For an important emotion, shame is strangely easy to get wrong. This is a conundrum of our age, with its constant access to a worldwide gallery of the shameful, but also of most other ages. The very first moment of human shame, according to Genesis, was misplaced: Adam and Eve hide from God in Eden not because they’ve disobeyed him and eaten the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, but because, having eaten the fruit, they are ashamed of being naked.
Shame is a social emotion. It is something you feel, but it is also something you believe—or feel, through your other emotions—that other people should be feeling. “It is administered,” Cathy O’Neil writes in the introduction to The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation, “by a collective whose rules and taboos are etched into our psyches. Its goal is the survival not of the individual, but of the society.”
