Where's the shame?

I hereby proclaim my intention to mount a grassroots campaign to restore the concept of 'shame' into political and popular social discourse. Seppuku, the Japanese ritual suicide response to being shamed might be an extreme action in response to it, but the now-absent emotion leading to Seppuku is immensely valuable to a society. 

Anthony Weiner, Bob Filner, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, Bill Clinton retain their ability to mount – and win- political campaigns. 

Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian – the latter with her mother’s encouragement-have built empires on the back of sex tapes. Farrah Abraham and Sydney Leathers hope to be so ‘lucky’. 

The term “Sex Scandal” returns 399,000,000 Google hits. “Shame”, less than half that many. 

And it isn't just about the sex, really. 

Driven by the fame of reality television and tabloid journalism, we’ve come to not only to accept but to celebrate the ignorance of young Italians from Staten Island (home of the Jersey Shore roommates), be amusingly appalled at guffawing Cajun swamp dwellers; giggle at ignorant pageant queens and cheer nouveau riche housewives. We concern ourselves with the lives of pregnant teens and celebrate their ‘bravery’. Even Ryan Lochte was an Olympic hero until his own reality show unforgivingly exposed him as a brainless dolt. We reinforce stereotypes and fuel race baiting by giving the worst of us far more attention than the best of us. 

Of course I know as a marketer that we air, publicize and laud that which sells. And in a social, economic and political environment that constantly reinforces what is wrong with us, and politicians leveraging this to tell us that it will never change (at least without a handout to you or a contribution to a PAC), it is far easier to glory at others’ faults far worse than our own than to think better of ourselves, our circumstances, and take action to improve them. As for the ‘performers’, they fulfill their media-manufactured need for identity in an increasing anonymous society by farting on camera to gain 15 minutes of fame, and then are easily forgotten thereafter.

Television, and the media in general, has always been populated more by mindlessness than by great art or even modestly passable programming, but only in the past several years has it been about not only publicizing, but celebrating and encouraging what is, (not by puritanical - but ‘contemporary community' standards, to quote our own government (FCC) regulations), strictly aberrant, overwhelmingly embarrassing behavior for political and public figures – and then to feed the ensuing frenzy by actively creating new public figures of citizens willing to do the same things publicly. Only in this environment can "Pregnant and Dating" be a real show, and not a punchline. Sigh.

Shame was once a powerful motivator for social obedience. I understand that society moves on and social mores liberate. But moving on needn't be moving backward; liberation doesn't mean public exposure of activities reserved for the bedroom, a celebration of ignorance, or reinforcement of negative stereotypes. Further, the ubiquity of internet doesn't require that you be validated by mentions, re-tweets, and ‘likes’. 

We’re better than this. I’m ashamed of the abandonment of shame.