Public shaming as blood sport has to stop - Monica Lewinsky

New Yorker   Monica Lewinsky and the Shame Game

A frightening, terrible thing about shame is how difficult it is to dispel. Guilt, at least, can be absolved through action. You apologize to the friend you gossiped about; you donate ten per cent of the $6.3 million cash bonus you got as the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs to charity. Guilt is the discomfort that comes from recognizing that you’ve done something wrong, or failed to do something right. It’s an emotional accountability mechanism—the way that the self takes itself to task.

Shame, on the other hand, is a social feeling, born from a perception of other people’s disgust, a susceptibility to their contempt and derision. You see yourself from the point of view of your detractors; you pelt yourself with their revulsion, and as you do you begin, like Cassio, to lose track of the self altogether. Someone else’s narrow, stiffened vision of who you are replaces your own mottled, expansive one. As Lewinsky listened to the recordings of her phone calls, she tells us, she heard her voice as if it belonged to a different person: “My sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth.” It was “the worst version of myself, a self I didn’t even recognize.”

That feeling of estrangement from the true, variegated self is expressed time and time again in “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” a new book by the journalist Jon Ronson, to be published by Riverhead next week. Ronson interviewed scores of people who have been cut down by collective vilification in our post-Lewinsky, social-media-soaked age. He wants to trace the shame phenomenon to its root, and the taxonomy that he comes up with includes those who have been shamed for doing dumb things in the professional realm (Jonah Lehrer making up those Bob Dylan quotes; the former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey creating a bogus official post for his secret male Israeli lover); those who have been shamed for doing dumb things in what they mistakenly considered to be the private realm (Justine Sacco, the P.R. person who sent out an unfortunate joke about AIDS in Africa to her two-hundred-odd Twitter followers before boarding a plane to Johannesburg, only to discover, when she landed, that her tweet had gone viral and that she had lost her job); those who have been shamed for doing things that seem perfectly acceptable by any common measure, public or private; and those who have been shamed for spuriously shaming others. (These last two are linked in a kind of reputation murder-suicide, in which a woman at a tech conference, overhearing a man making an anodyne joke to his friend, published his photo on her blog along with a post claiming that he had made her feel unsafe. He immediately lost his job; in what passes for virtual justice, she was then flooded with rape and death threats, and was fired in turn.) [...]

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