Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death.
Benjamin Rush (a signer of the Declaration of Independence)
Ignominy means being shamed, dishonored, humiliated or disgraced. This only happens when the “shaming” is public, that is to say, when others who know you or know about you witness your humiliation. A person living anonymously in a large city, for example, can commit shameful acts without suffering ignominy. Thanks to the worldwide web that kind of anonymity is often no longer available as a protection against the hostility of the inhabitants of the global village. The high-tech Big Brother nowadays is always watching.
Hordes of zombies—many of our fellow inhabitants in the “globalized” human community—are engaging in a “feeding frenzy” of late; like bloodhounds frantically seeking the scent of anyone guilty of bad judgment. Jon Ronson coincidentally supports the metaphors we will use in this essay in his article in The New York Times Magazine entitled “Feed Frenzy.”
It’s important that we get a good feel for the key word frenzy in this essay because it is, as we shall learn, an apt descriptor of the human condition. A frenzy is a temporary madness, manic activity, a violent agitation, wild excitement or delirium. Some brief historical examples of feeding frenzies and some occurring today will put the whole thing in perspective.
In colonial times public humiliation was used to punish transgressors of accepted moral behavior. The stocks, the pillory and the whipping post were commonly used in a public display that might make one wonder if the person “caught in the act” might have become a scapegoat for those who suffered their guilt in anonymity, those fortunate enough not to have been “caught in the act.”
In 1742, Abigail Gilpin, whose husband was at sea was caught “‘naked in bed with one John Russell.’ They were both to be ‘whipped at the public whipping post 20 stripes each.’ Abigail appealed the ruling, but it wasn’t the whipping itself she wished to avoid. She was begging the judge to let her be whipped early, before the town awoke. ‘If your honor pleases,’ she wrote, ‘take some pity on me for my dear children who cannot help their unfortunate mother’s failings.’” Abigail feared the shame more than the lash.
The pillory, stocks and public whipping were abolished at the federal level in 1839 but not whipping in jails and prisons. An 1867 editorial in The Times pointed out why we should be concerned with the “return of the stocks” today. “If [the convicted person] had previously existing in his bosom a spark of self-respect, this exposure to public shame utterly extinguished it … The boy of 18 who is whipped at New Castle for larceny is in nine cases out of 10 ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.” Not the result a truly compassionate community would be hoping for.
Before we turn to the form taken by public shaming today we have a couple more points to make about group behavior related to displays of violence in public. The first is denial. We don’t like to admit how violent and cruel we can be and, secondly, we like to forget how we have behaved in the past. Many of us have seen old photographs of whites smiling and laughing, including children, at what might seem like a public picnic or holiday celebration until we notice in the background the dangling body of a lynched African American. Then we are shocked and sickened. Then we remember what we would prefer to forget. Then, we also remember that people are capable of ugly and cruel behaviors in groups, much less “human” behavior that they wouldn’t even consider as individuals.
As for the “forgetting” or denial of our history many of us are not aware that minorities other than African Americans were victims of extra-legal justice. From 1848 to 1928 mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.”
Today, some perpetrators of violence are not ashamed following their acts of savage behavior and even want to display their gruesome acts of carnage so the whole world can suffer the shock of the unimaginable. Why? Has fear and paranoia driven some of us into advance states of psychopathology? Or maybe instead of extreme violence being a consequence of fear it is seen as a way to create fear. “Gavin Rees, the European director for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, which focuses on the issues of reporting on violence helps explain: ‘That is part of the gain for those who are producing these videos: They want to inspire fear and helplessness.’”
We have perhaps reached new levels of violence on our planet and as Rees concludes, the terrorists are achieving their goal. “One of the things about traumatic imagery is that it can numb us and render us passive and helpless.”
If you think our imagery of violent zombies is an extreme metaphor for modern public violence, think again. “The Syrian government has made much of a video of an insurgent ripping the organs from a slain soldier and taking a bite.”
If the “return of the stocks” and public shaming and violence was the work of only political extremists or a regrettable but forgotten chapter of our historical past that might not be so bad, however the unfortunate truth is that the stocks are being deployed around the world today by millions of us.
What are the “stocks” in the 21st century, who gets put in them and who puts the victims there? Let’s take Justine Sacco as an example of someone whose behavior offended her community. During the holidays in 2013, she was flying from New York to South Africa to visit her family and tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m White!” Justine had only 170 Twitter followers. By the time she landed in Cape Town after an 11-hour flight, her best friend Hannah tweeted “You’re the No.1 worldwide trend on Twitter right now.”
Sacco’s intended meaning with her tweet was ambiguous but remember, people are always looking for scapegoats on whom to project their dissatisfaction with their life and who they are. Sacco had quickly become for thousands of people in less than half a day that scapegoat. She was quickly put in the stocks. “By the time her plane had touched down, tens of thousands of angry tweets had been sent in response to her joke.”
Jon Ronson offers his personal insight into why so many people show up in the public square to witness and use sites like Twitter to take part in 21ST century lynchings. “Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.” That script is called P-B.
Back to Justine Sacco whose experience in the stocks tends to be all too typical and all too sad. The punishment tends to be severe and lengthy. Modern Americans seem to be more vengeful than our colonial ancestors. Those who gather on social media to jeer at the person being shamed are not content with public shaming (which occurs on a worldwide scale) but they put pressure on employers to fire the hapless victim, and they usually do. The shaming can go on for months and months, the zombies are relentless and insatiable until they tire and move on to the next victim. Sacco lost her job and had to go into hiding eventually before she found new employment and escaped the stocks.
Why do people like Sacco bring these attacks upon themselves? The answer is found in the affection/esteem energy center of the false-self survival strategy. “Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continue to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco’s own—a bid for the attention of strangers—[remember Anthony Wiener] as she milled about Heathrow, hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see.”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether we are witnessing compassion or fear-driven projection on the Internet. For example, women can use shaming or create a feeding frenzy by banding together to defend themselves against sexual harassment. “‘From the plaintiff’s perspective, it’s one of the great equalizers, allowing women to gain ground against well-funded defendants,’ said Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer who has been bringing employment and sexual harassment suits for three decades.”
Our colonial ancestors were very afraid of the wilderness, the Indians and unconsciously of chaos. Public shaming and witch-burning were expressions of this fear and represented their attempts to maintain control of their tenuous grasp on civilization. Is our legal system about to spin off into an Internet-centered chaos and what sort of paranoid psychopathology will accompany it?
“Leigh Goodmark, another Maryland law professor, said the online boom of gender-related court documents was a harbinger of a future in which virtually no legal document—an eviction notice, a divorce pleading with embarrassing details—would be safe from public consumption. ‘Things people never bargained on getting out will get out,’ she said.”
You have perhaps heard the Cherokee Indian folk tale of the young maiden who related a reoccurring dream that she was having to a tribal elder. She told of a white wolf and a black wolf fighting in her nightmarish dream and asked the elder who would win. He replied, “The one you feed.”
The black wolf, the bloodhound and zombies are all metaphors for the false self. The false self salivates at the thought of pursuing plenty, pleasure and/or power. But the false self is also very, very afraid. This makes the fearful person very, very dangerous.
Our false self’s need for others onto which to project its discontent has us using our social media to become both the one who shames and the shamed, the shooter and the target. Until we come to admit and understand how we choose to feed the black wolf, we will never experience the peace afforded by anonymity or the silence, solitude and simplicity we experience by feeding the white wolf. Given that the Internet is the most vital engine of our culture today we need to decide if that is the wolf we want to feed.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in the Simple Reality books:
Where Am I? Story – The First Great Question
Who Am I? Identity – The Second Great Question
Why Am I Here? Behavior – The Third Great Question
Science & Philosophy: The Failure of Reason in the Human Community
