In an antique city-state, or a modern municipality, shame is the penalty for the violation of ethics — making things more symmetric. Banishment and exile, or, worse, ostracism were severe penalties — people did not move around voluntarily and considered uprooting a horrible calamity. In larger organisms like the mega holy nation-state, with a smaller role for face-to-face encounters, and social roots, shame ceases to fulfill its duty of disciplinarian.

…we rationalize ourselves out of shame. We can rationalize anything away as we get older and older, but a child hasn’t that capacity yet. And so when the shame hits, it’s being knocked over. And it’s the truth of shame. And it’s what comes back to us. Sometimes when we are—and it—this is what happens to everybody. There’s going to be a time, no matter who we are, that we participate in the very oldest of human sorrows. We are at one with other people in our loss, in our shame, and we come to the very limit of who we are as people. We face that part of ourselves that we never wanted to look at. And then we experience shame the way a child experiences it…It’s pure. It’s pure and that moment and other moments like it link us with other human beings, I think.

One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn't it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I've found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. . . Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes. . . To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated. Our bureaucracy, for instance. I regard it as in high degree built up on humiliation, one of the nastiest and most dangerous of all poisons.

Shame is the fear of being unworthy, and it adversely affects our relationship with God, ourselves, and others. It greatly hinders our ability to receive God’s unconditional love — and share it with others.

Shame can make you more aware. Shame can make you more empathetic, too. What’s important, of course, is not staying in that shame, not wallowing in shame. If there are any political uses of shame, it’s that it allows you to see outside yourself. And to move, and to do something with that.

Shame...is a first rate form of social control. Shame is what keeps us in line, what prevents us from discovering not so much who we are, but what we might become.

Shame tells us that we are bad, which itself is an incredibly terrible feeling. But Systemic Shame teaches that entire groups of people are bad, and that through our choices and our identities, we constantly signal to other people whether we belong to a redeemable group or to an innately wicked one.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.

Now since shame is a mental picture of disgrace, in which we shrink from the disgrace itself and not from its consequences, and we only care what opinion is held of us because of the people who form that opinion, it follows that the people before whom we feel shame are those whose opinion of us matters to us.

Warrior cultures (and warrior leaders) enlist shame, not only as a counter to fear but as a goad to honor. The warrior advancing into battle (or simply resolving to keep up the fight) is more afraid of disgrace in the eyes of his brothers than he is of the spears and lances of the enemy.

I don't think I can give you an answer. Oh, I could give you Freudian reasons with fancy talk, and that would be right as far as it went. But what you want are the reasons for the reasons, and I'm not able to give you those. Not for the others, anyway. For myself? Guilt. Shame. Fear. Self-belittlement. I discovered at an early age that I was — shall we be kind and say different? It's a better, more general world than the other one. I indulged in certain practices that our society regards as shameful. And I got sick. It wasn't the practices, I don't think, it was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me — and the great voice of millions chanting, 'Shame. Shame. Shame.' It's society's way of dealing with someone different.

One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn't it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child.

Naturally, the antidote to shame is to risk showing up as fully as we’re able. The discipline needed for shame is to practice revealing yourself. It is bringing into the open the full brightness of your spirit, despite your fear of failure. It is to brave your secret gifts into the open. It is revealing your fears to trusted others, allowing them to be assuaged. It is reaching out when you’d rather hide. It’s asking for help when you feel abandoned.