19 February 2022

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...)

12 comments:

  1. People use those words interchangeably, but I always understood that embarrassment is temporary, like when you mispronounce a word or audibly fart. Shame is recognizing when you've done something hurtful or sinful. And humiliation ...is what you've described here.

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  2. This parses out the differences quite nicely, and has the benefit of being grounded in research: https://smallactbigimpact21days.wordpress.com/2019/06/15/shame-vs-humiliation-vs-guilt-vs-embarrassment-brene-brown/
    A helpful resource.

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  3. Jewish thought has much to say about how horrible it is to publicly humiliate a person. Theis is because they have suffered much humiliation and mockery for their piety over history, and theylive in a traditional honor-shame culture where one's honor is everything.

    The rabbis called it “Whitening the Face” and saw it as a crime just short of murder. Why? Because just as the face of a corpse is white, the face of a humiliated person becomes white to show that you have “murdered” him, in a sense. You have caused him great pain and distress, and the person’s reputation is often damaged in a way that cannot be repaired, just as murder can never be undone.

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  4. You can only be humiliated if you take your honor and/or opponent serious.

    Pick one and start ridiculing yourself or your opponent.

    Also, fuck revenge. It's such a waste of time.

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    1. That strategy (or perhaps tactic) would have worked well in WW II Nazi Detention Camps...

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    2. Word. I can't find who said it, but I really like the quote "Holding a grudge is letting someone live rent free in your head".

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    3. That was Ann Landers -

      https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/living-in-your-head-rent-free-is-the-perfect-insult-of-our

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  5. That strategy (or perhaps tactic) would have worked well in WW II Nazi Detention Camps..

    Sure, pull a Godwin without suggesting a better alternative. Surely you can cite dozens of successful strategies that worked in termination camps?

    I'm waiting.

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    Replies
    1. It's not "pulling a Godwin" if the author of the article has already introduced the Nazi dimension! As to the formula of ridiculing oneself and/or ones opponent: Yes, in less than "serious" context (i.e., bad customer service), great advice. In a serious moment (i.e., Dachau), not applicable.

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  6. I think of saving-face as the flip side of humiliation, and think it's just as detrimental. Sometimes it's better to just accept that we are flawed humans and move forward.

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  7. The nuns told us that the opposite of love was not hate, it was apathy. If you hate someone, you still acknowledge them. With apathy, that acknowledgement does not exist.

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