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A trenchant case for the use of public shaming as a nonviolent form of resistance,Is Shame Necessary?explores how one of society’s oldest tools can be used to promote large-scale political change and social reform. Examining how we can retrofit the art of shaming for the age of social media, Jennifer Jacquet shows that we can challenge corporations and even governments to change policies and behaviors that are detrimental to the environment. Urgent and illuminating,Is Shame Necessary? offers an entirely new understanding of how shame, when applied in the right way and at the right time, has the capacity to keep us from failing our planet and, ultimately, from failing ourselves.
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Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Jacquet All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jacquet, Jennifer. Is shame necessary? : new uses for an old tool / Jennifer Jacquet. pages cm ISBN 978-0-307-90757-8 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 978-0-307-90758-5 (eBook). 1. Shame. 2. Guilt. 3. Human behavior. I. Title. BF575.S45J335 2014 302.3’5—dc23 2014020331 www.pantheonbooks.com Illustrations by Brendan O’Neill Kohl Jacket image: Vetta/Getty Images Jacket design by Janet Hanson v3.1 Shame. The feeling that will save mankind. —Screenplay for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) Shame is for sissies. —BARON EDWARD VON KLOBERG III, American lobbyist (1942–2005) Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Shame Explained Guilt’s Ascendancy The Limits to Guilt Bad Apples How Norms Become Normal The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Shaming The Scarlet Internet Shaming in the Attention Economy Reactions to Shaming The Sweet Spot of Shame Appendix: Shame Totem v.2.1 Acknowledgments Notes About the Author About the Illustrator 1 Shame Explained [A man’s] moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream. —WILLIAM FAULKNER, interview in The Paris Review (1958) In 1987, thirty-year-old Sam LaBudde walked into the offices of the Earth Island Institute, in San Francisco, looking for a job fighting rainforest destruction. He walked out headed for Mexico, planning to become a spy. In Earth Island’s lobby, LaBudde read an article about how the tuna industry was killing millions of dolphins in purse seines —large nets that encircle a school of tuna and are then drawn tight to catch everything in their “purse,” including dolphins, which then drown or are crushed in the gear that pulls in the net. The article was powerful, but there were no visuals. Instead of saving the rainforest, LaBudde convinced Earth Island to send him a video camera (this was the 1980s, before camcorders were common) and he set out to find a job on a tuna boat, as a ruse to collect footage of the dolphin slaughter. LaBudde succeeded in becoming a deckhand and later a cook on board a Panamanian fishing boat operating out of Ensenada, Mexico. At great personal danger, he filmed several tapes of dead and dying dolphins caught in the tuna-fishing gear. Earth Island used the footage to launch a media campaign on national and local U.S. television. It was written up in newspapers and magazines, including a three-part series by Kenneth Brower in The Atlantic Monthly. The campaign was based on shaming, which involved exposing the transgressors to the American public. The target of the shaming was the tuna industry, specifically the three largest tuna companies: StarKist, Bumble Bee, and Chicken of the Sea. Around this time, I convinced