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A Look at Shame in Modern Society
Shame is in an interesting place in modern society. On the one hand, we've made the wise decision not to shame people into feeling bad about being extremely depressed or anxious, etc. This understanding has come from recognizing that a lot of the time, these feelings can make their conditions worse, thereby leading to increased suffering.
At the same time though, we have lost much of the utility of shame. Shame, in its traditional role, is to engender manners and create a very legible and trainable way for people to interact with each other. This is not a new concept, as Emily Post pointed out in her etiquette books. She talked about how the point of manners is to consider and focus on how the other person is feeling, and not to focus exclusively on your own desires.
I think the absence of this benefit of shame is why so much of modern society is characterized by vitriol and name-calling, etc. These are often symptoms of a deeper issue. A lot of this has to do with the norms of acceptable discourse online, where anonymity can sometimes contribute to a lack of empathy and understanding. It has gone out of fashion to shame people into talking or acting a certain way, even though there is a lot of social utility there.
How can we grapple with the two edges of shame, and find a way to have productive social discourse without burying people under piles of negative emotions?
Does it start with changing internet culture, and following the cancellation warrior's plan of making online anonymity a thing of the past?
Do we need to return to aristocratic training and virtues, making sure the elite at least have a legible, shared set of manners they can use to discuss fraught topics with each other?
Perhaps artificial intelligence will grow in capabilities to the point where we will talk to each other through an AI interface, which will automatically insert manners and promote productive discussion.
Where do you, dear reader, think that our society should go with regards to how we incorporate shame into our culture?
The best example of this, to me, is found in the term "fat shaming". The first time I heard it, I genuinely couldn't make sense of it, I was sincerely puzzled by what was meant. To me, being fat is plainly a bad thing to be, is a thing that people become due to their own actions, and therefore it is shameful to be fat. If someone engaged in self-control or exercise, they wouldn't be fat, but they are fat, so that is shameful. What an unsophisticated fool I was! If we can't even apply shame to something so straightforwardly negative, I don't see much hope for shaming behavior that's more equivocal.
Problem is "self-control or exercise" is not a solution to fatness in modern food environment like it maybe was for some king or rich merchant in the past. General populace just can't beat hyperstimulus, not without semaglutide at least. Fat shaming is bad because it isn't solving the issue of population becoming more and more obese it just makes lifes of unhealthy people more miserable.
What about Japan? Obesity rate there is lower than Ethiopia!
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-rates-by-country
I keep hearing people I presume to be Americans bemoaning obesity like it's an otherwise incurable curse that needs a technical fix. It really isn't impossible to have a healthy country if you have a healthy diet. Japan is fairly wealthy. Japan has access to American-style food, they just have their own cuisine which is healthier than the stuff we eat in the West. And I've never heard complaints that Japanese food is boring and unpleasant to eat. Hyperstimulus is just a description of problems localized to Western diet. And it is also possible to be healthy with a Western diet, if people put in a little effort cooking at home and buying food with proper ingredients that our ancestors would recognize. Cooking is not an advanced skill like programming, every household could do it a century ago.
HFCS-enriched chemical food is a choice. Like with its drugs problem, the US chooses to be fat and sick. It is possible for rich countries to be healthy and thin. It is possible for countries to build HSR. There are examples of it happening all around us.
People in thin places like Japan, Ethiopia, or the 1970s don't need to exercise self-control to stay thin. They just stay thin naturally.
On the other hand, we have a word for people who need to constantly employ self-control to try to lose weight. We call them fat people.
The solution is not for people to employ heroic amounts of self control. Instead the solution is for the natural environment to be reshaped such that self-control is not necessary. Sadly, there are no practical suggestions for how to do this on a large scale. We're not going to turn the U.S. into Japan. Also, we don't truly understand the root causes of the obesity epidemic.
I also think the suggestions for people to "just eat less" are equally bad. If you tell someone to do something 1000 times and they never do it, the advice isn't bad necessarily, but its certainly not effective.
I don't have any great suggestions for the interventions that will work. I just know that the ones which have been repeated ad nauseum for the last 30 years definitely don't work. It's time to try something different.
Semalglutide and its successors seem the most likely to actually make a difference.
What if the US just tried harder? In wartime, if fighting hasn't worked, then surrender, flight or negotiation are alternative options. But you can also fight harder to achieve victory.
I refuse to accept that the US has made a serious effort to fight obesity. European and American versions of food are wildly different in their ingredients, even the unhealthy stuff is markedly more full of weird chemicals:https://foodbabe.com/food-in-america-compared-to-the-u-k-why-is-it-so-different/
I know that everything is technically a chemical but there should not be petroleum products in food, not even as preservatives. That's not something we were supposed to consume. Reduce the processed chemical slop, return to food that comes from fields, seas and pasture.
Well, when Japan faced serious problems with their society, they tried consciously and intensively to turn itself into a blend of the UK, Germany and America. They copied the strengths of other nations and became stronger for it, while the rest of Asia was left behind. But they could've said, 'oh we're not going to turn Japan into Germany', done nothing and gotten colonized. Learning from other countries and copying what they do well is a useful and beneficial tactic. Refusing to learn is not a recipe for success.
Good points as long as "try harder" isn't just try the same stuff that's failed over and over again but the Max Power way.
I said I didn't have any ideas, but interventions targeted at youth seem like they have the greatest chance of success. People who are fat at age 18 tend to be fat for life. We could have more P.E. classes and actually flunk the nerds and fat kids who fail to meet standards instead of giving everyone who shows up an A.
If we're allowed to consider pharmaceutical inventions, then Metformin and Semalglutide should be free.
I think it would be good to teach young people how to cook for themselves. It's a basic, important skill. Economical too.
I mean, if Semaglutide works then great. It just seems like a really inelegant solution. What are the other consequences of eating highly processed food? Is processed food or additives making people mentally ill? Reducing sperm counts? There are other modern plagues aside from obesity. Even examining pictures of our grandfathers reveals significant differences in phenotype. There are faces that you just don't see anymore.
I think a big chunk of this multifaceted problem stems from things that people ingest, whether that's hormones, food additives, drugs or microplastics. Better to change diets than to introduce new sources of complexities via gastric bypass or drugs. Once we have a complete understanding of the body and biology generally, then we should be more aggressive. Given that our understanding is limited, we should try to reduce complexity of inputs (or use tried and tested inputs), reduce unnecessary medical interventions. Healthcare already gobbles up too much of our wealth as it is, with limited returns on quality of life.
As someone who doesn’t cook, it’s because it takes ages to get a worse-tasting product than what I can buy, it’s messy and I have to clean up afterwards. Frankly, I have better things to do with my time. It would be an ask even if I had a big kitchen and a short commute but otherwise it’s just not on.
Perhaps I’m overextending but I think that before 1950 cooking was done by housewives, employers or landladies. After the 80s it was mostly takeaways and microwaveable meals. The era when a majority of employed people cooked for themselves was almost infinitesimally short.
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