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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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Hard disagree. Other options: They respect your autonomy enough to present you with a moral choice. They are seeing if there is narrative overlap. They are ready to coerce you but recognize it as costly. awareness of cost is not uncertainty. They are prioritizing.
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