Pride is nothing compared with shame

I’ve always felt a little weird during Pride Month. Of course, I’m happy for my LGBTQ friends, and amazed and heartened at the energy that goes into marches and other events both here and around the world. (Fuck Viktor Orbán, by the way.) That so many millions of people get to be who they are—who they want to be—in public is objectively inspiring.

The issue I have is with pride as a concept. As usual, this stems from my having read too much. From Greek mythology, I took to heart the concept of hubris, of a pride that leads to one’s doom. Hubris brought down Odysseus, Oedipus, Achilles, my boy Sisyphus, and most 1980s movie villains. And while scholars may argue that hubris was less our modern notion of pride and more a defiance of the gods’ will, a privileging of man’s independence over the dictates of Heaven, to me they feel like the same thing: The error of thinking you know anything at all—about yourself, about society, about the universe. To show pride, to exhibit confidence, is to court disaster. Far better never to admit in public you know anything than to proclaim mastery and invite comeuppance.

The Christian idea of humility dovetailed nicely with the Greek. Not that I would ever believe any of that religion, but if you were going to have faith in Jesus, committing to humility—in dress, in manner, in ambition—made sense. That was the whole idea, right? The power and the glory again belonged to God, not man.

Or maybe it was just because I was small and bullied: To remain humble was to remain hidden, and maybe safe.

Not that I ever was or still am truly humble. (I’m a Leo, after all!) No writer who sets down words for others to read can ever be called humble. We all think our thoughts worthy of an audience; we perform as only we can for readers we will likely never meet. Even the driest writer gets a byline.

Still, there’s a big gap between not-humble and loudly proud. You can demonstrate your abilities—you can be observably talented at cooking or painting or juggling or theoretical physics—without necessarily crowing about it. Actions speak louder than words and all that. Pride, meanwhile, is doing it, and making sure you’re seen doing it, and informing the world that you want to be seen doing it. Maybe this is just a stylistic preference, but that feels excessive to me.

No, worse: Pride is boring. It’s one-note. It screams: ME! ME! ME! It’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect of emotions, blinkered and self-congratulatory.

So, forget pride. What I’m interested in is shame.

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God, shame is delicious! Shame is an emotion you can feast on for years. Shame is an endless banquet of motivation and humiliation, desire and error, that reveals not who we wish to be seen as—that’s pride’s Happy Meal—but who we are, who we were, who we’re afraid of becoming. If pride is what we loudly think we know, shame is what we know but refuse to admit, even to ourselves.

In other words, shame is who we are. We are ashamed of our failures—which means we recognize our capacity for error. We are ashamed of our weaknesses, which are failures in the making. We are ashamed of our wants, which highlight our weaknesses. We are ashamed of our bodies, or parts of our bodies; we are ashamed of our families; we are ashamed of our origins. We regret, we wish vainly, we keep secrets. And all of this makes us interesting! It might not be entirely psychologically healthy, but shame—and its BFF, repression—has a way of warping our behavior that no AI can ever replicate. Who knows how or when those long-held self-hatreds will emerge? Pride may unite us, particularly when we can all with one voice proclaim the same truths about ourselves, but shame makes us individuals—human beings worthy of the name—to begin with.

Shame can be dark. Some of us have real secrets to hide, real failures to sequester, real crimes to cover up, but many of us feel ashamed of details and moments about which no one gives a damn—an unrequited Y2K crush, an overlong earlobe, the wrong word at the wrong time before the wrong person. Me, I can remember every stupid mistake I’ve ever made, every flub, flop, and imprecision, most private, others public, and I continue to wince and blush at the memories even though they’re my memories alone, riven through my neurons by shame. In fact, I’m even ashamed to admit those memories bother me so much, because who cares? I should be beyond that. But I’m not. I remain ashamed of my shame.

Should we as a society try to alleviate shame? Probably! Much of it is pointless, unproductive, painful, and worst of all oppressive—a weapon we freely hand our enemies. Shame happens because we internalize some other schmuck’s arbitrary rules about dress, behavior, money, sexual preferences; to break free requires us to replace their rules with our rules—to assert our own weird individuality over spurious conformity. (I believe this is called liberation?) But shame can never be fully conquered: Whichever set of rules reigns over your subconscious—your own, your god’s, your culture’s—you will always fail it. You will err, you will deviate, you will breed secrets simply by living. The sin of pride is to imagine you could ever escape that.

(I don’t really want to bring up the president, but he bears mention because his shamelessness is what defines him: There is no secret of his—no crime, no craven failure—so awful that, upon its exposure, he cannot turn it into a badge of honor. I don’t know if this makes him less interesting, because what is a man without shame, or more, because the regrets that truly torture what’s left of his soul are buried so deeply.)

Therefore, now that Pride Month is at an end, I wish to propose a March of Shame. Everyone—absolutely everyone in the world, including you, {{ first_name | dear reader }}—would be invited to shuffle down the street together, heads hanging in mortification. There would be no audience, since anyone who enjoys watching such a thing should be ashamed of themselves, and thus would be invited to march with everyone else. Shame hurts, but at least we all hurt together.

When I mentioned this idea to my friend M.D., he offered this twist to improve it:

Clearly, this brilliant idea will become reality not long after I click “publish” on this email. So come next March 15 (the Ides, naturally) you will find me front and center at this shameful parade, my head bowed, my gait a dismal shuffle, my voice mercifully silent. At least until I reach the apex of the oval, gaze down and laugh with all my might at your shame—at your shame and my own. Et ego, Caesar? 🪨🪨🪨