Book: So You've Been Publicly ShamedAuthor: Jon RonsonPublisher: Riverhead BooksPages: 304

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Shaming is an act of assault and robbery. It robs the victim of something he had held private, and makes it public. This loss of a private memory, experience, can be dehumanising at times. This is what makes it so attractive and irresistible as a weapon in the hands of the individual or the mob, and what arouses the most violent of passions and feelings of retribution in the victim. Jon Ronson's book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, is in his inimitable style, a quick, breezy look at some recent public shamings and an attempt to understand the why.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Never has a more false proverb been more convincingly uttered. The power of words has been underestimated; severely, grossly, terribly, massively underestimated. Ask James Gilligan, described as "about the world's best chronicler of what a shaming can do to our inner lives."

In the 1970s, Gilligan, a young psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School lead a group of a of investigative psychiatrists to "make sense of the chaos" that were Massachusetts prisons and mental hospitals on the orders of a US District Court judge. What was the scene like? "Inmates were swallowing razor blades and blinding and castrating themselves and each other... Prisoners were getting killed, officers were getting killed, visitors were getting killed."

Such were the inmates that James Gilligan worked with and interviewed. What did he observe and what were his findings? 

"Gilligan filled notepads with observations from his interviews with the men. He wrote, ‘Some have told me that they feel like robots or zombies, that their bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood, that instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords. One inmate told me he feels like “food that is decomposing”. These men’s souls did not just die. They have dead souls because their souls were murdered. How did it happen? How were they murdered?’ This was, he felt, the mystery he’d been invited inside Massachusetts’ prisons and mental hospitals to solve. And one day it hit him. ‘Universal among the violent criminals was the fact that they were keeping a secret,’ Gilligan wrote. ‘A central secret. And that secret was that they felt ashamed - deeply ashamed, chronically ashamed, acutely ashamed.’ It was shame, every time. ‘I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed. As children these men were shot, axed, scalded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of the window, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their pimps. For others words alone shamed and rejected, insulted and humiliated, dishonoured and disgraced, tore down their self-esteem, and murdered their soul.’ For each of them the shaming ‘occurred on a scale so extreme, so bizarre, and so frequent that one cannot fail to see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum of violent behaviour in adulthood occupied an equally extreme end of the continuum of violent child abuse earlier in life.’ " [pg 235,]

Is it any wonder that shaming is such a powerful weapon in the hands of the individual and the mob alike? Is it any wonder also that shaming has become so endemic in the world of the Internet?

Remember Jonah Lehrer, the once bestselling author of pop-science books and a Malcolm Gladwell in the making (in whatever way you choose to see Gladwell notwithstanding)? He was exposed as a serial plagiarizer and then saw his attempt at a public apology go up in smoke in front of his eyes, in real-time. The organisers, Knight Frank, had arranged for a live Twitter feed to be displayed on screen behind his head and even as he read his prepared speech-apology.

Then there is the case of "Hank" and Adria Richards where public shaming via Twitter was followed by an even more vicious retributive cyber-lynching orchestrated by and on 4chan. The author's conversation with the young 4chan denizen, Mercedes Haefer sheds some light on the psychology of shaming. Throw in your prejudices, pre-conceived notions, stereotypes, then add in a dash of the spice of technology, and you get the perfect recipe for shamings in the modern era. Here is what Haefer said:

"But 4chan aims to degrade the target, right? And one of the highest degradations for women in our culture is rape. We don’t talk about rape of men, so I think it doesn’t occur to most people as a male degradation. With men they talk about getting them fired. In our society men are supposed to be employed."

Shaming is a form of control, an assertion of power over the victim, a no-holds barred degradation of the victim where physical violence is not possible or not practical.

Reading through the book, I felt it hit a high somewhere around the chapter on 4chan and the lynching-counter-lynching episodes.

This is not a book on cyber-bullying. Emily Bazelon wrote Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy on that topic. This is not even a book on how the Internet enables cyber-bullying. Nor is it about hate crimes in cyberwar—  there is an eponymous book on that by Danielle Keats Citron.

Does So You've Been Publicly Shamed provide any hope, any solution to the malaise of this relentless form of mob frenzy of shaming? Yes, and no.

What Ronson provides, at the end of the day, is a short, breezy look at a few aspects of shaming, with a little bit of history, a dash of personal anecdotes, some curative as well as palliative ruminations, and the trademark his wry humour.