PHILADELPHIA — The most powerful human emotion is not love or anger or jealousy but shame. That might sound like a bold declaration, but think about the acts committed in its name and you should begin to see its unique ability to both inspire and destroy. Carl Jung’s description of it as a “soul-eating emotion” strikes very close to the source of its singularity: love, anger, jealousy — these are all things we feel primarily toward others. Shame in its purest form is inspired exclusively by ourselves.
When James Harden strode blankly off the court at the end of the Sixers’ Game 6 loss to the Miami Heat in May, he looked like a man who was deep in the throes of shame. He has never said this explicitly, and he may never admit that his frustration had penetrated to such depths, but everything he said and did in the aftermath betrayed a man in the midst of an internal crisis.
For the first time in his career, he would enter an offseason without the comfort of knowing that he’d done everything he could. For the first time in his career, he walked off a playoff court knowing that he had not left it all out there. Not only that, but he knew that the reason he had not left it all out there was that he’d brought nothing there to leave. There is only one path forward for a man who has arrived at such a realization. He can fight, or he can flee.
