The Opposite of Shame

A friend asked me, the other day, what I thought the opposite of shame was. Years ago, I'd led a workshop for men called "The Things We Can't Forgive Ourselves For" and we were talking about another such thing happening and he was trying to ascertain where I would be taking the men to by the end of it. Certainly, it must be a journey from 'shame' to... what?

"For me, it's obviously self-confidence," he said.

Shame seems to be a popular word these days and, like most words, it seems to mean a lot of different things. In his understanding, shame was synonymous with a profound lack of confidence and, I suppose, it's not far off the mark from my understanding of it. In the context we were speaking I was using shame to speak to a state people get to where they don't even believe they deserve to be alive on this Earth anymore.

Of course, there are those who speak of a 'healthy shame' for which others might use the word humility and then there are ways that traditional cultures have used shaming as a tool to keep their cultures from going too far off the rails, knowing that there are certain behaviours, such as stealing from others, that can cause a chain reaction, an uncontrollable wildfire of responses from which it is costly to recover.

But, in this case, I'm speaking to a dynamic in which the thoughts, "I'm a bad person. I deserve to be punished and shunned," appear on a regular basis.

"So," my friend asked. "What is the opposite of shame?"

The question is a trap.

The question is, unknown even to itself, a deep illness in our modern culture perpetuating itself in the attempt to cure itself.

As Wittgenstein said once, "And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably."

I paused for a moment in answering, as if a hundred horses wanted to get out of the corral of my mouth at the same time.

His question wasn't just about shame. His question was about how we understand and make sense of the world.

"It's not so much that I'm trying to get people to an opposite of shame but that shame is the result of a way of looking at the world that divides it into opposites."

Ever since the times of the Greeks, and perhaps before, we have seen growth of what's now known as binary-oppositional thinking. This manner of thinking does three things.

First, it divides everything up into opposites. Black/white, night/day, right/wrong, good/bad, true/false etc.

Second, though it's implied in the word opposite, it imagines that these two things are opposed to each other.

Third, it tends to favour one of those two: white is better than black, day is better than night, right is better than wrong, good is better than bad, and true is better than false.

The challenge is that the world doesn't divide up that way. But, when we speak in this way, we conjure a shell, a sort of magnetic field around us that doesn't let us see anything but those opposites. Everyone is either 'with us' or 'against us'. You're either right wing or you're left wing. The capacity to see things that stand in the doorway, at the edge of the field, the moments in between day and night are banished. If you imagine that the world is black and white, then you will lose the capacity to see colour.

The world is full of a deep and wild diversity that doesn't obey the grossly overly simplified dictates of our binary-oppositional renderings of the world.

The Scorpion’s tail of imagining the there is a dichotomous relationship between good and bad and right and wrong means that you will always try to be right and good and, if you succeed, then you will feel superior to others.

But you will always be terrified to fall.

And if you do, if you do something that is bad and wrong you will feel inferior to others. If it's bad enough and wrong enough, you will find yourself utterly defenseless, the front door of your house kicked in and feeling undeserving of fixing it even as winter creeps in.

There are many other cultures who do not think in this way and, when someone does something that causes harm, seek to restore wholeness and to educate rather than punish. They seek to connect people to the full consequences of their actions as a means of restoring that person's humanity because the village deserves a whole and healthy human being, not because the human being deserves punishment.

If the world is a binary, if it's cut in half, then you will lift up one half and banish the other and, if you fall in the bad half, you will banish yourself.

But this is not the architecture of the world. The world is not a binary.

So, what is the opposite of shame?

This might be better understood as shame being the result of a worldview of opposites that appears even in the question about it.

The worldview of opposites creates shame and then attempts to solve the shame by, again, finding its opposite.

Another way to say this is: shame is caused by war and then we try to resolve it with a more noble form of war.

The binary oppositional thinking is our war on the world. It's a virus that sets everything against everything.

So, what is the opposite of shame?

What if shame has no opposite?

And what if shame is not 'one thing' but a composite of many things? What if each person experiences shame in slightly different ways because it's made up of slightly different things for each person?

What if the same manner of thinking that created shame will not solve the shame?

What if shame has its needed role in the great pantheon of human experience? What if shunning shame is just a set up for more shame (but now it's a shame about having shame)?

What if we might begin with looking at shame without trying to find its opposite but instead a deep willingness to learn the shame itself. What if we didn't approach shame as if we were going to war with it but as if it were one to wonder about? What if we courted shame, slowly, like a lover? What if we stopped imagining that we understood shame so well or that it understood us so well?

What is the opposite of shame?

Maybe the world doesn’t divide up easily into shame (bad) and ‘not shame’ (good). Maybe shame isn’t so big. Maybe it’s just one of the many denizens of the forest of our mutual days. Maybe it has its role too.

This is a question that perpetuates the way of thinking that has brought our world to the very place and the very moment where we imagine that asking such a question will bring us somewhere new.

What if there is no opposite to shame? What if shame is the result of insisting on looking at the world in opposites?