The Shame Economy - Part 1

Foreward

Philosophers like Byung Chul Han and Slavoj Žižek have written extensively on the way our current form of capitalism manufactures desire. I greatly appreciate their work, but I feel their psychological analysis around desire could use viewpoints other than just Freud and Lacan. Their work is missing a deep exploration of shame as both an internal and societal phenomenon. The following exploration is an attempt to begin to integrate shame into the philosophical conversation—informed by the work of Brené Brown, Richard C. Schwartz, and David Bedrick.

The Shame Economy

There’s a shadow economy operating in America. While our primary economy can optimistically be seen as the exchange of goods and services to meet human needs, or pessimistically as an exploitative and speculative system to meet corporate interests, there’s also something else at work: a system that’s harder to notice, but quite pervasive. This is the Shame Economy.

What is Shame?

I’m defining shame as both an emotion and a lens. Shame researcher Brené Brown calls shame an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging”. Shame educator David Bedrick extends this concept, making the case that shame can become internalized, showing up as a “shaming witness”, a lens of self-judgement imparted by parents, culture, injustice, and trauma. Some psychologist might call this an inner-critic (Schwartz). Shame in this context can be thought of as holding both of these senses: a painful emotional experience and a pervasive, but often unnoticed, lens of negative judgment directed towards the self and others.

Shame is nothing new. It’s been with humanity for eons and has often been weaponized by powerful institutions like the church or state. But over the last century, the power to wield shame has moved into the hands of corporations. In the 20th century brands discovered that mass media can be used to manufacture shame and exploit our strong compulsion to escape it—thus The Shame Economy emerged.

Happy Ad People

In the Shame Economy big brands use the power of image and story to manufacture and manipulate shame. This is at the heart of modern advertising. Where announcing a new product might be innocent enough, most ads and brands go much further and tell us how we ought to see ourselves.

In previous generations elders, shamans, or clergy held the role of imparting a lens to view the self, but this is now done by advertising (and related media like some films/tv). Ads present us with people who appear to have transcended shame: glowing, confident, limitless, thin, young, financially unencumbered people in art-directed environments. These shame-free characters exist as impossible yardsticks, exemplars of “normal” that we measure ourselves up to. The curated images in advertising and other similar media, when compounded over a lifetime can become an internal panopticon-like lens (Han), judging our weaknesses, imperfections, differences, and failures as bad instead of normal and even sacred parts of the human experience (Bedrick). At our most vulnerable, brands inject a promise of salvation: buy our product and transcend your weakness to become limitless. Consumption is pitched as salvation from shame.

The Forbidden Fruit

Apple has been “saving” people for decades. Starting with their 1984 Olympics ad, directed by Ridley Scott, Apple positions itself as the path to enlightenment--the Macintosh will make its owners fully actualized humans compared to colorless crowds of subhuman drones. Apple’s shame manufacturing got more explicit in the early 2000’s “Get a Mac” ad campaign. These ads are lighthearted and charming, but they also expertly reinforce Apple’s worldview: Mac users are enlightened, PC users are dull. Even today the blue bubbles on our iPhones separate those who “think different” from the masses. Just by creating an “us” vs “them” dichotomy, Apple implies that to be a “them” is shameful. If the public perceives Apple as a pathway to escape shame (the shame they created), people will flock to their product like pilgrims looking for redemption.

In the Middle Ages the Church held the power to decide who belonged and who was to be shunned in society--now brands hold a similar power. And “forgiveness” comes through aligning with a brand and purchasing their product. The consequences of this are not academic. Teenagers can face bullying for having the wrong brand shirt or shoes. Adults purchase Teslas, iPhones, and Herman Miller, less for their usefulness and more for crafting an identity—often one that subconsciously involves escaping feelings of smallness or worthlessness. In a shame economy our feelings of worth and identity are determined by what we buy and the brands we align with. Perhaps it is this compulsion, this need to escape shame that drives desire within our current capitalist system. We’ve been trained to misinterpret relief from shame as happiness and freedom.

Self as Ad (Work in Progress)

With the advent of social media everyone now has access to the tools of mass media (not equally). This has allowed some very important voices to be heard and hilarious memes to be made. But the power to wield shame has also been “democratized”. It’s no longer only glossy corporate ads that manipulate our feelings of worthlessness, now many of us have become bit players in The Shame Economy. We present ourselves online as both ad and product for our own personal brands. Byung Chul Han calls this the “ego exhibited as a commodity“. Those who perform well enough, who have enough likes and followers, who’s bodies fit into norms shaped by a century of advertising, who’s ideas are polarized enough to get engagement, appear to transcend shame and weakness. They are the new icons of advertising, influencing our desires, telling us who to be. It’s no coincidence that social media platforms are ad-supported. The design of an ad and the design of a user-generated piece of content are presented in the exact same way.

This online objectification and commoditization of the self (Han) appears to have increased feelings of unworthiness and shame in our lives and in society. The person who feels like a looser because they don’t measure up to the likes or looks of their peers on TikTok is incentivized to try harder to be successful—to change their body, their style, their voice, their interests, to work harder to gain a following—in other words to labor without pay for a large corporation, not to gain food or clothing, but to escape feelings of worthlessness.

The Shame Economy has thrived on the internet.

Shame Sells

In The Shame Economy both advertising (traditional and social media) and pornography objectify women for profit in shame-relief programs for men.

In pornography, images of women (and men) are sold as consumable products not only to provide sexual pleasure, or numb mens’ loneliness, but also to relieve men from feelings of shame. For many men, consuming porn is the only time they feel good about themselves, the only place they experience a simulacrum of the unconditional acceptance they perhaps never received as children or teens. This shame relief dynamic is also central to the way sexuality is used in advertising. Axe Body Spray ads are less about having a fulfilling sexual experience with a woman and more about never feeling like a looser. Perhaps the male gaze is just as much about escaping shame as grasping for power—or maybe they’re related as power and violence is one way men try to “armor up” (Brown) against experiencing difficult feelings like shame.

The church and state of previous generations used shame to restrict the social roles and gender expressions available to women in order to serve the needs of men in power. But the Shame Economy has perhaps created an equally violent dynamic. Through advertising and other image-based media, The Shame Economy has dictated impossibly narrow standards that women must squeeze into in order to be desirable in our society as shame-relief “products” for men. Advertisers and corporations (and now influencers) have the power to set the norms of who counts as a “real” woman and who does not. Women who fall short of The Shame Economy’s impossible (and always changing) standards are rejected for not being hot enough, smart enough, hip enough, busy enough, successful enough, conservative enough, liberal enough, or nice enough. To fail in any of these ways is to no longer belong in the realm of “normal” and to be judged as not “desirable”--not having the necessary elements needed to relieve men from their shame. Women are shamed by The Shame Economy for not being “enough” to relieve men from their shame.

Philosopher Byung Chul Hul makes the case that in our current form of capitalism we have lost any sense of the truly erotic. Unlike the shame relief in porn and advertising, in his view, the truly erotic has negativity in it. A true encounter with the erotic is not always a comforting experience. Where the consumption of porn acts as an opiate covering over shame wounds, an actual relationship with an imperfect human can press into our wounds. It can wake us up to our own pain and shame. But many of us men who were raised in The Shame Economy can’t handle the cognitive dissonance of this negative element in the erotic. But it is this encounter with the strangeness and full dignity of the beloved that can spark change. Psychologist Richard Schwartz labels this dynamic as “partner as tor-mentor”. In this way, ironically, women actually can be a healing force in the lives of men, through resisting the objectifying logic of The Shame Economy, and insisting on their own full dignity as they are. This “negativity” will feel painful and unattractive to men raised on ads, social media, and porn, but this is a necessary detoxification from The Shame Economy’s promise of shame relief through consumption. Consumption of Shame Economy stories and porn are an “opiate of the masses” that keep us men from caring for our pain and growing up as individuals, partners, fathers, and compassionate members of our communities.

End of part 1.

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