _at all_ -, but don't feel shame because they don't feel like they did something wrong (how can you think you're wrong when you don't _believe_ in climate change ?).

So shame in itself is not the problem.

I didn't say I don't like those people, I said i believe they feel guilt yet avoid shame by using flawed reasoning and self deception. Those were just examples i thought would help sell my point to the HN crowd.

Add sexual degeneracy to the list

Someone please explain to me how sexual degeneracy doesn’t exist. Its by definition bad, right? So if its not a problem doesnt that mean it doesn’t exist?