The power of humiliation

Selected excerpts from "Put on the Diamonds," an essay in the October 2021 issue of Harper's Magazine:

Anton Chekhov once observed that the worst thing life can do to human beings is to inflict humiliation. Nothing, nothing, nothing in the world can destroy the soul as much as outright humiliation. Every other infliction can eventually be withstood or overcome, but not humiliation. Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries forever. It allows people to brood for decades on end, often deforming their inner lives...

A psychiatrist who interviewed a group of men imprisoned for murder and other violent crimes asked each of them why he had done it. In almost all cases the answer was “He dissed me.”.. The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni was right when he wrote that [Harvey] Weinstein’s “hotel-room horror shows had as much to do with humiliation as with lust.”..

Primo Levi speaks often of the Nazi practice of “useless violence,” by which he means that even though everyone in Auschwitz—guards, gatekeepers, commanders—knew that all the prisoners were headed either for the gas chamber or a bullet in the head, they were nonetheless beaten, screamed at, made to stand naked and to endure a roll call that kept them at attention for an hour or two several times a week, outside, in every kind of weather.

Before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I thought Americans incapable of inflicting such horrors. After Abu Ghraib, I realized that Americans were as willing as the nationals of any other country to inflict the kind of humiliation that would make it a matter of indifference to the prisoner whether he lived or died.

In April 2011, The New York Review of Books published a letter written by two law professors, protesting the conditions under which the U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was being held: in solitary confinement, asked every five minutes the question “Are you okay?,” and the very week that the letter was written, forced to sleep naked and stand naked for inspection in front of her cell.

The law professors pronounced this treatment tantamount to a violation of the U.S. criminal statute against torture, and defined the Army’s methods as, among other things, “procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.”

As I read the article I had to stop and ponder the difference between humiliation, embarrassment and shame.  The terms seem to be used interchangeable, especially in the media when a (typically female) character announces "I was so ashamed"/ "I was so embarrassed"/ "I was so humiliated."

My sense is that shame and embarrassment typically arise when one's own actions or errors run counter to one's sense of propriety, while humiliation is typically imposed upon one by some other person.

Now back to the article, which offers this enticing paragraph to old English majors:

Humiliation commands the shape and texture of the works in which the following characters appear: George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth, Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas. Many of these characters are made to suffer materially, but their material pain is as nothing next to the immaterial pain they suffer simply by being in a position that inflames the disgust and anxiety of those who seem to hold all the cards but need the tormented inferior close by—just to make sure.

To this list I would add one memorable character, portrayed somewhat whimsically in this classic New Yorker cartoon:

And back to the article for a final thought:

The great Borges thought it best to look upon our broken inner state as one of life’s great opportunities—to prove ourselves deserving of the blood pulsing through our veins. “Everything that happens,” he wrote, “including humiliations, misfortunes, embarrassments, all is given like clay,” so that we may “make from the miserable circumstances of our lives” something worthy of the gift of consciousness.

Growth would be nice, but vengeance makes for better movies. (Much more at the link, btw...)