Once in a while, a thinker comes up with a singular lens through which to understand the world that makes disparate things make sense. For Douglas Hofstadter, it was the concept of a "strange loop," which unified incongruous intellectuals like Gödel and Escher; for Malcolm Gladwell, it was the statistical "tipping point" that intrudes in all kinds of unrelated social, biological and business schema. And for Cathy O'Neil, author of the just-released "The Shame Machine," it is the concept of shame itself.
Though not something that we often articulate publicly, shame permeates all realms of the human experience. It can be motivating, as O'Neil writes: individuals in a society who are violating social norms can be pushed towards righting their behavior vis-a-vis shame. Yet shame also takes on the dimension of currency, particularly in the online world — where profit-minded social media giants quietly push us to obsessively shame strangers to the extent that it increases time spent on their sites, and therefore their profits. This manipulation of our emotional culture should alarm us, inasmuch as it sows division among the body politic and only aggravates our bitter culture war.
