Technocracy: Online Connections and the Death of Shame

My WND Technocracy column this week was inspired by an interaction I had with a representative of a Ninjitsu dojo in California.  I was being harassed by one of the school’s students, who went so far as to create a Twitter account to impersonate me and pretend to be a racist.

Any of the people we meet online could become our good friends in real life. And any of them could, by their behavior, shame us and threaten us.

When I let the owner of the school knew that one of his students was behaving publicly in a vulgar, profane, and disgraceful manner, the folks in charge didn’t care.  Their attitude was basically that as long as the student in question hadn’t done anything to offend them personally, his public conduct was none of their concern, good-day-to-you-sir.

This was eye-opening because in all serious martial arts clubs and schools, disgraceful and criminal conduct of the type displayed by this particular student would be grounds for throwing that student out of the school — or, at the very least, disciplining or sanctioning him in some way.  The entire affair struck me as symbolic of the death of shame in our culture.

Read the full column here in WND News.