In part 1 I wrote about shame as an adaptive but limiting force, and how we might start to change our perspective of it and ourselves. This part is more about shame as a foundation of oppression.
Meanness armor
Bullies strut, puffing their chests and threatening violence to assert domination. They belittle, lie, take what they have not earned, and do whatever they can to inflate their perceived status. They dehumanize and manipulate to discharge their pain and self-worthlessness.
On a playground, bullying looks like stealing lunch money, spitting in a kid’s drink, using “fat” as an insult and a justification, and twisting unfamiliar names into nasty puns. At the extreme it is traumatizing, predatory, and abusive.
In politics, bullying looks like stealing minerals, poisoning water supplies, using “animal” as an insult and a justification, and twisting unfamiliar cultural practices into barbarism. At the extreme it is traumatizing, predatory, and genocidal.
Whatever the scale, shame is the puppeteer, wearing disguises of authority and righteousness. The scared child pretending to be powerful and omnipotent to cover how injured and unsure they actually feel. Shame tells us the ways we have been hurt are our fault, and that we can avoid being hurt in the future by armoring up and punching down.
In a world that has not made enough space for grief practices and psycho-emotional repair, that rewards bravado and exploits weakness, undigested pain turns into a quest for revenge. When punishment-lust gets empowered by massive armaments and propelled by media narratives, it can lead to the multiple genocides that are happening now.
Reclaiming softness
The etymological root of bully is a Dutch word that means “lover,” it was a term of endearment for centuries. Hatred is love deformed; unfulfilled longing for connection can devolve into destructiveness.
The inquiry at the true heart of most faiths is how we can love more. More authentically, more fiercely, more wholly. A bully is a lover who learned attacking instead of tending, who learned to touch through a fist or a bomb instead of a caress.
Concealing panic and grasping power make empathy impossible; life reduces to a careening horror ride from one method of trying to escape pain to another. Shame cuts off a bully from their own sense of self-worth, so they try to get worthiness by pushing down and climbing over other people. This gets compounded by centuries-long campaigns of dehumanizing people with different languages/skin colors/cultures/gods to excuse exploiting or displacing them.
The survival-protection origin of shame can intensify feelings of embarrassment, awkwardness, discomfort, loneliness, and otherness to the point that we are afraid we might actually die. For most of us the shame mechanism is so well hidden that we are often unaware that it is driving our behaviors and patterns. But liberation requires us to look back at the voices that have controlled us and refuse to obey any longer.
To stop being bullies and become more resilient against bullying, we need to bury our dead. To learn how to be kind to ourselves in the places the world has shamed us. To feature our supposed flaws and delight in our differences. To remember ourselves as living beings within an animate web.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written this and it won’t be the last, because the more I study the mechanisms of war, internal or global, the more I think our primary tactic of liberation and reconciliation is learning what it actually means to love ourselves while entangled with an overculture that feeds on fear.
If we learn to lovingly regard ourselves as dynamic processes within a living web, we will not need to dominate others to feed our worthiness hunger. And we will become more resilient against others’ narratives about us and their patterns of asserting dominance.
We get to reclaim our capacity for embodiment, whatever the world throws at us. We get to release the quest for the kind of “self-improvement” that is actually self-hatred in disguise. We get to refute any story, from the world or our own minds, that tells us our innate nature is flawed.
While we may not be able to rid ourselves of shame we can turn the volume down on it by focusing on what we want to create and how we want to show up in the world. We can focus on sharing our art and our love. We can focus on movement, relationship, germinating and disseminating joy, generating vitality, and living in reciprocity with the world around us. We can train ourselves to notice when shame is running the show and practice orientation and other resiliency tools to interrupt the pattern.
We get to stop fixing other people in certain roles and identity boxes in our minds, and find more honest and fluid ways to orient. We get to release the idea that we need to control others, or that we need unchanging conditions, to feel safe. And we get to discover how truly communal liberation is, how your health and freedom and mine, and everyone’s, are intrinsically and inseparably linked.
Stopping bullies
Understanding one potential reason for why people hurt people at the scale of individuals or governments can help us hold onto our own humanity, and not let ourselves also be twisted into oppressive monsters. But it doesn’t automatically stop the bullies. We each have different spheres of influence and capacities, but we all have ways of contributing to a culture with less bullying:
Notice how you talk about people who come from different identity groups and cultures. What banter, slang, slurs, and “jokes” do you tolerate, even when the people being insulted are not around?
Make domineering less attractive - don’t watch or participate in media that glorifies war and colonialism. Instead, watch movies made by oppressed and marginalized people, engage in media that tells their stories first-hand.
Speak up when you see oppression happening around you, in person or online. Stand up for the ones being bullied in whatever ways you can. Don’t let justifications like “boys will be boys” or “it’s complicated” slide. Make waves. Jeopardize your popularity for your integrity. The people you actually belong with will still be there after the false belonging crowd disperses.
Make oppression less profitable. Stop purchasing goods and supporting companies that rely on exploitative labor, war profiteering, and resource theft (Tl:dr, most multi-national companies, so shop local, buy used, and reuse/repair as much as you can).
Cultivate communities of care - join or create mutual aid groups, find or co-create community grief groups.
Leverage the time and skills you have. Create anti-oppressive art. Call your representatives and demand they call for a ceasefire. Amplify the voices of people who don’t have large platforms.
Beyond ideas of good and bad, we get to learn how to accept that we are all capable of loving actions and actions that lack love. We get to break the spells of internalized shame by learning how to embrace our flaws, be accountable for our actions, and discover our true integrity. We get to commit to the practices of forgiving ourselves and creating fields of true belonging. And we get to call our leaders to account, process our collective pain, and find ways to live together beyond the cycle of retribution.
May we relate in ways that honor our interbeing.