Shame is also a form of social control. Be ashamed you don't know your place, lower class person.
Lack of required shame used to be called being "uppity".
Lack of required shame used to be called being "uppity".
If they couldn't identity the person they would setup cameras or a passage system to identity who uses the staircase until the problem can be solved. The law here allows apartment owners to setup cameras in the case of resolving problems with property and shared spaces. For example, in my building there are cameras in the garage and the garbage room, and entry require tags that get recorded when opening the door. Those intrusive actions where done to address past theft and misbehavior which in turn cost money to the company who own the building.
Not every society is like this.
The framing of shame as a bad thing instead of an important mechanism of self regulation is destroying maturity and social cooperation at an obscene rate, and future generations will be the ones that pay the price in a society where government has stepped in with coercive force to moderate behaviour at a much more granular level in a society that no longer governs itself.
In this it is important to distinguish between shame and shaming. Shame is the useful mechanism of self regulation. Shaming is social aggression and is all too frequently hijacked by astroturfed “social movements” and vile and petty narcissists to project power. Shaming has its place, but needs to be legitimate social sanction or it’s just another form of unregulated violence.
Unfortunately, the reaction of society has been to reject shame, which is about as useful as rejecting fear, for example. Fear is a useful and necessary mechanism of self regulation, and people that lack it entirely tend to live short lives. That said, too much is crippling. Shame is much the same, but is a social contract. Societies that lack it tend to fail. Societies with too much are stifling.
Fortunately, now we have the CCP and Palintir, so we can shrug off the yoke of shame and give up over that mechanism of self regulation to social credit scores and surveillance capitalism. I’m not sure that will be so much better.
Treasure your shame. I’ve lived in societies where it has been replaced by violence, and it’s not better.