Shame is one of the most painful emotions humans can feel, and the distinctive facial flushing that typically accompanies it certainly doesn’t help.
To blush when one is ashamed communicates to others precisely what we would like to hide at that moment, somehow betraying ourselves, since the only thing to do at that precise moment would be rather to run away, hide, bury or disappear, just to name a few..
Shame is therefore one of those defined ‘social’ emotions because it is felt in front of others, what we think they represent for us, but which is also damned capable of acting when we are alone and fear that we will deviate from the ideal a little too much ‘ideal’ that we have of ourselves, ending up being ashamed of our own shame!
Of course, it can also be a very romantic experience, like when someone we like (who if they don’t know yet there must be a reason!) he gives us a compliment or tells us a nice thing, which is why we turn red like one of those nice big ripe tomatoes, revealing to the universe that no, we are not ripe at all, we are just left with stupid teenagers who still fall in love, and that that person is not indifferent to us.
And so it gets worse…
In short, in addition to being painful, shame can also be a little mischievous.
On the other hand, however, although we all know how it can be so difficult to deal with, psychopathology has never dealt with it much, at least not as it has been able to blame, perhaps because the Western Catholic-Jewish (and psychoanalytic!) cultural tradition it was built and organized precisely on guilt, considering shame as a characteristic of only oriental civilizations.
Maybe because you can somehow ‘free yourself’ from guilt, for example by apologizing (or confessing to it…) even if we are still talking about something we know we have done, and not something deeper.
Deeper and more unconscious.
With shame, however, it doesn’t work at all like this, and it’s not just a verbal fact, even if verbs have something to do with it, it’s that guilt concerns doing, while shame involves being, something so rooted and linked to what we are or think of ourselves that it is capable of making us feel ‘naked’ when we feel discovered, as if our deepest reality that we have so laboriously tried to keep hidden suddenly became visible to everyone.
Maybe that’s why we would really like to disappear too..
In short, shame is a human phenomenon that can have very dramatic implications, such as the one told by Ruth Benedict in her book Chrysanthemum and the Sword, an essay on Eastern culture written at the turn of the 1940s during a research project carried out in Japan..
Funded without his knowledge by the American government, grappling with the peaceful front of World War II, he described that ‘strange’ people so exhaustively as to make those who had the opportunity to read it tremble: the Japanese, so obsessed with the ideal of themselves, will never lay down their arms.
They would rather die than be ashamed for giving up.
The text was published almost a decade after the end of the war, giving rise to more than just a hypothesis: that the Stars and Stripes government took its conclusions as a pretext to ‘be persuaded’ to use the atomic bomb?
We’ll probably never know, but what we certainly know is that the West really doesn’t seem to know any shame..
And I am not just referring to Netanyahu, who shortly after signing the truce threatened the world that he wanted to continue the work, or to that gentleman who appeared on TV for whom in order to talk about those massacred by his government we must first understand each other and ‘define the children, because it would be useless, given that those two lost their child a long time ago.
And I’m not even referring to Trump, who also published a videoAI in which he bombs the demonstrators with manure, forgetting both the images of his soldiers watering women and children in Vietnam with napalm, and that those demonstrating against him are American citizens of which he should be president, not master.
President, not sovereign.
In short, I am not referring to geographically distant people, who unfortunately in recent months we have hosted in the living room every time we turn on our TV, but to our moderate, indeed very moderate and liberal, Foreign Minister, so liberal as to declare that international law makes sense to exist yes, but up to a certain point, especially if one claims the right to be able to do as he pleases.
Because if I feel like turning the Mediterranean into the new Far West and making the race for nature reserves off Gaza the new Eldorado, what do you want it to be to exterminate thousands of native Indians (pardon, Palestinians) to allow the white man to run his railways, sorry oil-gas pipelines?
Cover democracy with manure?
Up to a certain point.
People are tired, humanity is tired.
Tired and even a little’ angry.
Red with anger.
Marco Randisi
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