Principle of Narrative Relativity: You cannot shame or guilt someone living in a different narrative than you. You can at best humiliate or enrage them and that’s rarely a useful thing to do.
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Shame/guilt operate on a baseline posture of nonzero caring. A move to discount the value of the posture. But if someone doesn’t adopt a posture of even hypocritical caring to begin with you’ve got nothing. Discounting zero is still zero.
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If I pretend 2 units of caring but act only 1 unit, you could maybe shame me into matching actions to words. But you can’t shame someone who already cares 0 units.
It’s like the zero lose bound (ZLB) problem in monetary policy. You can’t lower nominal interest rate below zero.
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Interestingly one way societies maneuver people into being hypocritical enough in their caring posture for shaming tactics to begin to work is to allow them to get rich. Wealth creates an attack surface for shame/guilt. The mechanism is complex but it does work.
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Protect some of your capacity for shameless, non-secretive action. You’ve lost the plot of your own narrative when nothing you do is immune to shaming tactics.
But 100% invulnerability to shaming is overkill.
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When someone tries to shame or guilt you into acting differently, there are two causes:
1. They are too weak to coerce you
2. They are subconsciously not actually that sure of their own moral posture and are looking for validation in your contrition
2 is often >> 1
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People who are truly morally certain of their own position, including unconsciously, will generally not waste time trying to shame or guilt you. They’ll simply fight you directly as best they can.
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Okay the ZLB analogy requires more work to apply than it is worth, ignore.
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Reminds me of assumption of risk for greater outcomes. Don’t spend time convincing them if you’re right, just back yourself up and live the better outcome.
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One business model I’m increasingly interested in: assuming risk for outcomes.
We’ve been selling software and asking customers to trust that the increased productivity gains are worth the price.
If you’re sure, you should assume the risk and get paid for it.
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