So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

“Regrets of the sort I have are all-consuming,” Jonah continued. “I think about what I’ve done to the people I loved. What I’ve put my wife through. What I’ve put my brother through. What I’ve put my parents through. That is haunting. Long after I get over the loss of my status, and the loss of my career, which I enjoyed, I will never . . . Life is short. And I have caused tremendous pain to the people I love. I don’t know what that feeling’s called. Remorse sounds about right. There’s a tremendous amount of remorse. And as time passes, that isn’t going away. It is miserable and haunting.”

You combine insecurity and ambition, and you get an inability to say no to things.

I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people.

I suppose it’s no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt—before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. It’s the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behavior.

“The justice system in the West has a lot of problems,” Poe said, “but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don’t have any rights when you’re accused on the Internet. And the consequences are worse. It’s worldwide forever.”

I think we all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?

A shaming can be like a distorting mirror at a funfair, taking human nature and making it look monstrous.

It locks people off in the world they started with and prevents them from finding out anything different. They got trapped in the system of feedback reinforcement. The idea that there is another world of other people who have other ideas is marginalized in our lives.”

We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age. “Look!” we’re saying. “WE’RE normal! THIS is the average!” We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it.