Specific examples for the first and second interventions would be nice to have!
I wonder whether hypocrisy is a coalition against depravity. People who are aware of their own faults, and yet decide to push back against abandoning the norms; but without admitting guilt, as that would turn them into scapegoats.
And the opposition to hypocrisy is a kind of "Bootleggers and Baptists" situation, consisting of naive people whose analysis of the situation doesn't go beyond "everyone should just do the right thing, duh", and the depraved people who prefer the incentives to be set up in a way that forces everyone who fails at being perfect into their coalition. ("How dare you criticize me? Are you perfect? No? Well, that makes you a hypocrite!" yells the person who regularly does something 100x worse than the bad thing you did once.)
Contempt of court penalties for noncompliance with an investigative process is a mainstream example of 1.
Burning Man has some aspects of the second, as do some camping trips, or simply living in a relatively harsh climate. Compare measured levels of corruption in southern vs northern Europe, for instance. When modern democracies fight big wars, the first year involves learning which parts of their warfighting institutions are corrupt and incompetent, & repairing or replacing them.
The post seems to be talking about these topics solely from the perspective of the relation between the individual and the community they belong to ("You are a member of some community", emphasis added). But, in my opinion, one of the most important manifestations of guilt (and shame, etc) to analyze, if we aim to understand these emotions more deeply, is when the individual feels guilty for violating a norm inside a community they are no longer a part of. This comes about because the vast majority of people have a tendency to internalize the norms and lessons they are taught and to try to uphold them regardless of the external incentives they face from the group.
As Eliezer once wrote, when you punish a child for stealing cookies, the child learns not to be caught stealing, but usually and to some extent, they also learn not to steal, as an end goal/principle independent of whether they get caught.
I agree.
When applied to object-level behavior like stealing cookies, this kind of norm internalization is ethically neutral. But when applied to protocols and coordination mechanisms, this becomes part of how shame-based coordination infiltrates and subverts communities doing something more interesting - people who recognize and try to leave bad communities end up recreating those same dysfunctional behaviors in the better communities they seek out.
In my reply to CstineSublime on pecking orders I explored how this works through specific social mechanisms like using self-deprecation to derail accountability.
This seems like a very narrow view of shame and guilt to me.
The cognitive processes responsible for the intention to conceal what we call shame are necessarily partitioned from the ones that handle our public, pronormative personas. If someone senses enough optimization for moral concealment in their self and those around them
What about things we conceal, less because of what other people think of those behaviors but because they are inconsistent with how we see ourselves or the standards we like to hold ourselves to?
For example, a singer songwriter was up last last night, had a few drinks, they play a show the next morning which goes great. It's a hit. Everyone loves them, everyone in the audience is convinced the singer-songwriter played great. But backstage after the show "I shouldn't have stayed up late, I could have played so much better, this was such an average show. It should have been a great show. I was holding back, I could have sung so much better."
What does that come under? They certainly feel ashamed, they feel guilt over what they perceive to be the cause of their only-average playing. But this is in spite suffering no social consequences and indeed exceeding the expectations of proper behavior of everyone around them.
They expect that they can call on allies to derail investigations of their bad behavior, on the fly, by instantaneous mutual recognition.
Except frequently I think people who are ashamed don't expect this. Imagine that instead of concealing they openly admit and apologize for being only average: then what? Aren't they still ashamed?
Except frequently I think people who are ashamed don't expect this.
That’s why I distinguished explicitly between shame and depravity in the OP.
Admitting and apologizing for being 'only average' often functions as a submission move in dominance hierarchies, i.e. pecking orders.
This move derails attempts to enact more naïve, descriptive-language accountability. When someone has a specific grievance, it corresponds to a claim about the relation between facts and commitments that can be evaluated as true or false. Responding with self-deprecation transforms their concrete complaint into a mere opportunity to either accept or reject the display of submission. This disrupts the sort of language in which object-level accounting can happen, since the original specific issues are neither addressed nor refuted. Rather, they are displaced by the lower-dimensional social dynamics of dominance and submission.
So viewed systemically, such moves are part of a distributed strategy by which pecking orders disrupt and displace descriptive language communities by coordinating to invalidate them. And viewed locally, they erase the specific grievance from common knowledge, preserving the motivating shame.
I don't think you understand, in the example I gave they don't think they are 'average' they think their performance was not to the standard they hold themselves, and they believe that this was precipitated by their drinking which they regret. He is talking PAST the person after the show, not to them, almost like a soliloquy.
Do you think that every time you've ever felt shame it has always been primarily because of what others may think of you? You have never ever felt a solipsistic shame, a shame even though no one will know, no one will care, it has no negative influence on anyone other than yourself, and the only person you have to answer to is you? Never?
In this example?
Except frequently I think people who are ashamed don't expect this. Imagine that instead of concealing they openly admit and apologize for being only average: then what? Aren't they still ashamed?
Different example - I said "instead" - so if the musician openly admits and apologize for only being average they are ashamed because they are afraid of the reaction of the fan who clearly loved their performance (not their failure to abstain from what they believe is the cause of their average performance?), but if they don't mention it to anyone (therefore are committing neither a dominance nor submission gesture) they are also ashamed? Or are they not ashamed in both circumstances? I'm just saying I'm really confused.
Are you telling me there is no conceivable circumstance where any human being feels shame for something which is totally alone, none at all? Because at the risk of assuming I have privileged knowledge of myself - I assure you I've felt shame for things which no one would care about.
Different example - I said "instead"
If you look back, you'll see I was specifically responding to the hypothetical scenario about public admission in that comment. For your points about private shame, you might want to check my other comment replying to you where I addressed how internal shame and self-image maintenance connect to social dynamics.
I notice you're attributing positions to me that I haven't taken and expressing confusion about points I've already addressed in detail. It would be helpful if you could engage more carefully with what I've carefully written.
so if the musician openly admits and apologize for only being average they are ashamed because they are afraid of the reaction of the fan who clearly loved their performance (not their failure to abstain from what they believe is the cause of their average performance?)
You're introducing new elements that weren't in your original scenario. But more importantly: you described the show as "a hit" where "everyone loves them." Calling this performance "only average" isn't accurately revealing adverse information - it's a lie.
but if they don't mention it to anyone (therefore are committing neither a dominance nor submission gesture) they are also ashamed?
In my other reply to you, I explained how private shame often involves maintaining conflicting mental models - one that enables confident performance and another that tracks specific flaws for improvement. Even when no one would directly know or care about staying up late drinking, the performer may feel shame because they've invested in an identity as a "professional musician" or "disciplined performer" - an identity that others care about and grant certain privileges to. The shame comes from violating the requirements of this identity, which serves as a proxy for social approval and professional opportunities. This creates internal pressure toward shame even without a specific idea of someone else who would directly condemn the behavior or trait in question.
Are you telling me there is no conceivable circumstance where any human being feels shame for something which is totally alone, none at all?
What I'm suggesting is that shame inherently involves at least a tacit social component - some imagined perspective by which we are condemned. This is consistent with Smith's and Hume's moral sentiments theory, where moral judgments fundamentally involve taking up imagined perspectives of others. This doesn't mean the shame isn't genuinely felt or that any specific others would actually condemn us. But in my experience people can frequently unravel particular cases of such shame by honestly examining what specific others would actually think if they knew, which is some experimental validation for this view.
We conceal some facts about ourselves from ourselves to maintain a self-image because such self-images affect how we present ourselves to others and thus what we can be socially entitled to. This is similar to what psychologist Carol Dweck called a "fixed mindset," in contrast with a "growth mindset" where the self-image more explicitly includes the possibility of intentional improvement.
In the singer-songwriter example, creating a good vibe with the audience generally involves projecting confidence. This confidence can connect to an identity as a competent performer, which maintains entitlement to the audience's approval as well as other perks like booking future shows and charging higher rates. We might think of the performer as implicitly reasoning, "I must have audience approval in order to maintain my identity. I get audience approval by being a good performer. Therefore I must be a good performer. Good performers perform flawlessly. Therefore I must have performed flawlessly. Staying out late would cause flaws in my performance. Therefore I must not have stayed out late."
Meanwhile, improving as a performer requires honestly evaluating weaknesses in one's performance - noticing timing issues, pitch problems, or moments where energy flagged. This evaluation process works best with immediate, specific feedback while memories are fresh. Or, in the specific example you gave, the performer's process of improvement needs to include the specific factual memory that they stayed out late, which likely impaired their performance.
When the good vibe with the audience is based on a rigidly maintained self-image, this creates an internal conflict: The same performance needs to be confidently good for maintaining entitlement and specifically flawed to enable improvement. This conflict creates pressure toward shame - the performer must maintain a persona that cannot acknowledge certain facts, while those facts are still actively used to make decisions.
Some other prior work on this topic:
Everyone knows what it is to be tempted. You are a member of some community, the members of which have some expectations of each other. You might generally intend to satisfy these expectations, but through a failure of foresight, or some other sort of bad luck, feel an acute impulse to consume something that is not yours to take, or in some other way break commitments you would generally want to honor.
If, having violated trust, you intend to repair that trust by owning up to what you did and by making amends or accepting whatever penalty the community places on you, then you feel a pronormative sort of regret. When making the sorts of precise distinctions needed to navigate contemporary civil conflict, we call this condition guilt. We use the same word for the subjective feeling and for the objective fact, because someone feeling guilt is taking the perspective of a community member who expects norms to be followed, and intends to do so.
Guilty behavior tends to be self-limiting; it is experienced as a sort of tension that can only be discharged by correcting the record and restoring normative relations.
If the penalties for coming clean seem like too much to bear, or for any other reason a resolution does not appear available, someone might intend to keep their guilt a secret. Keeping two distinct stories straight - a public one and a private one - is cognitively expensive, so covert offenders will frequently substitute motivated forgetfulness. If we intend not to recollect our guilt, we will also intend to deflect investigation that would reveal it. When this is an exceptional state, towards some particular events in someone's life, we can call it shame.
At times in my life, I have maintained a work persona who was totally conscientious, in full control of and able to make arbitrary commitments about his time usage. This persona was not aware of my inclination to stay up late looking at what it would consider low-value media on the internet, procrastinating from my endorsed work. Maintaining this sort of separation creates a kind of tension, which is relaxed when I get away from other people and start procrastinating on the internet. The persona is constructed intentionally not to be aware of the motivations that cause the procrastination, so that it can speak as though I did not have those motives. If my day persona were asked to speak about why I did what I did at night, it would be unable to speak, and unable to investigate, because of the strength of the compartmentalization; I would experience that inhibition as an unexplained tension and difficulty thinking, rather than as a conscious intent to mislead or remain silent.
Because of the intent to conceal, shame is not self-limiting the way guilt is. Partial discharge of the tension of shame is frequently used to form adversarial, coalitional bonds. People frequently bond through "vulnerability," i.e. the mutual private revelation of information they feel ashamed about.
The cognitive processes responsible for the intention to conceal what we call shame are necessarily partitioned from the ones that handle our public, pronormative personas. If someone senses enough optimization for moral concealment in their self and those around them, they might notice that these are two sides in a conflict, decide that concealment is the winning side, and choose to side with it. In other words, they might act to interfere with the investigation of others' secrets, and expect to be reciprocally covered for.
Someone engaging in the depraved strategy would display less tension from fear and cognitive dissonance than someone who is merely locally ashamed. Thus, from coalitional motives, they would preferentially cover for people displaying an uncomplicated, i.e. generalized intention to cooperate with concealment. Since the intent to conceal isn't compatible with an explicit, accessible memory of the concealed events, such arrangements must be inexplicit; in the convergent case, members of the generalized coalition of depravity recognize each other not by their attendance at secret meetings, but by the following behavioral tells:
In practice, depraved coalitions frequently infiltrate and come to dominate privileged groups with some other more straightforward marker such as ancestry group, educational pedigree, or parents' socioeconomic class. But if you look carefully, access to the group's privileges are actually regulated by depraved behavior. Members of this group who do not exhibit depraved behavior are marginalized, have access to far fewer privileges than you would have expected based on the overt signs of membership, and you will usually see the occasional person who does not have the overt group marker, but displays compatibly depraved behavior, accepted into the club.
If there is enough shared intent to investigate a crime, this coalition will preferentially direct prosecutorial attention towards someone who is ashamed but not depraved, who might even flip back to being guilty and take responsibility for their crimes. They will try to attribute as much crime as possible to this person, in order to prevent or postpone further investigation. We call this sacrificial substitute a scapegoat.
Straightforwardly, the more badly misaligned a community's incentives are, the more people are forced into the kinds of double binds that convert guilt to shame. Unfortunately, while correcting incentives can slow or halt the conversion process, it does not seem to be sufficient to reverse it. This is because the avoidance aspect of shame and depravity interferes with the evaluation of incentives; ashamed or depraved people have a simplified, conflict metaphysics.
I know of three promising, complementary methods that might reverse the process.
The first is to intervene within the conflict, by applying short-term violence against concealment. This might work because unlike long-run incentives, short-term violence can reverse the perceived winning side. With people who are only partly converted, this can force the pronormative aspect of their consciousness to the surface, in a context where it might otherwise remain submerged. This does not in itself create a permanent improvement in alignment, but it does give pronormative consciousness a lot more information to work with, and might help jumpstart the process of incentive evaluation that can help someone recognize that they face good incentives, not bad ones.
The second is to put someone in a situation where their material environment imposes nonsocial performance constraints, which cannot be navigated or appeased through mental avoidance. This would provide lots of data invalidating their conflict metaphysics, and correspondingly validating hypotheses that help them avoid pain.
The third is chemical, somatic, and brain therapies such as MDMA, rTMS stimulation of the medial prefrontal cortex, and alignment-focused movement practices such as yoga and tai chi.
Related:
Against unreasonably high standards