The Other McCain

Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) has a smart take on Ron Jonson’s book about social-media shaming:

If I have one complaint about the book, it’s that he doesn’t dive deep enough into what shaming is good for and why we like it so much. . . .
Shame is, after all, a force for good as well as evil. . . .
Shame is one way we enforced good behavior in small groups before there were laws or trading networks. It is a very powerful motivator, and it helps us to come together in large cooperative groups with high degrees of trust and sharing. A hatred of being shamed ourselves and a love of shaming others who have transgressed both literally helped to make us human. . . .

Interrupting here (because I’m a mansplaining misogynist and that’s what we do) to point out that McArdle has correctly situated this in the context of mankind’s tribal nature. It cannot be emphasized enough that our need to feel membership in a larger group is a powerful psychological motivator. Even highly intelligent and well-educated people seldom stop to think why they identify so passionately as a sports fan (“Roll Tide!”) or in any other chosen tribal identity. Our social behavior — in everything from trivial things like online fanfic groups to international terrorist organizations — reflects our instinctive tribalism. And now, having exercised my patriarchal privilege, I yield the floor to Megan McArdle:

But . . . shame doesn’t just punish wrongdoers; it also turns us into our own moral enforcers. Once we’ve been shamed, we are strongly motivated to avoid doing the things that brought it on. Or at least, most of us are — one of the hallmarks of sociopaths is that they don’t feel shame or remorse. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, shame is good. Shame is right. Shame works.

Interrupting again, because she’s wrong: Sociopaths do feel shame. They feel it very intensely. The problem is that their damaged ego has erected psychological defense mechanisms that involve the evasion of responsibility through the externalization of blame. Sociopaths rationalize their feelings of shame, lash out at anyone who makes them feel bad about their guilty secrets, and try to play the victim. (“DARVO — Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.”) Understanding this aspect of sociopathic behavior was what enabled me to unlock the riddle of Brett Kimberlin. One you understood Kimberlin’s shameful motive, everything else about his hideous behavior made a lot more sense. And, yes: Shame is good. Shame is right. Shame works. We return to Megan McArdle:

In the small groups we evolved to live in, shame is tempered by love and forgiveness. People are shamed for some transgression, then they are restored to the group. Ultimately, the shamed person is not an enemy; he or she is someone you need and want to get along with. This is how you make up with your spouse after one or both of you has done or said something terrible. . . .

Except, of course, (a) tribal societies shun or murder those who offend their basic code or honor, and (b) many marriages end because people cannot forgive their spouse’s transgressions. Folks, I apologize for my repeated interruptions. I agree with Megan McArdle. I like Megan McArdle. I want her to like me. So why do I keep interrupting her to make all these niggling little points? But never mind. This is not about my glaring personality defects. Megan McArdle continues:

On the Internet, when all the social context is stripped away and you don’t even have to look at the face of the person you’re being mean to, shame loses its social, restorative function. Shame-storming isn’t punishment. It’s a weapon. . . .
Outrages are identified using the least charitable, most literal possible reading of what someone wrote or did, rather than trying . . . to think of what they could have meant by it, giving them the benefit of the doubt where two readings are possible. Things that were stupid and thoughtless are turned into deliberate outrages that could only be the work of hardened psychopaths. . .
But forget whether the shaming is excessive. Does it even work?
To be sure, a lot of folks certainly seem terrified by the possibility of being attacked by roving bands of verbal vigilantes. Yet I notice two things about these fears that raise some questions about the tactic’s usefulness. First of all, the fears are strongest among people who are politically allied with the shame-stormers. And second, the people who are afraid don’t fear being found out for their dark transgressions; they fear being unjustly attacked.
Twitter makes it absurdly easy to shame someone. You barely have to take 30 seconds out of your day to make an outraged comment that will please your friends and hurt the person you’ve targeted. . . .
This sort of tactic may buy silence, though it is likely to be the most effective on people who already agree with you and simply said something infelicitous. What it cannot buy is community, beyond the bonds that build between people who are joined in collective hate.

You can and should read the whole thing. It was that phrase — “people who are joined in collective hate” — which caught my eye in McArdle’s piece, for this reason: Most conservatives cannot comprehend the intensity of hatred that motivates and unites the Left. Any attempt to out-hate them is futile. For example: No matter how much you hate Amanda Marcotte, you can never hate her as much as she hates you.

Amanda Marcotte exudes an all-encompassing hatred from every evil cell of her wicked anatomy. She is also compulsively dishonest, because a vile sadist like Marcotte fears nothing so much as she fears the exposure of her despicable hatefulness. Once you understand that, once you have unlocked the hidden shameful motive of Marcotte’s otherwise mystifying madness, everything else makes sense.

Like I say, “Scratch a feminist and a kook bleeds.”

Also, “Bad causes attract bad people.”

Did you ever notice that people who constantly speak of "oppression" and demand "equality" tend to be sadists with a craving for revenge?

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 21, 2015

Can I inspire @asymmetricinfo to write something about mansplaining? Compared and contrasted to femsplaining, perhaps?

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 21, 2015

So I am grateful to Megan McArdle for her essay on shame-storming, and apologize again for my repeated interruptions. Nobody’s fault but mine.