“innate concern with looking good to ourselves”
Shame is a feeling of embarrassment or humiliation, when our “mask” (persona) has slipped and an unsavory action or emotion is revealed. Shame and guilt are felt by nearly every human, with the exception of psychopaths and narcissists. Their rigid defense system blocks their feelings of shame.
A case in point is American attorney Rudy Giuliani who “seemed to exist at the intersection of shame and shamelessness, inflicting shame on his perceived enemies and yet invulnerable to it himself. Today, this divide—between the shamed and the shameless—is at the center of our politics. Some political actors are constantly reacting to shame, or the fear of it; others seem incapable of experiencing it. This creates a kind of asymmetrical warfare in which one side can do whatever it wants to achieve victory and the other can’t. In such a dynamic, the outcome of every battle seems almost predetermined.”[i]
Insight # 63 comes to us from Leon Kass (b. 1939) an American physician, scientist, educator and public intellectual, best known as a proponent of liberal education via the “Great Books.”
“What we blush about may be a product of our rearing but that we are embarrassed and feel shame means that we have a kind of innate concern with looking good to ourselves.”[ii]
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Additional Reading:
- Shame, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
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[i] Mahler, Jonathan. “The Fog of Rudy.” The New York Times Magazine. January 19, 2020, p. 41.
[ii] Moyers, Bill. Bill Moyers A World of Ideas. New York: Doubleday, 1989, p. 369.
