Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Come Back, Shame!

(No, I’m not misspelling dialogue from the western classic…)
There used to be this thing called shame – there were social mores – norms – taboos – established standards of accepted behavior; guardrails that we used to function as a society. It helped to reinforce standards, and even violators of the rules helped strengthen society’s overall behavior by not advertising that they were doing it, because the village was going to give them an earful if they did.
Just like when you might spank your child to emphasize how they’re not supposed to touch a hot stove to keep them from WORSE things than a spanking (of course, it’s hard to know whether anyone still spanks their kids with the threat of arrest or having your kids taken away), we would also use shame to express our disapproval of what someone was doing, because there are worse things than shame, too.
Shame - used on a regular basis – was part of what helped build a conscience.
That’s probably not a welcome concept these days – negative reinforcement is – well – NEGATIVE, and we live in a world where we are told we should only use POSITIVE reinforcement – a reward (payment) for doing the right thing instead of punishment for doing the wrong thing. Of course, it’s hard to know who has really done the right thing when everyone gets a prize now just for being there…
Look – I know some people actually have empathy, and learn not to do things to other people because of how it makes those other people feel, but if you think about it, it’s still rather self-serving – we feel bad if we make other people feel bad, and we don’t want to feel bad, so… The Golden Rule seems wonderfully altruistic, but when you tell people “treat others as you want to be treated”, some of those people do it because of intimidation; they don’t want to be treated badly themselves.
We used to keep a very clear connection between a person and their actions. Society has worked hard to separate the two. Some time back (maybe in the 60’s), spankings became this horrible thing that no one should inflict on their children. We started worrying about what happened in this serial killer’s past that made them kill, and blamed ourselves that they were sociopaths instead of holding them responsible for the choices they made. More recently, a lot of emphasis has been placed on the “I like you, I just don’t like what you did” school of parenting, because we certainly didn’t want to “Johnny’s” self-esteem by holding his actions against him.
Look around you. If you’re like me, you see your world in upheaval – social standards are falling by the wayside. The underpinnings of our culture (social, economic, political - what have you) are being vilified as though they are the cause of the problems instead of the foundation civilization needs to survive. Things that have been considered common sense, ethical and moral practices have been turned on their head and ignored by people who have been raised to have no regard of RULES or the REALITY behind them.
Society has taken away spankings and shame as teaching tools. What are we using to take their place? Is it possible that the upsurge in self-centered sociopaths (by which I mean people who don’t care about other people and won’t conform to social norms – which includes bullies and mass-murderers, as well as people who can stand in front of millions and claim that they feel your pain, and then continue to cause more of it) is due to a failure to adequately chasten these children (and that’s what they still are), with the result that they think whatever they want they should have?
Just saying….
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William Mangieri’s writing (including his latest ePublication “The Re-Entanglement of Grant Decker”) can be found in many places, such as:
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